the light is brighter when seen through the tunnel

Essential reading - the NYT carries a powerful op-ed from a man in saudi Arabia who talks frankly about the atmosphere of religious oppression and the damage being done to his country by its Wahabi symbiosis.

The most recent government crackdown on terrorism suspects, in response to this month's car-bombing of a compound housing foreigners and Arabs in Riyadh, is missing the real target. The real problem is that Saudi Arabia is bogged down by deep-rooted Islamic extremism in most schools and mosques, which have become breeding grounds for terrorists. We cannot solve the terrorism problem as long as it is endemic to our educational and religious institutions.

Yet the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Islamic Affairs have now established a committee to hunt down teachers who are suspected of being liberal-minded. This committee, which has the right to expel and punish any teacher who does not espouse hard-core Wahhabism, last week interrogated a teacher, found him "guilty" of an interest in philosophy and put on probation.

During the holy fasting month of Ramadan, imams around the country stepped up their hate speech against liberals, advocates of women's rights, secularists, Christians and Jews � and many encouraged their congregations to do the same. I heard no sermons criticizing the people responsible for the attacks in Riyadh, in which innocent civilians and children were killed. The reason, I believe, is that these religious leaders sympathize with the criminals rather than the victims.

I cannot but wonder at our officials and pundits who continue to claim that Saudi society loves other nations and wishes them peace, when state-sponsored preachers in some of our largest mosques continue to curse and call for the destruction of all non-Muslims. As the recent attacks show, now more than ever we are in need of support and help from other countries to help us stand up against our extremist religious culture, which discriminates against its own religious minorities, including Shiites and Sufis.

Even more essential reading - read the letter with Dan Darling's in-line commentary.

Grand Old Plebiscite: Towards a Corporate Welfare State

as a follow-up to my earlier post, here is a Bob Novak column on the tactics that the GOP mafia used against their own party members in order to force the passage of the Medicare boondoggle:

Republicans voting against the bill were told they were endangering their political futures. Major contributors warned Rep. Jim DeMint they would cut off funding for his Senate race in South Carolina. A Missouri state legislator called Rep. Todd Akin to threaten a primary challenge against him.

Intense pressure, including a call from the president, was put on freshman Rep. Tom Feeney. As speaker of the Florida House, he was a stalwart for Bush in his state's 2000 vote recount. He is the Class of 2002's contact with the House leadership, marking him as a future party leader. But now, in those early morning hours, Feeney was told a ''no'' vote would delay his ascent into leadership by three years -- maybe more.

The GOP isn't even the party of conservatives anymore. The fact that the economy has done better under the Democrats than under the Republicans for the last 40 years is well-documented (see Dwight Meredith's "For the Record" series). And the behavior of the GOP in the past few years of total control has been extravagantly pro-spending. Excluding defense and security, the GOP has been the worst offender in terms of spending earmarks and pork projects:

The subject of the report is earmarks, which are specific pet projects inserted into bills by congress critters who are eager to funnel some federal dough directly to their own districts. Bottom line: everyone does it, but Republicans do it a lot more.

In the Labor-HHS-Education bill, as the chart shows, the number of earmarks has gone up from zero in 1995, when the Republicans took over, to 1,857 this year.

In the annual transportation bill, Democrats inserted 322 earmarks in their final bill in 1995. Republicans inserted 1,818 this year. In the defense appropriations bill the number has gone from about 300 to 1,800 and in VA-HUD from 265 to 921. Earmarks in the Commerce-Justice-State appropriations bill have skyrocketed from 45 to 966.

Put it all together, and in just these five appropriations bills the number of earmarks has risen from about 900 in 1995 to 7,362 this year.

You can read the on the House Appropriations Committee's full report on Republican addiction to pork right here (PDF).

Conservatives have many ideas I respect. Unfortunately, their party doesn't share my view of their principles. And as a political ideology, the GOP's true corporatist colors are ultimately a serious threat to conservativsm itself. As Matthew Yglesias notes, the Democrats can't carry water against the GOP onslaught alone:

Ultimately, it seems to me that the Democratic Party is just helpless when faced with the prospect of a GOP that isn't even going to try to stand for conservative principles. A party organized as an alliance between Big Government and Big Business just has too many big guns on its side. The only real question is whether or not conservatives will try and take their party back from the Rove-DeLay-Frist domestic policy agenda and return the GOP to advocating something that resembles a small government philosophy.

emphasis mine. The GOP is the party of Government-Corporate collusion - expecting such an entity to act with fiscal sanity (let alone fiscal conservatism) is counter to common sense. And as Matt points out, the resources available to such an alliance are prodigious in the extreme.

