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The Bully Pulpit

~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Category Archives: Debate

The Problem with Qatar

07 Tuesday Jul 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Debate, Freedom, Religion

≈ Comments Off on The Problem with Qatar

Tags

Charlie Hebdo, Daily Beast, David Cameron, Douglas Murray, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Hate Speech, Islam, Islamism, Jamie Dettmer, Mosque, Nick Clegg, Sa’ad Ateeq al Ateeq, Terrorism, World Cup

Qatar World Cup

“In Doha last Friday, the sermon given by the Imam at the biggest mosque in Qatar. Just reflect on this: biggest mosque in Qatar. You might have noticed Qatar is doing quite a lot of business in this city these days.

But what did the Imam say at Friday prayers? He said, among other things, this:

Allah strengthen Islam and the Muslims and destroy your enemies — the enemies of the religion. Allah destroy the Jews and whoever made the Jews, [and destroy the Christians and Alawites and the Shiites.]

This has been and is being pumped around by the ministries of the Qatari government. They’ve been sending around the video. They’re proud of it!

Is any leader in this country going to raise their voice about this sort of thing? I doubt it, because people don’t even raise them when it gets preached in this city, which it does. It really does.

[…]

It’s as bad as Je suis Charlie, which I’m deeply, deeply aggrevated and upset by… People weren’t Charlie, ladies and gentlemen. They really weren’t. They aren’t. If they were, Charlie Hebdo cartoons would’ve been published in every newspaper and on every TV station.

You know when Nick Clegg and David Cameron and all the other political leaders say Je suis Charlie, no they’re not. No they’re not. If Charlie Hebdo had been published here, it would have been decried as a far right wing, racist, Islamophobic magazine, and would have been shut down years and years ago. And don’t think when people say Je suis Juif that they mean that any more. They really don’t. It doesn’t mean anything more than Je suis Charlie. It’s a bit of sentimentality.

But hold them to it. Hold them to it, for God’s sake.”

__________

Pulled from Douglas Murray’s spot on, fervent opening on a recent panel with Maajid Nawaz and others discussing radical Islamism in Modern Europe:

The bracketed part of the pulled quote above is sourced from Jamie Dettmer’s article in the Daily Beast “An American Ally’s Grand Mosque of Hate,” which I’m assuming is where Murray found the quote.

Here is Dettmer’s more detailed account:

On the Friday before ISIS posted the horrific footage of the burning [Jordanian] pilot, a preacher sermonizing from the [Doha] Grand Mosque’s minbar prayed for the destruction of the faithful of other religions. “Allah, strengthen Islam and the Muslims, and destroy your enemies, the enemies of the religion,” intoned Saudi cleric Sa’ad Ateeq al Ateeq. “Allah, destroy the Jews and whoever made them Jews, and destroy the Christians and Alawites and the Shiites.”

His comments wouldn’t have been out of place in ISIS-controlled Mosul or Raqqa. He also beseeched Allah to save the al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, the third-holiest site in Islam, from the “claws of the Jews.”

Al Ateeq, who was on his sixth visit to the state-supervised Grand Mosque since 2013, reserved his most bellicose remarks for the part of the sermon called the du’aa, when the preacher encourages the faithful to join in guided prayer.

Within minutes, Qatar’s Ministry of Endowments and Islamic Affairs promoted al Ateeq’s remarks on Twitter. And the sermon was broadcast on several local television channels, including Qatar TV, the official state channel, signaling another stamp of approval…

If the thousands of dead slave laborers, gross violations of basic human rights and criminal extortion involved in Qatar’s hosting the 2022 World Cup are not enough to force us into even threatening to boycott the games, then surely the above facts and their attendant, sordid details should. Our only consolation so far is that hosting the World Cup is an enormous economic boondoggle.

