Thursday, April 24th, 2008 | 2:56 PM

In November of 1986 at Boston College, I heard Dith Pran relate his experiences in “the killing fields” of Cambodia under the radical communist Khmer Rouge (as if communist weren’t radical enough). Many are familiar with him as the photojournalist in the 1984 Roland Joffe film, The Killing Fields. He died in New Jersey of pancreatic cancer at age 65. This is what he told us that day.

The population of Cambodia was 7 million in 1970 when Cambodia entered the Vietnam War. The Khmer Rouge took power in 1975, and by 1978 when the Vietnamese toppled them they had killed 2-3 million Cambodians, one third of the country’s population. They did this for the good of humanity.

Dith became convinced that something was monstrously wrong when the Khmer Rouge began emptying the hospitals. They also emptied the cities, abolished all institutions, even money.

To establish a truly communist society and build a new humanity, everyone whom they did not kill had to become a peasant. Put simply, the people must work the land. To reach this goal they killed off the educated class. Wearing eye glasses was sufficient indication of one’s corruption by education. If you were a high official, you and your whole family were killed. Lower officials were also killed, but not their families. People would tell the Khmer Rouges what they used to do as an occupation in the hope of getting their jobs back, but they were put to death unless they were unskilled. Teachers would admit to being so because they could not imagine a country without education. These were not killed right away, but sometimes a few years later. To save his own life, Dith pretended to be an illiterate taxi driver.

Generally, people’s imagination for evil fell far short of the plans the Khmer Rouges executed. Dith said it was as though they were from another planet. But of course they were not. They share the same human nature that we do. What restrains us? What civilizes us? Whatever it is, are we preserving it, or eroding it? This question gets scant attention in our universities. (Obviously, it is a central concern at The King’s College in New York City where I teach.)

The Khmer Rouges came in both male and female form, he said. Both were brutal. People had to pull both plough and wagon. Eighty year olds had to work. Everyone who ate had to work. There was no mercy. They killed children in front of their parents. Husbands and wives were tortured in front of each other. They separated husbands, wives and children. They buried the dead in wells (the only source of water), B-52 craters and trenches.

People played stupid. “The Khmer Rouges has many eyes.” If you said, “I miss coffee” or “I miss noodle soup,” you had an imperialist, capitalist mind. When they gave you your meager food ration and asked you, “Is that enough?,” you were sure to say, “yes.”

Dith said that The Killing Fields is a very accurate account of his experiences although the film is mild compared to what actually happened because American audiences can’t stomach anything stronger. I require my Introduction to Politics students to see The Killing Fields (or one of a number of other films of that sort) in order to make them dramatically aware of the stakes that are involved in political life, the dimensions of evil that can proceed from the human heart, and thus how important it is for them to understand tyranny and liberty, wise and unwise political institutions, the importance of political culture and citizen character, the dimensions of God’s amazing common grace, and where we are and in what direction we are moving on the spectrum between the Founding and the killing fields.

Of course, this is just a glimpse at the horror. Sydney Schanberg, the New York Times journalist whose life he saved, wrote The Death and Life of Dith Pran (1980). Dith himself wrote Children of Cambodia’s Killing Fields: Memoirs By Survivors (Yale, 1999). Haing Ngor, a Cambodian doctor with no acting experience who played Dith in The Killing Fields, wrote Survival in the Killing Fields (2003). You may also read Dith Pran’s obituary in The New York Sun.

Saturday, February 2nd, 2008 | 2:42 PM

Barack Obama’s candidacy has brought left-wing evangelicals to greater public prominence. The public association with Democratic Party politics is nothing new, of course. People like Jim Wallis, Ron Sider and Tony Campolo have a history of advising Democrats in general and the Clinton administration in particular. (For example, see “The Message Thing” by Jim Wallis, New York Times, August 5, 2005.) The “emerging church” movement has picked up this approach to the Bible and public life, giving it an ecclesiastical home.

It is always helpful to look at the part in light of the whole, and I find that Albert Wolters’ book, Creation Regained, gives a theological big picture that can help explain politics, culture and all of life. For this reason, I assign it at the beginning of my Introduction to Politics course.

