According to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, it is only the liberation of women that can bring about lasting reform in the Muslim world. It has been the core piece of her agenda as an "enlightenment fundamentalist" as it is called these days, and it is the central theme of the short movie Submission which she co-produced with Theo van Gogh. While the story behind the film and its eventual impact are now well-known, I wondered about its intentions and brief history prior to it becoming a global firestorm after Van Gogh’s violent death.

According to her biography (due out in the US and Canada in February 2007) the idea for the film came from Hirsi Ali who responded to Van Gogh’s experiences with Muslim leader Aboe Jahjah (see below) and his increasing irritation over the submissive role of women in Islam. Once that idea was seeded in the moviemaker’s hyperactive brain, he wasted little time in getting the project to fruition and he urged Hirsi Ali to produce a workable script. The movie, only ten minutes long, was produced during the summer of 2004 and aired in the 'Zomergasten' (“Summer Guests”) show from the VPRO, a station traditionally known for its somewhat alternative and intellectual programming:

Van Gogh paid the costs of the film, 18,000 Euros himself. De VPRO paid him 2,000 Euros. Next week the film will be available on the filmer’s website. “I will send it to Al-Jazeera” says Van Gogh. “They broadcast these Bin Laden films, so they probably won’t object to this one”

Van Gogh’s boldness was matched by Hirsi Ali’s care. She cleared the airing of Submission first with the VPRO, who were fine with it but thought her idea to let it be part of Zomergasten somewhat unusual. She went one step further and consulted with her party members – she was after all an elected member of parliament for a governing party – and the reactions differed. Elder statesman Bolkestein was concerned. Vice-Premier and Finance Minister Gerrit Zalm betrayed his basic skill set as a numbers man by rationally verifying that the texts from the Koran quoted in the film were indeed accurate. Johan Remkes, Minister for the Interior, could not understand why Ayaan was so worried over security and protection. The same sort of response was offered by the Defence Minister Henk Kamp whose reaction was as shocking as it was revealing (from Hirsi Ali's biography):

“I asked him: what is the status of security?” Kamp responded: “the Muslim community has had to swallow a lot this year. It has hit them hard – they won’t respond to this”

It is telling that politicians with security in their portfolio – defence and interior – were the ones most oblivious to the dangers of the film. The Dutch press however knew immediately that something was amiss with the production and wasted no time plastering it on the front pages:

“New Provocation Hirsi Ali” said the NRC Handelsblad which revealed as much about the content of the short film as it did about the newspaper’s editorial sentiments. But it begs the question: did such a deliberate attempt to offend her religion create a situation in which a debate could be waged over the role of women in Islam? Neither Ian Buruma in his book, nor Hirsi Ali in hers, give a satisfactory answer to that question and I suspect that there isn’t one, yet. Hirsi Ali however did argue in the said TV show what she would like to see as the possible outcome:

“If you want something to lead to a discussion, if you want people to start thinking, then you have to do things that will place them in front of dilemmas. And not by way of violence or something like that, but through words and representations, that is the way I do it. Of course, there is a chance that people will say, ‘yes, the format is such that I am no longer interested in the contents’. But I am convinced that there are women who simply can not look away from this, women who won’t just look at the message’s format.

Muslim women – the few that saw the movie - reacted mostly defensively, and preferred to indeed look away. But the film and its deadly outcome reached another audience: the western non-believers, who all of a sudden realized to what extent ‘free speech’ had come under extreme pressure in their own society. Ayaan’s provocation to the Muslim world turned out to be one directed at the ‘free’ western world.

Submission’s real value therefore may only prove itself over time. Recognizing that freedom of speech should never be compromised is one, liberating the Muslim world quite another and an even more difficult one. Like most reform movements, attempts at change are usually perceived as being either unwarranted or arriving too early. That perception does not apply to Submission, but the evidence of that has yet to reveal itself. It did however come too early for the man who made and relentlessly championed it.

One of the core themes in all my writings about the Theo van Gogh murder has been that the mainstream media in most of the world was not well equipped to understand the complexities of Dutch society and the peculiar dynamics that led up to Theo’s murder two years ago this week. It requires knowledge and context and only now are journalistic efforts about the Dutch and their immigration woes starting to acknowledge that. The boilerplate “the Dutch were tolerant, immigrants Muslims moved in, a murder happened, and now tolerance is over and the Dutch have turned right” is not an adequate way to analyze the deep social and political rifts that have captured the small nation. For that you need someone with a deeper understanding of the situation and in Ian Buruma, a Dutch-English writer who spent most of his adult life away from The Netherlands, have we found someone who could probably be trusted with the task to write a book about the Van Gogh murder. His Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance is the result, and it is an excellent and riveting read.

