Letters From a Young Contrarian

Read more: http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2012/08/01/gore_vidal_s_greatest_novels_gore_vidal_was_a_great_character_but_you_shouldn_t_forget_his_work_.html

by Gershom Gorenberg, Slate, November 8, 2011

Today’s haredim are known for marrying early and having many children, even as men spend much or all of their adult lives studying Talmud rather than working. When the state was established, haredi society “was entirely different,” says sociologist Menachem Friedman . “It was a normal working society,” similar to the rest of the Jewish population. The fertility rate was about the same. So was the average marriage age, though sometimes haredi men married relatively late if they wanted to extend their religious studies. To get married, a man had to leave Talmudic studies in a yeshiva and find work.

Rather than being a diorama of traditional Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust, as many Israelis and visitors believe, Israel’s present-day version of ultra-Orthodoxy is a creation of the Jewish state. Policies with unexpected effects fostered this new form of Judaism, at once cloistered and militant. So did successful measures by haredi leaders to revive a community that was shrunken by modernity and then devastated by the Holocaust.

While a similar revival has taken place in haredi communities in the United States and other western countries since World War II, their dependence on government funding is necessarily more limited. In turn, the extent to which adult men can engage in full-time religious study rather than working is also more restricted.

In economic terms, the haredi revival in Israel has been disastrous. Israel’s ultra-Orthodox community is ever more dependent on the state and, through it, on other people’s labor. Exploiting political patronage, ultra-Orthodox clerics have largely taken over the state’s religious bureaucracy, imposing extreme interpretations of Jewish law on other Jews. By exempting the ultra-Orthodox from basic general educational requirements, the democratic state fosters a burgeoning sector of society that neither understands nor values democracy. And to protect their own growing settlements, haredi parties are now essential partners in the pro-settlement coalitions of the right.

by David Weigel, Slate, April 15, 2011

How far can this schtick take you? In 2000, not very far. That was when a lonely nation cried out for blandness, and demanded candidates with smart ideas of how to spend budget surpluses. There was none of the anger and immediacy that there was in 1992 or 2010. And Trump’s success, such as it is, is coming because he will say anything that fed-up people are thinking.

Here’s an example that’s more recent than his book. In 2008, after George W. Bush lost, Trump made a critique of the Iraq war predicated on the idea that Bush was a lousy president. “He’d go into a country,” said Trump, “attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with the World Trade Center, and just do it because he wanted to do it.” When he said that, that’s what people thought about Bush and Iraq.

Smash-cut to this month, when Trump sat down with the Wall Street Journal for one of many interviews with baffled reporters. He went at Iraq from another direction. “I always heard that when we went into Iraq,” he said, “we went in for the oil. I said, ‘Eh, that sounds smart.’ “

Different rationales, different solutions different times—the only thing connecting them is the degree of anger out there in that 18 percent or so of the country that hates and mistrusts both parties, and for the moment is still with the GOP. They like successful businessmen, or they at least like people who can sell themselves that way. They hate anything that sounds like political double-talk. They think Obama is wrecking the country. They can be sold snake oil, as long as the person selling it is brimming with confidence about the recipe. Enter, once again, Donald Trump.

by David Weigel, Slate, April 4, 2011

That brings Kern to the topic of sharia law. In 2010, Oklahoma voters passed a ballot measure—the first of its kind—prohibiting any judge or court from making decisions based on the teachings of the Koran. It won in a 70-30 landslide, then was immediately bogged down in court on First Amendment grounds.

So it was left up to Kern, who represents the western part of Oklahoma City in the House of Representatives, to introduce new legislation which can ban sharia without tripping on the First Amendment. Last week her bill, HR 1552, made its way to the Senate. It bans “any law, rule, legal code or system” not rooted in the Constitution of Oklahoma or the United States. Kern, a former history teacher, says she has no problem whatsoever with Muslims moving to Oklahoma and that the bill would protect them, too.

“When I see things that are happening that I think will weaken our American way of life, I don’t like that,” she says. “I don’t have a problem with people coming over here—why wouldn’t people want to come to America, the greatest nation in the world where you have the most opportunities and freedoms? Why wouldn’t they want to come over here? But if they’re going to come over here, let them become Americans. If they want to hold on to their own cultures, then why—and I hope I don’t get in trouble here—why not live in their own countries?”

by Christopher Hitchens, Slate, March 28, 2011

I admit that Egyptian and Tunisian and other demonstrators did not take to the streets waving Iraqi flags, as if in emulation. (Though Saad-Eddin Ibrahim, intellectual godfather of the Egyptian democracy movement, did publicly hail the fall of Saddam as an inspiration, and many leaders of the early Lebanese “spring” spoke openly in similar terms.) This reticence is quite understandable since, apart from the northern Kurdish region of Iraq from which Foreign Minister Zebari hails, the liberation of the country was not entirely the work of its own people. But this point has become a more arguable one since the Arab League itself admitted that there are certain regimes that are impervious to unassisted overthrow from within. Qaddafi’s is pre-eminently one of these, and Saddam’s was notoriously so, as the repeated terror-bombings and gassings of the Shiite and Kurdish populations amply proved. Meanwhile, Iraq already has, albeit in rudimentary and tenuous form, the free press, the written constitution, and the parliamentary election system that is the minimum demand of Arab civil society. It has also passed through a test of fire in which the Bin Ladenists threw everything they had against an emergent democracy and were largely defeated and discredited. These are lessons and experiences that are useful not just for Mesopotamia.