Wolters describes what he calls the “creation law,” or natural law. The Lord made the world, by its very structure, to work in certain ways, whether physically, morally, psychologically, economically, etc. Wolter explains this on pp. 13-20, following it with an account of the creation mandate in relation to creation law. He defines creation law as “the totality of God’s sovereign activity toward the created cosmos” and says that “ignoring the law of creation is impossible.” If you set government policy based on bad economics — i.e. policies based on economic principles that do not correspond to the way God created the world to operate — they will be counterproductive and bring unhappy results. They won’t “work.” The question for the evangelical left and right is this: What is creation law in the various spheres of dispute?

The left accuses the right of bowing to secular conservative notions that are not found in the Bible. But by common grace, non-Christians are able to discern these creation laws, often better than Christians can. The question is whether they have discerned accurately. The left tends to focus only on the moral law (which they may or may not have right) and understand that as the exhaustive expression of God’s will. Thus, they determine their economics, for example, based entirely on the moral principles that they cull from the Bible. But of course the laws inherent in God’s creation — moral, political, economic or chemical — are fully consistent with one another. God is not incoherent. He speaks with one voice. So if their moral theology entails an impoverishing and politically enslaving economic theory, it is a good indication that their moral reading of the Bible is defective.

For example, Wolters writes, “Any theory that somehow sanctions the existence of evil in God’s good creation fails to do justice to sin’s fundamentally outrageous and blasphemous character.” An evangelical on the political left would point out that the free market economic system (“capitalism”) employs and legitimizes selfishness, and thus is ungodly and inherently sinful. But lo, it works! It not only makes a few people rich, but it raises the tide and lifts all boats. In fact, the rising tide of prosperity in free market America lifts boats all over the world!

So how do we square the dependence on sinful selfish gain and the evident correspondence of economic liberty with natural principles in God’s created order? The answer, I think, is in examining the moral premise more closely. What our hypothetical leftist called sinful selfishness is actually just reasonable self-concern. My desire to prosper is not inherently sinful. My desire to get the best product for the lowest price is not inherently sinful. These things can take sinful forms, but that does not entail an indictment of the system itself that, like all things, needs to be set within the broader context of a charitable Christian society.

Thursday, January 24th, 2008 | 5:44 PM

Is there a more intolerant religion on earth than Islam?

Do you remember the Muslim cabbies at the Minneapolis airport refusing to pick up passengers who were carrying bottles of alcohol? Incidents like this are multiplying. Consider this report in Britain’s Daily Mail of a Muslim cashier refusing to serve a customer who wished to buy a Bible story book.

A Muslim store worker at Marks & Spencer refused to serve a customer buying a children’s book on biblical stories because she said it was “unclean.” Sally Friday, a customer at a branch of one of the famous stores, felt publicly humiliated when she tried to pay for First Bible Stories as a gift for her young grandson. When the grandmother put the book on the counter, the assistant refused to touch it, declared it was unclean and then summoned another member of staff to deal with the purchase.

In case you are wondering, Christians have not burned mosques in the wake of this offense, and no Christian has threatened any Muslim with death.

Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary-general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said, “This appears to be a very regrettable incident and the ‘unclean’ remark was clearly very offensive and unacceptable. Many Biblical stories complement the teachings of the Koran. We hope that M&S will investigate this incident.”

A reader of JihadWatch adds this insightful observation on Bunglawala’s attempt to quiet any fears this incident might provoke over the implications of increasing numbers of Muslims living among us.

The slithery Inayat Bunglawala pretends to share our indignation here, but he can’t keep it up without revealing his worldview. Note the last comment: “Many Biblical stories complement the teachings of the Koran.” Why is that relevant? What if the Bible stories did not, in his view, “complement the teachings of the Koran”? Do those stories only have value, and are only to be protected, or treated neutrally (and refusing to touch a book, calling it “unclean” is not treating it neutrally) because they may, as he puts it “complement the teachings of the Koran”?

He draws out further implications of this incident:

One final query. Is it right and proper for non-Muslim clerks to handle a Koran? Or should they refrain from handling it, lest by their own “unclean” status–”najis” in the list provided at the Shia cleric Al-Sistani’s website–they sully that book? In other words, would Muslims make clear to non-Muslims how we are to treat the Qur’an? Do we touch it, or not touch it? Do we wear gloves, or not wear gloves? Do we tug at our forelocks with one hand, or bow slightly if we are boys and curtsey if we are girls? What do we do with the Qur’an? And do the same rules apply to a collection, say by Al-Bukhari or Muslim, of the Hadith? Tell us. Infidel youth wants to know. Lest we offend.

