A couple of unrelated links that might have formed the basis of proper posts, had I but time. First, over at Leiter’s site, there’s a discussion of some highly critical remarks that Raymond Geuss has made about John Rawls and his work. Second, at Reason there’s an interview with Ayan Hirsi Ali in which she makes crystal clear the nature of her views and erases forever any thought that the perception of her as a “clash of civilizations” extremist might be the result of misreporting or looseness of expression (via Blood and Treasure).
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Hidari 10.15.07 at 1:33 pm
Oh not, but it has been proven that you are wrong about Ayan Hirsi Ali. According to those great minds of our time Sam Harris and Salman Rusdie:
‘Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust. As such, she is a unique and indispensable witness to both the strength and weakness of the West: to the splendor of open society and to the boundless energy of its antagonists.’
(http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-harris9oct09,0,3734484.story?coll=la-opinion-center)
I have no idea what the (demonstrably false) reference to the Holocaust might be, except to imply that anyone who denies the validity of Hirsi Ali’s profound contribution to modern political discourse is (what else?) an anti-semite.
Hidari 10.15.07 at 1:37 pm
Sorry I had to add this, which I missed the first time.
‘There is not a person alive more deserving of the freedoms of speech and conscience we take for granted in the West, nor is there anyone making a more courageous effort to defend them.’ (emphasis added)(Harris and Rushdie again).
So that’s those frauds Aung San Suu Kyi, the Dalai Lama, and Nelson Mandela put in their place.
Xel 10.15.07 at 2:00 pm
“There is not a person alive more deserving of the freedoms of speech and conscience…”
What a stupid stupid notion – more “enlightenment” babble that can only serve to make the current political discourse more high-strung and monochrome.
I’ll kill and die for Ali’s rights to say both warranted and inane things about the state of Islam (which she does) but she is not deserving of all her accolades nor can she be said to be entirely sensible and fair in her political choices. There are better voices to be heard.
Some morons on the left close their senses to Ali because they fear that she represents a failure in them to uphold liberal values in the face of a bunch of fundamentalist puppies who can’t handle non-muslim people having trace alcohol in their ice cream. They can’t understand that if they fail in such tasks there is a vaccuum where the right-wingers can find clout.
Most people on the left, like myself, scoff at her for a wholly different reason – the fact that her blunt speech and questionable allegiances enables the kind of right-wing, faux-enlightened crusades that harm muslims arbitrarily simply in order to satisfy conservative dreams and dark motives – see the occupation of Iraq.
SG 10.15.07 at 2:17 pm
I read an outline of an interview with her in Online Opinion a while back, and she seemed to have some pretty silly ideas about Indonesia and Turkey. The gazetteer of flag-burning linked to from Blood and Treasure also makes it pretty clear her claim that only Muslims burn the flag is wrong. In fact it even happened in Papua New Guinea!
More quality reporting from Reason magazine…
abb1 10.15.07 at 3:18 pm
Rogier van Bakel: “In Rotterdam, the Netherlands’ second-largest city, immigrants—mostly Muslims from Morocco and Turkey—had become a majority…”
Scary… But according to wikipedia:
So, you get ‘nearly 50%’ by counting those with “one parent born outside the country” as immigrants. Who else do you have to count to make immigrants a majority, I wonder?
Muslims comprise less than 25% of the whole population, and obviously not all of them are immigrants, so it sounds like “immigrants—mostly Muslims from Morocco and Turkey” is false too.
Clearly his definition of the word ‘immigrant’ is based on some racial criteria.
nu 10.15.07 at 3:56 pm
Muslims comprise less than 25% of the whole population, and obviously not all of them are immigrants, so it sounds like “immigrants—mostly Muslims from Morocco and Turkey†is false too.
If you use “not native to the Netherlands or have at least one parent born outside the country” as a definition of “immigrant”, I’d say that at least 80% of the muslims are “immigrant”. (and that because it excludes the very very young third-generation)
jayann 10.15.07 at 5:48 pm
I think that’s the official Dutch definition of an immigrant, abbi; a staggeringly illiberal one (given the prejudice against ‘immigrants’). If it were the UK definition, I’d be an immigrant — and probably stateless.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allochtoon
abb1 10.15.07 at 9:13 pm
Ah, thanks, Jayann. I did not know that.
Luc 10.15.07 at 10:15 pm
The interviewer is Dutch, so he knows exactly the difference between immigrant and “allochtoon”, and the confusion it causes when translated to English. So unless the intro isn’t his, he is guilty of fudging the numbers to play to the Eurabia crowd.
“courting the Muslim vote” in the third par. should have set off anyones bullshit detector.
Roy Belmont 10.16.07 at 3:31 am
Hirsi Ali is Ann Coulter’s shadow.
stostosto 10.16.07 at 8:09 am
For an extremist rabble rouser and rebel, Ayaan Hirsi Ali is oddly defeatist. Why, when she herself managed to free herself from the shackles of oppressive, intolerant religion is it so inconceivable that other Muslims do so as well?
MFB 10.16.07 at 8:33 am
Anyone who can bring herself to agree with John Bolton on any subject (except, POSSIBLY, the time of day) is a deeply disturbed individual.
Protect her from herself.
jayann 10.16.07 at 11:48 am
luc, my point is that (as I understand it) the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics defines ‘allochtoon’ as I did and the Dutch Cabinet uses the term (to = ‘immigrant’). I agree landverhuizer in fact = immigrant as usually defined.
(The interviewer probably is deliberately fudging the issue.)
des von bladet 10.16.07 at 3:25 pm
We remark, apropos of not much, that the Scholarly Advisors to the Dutch Government (WRR) recently recommended scrapping the term “allochtoon”, on the grounds it does more harm than good.
One of the many things it doesn’t do, though, is translate unproblematically into English “immigrant” – the standard British term that most closely matches “allochtoon” is “ethnic minority”, and facilitating a lack of distinction between that and “immigrant” is fighting talk in civilised company, and quite right too.
stostosto 10.17.07 at 1:33 pm
Here is a young Muslim with a very interesting take on the possibilities of Islamic reform. Contrary to Ayaan’s strange defeatist-aggressive appraoch, he doesn’t aim to simply kill, burn and destroy. He argues.
lemuel pitkin 10.17.07 at 3:48 pm
Hirsi Ali may be the first refugee from Western Europe since the Holocaust.
This is a rather odd thing for Harris and Rushdie to say, since it was an official of Ali’s own right-wing party that revoked her citizenship.
Hidari 10.17.07 at 4:52 pm
‘Contrary to Ayaan’s strange defeatist-aggressive appraoch, he doesn’t aim to simply kill, burn and destroy. He argues.’
Everyone knows that logical argument is a tool of the neo-Islamofascist hard right, and that appeals to reason and empirical evidence are a sure sign of an enemy of the Enlightenment Project. As Christopher Hitchens so rightly says, we cannot be tolerant of the intolerant. Likewise, we cannot use logical argument against the illogical and we cannot use reason and science against the unreasonable and the anti-scientific. Therefore, if you use reason, logic and evidence you are part of the Communoislamofasconazi conspiracy that secretly rules the world. THE WORLD I TELL YOU!!!!!!!
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