Later On

The Associated Press reports:

The British government and the Roman Catholic church colluded to cover up the suspected involvement of a priest in a 1972 bombing that killed nine people and injured 30, a new report said Tuesday.

The Northern Ireland police ombudsman’s report determined that Father James Chesney was the prime suspect in the blast in the village of Claudy, just outside of Londonderry and that the police chose not to pursue him. The Irish Republican Army has been blamed for the attack.

Despite the suspicions of authorities, the church and U.K. officials struck a deal that allowed Chesney to move to a parish in Ireland where British prosecutors lacked the jurisdiction to investigate him.

The deal was struck following a meeting between Cardinal William Conway, the head of the Catholic Church in Ireland at the time, and Britain’s representative in Northern Ireland, William Whitelaw, documents cited by the report said.

Chesney, who died in 1980 after suffering from cancer, had denied involvement in the attack, Conway told Whitelaw, according to the report.

The police at the time believed Chesney to be an IRA member, but the report made no conclusion one way or another about his potential involvement with the group.

However, according to the memo included in the report, a government official who was not named wrote that, "the cardinal said he knew the priest was a very bad man and would see what could be done."

The report is certain to raise more questions about what role, if any, the church may have played during the more than 30 years of violence that claimed 3,600 lives…

Continue reading. The Catholic church, as an organization, seems to be working to erode their moral authority as fast as they can.

TYD points out this intriguing article by Guy Deutscher:

Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.

In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.

Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.

Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts. The general structure of his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time. It seems barely comprehensible that this line of argument could ever have achieved such success, given that so much contrary evidence confronts you wherever you look. When you ask, in perfectly normal English, and in the present tense, “Are you coming tomorrow?” do you feel your grip on the notion of futurity slipping away? Do English speakers who have never heard the German word Schadenfreude find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing someone else’s misfortune? Or think about it this way: If the inventory of ready-made words in your language determined which concepts you were able to understand, how would you ever learn anything new?

Since there is no evidence that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: . . .

Continue reading.

14.5 minutes, non-stop. The villagers cheered when I skied up with the vaccine.

I was listening to Billy May and his Orchestra.

The point is that the liberal wing has no specific position on government size: agencies should be sized to do their jobs and meet the goals defined for them. The GOP, on the other hand, simply wants the government to be small, regardless of goals and accomplishments. Exception: the GOP supports have a military that uses virtually all the discretionary money the government spends—and the GOP wants to spend more there.

Steve Benen comments:

In a "Daily Dish" item yesterday, Conor Friedersdorf explored the ways in which someone like Matt Yglesias approaches public policy. Friedersdorf emphasized that Matt does not, conservative rhetoric notwithstanding, having a reflexive preference for larger government:

The desired end of Matthew Yglesias isn’t to grow the American state. On some issues, he sees a bigger state as a necessary means to an end he desires (like using subsidies to increase the percentage of Americans covered by some form of health insurance), and on other issues he favors taking power away from the state. It is useful to understand these distinctions, even if you think, as I do, that the federal government should be much smaller than Mr. Yglesias would have it.

It prompted Adam Serwer to note one of my favorite observations.

[T]he idea that conservatives don’t understand that liberals aren’t ideologically committed to the expansion of government the way conservatives are ideologically committed to the shrinking of government is indicative of the fact that conservative conversations about liberals take place in an alternate reality. Liberals believe that government has a responsibility to help people, especially those at the margins, cope with the exigencies of the free market, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to support a local height requirement in Washington, D.C., that artificially inflates the price of living space because it prevents the construction of housing with greater density. The means and outcome of policy matters, rather than the size of the role government ultimately plays. Yglesias is hardly unique in that sense.

On the other hand, I’m not sure I believe that conservatives don’t really understand the difference.

I continue to see this as one of the fundamental differences between the left and right — one considers smaller government an end unto itself, while the other cares infinitely more about policy outcomes than the size of government. Liberals and conservatives don’t only disagree on political goals, they differ on the kinds of goals worth pursuing.

Paul Krugman had an item on this in April: "On the right, people are for smaller government as a matter of principle — smaller government for its own sake. And so they naturally imagine that their opponents must be their mirror image, wanting bigger government as a goal in itself. But it’s not true. I don’t know any progressives who gloat over increases in the federal payroll or the government share of GDP. Progressives have things they want the government to do — like guaranteeing health care. Size per se doesn’t matter. But people on the right apparently can’t get that."