Among the same comments, I thought this rumor was quite plausible:

It would also be worth checking where and how the Muslim employees arrange books on the shelves. We have read reports of other stores arranging books to ensure that the Qur’an is stored on shelves higher than books for other religions. We have also read reports that books critical of Islam are not kept in view in some bookstores, but are only available in the back, out of sight.

In view of all the experience that Europe is accumulating with this interesting social experiment, I would like to see an objective and extensive study of the implications of having a significant minority of these strictly legalistic and intolerant people living in a generally secular and tolerant society, with reflections on what is likely to be America’s relationship with its Muslim minority in this coming century. I suggest the title, Dhimmi in America: The Twenty-first Century Tocqueville.

There is a much lower concentration of Muslims in America than there is in Europe, and they are more moderate, more reconciled with the American way of life. Nonetheless, we are seeing greater emphasis on Sharia compliant investments, Halal foods (the Muslim version of Kosher) and demands for accommodations of this sort. We are seeing hints here of what is a real problem in Europe: the Muslim minority insisting that the whole of Western society recognize that there is no God but Allah and conform to his Koranic law.

Incidentally, in my view the book is blasphemous because it displays images of Christ in violation of the second commandment. This is a traditional Protestant view (Westminster Larger Catechism Question 109: What are the sins forbidden in the second commandment?), though not widely accepted these days. But while I would reason with anyone on the subject, it is not my place to force compliance with that view upon my neighbors. If I could not in good conscience do my job by processing the sale (that would not be a problem), I would find another job. Do Muslims of this sort want jobs only to demand that employers change those jobs in order to accommodate them? As a Christian I know that if you are going to be faithful to your God in a world that does not recognize him, certain freedoms that your neighbors enjoy will be closed to you. Perhaps it is a line of employment or perhaps a recreation. If our society were more culturally Christian as it used to be, life for a conscientiously Biblical Christian would be a lot easier. But a Christian may not demand that a non-Christian society make his religion easy and free of sacrifice. The same is true for Muslims.

I can take this view because Christianity, understood Biblically, is based on the grace of God and the re-orientation of the heart toward God. By contrast, Islam is not grace (God sovereignly working in the spiritually helpless heart of the undeserving sinner), but law (”You need to be perfect. This is how to do it. Get going, or else!”). It does not pertain fundamentally to the heart, but to outward action, i.e. outward conformity to that law. Hence, if a Muslim converts to another religion, Muslim authorities can threaten the apostate with death if he does not convert back again within three days. Such threats would make no sense coming from Christians. (Yes, the Roman Catholic Church threatened Protestant “heretics” in this way, but Medieval Roman Catholicism was more like Islam than it was like Biblical Christianity. That’s why we had a Reformation.) Christianity and Islam are not just two different “faiths.” The one is a faith; the other is a law. Accordingly, there are political implications for the decline of the former and the rise of the latter among us. Gene Edward Veith had a helpful reflection on this in the wake of the looting in Baghdad following the fall of Saddam Hussein (”Heart Problems,” WORLD May 3, 2003).

Monday, December 17th, 2007 | 9:48 AM

In this election cycle, religion is showing up in novel and surprising ways. We have seen religion playing a prominent role since Evangelicals broke their isolation in the late 1970s. Since then, we have seen the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition, Preacher Pat for President and, on the Democratic side, Reverends Jackson and Sharpton. In the campaign for 2008, we have a Baptist minister advertising his “Christian leadership” as he surges ahead in Iowa, and even Hillary Clinton (amazing grace!) has found religion.

Barak Obama is employing religion in an especially interesting way. Rather than invoking the Savior or pointing to Him, the junior Senator from Illinois is claiming to be the Savior…or at least supporters who are intimately close to him are doing so.

It seems that Obama may be transforming from a man of faith into an object of faith. In his column, “Obama the Messianic,” (The New York Post is more aptly titled “Oprah the Apostle”), Rich Lowry observes Oprah’s anointing of Sen. Obama as what she called “the one” who was to come. You can view the video here, or at BarakObama.com.

In a her long introduction to the candidate before a packed South Carolina stadium, Oprah Winfrey said, “We need politicians who know how to tell the truth. But more important, we need politicians who know how to be the truth.” (The emphasis was hers.) Barak Obama, a professing Christian (though his Evangelical orthodoxy is at least open to question, such that even David Brooks can see it), is surely familiar with Jesus’ messianic claim to divinity, “I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6).

