David Leonhardt sums up the Republicans' economic program

The New York Times's very intelligent economic writer David Leonhardt examines the Congressional Republicans' so-called Pledge to America and works his way to the following conclusion:

[W]hen politicians tell you that they are opposed to tax increases, Medicare cuts, Social Security cuts and military cuts, they’re really saying that they are in favor of crippling deficits.

Ever since Obama's election, the Republicans have been noisily pretending to be "fiscal conservatives" committed to reducing the federal deficit (which they massively expanded between 1980 and the present). But what their stated commitments actually add up to is this:

In their Pledge to America, Congressional Republicans have used the old trick of promising specific tax cuts and vague spending cuts. It’s the politically easy approach, and it is likely to be as bad for the budget as when George W. Bush tried it.

Or, as the right-of-center columnist Clive Crook, who really is seriously concerned about bringing the long-term federal deficit under control, put it in August:

Right now the party’s position is to reject every meaningful spending cut and any and all tax increases. That is not fiscal responsibility. It is complete nonsense.

Both Crook and Leonhardt make a partial exception for Paul Ryan as the One Honest Congressional Republican. (Leonhardt adds some Republicans who aren't now in Congress, including nut-case Tea Party candidates for the Senate like Sharron Angle in Nevada, Joe Miller in Alaska, and Rand Paul in Kentucky, who at least have the courage of their extremist convictions, along with a few Republican governors.) But even this partial concession is actually far too generous to Ryan—for reasons that Ryan Avent, Brad DeLong, Paul Krugman, and the Tax Policy Center, among others, have pointed out.

=> The Republican economic "program" may be fraudulent and nonsensical in terms of substantive policy, as Crook said. But in terms of partisan politics, leading up to the November elections, it seems to be serving them pretty well. This should worry all of us—not just Democrats and progressives. By pursuing an effective strategy of almost monolithic obstructionism, Congressional Republicans have been able to do a great deal of harm despite having a minority in both houses and no constructive policies of their own. If these people get control of Congress in the fall, which is not at all impossible, we are all in terrible trouble.

--Jeff Weintraub

Sakineh Ashtiani on death row — Stoning sentence "suspended"

Sakineh Ashtiani's sentence of death by stoning for adultery has apparently been suspended—but not canceled, it is important to add. According to an Associated Press report on Thursday:

Iran says it has put the stoning on hold for now, but has also indicated Ashtiani could be hanged for her conviction of playing a role in her husband's 2005 murder. [....]

Ashtiani's lawyer, Houtan Javid Kian, has said that there has been no change in her case and the stoning sentence was suspended but not officially canceled. He has said Ashtiani was never formally put on trial on the charge of being an accomplice to murder and was not allowed to mount a defense.

Meanwhile, the international outcry about Ashtiani's case continues to build—which may well be keeping her alive. The Europeans, in particular, are becoming increasingly outspoken.

Foreign Minister Steven Vanackere of Belgium, which holds the EU's rotating presidency, said that Iran's concession that the punishment against Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani could be eased did not meet the human rights conditions the EU is insisting on. [....] This week, several European Union nations and the continent's biggest human rights organization have criticized Iran for its plan to stone the 43-year-old mother of two even if Tehran has put the plan on hold for now. [....]

"This inhuman conviction is indefensible and has raised our abhorrence," Vanackere said in a statement. "Human rights, particularly women's rights, are systematically thwarted" in Iran. [....]

Earlier this week, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso called stoning "barbaric" and several EU nations also criticized Tehran for its stand. They were joined by the European Parliament and the 47-nation Council of Europe human rights organization. [....]

On Friday, the Iranian lawyer, human rights activist, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi declared that maintaining and increasing this pressure is essential—especially since Ashtiani's case is just one example of much broader patterns of abuse:

Nobel peace-winner Shirin Ebadi has called on world leaders to fight to end the practice of death by stoning in Iran. She says Sakineh Mohammadi-Ashtiani, the Iranian woman whose earlier death sentence by stoning caused international outcry, is not the only one facing this fate.

In Brussels to meet EU officials, Ebadi says she has little faith that Tehran would spare Mohammadi-Ashtiani despite a suspension of her death by lapidation sentence last July.

"I have no trust in what the government says," she said at a news conference.

"But I say that apart from Sakineh there are several others awaiting death by stoning. Let us save them all."

