Comments on: Yasmin

By: Mark Eli Kalderon

Mark Eli Kalderon — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 23:47:59 +0000

Antoni, perhaps you are right, but somehow I feel there is a big difference in motivation and perhaps in substance between someone’s faith in a fundamentalist version of Islam where that person was raised in that tradition and where a person adopts that faith as a reaction to felt oppression. There is at least this much difference: the former need not involve resentment in the way the latter does. If I am right in suspecting a difference in substance as well as motivation, then radical Islam as identity politics is, ironically, an expression of modernity even as it is a reaction to it. And yes, the name is sephardi.

By: Antoni Jaume

Antoni Jaume — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 16:38:03 +0000

Mark, I think you are wrong to believe that fundamentalist Islam is at odds with identity politics. Islam is different from “Occident”, and more so to people whose families harbours from Muslim countries, but who themselves have in fact a mostly western vision of those countries an of Islam. A rigorist interpretation of Islam that refuse any change that would bring customs to be nearer those of our society is rather, in my perception, the norm. It is a bit of “Not Invented Here” syndrome. DSW OT: simple personnal curiosity, Kalderon is sephardic?

By: Mark Eli Kalderon

Mark Eli Kalderon — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 15:00:47 +0000

One thing I found odd about Yasmin’s turn to “orthodoxy” that has not been brought out in the comments so far is that it seemed like she was engaging in a bit of identity politics. What’s odd is that fundamentalist Islam and identity politics seem like strange bedfellows—even if some pursue identity politics by adopting the trappings of fundamentalist Islam.

By: abb1

abb1 — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 10:06:41 +0000

epidemic problems It’s not a problem, it’a trend; it’s just that marriage is the thing of the past, look at Scandinavia; the ‘marriage’ dogma is dying. Blacks are more urban and therefore less conservative.

By: Dan Simon

Dan Simon — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 01:04:14 +0000

Here’s a possible historical reason why there might be a few problems in the black family as an institution; I’ve got the surname “Davies” because I had a great-great grandfather who had the surname “Davies”. How many black Americans can make a similar claim? This is way off-topic, but I figure since a CT poster is initiating it.... Legacies of slavery might explain, say, a black illegitimacy rate of 18 percent in 1950 (as compared with 2 percent for whites). However, it's much worse at explaining the rough quadrupling of this rate to 69 percent by 1997. (The white rate crossed 18 percent in 1980, and has since leveled off at a little over half the black rate.) Marriage and divorce rates show a similar pattern: around the middle of the 20th century, family cohesion statistics that are until then only marginally worse among whites than among blacks suddenly become epidemic problems among blacks (and a much milder problem for whites). Explaining how the effects of slavery could have "reached out" across a half-century period to devastate black families seems like a difficult job.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Wed, 19 Jan 2005 00:16:43 +0000

that they were introduced by black migrants from certain regions of the South, where violence and family breakup were already firmly established in the local culture—black and white—for various historical reasons. Here’s a possible historical reason why there might be a few problems in the black family as an institution; I’ve got the surname “Davies” because I had a great-great grandfather who had the surname “Davies”. How many black Americans can make a similar claim?

By: Dan Simon

Dan Simon — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 23:11:48 +0000

Little by little, Dan Simon is coming around to the view Chris put forward: “[The] basic message: that unremitting hostility to a community will not lead them to abandon their most reactionary traditions in favour of modernity but will rather have the opposite effect, is a valid one.” Uh, no, I’ve been arguing quite consistently that society’s “unremitting hostility to a community” has very little impact on the latter’s formation of violent movements. Other influences—including, but not limited to, the community’s past traditions—have a much greater effect. (I’ve also suggested that another influence—a sympathetic response to the community’s violence—sometimes plays an important role. That point has gotten lost a bit in the more historically-oriented discussions, because I believe that it was until recently very rare for people to romanticize the terrorist killers within their own society. But that doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned the claim.)