And Bush is nothing like Reagan. As Kevin points out, the right has fooled themselves into wishing it were so, but there isn't any coherent ideology driving Bush's presidency at all, other than simple electorial interest-group politics:

I think that both liberals and conservatives have made the mistake of convincing themselves that Bush is a hard right ideologue � conservatives because they were so eager for a conservative president after eight years of Bill Clinton and liberals because it gives them a convenient object of hatred. But if you look a bit more closely you'll see that he's not.

It's true that Bush is temperamentally conservative, and it's also true that he sometimes does things that conservatives like: lowering taxes, for example, or invading Iraq. What's more, he talks the conservative talk pretty well, and all of this has fooled conservatives (and many liberals) into thinking that he does what he does out of deep devotion to conservative principles.

But he doesn't. I suspect that conservative eagerness for a conservative president has caused them to project their own views onto Bush, but Bernstein is right: Bush is just playing electoral politics. Tax cuts reward his rich contributors, invading Iraq was a crowd pleaser, the energy bill helped out his business pals, tariffs helped him with steel workers, the Medicare bill helps him with seniors, and the partial birth abortion bill helps him with the religious right. None of these things were truly driven by any kind of ideological purity.

Some conservatives are catching on, but as long as their discontent remains at the hand-wringing angst stage rather than actually fighting for their principles and sending a clear message by their votes, it will continue. Such conservatives have marginalized themselves by making a great case against Bush but then asking with great (feigned?) tremulous concern, "how can we stop this?" Simple answer: vote Democrat, and send a message.

There's really only one way to fight this. By creating an alliance of the many - and that's why Howard Dean's candidacy holds such promise. Conservatives need to realize that they can have more influence on policy under a Democratic Dean administration, rather than being paid lip-service by a GOP that takes them for granted and prostitutes their support to further their own radically anti-conservative agenda.

religious loyalty test

Go read Zack's responses to Daniel Pipes' "Moderate Muslim Questionnaire". The list of questions is designed to trap Muslims in contradiction, force them to accept second-class citizenhood, undermine their religion, and accept collective responsibility for the actions of a few. Zack treats them with the appropriate level of respect.

UPDATE: Kynn provides a test for identifying Christian moderates. Note that I think it's valuable in highlighting the bias in Pipe's questionairre, rather than an actual test that Christians would be expected to take. The entire point is that these tests meet an impossible standard and reject the integrity of faith, forcing the person who answers to sacrifice belief for political sanitization. As Zack's responses and Kynn's recasting of the entire thing towards a Christian target demonstrate, Pipe's questions are fundamentally an attack on the very act of believing in Islam.

party rule: plebiscite, not parliamentary, democracy

There are a number of assumptions that are needed for American governance to work. One is that the legislative branch is the realm of debate and compromise. The need for such debate and dialog is the foundation of government (and the root principle that also gives rise to such secondary concepts as freedom of speech).

The Republican Party has rejected this model utterly. Rather than compromise between majority and minority, the new rule is "plebiscitary democracy" - the small cadre of leaders of the Majority party decide policy unilaterally, and the entire Party membership is coerced into voting as a single block. Thus the Party ideology trumps all other concerns, including those concerns of the people whose interests representatives were elected to serve.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the GOP tactics to pass the Medicare bill:

If anyone doubted the rules had changed, House Republican leaders ended all illusions in the early hours of Saturday morning by holding open a 15-minute roll call vote for an unprecedented two hours and 51 minutes. At the end of the normal time for voting, Republican leaders faced defeat on the drug bill by a two-vote margin. Eventually, two Republicans were hammered into switching their votes.

"I don't mean to be alarmist, but this is the end of parliamentary democracy as we have known it," said Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts. The new system amounted to "plebiscitary democracy" in which leaders of the House have imposed such a strong sense of party discipline that they will ultimately pass whatever legislation they bring to the floor. "The Republican Party in the House is the most ideologically cohesive and disciplined party in the democratic world," Frank said. In response, House Democrats were more united in opposition to the bill than Democratic senators, who are operating as if the older system of give-and-take were still in force.

Edward M. Kennedy was one senator who believed the old system could still work. He had urged his colleagues to pass an earlier version of the drug bill on the assumption that Republicans would agree to a compromise acceptable to Democrats.