No, they really don’t. The liberal worldview is not about necessarily increasing the size of government or raising taxes; those mechanisms are only valuable insofar as they reach the desired end-point. For the right, it’s the other way around — the ideological goal is the desired end-point.

I can imagine a scenario in which the president hosts a big meeting with all the congressional leaders, and suggests it’s time to review the economic recovery efforts of the last year and a half, looking closely at what worked and what didn’t, and then working on what to do next. For Dems, the task would be fairly straightforward — let’s do more of what was the most effective, and less of what was the least effective.

For Republicans, it doesn’t work quite that way — they have ideological ideals that outweigh evidence. GOP leaders could be shown incontrovertible evidence that the most effective methods of creating jobs and improving the economy are aid to states, infrastructure investment, unemployment insurance, and food stamps, and they’d still say tax cuts for millionaires is the better way to go. Why? Because their ideology dictates that government spending is bad, government intervention in the economy is bad, and tax cuts are good.

Jon Chait had a terrific piece on this larger dynamic several years ago.

We’re accustomed to thinking of liberalism and conservatism as parallel ideologies, with conservatives preferring less government and liberals preferring more. The equivalency breaks down, though, when you consider that liberals never claim that increasing the size of government is an end in itself. Liberals only support larger government if they have some reason to believe that it will lead to material improvement in people’s lives. Conservatives also want material improvement in people’s lives, of course, but proving that their policies can produce such an outcome is a luxury, not a necessity.

The contrast between economic liberalism and economic conservatism, then, ultimately lies not only in different values or preferences but in different epistemologies. Liberalism is a more deeply pragmatic governing philosophy — more open to change, more receptive to empiricism, and ultimately better at producing policies that improve the human condition — than conservatism.

Now, liberalism’s pragmatic superiority wouldn’t matter to a true ideological conservative any more than news about the medical benefits of pork (to pick an imaginary example) would cause a strictly observant Jew to begin eating ham sandwiches. But, if you have no particular a priori preference about the size of government and care only about tangible outcomes, then liberalism’s aversion to dogma makes it superior as a practical governing philosophy.

Those on the right want to cut taxes, because tax cuts are necessarily good. They want smaller government, because smaller government is necessarily good. They want to privatize public programs because privatization is necessarily good.

The left has no parallel ideological desires (wanting bigger government just for the sake of having bigger government).

The left starts with a policy goal (more people with access to medical care, more students with access to college, less pollution, more Wall Street safeguards) and crafts proposals to try to complete the task. The right starts with an ideological goal (smaller government, more privatization, lower taxes) and works backwards.

Jonah Lehrer (a superstar himself) summarizes what is known about developing exceptional human skills. He begins:

The 10,000 hour rule has become a cliché. This is the idea, first espoused by K. Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida State University, that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice before any individual can become an expert. The corollary of this rule is that that differences in talent reflect differences in the amount and style of practice, and not differences in innate ability. As Ericsson wrote in his influential review article “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance”: “The differences between expert performers and normal adults are not immutable, that is, due to genetically prescribed talent. Instead, these differences reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance.”

On the one hand, this is a deeply counter-intuitive idea. (It’s best articulated in Gladwell’s excellent Outliers and Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code.) Although we pretend to be egalitarians, we really believe that the talented are naturally “gifted”. You and I can’t become chess grandmasters, or NBA superstars, or concert pianists, simply because we don’t have the necessary anatomy. Endless hours of hard work won’t compensate for our biological limitations. When fate was handing out skill, we got screwed.

And yet, the 10,000 hour rule also echoes a long-standing belief about how talent happens. Let’s call this the parable of Tiger Woods. The story goes something like this: When Tiger Woods was an infant, his dad, Earl, moved his high chair into the garage. This was where Earl practiced his golf swing, hitting balls into a soccer net after work. Tiger was captivated by the swift movement. For hours on end, he would watch his father smack hundreds of balls. When Tiger was nine months old, Earl sawed off the top of an old golf club. Tiger could barely walk – and he had yet to utter a single word – but he quickly began teeing off on the Astroturf next to his father. When Tiger was 18 months old, Earl started taking him to the driving range. By the age of three, Tiger was playing nine hole courses, and shooting a 48. That same year, he began identifying the swing flaws of players on the PGA tour. (“Look Daddy,” Tiger would say, “that man has a reverse pivot!”) He finally beat his father – by a single stroke, with a score of 71 – when he was eleven. At fifteen, he became the youngest player to ever win the United States Junior Amateur championship. At eighteen, he became the youngest player to ever win the United States Amateur championship, a title he kept for the next three years. In 1997, when he was only 21, Tiger won the Masters at Augusta by the largest margin in a major championship in the 20^th century. Two months later he became the number one golfer in the world.

