I currently blog politically/policywise at Obsidian Wings.
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Amygdala will move to an entirely new and far better blog template ASAP, aka RSN, aka incrementally/badly punctuated evolution.
Tagging posts, posts by category, next/previous post indicators, and other post-2003 design innovations are incrementally being tweaked/kludged/melting.
Above email address currently deprecated! Use gary underscore farber at yahoodotcom, pliz! Sanely free of McCarthyite calling anyone a traitor since 2001!
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I've a long record in editorial work in book and magazine publishing, starting 1974, a variety of other work experience, but have been, since 2001, recurringly housebound with insanely painful sporadic and unpredictably variable gout and edema, and in the past, other ailments; the future? The Great Unknown: isn't it for all of us?
I'm currently house/cat-sitting, not on any government aid yet (or mostly ever), often in major chronic pain from gout and edema, which variably can leave me unable to walk, including just standing, but sometimes is better, and is freaking unpredictable at present; I also have major chronic depression and anxiety disorders; I'm currently supported mostly by your blog donations/subscriptions; you can help me. I prefer to spread out the load, and lessen it from the few who have been doing more than their fair share for too long.
Thanks for any understanding and support. I know it's difficult to understand. And things will change. They always change.
I'm sometimes available to some degree as a paid writer, editor, researcher, or proofreader. I'm sometimes available as a fill-in Guest Blogger at mid-to-high-traffic blogs that fit my knowledge set.
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"The brain is wider than the sky, For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include With ease, and you beside"
-- Emily Dickinson
"We will pursue peace as if there is no terrorism and fight terrorism as if there is no peace."
-- Yitzhak Rabin
"I have thought it my duty to exhibit things as they are, not as they ought to be."
-- Alexander Hamilton
"The stakes are too high for government to be a spectator sport."
-- Barbara Jordan
"Under democracy, one party always devotes its chief energies to
trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule --
and both commonly succeed, and are right."
-- H. L. Mencken
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
-- William Pitt
"The only completely consistent people are the dead."
-- Aldous Huxley
"I have had my solutions for a long time; but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them."
-- Karl F. Gauss
"Whatever evils either reason or declamation have imputed to extensive empire,
the power of Rome was attended with some beneficial consequences to mankind;
and the same freedom of intercourse which extended the vices, diffused likewise
the improvements of social life."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his
expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were
respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom."
-- Edward Gibbon
"There exists in human nature a strong propensity to depreciate the advantages, and to magnify
the evils, of the present times."
-- Edward Gibbon
"Our youth now loves luxuries. They have bad manners, contempt for authority.
They show disrespect for elders and they
love to chatter instead of exercise.
Children are now tyrants, not the servants, of their households. They
no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble up their food, and tyrannize
their teachers."
-- Socrates
"Before impugning an opponent's motives, even when they legitimately may be impugned, answer his arguments."
-- Sidney Hook
"Idealism, alas, does not protect one from ignorance, dogmatism, and foolishness."
-- Sidney Hook
"Let me never fall into the vulgar mistake of dreaming that I am persecuted whenever I am contradicted."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"We take, and must continue to take, morally hazardous actions to preserve our civilization.
We must exercise our power. But we ought neither to believe that a nation is capable of perfect
disinterestedness in its exercise, nor become complacent about particular degrees of interest
and passion which corrupt the justice by which the exercise of power is legitimized."
-- Reinhold Niebuhr
"Faced with the choice of all the land without a Jewish state or a Jewish state without all the
land, we chose a Jewish state without all the land."
-- David Ben-Gurion
"...the proscribing any citizen as unworthy the public confidence by laying upon him
an incapacity of being called to offices of trust and emolument, unless he profess or renounce this
or that religious opinion, is depriving him injuriously of those privileges and advantages
to which, in common with his fellow citizens, he has a natural right; that it tends also
to corrupt the principles of that very religion it is meant to encourage, by bribing,
with a monopoly of worldly honours and emoluments, those who will externally profess
and conform to it;[...] that the opinions of men are not the object of civil government, nor under its jurisdiction; that to suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion
and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy, which at once destroys all religious liberty....
-- Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, Thomas Jefferson
"We don't live just by ideas. Ideas are part of the mixture of customs and practices,
intuitions and instincts that make human life a conscious activity susceptible to
improvement or debasement. A radical idea may be healthy as a provocation;
a temperate idea may be stultifying. It depends on the circumstances. One of the most
tiresome arguments against ideas is that their 'tendency' is to some dire condition --
to totalitarianism, or to moral relativism, or to a war of all against all."
-- Louis Menand
"The darkest places in hell are reserved for those who maintain their neutrality in times of moral crisis."
-- Dante Alighieri
"He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers."
-- Henry B. Adams
"The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the
poor to beg in the streets, steal bread, or sleep under a bridge."
-- Anatole France
"When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle."
-- Edmund Burke
"Education does not mean that we have become certified experts in business or mining or botany or journalism or epistemology;
it means that through the absorption of the moral, intellectual, and esthetic inheritance of the race we have come to
understand and control ourselves as well as the external world; that we have chosen the best as our associates both in spirit
and the flesh; that we have learned to add courtesy to culture, wisdom to knowledge, and forgiveness to understanding."
-- Will Durant
"Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is
but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest
winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?"
-- Herman Melville
"The most important political office is that of the private citizen."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."
-- Louis D. Brandeis
"It is an error to suppose that books have no influence; it is a slow influence, like flowing water carving out a canyon,
but it tells more and more with every year; and no one can pass an hour a day in the society of sages and heroes without
being lifted up a notch or two by the company he has kept."
-- Will Durant
"When you write, you’re trying to transpose what you’re thinking into something that is less like an annoying drone and more like a piece of music."
-- Louis Menand
"Sex is a continuum."
-- Gore Vidal
"I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibit the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state."
-- Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Baptists of Danbury, Connecticut, 1802.
"The sum of our religion is peace and unanimity, but these can scarcely stand unless we define as little as possible,
and in many things leave one free to follow his own judgment, because there is great obscurity in many matters, and
man suffers from this almost congenital disease that he will not give in when once a controversy is started, and
after he is heated he regards as absolutely true that which he began to sponsor quite casually...."
-- Desiderius Erasmus
"Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens? Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule of what we are to read, and what we must disbelieve?"
-- Thomas Jefferson, in a letter to N. G. Dufief, Philadelphia bookseller, 1814
"We are told that it is only people's objective actions that matter, and their subjective feelings are of no importance. Thus pacifists, by obstructing the war effort,
are 'objectively' aiding the Nazis; and therefore the fact that they may be personally hostile to Fascism is irrelevant. I have been guilty of saying this myself more than once. The same argument is applied to Trotskyism. Trotskyists are often credited, at any rate by Communists, with being active and conscious agents of Hitler; but when you point out the many and obvious reasons why this is unlikely to be true,
the 'objectively' line of talk is brought forward again. To criticize the Soviet Union helps Hitler: therefore 'Trotskyism is Fascism'. And when this has been established, the accusation of conscious treachery is usually repeated.
This is not only dishonest; it also carries a severe penalty with it. If you disregard people's motives, it becomes much harder to foresee their actions."
-- George Orwell, "As I Please," Tribune, 8 December 1944
"Wouldn't this be a great world if insecurity and desperation made us more attractive? If 'needy' were a turn-on?"
-- "Aaron Altman," Broadcast News
"The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand."
-- Lewis Thomas
"To be ignorant of what happened before you were born is to be ever a child. For what is man's lifetime unless the memory of past events is woven with those of earlier times?"
-- Cicero
"Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it."