Buruma doesn’t disappoint, putting even a mixture of shame and recognition on my face when he writes that the Dutch are a little too complacent, too smug, something that turns into absolute panic and manifest surprise when that feeling of smugness is challenged by the outside world. The best example of which is their national sport, soccer, where the Dutch have an ingrained sense that they’re the best but when they lose they scream out, “How come? We were the best!”. And this of course applies equally to the unfolding immigration farce and the ensuing murder which ended the much vaunted Dutch idyll. "Did we really deserve this? How come, we tried to be so nice, can anyone possibly explain this?" It is this lack of understanding and failure to accept basic realities as they are, which constitute a terrible default in the Dutch character and Buruma addresses it head on.

And not only that. He digs deep into the Dutch psyche, most notably the contentious relationship the present Dutch have with their chequered past role during World War II, which is a recurring theme around which much of the narrative is built. It is vital in understanding why immigrants have been treated the way they have and it is equally forceful in revealing how references to those years can have a devastating impact on the present day political debate. Buruma no doubt delves into his own vault of youthful experiences, but updates them with interviews, meetings and site visits during his stay in The Netherlands and so turns his book into a fairly comprehensive socio-political case study. From that perspective it would have been nice to have a thicker volume than the 265 pages that we eventually got, but in the end the book needs to be pumped into a mass marketing channel too I guess.

There has been a fair bit of criticism for Buruma, most notably that he failed to take a clear moral stance and was not sufficiently judgmental in taking sides in the conflict between free societies and nascent Islamism. To be frank, I was relieved to for once have a book in my hands that did not do that. Buruma is clear enough in what he thinks about jihadism, and instead gives us equal access to the Dutch and Moroccan cultures, and more specifically to Theo van Gogh’s life and Mohammed Bouyeri’s life. The only point where I do part ways with Buruma is his less than generous description of Pim Fortuyn whom he describes as 'pandering in nostalgia', even going as far as comparing the murdered professor-politician to the late Princess Diana. It’s a criticism often heard from those that do not entirely accept the intellectual underpinnings of Fortuyn’s political platform. The back to basics part is often mistakenly interpreted as a desperate “please take us back to the 1950s” call.

But the events that triggered Van Gogh’s murder are well-described. The total religious-cultural separation and potential for disaster, become very clear when Van Gogh and friends had organized a debate with the European-Arab League, led by Abou Jahjah. The latter refused to debate when he learned that Van Gogh was to be the moderator and walked out of the studio with his bodyguards. A debate followed outside the studio where young Moroccans shouted insults to Van Gogh who brushed them off with the usual crass Dutch humor along the lines of “if Allah protects you, why do you need bodyguards?”. It prompted one of his friends to say “It was then, that I realized how deeply they hated him. For us, it was just a game, a debating game. For them it was deadly serious”

That in a nutshell describes the incredible distance that even Theo van Gogh never fully understood. In a way he made exactly the same mistake as his fellow countrymen that were diametrically opposed to him when it came to dealing with immigrants. They advocated respect, political correctness and a far different approach to the issue, but they also failed to see that the mechanics of the debate were never about economics or culture. It was religion and a pretty stern and narrow approach to that, something the increasingly secular Dutch had long forgotten.

In the end of the book Buruma tries to explore ways where tolerance could neutralize the perils of radical Islam and hopes that religion can ultimately become the subject of reasoned debate, even for Muslims. This quote from the writer makes it clear where the boundaries between the Koran and fundamentalism are:

“Revolutionary Islam is linked to the Koran, to be sure, just as Stalinism and Maoism were linked to Das Kapital, but to explain the horrors of China’s man made famines or the Soviet Gulag solely by inviting the writings of Karl Marx would be to miss the main point”

Yes, correct, but this conclusion can also be explained in another direction by arguing that however well-meaning the basic tenets of Islam are, they have the potential to be turned around into a deadly totalitarian ideology. Theo van Gogh in his own distinctive way was not given to this type of socio-political analysis, but instinctively understood the dangers of history in the making. Yet at the heart he remained a Dutchman, a little too complacent and somewhat oblivious of the immediate perils. One can only imagine the panic he must have felt when he was butchered to death on an Amsterdam street.

Others Reviewing
Claire Berlinski - Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world in the Globe and Mail
Bruce Bawer – When Worlds Collide in The Boston Globe
Eric Weinberger – The Perils of Going Dutch for the Wilson Quarterly
Theodore Dalrymple - The Avant-Garde of the Apocalypse in City Journal
Brendan Kiley - Bicycle Drive-Bys in The Stranger
Matt Steinglass - Murder in Amsterdam in Salon
And our friend Tigerhawk, who is still reading the book

Dan Gardner from the Ottawa Citizen traveled to Europe to see whether all the alarmist rhetoric about Europe had a basis in reality. He visited Denmark for a lengthy assessment of the roots of the cartoon crisis and to Holland where he came away with a relatively positive feeling.