Michelle Obama seems to be following this Messianic theme (I have not been able to locate the source): “We need a leader who is going to touch our souls, who’s going to make us feel differently about one another.” Of course, Jesus does that. It’s called spiritual regeneration — being born again. To Michelle, Obama is the Life. To Oprah, he is the Truth.

What does the prophet Barak say? In a South Carolina church a few weeks ago, he said that, through the new politics that he will bring, we will “create a kingdom right here on earth.” Did the congregation gasp as they should have? I doubt it.

The American Revolution was, as Martin Diamond put it, one of “sober expectations.” It recognized the sinful depravity of man and designed a constitution that could bring out the best in us and manage the worst in us. It was the French Revolution that promised “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité,” a Republic of Virtue. Obama’s rhetoric, and that which he is condoning, places him in the radical French tradition which led of course to the Terror and to Napoleon’s tyranny. Excessive expectations for what is possible to achieve through politics always do. Hillary Clinton is more practically political, less inspiring, and even more selfish, and in those respects — believe it or not — she is a safer candidate. (A previous reflection on the longings of the soul and immoderate politics, “Community and the Longing Soul,” is relevant here.)

Oprah then suggests that Obama is perhaps not a god or a person within the Godhead, but rather a more highly evolved form of our species. “We are here to evolve to a higher plane. And the reason I love Barak Obama is because he is an evolved leader who can bring evolved leadership to this country.”

In the immediately preceding statement, Oprah claimed that Obama would not only love our country, but also love our enemies: “All human hearts are the same. Every mother losing her son in every country feels the same.” This simply repeats the peacenik arguments from the 1980s that, because “the Russians love their children too,” there is actually no threat of war coming from the Soviet Union. They skipped over the fact that even that argument depended upon maintaining credible nuclear and conventional threats. Oprah’s own argument does not, of course, account for the women who have supported their children in their suicide bombings. Nor does it account for the little influence that tender hearted women have in our enemy nations. But not to dwell too long on an entertainer’s silly remark.

She then adds that, “We need a president who cares about our friends and also cares about our enemies.” Does Senator Obama stand behind this statement? Does he propose that, when he is President, he will be above politics, above the America-world distinction, the friends-enemies distinction? Would he see himself as representing not just American interests, but in some way the worldwide common good? Does he understand that there are irreconcilable conflicts between national interests or between various local aspirations? He is so unseasoned, and he presents himself as being so idealistic, that I would take nothing for granted.

Saturday, November 17th, 2007 | 3:36 PM

Elliot Spitzer came to Albany in January as the “you’re not gonna know what hit you” reforming governor. This hot shot prosecutor was expected to be a political steamroller, and of course a not-too-distant-future presidential candidate.

But I find that in politics nothing can be taken for granted (except taxes, I suppose).

But the Princeton and Harvard alum has found himself back in school rather than “teaching a few lessons” as we thought he would be. He recently shared this newly acquired insight: “Leadership is not solely about doing what one thinks is right.” You would think that someone would understand politics before he put himself forward as a political leader. (Consider Plato’s comment on this in his “city as a ship” image in The Republic, 488a-489a.)

Let’s assume that the governor is speaking honestly and that his driving passion is to serve what he believes is the public good. But politics is more than just good intentions. It requires knowledge, judgment and an ability to move people so that they want to follow you. Essentially it requires statesmanship.

Statesmanship is the just, prudent and persuasive exercise of authority.

In order for your government to be just, you have to be morally serious, concerned not for yourself but for the public good. You are a principled political leader, not an ambitious pol.

In order to be prudent, you have to recognize the natural limits to what can be accomplished through politics generally as well as in one’s particular political circumstances. In 1787, you advocate the three-fifths compromise with the hope of defeating slavery down the road, rather than display your political purity and pass up the opportunity for a union of the American states. You must also have experience in order to judge wisely how to maximize justice in any given situation.

If you share power with others, you need the ability to persuade them in order to bring them into concert with your just and prudent plans. This persuasive ability–mastery in the art of rhetoric–is also necessary if you wish not only to change things for the people, but also change the people themselves, to make them more inclined to justice and more open to persuasion by just arguments.

