In the New York Review of Books, Timothy Garton Ash reviews two new books–Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance and Ayaan Hirsi Ali The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam–and add his two centimes on the issue of Islam in Europe.

Buruma rightly emphasizes the cultural diversity of Muslim immigrants: Berbers from the Rif mountains are not quite like Moroccans from the lowlands; Turks have different patterns of adaptation from Somalians, let alone Pakistanis in Britain. In the nineteenth century, European imperialists studied the ethnography of their colonies. In the twenty-first century, we need a new ethnography of our own cities. Since European countries tend to have concentrations of immigrants from their former colonies, the new ethnography can even draw on the old. At the same time, the British, French, Dutch, and German ways of integration—or nonintegration—vary enormously, with contrasting strengths and weaknesses. What works for, say, Pakistani Kashmiris in Bradford may not work for Berber Moroccans in Amsterdam, and vice versa.

We have to decide what is essential in our European way of life and what is negotiable. For example, I regard it as both morally indefensible and politically foolish for the French state to insist that grown women may not wear the hijab in any official institution—a source of additional grievance to French Muslims, as I heard repeatedly from women in the housing projects near Saint-Denis. It seems to me as objectionable that the French Republic forbids adult women to wear the hijab as it is that the Islamic Republic of Iran compels them to wear the hijab, and on the same principle: in a free and modern society, grown men and women should be able to wear what they want. More practically, France surely has enough difficulties in its relations with its Muslim population without creating this additional one for itself.

On the other hand, freedom of expression is essential. It is now threatened by people like Mohammed Bouyeri, whose message to people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali is “if you say that, I will kill you.” Indeed, Buruma tells us that Bouyeri explained to the court that divine law did not permit him “to live in this country or in any country where free speech is allowed.” (In which case, why not go back to Morocco?) But free speech is also threatened by the appeasement policies of frightened European governments, which attempt to introduce censorship in the name of intercommunal harmony.

This interesting blog covers the struggle of Dalits (“untouchables”) in Punjab. Among other things, it covers the story of Bant Singh, a Dalit activist and leader of the Mazdoor Mukti Morchat (a part of the All India Agricultural Labourers’ association) who was brutally attacked early this year.

Two hands and a leg amputated. The remaining limb yet to heal, has turned gangrenous and may also have to be removed. His kidneys have been damaged due to excessive bleeding and he can hardly eat and digest any food.

And yet defiance still sparkles in the eyes of Bant Singh, a Dalit agricultural labour activist, as he lies in the trauma ward of a state-run hospital in Chandigarh where doctors are battling to save his only remaining leg and even his life.

It is precisely for this defiance, coming from a ‘lower caste’ Dalit, that Bant Singh from Jhabhar village of Mansa district in Punjab was beaten to pulp and left for dead by armed upper caste men around a fortnight ago.

(There is also an appeal for his legal and medical needs.)

(Hat tip: Linta Varghese.)

Tavis Smiley interviews Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez on “his oil-for-poor program, U.S. foreign relations policy, his controversial anti-Bush comments and criticism of the United Nations.”

(Hat tip: Katie Langrock)

Over at Phronesisaical, Helmut discusses values and voting.

“Value voters” and their prophets (James Dobson, etc.) maintain, however, that they are in the exclusive possession of a sense of social value. This is, of course, flatly false. The old idea of liberal procedural and structural neutrality has come under theoretical assault even by liberals. It’s extremely difficult or impossible to articulate a fair-because-neutral set of political procedures without importing in some other set of values about, for example, what broad objectives ought to be sought through politics, what goods ought to be distributed, what those “goods” are in the first place, etc. But that’s really not what is in play in the “value voters” discussion.

What is in play is what I mentioned above: an ignorance about social and non-social values, combined with one group’s particular beliefs posing as universals, combined with a stupid media that has no capacity to make any of these distinctions and thus who run with the expression “values voters.” The continued propagation of that misnomer simply builds an accidental political power into what is essentially a rightwing view on socio-cultural politics.

Yet, at the same time, the left and progressives haven’t been terribly adept of late at spelling out in clearer terms just what kinds of social and non-social values they reasonably think ought to be at the core of the broader political discussion. As such, they’ve found themselves defending particular policies but not providing terribly compelling reasons to accept those policies over others. The religious right provides such a substantive explanation to its constituents, even if, in my own view, its wrong, exclusionary, and even punitive.

