Month: February 2006

‘Sparrow tactics’ challenge Chinese censors

 ‘Sparrow tactics’ challenge Chinese censors

Chinese Communist Party elders and U.S. lawmakers fired shots at China’s powerful censors this week, but Li Xinde says muckraking campaigners like himself are undermining the country’s barriers to free speech every day.

Hamas on a mission from God

Hamas, the Islamic radical party now ruling the Palestinians, announced that they don’t really care about financial aid from Europe or the U.S. This is because Hamas believes that soon the world will be largely Islamic, and the Christian nations will amount to little, or nothing, in the grand scheme of things. Hamas believes they are on a mission from God, and that their success is preordained. This creates some difficulties when trying to negotiate with Hamas.

Cathy Young: Modernity’s threat –

Cathy Young: Modernity’s threat –

Freedom from religion

In a New York Times column (IHT, Feb. 10), David Brooks wrote that the West, with its “legacy of Socrates and the agora” and its “progressive and rational” mindset, is open to a multiplicity of arguments, perspectives, and “unpleasant facts,” while radical Muslims cling to “pre-Enlightenment” dogmatism and shrink from the “chaos of our conversation.”

Yet Brooks overlooks the fact that a large segment of the population in the West, and especially in the United States, rejects the progressive, rational mindset and embraces pre-Enlightenment values as well. Fundamentalist Christians, traditionalist Catholics and ultra-Orthodox Jews do not, with very few exceptions, call for violence in response to heresy. But they too often equate criticism (let alone mockery) of their beliefs with “religious bigotry” or “hate speech.” And they, too, often seek not simply to protest but to shut down offensive speech.

The truth is that modernity, with its “chaos of conversation,” its chaos of lifestyles, its attitude that there is nothing more sacred than freedom of expression, is profoundly threatening to many religious traditionalists of different faiths. (Last year, quite a few American conservatives applauded Pope Benedict XVI’s assault on “the dictatorship of relativism.”)

At present, for a variety of historical and cultural reasons, radical fundamentalism holds a particular sway in the Muslim world, where it is wedded to political violence in ways that have no parallel in other religions. To ignore this difference and this danger would be foolish. But it is also unwise to ignore the religious backlash against modernity in the West, and its own tensions with individual freedom.

Observer | The end of freedom?

Observer | The end of freedom?

When is it a crime to give off ence and when is it reasonable to take it? Who decides? The Danish cartoon affair and last weekend’s violent protests around the world raise crucial questions about tolerance and free speech. In a provocative essay, Andrew Anthony claims Britain’s government and the liberal left have failed us

Los Angeles Times: Drawn into a religious conflict

Los Angeles Times: Drawn into a religious conflict

“Back in the High Middle Ages,” writes Tim Rutten, “the three great monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — reached one of those fundamental forks in the historical road.” Rutten says Judaism (largely thanks to Moses Maimonides) and Christianity (largely thanks to Thomas Aquinas) chose to believe that reason and faith led to the same truth. Ironically, Islam, whose early scholars had preserved the works of reason’s first apostle, Aristotle, “held that there were two truths — that of revelation and that of the natural world. There was no need to reconcile them because they were separate and distinct. It was a form of intellectual suicide and cut off much of the Islamic world from the centuries of scientific and political progress that followed.” Well done, Mr. Rutten!