No, it’s not an “April Fool’s” edition. For that, I refer you to The Gamecock:
- Jobs Report Signals Improving Economy (WSJ) — Well, that’s good to hear, eh?
- Afghans Angry Over Florida Koran Burning Kill U.N. Staff (NYT) — Why can’t these people just write a letter to the editor or something? Or at least go after the people they’re actually mad at?
- New protests flare across Syria (BBC) — … And are met with deadly force.
- End of Ivory Coast Battle Seems Near (NYT) — An African drama you may not have been paying attention to.
- Federal workers worry over shutdown (WashPost) — Meanwhile, in another sector of the economy…
- House OKs Medicaid cuts (The State) — This is old now, but I missed it yesterday (not having time to do a Virtual Front Page).
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Very sad saga. I’ve only been paying attention because I had some friends there and their continuing concerns for the citizens who remain. It was a peaceful place for many years.
to clarify: I meant to write #4, Ivory Coast
#2. Your response is really flippant considering 7 or 8 people died.
It’s pretty hard to imagine how much honor/shame is the highest cultural value in these places, but it is.
And how are they supposed to go after the people they are actually mad at? Besides, they’re not individualists like we are (another cultural value); their values are clan values. So they see us as a block; immoral, pork-eating Christians, out to defame and destroy their culture.
We’ve been at it since the Crusades, and the British-American colonization saga continues, in their eyes. Only by living among them without military uniforms outside of our fortress compounds can we show them why we want to be different, and we can understand how they think.
“Only by living among them without military uniforms outside of our fortress compounds can we show them why we want to be different, and we can understand how they think.”
And then they’ll REALLY want to kill us…
Sorry. That’s me being flippant again.
Martin, yes, I was using facetious language, but I was also being serious. Civilized people DO write letters to the editor instead.
Though I’m a skeptic of American involvement overseas, I’m even more of an opponent of religious fanaticism of all kinds. So while all decent people should condemn the jerk Terry Jones for being an a—–e, it’s missing the point to say, as Sen.Graham did, that “free speech is a great idea but we’re at war.” It’s barbarism to kill people because somebody burned some words written on paper. Terry Jones burning a Koran no more merits killing someone than somebody in Afghanistan burning a Bible does. The disgust should be directed 100% at those who value an inanimate object more greatly than a human life.
The killing of U.N. staff does not seem like an appropriate topic for a sarcastic request for letter writing. This is why the U.S. really can’t make any kind of a difference in international affairs. Our flippant commentary is viewed by others as condescending. And it serves to inflame the radicals and radicalize the moderates. Brad would NEVER have made suggest an insensitive comment if 8 American soldiers had died.
I tell you what, if y’all found that comment offensive, I shudder to think what you’d think of the kind of gallows humor that is common in newsrooms. The death pools, for instance (which shock even ME).
But I wasn’t even making an insensitive remark about the deceased. I was, as I would think everyone would understand, highlighting the absurdity of people who are so fouled up that they react to a provocation, any provocation, in such an irrational manner. Violence I understand; it’s part of the human condition. But this is so far removed from even an understandable form of violence. This would be like me getting offended at something happening in Russia, and walking out my door in South Carolina and killing the first 8 people I run into.
If I did that, I would worry — and with some reason — that I might fail to communicate my point clearly. I would have wasted 8 bullets. Not to mention, of course, the moral considerations.
Anyone ever read Swift, by the way?
Herb makes an excellent point. We can’t begin to win acceptance with peoople that we do not/cannot understand. Their culture is so very different from ours. While I have no desire to go over there (they do, after all, want to kill us), they, at least are living to the norms of their culture. why we are tolerating the behavior of that Florida church without the rest of our “Christian country” pointing out to them how far their actions stray from Christ centered behavior is beyond me. And BTW I realize that the Florida church has the right to free speech. So do the rest of us. And ours should be directed to speaking out agains Koran burning or any other overt insult to another’s faith.
