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Thursday, August 21, 2008

What makes a radical?

When asked why they supported the 9/11 attacks, the radicals gave
political rather than religious reasons.

from the May 16, 2008 edition

Various studies of Muslim terrorists show that most are not graduates
of madrassahs but of private or public schools and universities; most
are from middle- and working-class backgrounds; some are devout and
others are not. This survey confirms these findings:

•Among the Muslims surveyed, 7 percent condoned the 9/11 attacks. The
study terms these the "politically radicalized."

•When asked why they supported the attacks, the radicals gave
political rather than religious reasons. They have a sense of
political frustration and feel humiliated and threatened by the West.
Those who opposed the attacks often gave religious reasons for doing
so.

•The radicals, on average, are not the down-and-out people in society.
They are more educated than moderates, and two-thirds of radicals have
average or above-average income. Forty-seven percent supervise others
at work. They are more optimistic about their own lives than are
moderates (52 percent to 45 percent).

Radicals are no more religious than the general population and do not
attend mosque more frequently.

•What distinguishes them is not their perception of Western culture or
freedoms, but their perception of US policies. Even radicals say they
support democracy. But 63 percent of radicals do not believe that the
United States will allow people in the region to fashion their own
political future without direct US influence
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Thursday, August 07, 2008

This Really Pisses Me Off as Well!

