Vacation

I should have posted this little spring break vacation, but the spontaneity of this trip left me little time to think about The Main Issue. Anywho, I will be back with new write-ups just as soon as I get up to date on my current events and sort out what my opinion of them is. Meanwhile, watch CNN (joke).

Winter Soldier and the Unconscionable War

It's been five years since the U.S. began its devastating invasion and occupation of Iraq, and from all indications, we shall be there for much longer. Judging from the way the media is handling, or failing to report on, the Iraq war is how I have come to this conclusion. As Noam Chomsky so precisely put it, "the opposition to the war today in elite sectors... is pure cynicism, completely unprincipled". Instead of talking about the morality of being an imperial power, or the dubious role the U.S. plays as an occupying power in Iraq, exerting brutal military force in someone else's homeland, we argue whether the surge is working (working for America that is) or say, as Nancy Pelosi said, that it isn't working, and that we ought to stop sacrificing "our security for the sake of an Iraqi government that is unwilling or unable to secure its own future". We don't get the fundamentals of why this war is wrong, and so cannot possibly do what is right.
This hollow and cynical foreign policy begets political discourse where the anti-war candidates promise a "strategic and phased" withdrawal, "directed by military commanders on the ground and done in consultation with the Iraqi government". Continuing: "under the Obama plan, American troops may remain in Iraq or the region". Clinton's position is not much better. Given the choice between a pro-war candidate with convictions - John McCain - and a Candidate without anti-war principles, and not opposed to this war or wars like it in the future - Obama and Hillary - voters will most likely choose the candidate who's certitude feigns prescience.
The same sort of baselessness is seen in the media, our source for the information necessary to understand this conflict, what's at stake, and what is actually happening. I was made painfully aware of how out-of-touch our news media is, today, on the fifth anniversary of the war. After watching Democracy Now and their special coverage of the Winter Soldier event - more on that below - I switched to the most recent Newshour with Jim Lehrer. The lead-off piece, on the 5th anniversary mind you, was on the falling stock market. Following this was a piece on the Iraq war, which first devoted a big portion of the time to a Bush speech that offered little more than his usual empty platitudes. This was followed by the quote from Nancy Pelosi I included above, along with a quick mention of the anti-war protests. Moving on...
A few days prior, and making it onto the esteemed Democracy Now news program, was the Winter Soldier event held at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland. The event was organized by Iraq Veterans Against the War. Coverage of this event would have been apt for fifth-anniversary tribute, not only to the fallen American soldiers , but also to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed. Unfortunately the event was not covered by PBS's news program, nor CNN or Fox News. Interestingly, I was able to find mention of the historic event on MSNBC, but I was informed that the story "was no longer available," having been up on MSNBC's website for a full four days.
The best way to understand how horrible this war really is, to truly comprehend why it must end today, and to fight our own urges to think abstractly about something that to millions of people in Iraq, and veterans over hear, still remains real and painful, is to hear about the war from those who lived it. I am including below parts of the testimonies of Iraq veterans from the Winter Soldier event. I hope that you will find the time to watch and possibly tell others to watch. It is a testament to our modern, willfully disconnected era that we can delude ourselves into thinking war is anything but inhumane. These videos explicitly tell of the real inhumanity of war, making it impossible to justify a continued occupation of Iraq and subjugation of the people who live there.

Spitzer, Politics, and the Housing Crisis

If you're like me, you probably think that war mongering, corporate coddling, corrupt and scheming politicians deserve more attention than politicians using their own money to buy a prostitute. And if you are like me, you probably noticed that we aren't in the majority in our value judgements. No, in most U.S. media outlets the Spitzer story "has legs," and so all the lurid details must be doggedly pursued. The New York Times found it compatible with their ever waning journalistic integrity to include a link to "Kristen's" Myspace page, for the readers interested in all the social networking news fit to print. What's missing in this coverage is perspective, as well as some context that might make this story interesting and important.

First, perspective: The investigation into Mr. Spitzer was expensive and far reaching. Thus, the investigation in all likelihood was politically motivated.

Yes, that's right, the Bush Justice Department, not adverse to being political (joke), set its sights on the Democratic "sheriff" of Wall Street, and they got him good. The fact is that you do not go from a dead-end money transfer inquiry to a full blown investigation with plenty of personnel and wiretaps to a media fiasco, without a larger political motivation. As wsws.org pointed out in their great article on the topic - a must read - if this were as big a case as the federal government was claiming, where are Clients 1 through 8 and 10 and above - Spitzer, remember, was "Client 9"? Where are the prostitution ringleaders? Where is the confiscated cash and bank accounts? The dearth of evidence points to a hit-job, where the Justice Department focused all their recourses on catching the Governor, while letting the prostitution-ring slip by.

This would not be the first time that the Bush administration has targeted politicians not of their ilk for termination. A recent 60 Minutes piece on the shady conviction of former Alabama governor Don Siegelman, purportedly directed by Karl Rove via the White House, shows just how deep this administration is willing to get when they find it in their interest to get involved.

So what interest does the White House have in bringing down Elliot Spitzer. Now we are getting to context. Beside the fact that Mr. Spitzer was a popular Democrat who won the New York Governorship with over 60% of the vote and seemed to have high political aspiration, he was also very disliked by the money conjurers of Wall Street, a group very closely aligned with the Bush Administration.

Mr. Spitzer made his fair share of uber-wealthy enemies while working his way up to the Governors mansion in Albany. The scene of Wall Street traders cheering at the news of Spitzer's indictment clearly shows their antipathy towards him. As the journalist Greg Palast points out in a recent post on his blog, the bust of Spitzer coincides with another bust going on in the financial system, that of the housing market. Spitzer was very involved in investigating the shady sub-prime aspect of the housing bubble, filing suit not only against Countrywide Financial Corporation, but also its parent company, Bank of America, as well as many other financial firms, for illegal lending practices. Here, from his Washington Post op-ed, is what Mr. Spitzer had to say about the sub-prime mortgage debacle and the Bush administrations role:

Not only did the Bush administration do nothing to protect consumers, it embarked on an aggressive and unprecedented campaign to prevent states from protecting their residents from the very problems to which the federal government was turning a blind eye..... When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many innocent homeowners the Bush administration will not be judged favorably.

Harsh words... And so Spitzer is now out of office and out of the public arena for a very long time. No more prosecutor sticking his nose into Wall Street's sordid business. The saddest aspect of this whole story is the way the media has handled it. Instead of giving people the perspective and context that was needed, and should be expected from the venerable "liberal" 4th estate, we got a bunch of moral claptrap, without substance and without relevance.

