RUTHFULLY YOURS

This was an interesting, important read. It is getting a fair amount of attention on Twitter.

Former Pakistani parliamentarian Farahnaz Ispahani analyzes “Pakistan’s foundational dilemma—Muslim homeland or Islamic state” in her new book, Purifying the Land of the Pure: A History of Pakistan’s Religious Minorities. Therein she provides an observant overview of how recurring drives for Islamic theocracy dashed any founding vision of Pakistan as a secular state, to the detriment alike of Pakistan’s Muslim-majority and non-Muslim minorities.

Ispahani begins her historical review with the 1947 partition of Britain’s Indian colony into the newly independent states of India and Pakistan. “Pakistan was carved out of British India as a homeland for the subcontinent’s Muslims—a majority enclave designed to protect against minority status in an undivided India” with its Hindu-majority. Given disparate ethnicities and new borders drawn along Hindu/Muslim sectarian lines, “Pakistan was not a territorial nation in the traditional sense. Its leaders had to explain its raison d’être, and most found it convenient to do so in religious terms.”

This faith-based identity appears in Pakistan’s name, the source of Ispahani’s book title. Pakistan arose amidst the 1930s Muslim India independence movement from an acronym encompassing the future country’s regions. Yet Pakistan also means “Land of the Pure” in Urdu, a “meaning embraced by Islamist activists since the country’s founding.”

While Pakistan’s population today is only three percent non-Muslim, Ispahani notes that in 1947 Pakistan (then including modern Bangladesh) was almost 23 percent non-Muslim. This previously more pluralistic Pakistani population drew hope from Pakistan’s founding Quaid-e-Azam (Great Leader), Muhammad Ali Jinnah. Days before Pakistan’s August 14 independence, his famous August 11, 1947, “speech advanced the case for a secular, albeit Muslim-majority, Pakistan.”

Several of Jinnah’s fellow Muslim League leaders tried to suppress his speech’s publication, indicating for Ispahani the controversy surrounding Westernized, secular Pakistani leaders like him. “As time went on, Pakistan’s religious parties ferociously attacked Pakistan’s elites for their un-Islamic lifestyle while demanding greater Islamization,” demands often receiving appeasement. “Each round of Islamization was followed by demands for an even greater role for religion in public life.”

Already in 1949, notes Ispahani, Pakistan’s first Prime Minister, Liaquat Ali Khan, offered a “vision for Pakistan diametrically-opposed to the secular one Jinnah had offered” in Pakistan’s Constituent Assembly. “Liaquat, an Oxford-educated and thoroughly westernized landowner not known for personal religiosity,” supported the Objectives Resolution declaring an Islamic state as the objective in the drafting of Pakistan’s constitution. Many believe that he thereby “intended to placate clerics and Islamists only in the most cosmetic sense.” Nonetheless, Pakistan’s 1956 constitution, with the Objectives Resolution as preamble and numerous Islamic references, proclaimed the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

Ispahani examines a similar duality in Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) in Pakistan’s 1970 elections. He “spoke of Islam as the personal religion of the majority” on the campaign trail but under his leadership Pakistan’s new “1973 constitution not only retained the Islamic provisions from earlier versions but also added new ones.” A 1974 constitutional amendment then began the ongoing persecution of the Ahmadi sect by declaring them non-Muslim. “Rejecting Bhutto’s hard-cultivated Islamic credentials,” his Islamist opposition in the 1977 elections emphasized his alcohol consumption.

Following the elections, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq overthrew Bhutto in a coup and had him executed on trumped-up charges. Many associate Pakistan’s Islamization with Zia, Ispahani notes, who “used the phrase ‘soldier of Islam’ to describe himself in his very first speech” in power. Until his death in a mysterious 1988 plane crash, this dictator’s “Islamization of the nation was global in its scope and almost obsessive in its thoroughness,” as she documents in detail.

From “Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign,” a forthcoming book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, excerpted at TheHill.com, April 12:

Hillary Clinton turned her fury on her consultants and campaign aides, blaming them for a failure to focus the media on her platform.