You Still Can't Write About Muhammad
By ASRA Q. NOMANIAugust 6, 2008; Page A15


in 2002, Spokane, Wash., journalist Sherry Jones toiled weekends on a racy historical novel about Aisha, the young wife of the prophet Muhammad. Ms. Jones learned Arabic, studied scholarly works about Aisha's life, and came to admire her protagonist as a woman of courage. When Random House bought her novel last year in a $100,000, two-book deal, she was ecstatic. This past spring, she began plans for an eight-city book tour after the Aug. 12 publication date of "The Jewel of Medina" -- a tale of lust, love and intrigue in the prophet's harem.
It's not going to happen: In May, Random House abruptly called off publication of the book. The series of events that torpedoed this novel are a window into how quickly fear stunts intelligent discourse about the Muslim world.
Random House feared the book would become a new "Satanic Verses," the Salman Rushdie novel of 1988 that led to death threats, riots and the murder of the book's Japanese translator, among other horrors. In an interview about Ms. Jones's novel, Thomas Perry, deputy publisher at Random House Publishing Group, said that it "disturbs us that we feel we cannot publish it right now." He said that after sending out advance copies of the novel, the company received "from credible and unrelated sources, cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment."
After consulting security experts and Islam scholars, Mr. Perry said the company decided "to postpone publication for the safety of the author, employees of Random House, booksellers and anyone else who would be involved in distribution and sale of the novel."
This saga upsets me as a Muslim -- and as a writer who believes that fiction can bring Islamic history to life in a uniquely captivating and humanizing way. "I'm devastated," Ms. Jones told me after the book got spiked, adding, "I wanted to honor Aisha and all the wives of Muhammad by giving voice to them, remarkable women whose crucial roles in the shaping of Islam have so often been ignored -- silenced -- by historians." Last month, Ms. Jones signed a termination agreement with Random House, so her literary agent could shop the book to other publishers.
This time, the instigator of the trouble wasn't a radical Muslim cleric, but an American academic. In April, looking for endorsements, Random House sent galleys to writers and scholars, including Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of Islamic history at the University of Texas in Austin. Ms. Jones put her on the list because she read Ms. Spellberg's book, "Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of 'A'isha Bint Abi Bakr."
But Ms. Spellberg wasn't a fan of Ms. Jones's book. On April 30, Shahed Amanullah, a guest lecturer in Ms. Spellberg's classes and the editor of a popular Muslim Web site, got a frantic call from her. "She was upset," Mr. Amanullah recalls. He says Ms. Spellberg told him the novel "made fun of Muslims and their history," and asked him to warn Muslims.
In an interview, Ms. Spellberg told me the novel is a "very ugly, stupid piece of work." The novel, for example, includes a scene on the night when Muhammad consummated his marriage with Aisha: "the pain of consummation soon melted away. Muhammad was so gentle. I hardly felt the scorpion's sting. To be in his arms, skin to skin, was the bliss I had longed for all my life." Says Ms. Spellberg: "I walked through a metal detector to see 'Last Temptation of Christ,'" the controversial 1980s film adaptation of a novel that depicted a relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. "I don't have a problem with historical fiction. I do have a problem with the deliberate misinterpretation of history. You can't play with a sacred history and turn it into soft core pornography."
After he got the call from Ms. Spellberg, Mr. Amanullah dashed off an email to a listserv of Middle East and Islamic studies graduate students, acknowledging he didn't "know anything about it [the book]," but telling them, "Just got a frantic call from a professor who got an advance copy of the forthcoming novel, 'Jewel of Medina' -- she said she found it incredibly offensive." He added a write-up about the book from the Publishers Marketplace, an industry publication.
The next day, a blogger known as Shahid Pradhan posted Mr. Amanullah's email on a Web site for Shiite Muslims -- "Hussaini Youth" -- under a headline, "upcoming book, 'Jewel of Medina': A new attempt to slander the Prophet of Islam." Two hours and 28 minutes after that, another person by the name of Ali Hemani proposed a seven-point strategy to ensure "the writer withdraws this book from the stores and apologise all the muslims across the world."
Meanwhile back in New York City, Jane Garrett, an editor at Random House's Knopf imprint, dispatched an email on May 1 to Knopf executives, telling them she got a phone call the evening before from Ms. Spellberg (who happens to be under contract with Knopf to write "Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an.")
"She thinks there is a very real possibility of major danger for the building and staff and widespread violence," Ms. Garrett wrote. "Denise says it is 'a declaration of war . . . explosive stuff . . . a national security issue.' Thinks it will be far more controversial than the satanic verses and the Danish cartoons. Does not know if the author and Ballantine folks are clueless or calculating, but thinks the book should be withdrawn ASAP." ("The Jewel of Medina" was to be published by Random House's Ballantine Books.) That day, the email spread like wildfire through Random House, which also received a letter from Ms. Spellberg and her attorney, saying she would sue the publisher if her name was associated with the novel. On May 2, a Ballantine editor told Ms. Jones's agent the company decided to possibly postpone publication of the book.
On a May 21 conference call, Random House executive Elizabeth McGuire told the author and her agent that the publishing house had decided to indefinitely postpone publication of the novel for "fear of a possible terrorist threat from extremist Muslims" and concern for "the safety and security of the Random House building and employees."
All this saddens me. Literature moves civilizations forward, and Islam is no exception. There is in fact a tradition of historical fiction in Islam, including such works as "The Adventures of Amir Hamza," an epic on the life of Muhammad's uncle. Last year a 948-page English translation was published, ironically, by Random House. And, for all those who believe the life of the prophet Muhammad can't include stories of lust, anger and doubt, we need only read the Quran (18:110) where, it's said, God instructed Muhammad to tell others: "I am only a mortal like you."
Ms. Nomani, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is the author of "Standing Alone: An American Woman's Struggle for the Soul of Islam" (HarperOne, 2006)

I replied:

how long are we gonna let extremists and radicals dictate what we say and do? to bow down to them, to not publish stuff that they find offense, is to let them win, to let them have so much control over our lives that we can't even say or think what is really on our minds. if we start to cower like this then the war on terror is already lost and the terrorists have won, if they force us to take away our freedom of speech. we must be willing to stand up for what we believe in, despite the threat of death. this is just really sad to me and i believe, is more of a victory for the extremists than any bombs they can ever drop.

sara replied:

i agree with maynard, in a way. i agree in principal, i agree in the abstract, and i agree when we are thinking about thinkgs from far away. However, if i worked at the company, and was worried about my OWN life because of this, i can;t say i would move forward with the publishing. i can say that we should be ABLE to publish a book without worrying about it, but since they ARE worried about it i can;t say that any person should do something where they feel they might be killed because of it jut because i think a boiok should be published. so this is sad, and they should be able to publish the book, but i can;t say they should publish it.