Ebadi, who has not returned to Iran since leaving for a seminar abroad just days before the disputed June 2009 re-election, said the human rights situation had deteriorated in the country, as had poverty.

More than 800 political prisoners remained in jail while more than 4000 had been released, but many only after posting cripplingly heavy bail.

Lawyer Ebadi said she and other Iranian human rights activists were working to end not only execution by stoning and torture, but also to overturn laws that currently hit children the hardest.

The age of criminal responsibility was nine for girls and 15 for boys, she said. "That means that if a 10-year-old girl perpetrates a crime she is sentenced in the same way as a 40-year-old man. That is why Iran has the highest number of juvenile executions in the world." [....]

It may be that the Iranian regime is just waiting for the international outcry to die down before going ahead with Ashtiani's execution ... or it may be that it is still deciding precisely what to do next. Those of you who would like to add your signatures to a petition calling for for her release can do so here.

--Jeff Weintraub

Europe’s most persecuted people?

"Europe’s most persecuted people?" is the provocative title of a provocative article by Ben Judah about the plight of the Roma, or Gypsies. From the perspective of Europe as a whole—as opposed to localized situations in specific countries—the answer to the question posed by that title might well be yes.

President Sarkozy’s controversial roundup and deportation of thousands of gypsies currently living in France has been condemned by many quarters—the Pope, the president of the EU Commission and a UN committee. The Roma in question are EU citizens who had every right to move to France, but not to stay indefinitely without a job. Yet despite the high-level criticism of Sarkozy’s move, his policy signals a gathering tempo of persecution of the Roma people in Europe. Last week seven Roma were killed by a gunman in Slovakia, before he turned the weapon on himself. Eight similar killings have taken place in neighbouring Hungary over the past 18 months, and 30 firebombing attacks have been reported. In Rome, the mayor has begun demolishing shanties in effort to push the migrants out of the city. In both Serbia and Kosovo there have been ethnic stabbings of large numbers of Roma, who were driven out by Albanians after 1999 and are not welcome to return. Closer to home, Roma have been driven out of Northern Ireland in racist attacks. These developments should worry us all. As history has shown, the widespread maltreatment of a large, stateless minority can have devastating consequences.

Experts believe that there may be up to 11m Roma people in Europe today, making their population greater than Austria’s or Sweden’s. While fertility rates are dropping to record lows in the new EU member states, Roma numbers are exploding. If the numbers hold, 20 per cent of Hungarians and 40 per cent of the country’s workforce will be Roma in 2050—compared to just 6 per cent in 2006. In the coming decades, the danger is that a large proportion of the EU’s population could effectively end up being deemed second-class citizens.

A report by the EU regional policy division emphasises that “the integration of the Roma is a precondition for sustainable long-term growth in many central and eastern European regions.” [....] In 200[5], an initiative by 12 European countries declared this to be the decade of “Roma inclusion,” but NGOs note dryly that the high-point of Roma outreach was in the pre-accession phase of many new member states, especially Romania. After that, persecution mounted, and the socioeconomic facts speak for themselves. [....] These are the numbers of misery.

Europe will continue to see greater Roma migration and persecution unless concerted efforts are made to turn these statistics around. [....]

In a post at Harry's Place, Judah sums up the prospects this way:

[T]he next few decades will see a vicious cycle of migration and expulsion deepen – perhaps catastrophically – unless the EU seriously takes steps to integrate its most persecuted people.

This situation reminds Judah of the intensifying crisis of eastern European Jewry at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century—a period when something like a third of the Jews in eastern Europe, including my grandparents, fled to other places where they were not always welcome. And in some respects the analogy is illuminating.

=> The Economist recently published its own useful and informative article about Europe's Roma Problem (see below) by Adam LeBor. It doesn't have quite as urgent a tone as Ben Judah's article, but its basic message is similar. Some highlights:

Between them the Slovakian shootings and the expulsions from France highlight the difficulties faced by Europe’s largest stateless minority. An ingrained underclass, Roma are the victims of prejudice, often violent, at home in eastern Europe. Thousands have migrated westward to seek a better life, particularly as the expansion of the European Union has allowed them to take advantage of freedom-of-movement rules. Yet although conditions may be better in the west, the reception has rarely been friendly and politicians like President Sarkozy have ruthlessly exploited hostility towards the newcomers.

