An important new contribution to understanding Islamism and counterterrorism efforts

Egypt Today has a brilliant contribution to the effort to understand Islamism and the domestic and international terrorism threat it offers in the Middle East.

Memoirs of an Ex-Jihadi

Ed Husain was 16 years old, he says in his memoirs, The Islamist, when he traded in his family's traditional Islam for the radical political Islam of Jamaat-e-Islami, later the Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT).

His story of entering fundamentalist Islam and finally leaving it is a fascinating account of what motivates people to join, what daily life looks like in such groups, and what is at stake in his leaving and in the effort to persuade younger and older people to leave or never join, when possible.

This was the most powerful passage in this review, I thought:

"In 1995, during his second year of college, a fellow student — a Christian Nigerian — was murdered on campus, surrounded by a crowd of students, including Husain. 'It was inhumane, and it’s as if there was no differentiating between right and wrong,' he remembers.

Husain is certain today that the environment he helped to create in college, where outsiders felt confident coming in and distributing propaganda, led to the death. 'Who gave these Muslims this idea of supremacy?' he says. 'Who created this environment? Who created these clusters? Who gave them these ideas of jihad? Who said violence was legitimate? We did. HT did.'

One of the main aims Husain had in writing his book was to bring home the impact of ideas. 'I saw the impact of ideas on people. That’s why I have a problem with people going around calling for jihad, and calling for the kaffir to be killed, without taking responsibility for the actions that such rhetoric leads to.'"

The heart of the differences and conflict between liberal and illiberal forces in the world is their ideas and values. That is why we must be as clear as possible about the commitment in liberal democratic values to ideas rather than force animating our cultural and political life. That is the full embodiment of liberal values that we have been missing during this political period. As long as liberal peoples and governments rationalize force instead of ideas as the central value of liberal democracy, every illiberal group or government - terrorists, theocracies, Communist regimes, totalitarian regimes of all kinds - have the cover they need to engage in every illiberal imposition of force over ideas animating their own cultures and politics.

Ed Husain's experience makes that all the more clear for liberal peoples who might be and should be weary of force foolishly animating liberal and as well as illiberal cultures and politics, which is the ugly, long, and illiberal history of liberal and illiberal cultures and governments alike.

Love,
Ben

What's at stake

Do you see any substantial difference between the rationalizations of the present repressive direction in liberal democratic countries and this rationale?

Supreme Leader: Education has effective impacts on social norms

Me neither.

And you think American politicians, journalists, activists, and scholars are cynical in their arguments for power. Listen to this mouthful.

"Comparing the current educational system with that of pre-Islamic Revolution era, the Supreme Leader said that the education had focused on secular perceptions before the Islamic Revolution and was incompatible with the fundamental needs of the society.

'Notwithstanding the changes in Islamic and national perceptions of the Education Ministry, it still suffers from the outdated structures requiring radical changes to revitalize the education in conformity with the social progress.' Prior to the Supreme Leader's remarks, Minister of Education Mahmoud Farshidi presented a report on restructuring the body."

That is what is at stake during this political period. Whether liberal democracies are going to give cover to this kind of ugly illiberalism or not. Because it is fairly clear in these statements that these power-mongers take their cue from power-mongers in the West. And the question we all must ask ourselves is if we will give them the cover they want.

I, for one, will not.

Love,
Ben

Understanding is what is missing and needed

As I watch so many situations in the world - the war in Iraq, the revived Middle East peace process, and, today, the DUI and criminal drug charges being lodged against Lindsey Lohan and the criminal dog-fighting drama for Michael Vick of the Atlanta Falcons - it becomes clearer to me that what is missing that is needed in all of these situations and around almost every issue that democratic people face with one another is greater understanding, of one another and of the experiences and situations that we all face.