Oh How I Dislike Big Pharma

A recent article in The Washington Post explains why the Democrats have not been moving on their campaign promises to renegotiate parts of the Medicare prescription drug plan - aka pharmaceutical industry welfare - along with opening up our northern border to enable free trade in lower priced drugs from Canada. In short, The Washington Post found that the biggest stumbling block in Democratic efforts to fix our protectionist drug industry are Democrats themselves. This is no surprise in light of the fact that big pharma has drastically expanded their lobbying budget while making sure to dole it out evenly between both Democrats and Republicans. But the pharmaceutical industry is not just working on ways to stall today's meek protestations from the Democrats and a few Republicans; no, they have their future to think about. That is why they are pulling out all the stops in their drive to convince the American public that the current drug industry setup is the best. They are doing this, as the Post reports, by buying air-time in major media markets for half-hour talk-shows, where participants, including former Bush press secretary and fox news commentator Tony Snow, extoll the wonder making power of big pharma drugs, creating programs to provide low-income families with the drugs they need but can't afford, while making sure the media knows about the good deeds, and purchasing the lobbying services of former aids to big name Democrats.
Well, so what? If anything, this proves that the pharmaceutical industry understands that their old way of doing business will not work. They understand that their drug prices are too high for too many people, and so they are fixing this by providing discounted drugs. Doesn't all this show that big pharma has gotten the point, that they are mending their ways?

All this does prove that they realize that in order to keep doing what they are doing they need to change the ways they do business... on their own terms. There in lies the problem. The pharmaceutical industry has a sweet deal going: They have money, power, lots of well-connected friends, and high profits - although profits streams are waning due to faulty drugs, a lack of new drug prospects, and lawsuits. They have been doing very good up until quite recently, and so for years and years they have tried to hide the one dirty-little-secret that could bring their whole industry crashing down: profit-driven drug development is the most ineffective way to create innovative and cheap drugs. It is not only ineffective, it is rife with conflicts of interest that must be constantly regulated and mitigated, with mixed results.

To get a taste of how ineffective the current system is consider this: The pharmaceutical industry spent around $41.1 billion dollars on drug research in 2004, and yet the U.S. spent $220 billion dollars on drugs. The difference between the two are accounted for mostly by the cost of marketing and profits.

The drug industry is able to sell drugs for as much as they do because the government protects their profits through patent protections on their drugs. Patents are all fine and good when society has an interest in energizing research and development, but it hardly is the most effective way to spur innovation in drug creation. Why? Because the government is already funding huge amounts of research very effectively, through public universities, as well as the National Institute of Health (NIH), who's $30 billion a year budget is at the present moment a large subsidy for the pharmaceutical industry. What makes the current system even more ridiculous is the fact that much of that $41.1 billion research budget of big pharma is being spent on developing "copycat" drugs such as Cialis and Levitra, which cost around 90% more to develop than the original, Viagra, to treat a very profitable, if not life threatening, ailment. If the government were funding research there would be no copycat drug creation, because it is wasteful in an industry that has more important problems to focus on. Public funded drug research would allow most drugs to be sold at prices near those of generic drugs like aspirin, because, in a free market, drugs do not cost $6,000 to manufacture. I recommend reading this book to learn more about this and other corporate welfare.

Lastly, there is the ethical issues of for-profit drug production. In our current system there is a dangerous relationship between drug makers and drug consumers: their interests are divergent. Consumers are looking for a drug that will help them heal. They want to take a drug only for as long as is needed for them to recover from illness. They want the most impartial and informed advice as to what drug they should take. The drug industry, on the other hand, is looking to sell the most drugs possible at the highest price possible, to realize profit gains for their investors. To do this they must market their drugs effectively, not just to doctors, but also to patients who did not go through seven years of medical school. They apply the tried and true marketing techniques of a typical salesman, except in their case they are not selling appliances but products that often have life or death consequences, or at least potential to do harm in the short or long-term. Without constant regulation they would invariably be like the common drug dealer, with societal effects just as detestable. Because they are the only game in town, they have overwhelming power to make a money driven political system work for them to reach their profit objectives.

As a recent article in the New York Times shows, drug companies work first and foremost to drive sales, regardless of whether it benefits society. In this most recent example of drug company malfeasance reported by the NYT, the chief operating officer, soon to be CEO, of Eli Lilly, John C. Lechleiter, discussed in an e-mail possible "off-label" uses (uses not approved by the FDA) for a drug, Zyprexa, that is now the center of investigation and lawsuits. In this e-mail from 2003, Mr. Lechleiter seems to have been encouraging the use of this high power schizophrenia drug, which is now known to often cause obesity and high-cholesterol, on children and adolescents. He said, “The fact we are now talking to child psychs and peds and others about Strattera means that we must seize the opportunity to expand our work with Zyprexa in this same child-adolescent population”. Kids on antipsychotics, great one Mr. Lechleiter.

How many cases such as this does it take until we fix this mess; how much money must be wasted on big CEO paychecks and profits? How many deaths for lack of medicine until we wise up; how many deaths because of the misuse of medicine before we pull the wool from our eyes? Don't buy the lies propagated by big pharma. Their interests are different than yours and mine.

Islam in Britain

On one of the many walks I took around Oxford when I was there in the spring of 2007, I stumbled upon a large, almost completed Mosque. It was a beautiful building, cream colored with a large dark metallic dome culminating in the familiar sickle and star. What was most interesting about the new Mosque, however, was the amount of security that encircled the construction site. Ten-foot high metal gates and cement walls strung with imposing barbed wire encircled the building, as high-tech surveillance cameras peered down from behind tinted enclosures. All this heavy security made a significant impression on me, and I thought at the time how interesting it would be to write something about the clash of Islam and Western democracy that I had heard about, and now, standing below this fortress of a Mosque, felt I recognized first-hand.
Later on during my stay in England, I took a bus trip to Cardiff. My bus took the long route, going up north to Birmingham before carrying on down to the south of Wales. So it was that I had the opportunity to have some dinner in Birmingham center on my layover.
I didn’t know much about Birmingham – I didn’t even know that I was going to be stopping over there before the bus stopped – and so it was quite a surprise when I stepped off the bus to find a typical post-industrial British city with a very unanticipated South Asian flair. I walked through the streets looking for somewhere to eat, heading in the general direction of a large garishly decorated mall in the center of the city, wondering all the while at what sort of city I had stumbled into. During my whole, short stay in Birmingham I did not see one Anglo-Saxon – I think I saw every nationality but the typical pasty white Englishman. I had no judgment on this; I had no reason to judge.
What I learned while in England though was there was no shortage of judging, and resentment, and hostility, and confusion in the general non-Muslim population. If people weren’t complaining about the proverbial Polish plumbers, they were deriding the “Pakis” (an offensive word for people of South Asian decent). The reasons for this state of affairs in England, where Mosques were fortified, cities segregated, and people aggravated, are many, and I do not hope to address them all. What I hope to do in this piece is give a brief overview of the contentious issues, what they stem from, and what might be done to alleviate some of the most harmful side effects of this process of integration and assimilation.

