Due credit to Dearborn Muslims for sending the right message on Terry Jones

Tim Kowal 58 Comments

Pointing out the recent stories concerning Terry Jones’s plans to protest outside Dearborn, Michigan’s largest mosque—and noting that a local CAIR leader, Dawud Walid, among others, rightly and admirably criticized the legal attempts to shut down Jones’s speech—commenter BSK invites me to defend my argument that American Muslims have a “messaging” problem.  As readers will recall, I previously pointed out that many Americans harbor suspicions whether “moderate Islam” bears any problematic underlying connection to the “radical Islam” or “Islamism” practiced by our shadowy ideological enemies.  I argued that, even if we assume no such connections exist in reality, one of the reasons connections do exist in perception has to do with a “messaging” problem and, further, that moderate Muslims might be able to take steps to address it.  Given Dearborn Muslims’ apparently unequivocal message supporting Jones’s First Amendment right to voice his message—even while they strongly condemn that message—BSK and James Hanley suggest that those critical of Muslim messaging should at least acknowledge that Mr. Walid and other moderate Muslims got the messaging basically right here.  (See also here, here, and here.)

It’s a good point, and it deserves a response on a few different levels.

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A Plague on Words: Decimate, Disinterested, and Uninterested

Tim Kowal 57 Comments

A couple weeks ago, Ben Yagoda at Slate offered several examples of words and phrases whose original meanings seem to be fighting a losing battle against their incorrect contemporary meanings.  Some of the more surprising examples include “fortuitous” (it actually means “unplanned,” not “fortunate”), “presently” (meaning “shortly,” not “at present”), and “verbal” (meaning “in words,” not just “oral” or “spoken”).  While I appreciate that language is conventional to a certain extent, it’s hard not to be stubborn about the meaning of words.  That’s what it means to “mean” something, doesn’t it?  That, whatever it means, it will mean it predictably and reliably each and every time.

There are two particular examples on Mr. Yagoda’s list that are especially interesting: the traditional and new meanings of “decimate,” and the distinction between “distinterested” and “uninterested.”

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Capitalism is a Christian value

Tim Kowal 8 Comments

The Public Religion Research Institute finds that most Americans are unable to comport capitalism with Christianity:

Jamelle Bouie nods in agreement:

As it happens, they are absolutely correct; the Gospels are incredibly short on issues we associate with modern "values voting" — abortion and homosexuality, mostly — and incredibly long on reverence for the poor and disdain for the wealthy. Of course, that hasn’t made much of a difference to the United States, which through its history, has combined religious piety with stunning accumulations of wealth.

The “social gospel” has been with us since at least the late 19th century, but Jamelle seems to be talking about a different problem than capitalism.  In fact, capitalism is firmly supported by the Scriptures and by our God-given faculties. 

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A follow-up question on Arizona Christian v. Winn

Tim Kowal 5 Comments

I was too late to join in on Burt’s post about the Winn decision, but this was my question:  If Flast—carving out an exception for Establishment and Free Exercise Clause cases to Frothingham’s general holding that taxpayers lack standing to challenge federal spending—is a good policy that should be upheld, doesn’t that mean Frothingham represents a bad policy to a much greater degree and should be struck down? Similarly, should we get rid of the Chevron doctrine that gives so much deference to agencies and thus makes their actions, to a substantial degree, unreviewable by the courts?

My suspicion is that if you are a liberal, you will tend to reflexively like Frothingham because it protects big spending programs from challenge, and Flast because it permits challenges to spending that benefits religion—one of the relatively few sorts of spending programs liberals reflexively dislike.  Conversely, I also suspect that if you are a conservative, you are meant to dislike both Frothingham and Flast for precisely the same reasons. 

Why wealth inequality is not unjust, but power inequality is

Tim Kowal 34 Comments

In a previous post, I explained that one of the underlying sources of disagreement about basic economic policy is that first world economies are both theoretically and practically complex, and thus may be quite difficult to reconcile with one’s particular theory of justice—e.g., a theory that seeks to ensure some baseline fairness in the distribution of economic output (“substantive fairness”),or a theory that seeks simply to ensure some baseline fairness in the process of economic transactions (“procedural fairness”). Because tracing economic activity to tangible value is so difficult, it is also difficult to agree on the nature of our economic problems and how they can or should be fixed. Given the vastly different models of evaluating economic fairness, is there any way conservatives and liberals can get on the same page when talking about so-called entitlements like social security, health care, unemployment, welfare, et al.?

In this post, I attempt to explain the rationale and preconditions under a conservative political theory for the state’s provision of certain need-based economic concessions.  I then attempt to explain that while wealth inequality is rarely “unjust,” power inequality breeds injustice to the extent it compromises a political system’s guarantee of procedural fairness in economic transactions, and that if procedural fairness cannot be ensured, wealth inequality can no longer be deemed to be presumptively fair.

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“Wimpy” delivery of denunciations

Tim Kowal

A Muslim reader writes:

On the point of Muslims’ “wimpy delivery of denunciations”:

I agree with you that Muslims are wimpy when they denounce terror, but here’s why it generally happens:

Imagine if your people get murdered and butchered daily with little to no media coverage, including heinous crimes against children as well (how else do you explain the numbers by the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem, showing exponentially more Palestinians being killed than Israelis, even though the media presents the opposite image).  Here’s a brief excerpt taken from http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/net-report.html

Reporting of Children’s Deaths – 2004

Actual Number of Children’s Deaths
Israeli: 8
Palestinian: 179

ABC
Children’s Deaths Reported
Israeli: 8
Palestinian: 20

CBS
Children’s Deaths Reported
Israeli: 4
Palestinian: 7

NBC
Children’s Deaths Reported
Israeli: 8
Palestinian: 18

It appears that American media (and, naturally, American people) don’t seem to care.  So when a heinous murder happens against Israelis, everyone is at attention and Muslims are in the spotlight and asked about their position.  These Muslims want to denounce it because it is wrong and they don’t agree with it, but in those 15 seconds of media coverage can you really blame them to want to “get the point in there one way or another” that people shouldn’t forget the other crimes happening on the other side, those are just as bad.  After all, it’s a human issue not a religious or ethnic one.  Isn’t every life equally sacred, especially of children? 

Any reasonable person would understand the need to “fit this in there” especially since there is no other way that info will make it to the news or to the public.

However, I personally like to think “outside the box” and I realize that fitting a quick thing in there about the Palestinians also being murdered isn’t going to really help, at least not in that moment.  The way I see it, why take away from the otherwise great and sincere denunciation of violence, and not give non-bigots a reason to wonder why everything has to be tit-for-tat.  In the short run Muslims don’t get the frustration off their chests, but in the long run it may help their cause, and the other data of their people being murdered may eventually be exposed as well.

So I agree with you and I’d make this point to Muslims as well, but you really need to understand why they do what they do when they do it wimpy.  Almost any average American in a similar position would do the same exact thing.  I mean, who wouldn’t.  Think about it, it’s just human nature.  When my boss gets mad at me for not meeting a deadline for a customer, I (usually) don’t just say yes you are right and stay quiet, I am just boiling inside to put forth to my boss the message that the customer is also to blame for this and that—it’s just my natural defense mechanism when I’m in that situation.  However, I know that in the long run, my boss would respect me more if I just say sorry and not a word more and promise to not let him down again.  If he ever found out about the customer being partially at fault and knowing that I didn’t even bring it up as an excuse, he’d be even more impressed.  That’s the lesson Muslims should learn…i.e. to rise above the normal average human level and raise their moral bar to a higher standard.  That’s really their best weapon in this fight where the playing field is not level for them.

If Muslims have no outlet, and instead just complete silence and disregard by Americans for their plight, it only follows that when they do denounce terror they have a need to fit in a word or two about what is being overlooked on their people, but they should resist this and do better.

Muslims and PR: A response to comments

Tim Kowal

Because of the large number of comments, I hope it is acceptable that I respond to them en masse below.  

First, perhaps I didn’t clearly set out the nature of my argument and observations.  I did not prescribe how any Muslim should think about his faith.  I did not purport to impose a moral obligation on Muslims.  I did not claim that some or all Muslims bear all or even most of the responsibility for overcoming social and cultural problems. I did not claim that Muslims bear responsibility for the sins of their fellow Muslims.

Instead, the narrower point I am making concerns messaging, not beliefs per se. E.g., I do not doubt the sincerity of moderate Muslims who denounce terrorism.  Rather, I think sometimes that message falls short because of the way it is often (I hyperbolically said "always" in my post) presented. The denunciations are often boilerplate, or containing tit-for-tat denunciations.  According to the Wikipedia entry on the recent Itamar settlement attacks, for instance, “Palestinian Authority Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, said he ‘clearly and firmly denounces the terror attack, just as I have denounced crimes against Palestinians.’ During a tour in Bethlehem he said, ‘We are against all types of violence.’ ‘Our position has not changed. As we have said many times before, we categorically oppose violence and terror, regardless of the identity of the victims or the perpetrators.’”  Maybe his speechwriter had the day off, but this seems a bland affair for the killing of five family members in their beds, including a three-month-old infant. Other times, the denunciations are coupled with explanations why terrorism occurs, such as how it is not a function of religion only, but of economics, education, culture, and foreign policy, among other things. Truth be told, I find some of these explanations quite helpful—and as I mentioned, presenting these arguments among conservatives in the past has earned me accusations of anti-semitism or sympathizing with terrorism.  (Sometimes the right and the left really aren’t so different.) 

I just think the sometimes wimpy delivery or the packaging of the explanation with the denunciation makes the denunciation seem qualified and unforceful.  And I think that hurts the image of moderate Muslims—even among non-bigots.

Similarly, I did not argue that anti-Muslim bigotry is excused or justified due to the above described messaging failure.  I don’t know that I have any suggestions for how to resolve actual bigotry.  What I am proposing is simply that there exist non-bigoted individuals who wonder in good faith whether Islam and American ideals are compatible.  I recognize that some folks will insist it is the very definition of bigotry to ask such questions, but I’m not prepared to chase the thing down to any more rudimental level than that—if we are not able to agree on certain basic propositions, I think we are not compatible for conversation, you and I.  But if we are able to assume such good faith questions exist, and that there are non-bigots in the world asking them, then the question arises whether there might be any way the moderate Muslims community—whether through a political/media spokesgroup like CAIR, or AIFD, or something completely different—can help resolve those questions better than they have been.  I think there just might be.

In that light, I’d hoped it was clear that when I referred to “Muslims” or “moderate Muslims,” it was not to suggest all moderate Muslims are of the same mind or have precisely the same interests, beliefs, and concerns.  I simply meant to suggest that, with respect to the rhetorical issues, folks with a vested interest in accelerating the resolution of Muslims’ social and cultural problems in America might want to think along these lines.  Perhaps it was rash of me to assume the folks with such an interest would be Muslims.  At the time, I thought it a fair guess. 

Reading back through some of the comments again, it bears repeating:  I did not and do not purport to malign the Muslim faith, particularly not over any of the reasons described in my post.  I’ve shared many fulfilling discussions with the Muslims I worked with for over six years, during which time I was invited to and attended birthday parties and Ramadan dinners and other religious celebrations (I hung out with the ladies while the men prayed).  Many of our clients were Muslim-owned businesses.  I set up the computer network at a Muslim school.  One of my non-Muslim co-workers and I found amusing the large placard stretching across the six or seven stalls in the school’s bathroom that read “Remember, Urinating While Standing Makes You Unclean.”  But I always recognized that I shared many common fundamental values with the Muslims I worked and did business with.  As a Christian, obviously I disagree with Islam as a faith, but I don’t regard it as deserving special rebuke from other religions with which I also disagree.  In fact, I believe most Muslims are a wonderful component of our American culture.  Many people do not agree.  But among those, some could be convinced by some corrections to the messaging associated with Islam—corrections that I suggest can be made by its practitioners.