Gardner is right in pointing out that things aren’t as bad as they are sometimes made out to be, something which I have pointed out before. Yet, there are too many variables at play to settle on either a positive or negative outcome. Blindly banking on the repeat of historic accomplishments - like the 19th century integration of Jews into Dutch society – is probably not the best approach to guarantee future success in a situation that is materially different. It requires clearly defined policies and action from visionary politicians, something that is in short supply at the moment.

Gardner gives us a time estimate for integration success:

The usual theory on immigration holds that three generations are necessary for full integration into the larger society. There aren't many third-generation immigrants in countries like the Netherlands and they are mainly to be found in playgrounds and primary schools. It's simply too early to declare Europe's experience with immigration a failure.

And that's if the generations are measured from the arrival of the first guest workers. Arguably, it should not be. The better baseline is the moment when both newcomers and governments realized and accepted that immigration is a reality. And that wasn't until the 1990s.

So, that is somewhere between three or four generations depending on when you start counting. A projection not that different from Ahmed Marcouch, a Moroccan who did manage to integrate successfully and who as a politician has first hand experience in managing the process in some of Amsterdam's most notorious neighborhoods.

UPDATE: This Dutch media personality argues that negative attitudes of the native Dutch about themselves, have contibuted to the current malaise in the lowlands. He's written a book about it, Long Live the Netherlands:

Coming back after 10 years in America, I discovered that there's a terrible lot amount of grumbling and moaning in the Netherlands. We even talk a lot about our 'growling' culture, and this leads to a negative self-image. At the same time, I noticed that there are so terribly many Dutch people who are trying things a different way and are saying, "Enough of that moaning, enough of the grumbling. Let's deal with the problems'."

Long Live the Netherlands contains a number of elements which might best be described as 'right wing'. For example, the author describes the Netherlands' regulations on sacking employees for having a 'stifling effect' on enterprise; he says that some people who live below the poverty line only have themselves to blame, and he believes more Dutch women should be working a full week instead of part time.

This is the sort of language that is hardly new to longtime Peaktalk readers and Groenhuijsen's instincts are generally correct. The fact that he has kept his primary residence in Washington, DC however is not exactly a vote of confidence for a new Dutch miracle.

I have been a longtime fan of Camille Paglia, in particular because she is a non-conventional thinker and able to destruct both the left and the right with her razor sharp wit. The interview with her yesterday in Salon - in which she covers a variety of current topics - is a must-read.

While clearly identifying Iraq as a mess and Bush as "out of his depth" this onetime Democrat has no qualms about reducing her party to absolute rubble. More importantly, she understands the challenges of our future better than most of her contemporaries, note the following:

But my generation of baby-boom Democrats hasn't done much deep thinking about international issues except in terms of postmodernist fragmentation or fuzzy, smiley-face multiculturalism. We desperately need better candidates.

As for looking to the future here are Paglia's key indicators of impending doom:

I'm worried about the future of America insofar as our academically most promising students are being funneled through the cookie-cutter Ivy League and other elite schools and emerging with this callow anti-American, anti-military cast to their thinking. How are we ever going to get wise leadership or sophisticated diplomacy from people who have such a distorted, clichéd view about everything that's wrong with the United States?

And my favorite:

The more liberal parents are, the less contact their children have with religious ideas. That will surely disable our future American leaders from being able to understand the religious commitment of Islamic fundamentalists. Liberal journalists often seem incredulous about how anyone would seek death for religious principles. But that was the entire history of early Christianity, when the saints willingly sought martyrdom. We're heading into that world again.

Paglia is not calling for a religious revival, but for a measure of historical and religious awareness. Looking around me I am astounded to note how incredibly shallow historical knowledge is these days, especially among the 'well-educated' middle classes, the group supposedly forming the backbone of our society. It is one of the key reasons why western societies are so divided over rogue nations going nuclear and Muslim zealots blowing themselves up on commuter trains: most of us simply can’t recognize the phenomenon, much less conceive of any action to protect ourselves against it.

Even as a secular person, I would still strongly advocate to regain some of the moral bearings that religion has given us and at the same time try and raise a new generation with some basic historical awareness. The fact that I grew up in a house stacked with historical works and a father who had seen – and taken me – to war cemetery after war cemetery in Europe did at least leave me in a position where I could write the stuff that I write here on this site.

And Paglia is therefore on the mark in arguing that the absence of any clear leadership from either the right or the left in these challenging times is so troubling. So far we’ve been lucky in escaping any real disaster but we better start investing in a new generation that is bound to face situations where luck is no longer a sufficient enough tool to ward of our destruction.

Have a good weekend. Next week it will be Theo Van Gogh week over here.

The Mark Steyn interview on Hot Air continues today. Note how Steyn describes the recent emergence of sharia in the Muslim world and how absent it was in many regions only decades ago. Here is a good example of that:

Mr Musdaruddin is the overseer of something that for the time being remains unique in Indonesia. Aceh - where more than 160,000 people died as a result of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami - has in the past 18 months become the only one of Indonesia's 33 provinces to enforce Koranic law, or Sharia. Some people fear that makes it the potential vanguard in a movement to bring Taliban-style law to the world's largest, and still overwhelmingly moderate, Muslim nation.