marie replied:

How can this woman say that The Last Temptation of Christ isn't the same thing as this book? 4. That's the difference I've been saying about Christians and Muslims. I'm sure that there was outrage by Christians when The Last Temptation of Christ came out, but it wasn't not released because people were gonna die because of it.

sara replied:

in regards to number 4 i dont think its the difference between muslims and christians, i think it is partially a difference in perception. there were death threats over the last temptation of christ, but people didnt take them as seriously as they take threats from muslims. not all muslims who deliver death threats will or would follow through on them same as christians. but right now, we are in a world where muslims have killed people, so we see all muslims as killing people. but if a christian dedlviered a death threat over something i was doing i would take it JUST as seriously as if a muslim did. because in both religions you dont know who the crazies are.

marie replied:

But isn't everything perception? (Thanks Jason.) No one would be scared if it wasn't something perceived to be scary in the first place, right? You weren't scared cause you knew that there wasn't anything to be afraid of. Which again, is my point. People are scared because there is something to be afraid of. And no one is saying that ALL Muslims are going to blow up people. But there seems to be a big understanding that the ones that would, will.

sara replied:

if you threaten to kill me no im not scared. if i get a letter in the mail saying im a christian i am going to kill you you godless heathen i would be terrified. ebcause there are christians who are crazies. and i think you ignore that a lot.

I replied:

i think we should just say this and acknowledge it and not try to make excuses anymore. the fact is that muslim extremists are more extreme in their extremism than christian extremists and the fact is that there are more of these muslim extremists than christian extremists. but i think the thing we fail to recognize is that this extremism, and especially the number of extremists, have nothing to do with the particulars of the religion. if i want to be an extremist and kill people to prove a political point, i can use anything from sacred scriptures to beatles songs to hollywood movies to a picture of christ on a piece of toast to cartoons of muhammad to justify my extremism. i'm gonna be extreme regardless because it's not the justification which is motivating the extremism, but the politics and socio-economic conditions behind my extremism which is it's true motivation.

thus, i think it all has to do with politics and the socio-economic status of the world in which these extremists live. there aren't as many christian extremists because christians weren't forced off their land with american weapons in 1948, and there are more muslim extremists in the middle east than there are christian extremists in america because, simply put, there are a lot more jobs and economic opportunities here in the usa than in the middle east and we are not as repressed over here as much as they are over there. i think that these factors contribute a lot more to extremism than people realize and explain why there are more muslim extremists than christian extremists.

sara replied:

and i agree with Jason about this. but i do not agree when people try and say that there are no christians who are like that. thats the part i disagree with.

david replied:

Its all relative, right. Christians making death threats in northern Ireland are perceived real. I bet death threats by Christians in medieval times were looked at with a second glance as well.

I replied:

i think that's a great point david, it all depends on the times and places we are living in. Rome sure took the death threats of Jewish extremists in the first century as real because they remembered the Maccabean revolt a few decades earlier. they took the threats as real so much so that they destroyed israel and the temple in 70 AD because of it. and if we lived in ireland, we would be much more scared of christian death threats than muslim death threats, because christians have bombed people there and muslims haven't. it's vice versa though for us here in the states because of 9/11. people in india take threats from hindu's and muslims as real because they've been bombing each other for a few years now. and people in japan take threats from those crazy buddhist sects as real because they killed people with that poison gas attack a few years ago. and of course, the one thing that links all of these attacks together is not necessarily religion, but politics. i think that all terrorism is political terrorism, regardless of what label we attach to it or what ideology these terrorists say they represent.

David replied:

Admittedly, it was probably the way I was saying this years ago. But ya’ll seemed pretty intent that I was representing a shallow mindset regarding this topic. Even Maher tended to agree that radical Islamic fanaticism was more dangerous then its Christian counterpart. Just an observation. Now it seems most are recognizing the extreme factions within the Muslims is more dangerous then the radical Christians. Because everytime I would bitch about Islamic extremism ya’ll would bring up Ralph reed or falwell or the abortion bombers.
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Wednesday, August 06, 2008

Threatening to Move to Canada

Often times, white people get frustrated with the state of their country. They do not like the President, or Congress, or the health care system, or the illegal status of Marijuana. Whenever they are presented with a situation that seems unreasonable to them, their first instinct is to threaten to move to Canada.