But the demagogic instincts of western leaders pale in comparison to the negligence of their eastern counterparts. Roma don’t vote much. No government in eastern Europe with a substantial Roma minority has done much to deal with the discrimination they face or the hopeless poverty that keeps them excluded from the mainstream, says Rob Kushen of the Budapest-based European Roma Rights Centre. [....]

This year marks the halfway point of Europe’s “Decade of Roma Inclusion”, launched in 2005 at a riverside hotel in Budapest. Five years on, say activists, most Roma are still worse off than under communism, which, for all its faults, at least guaranteed work, housing and welfare, and stamped down on hate crimes. [....]

Yet the Roma also suffer from problems of their own making. Ambitious youngsters are often held back by their intensely patriarchal and conservative societies. Girls are married off in their teens and boys put to work at an early age rather than study. Weary of the hostility they face from the outside world, Roma communities are prone to cut themselves off from society and its laws. [....]

In recent years, under the EU’s rules on freedom of movement, a torrent of cheap workers from the east have found work in the west. But most Roma leave their homelands in search not of work but of freedom from destitution and persecution. Little wonder that France, egged on by Italy and others, has been keen to “Europeanise” the issue [....]

Europeans would be swift to condemn the plight of the Roma were they in any other part of the world. However, eastern European governments are unlikely suddenly to tackle a problem that dates back centuries just because Brussels tells them to. [....]

=> Judah reports that this situation has begun to produce efforts at Roma political activism in eastern Europe and elsewhere. But so far these amount to little more than "tentative beginnings," and it will not be easy to move beyond them.

It would be a mistake to think of the millions of Roma in Europe as all wanting the same things or living in the same way. Roma (like Jewish) identity exists on a spectrum of cultural identification. Different groups of Roma practice different religions, speak different languages, and tribal sentiment far outweighs any wider sense of unity. It is also worth remembering that a tradition that rejects the essentials of modernity—a settled life, careers and education—will probably continue to hold the Roma back more than right-wing bigotry and persecution. But for myriad reasons, the journey these communities face in the 21st century will be a tough one. They are waiting for their own Herzl, whose task will be even harder. Perhaps impossible.

That reference to Herzl indicates one respect in which, it seems to me, Judah has let a careless use of his historical analogy lead him astray. In his discussion, Judah correctly notes that the general crisis of eastern European Jewry around the end of the 19th century played a crucial role in giving rise to Zionism as a serious political movement. But whatever forms pan-Roma political activism might or might not take in the future, they're not likely to follow anything close to the Zionist model. History is full of surprises, but I think it's safe to rule out the possibility that Europe's Roma will ever get a nation-state of their own. Furthermore, and in some ways even more to the point, Zionism was only one of the major political and ideological responses to the crisis of eastern European Jewry. (For me, the best overview of their rich variety remains Jonathan Frankel's Prophecy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862-1917 ... though people with more expertise in that area will probably tell me that there has been more recent work I should prefer).

So that particular analogy strikes me as, on balance, more misleading than illuminating. Nevertheless, Judah is on to something significant. Political Zionism represented, among other things, a revolt against mainstream Jewish traditions and a repudiation of key features of Jewish historical experience. It shared those characteristics with almost all movements of national or ethnic "awakening" and self-emancipation. Whatever forms any future pan-Roma political activism might take, to be at all effective they will have to involve internal transformations in Roma society and culture as well as changes in external conditions. That's always hard.

--Jeff Weintraub

==============================
Economist
September 2, 2010 | Budapest
Europe's Roma
Hard travelling
Scapegoated abroad and the victims of prejudice at home, eastern Europe’s Roma are the problem no politician wants to solve
By Adam LeBor



SLOVAKIA is in shock; France in uproar. The cause of both nations’ turmoil is the Roma (gypsies), or, rather, what is being done to them. This week a gunman in the Slovak capital, Bratislava, killed seven people and injured 14, before shooting himself dead. Six of the victims were a Roma family, killed inside their apartment; they appear to have been deliberately targeted.

In France the expulsion of hundreds of Roma immigrants, whom Nicolas Sarkozy’s government says were in the country illegally, has galvanised opposition from the pope, French churches, a UN committee and even several ministers in Mr Sarkozy’s own government. Yet further tough legislation is promised.

