M. D. Aeschliman is the author of The Restitution of Man: C. S. Lewis and the Case against Scientism, and he recently edited a new edition of Dickens’s novel A Tale of Two Cities (Ignatius Press). He studied with Morris Dickstein at Columbia University nearly 50 years ago.
Morris Dickstein left Jewish Orthodoxy, but never embraced a Mailer-like egotism. In any moderately literate and moderately free society there is always and inevitably a “battle of the books” (as Swift put it) as part of a larger “culture war,” either chronic or acute: a battle over beliefs and values as articulated and conveyed in books and films, school curricula, and music and art works, as well as in political elections and legislation. As the cultural critic Morris Dickstein noted in 1997, “We are a nation . . . at war over basic social and moral values.” But we are also part of an increasingly interdependent global culture where a similar “Kulturkampf” is being waged.
One of Dickstein’s teachers, Harold Bloom, has been very influential in the world of literary criticism and literary studies — of how and what our very brightest students read in college and graduate school — and both Dickstein and Bloom, ten years apart in age (Bloom was born in 1930 and Dickstein in 1940), are important figures in a massive cultural-social development in post–World War II America: the emergence of Jewish intellectuals in positions of prominence in American cultural life. There is a great and grievous irony behind this emergence, itself a proof of the promise of American life through mobility: The last 75 years have represented both a Hell and a Promised Land for Jews.
There may well be a civil war going on within Islam, but it will be Muslims, not American politicians, who settle it. In Egypt, the president is Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, a pious Muslim. Having grown up in the world’s center of sharia scholarship and closely studied the subject, he has courageously proclaimed that Islam desperately needs a “religious revolution.” In the United States, the president is Barack Obama, a non-Muslim. His childhood experience of Islam, which ended when he was just ten, occurred in Indonesia — the world’s most populous Muslim country, but a non-Arabic one where the teaching and practice of Islam is very different from what it is in the Middle East. While Sisi sees a dangerous flaw in Islam, Obama believes America needs to be “fundamentally transformed” but Islam is fine as is.
You see the problem, no? Said problem was very much on display this week at the president’s “summit” on “countering violent extremism,” the administration’s euphemism for confronting violent jihad. The latter phrase is verboten because Obama will not concede the close nexus between Islam and modern terrorism. In reality, the summit had so little to do with confronting terrorism that the president did not invite the FBI director — you know, the head of the agency to which federal law assigns primary responsibility for terrorism investigations.
The summit was really about advancing the “social justice” agenda of “progressive” politics. The president and his underlings somehow reason that the answer to the barbarity of ISIS and al-Qaeda is to “empower local communities” here and abroad. Apparently, if the community organizers rouse the rabble to demand that government address “injustice” and Muslim “grievances,” the alienation that purportedly drives young Muslims into the jihadists’ arms will abate.
A Globe-Trotting Celebration of Erudition
Claudio Magris unleashes a lifetime of encyclopedic learning on the page in his magnificent ‘Danube: A Sentimental Journey From the Source to the Black Sea.’
The real adventure of travel is intellectual. Heart-stopping landscapes invite research into their history and culture, and books pile up in one’s library. Rebecca West’s “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” (1940) and Patrick Leigh Fermor’s “Mani” (1958) and “Roumeli” (1966) are memorable travel books in large measure because they celebrate erudition. But arguably the supreme example of this category is Claudio Magris’s “Danube: A Sentimental Journey From the Source to the Black Sea,” published in Italian in 1986 and translated into English by Patrick Creagh in 1989. Mr. Magris is an academic from Trieste, that quintessential Central European city, although located on Italy’s Adriatic coast. Every spot along the Danube provides an opportunity for him to unleash a lifetime of encyclopedic learning on the page. Mr. Magris is periodically mentioned as a possibility to win the Nobel Prize in Literature: It is primarily because of this one book, which is not even a novel.
Whereas the Rhine, he writes, “is Siegfried, symbol of Germanic virtus and purity, the loyalty of the Niebelungs, chivalric heroism,” the Danube “is Pannonia, the kingdom of Atilla, the eastern, Asiatic tide.” More pointedly, the Rhine is about the “purity” of one race; while the Danube, with its link to the Austrian Habsburg Empire, evokes a “supranational culture” beyond ethnicity. In this way, he explains, the German language forever maintains the possibility to connote universal values. This Austrian mind-set, both imperial and cosmopolitan, rooted as it is in a specific landscape, recognizes the “stupid nonsense” that is postmodernism, “while accepting it as inevitable.”
Mr. Williams is a political analyst for Fox News and a columnist for the Hill. He is the author of “Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary” (Times Books, Random House, 1998).
In his office hangs a copy of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery in America. When his critics, and he has many, call him names, he likes to point to it and shout out, “I’m a free man!” This black history month is an opportunity to celebrate the most influential thinker on racial issues in America today—Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas .
Justice Thomas, who has been on the court nearly a quarter-century, remains a polarizing figure—loved by conservatives and loathed by liberals. But his “free”-thinking legal opinions are opening new roads for the American political debate on racial justice.