Read on:

  • “I don’t have an Israel”: Murray explains why we have to preserve our own societies — because most of us have nowhere else to run
  • Maajid Nawaz, the great hope for a modern, moderate Islam, explains why our leaders should call ISIS “Islamic”
  • The cartoons the media will show us

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Maajid Nawaz: Why Not Calling ISIS “Islamic” Hurts Muslim Reformers

06 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Debate, Politics, Religion

≈ Comments Off on Maajid Nawaz: Why Not Calling ISIS “Islamic” Hurts Muslim Reformers

Tags

debate, Douglas Murray, extremism, ISIS, Islam, Islamic State, Islamism, Jihadism, Maajid Nawaz, Muslims, Quran

Maajid Nawaz

“When President Obama gave his speech, he said, ‘We will not allow these people to claim they are religious leaders. They have nothing to do with Islam.’

No. They are not “Islam” — of course they’re not. Nor am I, nor is anyone, really, because Islam is what Muslims make it. But they have something to do with Islam. If you’re going to argue with one of them — and I do all the time — you’re not discussing Mein Kampf. You’re discussing Islamic texts…

And just to clarify — one sentence:

What is Islamism? Islam is a religion; Islamism is the desire to impose any version of that religion on society.

It’s the politicization of my own religion. What is Jihadism? The use of force to spread Islamism.

The danger of not naming this ideology is twofold. Firstly, within the Muslim context, those liberal Muslims, reformist Muslims, feminist Muslims, gay Muslims, dissenting voices, minority sects, the Ismailis, the Shia — all these different minorities within the minority of the Muslim community — are immediately betrayed.

How are they betrayed? Because you deprive them of the lexicon, the language to employ against those who are attempting to silence their progressive efforts within their own communities. You surrender the debate to the extremists…

The second danger is in the non-Muslim context. What happens if you don’t name the Islamist ideology and distinguish it from Islam?

President Obama in his speech said there’s an ideology we must challenge, and he didn’t name it.

So, think about it, you’re sending out the message to the vast majority of Americans: there’s an ideology you must challenge, but you don’t tell them what it’s called. What are they going to assume? The average American is going to think, ‘Yeah, I’ve got to challenge an ideology — it’s called Islam.’

You’re only going to increase anti-Muslim hatred, increase the hysteria, like ‘he who must not be named’ — the Voldemort effect, I call it — by not naming the ideology. Because the average guy out there is going to assume the President is talking about the religion itself.

But if you distingiush Islamist extremism and say, ‘Look, Islam’s a religion. We’re not going to tell you whether Islam is good or bad, peaceful or not. We’re not going to define that for you. What we can say is you mustn’t try to impose that on anyone else. If you do, that’s called Islamism, and that’s what we have a problem with.'”

__________

Recent comments from Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamic extremist who was imprisoned for several years in Egypt and escaped to denounce radicalism and found the London-based counter-extremism group Quilliam. If the west is going to make it out of its conflict with Islamism in tact, we need a Muslim voice like Maajid’s to pop up for every extremist mullah. At the moment I don’t think the ratio is in our favor.

I encourage you to watch the entire discussion, which includes the brilliant Douglas Murray, and to buy Maajid’s remarkable book about the making and unmaking of a terrorist Radical: My Journey Out Of Islamist Extremism.

More on the subject:

  • Douglas Murray answers ‘Should we call terrorists Islamic?’
  • Christopher Hitchens’s resisting racial Islam 101
  • The cartoons the media will actually show us

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Bernard-Henri Lévy: The Russia I Respect, the Russia I Despise

01 Sunday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Debate, Political Philosophy, Politics

≈ Comments Off on Bernard-Henri Lévy: The Russia I Respect, the Russia I Despise

Tags

Alexander Pushkin, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, Anna Politkovskaja, Bernard-Henri Lévy, debate, democracy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Gulag, history, Leonid Brezhnev, Leonid Plyushch, Michel Houellebecq, Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take On Each Other and the World, Putinism, Russia, Russian History, Vladimir Putin

BHL

“Unlike you, I have absolutely no desire to be Russian or to return to Russia.

I used to love a certain idea of Russia.