Between them the Slovakian shootings and the expulsions from France highlight the difficulties faced by Europe’s largest stateless minority. An ingrained underclass, Roma are the victims of prejudice, often violent, at home in eastern Europe. Thousands have migrated westward to seek a better life, particularly as the expansion of the European Union has allowed them to take advantage of freedom-of-movement rules. Yet although conditions may be better in the west, the reception has rarely been friendly and politicians like President Sarkozy have ruthlessly exploited hostility towards the newcomers.

But the demagogic instincts of western leaders pale in comparison to the negligence of their eastern counterparts. Roma don’t vote much. No government in eastern Europe with a substantial Roma minority has done much to deal with the discrimination they face or the hopeless poverty that keeps them excluded from the mainstream, says Rob Kushen of the Budapest-based European Roma Rights Centre.

One of the biggest problems is schooling: Roma children are routinely placed in institutions for the mentally handicapped. A new survey by Amnesty International says that in Slovakia, Roma make up less than 10% of the school-age population but 60% of pupils in special schools. Unsurprisingly, many leave school early, without the skills they need to compete in the job market. Instead they drift into collecting scrap metal, begging or petty crime.

Straightforward prejudice plays its part. This week an MEP from Jobbik, a far-right Hungarian party, called for the mass internment of Roma. Last year Hungarian police sought help from the FBI after a series of attacks on Roma settlements in which six people were killed, including a five-year-old boy, Robika Csorba, and his father, Robert. Gunmen firebombed their house and lay in wait as they fled, before opening fire. A few weeks later, six Roma teenagers arrested in the Slovak town of Kosice for allegedly stealing a purse were forced to strip naked, kiss and hit each other, as police filmed their humiliation. In western Europe Roma migrants have faced firebomb attacks in Italy, pogroms in Belfast and forcible evictions in Greece.

This year marks the halfway point of Europe’s “Decade of Roma Inclusion”, launched in 2005 at a riverside hotel in Budapest. Five years on, say activists, most Roma are still worse off than under communism, which, for all its faults, at least guaranteed work, housing and welfare, and stamped down on hate crimes. Today conditions in Roma settlements on the edges of town and villages rival Africa or India for their deprivation.

Yet the Roma also suffer from problems of their own making. Ambitious youngsters are often held back by their intensely patriarchal and conservative societies. Girls are married off in their teens and boys put to work at an early age rather than study. Weary of the hostility they face from the outside world, Roma communities are prone to cut themselves off from society and its laws. Four years ago in Olaszliszka, northern Hungary, a driver who clipped a Romany girl with his car (she was unhurt) was dragged from the vehicle by a mob, many of them related to the girl, and beaten to death in front of his daughters.

In recent years, under the EU’s rules on freedom of movement, a torrent of cheap workers from the east have found work in the west. But most Roma leave their homelands in search not of work but of freedom from destitution and persecution. Little wonder that France, egged on by Italy and others, has been keen to “Europeanise” the issue, urging Brussels to go to greater efforts to get the eastern countries to integrate their Roma. Yet now that those countries are safely inside the EU it is far harder than in the pre-accession years for Eurocrats to tell their governments what to do.

Europeans would be swift to condemn the plight of the Roma were they in any other part of the world. However, eastern European governments are unlikely suddenly to tackle a problem that dates back centuries just because Brussels tells them to. Perhaps self-interest may prove a more powerful motivator. Roma families are far larger than those of the mainstream population: the pool of deprivation is only going to grow. In addition, a recent World Bank study estimates the annual cost of the failure to integrate Roma in Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and the Czech Republic at €5.7 billion ($7.3 billion). As the report notes: “Bridging the education gap is the economically smart choice.” If humanitarian arguments fail to carry the day, perhaps economics and demographics might.

More mysteries of public opinion polling

All the available information seems to indicate that the foremost concern on voters' minds leading up to the midterm elections is the dismal state of the economy, especially the continuing high level of unemployment.

=> Whom do they blame for these problems?

According to a recent USA Today/Gallup poll, they are still most likely, by far, to place the heaviest blame on the policies followed during the Bush administration. A total of 71% said that George W. Bush deserved either "a great deal of the blame" or "a moderate amount." Less than a third of respondents said it wouldn't be fair to blame him much or at all.

To be sure, Obama didn't get off scot-free. But his numbers were sharply different. A total of 48% said he deserves "a great deal" or "a moderate amount" of the blame, which is a good deal less than 71%. And on the other hand,

51% say he's dealing with problems he inherited, not created, saying he deserves not much or none of the responsibility for economic problems that include high unemployment and a faltering housing market.

=> One major economic issue dividing the Democrats and Republicans is what to do about the Bush tax cuts, which are set to expire automatically in 2011 (due mostly to the procedural tricks the Republicans used to pass those tax cuts via "reconciliation"). Obama's compromise proposal is, essentially, to extend those tax cuts for families whose taxable income is less than $250,000 per year (about 98% of families), whereas the tax cuts for families with a taxable income over $250,000 (that's about 2% of families) should be allowed to expire, bringing them back to the tax rates they paid during the Clinton administration. The Congressional Republicans, by contrast, monolithically oppose letting any of the Bush tax cuts expire.

What do voters think about this?

According to a recent CNN poll, 51% think tax cuts for those earning more than $250,000 per year should be allowed to expire, while another 18% think all the Bush tax cuts should be allowed to expire. That adds up to 69%. Only 31% favor the Republican position.

Nor is that poll an outlier. Other polls also indicate that substantial majorities oppose the Republican position on this issue. According to a CBS poll, even Republican respondents narrowly favored letting the tax cuts for the richest 2% expire (48% vs. 46%).

=> So which party are people planning to vote for in the November midterm elections?

According to one recent Gallup tracking poll:

Republicans lead by 51% to 41% among registered voters in Gallup weekly tracking of 2010 congressional voting preferences. The 10-percentage-point lead is the GOP's largest so far this year and is its largest in Gallup's history of tracking the midterm generic ballot for Congress.

Granted, that 10-point spread might turn out to be a fluke. But there's no question that all current polls show an overall Republican lead in voter preferences. And as Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight pointed out:

Gallup’s survey — and some other generic ballot polls — are still polling registered rather than likely voters, whereas its polls of likely voters are generally more reliable in midterm elections. At FiveThirtyEight, we’ve found that the gap between registered and likely voter polls this year is about 4 points in the Republicans’ favor — so a 10-point lead in a registered voter poll is the equivalent of about 14 points on a likely-voter basis. Thus, even if this particular Gallup survey was an outlier, it’s not unlikely that we’ll begin to see some 8-, 9- and 10-point leads for Republicans in this poll somewhat routinely once Gallup switches over to a likely voter model at some point after Labor Day — unless Democrats do something to get the momentum back.

Yours for democracy,
Jeff Weintraub

Foot-in-mouth disease ...

... seems to be an occupational hazard of politicians around the world. Here's a recent example from Germany:

An ally of German Chancellor Angela Merkel says she will resign from a top party post after suggesting that Poland may have been as responsible as Hitler for the outbreak of World War II.

Erika Steinbach said Poland had mobilised its troops months before the Nazis invaded in September 1939.

Her remarks were criticised by senior politicians including Mrs Merkel.

Mrs Steinbach heads a conservative body representing Germans who were expelled from Eastern Europe after the war. [....]

When political figures accidentally blurt out idiotic and offensive things they really believe, the effect can sometimes be usefully illuminating, since they're usually not the only ones who believe them. In this case, though, it's reassuring to know that pseudo-historical claims of this sort still go beyond the limits of respectable public discourse in German politics.

--Jeff Weintraub

Iran's ruling elite struggles over how to manage the fallout from the Ashtiani case (Ann Mayer)

According to the BBC's John Leyne, the continuing international outcry over the case of Sakineh Ashtiani, sentenced to death by stoning on (probably bogus) charges of adultery, to which trumped-up charges of murder have recently been added, has been causing diplomatic problems for the Iranian government. I should hope so.

However, that's only part of the story. The analysis offered by Ann Mayer, guest-posted below, digs deeper. The Ashtiani case has helped to bring out and sharpen some significant tactical splits and tensions within Iran's ruling elite.

On the one hand, Iran has decided that it wants to follow Saudi Arabia's example and worm its way into the UN human rights system with a view to subverting and perverting it. [....] For those members of the regime who seek to advance Iran's role in the UN human rights system, the Sakineh Ashtiani case is acutely embarrassing. They really do not want Iran to be seen as a country that stones to death a woman for adultery and realize that this case makes the mentality of the regime appear to be both primitive and sexist. [....]

On the other hand, there are apparently many hardliners who think that stoning -- or at least hanging - women for adultery is an excellent way of signaling their tough-minded approach to women's immorality and of intimidating women who are not inclined to defer meekly to clerical admonitions to uphold Islamic norms for women's conduct. [....]