This week, in the course of just one day, Gov. Spitzer has had to withdraw his proposal to give driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, an idea opposed by 70% of New York state voters, as well as his plan to charge sales tax on purchases make by New Yorkers over the Internet, an obviously unpopular move especially at the start of the Christmas shopping season. These sudden reversals in the face of opposition are not only humiliating, but politically debilitating. Hunter College political science professor Ken Sherrill is quoted as saying, “Spitzer has to understand that other elected officials have a responsibility to represent their constituencies.” When you share power with others, even with people of your own party, who are rightly jealous of their power and responsive to their constituencies, prudence dictates persuasion rather than mere pronouncements.Sherrill draws our attention to the pitfalls of electing a prosecutor to a political office: “It’s one thing to not get along with people as an attorney general or as an assistant district attorney. But there’s a need for it in the legislative process.”Thoughts rise to the Giuliani candidacy. We are tempted to support him for his toughness, whether in dealing with al-Qaeda or with Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi. But will the governing style the worked in New York City translate successfully to Washington DC?A Wall Street Journal editorial today (Nov. 16, 2007) offers a very informative summary and reflection on the Spitzer record and style thus far. Here is a sample:

Given Mr. Spitzer’s fall in the polls, it’s tempting to say New Yorkers have learned something new about the man who said on his inauguration day that, “we must change the ethics of Albany and end the politics of cynicism and division in our state.” But the bullying, the arrogance and the focus on destroying anyone who stood his way were on full display when he was Attorney General. Most of the media chose to overlook these qualities, instead extolling his “crusading” style….The only real difference between Mr. Spitzer now and then is that as Governor he is obliged to govern, as opposed to merely bringing charges amid a PR offensive and then settling before having to prove anything in court. His heavy-handed approach to the drivers license plan shows the limits of such behavior in a job where he actually has to persuade people.

Monday, November 5th, 2007 | 10:00 AM

It’s the presidential election cycle, so evangelicals are in the news again. Which candidate will they support? What price will they exact? Are they even relevant? The New York Times ran a story recently on fissures within the movement (“The Evangelical Crackup”). But anyone who thinks that American evangelicals are going to dwindle in numbers or retreat into their old fundamentalist cultural withdrawal is deluding himself.

Nonetheless, evangelicals are not primarily a political movement, but a spiritual community. So they are for the most part conscientious and prone to seasons of critical self-assessment. Thus, a growing number of evangelicals has become uneasy with the spiritual toll that politicking has taken on them personally and on the evangelistic calling for the church. (Consider Blinded By Might: Why the Religious Right Can’t Save America, published in 2000 by Cal Thomas and Ed Dobson).

Immediately after the broad Republican congressional defeat in 2006, David Kuo of the JWalking blog published this reflection on the evangelical soul searching that continues today (”Putting Faith Before Politics,” New York Times, November 16, 2006):

There has been a radical change in the attitudes of evangelicals—it’s just not one that will automatically be in the Democrats’ favor. You see, evangelicals aren’t re-examining their political priorities nearly as much as they are re-examining their spiritual priorities. That could be bad news for both political parties.

John W. Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute, the conservative Christian organization that gained notoriety during the 1990s when it represented Paula Jones in her sexual harassment suit against Bill Clinton, wrote this after the elections: “Modern Christianity, having lost sight of Christ’s teachings, has been co-opted by legalism, materialism and politics. Simply put, it has lost its spirituality.” He went on, “Whereas Christianity was once synonymous with charity, compassion and love for one’s neighbor, today it is more often equated with partisan politics, anti-homosexual rhetoric and affluent mega-churches.”

Mr. Whitehead is hardly alone. Just before the elections, Gordon MacDonald, an evangelical leader, wrote that he was concerned that some evangelical personalities had been seduced and used by the White House. He worried that the movement might “fragment because it is more identified by a political agenda that seems to be failing and less identified by a commitment to Jesus and his kingdom.”

After the 2006 election, Beliefnet.com conducted an online survey of 2,000 people. Two findings struck me:

• nearly 60 percent of non-evangelicals have a more negative view of Jesus because of Christian political involvement
• nearly 40 percent of evangelicals support the idea of a two-year Christian “fast” from intense political activism

A fast from “intense political activism” may be a healthy exercise for some, but abstaining from political engagement in general would be misguided. Christians are called to be good citizens. In a free republic, good citizens are politically engaged. It would also be a sinful neglect of one’s neighbor’s good. How to go about that political engagement Christianly appears to be the question for us at this end of the Bush presidency.