-- Samuel Johnson, Life Of Johnson
"Very well, what did my critics say in attacking my character? I must read out their affidavit, so to speak, as though they were my legal accusers: Socrates is guilty of criminal meddling, in that he inquires into things below the earth and in the sky, and makes the weaker argument defeat the stronger, and teaches others to follow his example."
-- Socrates, via Plato, The Republic
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, represents, in the final analysis, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children."
-- Dwight D. Eisenhower
"The term, then, is obviously a relative one; my pedantry is your scholarship, his reasonable accuracy, her irreducible minimum of education, & someone else's ignorance."
-- H. W. Fowler
"Rules exist for good reasons, and in any art form the beginner must learn them and understand what they are for, then follow them for quite a while. A visual artist, pianist, dancer, fiction writer, all beginning artists are in the same boat here: learn the rules, understand them, follow them. It's called an apprenticeship. A mediocre artist never stops following the rules, slavishly follows guidelines, and seldom rises above mediocrity. An accomplished artist internalizes the rules to the point where they don't have to be consciously considered. After you've put in the time it takes to learn to swim, you never stop to think: now I move my arm, kick, raise my head, breathe. You just do it. The accomplished artist knows what the rules mean, how to use them, dodge them, ignore them altogether, or break them. This may be a wholly unconscious process of assimilation, one never articulated, but it has taken place."
-- Kate Wilhelm
"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."
-- Albert Einstein
"The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual."
-- Franz Kafka, Aphorisms
"All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better."
-- Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho
"First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you."
-- Nicholas Klein, May, 1919, to the Third Biennial Convention of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America (misattributed to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, 1914 & variants).
"Nothing would be done at all, if a man waited till he could do it so well, that no one could find fault with it."
-- Lecture IX, John Henry Cardinal Newman
“Nothing is more common than for men to think that because they are familiar with words they understand the ideas they stand for.”
-- John Henry Cardinal Newman
"Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives."
-- James Madison
"Our credulity is a part of the imperfection of our natures. It is inherent in us to desire to generalize, when we ought, on the contrary, to guard ourselves very carefully from this tendency."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The truth is, men are very hard to know, and yet, not to be deceived, we must judge them by their present actions, but for the present only."
-- Napoleon I of France.
"The barbarous custom of having men beaten who are suspected of having important secrets to reveal must be abolished. It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile. The poor wretches say anything that comes into their mind and what they think the interrogator wishes to know."
-- On the subject of torture, in a letter to Louis Alexandre Berthier (11 November 1798), published in Correspondance Napoleon edited by Henri Plon (1861), Vol. V, No. 3606, p. 128
"All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible."
-- George Santayana, Dialogues in Limbo (1926)
"American life is a powerful solvent. It seems to neutralize every intellectual element, however tough and alien it may be, and to fuse it in the native good will, complacency, thoughtlessness, and optimism."
-- George Santayana, Character and Opinion in the United States, (1920)
"If you should put even a little on a little, and should do this often, soon this too would become big."
-- Hesiod, Work And Days
"Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."
-- Eugene V. Debs
"Reputation is what other people know about you. Honor is what you know about yourself."
-- Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign
"All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qaida," in order to make the generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving for it anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies."
-- Osama bin Laden
"Remember, Robin: evil is a pretty bad thing."
-- Batman
Gary Farber is now a licensed Quintuple Super-Sekrit Multi-dimensional Master Pundit.
He does not always refer to himself in the third person.
He is presently single.
The gefilte fish is dead. Donate via the donation button on the top left or I'll shoot this cutepanda. Don't you lovepandas?
Current Total # of Donations Since 2002: 1181
Subscribers to date at $5/month: 100 sign-ups; 91 cancellations; Total= 9
Supporter subscribers to date at $25/month: 16 sign-ups; 10 cancellation; Total= 6
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...writer[s] I find myself checking out repeatedly when I'm in the mood to play follow-the-links. They're not all people I agree with all the time, or even most of the time, but I've found them all to be thoughtful writers, and that's the important thing, or should be.