It is believed that the Indonesian government has allowed the implementation of sharia as part of its settlement with rebel forces from Aceh, an area which has through the ages always been quite restive. So, the question now is if with this form of domestic appeasement the Indonesian government has created a beachhead for an ideology that runs counter to the moderate way in which the nation has historically been practicing Islam. There are enough regional differences within Indonesia to thwart any rapid spread of this phenomenon, but the vigor with which sharia is now being enforced in Aceh is reason for deep concern.

Regular readers will probably remember that a lot of tips for posts come from my parents who – true to their generation's skill set – clip news articles and other interesting stuff and send it to me by mail for further consideration. As a lot of the information that comes to me in this way is not avaialbe online it is actually quite useful. That in particular applies to the endless analysis of the Iraq War by Dutch pundits, clippings where my father does not spare the ink to underline the words ‘failure’, ‘unilateral’, ‘disaster’, ‘more deaths’ and of course ‘Bush’. You see, he and I had our cordial dispute about the war in Iraq almost as soon as the preparations for it were put in place in late 2002.

It has become de rigueur for many right-of-center commentators to start penning mea culpas for supporting the war and a lot of them are quite frankly, insincere or somewhat politically expedient. At the same time the hardcore ‘stay-the-course’ punditry is digging itself in deeper with totally uninformed and highly partisan exhortations. To be frank, I have not done either but so far have decided to say nothing at all which of course is equally questionable.

So where to go from here? Absent any cogent argumentation from either my Dutch or American sources, it is refreshing to see that some Brits somehow get it and are able to wage a healthy debate about Iraq. And remarkably, these are two men from the left, one who has rescinded his support knowing what he knows now to a retroactive neutrality, the other in response reiterates a position of support, fundamentally unchanged since early 2003.

Norman Geras wrote earlier this month:

Had I been of mature years during that time, I hope I would have supported the war against Nazism come what may, and not been one of the others, the nay-sayers. The same impulse was at work in my support for the Iraq war. Even so, I am bound to acknowledge that, though I never expected an easy sequel in Iraq, much less a 'cakewalk', I did not anticipate a failure on this scale, and had I done so, I would have withheld support for the war without giving my voice to the opposition to it.

While that is a balanced and well-written response, it appears to be one that is pretty much risk-free. Oliver Kamm, in a comprehensive post entitled In Defence of the Iraq War takes a far riskier approach by offering his support for the war by revisiting and reinforcing its original rationale. This centers around the failure of Saddam-containment and the prospects of an unleashed rogue nation led by the next generation of Baathist tyrants, Uday and Qusay. Like Norman’s post you should probably read it in its entirety, but I will excerpt Kamm’s awareness of the lonely place he has staked out for himself:

I have appeared on some of these programmes debating, respectively, allegedly progressive and also High Tory opponents of the Government’s foreign policies. One thing on which my fellow interviewees and I, and everyone reading this, will be able to agree is that if the defence in the broadcast media of Tony Blair’s foreign policies is left to me, then Tony Blair is in trouble.

I could avoid all effort and position myself conveniently between Geras and Kamm, or even better, argue that it was better still to wait for James Baker’s report and hide in the media fracas that will no doubt follow its release. Both options would absolve me from providing some clarity and in our journey to find it I believe that, in spite of the grotesque failure of coalition operations, Kamm’s rationale stands, even after three bloody and terrible years.

Following my post yesterday on how economic news can drive elections, here is the latest on that impending downturn in real estate:

Housing developers, who saw prices fall last month at the fastest rate in 36 years, are feeling it most. The Commerce Department reported that the median price for a new home sold nationally in September fell to $217,100, a drop of 9.7 percent from a year earlier, when the median price was $240,400.

While we may have seen a peak in overall US prices, any adjustments will be of a regional character. Here is a list of the nation's Top 10 foreclosure markets, and here is a list of the ten best places to buy now.

And Canada is lagging the US, which means house prices in the north are still on the rise and they are fueling an already strong economy:

Canadian consumers are looking a lot like Americans these days, borrowing against their houses to fund their substantial shopping sprees.

Personal lines of credit are surging as house prices rise, and household credit is growing at double-digit rates. But analysts say the similarities with U.S. consumers end there.

The British market in the meantime is also setting record price increases.

It's not very difficult to spin the Dow, but it will be much harder to deal with an electorate that is bruised by soaring interest rates, negative equity and foreclosures. But judging from the numbers today, that scenario will not play itself out all that soon.

Andrew Sullivan is promoting his new book, The Conservative Soul which I haven't read as yet, but the many reviews so far tell me we all should.

If you have the time I recommend the interview Sullivan did with Hugh Hewitt yesterday. Transcript here and audio here. Not sure if it is all that enlightening, but it is a highly entertaining debate.

