Today's post set seems like a good place to revisit the issue of post-tipping point politics. Liberal Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, whose recent works include epistles like "Bushies in a State of Denial" and "Hillary Clinton: Our Favourite Victim" appears to have had a bit of a wake-up call over the threat to execute Christian convert (and hence murtadd charged with irtidad) Abdul Rahman. In Unfathomable Zealotry, he writes:
"The Americans have protested, the Brits have protested, the Vatican has protested and so (I assume) have some others. But if there has been a holler of protest from anywhere in the Muslim world, it has not reached my ears. That is appalling."
He goes on...
"It is no longer possible, as it once was, to see the world only from your front porch, being disturbed only by the ringing of the bell on some passing ice cream truck. In Africa, Asia, too much of the world -- it is Joseph Conrad much of the time: "The horror! The horror!"
Welcome to reality, Richard. Enjoy your stay.
"But you can say that these horrors are usually being inflicted by a minority. You say it is a few crazed terrorists of Iraq who are doing the killing. It is not most Iraqis. You can say the same about suicide bombers and torturers and rogue governments, like the one Saddam Hussein once headed. You can take solace in numbers. Most people are like us."
Odd that this should be the wake-up call, but follow along for a sec here, it's enlightening:
"Then comes the Rahman case and it is not a solitary crazy prosecutor who brings the charge of apostasy but an entire society. It is not a single judge who would condemn the man but a culture. The Taliban are gone at gunpoint, their atrocities supposedly a thing of the past. In our boundless optimism, we consign them to the "too hard" file of horrors we cannot figure out: the Khmer Rouge, the Nazis, the communists of the Stalin period. Now, though, this awful thing returns and it is not just a single country that would kill a man for his beliefs but a huge swath of the world that would not protest. There can be only one conclusion: They were in agreement.
The groupthink of the Muslim world is frightening. I know there are exceptions -- many exceptions. But still it seems that a man could be killed for his religious beliefs and no one would say anything in protest. It is also frightening to confront how differently we in the West think about such matters and why the word "culture" is not always a mask for bigotry, but an honest statement of how things are."
On one level, the fact that it has taken a noted columnist in one of America's leading papers no less than 4 1/2 years after 9/11 to wake up to this fact is an indictment. Of a media that too often sits on the porch waiting for the ice cream truck bell, and substitutes political correctness for real coverage. Of Richard himself, for having a national pulpit in a time of war and apparently not taking the time to educate himself in some fairly elementary ways.
On another level, maybe it's also an illustration of the fact that everybody does come to Rick's, in the end.
Perhaps now we can hope for more attention from the liberal-left to the matter of "honour" killings, chronicled over at All Things Beautiful in "Today You Die" - Maintaining Family Honor. My old friend Adil "Muslimpundit" Farooq covered this issue here on Winds when he was blogging, and so has Zack Ajmal.
Cohen drops in on reality every now and then, but can't seem to make up his mind to stay. He'll be advocating a withdrawal from Iraq next week -- count on it. The case that Cohen is writing about is not the first time that international pressure has averted an execution of barbaric Islamic justice in Afghanistan since the US toppled the Taliban. The dots here are US influence on the one hand, and the fact that Rahman is free, not dead, on the other, but don't bet on Cohen being able to connect them. There are even longer odds against his applying the lesson to Iraq, or anywhere else for that matter. He might get it yet, but he's handicapped by a brain-addling left-leaning worldview.
actually Richard is as hysterical in this column as he often when is when writing from the left. The entire society? How does he know that? The demos for killing the guy involved a few hundred, IIUC. AFAICT most ordinary Afghanis didnt care.
But sure, its a conservative Islamic society. Accepting women going to school, doesnt mean they accept muslims converting to Islam. Its a hot button. So what? Lets keep in mind wrt Afghanistan what we remind the left so often wrt Iraq. We werent going in to make this country like Sweden. Afghanistan was one of the most backward countries in the world. It had some secular middle class emerging in the 50s and 60s, but that class largely supported the USSR, and didnt do too well in the civil war, and is not very politically popular. Afghanistan today is far better than it was under the Taliban. Someday they will relax about conversions too, i think. But less than 5 years after the fall of the Taliban? Not yet, Im afraid. Civilizational change takes TIME.
Calm down Richard. The sky isnt falling. Not cause of this. Not cause of Bush.
neo, Rahman's in Italy and alive because some Muslims decided not to follow the passage you quoted. It's not a war between the West and Islam, rather, it's a war within Islam, between modernity and mediaval barbarism. For the sake of Hamid Karzai (and others like him) and his hopes for Afghanistan, and for the sake of our own fundamental principles, the West needs fight for its values rather than betray those within Islam who are with us.