Vol. 5 No. 9 (February 2007)
Uncommon
Denominator
The Newsletter
of the Commonweal Institute
http://www.commonwealinstitute
“It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a
statue,
and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve
and paint
the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do.”
CONTENTS
Talking Points: From freedom to justice
Wit and Wisdom: Top 10 Features of Bush’s New Iraq Plan
Eye on the Right: Exposing the global warming deniers
Featured Article: “Newspapers…and After?”
Happenings: Environmental activism training
Endorsements: David Brock
Get Involved: Spread the word; become a
contributor
The idea
that the
The
desire to advance human liberty is certainly laudable, but the problem is
that the administration has emphasized freedom as a policy goal at the expense
of clearly articulating another social value, justice, which is much more
deeply rooted in Arab culture. The result has been to cloud our
understanding of the conflict, to limit our options for dealing with it, and to
distort badly our entire foreign policy in the
There are
layers of history to this problem. At an immediate level, the war aim of
“liberating”
In any
event, what must remain clear in our heads is that the concept of “freedom”
does not have quite the same resonance, power, or historical weight in Arab
Muslim cultures as it does in our own. Higher in the scale of social
values is the principle of justice, and American
policy-makers drift into error when they fail to recognize that many of our
Arab friends would rather live in a just society than a free society (if ever
they had to choose). This cultural misunderstanding lies at the root
of the disastrous situation in which we find ourselves today in the Middle East.
The Arab
emphasis on justice as a cardinal virtue has its own particular history, which
helps to explain why, when we open the newspaper or turn on the television,
commentators and regular citizens in the
As early
as 1949, the radical Egyptian intellectual Sayyid Qutb put his finger on an issue that continues to haunt
Arab societies, and that in large measure accounts for the rise of
fundamentalist Islamic doctrine. “We have only to look,” Qutb wrote in his work Social Justice in Islam,
“to see that our social situation is as bad as it can be; it is apparent that
our social conditions have no possible relation to justice; and so we turn our
eyes to Europe, America, or Russia, and we expect to import from there
solutions to our problems…. [And] when it is a matter of importing principles
and customs and laws … we cast aside our own fundamental principles and
doctrines, and we bring in those of democracy, or socialism, or communism.”
Qutb maintained that justice, among other “fundamental
principles and doctrines,” had to be grounded in the Koran, and this insistence
should give us pause, for it does seem to invite all the evils of religious
intolerance and theocratic oppression. Yet as Majid
Khadduri has more recently suggested, in The
Islamic Conception of Justice (Johns Hopkins, 2001), the invocation of
divine authority to legitimate civil governance is a more complicated matter in
Arab cultures than we might expect. The principle of justice is not just
about applying sharia, or Koranic
law, heavy-handedly, and it has a centuries-long history that involves the
whole fabric of human relationships.
Lawrence Rosen, in The
Justice of Islam: Comparative Perspectives on Islamic Law and Society
(Oxford, 2000), gives a sense of how broad the philosophical underpinning of
the Islamic concept of justice is: “Whether it is in the relations among total
strangers looking for a basis of mutual comprehension and engagement,” he
writes, “or in the heart of the family itself, the sense of the negotiable
relatedness of all persons runs as a constant theme in Arab cultural life”
(70). Therefore, it “follows that what matters most in evaluating actions
is not their connection to a series of abstract propositions that lie behind
them but to the consequences that actions have in the world, their impact on
those networks of relationships, those webs of obligation, that are
constitutive of reality itself” (72).
Similarly, Mahmoud Ayoub, in “The Islamic
Conception of Justice,” in Islamic Identity and the Struggle for Justice
(University of Florida, 1996), emphasizes the relational and practical
dimensions of justice in the Arab World. He suggests that “justice in
Islam is a way of relating to one another without having anyone come up short,”
and that at its heart lies the belief that “whatever
we develop ought to be developed with a sense of fair, middle ground”
(20). The opposite of this social/divine justice, or Qist,
he writes, is Zulm, which is “often interpreted as
oppression, but it means far more. It goes back to the Islamic notion of
justice that implies sharing. Zulm is to get a bigger share than your fellow human being, which
creates opacity, darkness, and confusion” (22).
The Uncommon
Denominator does not purport to have the last word on Arab ideas of
justice, but these cited books are the sort of thing that people in the State
Department and the White House need to be reading when formulating American
foreign policy, or at least when fashioning our rhetoric. For there
remains a serious and debilitating disconnect between our words and actions, on
the one hand, and on the other, the actual needs, desires, beliefs, and
feelings of the part of the world we are supposedly trying to help.