From The London Times:

PRESIDENT Musharraf of Pakistan says that the CIA has secretly paid his government millions of dollars for handing over hundreds of al-Qaeda suspects to America. The US government has strict rules banning such reward payments to foreign powers involved in the war on terror. General Musharraf does not say how much the CIA gave in return for the 369 al-Qaeda figures that he ordered should be passed to the US.

The US Department of Justice said: “We didn’t know about this. It should not happen. These bounty payments are for private individuals who help to trace terrorists on the FBI’s most wanted list, not foreign governments.” The revelation comes from General Musharraf’s memoir, In the Line of Fire, which begins serialisation in The Times today and will further embarrass the White House at a time when relations between the US and Pakistan are already strained.

General Musharraf claimed last week that the Bush Administration threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” if did not co-operate with the US after the 9/11 attacks.

More here.

From The New York Times:

Hysteria is a 4,000-year-old diagnosis that has been applied to no mean parade of witches, saints and, of course, Anna O. But over the last 50 years, the word has been spoken less and less. The disappearance of hysteria has been heralded at least since the 1960’s. What had been a Victorian catch-all splintered into many different diagnoses. Hysteria seemed to be a vanished 19th-century extravagance useful for literary analysis but surely out of place in the serious reaches of contemporary science.

Functional neuroimaging technologies like single photon emission computerized tomography, or SPECT, and positron emission tomography, or PET, now enable scientists to monitor changes in brain activity. And although the brain mechanisms behind hysterical illness are still not fully understood, new studies have started to bring the mind back into the body, by identifying the physical evidence of one of the most elusive, controversial and enduring illnesses. Despite its period of invisibility, hysteria never vanished — or at least that is what many doctors say.

More here.

Frank Dituri. Full of bliss, Italy, 1996.

More on this Italian-American master photographer here and here.

In the Los Angeles Times, a review of Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s new novel, Wizard of the Crow.

NGUGI wa Thiong’o inhabits a world of subtle yet ever-present incongruity. In the mellow light of an early September afternoon, seated in the comfortable living room of his house on the campus of the University of California, Irvine, Kenya’s most widely lauded writer and his wife, Njeeri wa Ngugi, calmly discussed what it was like to be held at gunpoint by thugs, awaiting death. “We narrowly escaped,” Njeeri said.

Outside in the driveway, there was a pile of bikes belonging to their kids. Inside, before Ngugi began to discuss his new epic novel of the African postcolonial experience, “Wizard of the Crow,” his first in 10 years, the couple recounted their ordeal. It happened when they returned to Kenya in 2004, after more than two decades of self-imposed exile — an absence prompted by a personal grudge harbored against the writer by longtime President Daniel Arap Moi.

Ngugi and Njeeri were staying in a high-security apartment complex in Nairobi. Around midnight, four armed gunmen broke in (the children, luckily, were away for the night). “Humiliation was their goal,” said Ngugi, a 68-year-old giant of African literature who has been mentioned as a Nobel Prize contender. “Robbery is a capital offense in Kenya, but these robbers did not wear masks. That suggested that we were not meant to be around later to bear witness against their crimes.”

“We believe we were meant to be eliminated,” Njeeri added. Then she showed the scar in her forearm from the knife wound she received in the attack, during which she was also sexually assaulted and Nugugi was burned with cigarettes. It sounds horrific, but it was motivated by vicious boredom. “They needed something to do while they waited for something else,” Ngugi said. That something else, according to the couple, was murder. The robbers were merely detaining Ngugi and Njeeri until the death squad arrived.

In The New York Times Magazine, what, if anything, should be done with intersexed (or hemaphroditic) children.