This one is quite rich:

The nation's most senior Muslim cleric has blamed immodestly dressed women who don't wear Islamic headdress for being preyed on by men and likened them to abandoned "meat" that attracts voracious animals.

It may open up an opportunity for the moderates to start speaking out, and apparently they are doing so. One Iktimal Hage-Ali, an Australian female Muslim advisor responds here in an audio interview and there is lots more over at Tim Blair's, of course.

This is a Dutch expression, and you probably understand its deeper meaning. Consider this:

The Dutch parliament ordered an investigation Thursday into how much the country's top intelligence agency service knew about an Islamic extremist before he shot and stabbed film maker Theo van Gogh.

Lawmakers, including members of the government, supported a motion by the opposition Labor Party ordering an evaluation of why the intelligence agency knew Mohammed Bouyeri belonged to a radical group known as the Hofstad Network but did not consider him a major threat.

It has taken two years to get to this point and legal impediments – reasons cited by the government for delaying the inquest – seem not entirely plausible. What is remarkable though is the timing of the motion asking for an investigation. Yes, we are one week away from the second anniversary of Theo van Gogh’s murder and four weeks away from a general election. No prizes for those who can answer the question as to why it was Labor that has picked this week to move this issue back on the agenda.

And no, I do not expect this investigation to yield any worthwhile revelations, just like the inquest into Fortuyn’s protection failed to produce anything disruptive. That is often not the point of any of these exercises; they are used to placate some pressing voter concerns and more broadly to put the national conscience at ease.

Talking about Van Gogh, I have been getting a lot of mail about Ian Buruma's book Murder in Amsterdam which was released last month. I want to spent more time on it next week as mark the second anniversary of the murder, together with my own and other's reviews. In the meantime check out this instructive interview with Buruma on PBS. Key excerpt:

JEFFREY BROWN: At the end of the book, you write, "This story is not over. What happened in this small corner of northwestern Europe could happen anywhere as long as young men and women feel that death is their only way home." That sounds rather bleak, actually.

IAN BURUMA: Well, it's bleak in the sense that we do have to contend with this revolutionary movement inside Islam and that that's not going to go away fast. And we have to get used to it and find all means to protect ourselves against it.

But it's not necessarily -- my pessimism is not necessarily so bad that I think that the Muslims cannot become integrated European citizens; I think they can, and I think many are.

More next week.

A reader asks:

A lot of bloggers, like Instapundit, have been mentioning that current good economic news does not seem to be helping the Republicans. I wonder, if markets continuously discount for future events, are the markets showing a preference for a power shift to the Democrats? If so why? Are they sensing a change in War on Terror strategy would reduce costs and associated risks? A possible reversal on tax cuts is warranted? Or is the market predicting any power change in Washington DC will be over shadowed by positive earnings projections etc.

There are two things here. Firstly, despite public perception, there is not an awful lot of good economic news to speak of and secondly, I would argue that most market movements are fairly immune to possible election outcomes. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t manipulate the economic news. Note Amity Shlaes’ comments earlier today:

The politicization of economics is especially evident in the blogosphere, where supposed economic Web sites are really about economics and politics advancing the agenda of one or the other party.

It is tempting to argue that surging stock markets are evidence that sound Republican economic policies are paying off, but such claims lack any empirical basis. Yes, it is an argument propagated by the right during a challenging election cycle for them, but those commentators should bear in mind that they would also argue, correctly, that Bill Clinton was in no way responsible for the stock market boom of the 1990s.

The uptick in the Dow that we have seen over the past few weeks is largely due to the fact that US equities as an asset class have been undervalued in recent years. This, judging from my own portfolio, applies in particular to the heavyweights that constitute the Dow Jones whose recent rise everyone got so excited about. The real estate boom – to some extent influenced by Bush flooding the market with cash – and rising commodity prices have contributed to the relative underperformance of stocks. Slipping commodity prices may benefit the stock market, but any recent gains are sure to be wiped out if the expected downturn in real estate materializes. Neither the Republicans, nor the Democrats will have any material influence on these developments which to a large extent are driven by global market movements. For now I would prefer to keep my eyes on Ben Bernanke, rather than rely on short-term market movements and a set of desperate politicians trying to interpret them to their advantage.

Michael Yon, who has been an excellent reporter on the War in Iraq, writes a searing indictment in the Weekly Standard about how the US Military is throttling media access:

I believe now as I did then: The government of the United States has no right to send our people off to war and keep secret that which it has no plausible military reason to keep secret. After all, American blood and treasure is being spent. Americans should know how our soldiers are doing, and what they are doing while wearing our flag. The government has no right to withhold information or to deny access to our combat forces just because that information might anger, frighten, or disturb us.

By allowing only a trickle of news to come out of Iraq, when all involved parties know the flow could be more robust, the Pentagon is doing just that.

I suggest that you read the whole thing.

Don't miss Michelle Malkin's video interview with Mark Steyn. Again, demographics, Europe and US-European relationships feature prominently.

UPDATE: And for Steyn aficionados, here is another interview with him at Human Events. Yes, he is promoting a book.

Fascinating piece in Der Spiegel about sex in the Islamic world. Since fundamentalism is a very effective way to neutralize ambivalent feelings about sex, it goes a very long way to explaining why so many young male Muslims in Europe turn to it. And radical and pure beliefs are no longer just a vehicle for immigrants, many westerners too convert to Islam in order to reject the perceived loose morality that surrounds them. Therein lies one of the keys to understanding the global attraction of Muslim fundamentalism which, as a result, is not attracting the most stable characters. And that in turn explains why seemingly regular guys that appear to have integrated quite well in their new environment all of a sudden blow themselves up on a commuter bus.

Great blogside chat between Dan Drezner and Ann Althouse. It is fairly long, but it comes in separate installments and this one is of particular interest as it discusses Professor Bainbridge’s decision to re-brand his blog by departing from the general punditry format and return to ‘expert-blogging’. This issue is close to my heart as I have always believed in the general pundit approach, my broad interests no doubt support this format, and both Althouse and Drezner serve up some solid rationale for running a bog in this fashion. Having said that, at times I sense this blog veers too much towards Europe and its immigration and economic woes. It may undermine the broader brush that I would like to apply by discussing everything from American Idol to Kyoto to Lebanon and beyond. Let me know what you think.

Reporters Without Borders has released its annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index, and you can find the rankings here. The nature of the annual effort is probably not entirely unbiased when you start reading the accompanying notes:

The United States (53rd) has fallen nine places since last year, after being in 17th position in the first year of the Index, in 2002. Relations between the media and the Bush administration sharply deteriorated after the president used the pretext of “national security” to regard as suspicious any journalist who questioned his “war on terrorism.” The zeal of federal courts which, unlike those in 33 US states, refuse to recognise the media’s right not to reveal its sources, even threatens journalists whose investigations have no connection at all with terrorism.

Canada however is commended by Reporters Without Borders and ends up as number 18 on the list which is remarkable as nowhere is there a mention of the Juliet O'Neill affair, the Ottawa Citizen journalist whose house was raided a few years ago and who was effectively silenced by the state. Even though the courts quashed the law that enabled the search warrants last Friday, O'Neill's journey has been a dark one:

Ms. O'Neill has never been charged, but the Crown had held out the possibility that charges could yet be laid against her. That evaporated with yesterday's ruling.

Ms. O'Neill, who called the ruling "a powerful statement against the criminalization of communication," was delighted, but not quite ready to celebrate yesterday.

"I feel like I've been holding my breath for two and a half years and I can finally exhale," she said. "But I won't until I hear the minister of justice say the Crown will not appeal this ruling."

But to give credit where it is due, Denmark got mentioned:

Denmark (19th) dropped from joint first place because of serious threats against the authors of the Mohammed cartoons published there in autumn 2005. For the first time in recent years in a country that is very observant of civil liberties, journalists had to have police protection due to threats against them because of their work.

Next week, when we commemorate the second anniversary of Theo van Gogh's death, Peaktalk will focus almost exclusively on the freedom of the press and free speech at large. Both of these have come under increasing pressure in recent years and Reporters Without Borders - whatever its biases - is right in relentlessly pursuing the basic right to disseminate and have access to information, in freedom.

The latest polls numbers are in and Balkenende's Christian-Democrats are now pulling ahead of Labour. And in the man-to-man popularity contest for the role of prime-minister, Balkenende is also ahead of his Labour rival, with a edge of 35% to 24% over Wouter Bos. Noteworthy is that 40% of Dutch voters react negatively to both men and that reveals a level of apathy or disappointment with the current political scene that raises some deeper questions about the Dutch political landscape. And the debate which we've argued has been pretty tame so far. It is clear however that Bos peaked too early while not managing a tight campaign whereas Balkenende has always been somewhat of a 'by default' prime-minister.

In coalition terms it will remain difficult to form a majority one, but with these numbers the smaller factions on the right (wilders, Pastors and the Christian Union) could hold the key to a new right-of-center cabinet. We've got another four weeks ahead of us, but it seems that the Dutch are beginning to lean rightwards, carefully.

... for those interested to learn that a possible burqa ban will be (a) general, ie. not restricted to public employees only and (b) continues to be studied by a committee of wise men who will advise the government in early November.

Prediction: excpect a pragmatic Dutch compromise, not to be mistaken for 'tolerance'.

A compelling argument to create a trans-Atlantic free trade zone, modeled after NATO:

A trans-Atlantic free-trade zone would have greater aims than simply defending the interests of importers and exporters. "Peace in Freedom" has always been NATO's motto. "Prosperity with Values" could be the aim of the trans-Atlantic free-trade zone. One of those values would be the goal that this prosperity reach as many people as possible.

A worthy goal supported by an appealing slogan. But don’t expect it to materialize anytime soon, and if it will, its shape will not be driven by either Europe or the US and Canada. Asia in the end will indirectly dictate the form of such an alliance.

Richard Fernandez at the Belmont Club makes an excellent observation about the French riots:

Some may deride Chirac or de Villepin as appeasers. However the probable truth is that no one has yet figured out how to stop a vigorous ideology in its tracks. The West's own experience with Nazism and Communism shows that both accommodation and confrontation can fuel, rather than retard their growth. There is no magic formula; and perhaps there is no formula.

And that explains why politicians from both sides of the aisle struggle to find the right message, especially when it is election time. The intractability of violence fueled by cultural disconnects and social breakdown – a void nicely filled by religion – calls for a pragmatic diversion to ‘easier’ topics. And that is not just a European phenomenon:

With his party facing a difficult midterm election, President Bush is focusing on the positive this week: a growing economy he is using to try to persuade voters to keep Republicans in power in Congress.

White House advisers say Bush is not trying to change the subject from a deteriorating situation in Iraq, and that he will continue to talk about Iraq and the war on terrorism as the Nov. 7 election nears. But Bush advisers said they think the president should get more credit for recent positive economic news.

It all depends on how you look at it. But I see some eerie parallels in the ways in which both American and European politicians steer away from the hard issues and try to lull the electorate back into a sense of oblivious complacency. In the meantime we have a fully fledged civil war in Iraq and a nascent one in the streets of Paris.

Meet Sweden's new immigration minister: Nyamko Sabuni. It appears she is off to an interesting start:

" ... has caused a storm as Sweden’s new integration and equality minister by arguing that all girls should be checked for evidence of female circumcision; arranged marriages should be criminalised; religious schools should receive no state funding; and immigrants should learn Swedish and find a job.

Supporters of the centre-right government that came to power last month believe that her bold rejection of cultural diversity may make her a force for change across Europe. Her critics are calling her a hardliner and even an Islamophobe.

“I am neither,” she said in an interview. “My aim is to integrate immigrants. One is to ensure they grow up just as any other child in Sweden would.”

Again it is very often immigrants from outside Europe (Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Afshin Ellian) who are able to identify much better than native Europeans what is wrong and that drastic measures are needed to benefit both immigrants and their host nations. And somehow I am also beginning to sense that women are far better in delivering these blunt messages (witness Dutch immigration czar Rita Verdonk) than men. Let's see how Nyamko fares, it would be good if she succeeds and is not prematurely shipped off to a US-based think tank, fearful of her life knowing that there is a limited market for her ideas in Europe.

The Dutch Supreme Court has ruled last week that the earlier decision by the Court of the City of Amsterdam - the one that evicted Ayaan from her apartment in The Hague - needs to be revisited. Good news for sure, but not only is it late in the day, even a favorable ruling from the lower court will never eradicate the embarrassment and pain caused by the initial ruling.

Posts Related to the Hirsi Ali Court Case
Hirsi Ali Case: Translation
Hirsi Ali, The Hunted (3)
Hirsi Ali, The Hunted (2)
Hirsi Ali, The Hunted

The Sunday Times investigates how the debate over the separation between church and state on the European side of the ocean is back in full force. Expect that discussion to grow more intense with time, so do take note of this useful primer.

Twelve months have passed since the now infamous French riots erupted. As some of you may recall there was a bit of debate at the time about qualifying the violence as an ‘intifada', but it is a term now routinely used by French police unions, some even going as far as describing the deteriorating situation in the banlieues as 'war'. And various mainstream media have now picked up on a story the gravity of which was signaled on this and many other blogs well over a year ago. Here is the Globe and Mail which has a longer piece on the phenomenon and its political implications:

Michel Thooris, head of the small Action Police union, claims that the new violence is taking on an Islamic fundamentalist tinge.

“Many youths, many arsonists, many vandals behind the violence do it to cries of ‘Allah Akbar' (God is Great) when our police cars are stoned,” he said in an interview.

Larger, more mainstream police unions sharply disagree that the suburban unrest has any religious basis. However, they do say that some youth gangs no longer seem content to throw stones or torch cars and instead appear determined to hurt police officers — or worse.

“First, it was a rock here or there. Then it was rocks by the dozen. Now, they're leading operations of an almost military sort to trap us,” said Loic Lecouplier, a police union official in the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of Paris. “These are acts of war.”

The fact that police unions are the key voices on this deeply worrying trend tells us that the situation has reached a stage where policemen would in actual fact prefer to withdraw from these areas. And no one can reasonably blame them for this position. The safety and well-being of French police forces can no longer be guaranteed for the very simple fact that its mandate never included carrying out paramilitary operations in these dreaded suburbs. That most likely, requires a different skill and tool set.

