---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: James Kirchick
Friends,
Please find below two recent articles by me.
1. "Koran-burning preacher Terry Jones is innocent of murder," New York
Daily News, April 6, 2011.
2. "This is Justice and Development," Haaretz, April 1, 2011
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2011/04/06/2011-04-06_koranburning_preac
her_terry_jones_is_innocent_of_murder_rush_to_condemn_him_is_d.html
Koran-burning preacher Terry Jones is innocent of murder: Rush to condemn
him is deeply disturbing
By James Kirchick
When a mob of radical Muslims attacked a United Nations compound in
Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan last Friday, killing 12 aid workers, it didn't
take long for pundits to point the finger. No, it wasn't the actual
murderers who were to blame. It was Terry Jones, the attention-seeking
Florida preacher who burned a Koran on March 20.
"11 people lost their lives so Terry Jones could burn a Koran and feed the
24/7 news monster," Luke Russert of NBC wrote on his Twitter feed just as
the news broke. "Jones's act was murderous as any suicide bomber's," intoned
Time's Joe Klein.
Politicians followed pundits in the condemnation: "Free speech is a great
idea, but we're in a war," South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham told CBS News
on Sunday. Asked whether Congress might pass a resolution condemning the
burning, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid said, "We'll take a look at
this."
The sad fact, however, is that Jones didn't even need to broadcast an actual
Koran burning live on the internet to elicit the response he has since
called, correctly, "predictable." Does anyone for a minute believe that had
a false report of a Koran burning been issued, the fanatics would have
desisted from their murderous rage? Such a scenario played out in 2005, when
Newsweek erroneously reported that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay
prison camp had flushed a Koran down a toilet. To anyone who has actually
used a toilet, the story seemed specious from the outset. Nevertheless,
riots in Muslim countries resulted in at least 15 deaths.
It's worth noting that this time, unable to find Americans on whom to
unleash their wrath, the Afghan mob turned to the next best target: the
United Nations, 7 of whose employees, including a Norwegian and Swede, were
murdered. For radical Islamists, anyone will do, even pacifistic
Scandinavians. The randomness of the crime underscores the utter
irrationality of those who committed it, not to mention the masses that
tacitly lend them support. It also illustrates why appeasing such people is
an utterly fruitless task.
One can understand the concerns of a man like Gen. David Petraeus, who
doesn't need another reason for pious Muslims to target the soldiers under
his command. But in a democracy, it is not the role of a military officer to
offer his opinion on how American citizens should exercise their free speech
rights. Liberals tend to be more diligent about observing the
civilian-military divide, so it's strange that those heaping blame on Terry
Jones have not commented upon this remarkable development.
Those who fault Jones for the behavior of Muslim extremists in Afghanistan
must answer: Where does the blame-shifting end?
Is Salman Rushdie, whose "Satantic Verses" earned him a fatwa from the
Ayatollah Khomoeni, to blame for the murder of his Japanese translator?
Should the Danish cartoonist who drew images of Mohammed foot the bill for
repairs to his nation's embassy in Damascus, which was burned by a mob in
2006? Why don't we just veil our women and execute our gays while we're at
it, since that's what the radicals want?
Christians do not kill when comedians produce a Broadway play mocking
Mormonism or when an artist displays a crucifix in a jar of urine. Neither
do Jews go on murderous rampages when Muslim preachers celebrate the
Holocaust or when Arab newspapers publish cartoons depicting hook-nosed
rabbis, outrages that occur on a near-daily basis.
We do a lot of apologizing in the West, a function of our narcissistic
belief that the world revolves around us. But it's wrong and patronizing to
believe that what we do determines the course of world events, particularly
the most miniscule occurrences in the Muslim world.
As the writer Bruce Bawer commented in response to Jones's initial threat to
burn the Koran last year, "American flags can be burned by the hundreds, by
huge crowds, in the major squares of Muslim capitals, and that's apparently
hunky-dory with us. But when a guy in Gainesville whom nobody ever heard of
decides to burn a few Korans, everybody from the President on down begs him
to reconsider."