Recent History
The immigration of Muslims from their origins predominately in South Asia is a fairly recent affair. While many Muslims passed through England while working on merchant vessels in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it was not until the 1950’s that the Muslim population living in Britain began to grow. The reasons for this growth in immigration were many. Economic imperatives, as always, were a driving factor in the decision of thousands of Muslims from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, to pack up and move thousands of miles away to a foreign land. Due in part to the exploits of British imperialism, South Asia began to slowly descend into ethnic, religious and economic turmoil, and many people tried to flee the conflicts that were tarrying their countries apart. Many more immigrants came from places with a tradition of emigration. This is especially the case for regions such as Sylhet in Bangladesh as well as rural areas such as Kashmir in India and Pakistan. Still more immigrants made there way to Britain after the completion of the Mangla Dam in the Mirpur District of India, which drowned many villages and displaced over 100,000 people.
As is often the case, some of the first immigrants to Britain were men, intent on making money to send back to their families in South Asia. They came to work in the giant textiles industries that once were a major component of the British economy.
This male South Asian vanguard was little noticed by the local population. They usually staid well outside of mainstream British culture, keeping within supportive ethnic communities in the urban centers of Britain. Because the majority of immigrants were in Britain primarily to make money to send back to their homes in the Indian Sub-Continent, and thus were in Britain without their families, the unique communal landscape of Mosque’s, Halal grocers, and Kebab shops that are now ubiquitous in many British cities were missing.
All this began to change in the late 50’s and early 60’s when a variety of forces converged to drastically increase Muslim immigration. The most important of these forces was the 1962 Commonwealth Immigration Act, which sought to stymie the influx of immigrants from across the world through restricting the right of entry for people from the commonwealth. The knowledge of this looming cutback on immigrant permits pushed more people to try and find a way to get into Britain before it was too late. This was especially true for the women, children and relatives of the South Asian men who were already working in Britain.
With the new immigration of families to Britain came the culture that had been lacking before. Mosques began to be constructed as the focal point of the Muslim community. With these new Mosques came a demand for Islamic scholar’s, called ‘ulema, to see over the Mosques and Muslim schools and lay down the Islamic law for the burgeoning South Asian demographic. These ‘ulema were often very traditional and spoke very little if any English. They were direct connections between Muslims in Britain and their traditional towns and villages in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. Immigrant parents, not wanting their traditional culture to be lost on their children, were happy to offer their children up to be educated by the ‘ulema, creating new problems for the goal of integration originally sought by the British government.
As the population of South Asian’s continued to grow through the 60’s and into the early 70’s, with more and more Muslim children being born in Britain, the Muslim communities became more conspicuous, creating distinct neighborhoods within major cities such as London, Birmingham, Luton, and Bradford. As the textile industry started to crumble, many former textile workers went into business for themselves, creating shops that both served the local Muslim community as well as the tastes of greater British society.
Invariably conflict arose as the new Muslim communities began to assert themselves both economically and culturally. While the new ethnic groups and religion injected a diverse cultural element into British society, it also changed the uniquely British culture that had once been, and this change brought it into direct conflict with those who wished to keep things as they were before. Furthermore, the Muslim minorities were something different from the Hindu and Sikh Indian’s that had also come to the UK seeking a better life; they were far more hostile towards the dominant secular society around them, more steadfast in their traditional morals and values, and generally from poorer, less-educated backgrounds.
A noxious mixture of xenophobia on the British side, and cultural detachment on the Muslim side has come to a head recently as the perceived threat of Islamic terrorism quickly thrust the growing British Muslim minority into the spotlight. The public debates that have raged since the Salman Rushdie affair have often been hysteric, misplaced, or simply racist, but that does not mean they do not point to a real problem having to do with many millions of Muslims in Britain secluded both by choice and inertia from the general society.

Minority Status
Islam, historically, has not taken well to being in the minority. Unlike Christianity, which began as a religious movement separate from the political establishment of the time, Islam was founded as a complete ideology, including political aspirations. Ever since Muhammad left Mecca to establish his Islamic empire in Medina, Islam has had objectives larger than being a belief system apart from the tangible universe; it has been firmly rooted in the social, political, and economic forces of this world, as well as the spiritual realm of the next. And for a long time this arrangement worked remarkably well. The non-hierarchical nature of Islam allowed it to flourish in many forms within empires stretching across the Middle East, North Africa, and into Europe. Unlike the Christian world, which witnessed the idea of a unified catholic (coming from the Greek word for universal) faith dashed into many smaller sects, Islam saw only one main schism, between the Sunni’s and Shi’a’s. This remarkable unity of purpose and ideology allowed the Islamic faith to conquer huge swaths of the known world, quickly creating a civilization that worked harmoniously with its guiding aspirations of creating a pure Islamic state.
As the Islamic world began to butt up against the other large Abrahamic faith in Europe, and boundaries between Muslim states and Christian states shifted constantly due to war and conquest, Islamic scholars grappled with the idea of Muslim’s living outside of the Dar al-Islam (house of Islam) in the Dar al-Harb (house of war) of the Christian world. Because living with an Islamic state was so fundamental to Islam, these early scholars had a difficult time creating an acceptable rule governing the action a good Muslim should take if they were to fall into infidel hands. Sunni scholars generally came to the conclusion that a Muslim should immediately emigrate from their home if it were to become part of the Dar al-Harb, while Shi’a theologians were more willing to allow Muslim’s to stay in non-Muslim countries to be “an outpost and beacon of Islam” (Lewis). Both sects agreed that if a Muslim were to find himself in a foreign land, he would have to continue to conduct himself strictly in accordance with Muslim law and work to “reform” the infidel society he lived within to reflect the truth of Islam in its laws and institutions.
While at the time of the codification of the rules governing Muslim behavior the problem of Muslim’s living under infidel dominance hardly existed, today the number of Muslim’s living in non-Muslim lands grows by the year. While religious considerations factor into relations between Muslim’s and their secular governments, it would be far too simple to say that religion is the only or greatest factor. Nonetheless, it is helpful to recognize that the element of Islam that has difficulty accepting minority status does exist and is backed up by certain interpretations of Islam. Certain strains of radical Islam in Britain can be traced back to clearly intolerant ideas about the ability for disparate groups to live together, at least without an overarching Islamic state structure.
For the majority of Muslims that do not accept a hard-line Islamic ideology that rejects coexistence in a secular state, the experience of being a minority is quite similar to the experience of other minorities. Trouble adjusting to a drastically different and often hostile culture creates the urge to create parallel communities and institutions. The parallel communities are rooted in their own set of cultural norms and rules, which further isolate. But the idea that the differences in culture are insurmountable cannot be simply stated without actually looking into how different the cultural norms truly are, and how detrimental those differences can be to relations between Muslims and their non-Muslim neighbors.

