Slightly related: The best friend I've never known
I might not be reading this the way you hoped. It's delightful. And it also reminds me that, as a basically secular person, I have a hard time discerning people's religion from their culture. When I think about the religion of my Catholic friend or my Amish neighbors or my Muslim correspondents or my Maronite brother-in-law's family, I can't tell where "religion" leaves off and where Irish, Penna. Dutch, Pakistani, and Lebanese begins.
I'm not even sure there's a line; that is, that there's such a thing as a pure religion divorced from culture. Of course a couple of Appalachian types like Flynt and Falwell would both comprehend each other, on a man-to-man level, and feud.
Oh, I think you read it just exactly as intended.
I've seen too many examples in real life of "surprising" friendships, not to mention working relationships, to be surprised by this one.
Makes you wonder why people think they HAVE to be polarized from people with whom they don't agree. I'm beginning to move from a theory involving "laziness" to one of "vindictiveness," or worse.
Yeah, I suspect we read it, in many respects, in the same way--or at least from similar impulses.
Actually, I should not have responded in Ali's terms. They hardly do justice to my position or my post.
First, I HAVE written on abuses in India, as much as anyone resident in America can (on female foeticide, police raids on couples in public, on terror laws in North India, on the dispossession of poor people in slums during the monsoons, on racisim toward Sonia Gandhi, the Italian wife of Rajiva Gandhi etc etc.. Perhaps you should read that before making assumptions about my motives that are wrong. I have certainly done at least one piece on a (possible) terrorist attack in India.
However, it is a little difficult to bring in Indian abuses of women or honor killings into a critique of American foreign policy (a bit unrelated no?), a perception secondary to my belief (from a RIGHT liberarian perspective) that the unchecked growth of the welfare-warfare state is the single biggest political problem we have. I can bring in oil, or the RMA or defense appropriations, or the drug trade or the Cold War or the change in balance of power -- but honor killings are not a part of post war policy, so far as I know.
False equivalence is a strategy of liberventionist imperialism...which is what I was warning Ali against. It would be quite another thing coming from an Islamic specialist or activist in that area (and there are many American activists/journalists in Iraq and in India doing just that- nobody is calling them anti-Iraqi or anti Indian for it, though). Otherwise the critcism is simply a red herring.
My training in grad school, by the way, was in American foreign policy; my language is English; my religion is Christianity; I have lived here for 20 years; my citizenship is American; it's not surprising that I write about American foreign policy. Perhaps as an outsider but never as an anti-American.
I wish I didn't have to. I would rather be writing novels or making money than doing this for nothing, I can assure you. Your characterization is so unfair to most activists, I know who do it from a deperate sense of its urgency and importance and at grave cost to themselves. I assure you it does not help you earning prospects in this country to be an immigrant babbling about the CIA or Abu Ghraib.
Your comparison of a social evil with a state policy is also analytically quite wrong and in no way improved by your ad hominem attack. I added an example on my blog which should make that inaccuracy obvious to anyone.
So, thanks for the criticism, since it helped me respond in a clearer way. That's always a good thing.
And I hope you'll at some point read the whole post and the related material. It would help a very crucial debate at a very crucial time in history if people were able to distinguish serious criticism on both sides from frivolous ones.
And if Chomsky strikes you as anti-American for whatever reason, please read the all-American Garet Garett or visit antiwar or Lew Rockwell or American Conservative magazine (read
Lila, I think you got this on the wrong thread. Want me to fix that for you?
Also, you got caught in the dreaded Haloscan word limit cutoff. It's happened to all of us, and you have much sympathy for it, believe me. Perhaps you can finish your thoughts in a second post. But if it is just a continued reading list, you can save it; I find it rather condescending when people tell me what I have to read. I am quite familiar with Lew Rockwell and American Conservative.
Yes actually, thanks very much! and yes, I do have a criticism of Chomsky..he reverses the roles between the US and Israel, IMHO. It is Israel that was the prime mover in the Iraq war...again, IMHO...
thanks..and if you like Lord of the Rings you might like charles williams
here's where Chomsky is really wrong though I daresay you will dismiss it as antisemitism..
http://www.dissidentvoice.org/
Ma...ankfort0525.htm
I don't dismiss every criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism. But I approach every such example with awareness that I have no way of knowing whether a particular piece of writing is anti-Semitism or not without really knowing something about the author of it. There is no way to tell the honest criticism from the careful mask for hatred, or, more likely, the mix of the two motives in one mind.
America has a particularly complex and personal relationship with Israel; there's nothing like it in the world that I can think of. If you read about the debate in the Truman administration over what to do as the British dumped Palestine in our laps, you'll see how much heart was involved and how little head. Truman's approach to Israel was a response to a critical European problem, with little regard for the Middle Eastern reality.
Nowadays, however, nothing the U.S. does in the Middle East is done without reference to Israel, I believe. That is not the same thing as saying Israel, or Jews, drive the policy.
If you look at the "Liberty" incident, the early relationship of Israel to the Soviet Union, or the comments just today by the U.S. ambassador over the Pollard spying case, I think it shows a relationship a bit more complex than what you might believe. The rest of the world, from Ernie Bevin on down, always gets it wrong.
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