Terror & Humanism

Mission Impossible

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Henry Czerny, confident that he has the situation well in hand, sits at table and says, “I can understand you’re very upset.” Tom Cruise, sitting opposite, bares teeth, says, “You’ve never seen me very upset.” And he pulls from his pocket exploding bubble gum, which he hurls at the glass wall of a giant fish tank, and

Don’t ask.

Michael Berube, I gather, is upset. He complains that Benj DeMott read his book carelessly. It’s a wonder he read it at all. DeMott owned up promptly to a mistake, My bad, he said. He forgot to add, Your worse. What DeMott did was overlook a footnote. As bad goes, it isn’t much. Berube wrote the book, It isn’t much. Who would feel obliged to sift through the footnotes?

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Putting Cruelty First

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Alan Johnson – editor of the online journal, Democratiya, conducted an interview with Kanan Makiya in December of 2005. Following on from two previous postings here at our website (See “What’s Going On” and “Inside the Whale”), this interview amounts to the next chapter in Makiya’s on-the-fly history of the Iraq “project.”

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The Birth of Our Power

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We’re honored to reprint this (slightly adapted) excerpt from Kate Millett’s Going to Iran (Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, New York 1982) — her inspiring, heartrending and newly relevant account of her time in Tehran witnessing women’s struggles against Islamist misogyny after the fall of the Shah.

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Stop Breaking Down

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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 a pretty good cartoon: it raises the question of who is blinded, and to what, and who has been silenced, and how. It does this with remarkable economy, and with compassionate if mirthless wit. As economical if mirthless jokes go, it isn’t a patch on the one represented by the editors, academics and politicians who claim that reproducing that cartoon is a mistake more or less equivalent to threatening to murder whoever drew it.

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With Friends Like These

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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.

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What’s Going On

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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 future developments in Iraq.

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Reality Bites

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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 criticism of Israeli policy is vilified as anti-Semitism, free speech is imperiled. You may be mildly surprised to learn that Breytenbach thinks the Israelis, a people with a notorious tin ear for the way they sound to foreigners, are nonetheless manipulating American public opinion with fantastic success. But read on in the Breytenbach letter, and you will be diverted to learn that the “used-car salesman doppelganger, Netanyahu, ploys this craft of crude propaganda more openly, as if he were a dirty finger tweaking the clitoris of a swooning American public opinion.” While this sort of language does evoke the bad old days, one can look on the bright side: Breytenbach’s trope arguably bolsters the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Even sixty years ago, few people implied that assimilationist Jewish fingers, however dirty they might be when probing and manipulating literal or metaphorical gentile women, were also prehensile. As for Zionists–uniquely blessed with the ability to tweak things with a single finger–well, who knew?

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Inside the Whale

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Kanan Makiya–author of “Republic of Fear” and “Cruelty and Silence”–spoke about the future of Iraq on a panel organized by NYU’s Cultural Reporting and Criticism Program and the Center for War, Peace and the News Media on November 22, 2002. Arguing against other speakers at the forum, Makiya made a moral case for American intervention in the course of explaining recent developments in the relationship between the Bush administration and Iraqi dissidents. An edited version of his remarks follows along with an exchange between Makiya and Mansour Farhang (who was Iranian ambassador to the UN until he was forced to flee Iran after the fall of the Bani-Sadir government in 1981).

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A Palestinian Gandhi

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We asked George Lakey – a longtime proponent of nonviolent direct action – to interview Mubarak Awad – a Palestinian Christian psychologist who organized a nonviolent resistance movement against occupation of Palestinian lands at the end of the 1980’s. Israel expelled him to the United States where he currently runs an NGO based in Washington D.C. – Nonviolence International.

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