A Website of the Radical Imagination
One of the cartoons which my local newspaper has refused to print shows two veiled women, their staring round eyes, all that can be seen of their faces, expressing alarm, while a bearded man, apparently the Prophet, with a bar obscuring his eyes, his features otherwise visible, radiates a chilling and furious certainty. It is … Read more
Most times, the words, he’s got a gun, will redirect the conversation pretty effectively. Not this time, it appears. The uproar over the Jyllands-Posten’s cartoons of Muhammad has been framed as a free speech issue. The real issue is force. People have recalled the Salman Rushdie fatwa, from almost twenty years ago, and it’s worth … Read more
In the midst of A Matter of Opinion – Victor Navasky’s affable account of his professional life in journalism – The Nation‘s publisher tells a tale about a libel settlement that dishonors a smart set who have trashed efforts to mobilize resistance to the Muslim World’s Ku Klux Klan. Navasky, though doesn’t seem to recognize … Read more
Denial is not a river in Egypt. Denial is flooding the USA these days. But wake up calls can be heard here and there too. The Hudson is a river in New York State that runs south toward New York City. And on its banks about 30 miles North of NYC there sits a genuine … Read more
Kanan Makiya held a press conference in mid-October in Washington D.C. We’ve adapted and excerpted his opening statement and a few of the more pointed exchanges between Makiya and his interlocutors. Makiya’s comments on the Baathist ‘resistance’, the constitutional process and the issues raised by Ayatolla Sistani’s fatwa provide deep background for understanding current and … Read more
For some little time now, the people who make a living knowing these things have been saying a “spectacular” suicide operation was inevitable. And sure enough, along came the peace movement. It’s not enough to say that those who opposed the war against the Iraqi state were wrong. Nobody can be asked to know the … Read more
Paul Berman tells some pretty good stories, but you have to wait for the punch line. No one will be astonished to learn that Breyten Breytenbach, the celebrated South African novelist and homme de gauche, last year published (in Le Monde) an open letter to Sharon, and began with the now-rote observation that when any … Read more