The Qur’an is for the Muslim the eternal Word of God–I was at a meeting a few months ago in which Dr. Al-Ansari from USC and a Christian speaker each spoke to the topic, “For Christians, Jesus is the Word made flesh, and for Muslims, the Qur’an is the Word made Book.”
The error is often made of comparing Jesus to Muhammad, but this is a false comparison. What Muhammad is for Muslims, Mary is for Christians, the vehicle of divine revelation, not the content of the revelation itself.
So to burn a Qur’an is technically the same as burning the host would be for a Catholic (I think–but I’m not a Catholic)–except that the outrage is much greater in an honor-shame culture. Dishonoring God by basically burning and insulting the revelation of Himself is the ultimate degradation.
I appreciate Brad’s humor, but most don’t really want to kill us. Most Middle Eastern people and Muslims feel totally misunderstood, or understand us as extension of medieval crusaders. What I’ve found in sitting down with many is that they really appreciate our attempts to understand and relate to them. Most of them don’t hate Americans, but they do hate the American government, especially the Republican administration of 2001-2009.
Many come to the US for graduate studies, but find our culture and people really hard to understand–no time for relationships or hospitality. They can stay for years in America, and never be invited into an American home. Some, including founding members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, have become more radicalized as a result of being here, but never getting to know us.
I will e-mail Brad a picture that I saw recently in a church; maybe that will help folks to understand how Muslims feel about us, since evidently a great number of us feel that way about ourselves–it’s a picture of Uncle Sam holding a Bible with a US flag of the 13 colonies in the background. It was in the middle of a whole bunch of pictures of church members currently serving in the military. Maybe Brad will think it’s post-worthy, maybe not. It certainly is, in my opinion, idolatrous, even though I appreciate the desire to pray for fellow members in harm’s way.
But Herb– the link breaks down when the Afghans are killing people who never burned a Quran. If they want to assassinate “Pastor” Terry Jones,it would be consistent, but to just label all Americans with his sin….
Many innocent Muslims perished in 9/11, as we all know. I guess in Al Qaeda logic, they had been co-opted.
[sigh]
It’s awfully hard to respect such a belief system.
Good point, Kathryn. Of course, it’s the very point (or one of them) I made in the original remarks for which I’ve been taken to task — “Or at least go after the people they’re actually mad at?”
And Herb, I appreciate the analogy of Word as Book, but… I know you don’t mean to do this, because you don’t have an iota of malice in you, from what I can tell… but explaining Islam to me like that always seems a tad condescending. Of course, I’ve gotten that a lot from well-meaning interlocutors ever since 9/11. People who read what I write day in and day out, and assume that I’m some ignorant hayseed who just wants to go “thump hell outta them raghead sumbitches” because whuppin’ up on furriners is fun.
Yeah, I get it. Different culture. Tribal. Honor fetish. Inferiority complex. Economic and political impotence with little outlet beyond a perverted form of an otherwise respectable religion. Etc., etc. When you talk about Muslim students coming over here and failing to get us and going home radicalized, I immediately think of a dramatic specific example — Sayyid Qutb, who studied here, didn’t learn anything about us that he liked, and went home to establish the Muslim Brotherhood and become an inspiration to the likes of Osama bin Laden.
I get it. I do read the occasional book. And I think about what I read.
Still doesn’t begin to excuse killing some UN workers because of what some hammerhead down in Florida did. And I’m not endorsing killing the hammerhead in Florida, but it at least would make some sense. Killing UN workers does not.
Also, the “Word Made Book” analogy, while neat, has holes in it. Yeah, I understand that they don’t see Mohammed the way we see Jesus; we deify Jesus. But… we don’t run riot and kill unrelated people because somebody draws a cartoon of Jesus. We might, as I say, write a letter to the editor…
And you know what? People who write an indignant letter to the editor are more civilized, and less of a drag on the world, than people who go out of their freaking minds and run riot in the streets and intentionally kill people who had nothing to do with the thing we’re ticked about. One of those responses is dysfunctional and the other is not, and I really don’t care about the cultural or economic or other trauma that leads to the dysfunction; it’s still dysfunctional in the extreme. To and ABSURD extreme. Hence the way I tend to refer to it.