By: Sally

Sally — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 22:36:20 +0000

In fact, I’m not American, and as my previous comments have hopefully shown, I’m under no illusions about the harshness with which the US (like most countries) has treated its immigrants. I wasn’t implying that you were ignorant about the harshness with which the U.S. has treated immigrants. I’m implying that you’re ignorant about the incidence of violent response. Your only evidence for the scarcity of earlier terrorists is that you’ve never heard of them. And I think that speaks more to the biases in historical memory than to what actually happened. I study Irish-Americans, and I can’t speak in detail about organized violence among other groups, except to say that I can cite quite a few examples of Central, Southern and Eastern Europeans who were involved in anarchist and labor violence. (And in the case of the Haymarket martyrs and Sacco and Vanzetti, others who probably weren’t involved in violence but were executed for it anyway.) I’m sure you’d say that those people were exceptions, too, and in a sense they were. The vast majority of past immigrants, just like the vast majority of today’s immigrants, don’t resort to terrorism. But it’s just not right to say that earlier immigrants didn’t become terrorists. And if you’d asked a middle-class Anglo-American in 1905, he or she might well have insisted that Eastern Europeans were conditioned by their crazy non-Protestant culture (or their racial inferiority) to solve problems by assassinating the president, rather than by working hard and pulling themselves up by their bootstraps like civilized people. Yes, the Donegal Irish who emigrated to America faced harsh treatment—but they organized into violent groups because that was their tradition, not necessarily because they were oppressed. This strikes me as simplistic and as a false dichotomy. I don’t believe that either “traditions” or “oppression” alone triggered a particular response. I would be surprised if there were very many immigrant groups which didn’t bring with them traditions of violence, yet they only resorted to those traditions in certain circumstances. And there’s actually some interesting comparative immigration history which suggests that immigrants from the same background (and sometimes even the same families) behaved very differently depending on whether they ended up in places where they were welcomed or places where they weren’t. I think it’s more useful to think of tradition and local circumstances as things that interact, rather than competing explanations for behavior.

By: Kevin Donoghue

Kevin Donoghue — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 21:56:19 +0000

Little by little, Dan Simon is coming around to the view Chris put forward: “[The] basic message: that unremitting hostility to a community will not lead them to abandon their most reactionary traditions in favour of modernity but will rather have the opposite effect, is a valid one.” The reactionary traditions may come from Donegal or Sicily or Pakistan. It is not asserted that they must be terrorist traditions; merely that under the pressure of hostility the wagons will form a circle. Now whether this theory has much general validity I don’t know, but it is much more interesting than Dan’s “Root Cause” argument, which he hates with a passion despite the fact that it is his very own baby.

By: Dan Simon

Dan Simon — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 21:25:10 +0000

As someone who studies immigraton history, it bugs me to no end that a lot of Americans (and I’m assuming you’re American) rely more on cherished myths than on the actual historical record to understand the immigrant past. In fact, I’m not American, and as my previous comments have hopefully shown, I’m under no illusions about the harshness with which the US (like most countries) has treated its immigrants. In fact, that was one of my points—the “Root Cause” argument (that oppression and discrimination causes terrorism) fails to explain the rarity of organized terrorist violence among immigrant groups, nearly all of which have suffered considerable oppression and discrimination in America. Based on your description, your example—the Molly Maguires—appears to be an interesting exception, rather than a typical case. It reminds me a bit of Nicholas Lemann’s analysis of black inner-city problems—that they were introduced by black migrants from certain regions of the South, where violence and family breakup were already firmly established in the local culture—black and white—for various historical reasons. The interesting thing about this explanation is that discrimination and mistreatment don’t necessarily play a particularly strong role in provoking the ensuing violence. Yes, the Donegal Irish who emigrated to America faced harsh treatment—but they organized into violent groups because that was their tradition, not necessarily because they were oppressed. To make an analogy, Sicilians arriving in America also faced discrimination, but it would be hard to argue that they responded to it by establishing Mafia families. Rather, they formed Mafia families because that is what they had done in Sicily, and they probably would have done so even if their only problems had been the ordinary poverty and governmental indifference they endured back home, without the added burden of discrimination. Or am I wrong—was there something specific about the mistreatment of the Northwestern Irish in America that set them off more than “mere” hardship would have?

By: Sparks

Sparks — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 20:02:50 +0000

For those who missed it, set your VCR’s, it’s on again tonight at 0215 on Channel 4.

By: Dan Hardie

Dan Hardie — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 19:50:59 +0000

Shorter Dan Simon (hopefully concluding): I have a complete Theory of Terrorism Throughout the Ages for which I am offering no data at all, and unless someone can offer a complete data set of all terrorist incidents ever we will have to conclude that My Theory Is Right. Chutzpah- never heard of it.