Cultural Differences
The most offensive idea for many western pundits discussing the “Muslim issue” has to be Sharia law. Rolled up in this one term are all the repulsive images of radical Taliban judges stoning women to death, beheadings in town squares, and the imposition of harsh, chauvinistic repression of women. The reality of Sharia law is somewhat different from how it is often characterized, though this is not to say that such inhumane – by our standards – applications of Sharia law have not happened in the past or that they are not continually practiced today in many countries in the world. We often hear about the most horrific elements of Sharia as practiced in certain countries, and thus most “westerners” have a decidedly negative view of Islamic law. Because of this negative view, and misunderstanding as to how Sharia could possibly be administered within British society, controversies can erupt, such as the recent one over comments made by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who felt that the application of some elements of Sharia law in Britain “seem[s] unavoidable”. While it is understandable why many would be hesitant to allow a parallel legal system to exist within their country, the frightening image of what that would look like is somewhat different from how Sharia law would probably be practiced, and why some concessions to the Muslim community on this issue will probably need to be made. Furthermore, the argument over whether or not to allow Sharia law is really one manifestation of a deeper problem of us versus them, which I will address later.
As has been discussed earlier, Islam is a religion that permeates all parts of life, and cannot be relegated to only spiritual affairs. So, over the years, Islamic scholars have codified many aspects of what it means to live a good life in accordance with Allah’s laws, and the reams and reams of documents on this subject are what make up Sharia law. Day to day, a Muslim individual is supposed to live by the rules, and if a problem or a dispute should arise, the individual is to ask guidance from an ulema, a person well versed in Islamic law, or go to an Islamic court, where the Islamic judge will sort out what the correct punishment or advise should be.
On certain issues, such as marriage, the application of Sharia law can seem unfair to the western world. But just as western law has changed through the centuries, so to does Sharia law change. More liberal ulema can, and have, slowly changed interpretations so as to fit the exigencies of our times. Conversely, conservative ulema can change the rules to reflect a stricter adherence to archaic beliefs. This is an ongoing process, much like the changes in our laws are constant and ongoing.
Because Islam is, and always has been, a complete ideology, it is unthinkable for a Muslim to work outside of the jurisdiction of Sharia law – whether the interpretation is strict or liberal. Telling a Muslim to ignore Sharia is equivalent to telling a Jew to eat pork. So while Muslim’s will go through the court system, the rulings that may come down from the magistrate must be in sync with Muslim law to be relevant and followed by a devout Muslim. So, for instance, if a Muslim wanted a divorce, and a British court granted such a divorce, the divorce would not be realized until a Sharia judge ruled that the divorce was valid.
Conflict between religious belief and government law is not unique to Islam. It is common source of controversy in all countries and must be dealt with fairly in order to mitigate social angst. In the light of this fact, the Archbishop of Canterbury was making a very reasonable point when he said the implementation of aspects of Sharia law were unavoidable. If the British government wants its Muslim citizens to follow its decisions on say marriage, it has to take into account Muslim sensibilities, at least to a point. Certain aspects of common law, though, are vital to a liberal, free democracy and so should not be compromised.
The process of reconciling differences is difficult but necessary. If done correctly it can be an opportunity to involve a growing constituent in the larger community. But reconciling will be hard. As is clear from a reading of the stricter forms of Sharia law, there are some real differences of opinion as to the role of the individual in society, human rights, and the nature of the law.
Sharia law is not the only portion of Islamic ideology that is difficult reconciling with Western norms. Islam’s relation with the idea of secularism, connected to the issue of Sharia law, is also an important topic to be examined if we are to understand the hurdles of coexistence.
Islam has historically had a difficult relationship with the idea of secularism. The demand for the creation of an Islamic state like the first Islamic state created by Muhammad obviously is a contradiction with the idea of separate spheres for government and religion. This, however, has not meant that Muslims today do not recognize, and are also willing, to go along and even embrace the idea of secular democracy, especially as the benefits of such a separation become apparent. The first Muslim country to internalize the idea of secularism was Turkey, which, under the rule of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, was redefined as a modernizing secular nation. Others followed, and while many countries have not remained secular, many Muslim’s today understand and often covet the advantages of a secular state.
Recently there has been a backlash of Islamist sentiments, fueled by economic deprivation and war, but the ideas of human rights, democracy, and secularism are still alive and well in Muslim communities. A poll by the BBC world service last year showed that in reality, many Muslim’s are not thinking of the conflict between the West and Islam in strictly religious terms. In Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, and Indonesia, over 50% of the population thought the causes of conflict between Islam and the West were about “political power and interest,” while around 35% thought the conflict was because of differences of difference of “religion and/or culture”. This points clearly to the fact that what is at issue in the oft-cited conflict between the Muslim world and the West is far more nuanced, especially in the eyes of many Muslims, and not simply knee-jerk animosity towards Western ideas and values.
Another poll done by The Times and Populus in Britain a year after the 7/7 attacks on the London transportation network by Islamic terrorists shows more evidence that British Muslim’s are far from being unified against Western democracy, and Britain in particular. To the contrary, two-thirds of British Muslim’s feel that their community needs to integrate more with the larger British community. Clearly, such a sentiment would not be expected from people diabolically opposed to the culture and institutions of Britain.
The truth is that while cultural differences do exist between Muslim immigrants and the rest of the population, the barriers between the two groups are not as impenetrable as many seem to believe. The struggle for harmonious integration, not total integration, which is both infeasible and probably unwanted, from my perspective, will not be won by burying the tradition and culture that South Asian’s hold dear, but will come from greater economic integration along with a reevaluation of the merits of at least some portions of Sharia law, so as to integrate Muslim sensibilities into British institutions. This is not to say that some of the undesirable aspects of Sharia law should be condoned; they should not. But many aspects of Sharia, especially more liberalized interpretation, are not abhorrent and ought to be recognized. The truth is that the Muslim community is already abiding by many of these Sharia laws, and integrating some of them into the British legal system, much as other religions have aspects of their traditional law recognized, would only show Muslims that there are avenues for redress within common institutions, and that they need not look to parallel legal bodies to find solutions to their problems.