-- Tom Tomorrow
"Gary Farber is a gentleman, a scholar and one of the gems of the blogosphere."
-- Steve Hynd, Newshoggers.com
"Well argued, Gary. I hadn't seen anything that went into as much detail as I found in your blog."
-- Gareth Porter
Gary Farber is your one-man internet as always, with posts on every article there is.
-- Fafnir
Guessing that Gary is ignorant of anything that has ever been written down is, in my experience, unwise.
Just saying.
-- Hilzoy
I read Amygdala...with regularity, as do all sensible websurfers.
-- Jim Henley, Unqualified Offerings
Okay, he is annoying, but he still posts a lot of good stuff.
-- Avedon Carol, The Sideshow
Amygdala - So much stuff it reminds Unqualified Offerings that UO sometimes thinks of Gary Farber as "the liberal Instapundit." -- Jim Henley
...the thoughtful and highly intelligent Gary Farber... My first reaction was that I definitely need to appease Gary Farber of Amygdala, one of the geniuses of our age.
-- Brad deLong
Gary is a perceptive, intelligent, nice guy. Some of the stuff he comes up with is insightful, witty, and stimulating. And sometimes he manages to make me groan.
-- Charlie Stross
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend.
-- Ted Barlow, Crooked Timber
Favorite.... [...] ...all great stuff. [...] Gary Farber should never be without readers.
-- Ogged
I usually read you and Patrick several times a day, and I always get something from them. You've got great links, intellectually honest commentary, and a sense of humor. What's not to like?
-- Ted Barlow
One of my issues with many poli-blogs is the dickhead tone so many bloggers affect to express their sense of righteous indignation. Gary Farber's thoughtful leftie takes on the world stand in sharp contrast with the usual rhetorical bullying. Plus, he likes "Pogo," which clearly attests to his unassaultable good taste.
-- oakhaus.com
The only trouble with reading Amygdala is that it makes me feel like such a slacker. That Man Farber's a linking, posting, commenting machine, I tell you!
-- John Robinson, Sore Eyes
Jaysus. I saw him do something like this before, on a thread about Israel. It was pretty brutal. It's like watching one of those old WWF wrestlers grab an opponent's
face and grind away until the guy starts crying. I mean that in a nice & admiring way, you know.
-- Fontana Labs, Unfogged
We read you Gary Farber! We read you all the time! Its just that we are lazy with our blogroll. We are so very very lazy. We are always the last ones to the party but we always have snazzy bow ties.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber you are a genius of mad scientist proportions. I will bet there are like huge brains growin in jars all over your house.
-- Fafnir, Fafblog!
Gary Farber is the hardest working man in show blog business. He's like a young Gene Hackman blogging with his hair on fire, or something.
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Gary Farber only has two blogging modes: not at all, and 20 billion interesting posts a day [...] someone on the interweb whose opinions I can trust....
-- Belle Waring, John & Belle Have A Blog
Isn't Gary a cracking blogger, apropos of nothing in particular?
-- Alison Scott
Gary Farber takes me to task, in a way befitting the gentleman he is.
-- Stephen Green, Vodkapundit
My friend Gary Farber at Amygdala is the sort of liberal for whom I happily give three cheers. [...] Damned incisive blogging....
-- Midwest Conservative Journal
If I ever start a paper, Clueless writes the foreign affairs column, Layne handles the city beat, Welch has the roving-reporter job, Tom Tomorrow runs the comic section (which carries Treacher, of course). MediaMinded runs the slots - that's the type of editor I want as the last line of defense. InstantMan runs the edit page - and you can forget about your Ivins and Wills and Friedmans and Teepens on the edit page - it's all Blair, VodkaP, C. Johnson, Aspara, Farber, Galt, and a dozen other worthies, with Justin 'I am smoking in such a provocative fashion' Raimondo tossed in for balance and comic relief.
