Akram's Razor - Reflections on Islam, Muslims & America

New comment on Spencer invite

I posted a new comment to the labrynth of comments on the Spencer/ALA controversy mentioned yesterday.

Here it again.
----------------------------

svend Says:
July 10, 2009 at 12:48 pm | Reply
Incidentally, it’s not just Muslims or traditional academics who decry Spencer’s dubious scholarship and lacking objectivity. It’s even caught the eye of media observers.

Take a look at media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) report, “Smearcasters: How Islamophobes spread fear, bigotry and misinformation” http://www.smearcasting.com/smear_spencer.html

There’s no question that Spencer’s endless attacks on Islam and Muslims have played a role in fueling the kind of irrational fear and bigotry against Muslims with the Republican Party that General Colin Powell so courageously denounced at the tail end of the 2008 presidential election.

As FAIR’s report points out, his prejudice has even been denounced by fellow rightwing critics of Islam, such as Dinesh D’Souza and Stephen Schwartz. When an inveterate Muslim basher like Schwartz, known for shrill attacks on pretty much all mainstream Muslim groups (not to mention his trademark obsession with Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism) is moved to speak out against your rants against Islam, that’s pretty serious.

Joke of the day: Robert Spencer as bridge-builder.

The curious new face of interfaith dialogue. (Image via Wikipedia)

of the World's Most Intolerant Religion; Religion of Peace? Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't; The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: How Islam Law Treats Non-Muslims) testify eloquently of his unfitness for dialogue with Muslims. The gentleman is on his own personal crusade to make anti-Muslim prejudice intellectually respectable, churning out tracts to disabuse the world of the pernicious notion that there is any worthy of admiration in Islam and clear up any lingering suspicion that Islam that might share anything important with the civilized religions of Judaism and Christianity.

Predictably, his supporters are  calling this is politically correct censorship. Because, you understand, there's never a bad time or inappropriate venue to tear down Islam and mock Muslims. Even if it means derailing a public forum intended to build bridges between Muslim and non-Muslim.

I contributed some comments. Below are the longer ones that sum up why I think the drafters of this open letter are entirely justified and why these cries of censorship are specious. [I've taken the liberty of correcting a few of my typos.]

Incidentally, has a more maddening and inefficient medium for debate ever been devised than the blog comment? What a confusing mess. There are currently 139 comments, many threaded, and most worthless.

One interesting thing is how several of the Islamophobe commenters (and, naturally, Spencer defenders) matter-of-factly discuss the value of his supposedly evenhanded analysis as a weapon to demoralize the Muslim "enemy". Spencer may speak in code that makes it hard to pin his agenda down, but the haters out there get his message loud and clear.

 I'm dispensing with the normal convention of indenting quotes. The rest of this post is from the open letter.

* Not that it makes any difference given the particulars of this case, but one of them (Alan Godlas) is a former professor of mine at UGA, where I did an M.A. in Religion recently.

Update (2009-07-10): Added the comment about the FAIR report.

---------------------------------

svend Says:
July 8, 2009 at 7:58 pm | Reply

I see that the Muslim-bashers are out in force, letting all their hate and bite-sized ideas hang out.

Love his work or loath it, there’s no question that Spencer is highly partisan and confrontational. As the original post rightly points out, even a quick perusal of his CV shows that he is anything a voice of dialogue, much less a credible commentator on Islamophobia (unless I missed the memo that this event was a how-to workshop).

Quite to the contrary, a closer examination of his writings reveals an unmistakable pattern of *rationalizing* rather than critiquing prejudice, as much of his output is geared towards explaining why all the insulting and dehumanizing generalizations we rightfully find objectionable normally are, in the unique case of Islam and Muslims, completely justified by “the facts.”

Now, perhaps you agree with him and think we Muslims are the root of all evil. Even if you are right, that doesn’t change how self-evidently unsuitable someone with his political baggage and deliberately confrontational message is for a forum committed to reducing fear and conflict between Muslim and non-Muslim.

What’s next, demanding that a roundtable on defending abortion rights give a platform to somebody from Operation Rescue? This is common sense and basic professionalism. So spare us the histrionics and charges of political correctness. Whatever role he has to play, it sure ain’t there. Were this an equally virulent critic of another, less widely vilified community, such a petition wouldn’t even be controversial.

[...]

SL Says:
July 8, 2009 at 4:32 pm | Reply

Qur’an 9:5 – “Fight and kill the Disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, harass them, lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war.”