The lesson of Tiger Woods is . . .

Continue reading.

It was good to get a day off. I even took off the Nordic, but I continued to observe good eating habits. I made a couple of things.

When I buy boneless chicken breasts, I do buy them with skin-on (much cheaper). I bring to the boil a big pot of water containing:

Carrots
Celery
Onion
Other as desired (whole allspice, whole cloves, star anise, etc.)

Once at the boil, I cover and reduce heat to simmer for 40 minutes.

Remove and discard veg, using a slotted spoon. Return broth to heat and add:

Chicken breasts

Bring to boil, reduce heat, cover, and simmer for 20 minutes. Let chicken breasts cool in stock for 10 minutes then remove breasts, remove and discard skin from breasts, and refrigerate breasts.

Now I have a very nice stock. I always use it for something, and yesterday Whole Foods had fish for stew: cut up pieces of a variety of fish (including things like swordfish, salmon, and the like): just $8/lb and some very pricey fish included. Good-sized chunks, too.

I added that, some lemon juice, a chopped onion, and what was left of my lunchtime salad—I thought the greens would go well, and the seasonings would be fine. I wanted some carbs in the soup and didn’t feel like rice or pasta, so I added some red quinoa, which was pre-rinsed.

I simmered for 15 minutes. Extremely tasty.

I also made this recipe for dinner, except that I used calamari steak cut into strips.

I had some dandelion greens left over, so this morning I used a little coconut butter and about 1/4 c of water to sauté 1/4 chopped onion and three minced cloves of garlic, then added the leftover greens and cooked covered, stirring occasionally, for 6-8 minutes. Then I put that in a bowl, added my oat groats cooked with turmeric and a sliced 7-minute hard-boiled egg and a good splash of homemade hot sauce. A very nice breakfast indeed.

I recently blogged about Queen Charlotte Soaps, LLC. I received my first order (well packed, Priority Mail) yesterday, so I was eager to give it a go this morning. He says that he shaving soap is more on the order of a shaving cream, and he’s right: it’s quite a soft soap (like, for example, Figaro, but with a totally different fragrance).

I like Cedarwood-Lemongrass, an unusual fragrance, and the lather I got was quite good: lots of lather for all the passes, and it worked well. My Gillette Executive with a previously used Gillette 7 O’Clock SharpEdge blade, did three smooth passes, and then a splash of Pashana sent me on my way, feeling refreshed and fragrant.

I got to feeling I needed a break. Blogging will resume with full force tomorrow.

To tide you over, read this carefully and think it over.

Via Dan Colman at Open Culture:

America, as a nation, has some big fish to fry these days. But the energy is being focused right now on a symbolic question. Can the nation tolerate the building of an Islamic cultural center and mosque near Ground Zero almost a decade after the 9/11 attacks? Or, more to the point, can America uphold one of its core values – religious tolerance? The debate has smoldered on throughout the summer, and we’ve seen the hard right and left condemn the Cordoba Initiative and Islam more generally. On the right, Newt Gingrich has talked about  how we’re facing an “Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization.” And built into his thinking is the assumption that when Christians commit abhorrent crimes, it’s a perversion of the religion, not an indictment of its essence. But the same charity  doesn’t get extended to the Islamic minority faith in the country. Meanwhile, Sam Harris on the secular/atheist left gets in bed with Gingrich when he says“there is much that is objectionable—and, frankly, terrifying—about the religion of Islam and about the state of discourse among Muslims living in the West.” If it matters, the main difference between Harris and Gingrich is Harris’ consistency, which boils down to a consistent contempt for religion. (Partially Examined Life takes a much closer look at Harris’ arguments here).