Who wouldn't buy that paper? Who wouldn't want to read it? Who wouldn't climb over their mother to be in it?
-- James Lileks
I do appreciate your role and the role of Amygdala as a pioneering effort in the integration of fanwriters with social conscience into the larger blogosphere of social conscience.
-- Lenny Bailes
Every single post in that part of Amygdala visible on my screen is either funny or bracing or important. Is it always like this? -- Natalie Solent
People I've known and still miss include Isaac Asimov, rich brown, Charles Burbee, F. M. "Buzz" Busby, Terry Carr, A. Vincent Clarke, Bob Doyle, George Alec Effinger, Abi Frost,
Bill & Sherry Fesselmeyer, George Flynn, John Milo "Mike" Ford. John Foyster, Mike Glicksohn, Jay Haldeman, Neith Hammond (Asenath Katrina Hammond)/DominEditrix , Chuch Harris, Mike Hinge, Lee Hoffman, Terry Hughes, Damon Knight, Ross Pavlac, Bruce Pelz, Elmer Perdue, Tom Perry,
Larry Propp, Bill Rotsler, Art Saha, Bob Shaw, Martin Smith, Harry Stubbs, Bob Tucker, Harry Warner, Jr., Jack Williamson, Walter A. Willis, Susan Wood, Kate Worley, and Roger Zelazny.
It's just a start, it only gets longer, many are unintentionally left out.
And She of whom I must write someday.
SECULARISM IS A PRODUCT OF THE WEST. David Remnick visits Egypt and comes back with some interesting quotes and observations. This is sheer anecdotalism, of course, but still interesting reading. It's a long piece, worth reading in full.
“The great and proud nation of Egypt has shown the way toward peace in the Middle East,” Bush said, “and now should show the way toward democracy in the Middle East.”
[...]
There has, of course, been no such revolution in Cairo, and no sign of one. Part of the collateral damage of the Bush Administration’s prosecution of the war in Iraq is the erosion of American prestige and influence all over the world. Rather than take the democratizing cue from Bush, Mubarak’s regime has offered itself as an example to the United States: Spare us the pretense of an open society, its leaders imply. Your greatest fear, like ours, is terrorism, and the only way to defeat such an enemy is by crushing it.
[...]
In reaction, in 1928 Hassan al-Banna, a religiously educated teacher living near the Suez Canal, established the Muslim Brotherhood. Banna believed in Islam as a complete system, which provides divine instruction on everything from daily rituals, law, and politics to matters of the spirit, and to which all other forms of thought and social organization—secularism, nationalism, socialism, liberalism—are alien. In his essay “Between Yesterday and Today,” Banna wrote that the colonialist Europeans had expropriated the resources of the Islamic lands and corrupted them with “their murderous germs”:
They imported their half-naked women into these regions, together with their liquors, their theaters, their dance halls, their amusements, their stories, their newspapers, their novels, their whims, their silly games, and their vices. . . . The day must come when the castles of this materialistic civilization will be laid low upon the heads of their inhabitants.
The Brotherhood’s slogan was, and remains, “God is our objective; the Koran is our constitution; the prophet is our leader; struggle is our way; and death for the sake of God is the highest of our aspirations.”
[...]
The strongest ideological voice among the factional leaders in the Brotherhood was also the most extreme—Sayyid Qutb. Gamal said that “Qutb was a man of complexes” who had been radicalized by an extended journey to the United States in the late nineteen-forties. In books of theology and political theory—the most famous of which are “In the Shadows of the Koran” and “Signposts on the Road”—Qutb popularized an interpretation of the Koran that, to this day, is used as a justification for political violence in the name of establishing an Islamic state. According to the Koran, mankind, before the advent of Islam, lived in jahilyya, a state of ignorance and paganism. During Qutb’s travels through America, he saw people living in a decadent swamp of commercial obsession and sexual permissiveness—a modern incarnation of jahilyya.
[...]
I asked Akef how he had reacted to the attacks on September 11, 2001.