Finally, I understand many readers of this blog are now committed to the idea that I am a bad person.  Based on this, I assume they’ve already given up reading this post.  To whoever’s left, I wonder if, going forward, we could stipulate to the meaning of the term “bigot” just so I know what’s being accused next time I’m repeatedly called it.  Let me humbly suggest Merriam-Webster’s definition:  “a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices; especially : one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance.”  You won’t find any evidence in my arguments of an “obstinate[] or intolerant[] devot[ion]” to my own “opinions and prejudices.”  Nor will you find any evidence that I “regard[] or treat[] the members of a group … with hatred and intolerance.” Now, you certainly are entitled to pose this as a hypothesis along with a representation that you will proceed to find and adduce evidence to prove it, but, for what it’s worth, I submit you will not succeed.  Besides, it seems a rather nasty thing to do. 

Muslims and the need for reform or, at least, better PR

Tim Kowal 9 Comments

Two weeks ago, the Orange County Federalist Society, of which I am honored to serve as vice-president, hosted Andrew McCarthy to talk about the King Hearings on the question of radical Islam.  A few months ago, we hosted a panel discussion on the Park 51 mosque (a/k/a the “Ground Zero Mosque”) and the Oklahoma anti-Sharia law.  For some time now, I’ve been expressing concern over the fact that, despite Americans’ strong commitment to religious tolerance, many Americans continue to harbor doubts whether some fundamental incompatibility exists between Islam and Americanism.  This doubt manifests itself in such things as the reflexive concern over the entrenchment of Sharia law in America; skepticism over the motives of the Ground Zero Mosque; or outright fear that the nice neighborly Muslim who lives down the street might turn into another Nidal Hasan.  Nearly a decade after 9/11, Americans are still deeply conflicted over Islam.

I’ve previously offered my theory that the glacial pace of Muslim acceptance owes to the fact that Muslims are bad at PR.  Moderate Muslims have been too reluctant to distinguish themselves doctrinally from their more fanatical counterparts.  While we now have terms like “Islamism,” “radical Islam,” “Islamic extremism,” “fundamentalist Islam,” and “moderate Islam,” these are all apparently American inventions that don’t necessarily relate to any actual doctrinal difference within Islam proper.  As a result, Americans don’t have any real touchstone for understanding why some Muslims can believe in jihad while others don’t, why some seek to implement Sharia and others don’t, what Taqiyya is all about, or whether we need to take for granted that, in a world with a large Muslim population, burning a Koran in one part of the world will inexorably result in murderous mobs in another.

Shrinking this cultural divide really isn’t as hard as it seems.  One simple thing moderate Muslims could do to this end, for example, would have been to denounce the Park51 mosque.  Most Americans condemn the mosque as the tasteless, insensitive, oafish, irksome idea that it is.  Others worry this might send the wrong message to Muslims too dim to understand the difference between condemning an Islamic center in the shadow of an Islamist terrorist attack site, and condemning Islam as a religion or Muslims as people.  It was a clutch moment for moderate Muslims to clear their throats and rescue the two bickering WASPy groups with a clear statement of a true moderate Muslim position.  Dennis Miller got it right:

Now you can put me in the terror camp, I can’t worry about the earth, I’m too worried about the world and the thing that worries me the most in the world is radical Islam obviously and increasingly might I add moderate Islam. Because I’m starting to wonder when you guys are gonna declare a fatwa on the assholes within your own organization. Like I said, most of us don’t care about your faith, we don’t have an axe to grind with your faith but we are starting to bridle at how you treat your women and how you fucked up Cat Stevens. As far as this mosque at ground zero, can they build it? Of course you can. You know you can. Should you? You know you shouldn’t. It’s bad manners for you to do that there because of the people who died there . . . .

Moderate Muslims keep missing opportunity after opportunity to establish themselves as a group with any clear, cogent, or compelling message.  Instead, what we get from the American Muslim narrative is a mealymouthed condemnation of terrorism that is always coupled with a lecture about Israeli settlements or Israeli terrorism or the Israel lobby or American-Israeli foreign policy.  I made the point in a recent post about Terry Jones and Koran-burning that while two bad acts may be related, attempts to insist on drawing that link can be problematic.  In the case of moderate Muslims’ narrative on terrorism, their insistence on coupling terrorism and the Arab-Israeli conflict has the effect of suggesting that moderate Muslims, to some degree, mitigate the evil of terrorism.  CAIR, in  typical fashion, offers only boilerplate denunciations of terrorism and guarded acknowledgment of the problem of Islamicization.  Thus, CAIR suggests Islamist terrorism is no different than any other kind of terrorism, that we should not regard it as any special kind of threat, and that the King hearings were nothing more than a bigoted “witch hunt.”   