All of this makes me wonder: What would someone who actually knows something about Islam say about the whole affair? So here you have it. Karen Armstrong, one of the most well known thinkers in the field of comparative religion, a former Catholic nun, and the author most recently of The Case for God, offering her thoughts on the matter above

Zaid Jilani at ThinkProgress:

NY1 reports today of a likely hate crime in New York City, which has been the site of an ugly, emotional debate over the proposed Park 51 Islamic community center near the site of Ground Zero. The news station reports that a cab driver was attacked by a young man who appears to have assaulted him due to his Islamic faith. The man reportedly asked the driver if he was Muslim, and when he confirmed that he was, the young man attacked the driver, slashing him “in the throat, arm and lip” with a knife:

A city cab driver is in the hospital after being stabbed by a passenger who allegedly asked if he was Muslim, police tell NY1. Investigators with the New York City Police Department say it all began Monday night when a 21-year-old man hailed a cab at 24th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan.

Police say the passenger asked the driver, “Are you Muslim?” When the driver said yes the passenger pulled a knife and slashed him in the throat, arm and lip.

Both the driver and the alleged attacker are currently hospitalized in Bellevue Hospital. The first casualty of the “Ground Zero mosque.”

UPDATET: PM reports that the attacker will be charged with attempted murder and committing a hate crime.

UPDATE: The New York Times has more details on the attack:

The passenger, Michael Enright, 21, of Brewster, N.Y., hailed the cab at Second Avenue and East 24th Street around 6 p.m. Tuesday, the police said. Twenty blocks north, they said, he slashed and stabbed the 43-year-old driver in his throat, face and arm. [...] After falling silent for a few minutes, the passenger began cursing and screaming, and then yelled, “Assalamu alaikum — consider this a checkpoint!” and slashed Mr. Sharif across the neck, and then on the face from his nose to his upper lip, the alliance said. [...] “I feel very sad,” Mr. Sharif said in a statement released by the taxi workers’ alliance. “I have been here more than 25 years. I have been driving a taxi more than 15 years. All my four kids were born here. I never feel this hopeless and insecure before.”

UPDATE: Politico‘s Ben Smith finds that Enright is an employee "Internet media company who had recently spent time with a combat unit in Afghanistan filming military exercises until this past May." He was also a volunteer for Intersections International, an interfaith dialogue group that had recently put out a statement in support of building Park 51.

Nick Baumann and David Corn report at Mother Jones:

President Barack Obama has declared that a group of moderate Muslims have the right to build a community center in lower Manhattan, two blocks from the site once occupied by the World Trade Center towers. Yet representatives of a wholly US government-funded outfit have joined the vociferous opposition to the Park51 or Cordoba House project that critics have dubbed the "Ground Zero Mosque." A leader of this group—which receives $4.3 million a year from the government—has even proclaimed that the community center could be a front for Islamic terrorism. That’s not all: the same agency, the US Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCRIF), has been the subject of an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission complaint for allegedly discriminating against Muslim employees.

The commission was created by Congress in 1998 to monitor religious freedom around the world and scold countries that aren’t meeting religious freedom obligations outlined by international human rights treaties. Its sole source of funding is the US government; it is empowered to make recommendations to the president about policy decisions related to issues of religious freedom. Recently, the commission has decried Vietnam for its systemic violation of religious freedom and slammed China for its repression of Uighur Muslims. But leading conservative members of the commission have supported the opposition to the Cordoba House, essentially joining those who want to deny New York Muslims the freedom to build their religious and cultural center at this particular site.

In a recent piece for National Review Online, Nina Shea, one of USCIRF’s nine commissioners (who are selected by the president and congressional leaders), wrote that instead of "a cultural center for all New Yorkers," the "mosque" project could be "a potential tool for Islamists"—suggesting it would be a hotbed of jihadism that, among other things, spreads the literature and ideas of Islamic extremism. She compared the leaders of the Cordoba House project to convicted terrorist Omar Abdel Rahman (the "blind Sheikh") and accused Fort Hood and Christmas Day bombing coordinator Anwar al-Awlaki. (Shea’s piece, as of Monday, was no longer showing up on the NRO site.)

