Please, preserve the moral authority and concern that you possessed, and your distinctive voice. We will need them again in the future, which promises further ordeals on the road to peace. In the meantime, it would be best for us all – we and the Palestinians and the rest of the world – to follow the simple moral imperative of Kantian philosophy: "Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.

Curious because, well, one may as well condescendingly remind an astronomer of the Ptolemaic model of the solar system, and implore them to apply it across the board. Kant was a great thinker on the limits of reason  and a compelling enough moral thinker on many fronts, but the categorical imperative is only his famous, not the most useful of his contributions. Most have heard of it, but few have heard of the Problem of the Enquiring Murderer. It goes like this: according to the Kantian imperative, we should all tell the truth all the time. So what if a murderer asks you to disclose the location of a person he wants to kill? The imperative neglects the fact that two notions of the good can often conflict. Many of our most fiercely debated issues of the day hinge on how adamant one is about the correctness of his or her judgment regarding which of several conflicting goods is greatest. Take Iraq, for instance. It can hardly be disputed that civilian casualties and a five year occupation are bad and that it would have been good to have avoided both. And yet, the discontinued existence of Saddam Hussein’s regime is a good thing, too. Tempers rise and explode over this question of conflicting goods. Kant is of no use to us in these moments…unless one hopes to lend the sheen of universality to one’s own assessment of the good. Perhaps it is to my slight advantage that I’m not familiar enough with Levy’s coverage of the current conflict in Gaza to make a fair assessment of whether Yehoshua’s criticisms are fair. To read only the letter, I’m led to conclude that the two have agreed on many key points in the past with regards to Israeli wrongdoing, but that now Yehoshua feels Levy has overstepped the bounds from rational critic to unfair detractor of a just war. He goes on to note several instances where Levy’s omissions or judgments have undermined his once-laudable moral authority. But there is sleight of hand here. Despite the fact that many of the most honest pro-Israeli intellectuals doubt the ability of the current military campaign to effectively deter future missile strikes, Yehoshua writes:

All we are trying to do is get their leaders to stop this senseless and wicked aggression, and it is only because of the tragic and deliberate mingling between Hamas fighters and the civilian population that children, too, are unfortunately being killed.

just moments after he points out that he has asked Levy whether he

truly believe[s] that if they fire missiles the crossings will be opened, or the opposite. And whether you truly believe that it is right and just to open crossings into Israel for those who declare openly and sincerely that they want to destroy our country.

The consistency Yehoshua demands of Levy would require the realization that the tactics are either both futile or they are both justifiable. But then Yehoshua implies something of great import in the latter statement without coming right out and saying it: Hamas can’t be persuaded or dealt with because it its ideology is genocidal and irrational. But if this is so, as I believe it is, then one must also accept that, unless Israel plans to oust Hamas and occupy Gaza (the America-in-Iraq model), no amount of force can be truly thought to be accomplishing forseeable objectives. It is, then, as pointless and doomed to impotence as are Hamas’ rocket attacks designed to "open the crossings." The most depressing thing about the current conflict and the coverage of it is that time and again we are offered two competing visions of the good and treated as if we must be categorical about one or the other. And always the implication from each side rings, as Yehoshua’s letter does, of sanctimony and myopia. But Kant had a better lesson. His second formulation of moral law suggests that we treat each individual rational being as an end in itself, never as a mere means to an end. By adhering to this formula, one is permitted to insist on both supposedly competing visions of the good, while also insisting that no rational being be treated as merely a means to that end. One can argue for an end to dual stranglehold on Gaza by Hamas and Israel, remain opposed to Islamist fanaticism as well as colonialism, while remaining opposed to every casualty inflicted as players on each side cynically treat Israeli and Palestinian civilians as means to their supposed end.