Let me suggest a theological answer. That is, I suggest that Christian political life in this land of liberty take its bearings from the character of God. I have three particular attributes in mind: his wisdom, his sovereignty and his goodness. In order for God to be trustworthy, he must have all these three attributes. If any one of them were missing, we would have no grounds for trusting him. (I’ll leave you to think it through.) Following this pattern, if Christians are obedient to the wisdom of God, we will be a godly influence. If Christians are confident in the sovereignty of God, we will be a humble influence. If Christians are confident in the goodness of God, we will be an effective influence.

It is not enough to be culturally conservative. We have to be biblically faithful. But biblical fidelity entails not only godly ends, but also godly means, godly temperament, and sensible efforts to accomplish those ends in a world that is not amenable to, and even resists, godliness.

However wise we have been at selecting our policy positions, we have behaved terribly in the way we have advocated those positions. As a result of our public involvement over the past thirty years, people have come to see evangelical Christians as self-righteous, unloving seekers after an earthly kingdom. “Humble” is neither the first nor the last word that comes to mind for most impartial observers. Unlike the non-Christians who share our political positions on matters of justice and morality but who are strangers to Christ, we should be oddly winsome. Though faithful to the truth, we should demonstrate a personal concern for our opponent’s well being. Public debate should be a form of love for neighbor, and evidently so.

As to effectiveness, Jesus calls us to be as wise (Gk, phronimos - prudent, provident) as serpents, but as innocent as doves (Matthew 10:16). God wants more than good intentions. He wants us to do good. He wants not only veracity, but also charity, and the best charity actually gets things done.

Looking to the next election, the one still ahead of us, Kuo offered these last words:

We will have to wait until 2008 to see just how deep this evangelical spiritual re-examination goes, and how seductive politics will continue to be to committed Christians. Meanwhile, evangelicals aren’t flocking to the Democratic Party. If anything, they are becoming more truly conservative in their recognition of the negative spiritual consequences of political obsession and of the limitations of government power.

Evangelicals should see that we live in tension between two poles. It is wrong for Christians to act franticly in the political arena the way our political opponents do who are without God and without hope in this world, and to grieve the way they do when we lose. It would also be wrong for us to retreat from our responsibility to exercise godly influence in that legitimate and noble sphere of life. Though there are limits to what can be accomplished through politics, there is also an obligation to accomplish what we can, and to do so in the confidence that God does not depend upon our efforts, but does all things well according to his at times surprising and even puzzling will.

Friday, October 19th, 2007 | 12:32 AM

Samuel Johnson once said, “A decent provision for the poor is the truest test of civilization.” That may be so. But another reliable indicator of a civilization’s health is a people’s public restroom etiquette. Stay with me on this.

Have you noticed, as I have, how difficult it is for many adults, even in classy buildings, to use a simple bathroom bowl without rendering it useless for others? I have small children. Part of the task of raising children to maturity is training them in the civilized use of the salle de bain. Always flush. Always wash your hands after flushing. Leave it as tidy as you found it. (No towels or paper on the floor; get all the bad stuff in the bowl.)

But apparently, there are many grown men (I cannot comment on the women) who cannot use a public convenience without inconveniencing the public when they are done. (I once had to take my bursting five year old boy into a Burger King restroom which was so bad that it’s unseemly to describe.) This is a sign of the declining maturity of American adults, their infantilization, the advancing barbarism that is making “life together” less and less workable all the time. It is a sign of a disintegrating civilization.

At the heart of civilization is a willingness on the part of each to subordinate one’s selfish desires and narrow interests for the sake of harmonious living with others, i.e. our common life. This goes by various names. Civility. Citizenship. Civic spiritedness. Manners. Love of neighbor. The answer is not found in fixtures that flush themselves automatically (though, in the short run, they help). As a people, we would be wise to read this sign of the times, reconsider the nature and prerequisites for civilization, the value of civility, the role of civic education in cultivating it, and the appropriate forms which that education takes – from the cradle to the college to the couch potato.

Friday, October 12th, 2007 | 11:35 AM

For anyone who does not know, City Journal was the think tank behind Mayor Giuliani’s revitalization of New York City (perhaps “reconquest” is just as apt a word) in the 1990s. Peggy Noonan still calls it “the best magazine in America.”

