February 13, 2006
Al Gore talks to the Saudis
AP reports on a speech given by Al Gore in Saudi Arabia:
Former Vice President Al Gore told a mainly Saudi audience on Sunday that the U.S. government committed "terrible abuses" against Arabs after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, and that most Americans did not support such treatment.Blogger Tigerhawk (via James Taranto) gets it mostly right:Gore said Arabs had been "indiscriminately rounded up" and held in "unforgivable" conditions. The former vice president said the Bush administration was playing into al-Qaida's hands by routinely blocking Saudi visa applications.
"The thoughtless way in which visas are now handled, that is a mistake," Gore said during the Jiddah Economic Forum. "The worst thing we can possibly do is to cut off the channels of friendship and mutual understanding between Saudi Arabia and the United States."
Gore told the largely Saudi audience, many of them educated at U.S. universities, that Arabs in the United States had been "indiscriminately rounded up, often on minor charges of overstaying a visa or not having a green card in proper order, and held in conditions that were just unforgivable."
This is asinine both substantively and procedurally.Substantively, the idea that cracking down on Saudi visa applications is "playing into al Qaeda's hands" is laughable. Had we scrutinized Saudi visas a little more carefully in 2001, thousands of Americans who died on September 11 that year might well have lived. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers on that day were Saudi nationals. If we had denied some or all of them visas, exactly how would that have "played into al Qaeda's hands"? . . .
Procedurally, Gore's speech is repugnant. It is one thing to say such things to an American audience in an effort to change our policy. . . . It is, however, another thing entirely to travel to a foreign country that features pivotally in the war of our generation for the purpose of denouncing American policies in front of the affected foreign audience. It is especially problematic to mess with Saudi political opinions, which are subject to intensive influence and coercion by internal actors and the United States, al Qaeda, and Iran, among other powers. Supposing that some Saudis were inclined to be angry over the American visa policy, won't they be more angry after Al Gore has told them that they're being humiliated? How is that helpful?
Finally, Gore's outrage at the American treatment of Arab and Muslim captives may be genuine, and it may even be worthy of expression in the United States, where we aspire to do better than press accounts suggest we have done. But whatever nasty things we have done in exceptional cases in time of war, they pale in comparison to the standard operating procedure in Saudi Arabia. So this is what Gore has done: he has traveled to Jiddah to explain to the elites of an ugly and tyrannical regime that the big problem in the world isn't the oppression of Arabs by Arabs throughout the Middle East and North Africa, but the mistreatment of a few hundred Arabs in the United States. This is like visiting Moscow in 1970 and denouncing the United States in front of a bunch of Communist Party deputies for the killings at Kent State. . . .
There is simply no defense for what Gore has done here, for he is deliberately undermining the United States during a time of war, in a part of the world crucial to our success in that war, in front of an audience that does not vote in American elections. Gore's speech is both destructive and disloyal, not because of its content--which is as silly as it is subversive--but because of its location and its intended audience.
Posted by Conor at 02:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 08, 2006
Stalin Disturbingly Popular in Russia
Foreign Affairs has bad news from Russia:
Since 2003, we have conducted three surveys in Russia, and according to these polls, there is no stigma associated with Stalin in the country today. In fact, many Russians hold ambivalent or even positive views of him. For example, one-quarter or more of Russian adults say they would definitely or probably vote for Stalin were he alive and running for president, and less than 40 percent say they definitely would not. A majority of young Russians, moreover, do not view Stalin -- a man responsible for millions of deaths and enormous suffering -- with the revulsion he deserves. Although Stalinism per se is not rampant in Russia today, misperceptions about the Stalin era are. Few of the respondents to our surveys could be classified as hard-core Stalinists, but fewer still are hard-core anti-Stalinists. Most Russians, in other words, flunk the Stalin test.
Posted by Conor at 04:34 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
A Boycott on Your Products... Um, Except Your Flags
I posted before about the odd availability of Danish flags in the Middle East. Now I read about this Palestinian man:
GAZA, Feb 6 (Reuters) - When entrepreneur Ahmed Abu Dayya first heard that Danish caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad were being reprinted across Europe, he knew exactly what his customers in Gaza would want: flags to burn.A Western flag bearing the image of Mohammed would present quite a conundrum.Abu Dayya ordered 100 hard-to-find Danish and Norwegian flags for his Gaza City shop and has been doing a swift trade.
"I do not take political stands. It is all business," he said in an interview. "But this time I was offended by the assault on the Prophet Mohammad."
A wave of anger has swept the Muslim world over the publication of the cartoons, one of which shows the Prophet wearing a turban shaped like a bomb.
First printed in Denmark, the cartoons have appeared in newspapers across Europe, as well as in the United States.
While normally hard to come by in isolated Gaza, Danish and Norwegian flags are now popping up at daily protests, increasingly replacing Israel's Star of David.
It's not clear how many merchants apart from Abu Dayya are offering the flags, but they appear to be readily available. Angry Muslims set the flags ablaze or tear them to pieces.