The Homogenous Myth
If there is one overriding problem with the way we view the issue of Muslim integration or the lack there of, it is in our propensity for imagining a unified Muslim bloc, when in reality such a consolidated coalition does not exist. It would seem that there are many reasons for this myth of homogeneity. Firstly, on certain, limited issues concerning Islam, there is a fairly consistent opinion as to what is good and what is bad. Secondly, many Muslims portray Islam as a unified whole, save for the Shi’a and Sunni schism, and tend to skim over the differences so as to give the impression that Islam has more socio-political control than it actually does. This attitude of universal Islam is in a large part wishful thinking. Lastly, to the Western world, the reason for this false analysis of Islam is created by a combination of pundits and decision makers being outsiders looking in on a foreign religion, along with fear mongering by those who are not clear on the details of Islam, are xenophobic, or have nefarious geo-political motivations.
The truth, as always, is far more complicated than the accepted knowledge about the Muslim community, especially in Britain. As was discussed in the first section of this essay, the South Asians that made Britain their home came from very diverse locations and backgrounds, and that diversity has not been lost as they have adjusted to their new homeland thousands of miles from their origins. Family relations are still of paramount importance, followed closely by village and town affiliation, religious philosophy, nation-state citizenship and so on. Depending on the crisis, one can expect to see the different faces of South Asia’s diverse identities come to the fore. If there is an “outrage” against Islam, such as the Salman Rushdie affair or the cartoonification of the prophet, than one can be assured that the Muslim community will speak as one. But when an issue involves geopolitics, or questions of religious interpretation, the Muslim community is splayed into a wide variety of interest groups, comprised of different nationalities, incomes, ethnicities, political affiliations, and cultures. In fact, it has been quite a struggle historically for any one movement to unite the disparate Muslim groups in Britain into a unified coalition that can lobby under one banner, with one voice. Add to geographical and economic divisions separate approaches to the practice of Islam, along with the split between fundamentalism and quasi-liberalism – more on that later – and the Muslim community is truly a splintered polity.
The blessing of the diversity of the British Muslim community is also a curse. While diversity makes it easier for the British government to ease in integration measures, thereby lessening the threat that those who are uneasy about the prospect of millions of “foreigners” in their country might feel, diversity also weakens Muslim efforts to get their concerns heard, opens the way for extremist elements to define the whole of the community, and creates an atmosphere of internal bickering where nothing gets accomplished.
There have been numerous efforts, both grassroots and otherwise, to organize Muslims as a united whole. These efforts have been mirrored by other, often political, organization drives that tend to splinter the Muslim contingent – a good example of this is in the Pakistan People’s Party (formerly headed by Benazir Bhutto) setting up of local chapters inside of Britain. Nonetheless, religious interest groups have grown dramatically as South Asian Muslim’s have realized that in order to find space within British society for their customs, values, and concerns, they have to actively lobby. This realization has manifested itself in a multitude of Mosque councils that have sprung up across the UK. The proliferation of these outspoken Islamic groups have spooked quite a few non-Muslims, and realizing this, many groups have changed their tactics.
In 1997 The Muslim Council of Britain was founded to further organize the Muslim community. This organization is another addition to an ever-growing network of groups dedicated to giving Muslim concerns the same amount of attention as other special interests receive. As more Muslim groups develop, the inevitable winners will be the moderates, who, as seen from a number of polls, have the greatest support in the population.

Extremism and Liberalism
There is no more incendiary question in discussions on the Muslim presence in the UK as how to categorize the majority Muslim sentiment as it relates to religion. Are most Muslims conservative or are they liberal? The truth lies somewhere in-between the classic dichotomy.
First generation Muslim immigrants to the UK, in general, come from rural locations of South Asia, have very little, if any, education, and often do not speak English. With such severe handicaps impeding the immigrant’s ability to integrate himself into the larger society, it is no wonder that many choose to create separate transplant communities, duplicating their traditional communal order on alien soil. As was discussed before, these separate communities not only engrain social divisions, they also tend to incubate conservative religious doctrines, many of which have their roots in the troubled socio-economic and political climates of Bangladesh and Pakistan.
As was gone over before in the first section of this essay, it has been only fairly recently that largely conservative Islamic scholars, ‘ulema, have come to the UK, funded by a more settled Muslim community that desires to connect their children with the traditional values of their homeland. The ‘ulema generally preach a conservative version of Islam, very extreme at times. Their extremist hold on many Mosques is a worrying portent for future relations between Muslims and the general society.
Most liberal western democrats would describe the brand of Islam taught by the old guard ‘ulema as extremely anachronistic, and that is the opinion I hold as well. Simplistic ideas relegating the status of woman, demeaning secular education and inquiry, and hostile to democracy has no place in our modern world. And yet it still continues to exist in the British Muslim community.
This continuation of reactionary and decrepit religious practices is, fortunately, only part of the story. For another larger subset of the Muslim population, the old ways of doing things simply cannot do. The young are faced with a society that does not, cannot, accept conservative religious practices, and so many are looking for other doctrines that can give them meaning. Unfortunately, hard economic times, inequality, and foreign policy crimes and blunders have helped to allow fundamentalist sentiment to fester, creating many young men willing to die in order to make rationally impaired political and religious statements.
But there are many more positive signs that show not only that Muslims, in general, do not support extremism, but also that the young generation is liberalizing quickly, modifying traditional norms to allow them to fit more snugly into British society. The Times/Populus poll cited early also highlighted that over half of the Muslim population in Britain feel that the government is not doing enough to fight extremism, while a majority also think that it is “acceptable” for the government to monitor what is preached in Mosques so as to catch extremist imams. These statistics reveal that a large portion of Muslim society are more willing to take a hard-line approach than many non-Muslim’s would care to take, for fear of breaching important civil liberties. But along with these somewhat heartening statistics are others that show just how diverse opinion is within the Muslim community. Sixteen percent of Muslim respondents to this same poll thought that the 7/7 bombers were justified in their actions, while thirteen percent consider the terrorists martyrs. These are high metrics and point to a divide between radicals and moderates that needs to be addressed in order to keep integration acceptable to the majority of the population.
What is clear from the statistics is that a divide exists, and while a majority are more than willing to work and learn from the mainstream British system, a small contingent is opposed to the whole order, and could well destabilize relations between groups, a process that is well under way in certain European countries, and arguably, in the UK as well.