For example, if you are watching TV with white people and there is a piece on the news about that they do not agree with, they are likely to declare “ok, that’s it, I’m moving to Canada.”

Though they will never actually move to Canada, the act of declaring that they are willing to undertake the journey is very symbolic in white culture. It shows that their dedication to their lifestyle and beliefs are so strong, that they would consider packing up their entire lives and moving to a country that is only slightly different to the one they live in now.

Within white culture, it is agreed upon that if Canada had better weather it would be a perfect place.

Being aware that this information can be used quite easily to gain the trust of white people. Whenever they say, “I’m moving to Canada,” you must immediately respond with “I have relatives in Canada.”

They will then expect you to tell them about how Canada has a perfect healthcare system, legalized everything, and no crime. Though not true, it will reassure them that they are making the right choice by saying they want to move there.

But be warned, they will reference you in future conversations and possibly call on you to settle disputes about Canadian tax rates. So use this advice only if you plan to do some basic research.

Note: Canadian white people threaten to move to Europe.

Note: Europeans are unable to threaten to move anywhere.

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Tuesday, August 05, 2008

100th Blog Post! (Well, Almost)

So I blogged my 100th blogpost, 2 blog posts before this one. I wanted to devote an entire blogpost to my 100th post, but Aquinas took precedence over celebrating my 100th post, so I decided to do it later. Then I blogged yesterday about Solzhenitsyn dying and thus, finally remembered to blog about my 100th blogpost tonight when i got home from Juli's house, who is my new girlfriend who I started talking to on July 23 and whom i'm eventually going to marry one day. so this blogpost is dedicated to my 100th blogpost and my future wife, Juli. I love you both very much!
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Monday, August 04, 2008

Solzhenitsyn, chronicler of Soviet gulag, dies

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Nobel Prize-winning Russian author whose books chronicled the horrors of dictator Josef Stalin's slave labor camps, has died of heart failure, his son said Monday. He was 89.

Stepan Solzhenitsyn told The Associated Press his father died late Sunday at his home near Moscow, but declined further comment.

Through unflinching accounts of the years he spent in the Soviet gulag, Solzhenitsyn's novels and non-fiction works exposed the secret history of the vast prison system that enslaved millions. The accounts riveted his countrymen and earned him years of bitter exile, but international renown.

And they inspired millions, perhaps, with the knowledge that one person's courage and integrity could, in the end, defeat the totalitarian machinery of an empire.

Beginning with the 1962 short novel "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," Solzhenitsyn (sohl-zheh-NEETS'-ihn) devoted himself to describing what he called the human "meat grinder" that had caught him along with millions of other Soviet citizens: capricious arrests, often for trifling and seemingly absurd reasons, followed by sentences to slave labor camps where cold, starvation and punishing work crushed inmates physically and spiritually.

His non-fiction "Gulag Archipelago" trilogy of the 1970s shocked readers by describing the savagery of the Soviet state under Stalin. It helped erase lingering sympathy for the Soviet Union among many leftist intellectuals, especially in Europe.

But his account of that secret system of prison camps was also inspiring in its description of how one person — Solzhenitsyn himself — survived, physically and spiritually, in a penal system of soul-crushing hardship and injustice.

The West offered him shelter and accolades. But Solzhenitsyn's refusal to bend despite enormous pressure, perhaps, also gave him the courage to criticize Western culture for what he considered its weakness and decadence.

After a triumphant return from exile in the U.S. in 1994 that included a 56-day train trip across Russia to become reacquainted with his native land, Solzhenitsyn later expressed annoyance and disappointment that most Russians hadn't read his books.