By: x

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 19:09:27 +0000

“Now I won’t bore everyone with a history of terrorist movements” That’s a pity, I was looking forward to that. It would have been so accurate. I was so curious to hear in which decade you’d have placed the Baader-Meinhof or the FARC. 30’s? 90’s? somewhere in the future? There is, after all, among historians, substantial disagremeent on that too.

By: Sally

Sally — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 17:13:25 +0000

By now, though, it should be utterly obvious that “the Irish were cruelly discriminated against” does not constitute a plausible social cause. Yes, the Irish were cruelly discriminated against in America at the time. But numerous groups were also discriminated against just as cruelly during the same period, without forming terrorist movements
Are you sure? You didn’t know anything about the history of Irish-American violence: how do you know that you just don’t know about the histories of other ethnic groups? As someone who studies immigraton history, it bugs me to no end that a lot of Americans (and I’m assuming you’re American) rely more on cherished myths than on the actual historical record to understand the immigrant past. I’d be very interested to hear hypotheses regarding their social causes. The best recent attempt to understand Irish-American violence is Kevin Kenny’s Making Sense of the Molly Maguires. Kenny argues that the Mollies were recent immigrants from a particularly remote and underdeveloped part of Ireland, and they didn’t have the cultural capital they needed to deal with modern industrial capitalism. They didn’t understand the rules of the game. When they met with discrimination and exploitation, therefore, they fell back on methods of peasant resistance which worked in Donegal but which just brought the wrath of the state down on them in Pennsylvania. The effective solution to their grievances was to form a union, but they hadn’t figured that out yet. They were in an in-between state where they were trying to fix modern problems with traditional tools. Kenny makes it clear that they were a subsection of the Irish community: they were recent immigrants, they were Irish-speaking, they came from a particular region of Northwestern Ireland. Many Irish-Americans knew full well how to play by the rules of capitalism, and they were trying to form a non-violent union. But those distinctions were lost on the general population, and the Molly Maguires became associated with, and were used to bring down, organizations which had nothing to do with Molly Maguire violence. Most Americans saw the Molly Maguires and the union as linked; in fact, they represented two totally different approaches to dealing with the discrimination and exploitation faced by Irish-American miners. So to Kenny, the Molly Maguires were a culturally-determined response to real oppression. But also, “Irish-American culture” wasn’t monolithic, and it wasn’t fixed. It’s hard to imagine Irish-Americans resorting to that pattern of violence fifty years later, because at that point there weren’t any Irish-Americans who were as unfamiliar with industrial capitalism as the Mollies were.

By: Dan Simon

Dan Simon — Tue, 18 Jan 2005 16:31:47 +0000

Compare: “Of the children who catch infectious disease X, very very few indeed die.” Therefore “Infectious disease X could not be responsible for the death of this child”. Well, in the absence of all other information about this disease and this child, I’d say this is actually a pretty good inference. Of course, if we further know that this disease occasionally causes high fever, and that high fever occasionally causes death, and that this child experienced high fever, then we can revise our hypothesis accordingly. On the other hand, if we know that this child had no signs of high fever, but did experience severe head trauma unrelated to the illness, then we might well stick with our original guess. Now I won’t bore everyone with a history of terrorist movements, but I believe that if you investigate them, you’ll find that precious few of them followed the path, “oppressed minority leads to general restlessness among minority members, which leads to spontaneous formation of terrorist movement.” In fact, a hefty percentage of them cannot be said to have originated with an oppressed minority at all. However, the etiology “enterprising radical leader spots opportunity to gain notoriety and power by killing people, embarks on a terrorist campaign” is a very common story indeed. Sometimes the power is obtained through the support of members of a minority group that considers itself oppressed. Sometimes it’s gleaned from a majority group that sees a minority group, or foreign nation, or a political faction within itself, as a threat. And sometimes it’s gleaned from a majority group on behalf of the minority group that the leader claims to be representing. Of the three, I’d estimate that the first is the rarest and least effective source of support. In fact, terrorist groups that claim to represent oppressed minority groups are often despised by a vast majority of that group’s members, and even act as conventional criminal organizations preying on the group they purport to defend. Of course, I haven’t cited any hard data here—although I believe the terrorism research will back me up—and if Chris or anyone else wants to come back with a similarly detailed analysis of the claimed minority oppression-terrorism link, I’m ready to listen. However, “everybody knows” doesn’t constitute an argument—nor does a compelling BBC television drama.