I’d love to see the PC Apologists on this panel discussing that Jihad verse! I’d love to see ‘em squirming in their seats as they endeavor, in the face of all contrary evidence, to keep proclaiming “Islam is peace.”

• svend Says:
  July 8, 2009 at 9:00 pm | Reply

  @SL
  I usually ignore this kind of know-nothing heckling, but I’ll make an exception since it’s relevant to the broader discussion. This bigoted rant–which is methodologically if not stylistically in keeping with Spencer’s selective and instinctively adversarial style of interpreting Islam–completely wrenches a verse out of context to support your prejudices. There’s a long list of problems with this reading, but the simplest one is that it refers to the Meccan polytheists with whom the Muslims already were at war. The Quran does not teach pure pacificism, it is true, but it by no means encourages war, making it clear that war should be fought in self-defense and that even then it had to abide by strict rules of conduct. (Have Muslims always only fought defensive wars? Of course not. Welcome to the club.)

  For a serious analysis of this woefully misunderstood topic–and one that, it must be pointed out, reminds one how simplistic and tenditious Mr. Spencer’s commentary on Islam and Muslims often is–see “Islam, Quranic” [by Mustansir Mir] in the Encyclopedia of War and Religion by Gabriel Palmer-Fernandez. You can currently read much of it on Google Books at http://tinyurl.com/l3e9lt

  
  

John C. Barile Says:
July 9, 2009 at 2:50 am | Reply

Robert Spencer, director of jihadwatch.org, is a serious, respectable author, observer, and commentator; possessing integrity, principle, and wit. As a critic of ossified Islam in its unreformed expression, he is passionate but reasonably objective. He is a popularizer of information and ideas, yet not a self-aggrandizing sensationalist.

His is a valuable perspective on the collision of Islamic orthodoxies with modernity; a perspective to be weighed and considered, but not to be ignored nor shouted down.

• svend Says:
  July 9, 2009 at 8:23 pm | Reply

  I find the notion that Spencer is merely a critic of “ossified Islam” quite curious given how hard he works to delegitimize contemporary reformers as being out of sync with authentic traditional Islam.

  As always, the devil is in the details. First of all, his selective and tendentious presentation of Islamic doctrine and tradition is recognizable to neither traditional Muslim scholars nor Muslim reformers or liberals, so the idea that he is just a chronicler of Islamic tradition is untenable. No one outside his Muslim-bashing circles recognizes this “Islam” that he deconstructs over and over. He’s a highly partisan critic, and one that most his supposed colleagues in academia ignore.

  Second and more importantly, his message–diplomatically articulated though it may be–boils down to a categorical (and utterly unproven) claim that even when one takes them in their historical context Islamic tradition, the essential message of the Quran and Muhammad’s career are inherently and irremediably opposed to modern values, Judeo-Christian values, etc. etc. What that translates to on the ground in the real world is the simple, dehumanizing principle that a good, civilized Muslim is either 1) an ex-Muslim or 2) a hopelessly inconsistent one who that rejects his faith’s most core beliefs and values.

  Now, imagine an evenhanded, respectable scholar arguing that traditional Christianity is inherently illogical, contrary to modern values, and ultimately dangerous while grandly conceding that there that “modern Christianity” was a whole different matter. Imagine if he then defined “modern Christianity” as *necessarily* rejecting the Trinity, Christ’s resurrection, the Afterlife and perhaps even the historicity of Christ himself.

  How meaningful would that olive branch to modern Christians really be? And how could anyone ever imagine him to be a moderate commentator fit for dialogue with traditional Christians?

  I’m not threatened by Spencer or his ilk–I see them more as a political syptom than an emerging school of thought; they will go the way of other politically motivated academic fads of past eras–and I fully realize that there are aspects of Islam or Islamic tradition that many non-Muslims find problematic or even threatening (shoot, there are supposedly “traditional” Islamic beliefs that I reject myself) .

  But it is disingenuous in the extreme to present a polemical thinker like Spencer as some neutral observer on Muslim affairs or a recognized authority on Islam. You can’t ignore scholarly standards and go for the jugular but then expect to be hailed as a dispassionate scholar. Nor can you make a living attacking a community and then pass yourself off as one of its well wishers. Sorry, he can’t have that cake and eat it, too.