Shea, long an influential figure in neoconservative circles last appointed to the commission by House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), is not the only commissioner of this religious freedom organization trying to block the Cordoba House project. Leonard Leo, the chairman of the commission and a top official in the conservative Federalist Society, is director of Liberty Central, a new tea party-related rightwing group organized by Virginia Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, and Liberty Central has organized a petition campaign against the Cordoba House project. Moreover, Virginia Thomas is one of several conservative leaders participating in a 9/11 rally against the Cordoba House project, organized in part by anti-Islam activist/blogger Pam Geller, who runs an organization called Stop Islamization of America and who kick-started the "mosque" controversy. (Geller recently said that Obama has "sided with Islamic jihadists.") To break this down: the chairman of the US Commission for International Religious Freedom (Leonard Leo) is working closely with a conservative activist (Virginia Thomas) who is a featured speaker at an event being mounted by an outright anti-Islam group. [Regarding Thomas' participation in this rally, see the update below.]

And as TPM reported, Richard Land, another USCIRF commissioner and the influential president of the conservative Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, has opposed the project, comparing it to a (non-existent) Shinto shrine near Pearl Harbor and a (never-built) convent near Auschwitz. (Land says that the USCIRF itself is prohibited from intervening in domestic matters, but the commission has officially criticized a Saudi-run high school in Alexandria, Virginia.)

The USCIRF also happens to have connections to former UN ambassador John Bolton, one of the fiercest critics of the Cordoba House project. Bolton served as a USCIRF commissioner in the early years of the George W. Bush administration, and Jackie Wolcott, the commission’s current executive director, worked under Bolton when Bolton was in charge of nuclear nonproliferation efforts within the Bush State Department. (Bolton wrote the forward to Geller’s anti-Islam book and is another scheduled speaker at her September 11 rally against the project.)

The USCIRF may have internal problems with Muslims, too. In February, the Washington Post broke the news of religious infighting at USCIRF. According to the Post, Safiya Ghori-Ahmad, a former policy analyst at the commission, filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, alleging that her contract was cancelled because she was a Muslim and affiliated with the Muslim Public Affairs Counsel, an advocacy group. Another researcher at the commission, Bridget Kustin, quit in protest after Ghori-Ahmad’s contract was not renewed. In her resignation letter, Kustin wrote that she did not want to "remain part of an organization that would be willing to engage in such discrimination."

In a message on the commission’s website, Leonard Leo notes that …

Continue reading.

Stephanie Mencimer reports at Mother Jones:

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child was first issued in 1989 as a landmark human rights document defining basic rights for children under the age of 18. It’s so uncontroversial that every member of the UN has signed it. Every member, that is, but the U.S. and Somalia, and the only reason Somalia never signed it is that it hasn’t had a functioning government capable of signing. But even that wretched country last year announced plans to ratify the treaty. So that leaves the U.S. as the only civilized country in the world that won’t ratify an international document pledging to create a legal culture that acts in the best interest of the child (rather than, say, treats them like chattel). During the 2008 campaign, President Obama observed,"It’s embarrassing to find ourselves in the company of Somalia, a lawless land." His administration has attempted to revive efforts to get the damn thing ratified after more than 20 years of political wrangling.

But it doesn’t look like the treaty is going to get anywhere on Obama’s watch, either, despite having renowned children’s rights lawyer Hillary Clinton running the State Department. Religious conservatives, especially in the homeschooling movement, are raising a stink about the treaty and trying to get Congress to pass a constitutional amendment that would make it virtually impossible for the US to ever ratify it. Their main objections? Under the treaty, "parents would no longer be able to administer reasonable spankings to their children," the government couldn’t sentence teenagers to life in prison, kids could get sex-ed and birth control if they wanted it, and–gasp!–children would be able to choose their own religion, according to a fact sheet published by ParentalRights.org, an outfit headed up by Michael Farris, the homeschooling movement’s legal mastermind. The group is dedicated to winning passage of the parental rights amendment.

On Sunday, WorldNet Daily reported on the latest fury over the UN treaty and a renewed interest among conservatives in fighting it. WND noted that 31 Republicans in the Senate have expressed opposition to ratification in a move that seems directly related to the rise of the tea party movement. Farris told WND, "The whole notion that government wants to invade our lives in every sphere has awakened the American public, and frankly has aroused a sleeping giant."

I simply don’t understand what the GOP means by "family values," but it seems to include going out with prostitutes while the wife sits at home (better, I suppose, than the wife joining in), hitting kids, having sex with your best friend’s wife and then trying to pay him off with a good job, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and the like: a cesspool of human values.