In her ear the whole time, spurring her on to cast blame on others and never admit to anything, was her husband. Neither Clinton could accept the simple fact that Hillary had hamstrung her own campaign and dealt the most serious blow to her own presidential aspirations.

That state of denial would become more obvious than ever to her top aides and consultants during one conference call in the thick of the public discussion of her server. Joel Benenson, Mandy Grunwald, Jim Margolis, John Anzalone, John Podesta, [Robby] Mook, Huma Abedin and Dan Schwerin were among the small coterie who huddled in Abedin’s mostly bare corner office overlooking the East River at the campaign’s Brooklyn headquarters. Hillary and Bill, who rarely visited, joined them by phone.

Hillary’s severe, controlled voice crackled through the line first. It carried the sound of a disappointed teacher or mother delivering a lecture before a whipping. That back end was left to Bill, who lashed out with abandon. Eyes cast downward, stomachs turning—both from the scare tactics and from their own revulsion at being chastised for Hillary’s failures—Hillary’s talented and accomplished team of professionals and loyalists simply took it. There was no arguing with Bill Clinton.

Here is a book by multi talented Seth Swirsky that can be a help to those who suffer depression and a guide to their families and loved ones.
https://www.amazon.com/21-Ways-Happier-Depression-Creative/dp/1492648132/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1491340932&sr=8-4&keywords=seth+swirsky

Say goodbye to dreary shades of black and white and start seeing the world for the prism of color it is with this refreshing and creative guide! In a unique combination of art, activities, and uplifting anecdotes, 21 Ways to a Happier Depression leads you on a hands-on journey to personal growth. Getting you out of one of “those moods” can be as simple as:

• Making the bed
• Nurturing a plant
• Painting shapes in loops and colors
• Breaking down your work into a to-do list
• Getting a fresh new look with some different décor, or even a haircut!

Inspired by his own life experience, Clinical Psychologist Seth Swirsky gently encourages positive introspection through honest and practical advice. With this book, a happier depression is literally in your hands!

‘Lexicographer” is not a seductive word. Samuel Johnson famously defined it, more than 260 years ago, as “a writer of dictionaries; a harmless drudge.” His own “Dictionary of the English Language” belied this impression of soulless passivity, but the image has stuck. There is a common assumption that dictionaries are put together by faceless dullards. In the judgmental world of online dating, saying that you’re a lexicographer has all the aphrodisiac potency of admitting that you enjoy reorganizing your sock drawer.

Yet the reputation of lexicography is starting to change, and the main reason is the emergence of a new generation of word mavens who brighten social media with linguistic curios and discussion points. Among these is Kory Stamper, an editor at Merriam-Webster. That venerable firm of course takes half its name from Noah Webster, and one of Webster’s key statements was that “the business of a lexicographer is to collect, define, and arrange, as far as possible, all the words that belong to a language.” As Ms. Stamper comments, modern practitioners shift the emphasis: Today the aspiration is “to collect, define, and arrange, as far as possible, all the words that belong to a language.” After all, no dictionary can document everything.

Ms. Stamper’s responsibilities at Merriam-Webster include defining new words and revising out-of-date entries. She also appears in its “Ask the Editor” video series, where she holds forth on matters such as the correct plural of “octopus” and the question of whether Alanis Morissette’s song “Ironic” actually has anything to do with irony—two topics beloved of half-informed pedants. Meanwhile, on Twitter, where wholly uninformed pedants outnumber any other group, she is a voice of sassy realism, apt to celebrate “badass word-nerd women” or proffer golden nuggets of trivia, such as the fact that the German word for a lower-back tattoo is “Arschgeweih” (which literally means “ass antlers”).