Lindsey Lohan does not understand the need to not be driving while intoxicated, nor to avoid drugs like cocaine, her protestations notwithstanding. She's not a bad person. She is being irresponsible. But it has clearly not been helped by the arrests and criminal charges she has faced. Journalists following the case ignore that failure and cheer it on further with headlines that speak of Lindsey needing jail time for her own good. That case is obviously without any real regard for Lindsey's own good, which Lindsey is in a better position to assess than any journalist rallying for her imprisonment. And, worse, the failure of legal efforts to correct her behavior in absence of her own conscience coming to terms with it and with a greater maturity that is perpetually undermined by young people like Lindsey by the more controlling efforts of older "wiser" heads who want to imprison her "for her own good." Most people who follow Lindsey's case don't understand this fact of life. Lindsey herself may not understand it. But the facts of her life certainly do bear it out. And the failure to face up to that lack of understanding is occurring on the part of those who would imprison Lindsey as much as Lindsey herself. The difference is that Lindsey is looking at jail time for her failure to understand. And older people wonder why younger people romanticize outlaw culture.

Michael Vick, so some say, doesn't understand the seriousness of the situation he faces, right now. He won't take a leave of absence to deal with the trial on Federal charges that he faces for dog fighting. He doesn't understand what the big deal is. And the truth is that he just doesn't. Michael, like so many people, especially young people, and like me, in most ways, does not accept the legitimacy of government to regulate his behavior (though I do very seriously appreciate the intentions; the results just aren't too whoopy, by any standard) and have trusted older people in their lives who have told them that they will learn from their mistakes, just as those same older folks learned from their own. Most people accept the legitimacy of government regulating someone else's behavior. But few people, when push comes to shove, really believe in the government's or anyone's legitimate right to regulate their own behavior, when they are honest. It doesn't make Vick a bad guy. It just means that he doesn't understand. Most people involved in that drama, and so many such situations, don't understand what it means that Michael doesn't understand the gravity of the situation. And it's easier to paint people as bad than it is to recognize that they think about such situations differently. And older people wonder why younger people romanticize outlaw culture.

The fact that most people think this way when they are in similar situations and the hypocrisy that we all demonstrate when faced with such situations is the reason for why I support the broadest scope of freedom possible for all people, and the reason why liberal values taken seriously make the most sense to me.

The war in Iraq pits American political leaders and citizens who largely look at that conflict through their own self-centered lenses against both the real needs of the Iraqi government, military, and law enforcement, and, ultimately, the Iraqi people, and the more self-centered outlooks of those same Iraqis, not appreciating the gravity of American blood being spilt for Iraqi security and the hope of an Iraqi political resolution.

And the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, similarly, involves so many parties more attuned to their own more self-centered outlooks than to the needs of one another. I generally have thought of Israelis as the more selfless party in those negotiations, and then the Israelis go and say things like they did today to the Arab League proposal that they could not accept a right of return for Palestinians displaced by Israeli forces at Israel's founding because they do not want to impugn the "Jewish nature" of their state. Read: though Israel was founded as a safe haven for Jews who face discrimination and genocide abroad, we really are the discriminatory assholes that Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims accuse us of being.

And as I watch all of this, it becomes clear that, not only is what is missing is greater mutual understanding and efforts at understanding between people, but that what, more than anything else that stands in the way of such understanding is our more repressive, forceful efforts, as a rule.

I suppose, at some level, this is something many people have just resigned themselves to. And, more nefariously, it is something that many people will perpetually dismiss, out of their arrogance and hubris that their more repressive efforts accomplish more than they do.

What saddens me is the whole of it is based on the biggest lie of all, which is that it is that understanding and not the repression and force that is responsible for most of our troubles. It is the premise that others' interests must be sacrificed to our own rather than the much more honest and enlightened and decent idea that everyones' interests are benefited when we genuinely look after and make stronger efforts to understand the interests and perspectives and thoughts of everyone better and that it is our failure to do so which undermines so much of our presumed goals and is responsible for so many of the problems in the world today.

The beauty of repression is that people can hide those more self-centered, unconcerned, uncaring sentiments under their pretenses and facades (though anyone with an eye for pretense can tell the difference, better, generally). And even when our more cynical, less mutually regarding selves are out in the open, we so often glorify them rather than be more self-reflective and self-critical. That's what motivates a Michael Vick to be engaged in the kind of cruel dog-fighting that he was involved with that has precipitated his legal and professional troubles. And that is what motivates his prosecutors, who are more concerned with abstractions about the law than they are with the reality of a man's life and freedom.