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First, some definitions: POSTMODERN.  A term often deployed unspecifically, and just as often misunderstood by its adherents as by the layman.  Postmodernism was a fad in philosophy that took root roughly in the 1970s.  I know what some of you are thinking–philosophy is an ivory tower sort of thing that doesn’t connect to the real world, so blaming some European intellectuals from a few decades ago for anything that’s wrong in the world is nonsense.  Except that philosophy pervades every corner of your thought.  Just about all of us have willingly or unwillingly adopted certain philosophical ideas put forth by men from Socrates to Hegel, whether we know it or not.  Ideas matter because they effect how we think.  So when a group of thinkers came along and injected a dogma of anti-Western, anti-rational, relativism into the philosophy scene and it caught hold, what was in the ivory tower was sure to trickle down.  These days the average person experiences trickle-down postmodernism in several ways, but firstly as a vague but palpable lack of conviction.  They are hesitant to make claims about the truth on their own and if they choose to do so, experience either a deep sense of guilt, criticism from their peers, or both.   This is because we are taught that our rationality, our fundamental means of knowing and solving problems–especially if it is Western–is at best flawed and at worst nothing more than a manifestation of our imperialist male-dominated past.  The average person now associates judgment about the truth of the world with arrogance.  I’ve got my truth, you’ve got yours, let’s not fight.  Stop being judgmental.  That would be the mantra, and it’s one of the most widely accepted perversions of liberalism that exists.  But then again, liberalism is one of those racist, sexist things that postmoderns taught us to think derisively of.  The irony is that postmodernism, while it is officially a war against dogmas, actually produces several of its own.  The anti-dogmatists are, as a rule, dogmatically anti-Western.  They are skeptical of any truth claim if it originates from classical rationality rather than from a person of non-Western cultural persuasion.  And since just about all of the postmoderns were also self-styled leftists, the "left" now takes it’s truth a la carte, from the array of non-Western opinion.  AHISTORICAL.  Just what it sounds like.  Postmodernism helped speed this along, as it rejected "master narratives" of history.  But nobody needed Lyotard to see that as public education degenerated, and as our technological economy began rewarding those who knew how to deal with the rootless present as opposed to the rooted past, the discipline of learning any narrative of history would give way to the ability to make a Facebook profile, program your iPhone, or build a website.  The Internet is immaterial, whereas history is quite material.  DEPOLITICIZED.  It used to be that politics was a set of values and convictions for which one fought both in the realm of ideas and in the harsher realities of the political universe.   In the West, however, where we have made our politics a mere matter of purchase power ("I shop at Bath & Body Works because they donate money to the Third World") and identity adornments, politics has virtually ceased to exist.  Even Barack Obama’s victory must be attributed in part to his prodigious ability to understand this new world (which was in no small part what recommended him for the job).  Politics is today a brand, not a practice.  It’s something you wear, something you use to designate yourself socially and culturally.  For most, it’s not the art of the possible, even if they are marching in the streets.   After all, that’d take vision and conviction, which they’ve forfeited, to be respectful of everyone else’s truth.    Which leads us, finally, back to the protests in London over the attacks in Gaza.  How come, despite the fact that Hamas openly states its violent, intolerant, anti-Semitic, theocratic values, and despite having seen its brutal ways of doing business, can a mob of (mostly) well-meaning British liberals take to the streets and declare their solidarity?  It isn’t (with the exception of George Galloway)  because they are actual sympathizers with Islamist killers.  How is it that those concerned with social justice could possibly contort their values so that a slogan like this can cross their lips? Because that’s what happens when you perpetually doubt your own sense of truth and instead subscribe almost unconditionally to what the non-Westerner says about "their truth."  It’s what happens when you’ve accepted the notion that your rationality both comes from an evil place and is capable only of yielding evil conclusions.  It’s what happens when you’ve spent more hours making pop hits, riding your white horse into Studio 54, programming your iPod, designing and navigating websites in cyberspace than you’ve spent reading up on the history of the conflict.  A few snippets of grotesque propaganda and a dash of worldview confirmation will do.  At that point, you’ve got your marching orders.  You are, after all, a person who cares about the world and about the oppressed.  In order to express this, you will, like a consumer, seek out the brand that seems, in your feeble estimation, to demarcate that identity.  Non-Western?  Check.  Claims to operate on a different regime of truth?  Appears anti-imperialist?  Check.   Draw up the banner: WE ARE HAMAS.  After all, who would you be, beneficiary of the Western empire, to quarrel with those who suffer at the hands of the oppression your flag helped create and perpetuate?  Dare you call into question how many Palestinians have suffered at the hands of Arab oppressors like, say, the Jordanian kings who let starve and actively annihiliated thousands of Palestinian refugees?  Is it really your place, considering how brutal IDF tactics have been in the past, to entertain the notion that Hamas might be sending Palestinians to slaughter in order to obtain electoral and P.R. victories?  Or would you rather simply assert, out of guilt for past sins or out of rightful revulsion at seeing images of dead Palestinian children, that whoever is against England, the U.S. and Israel is your friend?  You’re unlikely to lose any sleep over declaring solidarity with Hamas, since you don’t believe it’s your place to question the legitimacy of their political goals.  You’ve got your truth, they’ve got their truth, and never the twain shall meet, much less conflict.  But this was never a principle that liberals or leftists believed in until recently.  Before postmodernism, the idea of the freedom of ideas and humanistic progress not merely allowed for, it required the intermingling of cultures and ideas, and the measuring of truths in a rigorous debate.  The goal was to eliminate the bad ideas and keep the good.  Before the banishing of truth into culturally specific enclaves, and before the death of history, the left was working toward creating a better material world.  Today, under the guise of being more accepting, it has let bad ideas not only survive, but has allowed them to thrive and proliferate.  With the material world an afterthought in the age of the Internet, George Galloway seems as good a fellow to stand beside as any, just as long as his is a brand that makes you feel good about who you are. 

