Not Forgotten

Memorial Day

Justifiable Violence

According to a recently released Pew poll, American Muslims are much more assimilated into our society than are, say, French Muslims into theirs. That is a good thing. But what has righties upset is the finding that the finding that while 80% of American Muslims oppose attacks on civilians in all cases, 13% said they could be justified in some circumstances.

There has been much gnashing of teething, rending of garments, and general frothing at the mouth from the conservative punditocracy, of course. Why? Because such violence is unacceptable, and would never be condoned by real red-blooded peace-loving Americans. Or would it?

Glen Greenwald has this to say about the Pew poll:

The reality, though, is that it is almost impossible to conduct a poll and not have a sizable portion of the respondents agree to almost everything. And in particular, with regard to the specific question of whether it is justifiable to launch violent attacks aimed deliberately at civilians, the percentage of American Muslims who believe in such attacks pales in comparison to the percentage of Americans generally who believe that such attacks are justifiable.

The University of Maryland's highly respected Program on International Public Attitudes, in December 2006, conducted a concurrent public opinion poll of the United States and Iran to determine the comparative views of each country's citizens on a variety of questions...

One of the questions they asked was whether "bombings and other types of attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are sometimes justified"? Americans approved of such attacks by a much larger margin than Iranians – 51-16% (and a much, much larger margin than American Muslims – 51-13%):

Click on image to enlarge

A rather substantial 24% of Americans thought that such attacks are justified "often" or "sometimes," while another 27% thought they were justified in rare cases (total=51%). By stark contrast, only 11% of Iranians think such attacks are justified "often" or "sometimes," with a mere further 5% agreeing they can be justified in rare cases (total=16%). Similar results were found with the series of other questions regarding violence deliberately aimed at civilians – including women, children and the elderly. Americans believed such attacks could be justifiable to a substantially higher degree than Iranians.

As Kenneth Ballen noted in The Christian Science Monitor in February of this year, Americans express greater support for "attacks against civilians than any major Muslim country except for Nigeria." Make of that what you will -- and its meaning is debatable -- but those are just facts.

Where is the rightie outrage here? It does make sense, though, from their perspective–I suppose they feel that it's wrong for Muslims to want to attack us, but OK for us to want to attack them, because we are right and good and doing God's work.

Worse than McCarthy?

Bush held a press conference today–always a risky venture for him, being a sufferer of foot-in-mouth disease. Today he was in peak form. As Rick Perlstein noted:

President Bush today: "These people attacked us before we were even in Iraq!"

Can we have a little frankness, please?

The President of the United States is a racist. Or at the very least, an anti-Muslim bigot.

In Iraq, Shi'ites and Sunni are fighting each other to the death. Under what possible logic can they be joined by a common identity?

There is no "these people" except in their common Middle East-ness.

Iran and Iraq fought a decade-long war - Shia against Sunni. They are, to our president, "these people." "They" attacked us. "They" continue to attack us. Iran, Iraq: all the same.

The people who attacked us on September 11 were from a group called "al Qaeda." According to U.S. intelligence, Iraq was one of the few countries in the Middle East where Al Qaeda did not have a beachhead.

In the 1960s, to much of the public, China and Russia were equally "these people." Even as those countries were on the verge of nuclear war with one another. Bad people stoked the equivalence of the two even after they knew better (Richard Nixon did it nearly until the day he made China our ally). They did it to keep a monstrous war going, as the American people began to know better.

It's much worse now. Who are "these people," Mr. President? Why are you worse than McCarthy?

That about sums it up. We're in Iraq because some brown-skinned Arab types brought down the World Trade Center. And because, as Cheney pointed out, when told that al Qaeda was actually responsible, "there are no good targets in Afghanistan!" Nor oil........

UCARE

I spent most of my free time last week updating the UCARE website. We had reached the limits of the old technology, so I switched to new templates, moved around a lot of old material, made some deletions, and have begun adding new material. It's a lot of time-consuming effort.

Make an orphan (and a poor webmaster happy)–go and have a look!

April is the Cruelest Month

A particularly attractive fungus from northern Michigan

It's been a month since I posted anything on this blog, and longer that that since I made any regular postings. Blog fatigue set in, and it was April.

Very few have the stamina, the dedication, or the attention span to be a blogger. Posting several bits of genius every day is not an easy task; neither is posting several bits of drivel, which is what most bloggers really do. Still, either takes time and effort and, every once in a while, you just get tired.

So I took a break. It was not an entirely voluntary break; April is a busy time for me, what with taxes and my NEJM CME both being due. (Yes, I could have done either much sooner, but I am a procrastinator by nature, and need deadlines to accomplish anything.) And then there is Easter; when you are a maker of pysanky, it's a busy time of year.

Still, it's May that's devoid of postings. I went away for the first to weeks, my annual trek to the UP, to visit friends and watch hawks. The weather was great, the sompany stimulating, and spent minimal time on the internet, just a few minutes a day to check my e-mail and make sure we weren't at war with Iran yet.

But now I'm back, and having recovered some of my mojo by sending out mass e-mailings to my friends on various political themes, and ready to once more take up the mantle of blogger.

Sorry.