At the heart of the controversy is the question of whether intersex children should have surgery to make their genitals look more normal. Chase has talked to thousands of doctors and others in the medical profession, making the case that being born intersex should not be treated as shameful and require early surgery. In doing so, she has assembled an impressive intellectual arsenal, drawing on everything from the Nuremberg Code and its prohibition against experimental medical procedures without patient consent to the concept of “monster ethics” — the idea that we perform questionable medical procedures on certain patients, like intersex people and conjoined twins, when we consider those patients to be less than human. Reports on the frequency of intersex births vary widely: Chase claims 1 in 2,000; more conservative estimates from experts put it at 1 in 4,500. Whatever the case, intersex is roughly as common as cystic fibrosis, and while the outcome of the debate Chase has stirred is directly pertinent to a limited number of families, her arguments force all of us to confront some basic issues about sexual identity, birth anomalies and what rights parents have in physically shaping their kids. Will a child grow up to enjoy a better life if he or she is saved from the trials of maturing in a funny-looking body? Or will that child be better off if he or she is loved and accepted, at least at home, exactly as he or she is?

From National Geographic:

Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia report that defects in the protein keratin 14 may be responsible for both diseases, known as Naegeli syndrome and dermatopathia pigmentosa reticularis (DPR). The lack of fingerprints can cause vexing social problems, which are magnified because few people have heard of the condition. Cheryl Maynard of Fairfax, Virginia, is part of the fifth generation of her family to have inherited DPR from her mother’s side. “My father was in the military and he had top-secret clearances,” she recalled. “We moved a lot, and everywhere we went they’d say, What do you mean your wife doesn’t have fingerprints? What do you mean that you have kids without fingerprints?”

Maynard has personally experienced many fingerprint-related snafus, often related to employment. She works as a flight attendant and noted that a standard background check by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, which took about 2 weeks for most of her peers, took 14 weeks in her case.

More here.

I don’t normally indulge in such piss takes but the hateful Zach Braff needs a smack down.

If Garden State is any indication, Braff’s weaknesses as a director go beyond narcissism. In the film, he piles on quirky details—a disembodied red gas pump hanging from a car, a guy in a suit of armor, a framed diploma on the ceiling—to keep viewers from scrutinizing his shallow characters and clichéd cultural observations. This is the kind of movie the Zuckers would have made if they used gags in the service of drama rather than screwball comedy. Braff also uses pop songs as a cheat, an easy way to heighten the emotional impact of otherwise unremarkable moments. The music in Garden State is so load-bearing that the movie becomes ridiculous if you swap in different tunes—if you don’t believe me, check this out.

more from slate.com here.

Tom of Finland invites an intimate, comedic gaze. If there were two keys words for his work, they would be “freedom” and “narrative,” rather than “hot” and “hunky” as some might hazard. True, the topics of a Finland portrait are very sexual, but as the artist’s choice to adopt the pseudonym “Tom of Finland” in late 1956 (the name accompanied his artwork submission to Physique Pictorial, which wowed the editor and earned “Tom of Finland” the magazine’s Spring 1957 cover) suggests, Touko Laaksonen understood that his work expressed an abandon that was not sanctioned by the homophobic, prudent regimes of his time.

more from artcritical here.

In 1846, Charles Baudelaire wrote a little essay called “What is the Good of Criticism?” This is a question that virtually every critic asks herself at some point, and that some have answered with hopelessness, despair, even self-loathing. Baudelaire didn’t think that criticism would save the world, but he didn’t think it was a worthless pursuit, either. For Baudelaire, criticism was the synthesis of thought and feeling: in criticism, Baudelaire wrote, “passion . . . raises reason to new heights.” A few years later, he would explain that through criticism he sought “to transform my pleasure into knowledge” a pithy, excellent description of critical practice. Baudelaire’s American contemporary Margaret Fuller held a similar view; as she put it, the critic teaches us “to love wisely what we before loved well.”

By “pleasure” and “love” Baudelaire and Fuller didn’t mean that critics should write only about things that make them happy or that they can praise. What they meant is that a critic’s emotional connection to an artist, or to a work of art, is the sine qua non of criticism, and it usually, therefore, determines the critic’s choice of subject. Who can doubt that Edmund Wilson loved literature—and that, to him, it simply mattered more than most other things in life?

more from Boston Review here.

Sometimes we think we know something, but we know it only in the most abstract way, which means we may not know it at all.

I can’t say it better than one of Daniel Mendelsohn’s travelling companions does toward the end of this powerful work of investigative empathy: “The Holocaust is so big, the scale of it is so gigantic, so enormous, that it becomes easy to think of it as something mechanical. Anonymous. But everything that happened, happened because someone made a decision. To pull a trigger, to flip a switch, to close a cattle car door, to hide, to betray.”