If we’re serious about
prevailing in “the decisive ideological struggle of our time,” as President
Bush phrased it in his January 10 address, we can’t simply try to export our
own values without a good understanding of the values of our would-be
partners. The
It is probably too late for the current administration to
understand any of this or to take any of it to heart, but in the years ahead
the policy analysts and planners in the American government need start
understanding and talking the language of the region they are dealing with.
Few changes would have a more salutary effect on our relations with the Muslim
and Arab worlds than explaining how our involvement in the region promotes
justice there as much as freedom – assuming, of course, we don’t just talk the
talk, but walk the walk. That means, above all, pushing hard for a just
settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and, if it’s not too late,
achieving a just allocation of resources and reconstruction monies in
Top Ten Features
of Bush’s New Iraq Plan
10.
Make the war best two-out-of-three
9. Blame
it on that crazy
8.
Convene blue-ribbon study group; ignore recommendations
7.
Consult with Rumsfeld, who’s now working as a casino
greeter
6.
Sit on ass until January 2009; let Hillary figure it out
5.
Send Cheney to
4.
Tax cuts for the rich
3.
Put Giants coach Tom Coughlin in charge of enemy, watch them collapse
2.
Raise money for escalation by robbing Mick Jagger’s
1
— from
The David Letterman Show
If it’s hard to believe that anybody nowadays would
seriously question the reality and the causes of global warming, that’s perhaps
because global warming deniers have been so good at covering their
tracks. Until now, that is. The Union of Concerned Scientists has
just issued a devastating report on the surreptitious efforts of ExxonMobil Corporation
to confuse the American people about global climate change and to undercut
effective governmental action to deal with the problem. The report,
titled Smoke, Mirrors & Hot Air: How ExxonMobil Uses Big Tobacco's
Tactics to “Manufacture Uncertainty” on Climate Change, details the
various methods by which the oil company has deliberately stymied public
understanding of global warming.
Noting that ExxonMobil channeled about $16 million
dollars to conservative advocacy organizations between 1998 and 2005, the
report explains what the company got for its money. The campaign has
“manufactured uncertainty” about global warming by questioning even the best
science; it has pursued a strategy of “information laundering” by feeding its
message through front organizations; it has promoted spokespeople who
“misrepresent peer-reviewed scientific findings” about global warming; it has
“attempted to shift the focus away from meaningful action” to address the
problem; and it has “used its extraordinary access to the Bush administration”
to influence policy and government communications. (Indeed, as Marc
Kaufman in the Washington Post reported on Jan. 16, the administration
has been cutting back funding for government agencies that monitor climate and
weather – an inexcusable affront to good science and good public policy).
To anyone reasonably familiar with the right wing’s
“noise machine” (which the 2006 election did not, unfortunately, vanquish) the
parties to this campaign of disinformation and manipulation will read like a
list of the usual suspects. The participating organizations include such
think tanks or advocacy outfits as the Cato Institute, the George C. Marshall
Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and
the Science and Environmental Policy Project, among quite a few others.
In addition to naming names, giving dollar amounts, and identifying specific
actions meant to discredit the science of global warming, the UCS report also
includes a variety of primary documents, in facsimile, such as leaked memos,
which reveal the thinking and strategizing behind the ExxonMobil campaign.
Ultimately, the truth about global warming will
become known, just as the truth about cigarette smoking finally came out.
That is in the nature of science. But it is a tragedy that it is taking
so long for that to happen, and for our global community to respond
effectively. Through its positively immoral pursuit of its own corporate
interests, ExxonMobil deserves a large measure of the blame. Read the
report, pass it on to others, and always try to do what you can in your own
lives to minimize your environmental footprint.
The Union of Concerned Scientist’s press release
can be read at: http://www.ucsusa.org/news
The full report itself is at: http://ucsusa.org/assets
The following is an excerpt from John Nichols’s “Newspapers…and
After?” which appears in the January 29, 2006
issue of The Nation.
“Newspapers may be the dinosaurs of
“Especially at the local and state levels, where
the fundamental fights for control of a nation less red and blue than complexly
purple play out, daily newspapers remain essential arbiters of what passes for
news and what Americans think about it. For all the talk about television's
dominant role in campaigns (less and less because of its importance as a source
of news for most Americans, more and more because of campaign commercials) and
all the new attention to the Internet, newspapers for the most part continue to
establish the parameters of what gets covered and how. Moreover, neither
broadcast nor digital media have developed the reporting infrastructure or the
level of credibility that newspapers enjoy. So candidates for the House, the
Senate and even the White House still troop into old gray buildings in Denver
and Omaha, Louisville and Boston, Concord and Des Moines in search of a forum
where they can talk with reporters and editors about issues and where those
conversations will, they hope, be distilled into articles and editorials that
set so much of the agenda for the political debate at the local, state and
national levels.”
Read the whole article at http://www.thenation.com/doc
Environmental Activism
Training – On January 12, in
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