I loved and defended this idea of Russian culture, which in the 1970s and ‘80s conjured up a whole hodgepodge, Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov, the Slavophiles and Europhiles, the disciples of Pushkin and those of Dostoyevsky, the dissidents on the right and the left and those who, in the words of the mathematician Leonid Plyushch, belonged to neither of these camps but to the concentration camp and the gulag…

Then there’s what Russia has become, what appeared when the breakdown of communism, its debacle — what a mountaineer like your father would call its ‘thaw’ — revealed to the world: the Russia of Putin, of the war in Chechnya, the Russia that assassinated Anna Politkovskaja on the stairway in her building and that the same Anna Politkovskaja described in her wonderful book A Russian Diary, just before she was assassinated. It’s the Russia of the racist packs who, right in the center of Moscow, track down ‘non ethnic’ Russians… the Russia that has the nerve to explain to the world that it has its own “democracy,” a special, local democracy that is quite unrelated to Western canons and rights.

It’s the country of such specialties as its party, the Nashi, meaning ‘our own,’ which, to call a spade a spade, is a Stalin-Hitler combo, the Russia that, incidentally, is giving new life to the anti-Semitic European pamphlets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries… This Russia, which, apart from this kind of idiocy, believes in nothing at all… This Russia, which, the last time I went there, struck me as having had its culture erased and its brain washed, this Russia, whose most discouraging side, according to Anna Politkovskaja, to mention her yet again, was its amorphousness and passivity, the way it accepts, for example, that it hardly has any employment legislation left and that its workers are treated like dogs… In this Russia, no less than under communism, people are ready to betray their parents to steal a broom, a bowl, a badly screwed tap or bits of scrap iron from deserted buildings abandoned by oligarchs on the run or in prison.

Not only does this Russia inspire no desire in me, it fills me with horror. I’d go so far as to say that it frightens me because I see in it a possible destiny for the late-capitalist societies. Once upon a time, during your postwar ‘glory days,’ the middle class was terrorized by being told that Brezhnev’s communism was not an archaism restricted to distant societies but rather a picture of our future. We were wrong: it was not communism but post communism, Putinism, that may be the testing ground for our future.”

__________

BHL on a tear in his book-form debate with French novelist Michel Houellebecq, Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take On Each Other and the World.

Regardless of whether you speak French, I recommend keeping up to speed on Lévy’s work wherever it’s translated. The man has more style and swagger and moral intelligence than several whole societies I can think of.

More from epitomizers of cool:

  • The wisdom and humor of Paul Newman
  • Drink and fight like Winston Churchill
  • The real Wolf of Wall Street was a brilliant saint
  • Johnny Cash talks toughing it all out
  • Hooman Majd riffs on mortality and fame in style

Below: BHL in Libya (2011), Egypt (2011), Ukraine (2014).

BHL en LibyeBHL place Tahrir

BHL Ukraine

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If We Do Not Stand for Western Values, Who Will?

25 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Debate, Freedom

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Douglas Murray, ethics, Irshad Manji, Islam, Islamism, morality, Morals, Muslim World, politics, Reform, religion, Secularism, Theocracy, Western Civilization, Western Values

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

“I talk at a lot of campuses, and I was at one last night in London where a student got up and started protesting because I had said that an Islamist government was of itself a bad thing, which I think it is. I replied to this student — and it’s not a hard question to ask — ‘Well name one Islamist state that you would want to live in.’ And this is a serious question, ladies and gentlemen. It is also a personal question…

One of my best friends, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, is in hiding again tonight because of what she says, and she would be killed if she went into any Muslim country. And I think that matters… We have the great blessing of living under this system. And we take it for granted. And we spit on it. And we can because we’re living in that freedom. But I beg you ladies and gentlemen not to pretend that that means that we shouldn’t assert the superiority of that system, because that is what it is. It is a superior system…

And if we do not stand for our values, ladies and gentlemen, who will? Who will assert them across the Muslim world? Who are the reformers in the Muslim world going to look to when they want to see, and desperately need, separation of church and state? If we do not say that we believe this is the best way to live, who is going to do it elsewhere? As Irshad Manji said a few weeks ago when she was in London: ‘If you give up on us, people like me are dead.’

And ladies and gentlemen, I think we should take that call seriously. To assert the superiority of Western values is to state the obvious. It is to have faith in ourselves and it’s to have faith in other people.”