Posted by Conor at 12:20 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 07, 2006
Danish Cartoon Update
The Danish cartoons have led to a staff walk out at a New York newspaper:
The editorial staff of the alternative weekly New York Press walked out today, en masse, after the paper's publishers backed down from printing the Danish cartoons that have become the center of a global free-speech fight.Editor-in-Chief Harry Siegel emails, on behalf of the editorial staff:
New York Press, like so many other publications, has suborned its own professed principles. For all the talk of freedom of speech, only the New York Sun locally and two other papers nationally have mustered the minimal courage needed to print simple and not especially offensive editorial cartoons that have been used as a pretext for great and greatly menacing violence directed against journalists, cartoonists, humanitarian aid workers, diplomats and others who represent the basic values and obligations of Western civilization. Having been ordered at the 11th hour to pull the now-infamous Danish cartoons from an issue dedicated to them, the editorial group—consisting of myself, managing editor Tim Marchman, arts editorJonathan Leaf and one-man city hall bureau Azi Paybarah, chose instead to resign our positions.We have no desire to be free speech martyrs, but it would have been nakedly hypocritical to avoid the same cartoons we'd criticized others for not running, cartoons that however absurdly have inspired arson, kidnapping and murder and forced cartoonists in at least two continents to go into hiding. Editors have already been forced to leave papers in Jordan and France for having run these cartoons. We have no illusions about the power of the Press (NY Press, we mean), but even on the far margins of the world-historical stage, we are not willing to side with the enemies of the values we hold dear, a free press not least among them.
Michelle Malkin says she tried to show the cartoons on Fox News but the camera cut away when she held them up.
Antonio Zerbisias argues that those showing the cartoons hates Muslims. (He's wrong.)
Iraqi blogger Alaa suggests that there is more to outrage at the cartoons than meets the eye:
Those who have been following my blog should know that I am a practicing believer in the religion of Islam; so naturally I consider it offensive to show disrespect to Islamic religious symbols or any religious symbols of any kind, for that matter. However there is more to this than meets the eye. It seems to me quite suspicious that this storm is created at this particular time. To start with this is certainly not the first time that insults and affronts of this nature appear on print in western media in many countries and places. Such things do not deserve any kind of reaction other rather the contempt they deserve. Yet there are those who seem to seize upon such opportunities for motives that have nothing to do with the apparent religious sensitivities. Clearly there are those who wish to harm relations between the West in General and the Moslem World and more particularly we should not forget the contribution of Denmark to the allied effort in Iraq. Yes friends, I who consider my self a fervent Moslem, tell you that this is an artificial storm stirred by the same kind of people who are beheading, kidnapping and blowing up market places and day workers in Iraqi cities etc. Those in the West who give such people the ammunition and pretexts to launch such pitiful shows and stir up the emotions of gullible simple people, are their allies and facilitators.
Meanwhile, Jonah Goldberg quips that the Iranian Holocaust cartoon contest has caused the Jeiwsh street to explode.
(Hat tip Instapundit)
Posted by Conor at 03:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
February 03, 2006
Will Democracy Lessen Terrorism?
The Becker-Posner blog has published an excellent discussion about propsects for improvement in the Middle East:
President Bush has suggested that spreading democracy is the surest antidote to Islamist terrorism. He can draw on a literature that finds that democracies very rarely go to war with each other, although a conspicuous exception is the U.S. Civil War, since both the Union and the Confederacy were democracies.America's foreign policy is now premised on an affirmative answer to that question. Here's hoping that's right.Hamas, which has just won a majority in the parliament of the Palestinian proto-state, is a political party that has an armed terrorist wing and is pledged to the destruction of Israel. Can that surprising outcome of what appears to have been a genuinely free election be squared with the belief that democracy is the best antidote to war and terrorism?
Posted by Conor at 03:31 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
February 01, 2006
International Banter
In 2004 I spent almost a year living and traveling in Europe, beginning with a month in Paris. Among my funniest memories is this conversation, overheard in an expatriate bar:
Canadian Bartender: Everyone in America thinks it's the greatest country on earth. You're a bunch of megalomaniacs!
American: Well think about where the world would be if not for America. Now think about where the world would be if not for Canada. Which country is greater?
Frenchman: (laughing) Ah ha! You see, Canada is better! America is the last imperialist country left. Canada and France understand that, and we don't succumb to it.
Canadian Bartender: Everyone in America thinks it's the greatest country on earth. You're a bunch of megalomaniacs!
American patron: Well think about where the world would be if not for America. Now think about where the world would be if not for Canada. Which country is greater?
Frenchman: (laughing) Ah ha! You see, Canada is better! America is the last imperialist country left. Canada and France understand that, and we don't succumb to it.
American patron: If not for America we'd all speaking German.
Frenchman patron: And if not for De Gaulle we'd all be speaking English.
American: We are all speaking English.
Posted by Conor at 11:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack