A silver lining to the recession may be that oil prices are going down, though still at far higher levels than they were just a couple years ago. The bravado of Ahmadinejad, Chavez, and Putin may be at least slightly tamed. Authorized Authoritarianism has gone hand in hand with oil wealth in Iran, Venezuela and Russia. Its license may now start to expire.
Hamas has started oppressing Gazans to a deeper degree. It is ferreting out freedom of assembly – even for innocuous civil society groups that are non-partisan and non-political. Here are emails from other groups of friends that circulated what they encountered:
The town hall meeting in [city name removed for protection] scheduled for today had to be canceled. [Name], the Director for the [host organization], the NGO which invited us to do the town hall meeting, informed me that Hamas Executive Force came into his office and asked him if he is planning on having any activities today, since he brought chairs & drinks and people are gathering around the office. [Name] told them that [Y] is scheduled to have a town hall meeting around 4:00pm. Hamas Executive Force told him to cancel the meeting; and he had to sign a paper stating that in the future if he wants to schedule any activity he needs Hamas approval in advance. I will update you if any new thing happen.
Have you ever wondered about the qualifications or provenance of all the insta-pundits that keep popping up across cable news? Jon Stewart did an intensive investigative report…
I got this over email and thought it was funny:
Amr Hamzawi provided an unusually frank self-admonition in Al Ahram Weekly about writing what his audience wanted to read, rather than what he truly felt, resorting to common scapegoats (ie, the West) rather than piercing through tougher truths. This problem is particularly acute amongst Arab academicians and commentators, but it plagues all societies to some degree, and the advent of the internet has in a sense actually exacerbated the phenomena of media sources that "affirm" rather than "inform" beliefs.
This article by Nathaniel Fick and Vikram Singh provides very practical and sensible prescriptions for progress in stabilizing Afghanistan.
To be fair to my earlier posts here and in the Huffington Post warning about the irresponsible incitement being fomented by the McCain campaign, John McCain at a town hall meeting on Friday Oct 10th reminded me finally of the John McCain I had admired in the primaries, in his acceptance speech, and in the last 10 years prior to his general election run and his selection of Sarah Palin as his VP. Here is some proof:
If the campaign continues to spew out terrorist innuendos through proxies including Sarah Palin, while McCain acts as the nice guy, then he should actually get even more blame for irresponsibility and hypocrisy. Indeed, some of the ugly comments you see in the video were to be expected – once you bring out the genie of racism & hatred, it is hard to bring him back in.
But McCain displayed extraordinary leadership in standing up in the midst of all his supporters and providing principled responses that visibly shook up the partisan crowd and channeled them towards the higher road. It sounds easy, but it takes enormous courage to tell your supporters, "No", and reject any support you get if it is ill-founded.
Here is hoping that the remainder of the campaign – on both sides – focuses on issues and is more principled.
Earlier today at a rally when John McCain asked, "Who is Barack Obama?", a supporter shouted back, "Terrorist."
And at a rally led by Sarah Palin, when she mischaracterized a New York Times story as pointing to an alliance between Obama and Bill Ayers, someone screamed "Kill him."
Neither McCain nor Palin have actually advocated such actions or said that Obama himself is a "terrorist," but they and their campaign have certainly engaged in smear campaigns creating enough innuendos to cause an atmosphere where such rants would not be totally unexpected.
This eerily reminds me of the atmosphere before Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Israel. Far-right Israelis had been engaging in a campaign of vilification against Rabin for months. Right-wing politicians had done nothing to discourage extreme incitement or death threats against Rabin. Posters filled the walls across Israel with horrifying statements and dehumanizing captions against Rabin. Extremist Rabbis said Rabin was betraying Jews and was cursed to death.
Then came Yigal Amir, the assassin who shot Yitzhak Rabin at point blank. When asked, he said he was inspired to kill Rabin to avenge the Jewish people and prevent him undermining Israel.
Suddenly after Rabin’s chilling assassination, everyone was against dehumanization and incitement. Everyone had condemned such vitriol all along. Everyone loved Rabin, the martyr and hero. It was unclear how all those posters got posted on the walls, or who had made all those calls into radio stations with threats against Rabin.
Before Rabin’s fate presages Obama’s, McCain and Palin – and in particularly Sarah Palin, whose hateful accusations earlier today were only little short of the more fanatical ones out there – have the responsibility to draw the line and demand from their followers a civil discourse based on the issues, recognizing the patriotism of their counterpart, instead of raising suspicions about Obama’s commitment to America, as Palin explicitly did throughout her rally earlier today.
If something happens to Obama, not only the McCain campaign but also all the "swift" teams and fear-mongering groups that are crossing the line will share in the responsibility for creating the environment that caused some fanatical follower to avenge the American people.
I find NYTimes columnist Frank Rich to be very insightful except for his obsessive Democratic bias. It makes many of his stories predictably partisan, reflexively anti-Republican. That said, this one contains some particularly interesting comments about the campaign.