Instead, House and Senate negotiators pushed the Senate bill to the right by adding in Medicare privatization experiments, big HMO subsidies and medical savings accounts. These and other changes pushed Kennedy to lead the last-ditch fight against the final version of the bill.

When the majority party decides it has the votes, and can bend the roll call itself to ensure that the votes are there, we are only one step away from the party deciding that it holds the votes of its members as proxy, and dispensing with the roll call altogether.

And after that, why bother with the formality of voting at all?

UPDATE: more on the history of the 15-minute rule, and comment:

The Medicare prescription drug vote -- three hours instead of 15 minutes, hours after a clear majority of the House had signaled its will -- was the ugliest and most outrageous breach of standards in the modern history of the House. It was made dramatically worse when the speaker violated the longstanding tradition of the House floor's being off limits to lobbying by outsiders (other than former members) by allowing Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson on the floor during the vote to twist arms -- another shameful first.

The speaker of the House is the first government official mentioned in the Constitution. The speaker is selected by a vote of the whole House and represents the whole House. Hastert is a good and decent man who loves the House. But when the choice has been put to him, he has too often opted to abandon that role for partisan gain.

Democracy is a fragile web of laws, rules and norms. The norms are just as important to the legitimacy of the system as the rules. Blatant violations of them on a regular basis corrode the system. The ugliness of this one will linger.

The writer is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

slandered

it's rare that I condemn anyone in public, but a regular commentator here on UNMEDIA has just disgraced himself:

#47 Joshua Scholar 11/25/2003 10:11AM PST

I would add, "do Israelis have a right to self defense?"

I think there's lots of "moderate" muslims that would agree to most of what you said, but in their hearts believe that jihadis are doing the work of God, that Jews are evil and prove it whenever they try to protect themselves and their children from attack.

I think even the venerable Aziz Poonwalla fails that test.

emphasis mine. I've never been slandered so brutally in my life. I'm utterly disgusted and profoundly disappointed by Joshua's behavior. On Eid ul-Fitr of all days, he chooses to go behind my back and spread pure libel? why? to score some cheap points with the shrill bigots infesting the comments at LGF? I can't believe I ever offered him the opportunity to guest-post here and I'm thankful he never bothered to accept.

Joshua is welcome to his sick belief system. Unless he becomes abusive, I won't ban this deceitful creature from commenting on my site, but I certainly won't ever engage him in conversation again.

Eid ul Fitr mubarak

Mubarak to all.

On the occassion, I would like to share the story of the Conquest of at Mecca by the Prophet SAW:

In 5 AH, Rasullulah (SAW) had a revelation which inspired him to leave for Makkah to perform umra. The Makkans, having lost a number of battles against Rasulullah, swore they would not let him enter their city. Their army intercepted the unarmed and pilgrim-garbed Rasulullah at Hudaibiya. Here, a famous pact was entered into by the two sides which assured peace for 10 years. Rasulullah was to return to Madinah and perform umra after 12 months. However, within 10 months, one of the terms of the treaty was violated by a tribe allied to the Makkans. When given the opportunity to retract or to declare the treaty void, the Makkans chose the latter. Rasulullah swiftly prepared an army to march into Makkah. The Makkans realised their mistake and attempted to renew their treaty but it was too late. The time for cleansing the Kaaba of the impure idols had come. The month was Ramadan, the month of fasting and purity, the month of Allah and in it, Makkah was destined to return to Islam.

On 6th of Ramadan, as Rasulullah approached Makkah at the head of an army of 10,000, the Makkans panicked. They had treated their own son, Mohammed (SAW) shamefully. They had fought him bitterly. Now, they thought, he was returning in revenge. Even Abu Sufyan, their head, betrayed his own people and submitted to Islam to save himself. As Rasulullah's army entered Makkah, its denizens hid themselves in their houses as they had been promised refuge if they did so.

Giving praise to Allah he immediately approached the Kaaba and performed tawaf. He then delivered a powerful khutbah reminding Muslims of their obligations and how Allah had chosen to favour them. Then, he set about doing what he had come to Makkah for. He entered inside the Kaaba with his wasi Ali (SA) and together, they destroyed the idols, returning it to the original state that the Prophet Ibrahim (SA) had made it. The Makkans watched as the symbols of their superstitious idol-worshipping religion were reduced to a heap of rubble, and along with them their prestige and honour in Arabia.