It is one thing to say that Jones's Koran-burning was a stupid and offensive
thing to do. He is not Rushdie, after all, whose "provocation" was the
exercising of the creative spirit. It is another thing entirely, however, to
move to the accusation that Jones is culpable for the murderous acts of
people half way around the world. People who riot and murder at the burning
of a book do not need a pretext to act like savages. That's exactly what
they already are.
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/this-is-justice-and-development-1.353457
This is justice and development?
In recent years, one can't help but suspect that the fundamental problems
with Turkey's foreign policy lay in the AKP's principles more than in its
practices.
By James Kirchick
Last November, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan traveled to
Tripoli to receive the annual Al-Gadhafi International Prize for Human
Rights. For over two decades, the blood-soaked dictator has awarded the
honor to a collection of rogues, blameless victims and genuine (though, as
their acceptance of the prize indicates, morally fickle) do-gooders. Past
recipients include Fidel Castro, "the victim children of Bosnia &
Herzegovina" and Nelson Mandela.
Given Erdogan's campaign to simultaneously rile the West and endear himself
to the Arab "street" − something that the tyrant of Tripoli obviously
appreciated − the Turkish prime minister was the obvious choice for 2010.
Eruptions like Erdogan's 2009 blow-up at Davos ("When it comes to killing,
you know very well how to kill," he snapped at Shimon Peres) and his
obscene exploitation of the May 2010 Mavi Marmara incident have boosted his
popularity throughout the Arab and Muslim world, which seems to be a crucial
component of his Justice and Development (AKP) Party's Eastern-focused
foreign policy.
Erdogan never hesitates to moralize about the policies of Europe, the United
States or Israel, the constant theme being that these powers are
hypocritical. "Those who are chanting for global nuclear disarmament should
first start in their own countries," he has said about Western pressure on
Iran to curtail its nuclear program. Yet Erdogan is selective in his
outrage. He was noticeably silent when his friend Gadhafi pledged to
"cleanse Libya house by house." Indeed, turning a blind eye to mass killing
has become de rigueur for the Turkish premier. In 2009 he defended Sudanese
President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, wanted by the International Criminal Court
for crimes against humanity, by stating that "a Muslim cannot commit
genocide." Tell that to the Armenians.
Erdogan called NATO intervention in Libya "unthinkable" and "absurd,"
attributed Western concern about the deteriorating situation there to
"calculations" over oil, and alleged that the "real plan" being advanced is
actually an old-fashioned "imperial carve-up." Only last week, when the
military effort was placed under NATO command and Gadhafi's ouster became
more likely, did Turkey, which highly values its membership in the military
alliance, quietly lend its cooperation.
Erdogan's pretensions to leadership of ordinary Muslims are once again being
tested now that Bashar Assad has taken to slaughtering his own people en
masse next door in Syria.
Erdogan has provided cover for Assad, informing him by phone last week of
his continued support, but also gently requesting that the dictator
implement economic reforms (as if such tinkering would quell Syrians'
foundational grievances toward their sclerotic and brutal regime).
Meanwhile, Erdogan has the gall to claim that the protests sweeping the
region are attributable to Turkey's democratic model − a model that he has
been gradually undermining.
"Which country were they inspired by?" he recently asked the Turkish
parliament (hint: probably not the regime whose imperial predecessor ruled
over the Arab world for four centuries).
Last week, at the annual German Marshall Fund's Brussels Forum, I asked
Turkish Minister for EU Affairs Egemen Bagis about his government's
indifference toward Assad's crackdown.
He said that Syria is a "very important and friendly country" and that "most
of the people in that large geography [of the Middle East] are looking up to
Turkey and they want to have similar democratic reforms that Turkey has been
conducting, in her approach to become a member of EU." He then turned the
issue on its head, however, and in what has become emblematic of Turkish
diplomatic rhetoric under the AKP, cast Turkey as victim.
"So on one side, we see EU member states who are encouraging the
modernization, the demand for human rights in the greater Middle East and
North Africa," he told me. "On the other side, they're not really treating
the source of inspiration of those demands, which is Turkey, with the
dignity that she deserves."
