[Mb-civic] RE: Mb-civic Digest, Vol 20, Issue 7

[wendy dunaway]

What are you doing up so early?


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>Subject: Mb-civic Digest, Vol 20, Issue 7
>Date: Thu, 2 Feb 2006 05:45:20 -0800
>
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>Today's Topics:
>
>    1. The Capitol's Tempest in a T-Shirt - Washington Post
>       (William Swiggard)
>    2. Fashions in Falsehood - Anne Applebaum - Washington Post
>       Op-Ed (William Swiggard)
>    3. FABULOUS AND WORTH READING: Squaring Islam With Democracy -
>       Jim Hoagland - Washington Post Op-Ed (William Swiggard)
>    4. Two Ideas Of Promise- David S. Broder - Washington Post	Op-Ed
>       (William Swiggard)
>    5. Alarm in Afghanistan - Nasrine Gross - Boston Globe Op-Ed
>       (William Swiggard)
>    6. Shutting out a voice for Islam - Diana L. Eck - Boston	Globe
>       Op-Ed (William Swiggard)
>    7. Today's 'Voice': Pazz and Jop Critics' Poll
>       (Village Voice Newsletter)
>
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>Message: 1
>Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2006 06:47:08 -0500
>From: William Swiggard <swiggard at comcast.net>
>Subject: [Mb-civic] The Capitol's Tempest in a T-Shirt - Washington
>	Post
>To: mb-civic <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
>Message-ID: <43E1F13C.2080706 at comcast.net>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
>The Capitol's Tempest in a T-Shirt
>Chief Apologizes for Ejections at State of Union
>
>By Petula Dvorak
>Washington Post Staff Writer
>Thursday, February 2, 2006; A01
>
>Two T-shirts -- one black, the other heather gray -- spotted in the
>House gallery the night of the president's State of the Union speech
>caused a major ruckus on Capitol Hill.
>
>It spilled into yesterday and came complete with impassioned political
>speeches, strident questions about rights being trampled, threats of
>lawsuits and a hat-in-hand apology from the U.S. Capitol Police chief.
>
>The black shirt with white letters was worn by celebrated war protester
>Cindy Sheehan; the white letters read: "2,245 Dead. How Many More?"
>Beverly Young, the wife of a Republican congressman, sported a heather
>gray top with red, white and blue letters saying, "Support the Troops."
>
>The wearers were hustled out of the House gallery by Capitol police who
>said the shirts amounted to protesting.
>
>Late yesterday, after C.W. Bill Young (R-Fla.) had taken to the floor
>with an impassioned speech and his wife's T-shirt held aloft, Capitol
>Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer showed up at his office to apologize.
>
>Gainer said he also would ask that charges against Sheehan -- she was
>arrested; Beverly Young left before it came to that -- be dropped. "It
>was," he said, "a good-faith mistake by officers operating under poor
>direction."
>
>After a night of fingerprinting and booking and lockup, Sheehan departed
>the city. But Young had not, and her response as she enjoyed hugs from
>supporters yesterday after the apology was to call Gainer "an idiot."
>Witnesses said her words for him were much saltier the night before.
>
>The drama in cotton unfolded when Sheehan, who received a spectator
>ticket from Rep. Lynn C. Woolsey (D-Calif.), took her seat and unzipped
>her jacket, revealing her antiwar message. Sheehan's son, Casey, was a
>soldier who was killed in Iraq in 2004.
>
>A Capitol Police officer spotted the words, pointed to her and yelled,
>"Protester!" Sheehan said. "He then ran over to me, hauled me out of my
>seat, and roughly . . . shoved me up the stairs," she said, adding that
>she was handcuffed, taken away, fingerprinted and booked.
>
>That was before the speech.
>
>About 45 minutes into the speech, an officer asked Beverly Young to step
>outside, where he told her: "We consider you a protester" because of her
>shirt, she said.
