Bunch of blithering idiots

Just because you have a right, doesn't mean it is wise or desirable to exercise it in any place at any time.

In this particular case, I am referring to the Israeli marchers provoking riots in the town of Umm al-Fahm.

One of the leaders of the march was Baruch Marzel, who led the anti-Arab Kach party that was banned in Israel in 1994.

"All we are doing is waving the Israeli flag. All we are demanding is loyalty to the state," another march leader, Michael Ben-Ari Ben-Ari, a member of the Israeli parliament, told the Israeli news website Ynet."

Yeah right. Watch out for the words "All we" or "We just". They almost inevitably precede lies. They are like magician's diversions, trying to draw your eyes away from what is really important. This formulation is often an important step in the process of self-deception, eagerly used by obnoxious extremists of all stripes.

The ability to wave a flag in any street is not exactly essential to anybody's well-being. I'm all for safe-guarding human rights, but this march should never have been allowed by the authorities. Its goal was primarily provocation and its only result the souring of Arab-Jewish relations within the Israeli state. It is equally obvious that this is precisely what the marchers desired, despite all the protests of offended innocence. It puts me in mind of all those nasty Irish marches that used to cause annual mayhem until the Irish finally grew up and learned to live together without constant nose-thumbing.

A similar outburst of maturity in the Middle East is not likely to occur in the near future.

History of Umm al-Fahm from Ynetnews.com


Technorati tags: Umm al-Fahm

Richard Dawkins is a religious fanatic

And in case you need convincing, he has now joined the ranks of those who condemn Harry Potter, without having read a word. He feels so strongly about the issue, he's stepping down from his position at Oxford to write a book about the pernicious and abusive nature of fantasy. Unless, of course, it's Pullman's Golden Compass, which he can't help loving because of its anti-religious slant.

To be fair to the professor, he says he's not sure about the pernicious influence of fantasy, but everything else he says in the article seems to indicate his mind is pretty well made up. He will, of course, "also set out to demolish the Judeo-Christian myth."

He was on a roll, and just couldn't stop at throwing rocks at fantasy:

Do not ever call a child a Muslim child or a Christian child – that is a form of child abuse because a young child is too young to know what its views are about the cosmos or morality.

It is evil to describe a child as a Muslim child or a Christian child. I think labelling children is child abuse and I think there is a very heavy issue, for example, about teaching about hell and torturing their minds with hell.

It's a form of child abuse, even worse than physical child abuse. I wouldn't want to teach a young child, a terrifyingly young child, about hell when he dies, as it's as bad as many forms of physical abuse.

(Note the emotive words: evil, abuse, torturing, terrifyingly. Makes me wonder how I survived my childhood. Also makes me wonder how he feels about teaching children about the danger of stepping in front of moving cars. That's pretty terrifying too. Is it abusive to make children fear the consequences? I can still remember pictures from those driver ed films.)

As far as I can tell, he fits the fill-in-the-blank template of a religious extremist. Anybody care to dispute it?

For what it's worth, I do think there is a profound difference between a convinced believer and a religious extremist.

Hat tip to Jeffrey Overstreet.


Technorati tags: Richard Dawkins, Religious extremism

The fallacy of binary thinking

Binary thinking has become my newest pet peeve. No, wait! Don't run away. It's not as eggheady as it sounds.

Binary thinking is the kind of thinking that says: "If you aren't A, then you are B. End of discussion." Or: "If you don't do A, then you must do B. End of discussion."

It raises its ugly head all over the place, but most especially in politics. It is the thinking of division, of facile labels. It is highly effective for pressuring or bullying someone who has not recognized it for what it is.

It is doubtful whether it qualifies as thinking at all, seeing as it falls short of even one dimension in its complexity, let alone the three (if you're normal) or four (if you have pretensions to scientific thinking) or ten (if you're a confirmed physicist) that the rest of the world lives in.

Let me illustrate. Binary thinking reduces everything to two points, thusly:

A. .B

In politics, especially of the American variety, this means you're either a bleeding-heart, pinko, atheistic commie or a flinty-eyed, redneck, heartless fascist.

This, of course, ignores the possibility of a complete first dimension, which looks like this:

A................................B

There are lots of intermediate points (an infinite number, if you want to get picky) between A and B. There are a lot of gradations of colour, even between the pinko and the redneck.

And all of this conveniently ignores the fact that there is more than one dimension. (No, I am not going to try to illustrate this with a keyboard. You are going to have to draw your own mental pictures.) There is a point C above the line and a point D below it. Now we are dealing with an embarrassing number of points. Because there are, yanno, God-fearing liberals and atheistic conservatives. And generous conservatives and skin-flint liberals.

It gets better. Between you and the line AB, (Yes, I know it's a square now. Don't get difficult.) there is a point E. And on the other side of AB there is a point F. Because there are, yanno, authoritarian liberals and libertarian liberals. And authoritarian conservatives and libertarian conservatives. And the vast majority, who fall somewhere in the muddled middle of what is now a cube.

In all the vast space of the cube, it seems beyond childish to try to pile every single issue into a box on point A or another on point B. I would be greatly in favour of scrapping the terms "liberal" and "conservative" altogether. They generate more heat than light, and obscure thinking more often than encouraging it.

Please note that binary thinking is also a handy tool of salesmen and advertisers the world over. If you don't buy car seat Brand A, your children will die horrible deaths. (Of course, they are a little more subtle about it, but that's the message they want you to get.) Because a couple of cars have been broken into in your neighbourhood, you had better buy my security system, so you won't be facing a raving lunatic with a knife in your dark living room. (Yes, this one was used on me recently. He put lots of sentences in between Point A and Point B so that I wouldn't catch on to the absurdity. It didn't work.)