Others have grappled with this problem: how do you tell the story of the Holocaust in a way that encompasses both its vast geopolitical and its intimately personal dimensions? On the one hand, for instance, there is “The Destruction of the European Jews,” Raul Hilberg’s portrait of the continentwide project of genocide, which includes everything from railway schedulers to Zyklon B gas manufacturers. And there is “The War Against the Jews,” Lucy S. Dawidowicz’s invaluable account of the origins of the extermination in the perpetrators’ ideology. On the other hand there are the memoirs of survivors like Primo Levi and Elie Wiesel, along with numerous less well-known but no less affecting personal accounts. There is also an entire “second generation” literature, both memoirs and novels by children of victims who testify to the enduring questions the Holocaust has left behind, questions about the nature of human nature and the perplexities of theodicy — the relationship of God to the evil visited upon the innocent. There are novels about attempting a new life in the aftermath, like Isaac Bashevis Singer’s icy masterpiece, “Shadows on the Hudson,” and jarring, unconventional works like Art Spiegelman’s “Maus.”

more from the NY Times here.

From the Daily Times of Pakistan:

The coveted Sword of Honour for best all-round performance was claimed by Aviation Cadet Saira Amin, who made history by being the first woman pilot to have won the Sword of Honour in any defence academy of Pakistan.

The passing out parade of the 117th GD (P) course, which includes the second batch of three women pilots, was held at the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) Academy, Risalpur Air Chief Marshal Tanvir Mahmood Ahmed, PAF chief of air staff, was the chief guest. The trophy for best performance in general service training and the Chief of Air Staff Trophy for best performance in flying were lifted by Aviation Cadet Squadron Under Officer Nadir Ali. The Asghar Hussain Trophy for best performance in academics was achieved by Aviation Cadet Saira Amin. Squadron No 3 received the Quaid-e-Azam Banner for being the champion squadron.

Also in Boston Review, Michael J. Piore and Andrew Schrank on how a labor inspection system can ease dislocations and other human costs of free markets.

The operation of the labor market affects workers concretely and immediately, and hence is a flashpoint for clashes between social forces and economic exigencies. While many of the policies promoted by the Washington Consensus are only now beginning to encounter determined resistance, Polanyi’s second movement has been underway for some time in the labor market—and labor-law reform therefore constitutes something of a Waterloo for the forces of neo-liberalism. In fact, the labor-law reforms anticipated by proponents of the Washington Consensus have not only been “limited to a few countries,” according to Eduardo Lora and Ugo Panizza of the Inter-American Development Bank, but have arguably been more likely to expand than to curtail the scope of worker protection. For example, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic have rededicated themselves to labor-law enforcement in recent years. And potentially more fundamental reforms are underway from Argentina, where they are motivated by domestic party politics, to Central America, where they are a product of transnational pressures emanating from the campaign for a U.S.–Central America Free Trade Agreement.

The results are neither trivial nor cosmetic. In the 1990s the Chileans hired new inspectors and thereby doubled the size of their enforcement division. And the Dominicans not only tripled the size of their own enforcement division but simultaneously adopted new hiring criteria—including legal credentials and competitive examinations—as well as wage and employment guarantees. By the early 21st century, therefore, one of the Dominican Republic’s least reputable regulatory agencies had been transformed into a model of administrative reform, and the island nation’s inspectors were fanning out across the region to impart their lessons to their neighbors.

In the Boston Review, Henry Farrell on what “netroots” can mean for American democracy.

The “netroots”—an Internet grass roots that has set out to change the Democratic Party—are often maligned. These progressive bloggers and their readers, who emerged as an influential group during Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, are increasingly depicted as a sinister movement under the dictatorial control of Markos “Kos” Moulitsas Zúniga, the founder of the prominent political blog Daily Kos. The New York Times columnist David Brooks writes that Kos “fires up his Web site . . . and commands his followers, who come across like squadrons of rabid lambs, to unleash their venom on those who stand in the way.” The New Republic senior editor Lee Siegel (now suspended) warns portentously of the dangers of “blogofascism,” a movement bearing worrying similarities to the Fascist forces that transformed post–World War I Europe into a “madhouse of deracinated ambition.” When the netroots aren’t Nazis, they’re proto-Stalinists: Jonathan Chait sees them as heirs of the “McGovernite New Left,” possessed of the same “paranoid, Manichean worldview” and “humorless rage” as extreme-left radicalism.