__________

Some highlights from Douglas Murray’s rousing opening remarks in his debate on the motion ‘Is West Best?’ – Should we be reluctant to assert Western values as superior?.

I’d never heard of Murray until I was just sent this video, and I have to note that it’s one of the strongest short bursts of public speaking I’ve seen in a very, very long time.

  • In related news: Last week, I wrote an open letter to Brandeis University about the imperative to defend Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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The Greatest Debate of All Time: Hitchens Versus Galloway on Iraq

10 Friday Jan 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Debate, Freedom, Original, Politics, Speeches, War

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

Afghanistan war, Amy Goodman, Baruch College, British Parliament, Buckley-Vidal, Charles James Fox, Chomsky-Foucault, Christopher Hitchens, conflict, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Einstein-Bohr, foreign policy, Foreign Policy Debate, Galloway Versus Hitchens, Galloway-Hitchens, George Galloway, George W. Bush, Hitch-22, Huxley-Wilberforce, International Affairs, Invasion of Iraq, Iraq War, John Ashcroft, Lincoln-Douglas, Michael Faraday, Miliband–Poulantzas, Military, Nation-Building, Occupation, Parliament, Pat Robertson, Rhetoric, The Greatest Debate Ever, The Greatest Debate of All Time, The Iraq Invasion Debate, The Iraq Occupation, War

Christopher Hitchens

It’s often tricky to identify “the best” of a certain category. But with debates, ironically enough, the question is, at least to my mind, settled. There are a lot of nominees for second place: Buckley-Vidal, Chomsky-Foucault, and Miliband–Poulantzas (Here I’m talking about debates for which we have a substantive record, so Lincoln-Douglas, Huxley-Wilberforce, and Einstein-Bohr don’t count). But the greatest recorded debate of all time is Hitchens-Galloway. No Question.

It is simply the most caustic, articulate, and galvanizing verbal clash that has ever been captured on film. If you do yourself the favor of watching it, within a minute you will have found a side — and you will be enthralled. Once, after a long, desultory day of swimming last Spring, two politically-minded friends and I decided to put Hitchens-Galloway on in the background as we poured some drinks and planned out our evening. Within 5 minutes, we were glued to the screen; within 10, we had forgotten about the night’s plans and were rehearsing arguments about the Iraq War; within 20, we had taken sides in a 2-on-1 verbal fray that eventually ended — I’m amused and embarrassed to admit — with several not-so-light shoves being thrown.

I happened to be fighting solo in that scuffle. Because I did, do now, and have always categorically opposed the invasion of Iraq. In this debate, I take the side of Mr. Galloway. My two friends, loyal as ever to the Hitch, were flanking me from the right.

George Galloway

This does not alter the fact that I despise almost everything I’ve subsequently read about Mr. Galloway, and believe that Hitchens is dead right in many of his cutting ad hominems against the Respect MP. Nevertheless, the gravity and intensity with which Galloway gives voice to the concerns of the anti-war Left is unmatched really by anyone I have ever seen. Like an acid reacting to its catalyst, the venom that bubbles out of Galloway is clearly a response to what he identifies as the “malevolence and incompetence” of the “neo-con gang” which occupied 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue at the time. Fanning this brushfire of wild contempt were the looming effects of Hurricane Katrina, and the naturally conjoined questions which arose from it: Why are we hemorrhaging resources over there? Don’t we need that cash and manpower here?

Galloway makes this explicit several times in the exchange, but it runs like an underlying seam through several of his rejoinders. Some of these are, in addition to very clever, scathing and overflowing with (righteous?) animosity: “What you are witnessing is something unique in natural history: the first ever metamorphosis from a butterfly back into a slug”; “Never wrestle with a chimney sweep… there’s no way you can come out clean”; “People like Mr. Hitchens are ready to fight to the last drop of other people’s blood”; etc. But while these are below the belt, I don’t think they are — to borrow a line from Hitchens in the debate — beneath contempt. For one, Hitchens invites them (see the last two minutes of his opening remarks); and second, Hitchens can handle them. Galloway and Hitchens were two of the biggest alpha-males on the planet, and Galloway was not going to relent on his alpha-maleness. He couldn’t bring a knife to what was so clearly going to be a gun fight.