Alex Pareene in Salon:

Jonah Goldberg, whose columns are apparently published in grown-up newspapers for consumption by literate adults, uses today’s to expand on a theme that he first toyed with at The Corner last week: Liberals are the real intolerant ones because they make up "Islamophobia" and accuse Real Americans of it.

Here’s the lede:

Here’s a thought: The 70% of Americans who oppose what amounts to an Islamic Niketown two blocks from ground zero are the real victims of a climate of hate, and anti-Muslim backlash is mostly a myth.

First: "an Islamic Niketown"? What … what does that mean? Will there be shoes for sale? Are Americans objecting to the commercialization of the sacred ground near but not adjacent or particularly related to the former site of the World Trade Center, where a complex of commercial office building are currently being constructed? Couldn’t Goldberg, who is Jewish and from New York, have come up with an analogy that actually helped explain to his readers what he is talking about?

The data backing up Goldberg’s thesis? FBI hate crime statistics. That’s it. There were only 481 hate crimes against Muslims in 2001, "the year a bunch of Muslim terrorists murdered 3,000 Americans in the name of Islam on Sept. 11," Jonah helpfully reminds us. ("Now, that was a hate crime," he adds, because he is a truly execrable columnist.)

Goldberg certainly doesn’t like hate crimes, but he finds that to be an acceptable number of them. Although, the ADL presented the FBI’s numbers with the disclaimer that "anti-Islamic" bias crimes are hard to classify, because people were going around stabbing Sikhs and blowing up Hindu temples in the weeks after 9/11. One group, using contemporary media accounts, found 645 incidents of bias in the first week after 9/11.

And as Conor Friedersdorf pointed out when Goldberg first tried this line, even outside of outright crime or incidents of harassment or threats, the entire national media conversation became, at times, incredibly anti-Islamic. Goldberg claims, hopefully (but probably not) in jest, that occasionally "heated" anti-Muslim rhetoric is dwarfed by "open bigotry toward evangelical Christians" on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times. If anyone can point to anything published in the Times that is as hysterically anti-Christian as, say, any random week’s worth of Andy McCarthy’s contributions to the National Review, please let me know.

Then there is the fact that this miserable summer has, from sea to shining sea, featured  enraged white people staging marches in the street attacking all Muslims as terrorist sympathizers, for the crime of wanting to build a house of worship in their communities. And the entire conservative political elite, along with a huge portion of the supposed other wing, refuse to even bother to condemn it. (Indeed, they indulge it! The Muslims in New York are all told to be more "sensitive" to the angry white people!)

So you can maybe see why some people are concerned about an atmosphere of intolerance toward American Muslims, and the possible effects of such an atmosphere. It is about more than just FBI-identified bias crimes.

The "news peg" of that Time cover on Islamophobia that Jonah is so mad about is not some sort of lofty essay about stupid middle-American pigs being bigots; it is based on an actual poll, of the Americans themselves.Some fun findings:

Twenty-eight percent of voters do not believe Muslims should be eligible to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. Nearly one-third of the country thinks adherents of Islam should be barred from running for President — a slightly higher percentage than the 24% who mistakenly believe the current occupant of the Oval Office is himself a Muslim.

Forty-four percent of Americans have a favorable view of Muslims. Even Mormons top 50 percent.

I’m just saying that before we go around congratulating ourselves, as a nation, for not spending even more time vandalizing the property of people we suspect to be Muslim and physically attacking anyone in a turban, we should maybe ask ourselves if we are setting the bar a bit low.

But Goldberg apparently thinks that it’s bigoted against real Americans to be at all concerned about bias against American Muslims, because Goldberg, who does not give a shit about American Muslims, does not think the coordinated nationwide campaign to make people uneasy about them has led to that much violence.

This, actually, is the funniest line from Goldberg’s piece:

Meanwhile, to listen to Obama — say in his famous Cairo address — you’d think America has been at war with Islam for 30 years and only now, thanks to him, can we heal the rift. It’s an odd argument given that Americans have shed a lot of blood for Muslims over the last three decades: to end the slaughter of Muslims in the Balkans, to feed Somalis and to liberate Kuwaitis, Iraqis and Afghans.