>
>She said she angrily challenged officers to explain what law she had
>violated, and they threatened arrest.
>
>She said an officer mentioned that Sheehan was removed earlier and
>therefore "it was kind of only fair" that she be asked to leave, too.
>
>"They publicly humiliated me," Young told reporters. "They insulted our
>troops."
>
>When the congressman heard what had happened to his wife, he summoned
>Gainer to his office and called Karl Rove, the president's deputy chief
>of staff.
>
>"When your wife is insulted and embarrassed, you do tend to get a little
>offended," Young said yesterday, explaining his upbraiding of Gainer
>that night and his fervent speech on the House floor yesterday morning,
>when he waved the shirt and bellowed about his wife's ejection: "Shame!
>Shame!"
>
>Young said he wouldn't be so mad if it were just Sheehan. "I totally
>disagree with everything she stands for," he said. But by removing his
>wife, Gainer's officers clearly "acted precipitously," Young said.
>
>Attorneys on Sheehan's side and attorneys for Young pored over case law
>yesterday, trying to find precedent for the ejection.
>
>Gainer's office didn't respond to inquiries until after 5 p.m., when he
>walked into Young's office and apologized.
>
>"We've asked the U.S. attorney's office to drop the charge against
>Sheehan," Gainer said later. "Our interactions both with her and Beverly
>Young were inappropriate."
>
>He said he will clarify rules about disruption to remind officers that
>"simply having a T-shirt on" does not constitute lawbreaking.
>
>After the mea culpa, Beverly Young, in her T-shirt again, was not
>forgiving, calling Gainer "an idiot" who should be replaced.
>
>Her husband said he doesn't want Gainer fired, but when asked if he
>might take legal action, he said, "I'm taking it one step at a time."
>
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/01/AR2006020100348.html?nav=hcmodule
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>Message: 2
>Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2006 06:49:46 -0500
>From: William Swiggard <swiggard at comcast.net>
>Subject: [Mb-civic] Fashions in Falsehood - Anne Applebaum -
>	Washington Post	Op-Ed
>To: mb-civic <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
>Message-ID: <43E1F1DA.2020204 at comcast.net>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
>Fashions in Falsehood
>
>By Anne Applebaum
>Thursday, February 2, 2006; A21
>
>The memoir was a bestseller, a literary sensation, a compelling read.
>Unfortunately, its most sensational and compelling material was invented
>-- a fact that many of its readers learned from a controversial and
>much-quoted television show.
>
>No, I'm not talking about James Frey's drug-, blood- and alcohol-soaked
>"memoir," "A Million Little Pieces," which led to an unprecedented
>apology from Oprah Winfrey last week. I'm talking about Lillian
>Hellman's "memoir," "Pentimento," published in 1973 and denounced on
>"The Dick Cavett Show" by the writer Mary McCarthy in language
>significantly more withering than what we have become accustomed to
>hearing on daytime television: "Every word she writes is a lie,
>including 'and' and 'the' " is how McCarthy put it on the air -- a line
>far more memorable than Winfrey's "I feel duped."
>
>But what's interesting about a comparison of the two works is not what
>they tell us about the evolution of talk shows from Dick Cavett to Oprah
>-- I'll leave that analysis to the professors of media studies -- but
>what they tell us about the evolution of literary fabrications.
>Hellman's most famous invention was a character named Julia, a female
>friend who supposedly persuaded Hellman to smuggle money into Germany to
>help the anti-Nazi resistance. In "Pentimento," Hellman's descriptions
>of that mythical 1937 train ride into Germany are powerful. There is a
>girl in the train compartment who asks too many questions, an emotional
>meeting with Julia in a station and various other emotionally convincing
>scenes that never took place. Julia's character was actually derived
>from the life story of a woman named Muriel Gardiner, whom Hellman knew
>of but had never met.
>
>What is most striking about a rereading of "Pentimento" (which I don't
>necessarily recommend) is the quaint, outdated heroism of it. Hellman
>reinvents herself and her nonexistent friend as brave and principled,
>willing to fight for the right cause even in the face of great danger.