I can remember watching this debate when it aired on DemocracyNow the week of September 9th, 2005. I can also remember how much the Iraq question was beginning to fill the sky in the Fall of 2005 — that moment when some of us could foresee the now nearly unavoidable truth that our invasion was an enormous blunder and our occupation a Sisyphean waste. As a freshman at my conservative Southern Baptist high school, I was among the only students who felt this way about Iraq, and I can remember not only how strongly I was beginning to oppose the invasion, but also how much I despised the assumed self-righteousness of those who repeatedly excused the Bush administration’s rank deceptions and bravado.

It would be several years until I would read James Fenton’s “Prison Island”, a poem he wrote during his visit to Cambodia as the U.S. began bombing there in 1970. One particular stanza rings most acutely in my mind when I recall the bad early news out of Iraq and that 15-year-old kid who didn’t exactly know how to express why he didn’t like the war.

My dear friend, do you value the counsels of dead men?
I should say this. Fear defeat. Keep it before your minds
As much as victory. Defeat at the hands of friends,
Defeat in the plans of your confident generals.
Fear the kerchiefed captain who does not think he can die.

Ironically enough, I would for the first time stumble upon these words in the second-to-last page of Christopher Hitchens’s memoir, Hitch-22. The fact that Hitchens could write them without embarrassment or irony stands as verification of Michael Faraday’s immortal rejoinder. “There is nothing quite as frightening as a man who knows he is right.”

Watch “The Grapple in the Big Apple”, the greatest debate of all time (Playback begins as the debate heats up, so rewind to the start to watch all of Hitchens’s opening):

__________

Some of my comments on the so-called “Debate of the Decade”: George Galloway versus Christopher Hitchens on the Iraq War.

For the record: I don’t endorse all of Galloway’s remarks, nor do I oppose all of Hitchens’s. I admire this debate first for the rhetorical skill and knowledge it exacted from the interlocutors, and second because it brings to light many nuanced issues surrounding the Iraq invasion and occupation — issues which we should still grapple with today.

Christopher HitchensGeorge Galloway

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Steven Pinker on Feminism

13 Tuesday Aug 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Debate, Science

≈ 15 Comments

Tags

biology, cognitive science, discrimination, Elizabeth Spelke, feminism, feminists, gender, gender discrimination, gender relations, human nature, men, Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, women

Steven Pinker

“I am a feminist. I believe that women have been oppressed, discriminated against, and harassed for thousands of years. I believe that the two waves of the feminist movement in the 20th century are among the proudest achievements of our species, and I am proud to have lived through one of them, including the effort to increase the representation of women in the sciences.

But it is crucial to distinguish the moral proposition that people should not be discriminated against on account of their sex — which I take to be the core of feminism — and the empirical claim that males and females are biologically indistinguishable. They are not the same thing. Indeed, distinguishing them is essential to protecting the core of feminism. Anyone who takes an honest interest in science has to be prepared for the facts on a given issue to come out either way. And that makes it essential that we not hold the ideals of feminism hostage to the latest findings from the lab or field. Otherwise, if the findings come out as showing a sex difference, one would either have to say, ‘I guess sex discrimination wasn’t so bad after all,’ or else furiously suppress or distort the findings so as to preserve the ideal. The truth cannot be sexist. Whatever the facts turn out to be, they should not be taken to compromise the core of feminism.
..”

__________

From Steven Pinker, in his debate with Elizabeth Spelke on the topic of Science and Gender. You can find more of Pinker’s thoughts in his superb collection Language, Cognition, and Human Nature: Selected Articles.