Judith Miller has a story in the recent issue, “A SLAPP Against Freedom” following up on an issue I addressed in two of my Principalities and Powers posts, “Troubling Saudi Arms Deal” and “Follow-up on Saudi Terror Funding”. Well-funded Islamic organizations and individuals have found it more prudent in the West to silence their critics with libels suits than with violence. If nothing else, the victims pay your expenses. (And you can’t beat that!) Recent cases, however, at least in this country, have been discouraging that sort of legal brutality.

In 2006, Yale University Press published a book on Hamas by Matthew Levitt of the Institute for Near East Policy. KinderUSA, an Islamic charity, and its board chairman, Laila Al-Marayati, brought a libel suit against Levitt and Yale UP in California state court for linking them with the terrorist organization. In June, Levitt charged his accusers with bringing a SLAPP suit (strategic litigation against public participation), i.e. a suit designed not seriously to recover damages, but simply to intimidate. They won. KinderUSA backed off.

In May, the Islamic Society of Boston dropped a suit against the Boston Herald and others for claiming that they had been passing funds to terrorist organizations. In the course of the trial, it came to light that the ISB had in fact given money to two groups on the government’s list of terrorist organizations.

Earlier this year, six Muslim imams who had been removed from a flight for reportedly suspicious behavior sued US Airways, the Minneapolis airport and several passengers who had reported them. In August, they dropped their suit after Congress passed a law, sponsored by my Congressman, Rep. Peter King (R-LI), protecting such civic spirited tips from intimidating lawsuits. Plaintiffs must prove that the finger pointers lied or they must pay all court and legal fees.

That sounds like a series of victories for domestic Tranquility, the common defence, the general Welfare, and the Blessings of Liberty. Were KinderUSA or the Islamic Society of Boston falsely accused? I am not in a position to judge with certainty, though I certainly have my inclinations on the matter. Either way, the remedy is not to shut down all public inquiry and discussion on the matter — which has been the effect of plaintiff-friendly libel laws in Britain. Rather, aggrieved parties should defend the truth by challenging and refuting their accusers in public debate.

Monday, October 8th, 2007 | 10:32 AM

Given what I have been reading about the situation in Iraq these days, I’m encouraged. The Bush administration’s critics say that I should not be because despite military success of the 2007 surge, we have not met our benchmarks. This criticism seems to betray too little interest in remedying the national security problem over there and an inappropriate zeal for pursuing political interests back here. Our interest is not in the benchmarks per se, but in removing Iraq as a source of danger in the War on Terror, perhaps even using it as an instrument of peace in that conflict.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is not encouraged, but he provides some interesting information in today’s column, “A Surge, and Then a Stab.” He opens with this: “To understand what’s really happening in Iraq, follow the oil money…,” which caught my hard-nosed conservative attention. I should be particularly observant of American business activity in response to conditions under the Surge given one of my previous posts. Of course, he completes the sentence with, “…which already knows that the surge has failed.” But I read on anyway.

Background information:

1. “Two thirds of Iraq’s G.D.P. and almost all of its government revenue come from the oil sector.”
2. The provisional government in Kurdistan “signed a production-sharing deal with the Hunt Oil Company of Dallas.”
3. Ray L. Hunt, the company’s CEO and president, sits on the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board

Krugman then comments:

What’s interesting about this deal is that Mr. Hunt, thanks to his policy position, is presumably as well-informed about the actual state of affairs in Iraq as anyone in the business world can be. By putting his money into a deal with the Kurds, despite Baghdad’s disapproval, he’s essentially betting that the Iraqi government — which hasn’t met a single one of the major benchmarks Mr. Bush laid out in January — won’t get its act together. Indeed, he’s effectively betting against the survival of Iraq as a nation in any meaningful sense of the term.

Good point. But it seems to me that Krugman draws unjustified conclusions from this. “The smart money, then, knows that the surge has failed, the war is lost, and that Iraq is going the way of Yugoslavia” (emphasis added). But our goal is Iraq is not necessarily unity, but stability and decency. The benchmarks included national reconciliation, but that is a means to an end, not the end itself. It would be nice if they would love each other, or at least respect one another as fellow citizens and human beings, but that is a wildly unrealistic foreign policy goal anywhere in the world.