>In that sense, Hellman's work belongs to a long line of fantasists,
>stretching back to Baron von Munchausen and beyond -- liars who
>reinvented themselves as better, braver or more blue-blooded than they
>really were.
>
>Frey, by contrast, belongs to a tradition that emerged more recently and
>that has been best described by the British writer and psychologist
>Anthony Daniels as the "literary assumption of victimhood." These
>fabricators reinvent themselves not as heroes but as victims, a status
>they sometimes attain by changing their ethnicity. Among them are Bruno
>Grosjean, aka Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose touching, prize-winning,
>"autobiographical" tale of a childhood spent in the Majdanek
>concentration camp turned out to be the fantasy of the adopted son of a
>wealthy Swiss couple. Another was Helen Darville, aka Helen Demidenko,
>whose touching, prize-winning "autobiographical" tale of a Ukrainian
>girl whose father was a former SS officer turned out to be the fantasy
>of a middle-class British girl living in the suburbs of Brisbane, 
>Australia.
>
>And the trend continues: In the past few days, yet another prize-winning
>author, who calls himself "Nasdijj" and claims to be the son of a
>violent cowboy and an alcoholic Native American woman (and who, as a
>child was "hungry, raped, beaten, whipped and forced at every
>opportunity to work in the fields," he told an interviewer) -- has also
>been "outed" as a white writer of erotica named Timothy Barrus. As
>Daniels wrote in the New Criterion several years ago, "where fantasists
>would once have invented privileged aristocratic backgrounds for
>themselves, they now invent childhoods filled with misery. It is lack of
>privilege, not privilege, that now confers prestige upon a person's
>biography."
>
>As for Frey, he gave himself not just a juvenile delinquent's childhood
>but a flamboyantly bad character -- "I was a bad guy," he originally
>told Oprah. He had spent most of his life, he wrote, as a drug-addicted,
>alcoholic criminal. Although his violence and excess were in truth
>limited to his vulgar prose, Frey was clever enough to know that moral
>degradation is, nowadays, what wins you admiration, fans and money.
>
>I'm not writing here in praise of Lillian Hellman (whose other fantasies
>included a deeply held belief in the goodness of Stalinism) but rather
>to point out how much the world has changed in 30 years. We used to
>admire people who claimed to fight the Nazis. Now we admire people who
>claim to have fought their own drug addiction -- and we really, really
>admire them if they beat up priests, fight with cops, frequently find
>themselves covered in vomit and spend lots of time in jail while doing so.
>
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/01/AR2006020101837.html
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>Message: 3
>Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2006 06:53:53 -0500
>From: William Swiggard <swiggard at comcast.net>
>Subject: [Mb-civic] FABULOUS AND WORTH READING: Squaring Islam With
>	Democracy - Jim Hoagland - Washington Post Op-Ed
>To: mb-civic <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
>Message-ID: <43E1F2D1.6090304 at comcast.net>
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>
>Squaring Islam With Democracy
>
>By Jim Hoagland
>Thursday, February 2, 2006; A21
>
>"I have no idea what the result will be, but I am certain that it will
>lead to a very interesting situation."
>
><>-- Arthur Balfour, on issuing the 1917 declaration that promised a
>national home in Palestine for the Jews.<>
>
>President Bush has created his own Balfourian times to live in by
>betting his legacy on the shifting sands of Middle East politics and
>religion. Iran's demagogic president, Iraq's Shiite clerics and the
>Palestinian radicals of Hamas have in recent days reminded Bush of the
>audacity of his bet that democracy will transform and stabilize the region.
>
>How much more interesting can it get? Hillary Clinton is running to the
>right of Bush with a call for economic confrontation with Iran. Centrist
>support is growing for John McCain's view that bombing Iran is now in
>the cards. Kofi Annan has joined European foreign ministers in telling
>Hamas to recognize Israel or in effect go hungry.