During the 1990s, his stalwart nationalist views, his devout Orthodoxy, his disdain for capitalism and disgust with the tycoons who bought Russian industries and resources cheaply following the Soviet collapse, were unfashionable. He faded from public view.

But under Vladimir Putin's 2000-2008 presidency, Solzhenitsyn's vision of Russia as a bastion of Orthodox Christianity, as a place with a unique culture and destiny, gained renewed prominence.

Putin argued, as Solzhenitsyn did in a speech at Harvard University in 1978, that Russia has a separate civilization from the West, one that can't be reconciled either to Communism or western-style liberal democracy, but requires a system adapted to its history and traditions.

Putin's successor Dmitry Medvedev sent condolences after news of Solzhenitsyn's death, Russian media reported.

"Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth's surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking," Solzhenitsyn said in the Harvard speech. "For one thousand years, Russia has belonged to such a category."

Born Dec. 11, 1918, in Kislovodsk, Solzhenitsyn served as a front-line artillery captain in World War II. In the closing weeks of the war, he was arrested for writing what he called "certain disrespectful remarks" about Stalin in a letter to a friend, referring to him as "the man with the mustache."

He was sentenced to eight years in labor camps -- three of which he served in a camp in the barren steppe of Kazakhstan that was the basis for his first novel. After that, he served three years of exile in Kazakhstan.

That's where he began to write, memorizing much of his work so it wouldn't be lost if it were seized. His theme was the suffering and injustice of life in Stalin's gulag — a Soviet abbreviation for the slave labor camp system, which Solzhenitsyn made part of the lexicon.

He continued writing while working as a mathematics teacher in the provincial Russian city of Ryazan.

The first fruit of this labor was "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," the story of a carpenter struggling to survive in a Soviet labor camp, where he had been sent, like Solzhenitsyn, after service in the war.

The book was published in 1962 by order of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was eager to discredit the abuses of Stalin, his predecessor, and created a sensation in a country where unpleasant truths were spoken in whispers, if at all. Abroad, the book — which went through numerous revisions — was lauded not only for its bravery, but for its spare, unpretentious language.

After Khrushchev was ousted in 1964, Solzhenitsyn began facing KGB harassment, publication of his works was blocked and he was expelled from the Soviet Writers Union. But he was undeterred.

"A great writer is, so to speak, a secret government in his country," he wrote in "The First Circle," his next novel, a book about inmates in one of Stalin's "special camps" for scientists who were deemed politically unreliable but whose skills were essential.

Solzhenitsyn, a graduate from the Department of Physics and Mathematics at Rostov University, was sent to one of these camps in 1946, soon after his arrest.

The novel "Cancer Ward", which appeared in 1967, was another fictional worked based on Solzhenitsyn's life. In this case, the subject was his cancer treatment in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, then part of Soviet Central Asia, during his years of internal exile from March 1953, the month of Stalin's death, until June 1956.

In the book, cancer became a metaphor for the fatal sickness of the Soviet system. "A man sprouts a tumor and dies -- how then can a country live that has sprouted camps and exile?"

He attacked the complicity of millions of Russians in the horrors of Stalin's reign.

"Suddenly all the professors and engineers turned out to be saboteurs — and they believed it? ... Or all of Lenin's old guard were vile renegades — and they believed it? Suddenly all their friends and acquaintances were enemies of the people — and they believed it?"

The Stalinist era, he wrote, quoting from a poem by Alexander Pushkin, forced Soviet citizens to choose one of three roles: tyrant, traitor, prisoner.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970, an unusual move for the Swedish Academy, which generally makes awards late in an author's life after decades of work. The academy cited "the ethical force with which he has pursued the indispensable traditions of Russian literature."

Soviet authorities barred the author from traveling to Stockholm to receive the award and official attacks were intensified in 1973 when the first book in the "Gulag" trilogy appeared in Paris.

"During all the years until 1961," Solzhenitsyn wrote in an autobiography written for the Nobel Foundation, "not only was I convinced that I should never see a single line of mine in print in my lifetime, but, also, I scarcely dared allow any of my close acquaintances to read anything I had written because I feared that this would become known."