The sad part, though, is that it’s a good thing to want to show solidarity with the oppressed, to want to work towards a world where the crimes of our more ignorant past are corrected.  People like me, who are quite convinced that Galloway represents another, far more sinister breed than the well-meaning accidental fascist weekender-type outlined here, are in a difficult position.  Criticize Galloway and the protest, and be accused of siding with colonialists, child-murderers and labeled a treacherous bastard.   Fail to do so, and fail to defend the right of a liberal democratic state to self-defense and let thrive the growing sector of the left that openly declares support with the radical theocratic right.  But would it really be too much to ask for some celebrities of conscience, musicians, movie stars, and leftists to take neither the side of heavy-handed Israeli retaliations, nor the side of terrorists who fire rockets indiscriminately into civilian areas of Southern Israel and use their own people as human shields?  What if instead, in a gesture of solidarity, they took the words of a bereaved Palestinian mother whose child had been killed in an Israeli strike as their slogan?  She is a female, non-Western victim of both the Israeli occupation as well as the cynical machinations of Islamic imperialists that provoked this conflict.  Her cry?  "May God exterminate Hamas!"  Whether or not one endorses her means, this formulation captures perfectly a real vision for a political project worth undertaking.  You needn’t endorse Israel’s means of accomplishing that task either, but at the very least it is the ultimate statement of solidarity with Palestinian victims of this war. A fairly potent means of examining and critiquing the postcolonial West might involve asking the following simple, jargonless question: How can a woman who lives this war and has lost her own flesh and blood to an Israeli strike be able to distinguish the guilty party even through a haze of grief that few of us can imagine, while those in the West march in support of the party that she knows brought about the death of her child?

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OK, Cal, I’ve got the Internet–shall we consider what dictionary.com says about the word ‘fascism’ then?  Fascism "appeals to strident nationalism" and "promotes suspicion or hatred of both foreigners and ‘impure’ people within his own nation."  It "does not demand state ownership of the means of production, nor is fascism committed to the achievement of economic equality."  And lastly, "fascists are usually described as right-wing."  While this is the proper definition, it can also refer to "governments or individuals that profess racism and that act in an arbitrary, high-handed manner."  So, is it now time for the Obama campaign to roll out charges of fascism against the McCain camp?   McCain, who asks on the stump, "Who is the real Barack Obama?"   Whose operatives emphasize his foreign-sounding name and send out race-baiting robocalls as they gallivant around the nation intimidating voters by placing their commitment to fervent nationalism–to "Country First"–on the line?  An avowedly right-wing party, that has acted arbitrarily and high-handed by almost any measure?  McCain has made clear that economic equality is nothing he’s committed to.  And think about this: fascist leaders are usually military men, too.  Barack Obama has never served in the military.  John McCain has.  Ergo, McCain has more in common with fascists than does Barack Obama.   See how this logic works?  It’s childish, it’s loony and most of all it’s false.  Of course John McCain isn’t a fascist, even if he has stooped pretty low in the course of this campaign.  The drift toward partisan extremism is conjecture on the part of Obama detractors who imagine he would set the country on a Marxist course.  The drift toward right-wing extremism however, is on display in the here-and-now, evidenced in the parameters of argument set by some conservatives.  It isn’t just liberals who will rejoice if Obama wins the election.  Sensible conservatives, one imagines, will be glad to see this aspect of their movement purged by a rejection of the McCain-Palin ticket, and a party once characterized by its distaste for crackpots, cranks and demagogues given the chance to restore its integrity.