  Some aspects of Islamic orthodoxies (which I agree need to be discussed in the plural) are indeed in conflict with modernity (singular?)–a state of affairs that is not unique to Islam–but there are frankly many scholars doing far more penetrating and evenhanded work than Spencer, some of them Muslim. For every valid point he makes, he makes a dozen more fundamental errors.

[...]

svend Says:
July 10, 2009 at 12:48 pm | Reply
Incidentally, it’s not just Muslims or traditional academics who decry Spencer’s dubious scholarship and lacking objectivity. It’s even caught the eye of media observers.

Take a look at media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) report, “Smearcasters: How Islamophobes spread fear, bigotry and misinformation” http://www.smearcasting.com/smear_spencer.html

There’s no question that Spencer’s endless attacks on Islam and Muslims have played a role in fueling the kind of irrational fear and bigotry against Muslims with the Republican Party that General Colin Powell so courageously denounced at the tail end of the 2008 presidential election.

As FAIR’s report points out, his prejudice has even been denounced by fellow rightwing critics of Islam, such as Dinesh D’Souza and Stephen Schwartz. When an inveterate Muslim basher like Schwartz, known for shrill attacks on pretty much all mainstream Muslim groups (not to mention his trademark obsession with Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism) is moved to speak out against your rants against Islam, that’s pretty serious.

Christians don't "murder" & the Obama-the-Muslim conspiracy theory is back

Speaking of the way people interpret behavior based on their shared religious background (or lack thereof), Dan Mathewson has a sharp analysis in Religion Dispatches of the conspicuous absence of Christian faith from MSM analysis of the recent abortion doctor murder by a Pro Life fanatic. The title says it all: Muslims Murder, Christians Don’t: What Went Missing in Analysis of Tiller’s Executioner

While much of the media had no trouble detailing the religious commitment of the Muslim killer of an army recruiter, most profiles painted Scott Roeder as a right-wing, anti-government, anti-abortionist, with a prior arrest history and mental problems. His connection with extremist Christian groups, apparently, is irrelevant. [...]

Also at RD, Hussein Rashid reports in "The Obama/Muslim Smear Strikes Again" how that transparent, repulsive old Manchurian Moslem conspiracy theory is still alive and kicking in the MSM. (A topic I wrote about once for Religion Dispatches, as well, in "Who's Smearing Obama?")

Man, Frank Gaffney just never ceases to nauseate.

The personal is theological

Two years ago, I shared a great cartoon commentary on hijab in  "The infinite varieties of hijab," and wrote:

Doing a web search, I came across an entertaining cartoon drawn by Syrian cartoonist Puppeteer cataloging the many styles of hijab out there. Its focus is on Syria, but aside from the Kubeisya it seems pretty universal to me. And every community has its well-meaning but unnerving glarers who more or less share the aesthetic (if not the trademark coat...or the cartoon's unibrow). [HT:  My Adventures in Syria]

Brilliant and wonderfully playful.  I especially like the "ninja", who's ready to pounce.  And that Indonesian maid bit is biting but painfully familiar social commentary.

Responding to a new comment the other day, I realized that an eloquent previous contribution from a reader in either Denmark or Norway* deserved to be considered in its own right, so here it is without any further ado along with the still-entertaining cartoon.

...some Muslims do carry themselves in public with a stern, intimidating demeanor that can make the community a cold place (and which I do not think is anyway encouraged, much less required by, the Sunnah). I think that's a legitimate concern to raise in a constructive manner.
[From my original post. --SW]

In the cyber world I can pick and choose which sisters to befriend...and I would only be able to befriend the friendly ones. In RL (real life) I have been scared out of my boots by the stern, intimidating demeanors of some sisters I see on the street...I also get it from the scandinavians for being in hijab at all (and probably because I am an 'obvious' convert) and from the ummah for probably tying my hijab scarf 'all wrong' and looking like a 'wannabe'. Talk about between the devil and the deep blue sea.

Many's the time I've espied a muslim sister in the street and thrown a big smile getting ready to utter my practised 'assalamu alaikum søster!' only to be looked at like I have done something really really wrong and am about to snatch someones handbag. Just where do I fit in? Oh. With Allah. That's right. So long as I don't lie to myself. Am I any less a muslim if my hijab is not acceptable to all? I have given up now and am tired of looking like a wannabe Arab...(we have that here)...I am in hijab of my own style..and which muslim sister is not? I have yet to see two muslim sisters interpreting hijab in exactly the same way...there is always individuality even if is subtle.