These claims are hysterical to the point of near-incoherence. They’re also wrong. The netroots are becoming a power in the Democratic Party, but they aren’t under the control of any one person or clique. And while many netroots bloggers describe themselves as progressive, they are generally not leftists in the conventional sense. Certainly they aren’t committed to any program of fundamental political and economic reform. As Benjamin Wallace-Wells and Bill McKibben have both documented, the netroots aren’t complaining that the Democratic Party isn’t radical enough; they’re complaining that it’s losing elections. Netroots bloggers don’t share a common ideology. If they are united by anything, it is their harsh criticism of the Republican Party, their shared anger at the Democratic Party’s failures, and their rough analysis of how it could do better.

Brad DeLong takes exception to Duncan Foley’s new book, Adam’s Fallacy: A Guide to Economic Theology.

It must be a theology book, for Duncan Foley has worked a miracle, a dark miracle. He has created in me–me! J. Bradford DeLong!!–something that I thought would never happen: the desire to say something good about Jean-Baptiste Say.

Foley has done this with a book that claims that Adam Smith holds to a:

P. 3: moral fallacy… urges us to accept direct and concrete evil in order that indirect and abstract good may come of it… [while] neither Smith nor any of his successors has been able to demonstrate rigorously and robustly [how]…. Smith’s rationalization… requires… wholesale denial of the real costs of capitalist development…

Let’s get this clear. Foley thinks that it is immoral to weigh “indirect and abstract” goods that come from capitalist development against “direct and concrete costs”: that doing so is “wholesale denial of the real costs of capitalist development.” That is what Foley calls “Adam[ Smith]’s Fallacy.”

Amitava Kumar was to introduce Salman Rushdie at a lecture Rushdie delivered to Vassar’s freshman class. But Rushdie insisted that he’d cancel or that he’s not share the stage if that happened. Amitava on the affair, and his never delivered introduction, over at his blog:

Salman Rushdie came to Vassar College earlier this week to deliver a lecture to the Class of 2010–but he made it clear to the organizers that he would cancel if I was involved in his visit. I had earlier been asked to introduce him, and then, well, I was disinvited. Mr Rushdie and I have never met, although I have heard him speak several times. I presume his dislike of me has to do with essays like this that I have written about him in the past. I cannot say whether he has read my Passport Photos but it’d be fair to say that the book takes its cues from Rushdie. It was from him that we really learned to show some attitude. When I say “we” I’m talking of many contemporary Indian writers in English. But we have also sought our own paths, and in doing so we’ve also sometimes sought to renounce our past, the past in which Mr Rushdie looms so monumentally. I don’t know whether I could’ve usefully involved the freshmen at Vassar in a public discussion of any writer’s troubled relationship with his or her forbears; nor am I certain how much they (or, for that matter, our honored guest) would’ve valued a dissection of the ways in which criticism must survive in the world. But despite those uncertainties, I very much feel that an opportunity has been lost. In any case, here’s a part of what I had intended to say in my introduction…

Rushdie responds in the comments.

From The New York Times:

Now, just in time for the midterm elections, the collected columns of two passionate Bush critics, Lewis H. Lapham and Sidney Blumenthal, are landing in bookstores. Both, to varying degrees, suffer from a distorting case of Bush-phobia. Lapham’s “Pretensions to Empire: Notes on the Criminal Folly of the Bush Administration” is by far the more trying of the two. The editor emeritus of Harper’s Magazine and its Notebook columnist for more than 25 years, Lapham compares the Bush administration to a “criminal syndicate” and Condoleezza Rice to a “capo.” He likens the United States to “a well-ordered police state” and the policies of its Air Force to those of Torquemada and Osama bin Laden. He calls Bush “a liar,” “a televangelist,” “a wastrel” and (ultimately) “a criminal — known to be armed and shown to be dangerous.”

More here.