The following year, he was arrested on a treason charge and expelled the next day to West Germany in handcuffs. His expulsion inspired worldwide condemnation of the regime of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev.

Solzhenitsyn then made his homeland in America, settling in 1976 in the tiny town of Cavendish, Vermont, with his wife and sons.

Living at a secluded hillside compound he rarely left, he called his 18 years there the most productive of his life. There he worked on what he considered to be his life's work, a multivolume saga of Russian history titled "The Red Wheel."

Although free from repression, Solzhenitsyn longed for his native land. Neither was he enchanted by Western democracy, with its emphasis on individual freedom.

To the dismay of his supporters, in his Harvard speech he rejected the West's faith "Western pluralistic democracy" as the model for all other nations. It was a mistake, he warned, for Western societies to regard the failure of the rest of the world to adopt the democratic model as a product of "wicked governments or by heavy crises or by their own barbarity or incomprehension."

Some critics saw "The Red Wheel" books as tedious and hectoring, rather than as sweeping and lit by moral fire.

"Exile from his great theme, Stalinism and the gulag, had exposed his major weaknesses," D.M. Thomas wrote in a 1998 biography, theorizing that the intensity of the earlier works was "a projection of his own repressed violence."

Then-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev restored Solzhenitsyn's citizenship in 1990 and the treason charge was finally dropped in 1991, less than a month after a failed Soviet coup.

Following an emotional homecoming that started in the Russian Far East on May 27, 1994, and became a whistle-stop tour across the country, Solzhenitsyn settled in a tree-shaded, red brick home overlooking the Moscow River just west of the capital.

While avoiding a partisan political role, Solzhenitsyn vowed to speak "the whole truth about Russia, until they shut my mouth like before."

He was contemptuous of President Boris Yeltsin, blaming Yeltsin for the collapse of Russia's economy, his dependence on bailouts by the International Monetary Fund, his inability to stop the expansion of NATO to Russia's borders, his tolerance of the rising influence of a handful of Russian billionaires — who were nicknamed "oligarchs" by an American diplomat.

Yeltsin's reign, Solzhenitsyn said, marked one of three "times of troubles" in Russian history — which included the 17th century crises that led to the rise of the Romanovs and the 1917 Bolshevik revolution. When Yeltsin awarded Solzhenitsyn Russia's highest honor, the Order of St. Andrew, the writer refused to accept it. When Yeltsin left office in 2000, Solzhenitsyn wanted him prosecuted.

The author's last book, 2001's "Two Hundred Years Together," addressed the complex emotions of Russian-Jewish relations. Some criticized the book for alleged anti-Semitic passages. But the author denied the charge, saying he "understood the subtlety, sensitivity and kindheartedness of the Jewish character."

Yeltsin's successor Putin at first had a rocky relationship with Solzhenitsyn, who criticized the Russian president in 2002 for not doing more to crack down on Russia's oligarchs. Putin was also a veteran of the Soviet-era KGB, the agency that, more than any other, represented the Soviet legacy of repression.

But the two men, so different, gradually developed a rapport. By steps, Putin adopted Solzhenitsyn's criticisms of the West, perhaps out of a recognition that Russia really is a different civilization, perhaps because the author offered justification for the Kremlin's determination to muzzle critics, to reassert control over Russia's natural resources and to concentrate political power.

Like Putin, Solzhenitsyn argued that Russia was following its own path to its own form of democratic society. In a June 2005 interview with state television, he said Russia had lost 15 years following the collapse of the Soviet Union by moving too quickly in the rush to build a more liberal society.

"We need to be better, so we need to go more slowly," he said

Following the death of Naguib Mahfouz in 2006, Solzhenitsyn became the oldest living Nobel laureate in literature. He is survived by his wife, Natalya, who acted as his spokesman, and his three sons, including Stepan, Ignat, a pianist and conductor, and Yermolai. All live in the United States.

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By DOUGLAS BIRCH, Associated Press Writer

Correspondent Jim Heintz in Moscow contributed to this report

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