I was curious about this 'cartoon' because for a long time now I have wanted to see something that presents all the different styles of hijab (and being a muslim woman in public) on one page. I am very curious since the argument rages on in all muslim circles about the 'right' way to hijab (and hijab is more than clothes right??). Isn't mastering the other (non cloth related) aspects of hijab (demeanor and vibes put out) the greater jihad?

I resent the fact that I am judged for the fact that sometimes a square centimetre of my neck is sometimes showing...when in fact I am swathed in so many layers of voluminous fabric, including a head scarf, that I cannot be in anything other than hijab, appearance wise. But technically..am not..due to the square inch of neck? I need to breathe for personal reasons. (LOL). Not a laughing matter though (can feel stern intimidating glares). It is worth exploring ad infinitum our attitudes to how we carry ourselves...even if this does destroy the humor.

As I noted when I  replied, I find the woman's testimony very powerful, and I see it as worth a heap of footnoted scholarly articles.

Feminists have long argued that "the personal is political", which I think means different things to different people. The reading of the phrase I find most stimulating is that it privileges the reliance on the proof of individual experience over the dictates of abstract, totalizing ("male"?) systems that are unlikely to address all people's needs.

In that sense, the personal is eminently theological, as well. In fact, I have profound concerns about theologians no matter how erudite who don't feel it necessary to test their theories and rulings against the personal experiences and struggles of real people today, especially those whose backgrounds, challenges and dilemmas are unfamiliar to a still overwhelmingly male-dominated scholarly class.

And, no, this isn't a complaint against a straw man. In a world where one-size-fits-all approaches are rightly out of favor, a lot of people pay lip service to the ongoing evolution and adaptation of Islamic law based on circumstance while ironically fighting tooth and nail at every turn to deny the possibility of rulings crafted centuries ago in far-off lands being in need of reevaluation. Especially in the area of gender.

But this is an old hobby horse of mine.

* The giveaway is the choice of the word søster [sister]. Were she Swedish or Finnish, it would be syster or sisar, respectively.

Not that I could even order a cup of coffee in Finnish. It is not an Indo-European language with more in common grammatically with Turkish than its the neighboring tongues. And they don't have Thor, which I find very disorienting. But I digress.

The semiotics of swords

Look at this creepy scene of jihadi role playing. This Islamic obsession with all things martial is so alien to the Judeo-Christian tradition, don't you think?

Photograph by Ed Kashi, National Geographic

Which is why it's so interesting that these are really Palestinian Christians in Jerusalem, caught while celebrating Easter.

When a Christian swings a sword at party, it's just innocent fun, at most an assertion of healthy pride in tradition.  When a Muslim does it, to the contrary, it's practice for killing infidels. 

A bumper crop of religious fanaticism

First, an anti-abortion fanatic gunned down an abortion doctor (and in the latter's own church, where he served as an usher). Yesterday, a spectacularly moronic and disgusting young convert to Islam shoots a man he didn't know outside a military recruiting center and then declares his conscience clean because of American military involvement in the Middle East and the allegedly concomitant need for retaliation. And today an unusually vigorous and hate-filled octogenarian White Supremacist barged into the Holocaust Museum in DC, his gun blazing, fatally wounding one guard before himself being gunned down.

Whew, what's next?

Consider the details of this last case. An 88 year-old man burst into a well guarded museum dedicated to commemorating genocide and tried to shoot random people, knowing full well that he'd almost certainly die. That kind of rage and aggression (whether at Jews or anybody else) aren't generally associated with people of such advanced age. I doubt seniors are going to start getting gunned down by trigger-happy cops any time soon, but an event like this has to affect how people in the security business profile people and calculate risk.

Elderly gunman kills guard at Holocaust Museum - Yahoo! News

An 88-year-old gunman with a violent and virulently anti-Semitic past opened fire with a rifle inside the crowded U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday, fatally wounding a security guard before being shot himself by other officers, authorities said.

The assailant was hospitalized in critical condition, leaving behind a sprawling investigation by federal and local law enforcement and expressions of shock from the Israeli government and a prominent Muslim organization.

Washington Police Chief Cathy Lanier said the gunman was "engaged by security guards immediately after entering the door" with a rifle. "The second he stepped into the building he began firing."

Man pleads not guilty in deadly recruiting center shootings - CNN.com

An Arkansas man suspected in a shooting that killed one soldier and wounded another at a Little Rock military recruiting center was angry over the treatment of Muslims, authorities said Tuesday.