Born in Makkah, and raised to prophethood there, Rasulullah had preached Islam amongst the Makkans for 13 years whilst they had ridiculed him. They had opposed him, put him under house arrest, tormented him and his followers and finally plotted to kill him. Even when he left for Madinah, they had raised armies against him. Now the Makkans expected that Rasulullah would exact a just retribution.

Instead, Rasulullah forgave them all. Not only that, but he declared Makkah a safe-haven for man and animal alike. The nobles and those from amongst his family who repented and embraced Islam were even rewarded. His magnanimity startled the whole of Arabia and overwhelmed the Makkans who repented their past actions tearfully. Even the Madinans were taken aback by his benevolence and feared that the Prophet might make his home in Makkah again. They approached him and asked:

"O more beloved than our souls, will you now disregard the treaty of Aqaba and forsake us?"

The Prophet replied that he would never do so and consoled the Madinans thus:

"Do not fear my bestowals to the Makkans, for you will always have me".

Emigration filters

Steven has a long post about differences between America and Europe, in the context of which he makes the observation that immigration to America from the old country was in effect, a kind of filter:

When you're doing a cost/benefit/risk analysis, you may be in a situation where the risk and consequences of inaction are so crummy that any alternative is virtually certain to be better. In that case, you can and should choose some alternative even if it's not at all well understood. Part of the willingness to do such a thing is confidence that as problems with the alternative start turning up, you'll probably be able to deal with them, and part of that is a recognition that even if you can't, the consequences will still be less severe than what you'll face if nothing happens.
a filter on the source, not the target

Sometimes when the status quo is intolerable, the best answer is to chuck everything and strike out into the wilderness. If life in the slums of Europe is terrible, the best answer may be to save enough money for a steamship ticket and move to a strange land across the ocean, where they speak a strange language but where there's more opportunity. The great wave of immigration in the sixty years after the American Civil War was a filter; those who said, "It might be better!" were more likely to go than those who said, "It might be worse!"

It's probably over-stating to claim that all the pioneer spirits in Europe left for America, but certainly enough did that the center of mass shifted. The effect on America was profound - isolationist conservatives' claims to the contrary, its immigrants' energy and commitment to the freedom and opportunity and promise of this new land that the success of America was built on. And the great fortunes of the corporate elites were also built on exploitation of that same teeming surge of raw human power and will.

Also note that immigration waves from other countries and during other times were quite different. From China there were two waves, one of immigrant laborers, and a second of educated professionals fleeing the communist revolution (causing no small amount of culture clash in San Francisco's Chinatown). From India it has been mostly the educated professionals, the so-called "brain drain" who realized that they could earn more money and live better with their skills in the US than try and ocmpete against the hordes back home. My own parents are examples of this, they came here so that their children would have access to the opportunities that a rich nation can provide. In India, you're lucky to even get seated in a college, regardless of grades (the Dalit quota is a necessary investment in the future, but it comes at great cost) - in contrast, I went through the standard ritual of throwing away bags upon bags of college literature. All of these immigrations left a mark upon America, but they also left a mark upon the home countries, often subtle but never insignificant.

And now it's Israel's turn - 760,000 Israelis are living abroad:

According to Prigat, some 60 percent of them live in North America, 25 percent in Europe, and 15 percent elsewhere. Prigat had no statistics as to the number of Israelis who had left during the three years of the intifada, but she noted that an estimated 550,000 Israelis (400,000 adults and 150,000 children) were living abroad in 2000.
...
Statistics show the return rate of Israelis is influenced by the economic and security situation in Israel. From 1993 to 1999, a relatively high number of Israelis returned each year (between 4,700 and 6,500). But in 2000, apparently as a result of the intifada and the economic downswing, the number of returning Israelis declined. In 2000, 3,956 Israelis returned; in 2001, 3,546 Israelis returned; and, until October of this year, the number of returning Israelis stood at 2,771, Prigat reported.

This is an early Exodus, not a late-stage one, and the primary factor is economic. The lavish per-capita spending on the settlements amounts to a tremendous drain on Israel's resources.

Of course, security has a psychological effect, the economic situation is the real threat to Israel's existence. It is a massive drain on the country's resources and the reason that many domestic problems simply cannot be addressed.

The problem is simple. Democracy, Jewishness, and Greater Israel. Pick any two. Since the the two that Sharon seems to have chosen are Jewishness and Greater Israel, many Israelis are finding that the only way to preserve the promise of a free society (as opposed to a broken one) is to leave. And most of them are coming here, to the US - a good filter for America, but at what cost to Israel? Not to mention the radicalization of those who stay behind...