Reality can almost never be reduced to an either/or situation. Be suspicious of such simplistic analysis whenever it comes along. And look for the intermediate points, because out on the extreme edge is rarely a good place to be.

ETA: After posting this, I found this quote in my Quote of the Day box:

Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
- Kurt Vonnegut

Technorati tags: Binary thinking, Extremism

Paramilitary training in kindergarten

It happens in Bangladesh. And this man, Shoaib Choudhury, is begging people in the West to speak up against it, to kick up a stink, to tell one more person.

Regular readers of this blog might recall me talking about Choudhury about a year ago, when he was in prison in Bangladesh, having dared suggest that his country should recognize Israel. He is now free in the West because of political pressure but amazingly has every intention of returning to his country to face trial.

"Islam is not a bad religion," Choudhury said, "but it is now in the hands of criminals and terrorists." And silence, he said -- silence from the West -- is what they want. Silence about the 9,000 kindergarten Madrassas in Bangladesh that include paramilitary training in their curriculum. About the 64,000 Koranic madrassas, heavily funded by Saudi Arabia, that are not accountable to authorities, where hatred for Israel, Jews and Christians is built into the school day; about the way the most beautiful young women are selected, educated, trained, given every advantage -- then sent to the West, as terrorists, to await their orders to act.

Read about his recent meeting with high school students to motivate them to become activists at True Ancestor (hat tip to Amba at Ambivablog). Further references are provided there.

Tell one more person.

Technorati tags: Shoiab Choudhury, Bangladesh, Islam

Gleanings from the blogosphere, Oct. 14

Islamic scholars are taking up the Pope's challenge and engaging in interfaith dialogue, reports Ed Morrissey at Captain's Quarters. Their response to the Pope will be delivered Sunday, but it is already available online. It's a small start, but it's a start. As you can read in the Bible, "Do not despise the day of small beginnings."

Continuing the Islamic theme, John Burgess at Crossroads Arabia tells us the Saudi government has set up an English/Arabic website with the express purpose of combatting Muslim extremism.

A moderate Muslim journalist, Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, is literally running for his life in Bangladesh. Reader_iam at Done With Mirrors brings us up-to-date on his situation, with more than a note of despair.

Technorati tags: Salah Choudhury

Jihadis vs. neocons

Aisha continues to impress me over at Eteraz with her very probing questions and analyses. I don't agree with everything she says, but it is always worth thinking about the issues she raises. Today she is proposing that jihadis and neocons are operating on the same dynamic: a rejection of their socialist/hippy parents' discredited values. She can be devastating in her critique:

And the reason for the staying power of each—neoconservatism and jihadism—might, ironically, be the same. Both are movements rhetorically rooted in religion, but politically rooted in self-interest; both cling to religious law when it suits them and ignore it when it suits them, and when absolutely necessary (Jesus never preached a crusade; the Qur’an specifically forbids the killing of non-combattants [Surit il Nisa’]) invent it out of whole-cloth.

Read it all.

Technorati tags: Jihad, Neo-cons

Gleanings from the blogosphere, Sep. 13

Aisha at Eteraz has a great post on What the Infidel Did Today. I particularly like the sex strike called by the wives and girlfriends of Colombian gangsters. Now if we could just see a similar movement in the hip hop and rap world...

Dave Schuler at The Glittering Eye finds the extremism evident in far too many blogs to be unrealistic.

People seem to be advocating mindlessly extreme positions as the minimally acceptable policy. Only a pure market health care system is acceptable. Only a totally socialized health care system is acceptable. Abolish the minimum wage. Double the minimum wage. Nuke all Arabs. There is no terrorist threat. Nothing is Bush’s fault. Everything is Bush’s fault. 9/11 changed everything. 9/11 changed nothing.

He observes that in real life, workable approaches are neither burning hot nor bitterly cold. Hard to get a crowd roaring with that kind of approach, but he's absolutely right.

Michael J. Totten publishes a lengthy interview he conducted with Major Tal Lev-Ram, Spokesman for the IDF Southern Command. It dates from June, but it's still interesting. What I found most striking was the Palestinians' use, not only of human shields, but young teenagers for planting charges, moving weapons.

"It’s a problem," he said. "Sometimes we see resistance. But it’s difficult to judge from our perspective. We see a lot of cases where Katyusha or Qassam rockets are fired from within populated areas. More than that, they came up with a system that was based on the fear that we would find the exact location of the rocket launchers. So they place the launchers with a timer. And ten, eleven, and twelve year old children come and take the launcher away afterwards. Often we’re faced with fourteen or fifteen year old youth who come, armed, and place charges along the fence. When we see them, even when we see that they are armed, if they are only fourteen or fifteen we only shoot to scare them. We don’t actually fire at them. Of course, only if there is no immediate danger to our forces."

...

"About a month and a half ago," he said, "another event that shows you the dilemma here: Two terrorists with an RPG tried to shoot a tank. We shot back. In the same house the mother of them, and a cousin, were in the same house. They fired five meters away from where the mother and cousin were standing. The Palestinian headline said that a mother and child were killed. The child was twenty two years old. And he was a member of Hamas. So, I am not happy about the mother. But, this is my right. You know? In the houses of Hamas militants, and all the other terrorist organizations, there are storages of weaponry. That’s because in the past we would avoid attacking houses with families. Which raises the question: Sometimes we as the IDF care more about the families and the children than he who would put them in danger. In a house, let’s say of three floors, a whole floor may be used as a storage."

Technorati tags: Gaza Strip