Abdulhakim Bledsoe, 23, of Little Rock, also told police he recently watched a video "pertaining to subversive activities which spurred him to commit this act," according to court documents.

Bledsoe pleaded not guilty at his arraignment Tuesday and was ordered held without bail.

He faces one count of capital murder and 16 counts of engaging in a terrorist act, said Little Rock Police Chief Stuart Thomas. The terrorist counts stem from the shots fired at an occupied building. Video Watch scenes from Tuesday in court »

Before the not guilty plea, authorities said Bledsoe waived his Miranda rights after the shooting Monday and gave a video statement indicating that "political and religious" motives were involved.

He "stated that he was a practicing Muslim ... that he was mad at the U.S. military because of what they had done to Muslims in the past," homicide detective Tommy Hudson said in a police report.

Bledsoe told police "he fired several rounds at the soldiers with the intent of killing them," according to Hudson's report.

Scott Roeder, charged with abortion doctor George Tiller's murder, says more violence is coming

The Kansas City man charged with assassinating abortion doctor George Tiller in his church a week ago warned Sunday that more violence is coming.

"I know there are many other similar events planned around the country as long as abortion remains legal," Scott Roeder said in one of two phone calls to the Associated Press from prison.

Latest pseudo-science inspired by this blog's title

I see it more of a quirk of the unexpected workings of Internet media than anything else, but as I've mentioned before, despite my blog's quite modest traffic every now and again a contributor to an online forum will refer in all seriousness to the famous philosophical principle of, ahem, "Akram's Razor." The actual precept is called, of course, Occam's Razor. (I explained the reasoning behind my pretentious neologism when I set up the blog in 2005.)

Here are the two latest examples I've come across.

1. A comment (posted only a month or so ago, fetched from Google's cache since the link's now broken) in a discussion on an engineering magazine's online forum on, I kid you not, the feasibility of Cold Fusion:

Regardless of PERSONAL OPINIONS, there remains the fact that Neutrons just dont get up and move because they don't like their neighbours and that Helium just doesn't appear out of nowhere! Highly regarded laboratories around the world are providing some evidence that there is excess heat.
(please see Thermodynamics for the morons that are to silly to realise that they can be wrong ) I believe that Galileo was wrong and so were some very great scientist in history that funnily enough we now revere and quite happily tout as the greats. No matter how we want to put it there is evidence pointing straight towards Cold fusion being somewhat of a reality. ( please see Akram's Razor and  once again for the morons, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a DUCK!
The truth is that no one understands the process and it will take some time for physics to meld the process into their thought processes but no matter how you want to take it something is happening that is reported to give us Helium, Stray Neutrons and Gamma Rays and all of this from good old water..... HMMMMMMMM!!!

2. Then there's this contribution from last year to the Heroes forum on Tv.com (emphasis also added). TV.com Forums - I think I know where Sylars Power of Freezing comes from. Possible Spoilers.

On wikipedia and a bunch of other sites it says that Sylars power of Freezing is unkown where he gets it from. I think it is quite obvious where he got his power from Molly Walkers father. When we first see him he is frozen with his head cut-off eating cereal. Whenever Sylar gets a new power he always tests it out as soon as he gets it. When he got his Telekinesis he showed Mr. Suresh, Precognitive Painting from Issac he paints himself as the President, Liquification from Zane Taylor he melts everthing in th Apartment, Enhanced hearing from Dale everything is super loud and Radiation Manipulation from Ted Sprague he is on the roodtop making explosions in the palm of his hand. So why wouldnt he freez Molly Walkers dad after he cut of his head and stole his power because he killed her Mom by stabing her with household objects. Also we know Powers run in the Family, Hiro's Dad had a power, Parkman's Dad. Peter/ Nathans Dad/Mom, and Claires Dad and Mom. So what do you think is my theory correct or am I way off??? Akrams razor states the most obvious answer is usually the right one.

Thanks, dudes, but with all due respect I think you need to get your head out of your twitter and read some, like, books. Especially that first guy. Sure wouldn't want to use any technological device designed by an engineer so careless as to cite my blog in a scientific discussion!

As online typos go, this case seems unique in that, so far as I can tell, there is no other possible source for this mistake. An interesting and ironic index of  influence in the New Media.

I wonder how many other instances there of this weird slip.

SeekersDigest: Ask not what Obama can do for you

Sh. Faraz Rabbani at Seeker's Digest made a wonderfully thought provoking connection between President Obama's historic and courageous speech yesterday in Cairo and President John F. Kennedy's legendary Inaugural Address in 1961. 