I noticed this in a Wall Street Journal article by Dreazen, Shishkin and Jaffe, “U.S. Shifts Iraq Focus As Local Tactics Gain: Central Government Loses Clout to Regions; Bush Skips Baghdad” (Sept. 4, 2007, p. A1). They reported that, “…senior military officials are increasingly working to strengthen local players who are bringing some measure of stability to their communities. The new approach bears some striking similarities to the ’soft partition’ strategy pushed by senior Democrats, and suggests that despite the often bitter debate in Washington on Iraq policy, a broad consensus on how to move ahead in the war torn country may be forming.” Aid in Anbar has been given directly to local leaders, bypassing Baghdad. This is a classical American solution. Keeping government as local as possible maximizes liberty and minimizes corruption. (Of course, it is not fool proof: look at New Jersey.)

“The logical result of the new policy is a profound shift away from the Bush administration’s original goal of building a multisectarian democracy in the heart of the Middle East.” Politics is the art of the possible. “Instead, the new strategy seems likely to lead to an Iraq with a very weak central government and largely self-governing and homogenous regions.” Instead of calling this “soft partition,” a kind of federalism, the Bush administration has been calling it “bottom-up reconciliation.” General Petraeus refers to “accommodation,” rather than the less realistic reconciliation. This is the Middle East, after all. Perhaps that is the best hope for our ultimate goal which is not universal brotherhood, but a stable and al Qaeda-free Iraq.

Friday, October 5th, 2007 | 6:04 PM

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s recent speaking engagement at Columbia University has, among other things, focused attention on the exclusion of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) from Ivy League campuses. Isn’t it strange (as people have been wondering) that Columbia welcomes this political oppressor onto campus, giving him not only a voice, but a prestigious platform from which to address, by virtue of that platform, not only the university but the nation, and yet Columbia is careful to shield its tender and impressionable students from exposure to the ROTC. The school justifies its invitation to the morally repulsive Ahmadinejad by citing free speech and the free exchange of ideas while forbidding ROTC access to the campus on specifically moral grounds.

ROTC has been barred from all the Ivy League campuses since the 1960s when the New Left anti-war student agitators drove them off. Those radicals now dominate the university faculties…and they loath the military. (Remember the early days of the Clinton White House, and how Hillary, a child of the 60s, was reported to resent the presence of uniformed military personnel, forgetting that her husband was commander-in-chief?)
These people are supposedly intelligent, learned and observant. And yet they cannot see their own dependence as citizens, and in particular as a thinking and speaking class of citizens, on the national armed forces that prevent foreign powers from taking away their freedom to think and speak. Has this intelligent, learned and observant class convinced itself that all the world is Mayberry? Have they honestly concluded from their study of man and the history of man that we can safely leave our national doors unlocked because all the neighbors are civil and decent, or would be if only we ourselves would behave as good neighbors?

I have seen this absurdity elsewhere. After the 9/11 attacks on our country, many people began displaying “God Bless America” signs. This seemed to me a natural and healthy response to what amounted to an attack on all Americans and on the foundations of the liberties we rightly hold dear. In that context, someone in my neighborhood put up a large, plywood sign saying, “God Bless the World.” In other words, “Unlike my neighbors, I am above these irrational, even immoral, parochial attachments which do nothing but divide people and lead to bloodshed.” It struck me as not only naively apolitical, but also hypocritical.

Rising above politics certainly has its time and place. But as a moral absolute, it is neither practical nor wise.
We have nations – separate and armed political communities – because there is bloodshed, not the reverse. We live in a world of scarcity, a world of competitive goods. There is only so much land, only so much gold. Glory shared is glory diminished. We need political communities, political life and political attachments because, in pursuit of these goods, people (or too many of them) are selfish and rapacious.

The sentiment expressed on my neighbor’s sign is, on one level, admirable. But as a denial and condemnation of political sentiments it is hypocritical. The person who posted the sign did so because he or she has the liberty to do so. Furthermore, the people in this person’s neighborhood are of such a character that they did not deface or remove the sign, much less turn violently on its author. In other words, to exercise the liberties that his sign presupposes, this globally minded neighbor depends on the same political community and on the coercive authorities that preserve it that he condemns.

The Ivy League universities are in the same position. I’m sorry to have to resort to seemingly uncharitable language, but those who oppose ROTC simply because it represents and advances the United States Armed Forces are either hypocritical or stupid. I suppose it would be more charitable to assume the latter.