“The incidents of September 11th were criminal, and only a professional criminal would have done such a thing,” he said. “That is why, until now, there’s been no clear evidence of who did this. Talk of Mohammad Atta and Al Qaeda is all lies, an illusion. Al Qaeda is an American illusion. Is there any power on earth that can stand up to the United States of America and its power? Whenever America claims there is another power to challenge it, it is an illusion used to serve other purposes. For example, the United States wanted to invade Afghanistan in order to ship its oil by pipeline across that country. The U.S. wanted to plant its bases there and ship the oil. So they claim there is a Taliban there with Al Qaeda functioning there, too. But how much power does the Taliban really have?”
In the nineteen-sixties, Sayyid Qutb said that the Jews were behind “materialism, animal sensuality, the destruction of the family, and the dissolution of society.” As for the West, he said, “Should we not issue a sentence of death? Is this not the verdict most appropriate to the nature of the crime?” The intervening decades have not much changed this aspect of ideology within the Brotherhood, at least among the reigning elders. Akef saw Sadat’s treaty with the Israelis as a grievous heresy and, again, turned conspiratorial when it came to the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. “In the West, they wanted to get rid of the Jews, and so the Europeans and the United States implanted the Zionists in the Holy Land to get rid of them and their evils,” he said. “At the same time, they implanted this evil in the Middle East so the Muslims could busy themselves with it. The Europeans and Americans knew that Israel would never survive. Israel cannot stand before one and a half billion Muslims. This is temporary. Israel has no future! And I am not the only one saying this. There are scholars saying this.”
[...]
I had dozens of meetings in Cairo—with government officials, religious leaders, opposition figures, intellectuals, students, working people—and nearly every session began with a speech on the perfidy of the Bush Administration. The novelist and editor Gamal al-Ghitani greeted me at the offices of his journal, Akhbar Aladab, the most prominent literary magazine in the Middle East, and showed me the portraits on the wall of his “American icons”—Hemingway, Melville, and Louis Armstrong—and yet within minutes he was telling me that what he feared most in the world was the United States. The faces of American officers in Iraq reminded him of Nazi officers, he said. “I fear that my culture is targeted by a superpower that is acting stupidly.” He was, if anything, mild in his rhetoric. Later, I visited Sonallah Ibrahim, a Marxist novelist who is known for scathing political fictions, like “The Smell of It,” which he published after a term in Nasser’s prisons. Before knocking on his apartment door, I noticed a decal above the bell showing the American and Israeli flags joined by a swastika. He, too, was enraged about Palestine and Iraq, but not only that: everything about the United States repelled him. Ibrahim taught Arabic literature at Berkeley in 1998, an experience that evidently did not suit him. “I despised the total individualism, the control of multinationals, the manipulation of the media over the ordinary person, the values of life, just living to eat, drink, fuck, have a car, and that’s all,” he said. “There are no moral values, no broad-minded attitudes toward life in general or a sense of what is happening in the world, no sense of the role America is playing in trying to control the resources of the world.” Perhaps what irked him most, he said, was “the genuine stupidity of the normal American citizen. He is ignorant. He doesn’t know what his own country is doing in the world. The U.S. is following the same policy of racism as the Nazis. Do I really have to explain something to you that is so well known everywhere?”
[...]
Abdel Moneim Said, who is the head of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a think tank that works closely with the regime, was among many who told me that the American failure so far to establish security in Iraq has decisively undermined the idea of a democratization movement in Egypt and elsewhere in the region. “The United States is in a position that looks like Lebanon in the nineteen-eighties—occupation, resistance, as well as a competition among groups,” he said. “You want Egypt to democratize, to change, but Egypt has drawn the opposite lesson. Instead of creating a liberal model, we see chaos, and the Saudis and the Syrians see the same thing. Now you have arrived at a much more modest sense of a liberal state than you started with.”
[...]