Diversity Benefits
The mixing of different ethnic, cultural, and religious groups is a defining component of the history of our modern era. One can not begin to imagine all the ways that immigration has shaped, both positively and negatively, British culture and society, but there are certain aspects of Britain’s new diversity that have created some real benefits. This is a broad subject of course, and I will focus mainly on the benefits that British Muslim’s have brought to the formulation of Britain’s foreign policy, a very important aspect of government policy, especially for a small island nation that relies on good foreign relations for its bread and butter.
There is no better place to examine the impact politically active Muslim’s have had on foreign policy than in the recent conflict in Iraq, and, further back, the first Gulf War. Both conflicts were exceedingly unpopular within the Muslim community. Before both wars, Muslim’s mobilized to speak out against the looming conflicts, expressing a sentiment mirrored throughout the Muslim world, and one that would most likely have been lost to the West if it were not for vocal minorities. This is an important point that speaks to the benefit of having a diverse cultural and ethnic society in our modern world. With minorities come perspective, and with perspective comes understanding which can help decision makers make more informed decisions, and decisions that represent their diverse constituencies.
In 2003, as the U.S. was gearing up for war with Iraq, the majority of the world was against any action by the belligerent super power. In the UK, where Tony Blair was working furiously to secure public support for a U.S. invasion, poll numbers indicated that he had support from far less than a majority. This was even as the infamous Rupert Murdoch was acting as “the 24th member of the Blair cabinet,” selling the war through his newspapers much as the U.S. media did in the U.S. It would be exceedingly difficult to pin the lack of support for the Bush-Blair agenda on a large anti-war Muslim presence, but it cannot be denied that the Muslim communities vocal condemnation of any rush to war gave many Britain’s pause, especially since Muslim’s make up a large portion of the population in urban centers.
During the first Gulf War, large bastions of the population and the press derided anti-war sentiments in the Muslim community. While the situation was different in that war, with Saddam Hussein having invaded another country, the justification for war were equally suspect, being that the war amounted to one dictator invading another autocratic kingdom. The case for protecting freedom and democracy could not even be argued, though that did not stop many from selling the idea of such high moral aspirations.
Regardless of the fact that Muslims had a legitimate point in their opposition to the Gulf War I, many looked on their protests as anti-patriotic and anti-British, declaring that those who spoke out against the war held allegiances to Saddam over their adopted homeland. There were, in fact, many who did revere Saddam, seeing him as a worthy Muslim ruler in that he had the power and military might to not be pushed around by non-Muslim powers. For others though, their opposition to the war was rooted in an understanding of the conflict as primarily economic, with Western powers trying to secure Middle Eastern oil. They also condemned the prospect of non-Muslims setting up military bases in the Muslim holy land; a position shared by Muslims the world over. With hindsight, we can now see how wise it would have been for the government in Britain as well as the U.S. to pay attention to what their minorities were saying. Much of the conflicts we have witnessed today directly stems from this grave misstep in 1991.
The Israel-Palestinian conflict is another issue that Britain has gained considerable perspective on, due, at least in part, to their Muslim population. Britain had a large part to play in setting the conflict in motion by creating the Jewish state of Israel in 1948. Since then it has wavered back and forth in its approach to the ongoing conflict. For the most part, it has been on the side of Israel, working with it, most infamously, in the Suez Crisis of 1956 as well as helping it develop nuclear weapons, both actively and unknowingly, by supplying it key material such as plutonium for its nuclear weapons program. Recently, however, it has changed its policy towards Israel, taking a much more balanced approach towards the conflict. This is due to changing attitudes in the Western world on the issue, but the presence of a large voting population with sympathies towards the Palestinians has undoubtedly had an effect on the political posturing.
As many globalization proponents have argued before, the presence of large groups of minorities adds traction to the integration of the world. While there is always room to argue with the mainstream globalization crowed, it does appear that minorities can and do support greater global integration. Always a key part of integration is cultural sensitivity, and as we have seen in Britain in light of two major conflicts, the Gulf War one and two, and other international issues concerning Muslims, that sensitivity has helped to shift debates, modify – not change, at this point – policies, and dampen ill will between foreign countries. It is impossible for countries to look on each other today and not recognize their common heritage, since ethnicities and religions that once were exclusively tied to one nation are now dispersed across the world.

Here Today, Here Tomorrow
Problems exist in the British Muslim community, and they will continue to exist, because the Muslim community will remain in Britain. This fact means that what is necessary is a plan for making the current social dynamics in Britain work. There have been many events as of late that have made it very difficult to focus on problem solving rather than condemnation, but that does not mean that a concerted effort to break the barriers and bridge the gaps should not be attempted.
Beside the fact that all the naturalized citizens from across the world are in Britain for the long haul, there is the issue of further immigration. The British Isles are small, and crowded, and my personal opinion is that a growing population will be at the expense of quality of life. House prices throughout Britain have gone up tremendously in recent years, even as interest rates remained relatively high, especially compared to U.S. rates.
On top of all this there is the issue of whether further immigration from South Asia would be palatable to the general public. The odds are, especially as hard economic times loom, that most Briton’s would prefer a lock down of the border. In fact, the Home Office of the UK has announced a point system similar to the one employed by Australia, in order to attract workers with specific skills and English proficiency. That system was pushed for because of restlessness with past immigration policy and it will come online in 2008.
Regardless of how the immigration issue works out, or fails to work out, there will need to be a drastic change in the dynamics of British society, built upon a realization that multiculturalism is here to stay, and the choice is between embracing the opportunities it offers or wallowing in animosity. It will take more than individual citizens making efforts to bring about understanding; it is going to take an effort by the government to make the situation right through urban planning, community outreach, and an effort to get Muslims involved in British institutions. All of these steps cannot be taken unilaterally, but must bring along the Muslim community, adopting their values as much as possible so as to show that democracy goes both ways, that change can be manifested in both the individual and society.

Bibliography

Bawer, Bruce. While Europe Slept. New York: Doubleday, 2006.

Global Poll Finds that Religion and Culture are Not to Blame for Tensions between Islam and the West. 16 Febuary 2007. 1 March 2008 .

Immigration. 2 October 2002. 1 March 2008 .