As for the Iraq effect on Libya: Here is what I was told in confidence by the British diplomat who helped negotiate the surrender of Qaddafi’s stockpile of WMD. Not by any means a neoconservative (a breed in any case rare in her majesty’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office), he emphasized three factors. First, and on this occasion at least, the West had extremely good intelligence and was able to astonish and demoralize Qaddafi by the amount it knew about his secret programs. Added to this, and acting cumulatively over time, was the adamant persistence of the Scottish courts in the matter of the Lockerbie atrocity. (Don’t mess with Scottish law, a maxim imperfectly understood by the sort of people who style themselves “king of kings.”) Third, and very important in the timing, was Qaddafi’s abject fear at watching the fate of Saddam Hussein. This has been amply reconfirmed by many Libyan officials in the hearing of many of my friends. He did, after all, approach George W. Bush and Tony Blair, not the United Nations. So now Qaddafi’s stockpiles are under lock and key in Oak Ridge, Tenn. —their trace elements having successfully incriminated the A.Q. Khan network in Pakistan—and who can conceivably wish it had been otherwise?

by Elizabeth Weingarten, Slate, March 25, 2011

Unlike its oil-rich neighbor Bahrain, Qatar—a majority Sunni Muslim country led by Sunni Muslims—doesn’t struggle with sectarian violence. Qatar can be most aptly compared to the United Arab Emirates, which is also majority Sunni and flush with oil money. But Qatar’s population is less diverse and much smaller than that of the UAE, which has recently seen some unrest: There were small protests from migrant laborers in January, and a Facebook page promises protests in the region on March 25. A cadre of intellectuals has also petitioned the government to hold open elections.

There are no similar stirrings in Qatar, which is ruled by Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani. (He overthrew his father in a bloodless coup in 1995.) Its comparably small, docile population allows Sheikh al-Thani to operate a rentier state: Qataris don’t pay income tax, and they’re provided with free utilities and health care. Education is also heavily subsidized, with Qatari students often receiving full scholarships to attend universities. In exchange for these perks, Qataris allow Sheikh al-Thani to rule unopposed.

While most Qataris seem content, one group does suffer from significant injustices. The country’s migrant laborers, primarily from Southeast Asia, are frequently underpaid and abused. The controversial Sponsorship Law, which other Gulf countries have recently abolished, prohibits them from leaving the country without permission from their sponsor, essentially dictating a relationship of indentured servitude. Southeast Asian laborers have virtually no political voice in Qatar. If they were to take to the streets and protest, they’d be deported.

by Nooren Malone, Slate, March 23, 2011.

In many ways, Rania’s appearance also meshes perfectly with Western ideas of what an enlightened Arab woman might look like: Not only does she speak her mind, she’s unveiled, and she wears pretty much whatever she wants. The writer of the Vogue profile half-acknowledged this part of her appeal, writing: “I can look at Rania … and not make assumptions. But, as a Western woman, I do make assumptions when a faceless woman is hidden under a niqab or burka.”

Rania’s image doesn’t play as well at home, however. Muslimah Media Watch blogger Sana Saeed put the problem this way in an email: “Rather than speaking to the very people she seeks to represent, Rania speaks beyond them.” Nor do they like her spendthrift ways: The lavish clothes that land her on best-dressed lists rankle in a country where an estimated 25 percent of people live in poverty. During the recent Jordanian protests, a group of the country’s Bedouin tribesmen wrote an unpredecented open letter criticizing the monarchy and accusing Rania of corruption and extravagant spending. (For an example of which, see the queen’s 40^th birthday party, which the Spectator describedthus: “Six hundred guests were flown in from all over the world. Two giant figure ‘40’s were beamed on to mountainous outcrops – although the neighbouring villages don’t even have electricity. Locals still speak of the water used to dampen down the sand so that the guests could walk more easily, though there were desperate water shortages nearby.”) The tribesmen’s letter went on to compare Rania to the unapologetically spendy Leila Trabelsi, wife of deposed Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali and so-called “Imelda Marcos of the Arab world.” Whether or not there is merit to the comparison, or to the corruption charges more broadly, even the suggestion draws attention to the contrast between her personal habits and the values she advocates publicly.

by Christopher Hitchens, Slate, March 14, 2011.

As to the feasibility of a no-fly zone, I pointed out several weeks ago what I couldn’t avoid noticing on two brief visits to Libya: The entire country is in effect a long strip of coastline, with a vast hinterland of desert, bordering a sea, where the strongest force by far is the Sixth Fleet. This elementary point has been taken up and elaborated in a very considered—one might almost call it realist—Wall Street Journal article by James Thomas and Zachary Cooper. These two experts at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments emphasize that “[u]nlike in the Balkans and Iraq, Libya’s most populated cities and airbases are situated near its coastline, with most situated less than 10 miles from the shore” (my italics). This sheer geographical fact gives us the option of using ship- and aircraft-based missiles without sending any planes into Libyan airspace, what the authors call a “stand-off no-fly zone.”

…If the other side in this argument is correct, or even to the extent that it is correct, then we are being warned that a maimed and traumatized Libya is in our future, no matter what. That being the case, a piecemeal and improvised policy is the least pragmatic one. Even if Qaddafi temporarily turns the tide, as seems thinkable, and covers us all with shame for doing so, we will still have it all to do again. Let us at least hope that certain excuses will not be available next time.