Most people resist that kind of understanding, I am learning. And since they are often rewarded for it and because they so often see more understanding efforts overwhelmed by more repressive efforts and nice guys finishing last, too often, they can rationalize their self-centeredness as a means of survival, even if it means the utter and complete dysfunction and ugliness of a world where everyone's interests get sacraficed for the interests of someone else. Or as such that wrong-headed and ugly value system is articulated in common parlance: every man for himself.

It is reinforced by a market and political system where people too often behave this way and then call it "reality". It's the same kind of reality that animates the Iraqi sectarian civil war. It is an ugly and cynical reality. And it is responsible for so much that is wrong with the world.

It is exactly what Lord Acton warned us of in his 19th century musings: power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Power persistently corrupts reality. And then power proclaims itself the savior of that same reality. It is likely the biggest lie ever told to humanity and that humanity tells itself.

It most certainly gets better, generally because it breeds mistrust in its proponents. But it does much harm along the way.

Hillary Clinton says that Barak Obama is "naive" and "irresponsible" for his suggestion that leaders of rogue nations should be engaged by heads of state rather than isolated. He happens to be right and all the writing is on the wall to suggest so. And Obama is right to point out that Clinton, who voted for the Iraq war without raising any serious objections about that war, is in a curious position to call Barak Obama naive or irresponsible about anything. Clinton is playing politics. She knows that many older voters, especially, will view Obama's honest admission of taking illegal drugs in school as "irresponsible" and that his popularity among young voters for that fact associates him with the pride that older voters and Democrats maintain that they are wiser, not more cynical, than their younger counterparts, who can thus be disregarded as "naive". It's a cynical ploy by a cynical politician. And exactly why I don't trust Hillary Clinton any further than I could throw her.

And exactly why such cynical power grabs are unsustainable. Because they breed mistrust.

Hillary Clinton might or might not win this election. I will likely be voting against her. Largely because it is clear just how power-hungry and paternalistic she seems to irreparably be.

But there is no way in hell that a Hillary Clinton administration will breed anything but mistrust among a younger generation that will long outlive here political career.

And that is the long view that Hillary Clinton sacrifices in her machinations for power. And that all people sacrafice in their rationalizations of a more repressive direction for liberal democracy.

Americans were cowered for a time by the machinations of Adolph Hitler, in the same way. But they soon enough saw through the charade, largely because an allied Japan overreached and attacked American homeland and also largely because people with more courage and clearer liberal purposes could see what a masterful and cynical power-monger he was, despite the conventional political cowardice of the times, while others were blinded by that popular cowardice. The more repressive fact of the present politics is not a fact of Hillary Clinton or Rudy Guliani or any of the candidates alone. Neither is this fetish with a governing philosophy of force sustainable, anymore than its comrades in governance, Nazi Germany or Soviet Communism, were sustainable.

It is a sad fact of life that the more decent and honest far from perfect idealism of youth is perpetually undermined, punished, corrupted and treated with contempt by the cynicism and desire to control by far from perfect older generations. It is also the quite happy fact of life that such cynicism, control and corruption of spirit fades away, slowly, each generation as young people learn to mistrust their elders, for good reason, and to face their problems more honestly than previous generations.

Slowly.

And, in the meantime, it is understanding of one another that is needed. And it is understanding of one another that is undermined by our quest for power to solve problems it cannot solve.

The only way out of this cynical mess is to recognize this. And for all of their terrible records of dealing with problems well while they are in the midst of them, liberal democracies, like the people who make them up, do seem to have a pretty unflagging ability to face their problems more honestly after everything else has failed.

Understanding that this is a fact of life made so by peoples' natural incapacity to solve problems they do not more completely understand is what is missing and needed, as much as understanding of one another.

It will remain so, and all of the problems that it harbors, until we face the need for that kind of understanding.

If I am so confident that liberal democracies correct themselves, in the long run, why, might you ask, am I so depressed about their behavior in the short run?

The answer: because I grieve for so many who will be hurt in the meantime.

May that number be as few as possible.

Love,
Ben

H. L. Mencken on what it means to be a liberal

I have been pretty discouraged these last 7 or so years, watching the liberalism of my youth get distorted into something nasty, overbearing, and ugly in the last few years. I have been discouraged by how thoughtlessly the debate about this war has been engaged by liberals as much as by conservatives in their mutually consistent effort to perpetually substitute thoughtful and practical discussion with pressure politics and self-righteous grandstanding.