Islam in Britain. 4 July 2006. 1 March 2008 .

Leigh, David. Papers reveal UK's nuclear aid to Israel. 10 December 2005. 13 March 2008 .

Lewis, Bernard. Islam and the West. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 1993.

Lewis, Philip. Islamic Britain. New York: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. , 2002.

Religion & Ethics - Islam. 1 March 2008 .

Why Nader?

I have no illusions about the chances of Ralph Nader winning this election. More likely than not he will loose - he probably won't even be allowed to debate the other candidates. But whether he wins or looses is really beside the point. Ralph Nader is running for other reasons.

He is not running as a "spoiler". That argument made time and again by the Democrats in order to keep a system in which two parties dominate politics and nothing gets done is false. The truth is that Ralph Nader never lost the election for Gore or Kerry. The votes that went to Ralph were made by free individuals who have a right to choose who they would like as president. Gore and Kerry lost every vote they failed to get, including the millions upon millions of votes that were never cast by people fed up with a two-party dictatorship. The Democrats ought to be ashamed of the way they have tried to stifle democracy in this country by pushing third-party candidates off the ballot and out of the public eye.

Ralph Nader as well as every other third-party candidate has a right in a free democracy to run, and they must run if we are going to get the diversity of choices that the oldest democracy in the world deserves. Bill Clinton won both U.S. presidential elections with less than half of this country supporting him (43% the first time, 49% the second) because each time a "spoiler" fractured the Republican vote. But you didn't hear Democrats complaining then. As Matt Gonzalez, Nader's VP, points out, if the Democrats were so concerned with "spoilers" ruining elections, they and their Republican partners in crime would work hard to reform the voting system, taking such steps as introducing a ranked voting system, so that no candidate will win an election with less than 50% of the vote. But both parties refuse to do anything. They are content in divvying up districts, restricting choice, and taking advantage of vital voting blocks (liberals, progressives, social conservatives, Christian conservatives etc.).

I, for one, am tired of all this. I am tired of learning about inside deals, where the Democrats and Republicans connive to keep the system in which they thrive safe. I am tired of learning how Nancy Pelosi will come to agreements with then house majority leader Tom Delay to not investigate Republican ethical lapses if Delay will do the same for Democrats. This is called incestuous politics, and it stinks. I am also tired of two parties that continue each others failed foreign, economic, and social policies. The sad truth is that both parties, due to the tremendous amount of money at work in Washington, have one constituency: their major financial backers. Sure the Democrats might fix this bureau or tweak that regulation, but by in large they work to secure gains for a small subset of our population, consistently backing capital interests over the majority of people who make a living with their labor. That is why we have situations where the average worker pays 35% tax on their income, while a hedge fund manager, raking in millions of dollars of dubiously got income, pays a measly 15% tax. The Democrats #1 industry contributor is Wall Street, the ones who brought us a sub-prime crisis, housing bubble, rampant speculation etc. And guess who gives the Republicans the most money: Wall Street. You see how it goes.

So that is why I am supporting Ralph Nader and Matt Gonzalez. Their campaign is the best way to set up a structure that can be used to educate the public about the corporate Demo-Republican duopoly, electoral reform, progressive economic reform, real reform for our failed healthcare system, real environmental reform, and real education reform. His campaign gives us all a chance to participate in something we believe him, creates the foundations of a grassroots movement that is not built on airy-fairy pronouncements of "change" or "experience" but on a principled stand on issues. His campaign will hopefully shift the debate in this country from the completely corrupted talking points contrived by the Demo-Republicans, to a higher level, where solutions are more important than rhetoric, where securing human rights are our base motivation, and where setting our democracy free in the ways that our founding fathers envisioned is paramount.

William F. Buckley Obit

Patrick Martin did an honest obituary - here - on the original conservative pundit, William F. Buckley, for WSWS.org. Here it is:

The death of William F. Buckley, founder of the National Review magazine and long-time media publicist for the American political right, has prompted an outpouring of tributes and praise in the American press, out of all proportion to the significance and stature of its subject.

The encomiums for Buckley from the likes of William Kristol, David Brooks and George Will are predictable, but they seem unaware that in proclaiming Buckley their political mentor and forerunner, they demonstrate their own intellectual and political poverty.

If one examines Buckley’s biography dispassionately, it is clear that he was a talented promoter of noxious, reactionary and anti-democratic ideas. He took the initiative to refurbish American conservatism in the early 1950s, at a time when the political right had been completely discredited by its ties to Nazism, fascism and the Great Depression.

For some 30 years, from the founding of National Review in 1955 to the rise of right-wing talk radio in the 1980s, Buckley was the most prominent advocate for what would become the dominant position within the American ruling class: opposition to any government effort to alleviate social distress; hostility to popular movements of the oppressed, whether in the United States or internationally; and a repudiation of the compromises made on both these fronts by the New Deal of the 1930s.

Buckley was put in a position to play this role because of his family’s wealth and connections. His father, William F. Buckley, Sr., was a wealthy oilman with holdings in Mexico and Venezuela, who reportedly played a role in financing the Cristero rebellion in Mexico—a right-wing, Catholic Church-inspired revolt in reaction to the Mexican Revolution of 1911-1919.

These two themes—conservative Catholicism and hostility to social revolution—became the axis of Buckley’s political life. After graduation from Yale in 1950, he enlisted in the Central Intelligence Agency, working as an undercover agent in Mexico reporting on left-wing student groups. His supervisor was E. Howard Hunt, then CIA station chief in Mexico City, later one of the organizers of the Watergate burglary that brought down the Nixon administration.

Buckley decided against a CIA career after his first book, God and Man at Yale, a memoir attacking the liberal proclivities of the university faculty, found a wide reception in right-wing circles and became a best-seller. He and his brother-in-law, L. Brent Bozell, published a 1954 polemic, McCarthy and His Enemies, which declared, “As long as McCarthyism fixes its goals with its present precision, it is a movement around which men of good will and stern morality can close ranks.”

In 1955, Buckley launched National Review, a magazine bankrolled by his own money and that of other wealthy supporters, and enlisting such figures as the ex-Stalinist Whittaker Chambers and the ex-Trotskyist Professor James Burnham.

The standpoint adopted by the magazine, as the founder declared it, was “to stand athwart history, yelling, ‘Stop!’” By this he meant not only opposition to then-dominant American liberalism, and to the Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, but hostility to the growth of progressive and revolutionary movements throughout the world.