>
>But these tactical maneuvers are likely to fail in the absence of a
>larger strategy to reconcile democracy as understood in the West and
>Islam as practiced in much of the Middle East. Bush should not abandon
>his push for Middle Eastern democracy because radicals draw temporary
>advantage from it. But he needs to reexamine where that push is taking
>him. This means forging a new Western strategy to engage with and
>support moderate forms of political Islam, rather than assuming that
>democratic elections and other reforms will automatically separate
>religion and politics and devalue the former in favor of the latter.
>
>That theme echoed through the State of the Union address. Bush twice
>condemned "radical Islam" and said it would be defeated by American
>resolve. But he remained silent on mainstream Islam's role in politics
>and in jihad. A stronger commitment to democracy would overcome all, he
>suggested.
>
>This fails to adjust his policies to the changes they have helped
>produce. Political Islam has largely been treated by American and
>European policymakers as an extremist phenomenon since Iran's Shiite
>clerics seized power in 1979. The tendency was reinforced by the
>atrocities of Sept. 11, 2001. Under the Bush doctrine, political Islam
>is to be fought country by country, through counterterrorism programs,
>diplomatic isolation and economic sanctions.
>
>But political Islam finds democracy to be a congenial rather than an
>antithetical force. Calling for the destruction of Israel, as Hamas and
>the Iranians do, is a popular program sold to the masses under an
>Islamic banner. When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was warned by
>friendly diplomats last September that his hard-line speech to the U.N.
>General Assembly would cost him international support, he reportedly
>scoffed: "I am getting good news from home" about reaction to the speech.
>
>Or take Hamas's electoral victory over Fatah and other remnants of the
>Palestine Liberation Organization. It is the final nail in the coffin of
>pan-Arab nationalism, which is now as much a relic of history as the PLO
>itself. The obsolescence of pan-Arabism was also underlined by the
>victory of Shiite religious parties in Iraq's recent elections.
>
>It is possible to reconcile democracy, Islam, peaceful coexistence with
>Israel and good governance. Turkey and Morocco are examples of countries
>making significant progress on these fronts. Iraq has the potential as
>well to show that Bush's emphasis on promoting democracy is not
>guaranteed to boomerang on him.
>
>Bush's demand that freedom and democracy become the beacons toward which
>all nations in the region should advance was neither inherently flawed
>nor clueless, as critics maintain. The post-colonial Arab political
>order of militaristic or hereditary authoritarianism was tottering
>toward collapse in any event. American efforts to help channel the
>coming upheaval were, and are, appropriate.
>
>"A democratic election is an exercise in accountability," says former
>secretary of state George Shultz. "It is no surprise the electorate
>threw these rascals out when they got the chance," continued Shultz, who
>in 1988 approved the first official U.S.-PLO dialogue and held the
>guerrilla organization to strict account on its promises.
>
>"I wouldn't automatically say you won't talk to somebody in this
>situation," he added. "What is important is what you say: Tell them what
>you stand for and what you hope will happen. But you sure don't have to
>fund them."
>
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/01/AR2006020101836.html?nav=hcmodule
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>Message: 4
>Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2006 06:55:53 -0500
>From: William Swiggard <swiggard at comcast.net>
>Subject: [Mb-civic] Two Ideas Of Promise- David S. Broder - Washington
>	Post	Op-Ed
>To: mb-civic <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
>Message-ID: <43E1F349.1040807 at comcast.net>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
>Two Ideas Of Promise
>
>By David S. Broder
>Thursday, February 2, 2006; A21
>
>The George Bush who stood in the House chamber Tuesday night facing
>members of Congress and a worldwide television audience was not a
>lame-duck president. When he said, in his peroration, "We will finish
>well . . . confident of the victories to come," he was making a promise
>to himself as much as he was encouraging the country's hopes for the
>remaining three years of his term.