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Ayers’s school reform agenda focuses almost exclusively on the idea of teaching for "social justice" in the classroom. This has nothing to do with the social-justice ideals of the Sermon on the Mount or Martin Luther King’s "I Have a Dream" speech. Rather, Ayers and his education school comrades are explicit about the need to indoctrinate public school children with the belief that America is a racist, militarist country and that the capitalist system is inherently unfair and oppressive.

This goes to the heart of who Ayers is today and why Obama’s association with him might be problematic. However, it also conveniently neglects to broach the subject that guilt by association would also implicate figures like the Annenbergs: prominent Republican philanthropists whose pocketbook Ayers’ grant proposal helped dip into. No detractor of Ayers has yet to apply any similar standard of guilt to the Annenbergs, who gave 42.9 million dollars to this former domestic terrorist. Stern wants Obama to be asked what he thinks about Ayers’ view of school reform–but why not ask the same of Leonore Annenberg who, after having bankrolled a project bearing Ayers’ name and his ideas must certainly be as responsible for supporting this kind of radicalism as Obama?

Paul Berman strikes at Ayers as well–but Berman uses the Ayers of today and yesterday as a means to take aim at the foul tendencies of left. Berman, a liberal intellectual who bucked orthodoxy after 9/11 by contributing one of the most significant studies of the linkage between European fascism and Islamic radicalism, doesn’t seem to care about Obama or Ayers so much as "left-wing politics of a lunatic variety." Berman’s a history guy and can’t quite shake the Ayers of yesteryear off as easily as the 3,000 who have signed a statement in support of "the stupidest man in America, politically speaking." Berman manages to call Obama naive, but doesn’t care to chain him to Ayers. He’d rather explain what an ass Ayers is and was, and how foolish the left of today is for helping make Obama look bad:

Obama is saddled with Ayers also because of a culture of mendacity on the far left in America—the mendacity that allows Ayers to go on proclaiming his own nobility and ideals, quite as if his own principles were those of any liberal-minded person, which they are not[…]Barack Obama’s prospects appear right now to be good. But if he loses? Dear 3,247 signatories, and dear Bill: if Obama loses, one of the reasons will be your moronic and dishonest refusal to draw a distinction between the democratic ideals of the left, and terrorist notions of totalitarian communism.

David Tanenhaus and Richard Stern, however, would have us have nothing to do with history. Content to separate the Ayers of old from the the Ayers of today, their apologetics are not even reasonable engagements with the actions of the Weathermen. No far left sympathy for Ayers’ "principles," only rosy portraits of the here and now, of dinner parties and misguided do-gooders made good. At Slate, Tanenhaus paints a holiday card:

I sometimes find it hard to believe that the Bill and Bernardine that Barack and I met in Hyde Park in the 1990s are the same people that my students are learning about in class. I know them better as the couple that invited me into their home in 2000 to meet their extended family, make gingerbread-cookie houses, and share Christmas dinner. Our conversation that night, as it almost always did, focused on the future, not the past.

At the New Republic, Richard Stern hasn’t much else to offer:

At dinner, thirty-eight years later […] I didn’t hold their fiery and criminally violent behavior against them. As in Chekhov’s wonderful story "Old Age," time had planed down the sharp edges and brought one-time antagonists into each others’ arms.

Arguing that these individuals have been reformed is something quite apart from painting disingenuous idyllic pictures that disengage from the past. Tanenhaus briefly tries to contextualize Ayers’ behavior in light of the political heat of the 1960s. But nowhere is there a serious discussion about the qualitative differences and similarities between Ayers’ actions and what we now associate with the term terrorism. Sol Stern should certainly not expect us to believe that the Weathermen attacking, with warning, the U.S. military-industrial complex in the midst of an inhumane war is the same as those who attack, without warning, innocents in New York and Baghdad. But nor should Richard Stern rattle on about the "adolescent fizzle" in Ayers’ "sexagenarian bones" without some serious confrontation with the moral questions presented by Ayers’ past actions. This might be an excellent time to have a serious conversation about domestic demons symbolic and real, about the weight of history or the passage of time. But it has so far been a chance missed.