In “Word by Word,” Ms. Stamper maintains this “nitty-gritty, down-and-dirty, worm’s-eye view.” We learn that her suitability for her chosen career revealed itself when she was a child. Growing up in Colorado, she devoured her parents’ hoarded catalogs. At age 9, having gorged on a medical dictionary, she alarmed her father by announcing, “I’m reading about scleroderma.” Though she doesn’t say so, learning about an ailment that causes hardening of the skin may have been useful preparation for a life of being teased by people who think that logophilia is itself an illness, not an endowment. CONTINUE AT SITE

You Can’t Go Home Again (But You Can Hide Out)

The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation, by Rod Dreher. Sentinel Press. 262 pages with index. $25.00

There is something inherently odd about the Benedict Option, the view that Christians should retreat from the world into small and tightly-knit communities where they may live a Christian life with a minimum of disturbance from the evil side of modernity. Christianity by its nature has a universal mission. It speaks to the evil of our age that devout Christians want to encyst themselves against the secular world.

Rod Dreher, a prominent conservative writer, describes his Benedict Option as follows:

We live liturgically, telling our sacred Story in worship and song. We fast and we feast. We marry and give our children in marriage, and though in exile, we work for the peace of the city. We welcome our newborns and bury our dead. We read the Bible, and we tell our children about the saints. And we also tell them in the orchard and by the fireside about Odysseus, Achilles and Aeneas, of Dante and Don Quixote, and Frodo and Gandalf, and all the tales that bear what it means to be men and women of the West.

Dreher’s book has both the charm and merit of a participant’s account of the practicalities of withdrawing from the world. The first half of the book tries to account for the decline of Western civilization, an issue to which I will return later; the strongest chapters come later, recounting the experience of the religious who have tried to separate themselves from secular society, and exhorting the reader to embrace work, risk, and faith. Christians should be prudent, that is, not seek needless career martyrdom in pursuit of principles where victory is impossible; they should save themselves for family and community. Where believers are driven out of certain professions by the new secular inquisition, Dreher says, they should instead be entrepreneurial. Christians should rediscover the trades, where the religious can make a living without signing on to secular ideology. They should buy from other Christians and help Christians find employment.

These examples and exhortations will be of great help to religious people who find it impossible to protect their children from the plagues of pornography and commercialism that erode the content of contemporary life. Dreher proposes sensible, well-considered measures to achieve family and community independence from mainstream society rather than radical demonstration.

Jews have no business telling Christians how to conduct their lives, but there is something in the Jewish experience that resonates with the idea of withdrawal from the mainstream of society. When I speak to Christian groups the question I hear most often is: “How do the Jews keep their children in the fold?” The answer, of course, is that most of us don’t. As the joke goes, the difference between Donald Trump and a liberal Jew is that Trump has Jewish grandchildren.

The Crime of Complicity: The Bystander in the Holocaust by Amos N. Guiora, Ankerwycke, April, 2017

Amos Guiora, a law professor at the University of Utah, was born in Israel, moved to America as a child with his family, and later moved back to Israel, where he had a long career in the Israeli Defense Forces, serving in the Judge Advocate General Corps. In recent years he has been a faculty member at several American law schools. For the record, Amos is a friend, and we both attended Kenyon College.

Guiora’s grandparents on his father’s side were murdered at Auschwitz. Both his mother and father had near death experiences in Nazi occupied Hungary and Yugoslavia towards the end of World War 2. In his new book, Guiora examines the role of the bystander during the course of the years when Germany and its proxies slaughtered approximately six million Jews in Europe, nearly 2/3 of the prewar Jewish population on the continent.

Guiora’s key question surrounds whether this Nazi extermination program could have succeeded without the complicity of many people in the countries of Europe, who were not themselves perpetrators of the crimes against the Jews. Were they innocent bystanders or guilty themselves for failure to assist those in immediate need, oftentimes their neighbors. The author clearly believes that many more Jews could have been saved had bystanders intervened, and the bystanders were in many cases guilty of the crime of complicity.

Guiora extends his analysis to a more general approach to evaluate complicity of bystanders to crimes that they see in the modern world, including suggested language for when standoffish behavior by bystanders is in effect unacceptable, and subject to penalty of some sort.