>
>But he is a diminished political force, weakened by events from the Gulf
>Coast to the Persian Gulf and by a loss of public support. In both tone
>and substance, this State of the Union address was closer to the one
>Bill Clinton gave in 1995, just months after the Democrats had lost
>control of Congress, than to the speech Bush delivered a year ago, after
>he and his party had triumphed in the 2004 elections. That speech was a
>trumpet call to confident GOP majorities to take on huge challenges --
>from revamping Social Security to democratizing the Middle East. Tuesday
>night he was bucking up a nervous collection of GOP legislators, who are
>looking at the worst poll ratings most of them have ever seen, and
>trying to placate the Democrats.
>
>The parallels to the Clinton address are striking. Clinton's plea to the
>politicians seated before him, a quarrelsome lot, as he well knew, was
>to "put aside partisanship and pettiness and pride" and "come together
>behind our common purpose." Bush, who knows he has squandered his
>mandate in even less time than it took Clinton, was also reaching out to
>the opposition for help. Near the top of his speech, he said that while
>policy differences are inevitable, they "cannot be allowed to harden
>into anger." He pledged to do his part to tamp down the fires.
>
>Bush had good reason to be on his best behavior. Not only was he looking
>at an anemic 42 percent job approval rating in the latest Washington
>Post-ABC News poll but the tone of much of the pre-speech commentary
>also invited cynical reactions to everything he might say. The Post and
>the New York Times both ran opinion articles questioning whether the
>State of the Union address was anything more than a cheap bit of
>political theater. Some of what Bush did -- the labored rhetorical bow
>to the first lady, the too-familiar letter home from the Marine killed
>in Iraq and the introduction of his family seated in the visitors'
>gallery -- justified that cynicism.
>
>But there were several points where I thought Bush's statements -- and
>the congressional reaction -- showed where some headway might be
>achieved. One, oddly enough, came at the most partisan moment of the
>speech. When Bush acknowledged the failure of his effort to add private
>accounts to Social Security, the TV cameras showed Hillary Clinton
>leading a derisive Democratic ovation at this "good news." When the
>president said in the next sentence that the problem of financing Social
>Security and Medicare for the retiring baby boomers "is not going away"
>but will only get worse because of Congress's inaction, it was the
>Republicans' turn to cheer.
>
>And then he surprised both sides by suggesting a bipartisan
>congressional commission to tackle the big entitlement programs -- and
>all of the members cheered. Commissions are often devices for postponing
>action, but the only way to deal with this issue is through bipartisan
>agreement -- and Bush has opened the door to that possibility.
>
>The other promising moment came when he endorsed the initiative to
>improve America's competitiveness by increasing federal funds for
>scientific research and training more mathematicians, scientists and
>technicians. As I wrote in December, this initiative had been teed up
>for presidential blessing by the National Academy of Sciences, spurred
>on by Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Democratic Sen.
>Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico. They now have more than half the Senate
>co-sponsoring their legislation, and the White House announcement that
>Bush's budget will provide $6 billion next year and $136 billion over
>the next decade means that we could see a breakthrough in the teaching
>of those subjects and the recruitment of workers with those skills.
>
>His offerings on energy, health care and the budget were far more
>meager. But this initiative at least means the address could be more
>than a theatrical event.
>
>http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/01/AR2006020101838.html?nav=hcmodule
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>Message: 5
>Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2006 06:58:43 -0500
>From: William Swiggard <swiggard at comcast.net>
>Subject: [Mb-civic] Alarm in Afghanistan - Nasrine Gross - Boston
>	Globe Op-Ed
>To: mb-civic <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
>Message-ID: <43E1F3F3.7010708 at comcast.net>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
>
>   Alarm in Afghanistan
>
>By Nasrine Gross  |  February 2, 2006  |  The Boston Globe
>
>FOR AFGHANS, the United States is the deciding factor in their recovery
>from a failed state, from the nightmare of becoming a breeding ground
>for terrorists, and from living in a culture of war and misery.