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Now, PETA's propensity to sell their message with sex has always just been a bit silly. It wasn't until they compared animals caged for slaughter to those killed in Nazi concentration camps that I surmised they were absolute opportunist nutjobs whose ideas about morality deserved zero hearing (an opinion only reinforced by the discovery that Newkirk has written checks out to people who torch university laboratories). According to PETA's equivalencies, then, a neo-Nazi skinhead who only a few months ago was convicted of beating a Jewish man to death would, after a sensitivity course, be a reasonable candidate for speaking out against anti-Semitism and hate crimes. But chances are, not many PETA members would agree with this–maybe not even Newkirk herself. If they don't, it exposes the conceptual fallacy in their Holocaust ads, and, in a way, the practical confusion of the overarching PETA mentality–that non-human life is worthy of reverence and consideration equal to that which we afford humans. While it may be true that one guilty of a crime can have a more intimate experience with its evil and thus a deeper understanding of why it is wrong, it is equally as true that most humans experience a visceral and deep feeling of repulsion for those guilty of murdering their own. Nobody wants to see sexually depraved child murderers doing PSAs on the dangers of internet chatting for minors. If Vick wants to try to salvage his career by speaking out against dogfighting on behalf of PETA, that's fine by me. What he did was disgusting and we should hope that our societies keep a check on people who increase the suffering of living things for purely recreational purposes. But we should enjoy PETA's hypocrisy here, as it simply helps to show why we should punish people like Vick, while recognizing their crimes are not equal to the killers of humans–precisely because we know that humans have a tendency to see themselves in other living organisms (especially those that have some similar features like eyes noses, etc.). But the main reason this should concern us is because we know that people who don't make this essential connection might fail to make it in the case of our fellow humans.

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…women who uphold these rituals do so because they want to — they relish the supernatural powers of their ritual leaders over against men in society, and they embrace the legitimacy of female authority and particularly the authority of their mothers and grandmothers.

Upon reading some of her work, I discovered that Ahmadu doesn't think very highly of Susan Moller-Okin's excellent essay Is Multiculturalism Bad For Women? I think I know why.Moller-Okin's basic insight is that when defenders of this amorphous abstraction 'culture' utter the word, it is almost always too unspecific. Can it be said that every girl who is to experience FGM is looking forward to it, eager to experience this particular kind of "feminine empowerment?" Of course not. So what of their particular 'culture'–the culture of the girls who don't want to get cut? How is it that the admitted "authority" of the mothers and grandmothers is afforded preference? Obviously Ahmadu has some value for self-determination if she wants us to respect that of one or another culture. But the case can be made that she is arguing for the respect of one over another–the elder females over the younger females who, if they want to experience this supposed ecstasy, probably only think of it as ecstasy because they've been taught that's what it is. If culture and indoctrination can make millions of people think of an image of a crucified man is a symbol of peace and hope, then let's be frank–it can make anybody think anything awful is lovely. This issue is only one among many that exemplify this basic disagreement within the intelligentsia. And we can't be so quick to say that what ivory tower intellectuals say to one another is of little relevance to the world outside the tower. One need only look at Michel Foucault's attitude toward the Islamist element of the Iranian Revolution and subsequent attitudes to Islamism in the wider culture to understand that these ideas trickle down into the wider world. Horowitz's conservative campaign against liberals in education isn't what's needed. What is needed is the reinstatement of the search for knowledge and the eschewing of relativistic Foucauldian indoctrination into a discipline that's supposed to be telling us about ourselves presumably so we can make the best ethical and value judgments based on the best information. When all we hear is that such judgments must be suspended or understood as imperialistic, one must wonder what fruits anthropologists hope their work will bear.