My major problem with Guiora’s analysis relates to whether his suggested approaches to complicit behavior by bystanders today would have had any impact during the dark days of 1939-1945. The United States is a country with the rule of law and established procedures to deal with those who break the law — either as perpetrators, or as bystanders when the laws were changed in many places to make bystander complicity (however it should be defined) illegal. In Nazi occupied or controlled Europe, the idea that bystander behavior would have been better — more intervention to help the beleaguered Jews marching or being rounded up had there only been laws on the books to punish those who did not help the bystander if there were no physical risk to themselves — seems highly unlikely. At the Israeli Holocaust Museum, Yad Vashem, there are dedications to the righteous among those in Europe who took personal risks in order to shelter or assist in some other way the Jews of Europe. In essence, there were those whose values, ethics, or personal moral code required or enabled them to act. These people were a distinct minority among many others who were either indifferent or worse — in some cases creating additional pain for the Jews in distress.

Anti-Semitism in Europe during the pre war period and in World War 2 was widespread, more open than is acceptable today for most Europeans, (though that seems to be changing), and had a long ugly history in many of the countries where the highest percentage of pre-war Jews perished during the Holocaust. It is interesting that Guiora’s parents had little or no confidence in their neighbors or countrymen behaving any better than they actually did. Guiora’s father was saved from death by an attack by Yugoslav partisans on a march toward Hungary from a camp in Serbia. Yugoslav history during World War 2 was one of the bloodiest in all of Europe (10% killed), and resembles to some extent modern Syria, with shifting alliances and targets among ethnic groups with long histories of grudges toward others in their country carried over centuries. That his father was saved was more happenstance than noble behavior by a group. Tito’s partisans wanted to defeat the Nazis, not look out for the Jews.

Guiora lays out examples of where appropriate bystander behavior today might involve nothing more than using a cellphone, if one is in the presence of a crime, to notify authorities that someone was at risk of physical harm. No intervention is required which would impose the risk of physical harm to the bystander or his family. There could be other extenuating circumstances as well. He suggests that bystander complicity might result in a $500 fine upon conviction.

The type of legal approach suggested by Guiora is certainly a mainstream suggestion, already in existence in a few states, and would draw both proponents and opponents, depending on how one feels about personal autonomy and personal responsibility. But Guiora is certainly correct that doing nothing is often a contributing factor to creating harm for victims of attacks. This week, there was a report of a gang rape in Chicago seen by 40 people on Facebook, none of whom thought to notify authorities.

Violent crime rates in the United States are on the rise again after a long period of decline, and the clearance rate is way down from earlier periods. People won’t “snitch” on their friends or neighbors or volunteer to correct a fake news record (e.g. Michael Brown was an innocent victim walking with his hands up when shot by a policeman). But it is likely that police could identify who watched and did nothing on a social media site whose primary beneficiary at this point appears to be the company receiving ad revenue.

Guiora believes that laws that make bystander complicity legally liable will have a deterrent effect, making it more likely that fewer crimes are committed with wide public exposure. However, whether this is likely depends on whether the sanction is sufficient to change bystander behavior and or perpetrator behavior. Will the possibility of a $500 fine cause someone to call 911 when they see a crime being committed on Facebook, something they get to view because one is linked to at least one of the perpetrators who was proud to send video around of his “accomplishment”?

When I was a young child of 12 or 13 in New York, I was robbed on a subway train by three adults with knives and clubs while coming back home from Madison Square Garden to the Bronx. So too were two friends who were with me. The train car was an express during the robbery, with no stops, and no one else in the car lifted a finger to intervene. They buried their heads in their newspapers (this was back when people read newspapers). We all surrendered what we had, and that seemed enough for the robbers. But what if the perpetrators had been more malicious and had decided to pound us physically? My guess is that would have created even a greater inhibition for action by the bystanders on the train, none of whom would have been identifiable in any case after the event. The idea of bystander complicity being punishable will only work if there is no risk of physical harm to an intervener and the requirement for action is something as simple as a call to 911. But will a statute requiring such behavior result in more intervention (this occurs at times today with no legal sanction for non-intervention), or more people disappearing while crimes are being committed to avoid ever being questioned or judged?

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