Hisham Kassem, the head of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights and the publisher of the English-language magazine The Cairo Times, is an exception. His jaundiced view of Egyptian politics, and of the Middle East in general, would not be out of place at a conservative American think tank. “In the Middle East, you travel in a time machine,” he told me one evening in his office. “In Libya, you have a complete madman in charge. In Iraq, you had Saddam and now bloodshed. In Yemen, the whole country is doped up on khat and everyone owns a Kalashnikov, as in ‘The Lotus Eaters.’ In Saudi Arabia, you leave Friday prayers and then you’re forced to watch an execution—some woman being stoned for adultery or a head chopped off. In Syria, they used their military to slaughter their own people. Jordan is banal. Not one of the Gulf States is a signatory to the Covenant of Human Rights. There is nothing like it anywhere else. Twenty-two Arab League states, all authoritarian. For decades, the Middle East has been kept in a political deep freeze. People flee from here: the crime, the fundamentalism, the brutality. There is no growth rate, no acceptable governmental or economic management. Nothing short of a military intervention could have exerted any political pressure on the region. It’s the only solution, the only lesser among many evils.”
When I asked Kassem his opinion of the American invasion of Iraq and the chaos that followed, he said, “When you look at the intervention itself, you look at the people who will die as a result. Well, a great many more would have died from sanctions and from Saddam than from any intervention. All those arguments about how you can’t bring democracy in on the wings of a B-52 are garbage. The only thing that can bring about a change here is American foreign policy. Egyptian brutality will not change and neither will the apathy of the people. Change in the Middle East will be slow, but we needed the air cover. There was no way we could have done this on our own. We were going nowhere.”
[...]
Tariq does not come from a fundamentalist family, but he said that he had become more and more observant and politically radicalized. “A lot of things did it,” he said: the Russian bombing of Chechnya, American support for Israel, and the “despicable” leaders of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. The news of September 11th, Tariq said, gave him a “sense of joy,” a sense of the possible. “Two years later, I’ve met people in the Egyptian bourgeoisie who are happy every time they hear that the Islamists have hit a soft target in the West. With Palestine and Iraq, the militant perspective is making more and more sense.”
[...]
“The Egyptian government, like all other Arab governments, is a puppet regime, an agent of foreign powers, particularly the United States, which controls the world now,” the Sheikh said. “But if democracy were implemented and there were freedom of expression, Islam would rule and rule all aspects of life, including for non-Muslims. Some non-Muslims, especially in the West and the States, believe that if Islam rules it will massacre all non-Muslims. The Jews lived under Islamic rule in Medina in the time of the Prophet, and it was the best life they ever had. The same with the Christians. Whereas under Roman rule they were treated brutally.” The Sheikh also said that he and everyone he knew was firmly convinced that “the Jews” were behind September 11th, the invasion of Iraq, globalization, and just about everything that he might label “pernicious” in the course of our conversation. “Jews are like that,” he said.
Interesting mix of arguments. None of it is cheering or encouraging. Still, twenty-five years after the Iranian revolution, the masses chafe under the mullacracy; perhaps the price we'll have to pay for having supported Mubarak's kleptocracy for decades is the same price paid in Iran, which will someday be free (one hopes in the not very distant future); the crying shame, of course, is that it is the people of Egypt who will have to pay such a price.
Meanwhile, I am completely convinced that living under a government such as the last fellow desires would be "the best life [Jews] ever had." And if we weren't to like it, it would be just like a Jew.
Read The Rest Scale: 3.5 out of 5. (Bill Allison of Ideofact and Jonathan Edelstein of The Head Heeb have had many excellent posts in the past year on Qutb and the roots of Islamic radicalism, by the way.
"The Jews lived under Islamic rule in Medina in the time of the Prophet, and it was the best life they ever had."
Um, until the Prophet had them massacred and driven out, anyway. Which is in the Koran. This guy must not know his Koran very well, must report him to his local imam.
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