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Ian Buruma and Paul Berman have been among the most prominent figures who have tried to show the connection between Islamic radicalism and it's having absorbed ideas from European thinkers, although Stephen Schwartz has out-muscled both of them in his explication of the historical and ideological debt that modern Islamic radicalism owes to that infamous people of the Najd. Islamism doesn't stand a chance in the long run because depraved nihilistic movements always burn themselves out. The question is only how much ground they'll gain and how much damage they'll do before then (no small matter in view of the power of 21st century weapons technology). The ears their claims fall upon and the responses of the societies they attack and wish to destroy play a large part in determining the course of events. As one can quickly gather from reading Anja Havedal's review of Afghan Women by Elaheh Rostami-Povey in this month's issue of Democratiya, the particular Western incarnations of philosophy that inform certain current understandings of multiculturalism are poisoning "Western" minds just as much as the screeds of kaffir beheaders are infecting the minds of Muslims. According to Havedal, Rostami-Povey thinks that just about every effort to help women in Afghanistan is a failure and/or a ploy disguising colonialist arrogance and avarice in the cloak of rights and freedom. But what's nonsense in all the talk about us and them, Western and non, is that while Elaheh Rostami-Povey claims that "an alien imperialist culture and prefabricated identity wrapped in the rhetoric of 'security, development, women's liberation and democracy' has [sic] been imposed on Afghan women and men alike" she herself speaks as one educated in the halls of British academe. Her CV is impressive: a BSc in Applied Economics (University of East London), an MA in Agrarian Studies (University of Sussex), and a PhD from the Open University. According to Rostami-Povey's view of things, she is herself imposing the philosophical insights of Western thinkers on Afghan women. Culture is a notion that only has meaning through alienation or distance from one's way of life–the kind of alienation experienced in modern multicultural societies. Much widespread understanding of the moral evils of imperialism derive from the European-American experience of having been imperialists. The critique of imperialism most preferred by academics to this day was hatched by a German Jew steeped in the work of the monumental German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. So when Rostami-Povey mounts her high horse of anti-imperialism and cultural preservation, shall we accuse her of making Afghan women Hegelians or Marxians? Individualistic self-determination, one could argue, is decidedly a product of European political philosophy, and the modern understanding of authenticity from Trilling to Taylor is American and Canadian, respectively. Isn't Rostami-Povey's argument just an imposition of a tapestry of "Western" ideas? One doubts that she would welcome this critique. Certainly Rostami-Povey believes that Afghan women deserve a certain quality of life that is universally appreciated by our species. Freedom from war, loss, starvation, coercion, and suffering. This was precisely the political project from Hobbes onward, to see that humans improve their lot beyond the short, brutish one it has potential to be. But was Hobbes unique? Muhammad was himself a sort of political philosopher and conflict resolver proposing a way of organizing life both personal and political so that suffering might be decreased and goodwill promoted. More likely, these figures spoke in different places to the same need. But Afghanistan is one of the most recently converted majority Muslim countries in what can only rightly be described as an Islamic empire. Prior to the arrival of Islam, and in many ways even after, Afghans adhered to centuries-old patriarchal tribal traditions. So when Rostami-Povey insists that Afghan women should be allowed to " struggle against local male domination in their own way and according to their culture," to which 'culture' can she possibly be referring if she hopes to maintain an ethic of anti-imperialism and women's rights? People like Rostami-Povey must decide whether they believe it is a universal good that women be free and persons have a right to self-determination. If she does, then she must also accept that Western philosophers' ideas were not ethnically bounded, but considerations of human beings attempting to create what used top be called in less relativistic times "the good life." Those ideas are no more culturally specific than is the basic need to live free of the horror that Afghan women have been experiencing for centuries under male, Soviet or Islamist domination. Instead, she suffers from the cancer in Western philosophy–the popularization of two absurd notions in particular. One, that the preservation of culture is an end in itself, even if that culture espouses ideas that are inimical to the good life; and two, that quest for the good life is a conceit to be replaced by instating the regime relative values. That regime is, by Rostami-Povey's standards, a German (read: Nietzschian) one. I prefer to say it's just a bad idea. Her system of designations is undesirable. That regime is, according to the standards of anyone interested in bettering of the lives of others, at best a hindrance and at worst a recipe for the kind of liberal nihilism, despair and self-hatred that will say when thousands of its countrymen die at the hands of illiberal murderers, 'We deserve it.' But in Afghanistan, it makes the best the enemy of the good, positing failure due to the 'self interest' part of enlightened self interest. It declares the messy business of aid a fiasco where there are instead some lives improving, even if not all at the rate and to the degree that Rostami-Povey–and any decent person, I might add–would like to see.

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