>
>Afghans perceive the impending drawdown of US military forces and
>cutback of economic assistance with alarm and misgiving. They think
>Afghanistan is like a patient who in a single operation had successful
>heart, lung, and liver transplants, and should be in the recovery room,
>not out on the sidewalk.
>
>The impact of the drawdown of US forces is that it may embolden enemies
>into more action. The enemies of Afghanistan consider this pullback a
>victory. Just look at all the daily episodes of fighting between the
>coalition forces, including the Afghan National Army and the Taliban and
>Al Qaeda, many of which do not get news coverage in the United States
>unless they involve an American.
>
>As a result of the continued Taliban attacks, Afghanistan will continue
>to be divided into two areas -- the provinces where Taliban forces are
>active and the rest of the country, which will further prevent Afghans
>from reconnecting with each other. With extremists holding seats in
>Parliament, they may try to reintroduce laws curtailing democratic
>rights and prevent needed legislation such as confirmation of female
>judges to the Supreme Court. Prodemocracy groups will not have the
>stature to defend their interests robustly. And since the US-Afghan
>strategic agreement did not set well with some countries in the region,
>most notably Pakistan, these countries will freely encourage the Taliban
>and Al Qaeda to further destabilize the fledgling state.
>
>On the economic assistance cutback from $1 billion to $630 million per
>year, many Afghans think it means one of two things: Either the United
>States is hard pressed for $370 million or the United States is sending
>an unmistakable sign of ending its involvement in Afghanistan. Because
>of the bitter memories of an earlier US disengagement after the Soviet
>retreat from Afghanistan, guess which one of these two ideas they more
>readily believe? And among all the reconstruction groups in the country,
>there are jitters that their projects will be seriously impacted.
>
>The perception of this dual drawdown must be alleviated. The US
>secretary of state's participation in the recent London Conference is a
>good thing, but not enough. It will take many more gestures and actions
>from the United States to reassure Afghans, and to provide a surefire
>signal to the enemies that America means business.
>
>The idea that the Taliban works to further the interests of the Pashtuns
>of Afghanistan must be countered. The Taliban is not an indigenous
>Afghan movement; rather it is an import of foreign countries and
>extremist groups from many parts of the world that abuse, in a clever
>way, the Pashtunwali traits, such as the code of silence and others. We
>need to help the Pashtuns of these provinces understand they do not owe
>the Taliban and Al Qaeda anything -- no loyalty, no code of silence.
>
>We need to make the provinces where the Taliban and Al Qaeda operate
>more accessible to all Afghans, so the local population can develop a
>vested interest in keeping up security rather than be prey to the
>enemies' machinations.
>
>The US government and public should become more aware that Afghanistan
>is the front line in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. They must
>not leave the rehabilitation of Afghanistan unfinished.
>
>Nasrine Gross is an Afghan-American writer and women's rights activist
>who has been living in Afghanistan since August 2001.
>
>
>http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/02/alarm_in_afghanistan/
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>Message: 6
>Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2006 07:01:10 -0500
>From: William Swiggard <swiggard at comcast.net>
>Subject: [Mb-civic] Shutting out a voice for Islam - Diana L. Eck -
>	Boston	Globe Op-Ed
>To: mb-civic <mb-civic at islandlists.com>
>Message-ID: <43E1F486.7040501 at comcast.net>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
>
>   Shutting out a voice for Islam
>
>By Diana L. Eck  |  February 2, 2006  |  The Boston Globe
>
>WHY IS THE American Academy of Religion, with more than 10,000 members
>who teach religion in colleges and universities, suing Secretary of
>State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Homeland Security Michael
>Chertoff? It takes a matter of grave concern for an academy of scholars
>who study everything from the Bible to Buddhists to join the American
>Civil Liberties Union in bringing a case against the US government. The
>concern is this: Our colleague, Tariq Ramadan, an Islamic scholar and
>theologian, has been barred from entering the United States to
>participate in the discussion of one of the most important topics of
>today: contemporary Islam in the West.