Ask Not What Obama Can Do For You :SeekersDigest

President Obama made some very important statements in his historic speech in Cairo earlier today. Many Muslims are excited, enthused by the positive tone and attitude. Indeed, Obama’s gestures were significant; his choice of symbols and issues, careful; and his message, hopeful. As Muslims, we shouldn’t be armchair pundits, merely wondering whether Obama will follow is great words with real actions. Rather, we have to look at ourselves. We have to consider how we can positively engage; how we can get serious about learning and living the way of our Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace); how we can get out of our shells and be people who spread the good not just in our communities but for humanity.

So right and so elegantly put.

Some of Obama's critics in the Blogosphere are already comparing yesterday's address to another famous JFK speech, but in a way that highlights how risky and brave this move was. Some are recalling JFK's Berlin address of 2 years later, but dubbing it "Ich bin ein Muslim." And you can be sure a flood of trite Neville Chamberlain analogies are on the way.

It's time to put up or shut up. Arab and Muslim countries need to seize the opportunity and pursue peace now that the White House is serious about peace (perhaps for the first time since Carter).

If the Arabs and Muslim leadership don't respond in kind and prove Obama's vision right, further actions by Obama will be politically impossible and the door will slam shut. Let's not prove Abba Eban's memorable (but factually quite debatable) quip about missed opportunities right.

Stop what you're doing and listen to Obama's Cairo speech

For those wondering where to find it, I just listened to the audio for President Obama's historic speech in Cairo on NPR's website (from which you can download it, as well, if you don't have a connection fast enough for streaming audio). NPR also has the transcript, too, but their version isn't print-friendly. WaPo's transcript is much better for that purpose. And HuffPo has the video.

So much to parse and ponder.

Aside from the from-a-sitting-President-shockingly evenhanded tone, the biggest news is probably its unequivocal rejection of Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories.

Don't have time to react in any detail now and I realize that you can only cover so much ground in an address of this nature (even one weighing in at nearly 6,000 words), but I will say that as happy (and proud) as I am with it overall, I would've liked for it to touch on non-Muslim rights in Muslim societies. Given all the respect he showed to Islam and Muslims, when he discussed the largely successful integration of Muslims in American life it would've been entirely fair and rhetorically balanced to note in passing that work needs to be done to fully enfranchise non-Muslim minorities in many Islamic societies. In a day when Islamic media hold forth loudly about the rights and dignity of Muslim minorities around the globe, it's high time they started discussing the lack thereof for Christians, Jews and other non-Muslim communities in too many parts of the Muslims societies and the barrier this presents to Western-Islamic rapprochment. This needs to be on the agenda.

But that's a fairly minor quibble in the scheme of things, as the address was inspiring, constructive and courageous on so many levels.

The knives are really going to come out from the Israel-firsters and "dhimmi"-chanting Islamophobodunces at this drawing of a line in the sand before Bibi on settlements, but they're going to have to tread lightly, as all but the certifably insane instinctively understand that new, more pragmatic approaches are desperately called for in the Middle East peace process than this endless carte blanche to hardliners in Tel Aviv to do as they will. Some good old fashioned tough love is called for from Washington--to both sides--for everybody's sake.

Interesting times these. Could the virtues of common sense and long term planning are slowing making headway inside Beltway Mideast policy circles?

Update (2009-06-08): Silly me, I see that Obama did address the question of religious freedom, if a bit more obliquely than I hoped. 

The hardships of war

A light bit of news  from the Af-Pak neck of the woods.

Aussie troops in Afghanistan appalled by Dutch food

A team of Australian military cooks has been rushed to Afghanistan after troops deployed there complained about the Dutch food they are being served. By Radio Netherlands Worldwide Feature - Dutch soldiers eat home specialities in the Afghan desert There have been few if any complaints about the Dutch troops in Afghanistan from the other countries in the coalition forming the International Support and Assistance Force (ISAF). Generally they are regarded as valuable colleagues doing a good job. However, there is one problem being experienced by the 800 Australian troops who share the Tarin Kowt military base in Uruzgan province with Dutch troops. The Dutch are in charge of the mess and the Aussies are less than happy about the food. There have been so many complaints about the Dutch food being "tasteless" and "not fresh" that the issue has been raised in the parliament in Canberra. ...

Now, imagine if the cooks had been British. There probably would've been mass desertions to the Taliban.