What moderate Muslims really need are more spokespersons like Zuhdi Jasser.   Jasser, a devout Muslim who testified at the King hearings, offering a strikingly different perspective about what American Muslims should be doing to advance the narrative.   Aaron Elias writes concerning Jasser and his views:

“[U]until anti-Islamist Muslims wage the intellectual battle against Islamism within the Muslim consciousness, we will make no headway against ‘the narrative.’"

Jasser founded AIFD in the wake of the 9/11 attacks in order to provide a Muslim American voice that would genuinely advocate and defend the founding principles of the U.S. Constitution. He has taken the fight against radical Islam to heart and sees it as a responsibility of all "true" Muslims. Where many U.S.-based Islamic organizations, such as CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America, claim to support the U.S. Constitution but provide dodgy answers and shoddy excuses for terrorism when the rubber meets the road, Dr. Jasser’s AIFD is based on the founding principles of the United States. Where CAIR’s rhetoric tends to create a tension between Americans and its Muslim members, the rhetoric of Jasser and AIFD refers to Americans as an "us" and not a "them."

"I have always looked upon myself, long before 9-11, as a Jeffersonian Muslim, if you will," Dr. Jasser answers when asked about his identification as a Muslim. "Along with the ideas of liberty as embodied in the works of our founding fathers, naturally emanating from that is a deep antipathy for Islamism (political Islam), salafism, jihadism, governmental sharia, and the global collectivist movement of the Muslim Brotherhood."

. . . .

"America is really the only laboratory in the world that gives us the freedom to create a third alternative," Dr. Jasser states with certainty. "That is, an Islam based in modernity that separates mosque and state and celebrates universal religious freedom and liberty."

Bizarrely, liberal outlets like the Huffington Post dismiss Dr. Jasser as a “friend” of Glenn Beck and the right-wing media’s “Muslim voice of choice,” and describe his testimony at the King hearings as having “added nothing of value to the discussion.”  HuffPo also saw fit to quote the conclusions of one Mazen Ayoubi, without explanation of his credentials, who complains Dr. Jasser is “hijacking our religion.”  HuffPo quotes an apparently equally unqualified Boston Muslim, Aatif Harden, who accused Dr. Jasser of being “right on the edge” of being an “Uncle Tom.”  Daniel Larison also has no love for Jasser after Jasser sided against Imam Rauf on the Park 51 mosque near Ground Zero.  T.A. Frank at The New Republic, on the other hand, gives an even-handed treatment of Dr. Jasser and his message, including his role in narrating the controversial documentary The Third Jihad:

This is a tough game to play. To those on the left, Jasser wants to deliver a wake-up message that danger is afoot. To those on the right, Jasser wants to say that Islam is perfectly compatible with modernity and mainstream American life. In short, he wants to stress that Islamism is a more serious threat than we think and a less serious threat than we think. … The end result is that Jasser is unpopular with basically everyone.

Despite Frank’s suggestion to the contrary, there don’t appear to be many attacks on Jasser coming from the right.  The left’s hostility toward Jasser, then, would seem to be predominantly partisan. 

Finally, and as Jasser also suggests, moderate Muslims aren’t doing enough to demonstrate their religion doesn’t have to be monolithic.  Americans want to believe that the Islam practiced by American Muslims is something fundamentally other than the Islam practiced by radical Muslims.  However, moderate Muslims haven’t made any significant progress in setting out the formal or doctrinal differences that separates them from the Sharia-embracing chauvinistic Muslims of Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan, for instance. While moderate Muslims seek to placate westerners by offering ready denunciations to terrorism generally, they fail to address the precise question on the minds of westerners: Is terrorism inextricably intertwined with Islam? 