>
>For 18 months, the government has withheld his visa on the basis of the
>''ideological exclusion" provision of the Patriot Act, interpreted so
>broadly as to be a danger to the enterprise of debate and exchange in a
>free society.
>
>At first it seemed an ignorant mistake. Ramadan, a Swiss national of
>Egyptian ancestry, had previously lectured at universities and attended
>conferences in the United States. But in August 2004, he suddenly had
>his visa revoked by the Department of Homeland Security on the eve of
>his departure to teach at Notre Dame. Those of us who had known and
>admired his work were astounded. He was at the top of my reading list as
>an articulate spokesman for Islamic engagement in civil society and in
>the dialogue of religions. I had met Ramadan that summer at the
>Parliament of the World's Religions in Barcelona. I looked forward to
>hearing his plenary address at the annual meeting of the American
>Academy of Religion in November 2004. So why would the US government
>revoke the visa of a scholar whose entire body of work was dedicated to
>an emergent ''reformist" Islam? Why would the United States deny entry
>to someone able to contribute constructively to public discussion in
>Western countries with growing Muslim populations?
>
>That very summer, Rice had spoken at the US Institute of Peace, calling
>for the United States to dramatically expand ''our efforts to support
>and encourage the voices of moderation and tolerance and pluralism
>within the Muslim world." So why would she be party to the exclusion of
>one of the most prominent of these voices?
>
>The government has invoked a provision of the Patriot Act that allows it
>to deny a visa to anyone who ''endorses" or ''espouses" terrorism. It is
>chilling to see that this provision has been interpreted to ban a
>prominent intellectual who has been a consistent public critic of
>Islamic extremism and terrorism.
>
>Of course the government has and should have the power to exclude known
>terrorists. But this provision of the Patriot Act is being used to
>exclude people whose voices the government does not want us to hear and
>to block critics of US policies from engaging in public discussion and
>academic debate.
>
>In November 2004, Ramadan did deliver that keynote address, sitting at a
>bare table somewhere in Canada, speaking to us on a large-screen video
>monitor. Ramadan articulated the themes he has long emphasized. He spoke
>of the ''new reality" of American Muslims and of the importance of being
>''fully Muslim and fully American." Without a trace of bitterness, he
>spoke of the ''ethics of citizenship" and participation as Western
>Muslims. Western Muslims must be able to say ''This is our country. It
>is not an alien space in which we forever perceive ourselves as
>foreigners. It is our home." He spoke of the ''silent revolution" of
>reformist Islam taking place today. And he spoke of the critical
>significance of interfaith dialogue, grounded for him in the Muslim
>doctrine of tawhid, the oneness of God. It was a stirring message by a
>Muslim theologian of the stature of a Reinhold Niebuhr or Paul Tillich,
>delivered to us from the other side of the walls we ourselves have
>built. While heartened by his message, I felt saddened, ashamed, and
>fearful for my country.
>
>The study and analysis of religion is indisputably important in the
>world in which we live today. Religious and theological studies are
>integral to the curriculum of more than 2,000 colleges, universities,
>and seminaries across the country. Our community of colleagues is
>global. Denying us face-to-face access to scholars and theologians who
>contribute to critical reflection on the religious currents of our world
>is an intolerable impoverishment of the academic enterprise.
>
>Diana L. Eck, a professor of comparative religion at Harvard University,
>is president of the American Academy of Religion.
>
>http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2006/02/02/shutting_out_a_voice_for_islam/
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>Message: 7
>Date: Thu, 02 Feb 2006 01:56:36 -0500
>From: "Village Voice Newsletter" <newsletter at villagevoice.com>
>Subject: [Mb-civic] Today's 'Voice': Pazz and Jop Critics' Poll
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>End of Mb-civic Digest, Vol 20, Issue 7
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