Since his breakout book The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, Pinker has outlined and continually advocated a conception of human nature which I find extremely compelling. It’s foundational claim is that we are not plastic in the way twentieth-century behaviorists would suggest. Human nature is not malleable in any robust sense of the term; but instead it is very rigidly pre-programmed by our biology, which is — perhaps not intuitively — the reason for our complex abilities and variations. The fact that, say, we are wired to acquire a rigid grammatical structure in childhood, and hence speak a language, is what allows us to communicate in such a wealth of information, emotion, and ideas to others. Of course we are plastic in the sense that we learn the language of our childhood environment (I’m not writing this in Japanese, after all), but our ability to internalize grammar emerges from our biological make-up, which we do not choose. (Pinker, who studied in the M.I.T. linguistics department under Chomsky, uses this example among others to emphasize his point.)

Pinker delineates and actively patrols the fine line separating gender distinction from gender discrimination, and for that reason, his debate with Spelke is worth reading or listening to.

More from Pinker, one of our clearest and best communicators of cognitive science:

Steven Pinker

The F Word

Steven Pinker

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin

Hitler, Stalin, and the Power of Ideology

Boston Marathon

The Psychology of Terror

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The Aching Questions

15 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Debate, Religion, Science

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Atheism, David Berlinski, Freeman Dyson, Heinrich Himmler, Joel Primack, Nazism, phsyics, religion, science

Masada

“The aching questions that trouble the human imagination about which the sciences, when seriously considered, are resolutely silent, remain just as they were. And the religious tradition, especially the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, has offered a coherent body of belief and doctrine by which they can be explained.

Do we understand why the universe arose? No, we don’t. Do we understand why it’s here at all? No, we have no idea. Do we understand how life emerged on Earth? Not a prayer right now. Do we understand the complexity of life? We can’t even begin to describe a living creature in anything resembling precise terms. A recent article in Science Digest said that cell division requires four thousand coordinated proteins acting together. What a remarkable statement. What a wealth of information we possess about biology. What an abundant lack of understanding we have about living systems.

Do we understand why the laws of nature are true? No, we have no idea. Do we understand the miracle of analytic continuation in physics—when certain kinds of functions can be pushed forward into the future contrary to all experience? Do we understand why the universe remains stable from moment to moment? The medievals pondered this question. Ladies and gentlemen they came to the conclusion, and I quote a Medieval theologian, that ‘God is everywhere conserving the world.’ What a remarkable declaration—can we do without it?

Do we have an explanation for the continuity and stability of the universe? There is one paper that I know of in the literature by Freeman Dyson that addresses the stability of matter, but beyond that, everything is enigmatic.

How can we propose, seriously and solemnly, to rule out of court in advance a hypothesis that not only answers to the human heart in many respects, but that answers to genuine intellectual needs in other respects? When one sees the American scientific community like a herd of wildebeests trotting across a fruited plain, it’s very reasonable to ask are they going someplace or are they fleeing from someplace? And I think the overwhelmingly obvious answer is that they are fleeing. They are fleeing from an idea that they reject for a variety of reasons. Not only is the inquiry about atheism not necessary in terms of the history of social thought, it’s not necessary in terms of the outline of scientific thought.

But there is a last question to be addressed. It is perhaps the most important for you and me. The cosmologist Joel Primack asked an interesting question. He asked what compels the electron to follow the laws of nature. Good question. I don’t know. But Heinrich Himmler, who had presided over the destruction of churches and synagogues throughout Europe and was the mastermind behind the extermination of the Jewish people, asked a very similar question in 1944. When confronted with the onerous treaty obligations the German state had adopted with respect to its own satraps, he asked insouciantly but pregnantly, ‘After all, what compels us to keep our promises?’ Moral relativism is very often derided as an unhappy consequence of atheism. I don’t think moral relativism is a particularly deep issue, but I do think the issue of what compels us to keep our promises is very relevant.

I have in front of me a rather remarkable button. If you should press it, yours would be untold riches and whatever else you desire. The only consequence to pressing it beyond your happiness is the death of an anonymous Chinese peasant. Who among us would you trust with this button?'”

__________

The latter part of Dr. David Berlinski’s opening in his debate against Christopher Hitchens on the motion “Atheism Poisons Everything.”

The photograph was taken at sunrise from atop the plateau of Masada in Southern Israel.

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