Well, if that is how you interpreted that speech, I can understand why you’d find it "an odd arguments." Lots of arguments probably seem odd when you don’t understand rhetoric or logic. But, yes, Jonah Goldberg still thinks America is owed a great big fucking thank you from all the people we’ve been "liberating" in Iraq and Afghanistan, and Barack Obama should spend less time apologizing to people who hate us for our freedom and more time apologizing to people who hate him because they think he’s a Muslim.

He had his day, and is now acting against his earlier positions, which he apparently did not mean. He increasingly seems like a bigoted jerk. Justin Elliott at Salon:

Yesterday we reported on the Anti-Defamation League’s unusual lobbying effort against a trip to concentration camp sites by a group of U.S. imams and a few Obama Administration officials.

And now one of those officials, envoy to combat anti-Semitism Hannah Rosenthal, has issued a response to the ADL in a statement to Politico’s Laura Rozen.

The background is that the ADL, while acknowledging that National Director Abe Foxman lobbied against U.S. officials’ participation in the trip, claimed Monday that Foxman objected only because he thinks Rosenthal should be focusing on "government to government" work. (Though a person familiar with the trip told Salon Monday that Foxman went so far as to call a Polish rabbi during the imams’ trip earlier this month to implore the rabbi not to meet with the American group.)

In response to the ADL’s objection, Rosenthal explained: "My reason for going was simple – Anti-Semitism is growing in places for different reasons, but Holocaust denial is growing in parts of the Muslim communities and must be confronted in order to combat the anti-Semitism that accompanies it."

It’s also worth noting that the imams’ trip to Auschwitz ended with a strong joint statement denouncing anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial.

Here’s Rosenthal’s full statement:

My reason for going was simple – Anti-Semitism is growing in places for different reasons, but Holocaust denial is growing in parts of the Muslim communities and must be confronted in order to combat the anti-Semitism that accompanies it.

The response to my participation on the trip has been overwhelmingly positive and encouraging. As I travel to countries facing increased anti-Semitism, I regularly meet with Jewish organizations, and interfaith and interethnic organizations, in addition to meeting with government leaders. I recognize that this age-old hatred will take a multi-faceted approach: calling for government leadership in condemning anti-Semitism; better education for the younger generation; interfaith understanding and advocacy; and good old-fashioned relationship building. I am trying hard to do just that.

This seems a tad modern for me. I note it was recorded in 1959.

Tom Lasseter in McClatchy reports on how China continues to try to keep the Cultural Revolution out of popular memory, just as they work to suppress Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 and the associated massacre (3000 people, according to Soviet intelligence reports).

Lasseter:

The schoolgirls slapped and punched their vice principal, then grabbed table legs with protruding nails and beat her unconscious. Bian Zhongyun was left slumped in a garbage cart in the Beijing high school’s courtyard. She’d urinated and defecated on herself, and died with blood and spit drooling from her mouth.

On that afternoon in August 1966, Bian became an early murder victim of the Cultural Revolution, a movement that would leave millions of Chinese dead, injured or mentally broken in the decade that followed.

Although 44 years have passed since the "Red August" that unleashed the floodgates of violence in the capital and across the nation, there’s never been a complete public accounting in China about what happened. Bian’s killers have yet to be named.

"Even after all these decades, their crimes are still being covered up," said Wang Jingyao, 89, Bian’s widower. Wang has kept the bloody, soiled clothes that Bian wore the day she was killed. He wants to know who killed his wife.

"But it’s very difficult to find out in China," he said.

Unlike South Africa or Chile, which set up truth commissions to exhume painful pasts, China remains tight-lipped. The authoritarian government in Beijing has discouraged domestic attempts at critical examination of the legacy of the Cultural Revolution.

So even as analysts across the world speak of China’s bright economic future, at home this August there remains a page missing from the country’s past.

Observers say the reason is obvious: Mao Zedong, who fanned the flames of the Cultural Revolution out of fears that the government was growing too moderate, is the historical bedrock of the Communist Party. To delve into the destruction Mao wrought could lead to a questioning of the political system itself.

Chinese official histories acknowledge that the period was bloody and chaotic, but they give little detail about what happened, especially when it comes to individual murders. State museums often don’t mention the event at all.

The Cultural Revolution formally began in the spring of 1966 with notifications at the Politburo, but the wider bloodshed began that August after Mao, dissatisfied with the government for not acting boldly enough, urged more radical action. Red Guard units attacked those with "bad class backgrounds" with impunity, universities were shut down and millions were sent to the countryside to do manual labor.