Now watch — some of my anti-war friends will now speak of our military actions as being the moral equivalent of the running riot in the street. Which it isn’t, and anyone should realize after comparing the two and thinking about it for about five minutes, but… there are a lot of well-meaning people whose default position is moral equivalence, and it’s hard to get past that.
Which is why I appreciate the fact that Kathryn GETS IT that we’re looking at irrational behavior here…
“some of my anti-war friends will now speak of our military actions as being the moral equivalent of the running riot in the street. ”
How about the U.S. military murderers who have been revealed (despite higher up attempts to cover it up)?
The story in this week’s Rolling Stone about the unit in Afghanistan about premeditated murders, corpse mutiliation, and trophy pictures with dead civilians was disgusting. And the fact that military brass were warned of the problem and didn’t deal with it until much later during a separate investigation of pervasive drug use and the beating of a soldier who raised the drug issue was chilling yet sadly unsurprising.
The Pentagon likes to spin these stories as rogue individuals when it is really a case of trained killers being put into high stress situations with no clear objective.
“Many come to the US for graduate studies, but find our culture and people really hard to understand–no time for relationships or hospitality. They can stay for years in America, and never be invited into an American home. Some, including founding members of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, have become more radicalized as a result of being here, but never getting to know us.”
This is probably true – but when I was at USC, I was in a group that tried hard to get to know Muslims and all international students.
I found that they many had a wall up around them as many Americans did. In other words, most weren’t interested in “getting to know us” anymore than most of the students were interested in getting to know them.
Sorry Brad, I didn’t realize I came across that way. For someone who came to the whole cross-cultural thing rather late in life (it wasn’t until my late 40s that I began any real study of it in earnest), I probably tend to assume the other is as inobservant as I was. I’ve enjoyed learning new stuff, particularly from Dr. Al-Ansari; the couple of lectures I’ve attended have been really informative.
I do know a lot of folks, Europeans especially, who live in the Middle East, and they all–at least just about everyone I know–have been rather dismayed at American reactions over the last ten years.
Anyway, I’ll try and refrain from comments about culture in the future. Just one more for Kathryn–corporate solidarity runs high among non-Western people, generally people. You probably know that as well (not to come across as condescending!), but it needs to be kept in mind. We think individualistically; they don’t very much.
I’m not trying to excuse wrong behavior; just give a plea for a totally different worldview. Kipling had that much right–East and West rarely meet, even with globalization.
‘Corporate solidarity runs high among non-Western people, generally people.’
Forget the last two words. Typo.
Yeah, it runs high among Democrats and Republicans as well. And I disapprove of that, too. I believe in thinking, rather than reflexively going along with a tribe or a party, which I see as pretty much the same mindless association, what Vonnegut called a “granfalloon.”
And no offense taken, Herb. I was just saying that I fully understand that people are different. In fact, I consider Ahmed to be different from Abdullah, in ways they themselves may not acknowledge, being oriented as they are toward tribalism. I believe in dealing with people as individuals. And when those individuals behave as murderous cretins, I do not choose to excuse it on cultural grounds.
Sorry, but I can’t resist one parting shot:
Laying aside the issue of the actual value of their way of life as opposed to ours, the whole point is that a Muslim fundamentalist/fanatic is fighting for the very existence of their people and their civilization. This, which happens to be God’s civilization and way of life, in their eyes, has been under attack by the West since the Crusades began. It has continued down into recent centuries in the act of forcing nation/states, created by colonialism for the purpose of divide and rule, to be subject to the West.
Now it continues by cultural influence via the Internet, to which they are powerless to respond, except as any rebellion would respond–with the weapons at hand.
Add to that the Israeli genocide on the Palestinian people, which the West ignores–the only reporting on it is virtually by European news agencies.
We don’t fight for our way of life by writing letters to the editor, and we shouldn’t expect they will, either.