The Globe and Mail points out that this will no doubt influence next year’s presidential election, but that remains to be seen. The current Dutch election campaign tells us that parties from both sides of the political spectrum have opted to emphasize the positive and ignore potentially explosive and controversial situations. Not only are these problems too complicated to solve, hard talk on immigration and law and order can only be applied in limited amounts in order keep an electorate prone to tilt leftwards on side. And, equally important, the escalating violence is confined to areas where the average Frenchman never ventures. So, it can be ignored for now, but whoever gets into the Elysée next year will be have the ultimate responsibility to ensure that the lawlessness will not spill into France proper. Given the current dynamics we can be assured however that it will.

In what may be a first, Germany has decided to start charging a licence fee for using the internet to access TV and radio programmes. And that relates to internet access only, what logically follows is that governments will eventually want to have a chunk of the ever increasing amounts of real cash that change hands in online virtual worlds. Let's see what revenue hungry country moves in first.

Timothy Garton Ash weighs in on the Armenian Genocide bill which passed in France last week, and pleased he is not:

No one can legislate historical truth. In so far as historical truth can be established at all, it must be found by unfettered historical research, with historians arguing over the evidence and the facts, testing and disputing each other's claims without fear of prosecution or persecution.

In the tense ideological politics of our time, this proposed bill is a step in exactly the wrong direction. How can we credibly criticise Turkey, Egypt or other states for curbing free speech, through the legislated protection of historical, national or religious shibboleths, if we are doing ever more of it ourselves?

It is a clear message to those that argue that criticizing religion, culture and denying tragic events of the past tend to inflame, offend and polarize. They argue that we need certain laws to control our ‘malign’ impulses that trigger the need to say or write things that are beyond conventional truths or that are not ‘socially acceptable’. That approach not only neutralizes debate, it rejects mechanisms such as research, analysis, rationality, and whatever other tools we have at our disposal to find some sort of balance or agreement on what is right or wrong. Garton Ash is right that we lose our credibility if we pass laws that chip away at the basic freedoms that our societies have been built on. What is more, we will lose ourselves.

A remarkable speech by Hosni Mubarak earlier today:

Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak questioned on Thursday whether Muslims had done enough to change the West's "wrong perceptions" about Islam, which he said was under "ferocious attack".

He also said Islam needed a fresh religious discourse to promote tolerance and uproot extremist views.

"The Muslim world is facing a ferocious attack, describing Islam wrongly and offending Muslims' sacred (symbols and figures) and beliefs," Mubarak said in a speech marking Lailat al-Qadr, the night Muslims believe God started the revelation of the Koran to Prophet Mohammed more than 1400 years ago.

"Don't we Muslims share part of the responsibility for the wrong perceptions about Islam? Have we done our duty in correcting the image of Islam and Muslims?" he said.

The proof is in the pudding of course: how will Mubarak's well-meant words go down in a Muslim world where he has not exactly been all that well-liked. In fact, the Egyptian president remains a throwback to the old days of brutal pro-western rule with a secular flavour that has steadily gone out of fashion in most of the Arab world. But if that is the best that is available on the moderate Muslim market today, we'll have to take it. Let's see if there are any followers.

One of the defining characteristics of the left, wherever you are: no sense of humor.

The notion of Europe’s demographic bust is questioned once more. France's policies to avoid one are apparently paying off through some clever social engineering:

But the propensity of women here to have more babies has little to do with notions of French romance or the population's formerly strong religious ties to the Roman Catholic Church.

France heavily subsidizes children and families from pregnancy to young adulthood with liberal maternity leaves and part-time work laws for women. The government also covers some child-care costs of toddlers up to 3 years old and offers free child-care centers from age 3 to kindergarten, in addition to tax breaks and discounts on transportation, cultural events and shopping.

Very few countries so far have been able to get childcare, inextricably linked to birthrates, right. A prime example are the Dutch where women have been urged by relentless government campaigning to join the workforce, but where any solid childcare plans to support these policies have been sorely lacking. It is not that different here in Canada where the current conservative government has been trying to encourage moms or dads to stay at home, but the monetary reward for that so far has been paltry to say the least. And that is where the essence of encouraging birth rates and extended childcare is: to what extent can the state interfere and fund it all?

For the statist French that has been a relatively easy question to answer and that is why they are getting results. Now the issue is whether all these babies will eventually find a job in France’s moribund economy.

Here is an area where the EU is clearly failing to promote competition: taxes.

Andrew Sullivan addresses the exact point that I have been trying to define earlier:

Some of you have argued that my opposition to public school teachers wearing the full, face-covering veil is contrary to my generally laisser-faire approach to cultural and social issues. But the distinction in the case of a public school teacher is obvious: in representing the state, and doing a job paid for by the government, you are obliged to follow the rules.

But the debate has already moved well beyond public employees. For example doctor’s assistants (who are quasi public I guess) in countries such as The Netherlands have been told to remove a headscarf or lose their job. And in a number of European jurisdictions it has been made illegal to wear a burqa in public places, regardless of whether someone is publicly employed or not. The latter has often been justified as a securi