Moderate Muslims and extremist Muslims both claim to follow true Islam, and insist the other camp has misunderstood or manipulated certain doctrines.  If your religion was called the Branch Davidians, the first thing I’d recommend is you change it, and thereafter never say or do anything that reminds anyone of David Koresh.  Kind of like how Mormons won’t even joke with you about polygamy.  I’d recommend something similar for Islam:  slap a “reformed” in front of it and work on putting as much distance between you and the terrorist, jihadist, theocratic, misogynistic, revanchist, violent extremists as humanly possible.  Americans are capable of accepting Muslims just as well as they’ve accepted any other religion.  The issue is branding.

We shouldn’t blame Terry Jones for the Afghanistan riots

Tim Kowal 16 Comments

I was late getting to the Terry Jones story Burt posted the other day, so I’m going to reprise my comment here along with some additional thoughts.

As is well known by now, Terry Jones’s fulfillment of his tasteless publicity stunt to publicly burn the Koran apparently triggered five days of protest and mob violence across Afghanistan, resulting in the deaths of more than 20 people.  Meanwhile, back stateside we seem to be struggling to come up with the appropriate narrative to frame the problem.  Is Terry Jones to blame?  To what extent?  Should we blame the Afghanis?  Islam?  Or are Afghanis and Muslims just “animals who can’t be controlled” anyway?

On this score, I’m always a little unsettled when Bill Maher says something I agree with:

All this talk of people who burn the Koran and nothing about the people who reacted in such a stupid way. We are always blaming the victim and not holding them — most Muslims, but at least a large part of Muslim culture that doesn’t condemn their people.

There is one religion in the world that kills you when you disagree with them and they say ‘look, we are a religion of peace and if you disagree we’ll (expletive deleted) cut your head off. And nobody calls them on it — there are very few people that will call them on it.

It’s like if Dad is a violent drunk and beats his kids, you don’t blame the kid because he set Dad off. You blame Dad because he’s a violent drunk.

I think this is basically right, and it ties into a longer post I’ll have up soon. 

Really, nothing good can come from talking about Jones’s moral culpability for the rioting and vicious acts of Afghanis on the other side of the globe. His act was sick and repugnant in itself, and that ought to be the end of the story. If there is some link to be drawn between his immoral act and others’ immoral acts, that’s a private matter for Jones to mete out with with his conscience and with God, and something for which his congregation and community should censure him.  But this certainly does not meet the “imminent lawless action” test under Brandenburg v. Ohio:  there was no intent to cause the rioting, and I don’t believe the doctrine applies to lawless action that happens in another country. 

Putting aside the legal connection between Jones and the riots, I think the analysis of the moral connection is basically the same as in the case of a woman of poor virtue who falls victim to rape. Her poor virtue and promiscuity may be immoral. And the act of rape is certainly immoral. But whether there might be any link between the two has such little relevance, and carries such a strong suggestion that the latter act was in some way justified or mitigated, that it is simply not worth even mentioning. In lawyer-speak, its probative value, if any, is substantially outweighed by the substantial danger of undue prejudice or confusing the issues.  It’s not to say promiscuity is not a problem, but when we talk about it in the same breath as rape, it tends to suggest that the rapist is in some way off the hook.  And that’s a terrible suggestion to make. 

In the same way, laying blame on Terry Jones for the lawless riots and killing in Afghanistan suggests that the murderous mobs, to some degree, should be let off the hook.  They shouldn’t.

The Transcendental Argument for the Existence of God

Tim Kowal 20 Comments

Here is the argument, made famous by Greg Bahnsen, stated as succinctly as I can manage:

By rejecting God, one implicitly rejects the only nonarbitrary basis for positing the existence of morality, order, causation, induction, sets, logic, numbers, and a whole host of other abstracts necessary for making the world intelligible. Such an arbitrary worldview is thus so defective on its face that its only adherents will be those who maintain a dogmatic belief in atheism—i.e., those who, as a matter of underlying precommitments, irrationally prioritize the rejection of God over the rejection of universal arbitrariness.