His opinions are rooted in the premise that the 14th Amendment—guaranteeing equal rights for all—cannot mean different things for different people. As he wrote in Fisher v. University of Texas (2013), he is opposed to “perpetual racial tinkering” by judges to fix racial imbalance and inequality at schools and the workplace. Yet he never contends racism has gone away. The fact that a 2001 article in Time magazine about him was headlined “Uncle Tom Justice” reminds us that racism stubbornly persists.
Wesleyan President Michael Roth on the importance of understanding religious experience—and the difficulty teaching it
It happens every year. In teaching my humanities class, I ask what a philosopher had in mind in writing about the immortality of the soul or salvation, and suddenly my normally loquacious undergraduates start staring down intently at their notes. If I ask them a factual theological question about the Protestant Reformation, they are ready with an answer: predestination, faith not works, etc.
But if I go on to ask them how one knows in one’s heart that one is saved, they turn back to their notes. They look anywhere but at me, for fear that I might ask them about feeling the love of God or about having a heart filled with faith. In this intellectual history class, we talk about sexuality and identity, violence and revolution, art and obscenity, and the students are generally eager to weigh in. But when the topic of religious feeling and experience comes up, they would obviously just prefer that I move on to another subject.
What’s with Kim Jong-Un’s Hair? By Rick Moran
Who would have thunk it? North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un a fashion maven?
Say it ain’t so, Kimmy.
“Quirky” is an understatement. It looks like a cross between a 1950s “rocket” haircut and a bad afro from the 1980s.
And check out those “emoticon” eyebrows. Does Kim plan to star in an anime porn film?
Kim Jong Un’s latest hack job created another international incident.
North Korea watchers combing through the supreme leader’s appearance at a politburo meeting Wednesday were struck by Kim’s new look.
Kim was photographed with shrunken eyebrows the size of emoticons and cartoonishly high hair.
“O Europeans, the Islamic State did not initiate a war against you, as your governments and media try to make you believe. It is you who started the transgression against us, and this you deserve blame and you will pay a great price…. We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women, by the permission of Allah.” — From a jihadist video threatening Italy.
“We Muslims in no way need your help to drag us down into a sad, Western culture where youth suffer from a capitalist existential void which causes widespread depression, addiction, self-injury, and even an alarmingly high rate of suicide. It is clearly the Danish people who need help to find the correct meaning of life, and here we would like to help.” — Junes Kock, Danish convert to Islam and spokesman for Hizb ut-Tahrir, Scandinavia.
“There seems to be something going on in Scandinavian countries, and I think it’s been the reluctance to actually identify and confront hate preachers.” — Haras Rafiq, managing director, Quilliam Foundation.
Like math and the Midwest, ISIS confuses progressives. It’s not hard to confuse a group of people who never figured out that if you borrow 18 trillion dollars, you’re going to have to pay it back. But ISIS is especially confusing to a demographic whose entire ideology is being on the right side of history.
Raised to believe that history inevitably trended toward diversity in catalog models, fusion restaurants and gay marriage, the Arab Spring led them on by promising that the Middle East would be just like Europe and then ISIS tore up their Lonely Planet guidebook to Syria and chopped off their heads.
But ISIS also believes that it’s on the right side of history. Its history is the Koran. The right side of its history is what Iraq and Syria look like today. It’s also how parts of Europe are starting to look.
Progressive politicians and pundits trying to cope with ISIS lapse into a shrill incoherence that has nothing to do with their outrage at its atrocities and a lot to do with their sheer incomprehension. Terms like “apocalyptic nihilism” get thrown around as if heavy metal were beginning to make a comeback.
Can Jews just pick up and move?
Last Saturday, Omar Abdel Hamid El-Hussein opened fire during an event on “Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression” at a cultural center in Copenhagen, killing one attendee and wounding three police officers. The following day, he shot and killed Jewish security guard Dan Uzan and wounded a number of policemen outside the Great Synagogue, during a bat mitzvah celebration.
These attacks in Denmark were eerily similar to those that took place in Paris last month. First the terrorist targeted “infidels” who dare offend Muslims by expressing their views freely, and then he went after the Jews.
While the events in Copenhagen were unfolding, a cemetery in France was discovered to have been desecrated days earlier, with some 250 headstones vandalized and overturned.
Islamist criminal and terrorist networks overlap for a simple reason: both involve the same sort of individuals doing the same sort of things. European governments know this, because they operate in the common ground between crime and Jihad. Declarations by European officials to the effect that Jihadi terrorists are really violent criminals in search of a pretext are a particularly revolting sort of hypocrisy. Possibly the most disgusting thing I have read in a publication that purports to be mainstream is Andrew Higgins’ Copenhagen dispatch in yesterday’s New York Times.
[Copenhagen terrorist Omar Abdel Hamid] Hussein’s journey from drug-addled street thug to self-proclaimed jihadist declaring loyalty to the Islamic State has stirred soul-searching in liberal-minded Denmark over whether Islam, in fact, was really a prime motivator for his violence, or merely served as a justifying cover for violent criminality.“This is a very difficult question to answer,” said Manu Sareen, the minister for integration and social affairs, who shortly before the attacks began a program to combat radicalization through outreach to parents, schools and other efforts.….Often the attackers invoke Islam. But just as often, well before they had found religion, the professed jihadists built up long track records as violent criminals. Though many have become radicalized in prisons, they often seem determined to find an outlet for their violence.