Other leaders later took the blame for the chaos, starting with the "Gang of Four," which included Mao’s wife, but veneration of the "Great Helmsman" continued after he died in 1976.

"The Cultural Revolution changed the life of our generation completely, and it wreaked havoc on China. It was a catastrophe," said Wang Duanyang, who as a teenager led a Red Guard group in Tianjin, a city southeast of Beijing. "I feel regret. … I have done a lot of things that you may think ridiculous and insane, but those things were done in a particular context."

Wang wrote a book that described the humiliation and beating of his school’s leaders and local officials that he witnessed, and in 2007 he paid to have 1,000 copies published. In the forward he apologizes "to the people who I’ve hurt." He handed out the volume to friends and acquaintances, but commercial distribution wasn’t an option.

"According to the Chinese government, any (unauthorized) book related to the Cultural Revolution is not allowed to be published," said Wang, whose own father, an author, was denounced as a "rightist" during the movement.

Why? …

Continue reading.

Indeed, they are pretty much making the case that the terrorists have claimed: that the US is hostile to Islam—the entire religion, not simply the insane extremists. It’s like judging Christianity by looking only at the pedophile priests (who, it must be admitted, have long enjoyed the protection and backing of the Catholic church).

Steve Benen:

As conservatives become more animated in their demands that Muslim American face discrimination, it’s becoming increasingly important to appreciate the consequences of the right’s hysteria. As we talked about yesterday, it’s not just the Republican base feeling energized by the "debate."

Frank Rich had a very good column over the weekend, noting, "After 9/11, President Bush praised Islam as a religion of peace and asked for tolerance for Muslims not necessarily because he was a humanitarian or knew much about Islam but because national security demanded it. An America at war with Islam plays right into Al Qaeda’s recruitment spiel. This month’s incessant and indiscriminate orgy of Muslim-bashing is a national security disaster for that reason — Osama bin Laden’s ‘next video script has just written itself,’ as the former F.B.I. terrorist interrogator Ali Soufan put it."

NPR reported today that experts in counter-terrorism believe the controversy surrounding the Park51 proposal may play "right into the hands of radical extremists." (thanks to B.A. tip)

The supercharged debate over the proposed center has attracted the attention of a quiet, underground audience — young Muslims who drift in and out of jihadi chat rooms and frequent radical Islamic sites on the Web. It has become the No. 1 topic of discussion in recent days and proof positive, according to some of the posted messages, that America is indeed at war with Islam.

"This, unfortunately, is playing right into their hands," said Evan F. Kohlmann, who tracks these kinds of websites and chat rooms for Flashpoint Global partners, a New York-based security firm. "Extremists are encouraging all this, with glee.

"It is their sense that by doing this that Americans are going to alienate American Muslims to the point where even relatively moderate Muslims are going to be pushed into joining extremist movements like al-Qaida. They couldn’t be happier." [...]

Extremists and radical clerics posted a stream of "I told you so" messages: After years of telling followers that Islam was under attack by the West, the harsh reaction to a simple community center seemed to prove it.

Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical cleric linked to the Fort Hood shootings and the failed Christmas Day attempt, recently released an appeal to disaffected American Muslims, who may be feeling ostracized by American society. Brian Fishman, a counterterrorism research fellow at the New America Foundation, said the fear is Awlaki will gain more credibility.

"Over the past nine to 12 months, Anwar al-Awlaki has tried to promote this notion that the West, and particularly the United States, will turn on its Muslim citizens," Fishman said. "And some of the anti-Islamic tone that has been going around the country in connection with the mosque debate feeds into this notion that people like Anwar al-Awlaki can take advantage of."

Opposing efforts to improve the economy, willingly providing fodder to our enemies, demanding sweeping changes to our Constitution … I’m not sure what the United States did to offend conservative activists so much, but for all of our sake, I wish they’d reconsider.

I like Glenn Greenwald, though I recognize that some do not. Nonetheless, in this column he quite rightly rips Conn Carroll of the Heritage Foundation a new one. I think one problem is that Greenwald argues more carefully than many people read, so they simply don’t follow, but in the linked column, I think everyone can understand and agree with the case he makes.

This particular column should be read and read carefully. Please click the link and read.