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| Europe |
| Crisis in Europe |
| 2006-04-13 |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #3 I didn’t find the article to be overly academic, but it is rather long. It’s also completely worth reading. I especially enjoyed the author’s skewering of pompous academics like Garton Ash. What fool in his right mind could compose a sentence like this? “even if it were possible for the United Nations to be composed entirely of crypto-Americas [i.e., democracies], this would be deeply undesirable, on grounds of, so to speak, the biodiversity of world politics—not to mention sheer boredom.” Wow! Leave Oxford’s campus once and a while, Mr. Ash. |
| Posted by: Secret Master 2006-04-13 14:49 |
| #2 A few gems: Several of the books stressed that those most severely affected by these problems tended to be Muslims themselves—the abused wives who fled to women’s shelters, the toddlers subjected to the torture of clitoridectomy, the children sent abroad to prison-like Koran schools, the teenage girls compelled to wed illiterate bullies who think wife-beating is a God-given right. Please note how the list of victims really aren't "Muslims" so much as plain women and children. The least willing participants in Islam's aggression. it’s not American imperialism or exploitation that provokes Islamists but rather the seductive appeal of American culture, their own attraction to which appalls them. So, just like how women must be kept sequestered and veiled because of the potent and persistent threat they represent to an easily tempted Muslim male, so must America be obliterated solely due to its enticing freedoms. Yeah, sure ... [spit] Warraq concludes with a sentence that resonates now even more than it must have in 1995: “The final battle will not necessarily be between Islam and the West, but between those who value freedom and those who do not.” Right there is the bottom line. Just like WWII. He favorably quotes a postwar observation by Bertolt Brecht: “The womb is fertile still, from which [Hitler] crawled.” And just like WWII, Europe is still at risk of becoming the same old charnel house it becomes whenever its utopic ideals fall crashing to the ground. |
| Posted by: Zenster 2006-04-13 10:51 |
| #1 Very long and academic but interesting nonetheless. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2006-04-13 09:58 |