I've turned a lot, these days, to H.L. Mencken for some consolation for how wrong and ugly this period has been and seemed for someone who was openly and consistently critical of the illiberal tendencies of Liberals, as he called them, in the early part of the 20th Century.

What Mencken writes about Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes and liberalism of the 20's and 30's could easily have been as said of liberalism at the beginning of the 21st century, sadly. It's clear we have made progress from Mencken's time. It is also clear that no matter how far we come, that those repressive forces in liberal clothing seem to perpetually have all too dominating seat at the table of liberal democracy, and then wonder why illiberal forces in the world get so much traction around the world. One has to wonder.

"Mr. Justice Holmes
The American Mercury, May 1930

A Review of The Dissenting Opinions of Mr. Justice Holmes
arranged by Alfred Lief, with a forward by George W. Kirchwey

Mr. Justice Holmes's dissenting opinions have got so much fawning praise from liberals that it is somewhat surprising to discover that Mr. Lief is able to muster but fifty-five of them, and even more surprising to hear from Dr. Kirchwey that in only one case did the learned justice stand quite alone, and that the cases "in which he has given expression to the judgement of the court, [sic] or in which he has concurred in its judgement, far outnumber, in the ratio of eight or ten to one, those in which he felt it necessary to dissent."

There is even more surprising stuff in the opinions themselves. In three Espionage Act cases, including the Debs case, one finds a clear statement of the doctrine that, in war time, the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment cease to have any substance, and may be set aside by any jury that has been sufficiently alarmed by a district attorney itching for higher office. In Fox v. the State of Washington, we learn that any conduct 'which shall tend to encourage or advocate disrespect for the law' may be made a crime, and that the protest of a man who believes that he has been jailed unjustly, and threatens to boycott his persecutors, may be treated as such a crime. In Moyer v. Peabody, it appears that the Governor of a state, 'without sufficient reason but in good faith,' may call out the militia, declare martial law, and jail anyone he happens to suspect or dislike, without laying himself open 'to an action after he is out of office on the ground that he had no reasonable ground for his belief.' And, in Weaver v. Palmer Bros. Co. there is the plain inference that in order to punish a theoretical man, A, who is suspected of wrong-doing, a State Legislature may lay heavy and intolerable burdens upon a real man, B, who has admittedly done no wrong at all.

I find it hard to reconcile such notions with any plausible concept of Liberalism. They may be good law, but it is impossible to see how they can conceivably promote liberty. My suspicion is that the hopeful Liberals of the 20s, frantically eager to find at least one judge who was not violently and implacably against them, seized upon certain of Mr. Justice Holmes's opinions without examining the rest, and read into them an attitude that was actually as foreign to his ways of thinking as it was to those of Mr. Chief Justice Hughes. Finding him, now and then, defending eloquently a new and uplifting law which his colleagues proposed to strike of the books, they concluded that he was a sworn advocate of the rights of man. But all the while, if I do not misread his plain words, he was actually no more than an advocate of the rights of lawmakers. There, indeed, is the clue to his whole jurisprudence. He believed that the law-making bodies should be free to experiment almost ad libitum, that the courts should not call a halt upon them until they clearly passed the uttermost bounds of reason, that everything should be sacrificed to their autonomy, including apparently, even the Bill of Rights. If this [sic] is liberalism, then all I can say is that Liberalism is not what it was when I was young.

In those remote days, sucking wisdom from the primeval springs, I was taught that the very aim of the Constitution was to keep law-makers from running amok, and that it was the highest duty of the Supreme Court, following Marbury v. Madison, to safeguard it against their forays. It was not sufficient, so my instructors maintained, for Congress or a State Legislature to give assurance that its intentions were noble; noble or not, it had to keep squarely within the limits of the Bill of Rights, and the moment it went beyond them its most virtuous acts were null and void. But Mr. Justice Holmes apparently thought otherwise. He held, it would seem, that violating the Bill of Rights is a rare and deliberate malice, and that it is chief business of the Supreme Court to keep the Constitution loose and elastic, so that blasting holes through it may not be too onerous. Bear this doctrine in mind, and you will have an adequate explanation, on the one hand, of those forward-looking opinions which console the Liberals- for example in Lochner v. New York (the bakery case), in the child labor case, and in the Virginia case involving the compulsory sterilization for imbeciles- and on the other hand, of the reactionary opinions which they so politely overlook- for example in the Debs case, in Bartels v. Iowa (a war-time case, involving the prohibition of foreign-language teaching), in the Mann Act case (in which Dr. Holmes concurred with the majority of the court, [sic] and thereby helped pave the way for the wholesale blackmail which Mr. Justice McKenna, who dissented, warned against), and finally in the long line of Volstead Act cases.

Like any other man, of course, a judge sometimes permits himself the luxury of inconsistency. Mr. Justice Holmes, it seems to me, did so in the wiretapping case and again in the Abrams case, in which his dissenting opinion was clearly at variance with the prevailing opinion in the Debs case, written by him. But I think it is quite fair to say that his fundamental attitude was precisely as I have stated it. Over and over again, in these opinions, he advocated giving the legislature full head-room, and over and over again he protested against using the Fourteenth Amendment to upset novel and oppressive laws, aimed frankly at helpless minorities. If what he said in some of those opinions were accepted literally, there would be scarcely any brake at all upon lawmaking, and the Bill of Rights would have no more significance than the Code of Manu.

The weak spot in his reasoning, if I may presume to suggest such a thing, was his tacit assumption that the voice of the legislature was the voice of the people. There is, in fact, no reason for confusing the people and the legislature: the two, in these later years, are quite distinct. The legislature, like the executive, has ceased, save indirectly, to be even the creature of the people: it is the creature, in the main, of pressure groups, and most of them, it must be manifest, are of dubious wisdom and even more dubious honesty. Laws are no longer made by a rational process of public discussion; they are made by a process of blackmail and intimidation, and they are executed in the same manner. The typical lawmaker of today is a man wholly devoid of principle- a mere counter in a grotesque and knavish game. If the right pressure could be applied to him he would be cheerfully in favor of polygamy, astrology or cannibalism.

It is the aim of the Bill of Rights, if it has any remaining aim at all, to curb such prehensile gentry. Its function is to set a limitation upon their power to harry and oppress us to their own private profit. The Fathers, in framing it, did not have the powerful minorities in mind; what they sought to hobble was simply the majority. But that is a detail. The important thing is that the Bill of Rights sets forth, in the plainest of plain language, the limits beyond which even the legislature may not go. The Supreme Court, in Marbury v. Madison, decided that it was bound to execute that intent, and for a hundred years that doctrine remained the corner-stone of American constitutional law. But it late years the court has taken the opposite line, and the public opinion seems to support it. Certainly, Dr. Holmes did not go as far in that direction as some of his brother judges, but equally certainly he went far enough. To call him Liberal is to make the word meaningless...."

To call so much of what passes for liberal values liberal, today, makes that word sound hollow and meaningless, I must say. It's as if there really is no difference between liberalism and illiberalism except that liberalism is not quite as mean-spirited and brutal in its paternalism.

Mencken doesn't offer much real consolation except that maybe really believing in those values might remind those who don't of their failure of heart and logic and more genuine courage. And to encourage each generation to make up for where its' parents failed so miserably.

My generation won't complete the project, of that I am certain. Neither will the next. But perhaps we chip away at the rationalizations for repression and illiberal power that animate terrorism, genocide, and despotism around the world as much as they animate illiberal attitude, laws, and aggression here at home and in liberal democracies around the world so that next generation fewer innocents are murdered by terrorists and sectarians and genocidal maniacs who prey and pressure upon governments and populations with threats against their security, fewer students are killed and imprisoned by autocrats who borrow their repressive instincts from their more liberal brethren, and fewer decent citizens of liberal democratic societies have to live in fear for their freedom and safety because their neighbors have decided that they know better.

Too many tragedies must take place in this world before we will face our more ugly and menacing ways. It is the saddest and most serious hope that liberal democracy offers that it has never been the society and form of government that has unerringly treated people with dignity but the society most likely to recognize its errors long after they have been committed.

Here's to one American who looked ahead of so many curves because his notion of liberalism was consistently liberal in all of its original and genuine meaning as one committed to simple but profound notion of liberty.

Love,
Ben