Get it? All this stagnation in the Muslim world is to be heaped on the
shoulders of Europe, which has slowed Turkey's EU accession by refusing to
overlook the disturbing direction Turkey has taken under the AKP. Reporters
Without Borders ranks Turkey 138 out of 178 countries for press freedom.
Nearly 70 journalists are in prison and hundreds face prosecution there
today. Hundreds of Kurdish politicians are also in the dock. Hundreds of
academics, civil society activists and businessmen have been languishing in
jail for years as accused conspirators in the infamous "Ergenekon" affair.
When the American envoy to Ankara criticized these moves, Erdogan sneered
that he was a "rookie ambassador."
To be sure, Turkey before the AKP was hardly a beacon of democracy. And
Turkey has reason to seek better relations with its neighbor Syria. Just
over 10 years ago, Damascus' sponsorship of a Kurdish terrorist group nearly
brought the two nations to war. This enmity derived from the Assad regime's
anxiety about the erstwhile Western tilt of its neighbor. But now that the
moderately Islamist AKP is in power, relations have improved dramatically.
In 2003, Turkey refused to cooperate in the American-led assault on Iraq,
which boosted Ankara in Assad's eyes. In 2009, the two nations completed
their first joint military exercise and reopened their borders. Trade
doubled from $800 million in 2006 to $1.6 billion in 2009.
But the rapprochement has not led to the sort of liberalization in Syria
that Bagis suggests it would, and Turkey has been content to condone the
depredations of its repressive neighbor.
Just imagine what the AKP reaction would be to an unprovoked, murderous
American or Israeli attack on a mosque, which is exactly what Assad
perpetrated last week.
No country, especially one with pretensions to being a regional power, can
be expected to have a foreign policy that is at all times the product of an
absolute and unblemished moral code. America's intervening in Libya − while
it largely ignores regime crackdowns in allied nations like Bahrain, Yemen
and Saudi Arabia − is demonstrative of this fact. Yet given the baleful turn
Turkey has taken on the world stage in recent years, one can't help but
suspect that the fundamental problems with its foreign policy lay in the
AKP's principles more than in its practices.
From: James Kirchick
Friends,
Please find below two recent articles by me.
1. "Koran-burning preacher Terry Jones is innocent of murder," New York
Daily News, April 6, 2011.
2. "This is Justice and Development," Haaretz, April 1, 2011
http://www.nydailynews.com/opinions/2011/04/06/2011-04-06_koranburning_preac
her_terry_jones_is_innocent_of_murder_rush_to_condemn_him_is_d.html
Koran-burning preacher Terry Jones is innocent of murder: Rush to condemn
him is deeply disturbing
By James Kirchick
When a mob of radical Muslims attacked a United Nations compound in
Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan last Friday, killing 12 aid workers, it didn't
take long for pundits to point the finger. No, it wasn't the actual
murderers who were to blame. It was Terry Jones, the attention-seeking
Florida preacher who burned a Koran on March 20.
"11 people lost their lives so Terry Jones could burn a Koran and feed the
24/7 news monster," Luke Russert of NBC wrote on his Twitter feed just as
the news broke. "Jones's act was murderous as any suicide bomber's," intoned
Time's Joe Klein.
Politicians followed pundits in the condemnation: "Free speech is a great
idea, but we're in a war," South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham told CBS News
on Sunday. Asked whether Congress might pass a resolution condemning the
burning, Senate Majority leader Harry Reid said, "We'll take a look at
this."
The sad fact, however, is that Jones didn't even need to broadcast an actual
Koran burning live on the internet to elicit the response he has since
called, correctly, "predictable." Does anyone for a minute believe that had
a false report of a Koran burning been issued, the fanatics would have
desisted from their murderous rage? Such a scenario played out in 2005, when
Newsweek erroneously reported that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay
prison camp had flushed a Koran down a toilet. To anyone who has actually
used a toilet, the story seemed specious from the outset. Nevertheless,
riots in Muslim countries resulted in at least 15 deaths.
It's worth noting that this time, unable to find Americans on whom to
unleash their wrath, the Afghan mob turned to the next best target: the
United Nations, 7 of whose employees, including a Norwegian and Swede, were
murdered. For radical Islamists, anyone will do, even pacifistic
Scandinavians. The randomness of the crime underscores the utter
irrationality of those who committed it, not to mention the masses that
tacitly lend them support. It also illustrates why appeasing such people is
an utterly fruitless task.
One can understand the concerns of a man like Gen. David Petraeus, who
doesn't need another reason for pious Muslims to target the soldiers under
his command. But in a democracy, it is not the role of a military officer to
offer his opinion on how American citizens should exercise their free speech
rights. Liberals tend to be more diligent about observing the
civilian-military divide, so it's strange that those heaping blame on Terry
Jones have not commented upon this remarkable development.
Those who fault Jones for the behavior of Muslim extremists in Afghanistan
must answer: Where does the blame-shifting end?
Is Salman Rushdie, whose "Satantic Verses" earned him a fatwa from the
Ayatollah Khomoeni, to blame for the murder of his Japanese translator?
Should the Danish cartoonist who drew images of Mohammed foot the bill for
repairs to his nation's embassy in Damascus, which was burned by a mob in
2006? Why don't we just veil our women and execute our gays while we're at
it, since that's what the radicals want?
Christians do not kill when comedians produce a Broadway play mocking
Mormonism or when an artist displays a crucifix in a jar of urine. Neither
do Jews go on murderous rampages when Muslim preachers celebrate the
Holocaust or when Arab newspapers publish cartoons depicting hook-nosed
rabbis, outrages that occur on a near-daily basis.
We do a lot of apologizing in the West, a function of our narcissistic
belief that the world revolves around us. But it's wrong and patronizing to
believe that what we do determines the course of world events, particularly
the most miniscule occurrences in the Muslim world.
As the writer Bruce Bawer commented in response to Jones's initial threat to
burn the Koran last year, "American flags can be burned by the hundreds, by
huge crowds, in the major squares of Muslim capitals, and that's apparently
hunky-dory with us. But when a guy in Gainesville whom nobody ever heard of
decides to burn a few Korans, everybody from the President on down begs him
to reconsider."
It is one thing to say that Jones's Koran-burning was a stupid and offensive
thing to do. He is not Rushdie, after all, whose "provocation" was the
exercising of the creative spirit. It is another thing entirely, however, to
move to the accusation that Jones is culpable for the murderous acts of
people half way around the world. People who riot and murder at the burning
of a book do not need a pretext to act like savages. That's exactly what
they already are.
http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/this-is-justice-and-development-1.353457
This is justice and development?
In recent years, one can't help but suspect that the fundamental problems
with Turkey's foreign policy lay in the AKP's principles more than in its
practices.
By James Kirchick
Last November, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan traveled to
Tripoli to receive the annual Al-Gadhafi International Prize for Human
Rights. For over two decades, the blood-soaked dictator has awarded the
honor to a collection of rogues, blameless victims and genuine (though, as
their acceptance of the prize indicates, morally fickle) do-gooders. Past
recipients include Fidel Castro, "the victim children of Bosnia &
Herzegovina" and Nelson Mandela.
Given Erdogan's campaign to simultaneously rile the West and endear himself
to the Arab "street" − something that the tyrant of Tripoli obviously
appreciated − the Turkish prime minister was the obvious choice for 2010.
Eruptions like Erdogan's 2009 blow-up at Davos ("When it comes to killing,
you know very well how to kill," he snapped at Shimon Peres) and his
obscene exploitation of the May 2010 Mavi Marmara incident have boosted his
popularity throughout the Arab and Muslim world, which seems to be a crucial
component of his Justice and Development (AKP) Party's Eastern-focused
foreign policy.
Erdogan never hesitates to moralize about the policies of Europe, the United
States or Israel, the constant theme being that these powers are
hypocritical. "Those who are chanting for global nuclear disarmament should
first start in their own countries," he has said about Western pressure on
Iran to curtail its nuclear program. Yet Erdogan is selective in his
outrage. He was noticeably silent when his friend Gadhafi pledged to
"cleanse Libya house by house." Indeed, turning a blind eye to mass killing
has become de rigueur for the Turkish premier. In 2009 he defended Sudanese
President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, wanted by the International Criminal Court
for crimes against humanity, by stating that "a Muslim cannot commit
genocide." Tell that to the Armenians.
Erdogan called NATO intervention in Libya "unthinkable" and "absurd,"
attributed Western concern about the deteriorating situation there to
"calculations" over oil, and alleged that the "real plan" being advanced is
actually an old-fashioned "imperial carve-up." Only last week, when the
military effort was placed under NATO command and Gadhafi's ouster became
more likely, did Turkey, which highly values its membership in the military
alliance, quietly lend its cooperation.
Erdogan's pretensions to leadership of ordinary Muslims are once again being
tested now that Bashar Assad has taken to slaughtering his own people en
masse next door in Syria.
Erdogan has provided cover for Assad, informing him by phone last week of
his continued support, but also gently requesting that the dictator
implement economic reforms (as if such tinkering would quell Syrians'
foundational grievances toward their sclerotic and brutal regime).
Meanwhile, Erdogan has the gall to claim that the protests sweeping the
region are attributable to Turkey's democratic model − a model that he has
been gradually undermining.
"Which country were they inspired by?" he recently asked the Turkish
parliament (hint: probably not the regime whose imperial predecessor ruled
over the Arab world for four centuries).
Last week, at the annual German Marshall Fund's Brussels Forum, I asked
Turkish Minister for EU Affairs Egemen Bagis about his government's
indifference toward Assad's crackdown.
He said that Syria is a "very important and friendly country" and that "most
of the people in that large geography [of the Middle East] are looking up to
Turkey and they want to have similar democratic reforms that Turkey has been
conducting, in her approach to become a member of EU." He then turned the
issue on its head, however, and in what has become emblematic of Turkish
diplomatic rhetoric under the AKP, cast Turkey as victim.
"So on one side, we see EU member states who are encouraging the
modernization, the demand for human rights in the greater Middle East and
North Africa," he told me. "On the other side, they're not really treating
the source of inspiration of those demands, which is Turkey, with the
dignity that she deserves."
Get it? All this stagnation in the Muslim world is to be heaped on the
shoulders of Europe, which has slowed Turkey's EU accession by refusing to
overlook the disturbing direction Turkey has taken under the AKP. Reporters
Without Borders ranks Turkey 138 out of 178 countries for press freedom.
Nearly 70 journalists are in prison and hundreds face prosecution there
today. Hundreds of Kurdish politicians are also in the dock. Hundreds of
academics, civil society activists and businessmen have been languishing in
jail for years as accused conspirators in the infamous "Ergenekon" affair.
When the American envoy to Ankara criticized these moves, Erdogan sneered
that he was a "rookie ambassador."
To be sure, Turkey before the AKP was hardly a beacon of democracy. And
Turkey has reason to seek better relations with its neighbor Syria. Just
over 10 years ago, Damascus' sponsorship of a Kurdish terrorist group nearly
brought the two nations to war. This enmity derived from the Assad regime's
anxiety about the erstwhile Western tilt of its neighbor. But now that the
moderately Islamist AKP is in power, relations have improved dramatically.
In 2003, Turkey refused to cooperate in the American-led assault on Iraq,
which boosted Ankara in Assad's eyes. In 2009, the two nations completed
their first joint military exercise and reopened their borders. Trade
doubled from $800 million in 2006 to $1.6 billion in 2009.
But the rapprochement has not led to the sort of liberalization in Syria
that Bagis suggests it would, and Turkey has been content to condone the
depredations of its repressive neighbor.
Just imagine what the AKP reaction would be to an unprovoked, murderous
American or Israeli attack on a mosque, which is exactly what Assad
perpetrated last week.
No country, especially one with pretensions to being a regional power, can
be expected to have a foreign policy that is at all times the product of an
absolute and unblemished moral code. America's intervening in Libya − while
it largely ignores regime crackdowns in allied nations like Bahrain, Yemen
and Saudi Arabia − is demonstrative of this fact. Yet given the baleful turn
Turkey has taken on the world stage in recent years, one can't help but
suspect that the fundamental problems with its foreign policy lay in the
AKP's principles more than in its practices.
Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups.
For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum
* Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/
* It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls.
* Read the latest breaking news, and more.
No comments:
Post a Comment