Buckley packaged his ferocious anti-communism as the defense of the “free world” against totalitarian rule in Russia and China, making full use of the crimes of the Stalinist bureaucracy to discredit socialism. But his outlook was rooted in a class opposition to all genuine struggles for freedom and democratic rights on the part of the oppressed workers and peasants in the capitalist countries.

Thus, Buckley was an adamant opponent of the civil rights struggles in the American South, declaring, in a National Review editorial in 1957:

“The central question that emerges—and it is not a parliamentary question or a question that is answered by merely consulting a catalog of the rights of American citizens, born Equal—is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes—the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”

Answering the charge that the Southern segregationists were defying the will of the majority of the American people, expressed in civil rights laws, executive orders by elected presidents, and the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling, Buckley argued in favor of resistance:

“National Review believes that the South’s premises are correct. If the majority wills what is socially atavistic, then to thwart the majority may be, though undemocratic, enlightened. It is more important for any community, anywhere in the world, to affirm and live by civilized standards, than to bow to the demands of the numerical majority. Sometimes it becomes impossible to assert the will of a minority, in which case it must give way; and the society will regress; sometimes the numerical minority cannot prevail except by violence: then it must determine whether the prevalence of its will is worth the terrible price of violence” (This whole passage was cited by New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in his recent book, The Conscience of a Liberal).

This apologia for violence against demands for the abolition of Jim Crow came at the opening of an increasingly bloody decade that included the beating of Freedom Riders, the murders of Medgar Evers, Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, Viola Liuzzo, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and dozens of others. Buckley’s only concession to criticism of this defense of racial oppression was to suggest that uneducated whites as well as blacks could be denied the vote.

Despite—or perhaps because of—this identification with the last-ditch defenders of Southern segregation, Buckley enjoyed increasing prominence as the media spokesman for the American right, beginning a syndicated newspaper column, “On the Right,” in 1962, and a weekly television interview program, “Firing Line,” in 1966, which ran for 33 years. He enthusiastically backed the campaign of Senator Barry Goldwater, who won the Republican presidential nomination in 1964 only to lose in a landslide to Democrat Lyndon Johnson.

To preserve his role as the “respectable” right-wing alternative in official political circles, Buckley was careful to distance himself from the more deranged segments of the ultra-right. National Review conducted a public campaign against the John Birch Society, whose founder accused President Eisenhower, General George Marshall, and other pillars of the US political establishment of being conscious agents of a world communist conspiracy.

Buckley also insisted, at least in public, on a break with anti-Semitism, which discredited the ultra-right in the wake of the Holocaust. He was not so careful about fascism, at least in its less populist form as espoused in Spain by Generalissimo Francisco Franco, whom Buckley repeatedly championed.

“General Franco is an authentic national hero,” he wrote in a “Letter from Spain,” published in his magazine, and widely quoted in press obituaries last week. “It is generally conceded that he above others had the combination of talents, the perseverance, and the sense of righteousness of his cause, that were required to wrest Spain from the hands of the visionaries, ideologues, Marxists and nihilists that were imposing on her, in the thirties, a regime so grotesque as to do violence to the Spanish soul, to deny, even Spain’s historical identity.”

Buckley defended other right-wing dictators whose regimes were aligned with US foreign policy, including Augusto Pinochet of Chile. He criticized the 1998 effort to bring criminal charges against Pinochet in Spain as “an act of ideological malice” and praised the military dictator for ousting Salvador Allende, “a president who was defiling the Chilean constitution and waving proudly the banner of his friend and idol, Fidel Castro.”

Throughout the 1960s and early 1970s, Buckley served more as a right-wing gadfly than an actual influencer of policy. He ran for mayor of New York City in 1965, winning 13 percent of the vote as the Conservative Party candidate. He participated in frequent debates with liberals on college campuses and was a diehard defender of the Vietnam War. In one notorious live appearance on ABC television during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, he was paired with liberal author Gore Vidal, whose verbal sallies so infuriated Buckley that he threatened violence, shouting, “Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face.”

Only the swing to the right in the American ruling elite, from the mid-1970s on, brought Buckley from the fringes of official politics into its center. Ronald Reagan was an admirer of Buckley and longtime reader of National Review, and with the Reagan administration, a whole layer of right-wing advocates trained in the Buckley school entered political office and rose to top positions in the media as well.

Buckley was not, however, entirely in step with some elements of the “Reagan coalition,” including the Christian fundamentalists who were, in many cases, virulently anti-Catholic, and the neo-conservatives, many of them Jews and former liberals who had supported the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

His orientation was always towards the worldwide struggle against social revolution, which he identified with the Soviet Union, and after the collapse of the USSR he evinced less interest in a militaristic foreign policy and more sympathy for the isolationism once traditional in the American right. He expressed regret that the conservative coalition was no longer held together by “the galvanizing thread that the Soviet Union provided. And for that reason I think conservatism has become a little bit slothful. It could be very decisive when the alternative was the apocalyptic reordering presented by the Soviet Union.”

Buckley eventually disavowed the longstanding blockade of Cuba after the collapse of Castro’s Soviet sponsor, on the grounds that the island nation no longer represented a security threat to the United States. He showed little enthusiasm for the Bush administration’s invasion and conquest of Iraq, observing that the “insurrectionists in Iraq can’t be defeated by any means that we would consent to use.”

The tributes from the right-wing pundits give a glimpse of the social milieu which produced Buckley and which remained a powerful source of attraction for corrupt elements of the aspiring middle class. David Brooks, now a New York Times columnist, gushes: “To enter Buckley’s world was to enter the world of yachts, limousines, finger bowls at dinner, celebrities like David Niven and tales of skiing at Gstaad ... He showered affection on his friends, and he had an endless stream of them, old and young. He took me sailing, invited me to concerts and included me at dinners with the great and the good.”

Apparently there were limits to this affection, however. According to Timothy Noah, columnist for the online magazine Slate, “Christian piety and anti-communism were Buckley’s twin pillars, the former to such an extent that Buckley ruled out David Brooks, his onetime protégé, as a possible editor of National Review on the grounds that Brooks was Jewish. Buckley wasn’t willing to sacrifice National Review’s identity as a publication whose mission was at least partly theological.”

The depth of Buckley’s embrace of reaction is summed up in another widely quoted remark in which he defined his conservative political philosophy as “tacit acknowledgment that all that is finally important in human experience is behind us.” It would be difficult to find a pithier summation of the obscurantism and hostility to the development of science, technology and human culture which characterize the right-wing world view.

"Rocket Men"

An inside look at the war between Israelis and Palestinians by Al Jazeera's program People and Power.