It is amusing to observe the official class of the IRI engaged in infighting and squirming as its members try to develop a politically viable party line on human rights and on women's rights in particular, meanwhile getting tangled up in their own webs of lies and hypocrisy. [....]

But these are disagreements over rhetoric and public relations, not fundamental policies. Although feelings of disgust at the penalty of death by stoning is entirely justified, it would be wrong to let a focus on this specific penalty

be a distraction from the much broader issues behind the case. These relate to the egregious failure to adhere to basic tenets of the rule of law on the part of Iran's courts and judges and their routine recourse to torture to induce victims of specious criminal charges to make "confessions" of their guilt. [....]

Correct. Read the whole thing (below).

--Jeff Weintraub

==============================
Iran's ruling elite struggles over how to manage the fallout from the Ashtiani case
Guest-posted by Ann Elizabeth Mayer
Department of Legal Studies & Business Ethics
The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Iran's "human rights" policy is in considerable disarray, as the discordant voices recently emanating from various segments of the ruling elite prove.

On the one hand, Iran has decided that it wants to follow Saudi Arabia's example and worm its way into the UN human rights system with a view to subverting and perverting it. To that end, Iran has felt compelled to alter its rhetoric - while not necessarily altering its actual policies - to obscure its fundamental hostility to the philosophy of human rights, which it must do in order to be a player in the UN human rights system. Instead of its former defiant repudiation of human rights as secular or "too Western" for use in the Islamic Republic, it now opts for the route of hypocrisy, as when it pretended in its February 2010 statement to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva that Iran has a "firm commitment to the promotion and protection of human rights." In 2009 the IRI also tried hard, but failed, to get a position on the UN Human Rights Council. However, it succeeded earlier this year in engineering its membership of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, an entity that is supposed to set standards for the advancement of women's equality. To make any impact there, Iran must try to preserve the fiction that it is committed to upholding women's rights.

For those members of the regime who seek to advance Iran's role in the UN human rights system, the Sakineh Ashtiani case is acutely embarrassing. They really do not want Iran to be seen as a country that stones to death a woman for adultery and realize that this case makes the mentality of the regime appear to be both primitive and sexist. One can see evidence of official compunctions in the efforts that have been made to recharacterize Ashtiani as a woman who is guilty of a murder so heinous that the regime cannot even bear to publicize the details, and in the Foreign Ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast's statement to a news conference that punishing Ashtiani for her crime cannot be a human rights issue, since European countries likewise punish murderers.

On the other hand, there are apparently many hardliners who think that stoning -- or at least hanging - women for adultery is an excellent way of signaling their tough-minded approach to women's immorality and of intimidating women who are not inclined to defer meekly to clerical admonitions to uphold Islamic norms for women's conduct. For the hardliners, it is natural to do what the prominent hard-line newspaper Kayhan just did, to lash out at Carla Bruni for her denunciation of the plans to execute Ashtiani. Repeating slurs made by other hardliners, Kayhan a few days ago called Bruni a prostitute. Today it maintained that Bruni's sordid personal history shows why she would support a woman who committed adultery and who killed her husband. Referring to Bruni's own colorful sex life, Kayhan concluded that Bruni's record of immorality showed "she herself deserves death." Of course, this would not be the first time that the IRI has acted as if entitled to deploy what are said to be Islamic standards to call for punishment of conduct occurring in Europe, but the scurrilous attacks on the wife of the French President represent a striking instance of incivility and a sharp breach of diplomatic norms.

The hapless Mehmanparast as the Foreign Ministry point man now has the task of trying to mitigate the harm that is being done to the image of the IRI, stating publicly that it did not endorse "insulting officials of other countries and using indecent words," and enjoining Iran's media to refrain from using such language.

It is amusing to observe the official class of the IRI engaged in infighting and squirming as its members try to develop a politically viable party line on human rights and on women's rights in particular, meanwhile getting tangled up in their own webs of lies and hypocrisy.

In the meanwhile, as deplorable as the plight of Sakineh Ashtiani is as she confronts an execution on trumped-up charges of murder, one should not let a preoccupation with the shocking penalty be a distraction from the much broader issues behind the case. These relate to the egregious failure to adhere to basic tenets of the rule of law on the part of Iran's courts and judges and their routine recourse to torture to induce victims of specious criminal charges to make "confessions" of their guilt. What would be seen as outrageous affronts to principles of due process in modern systems of criminal justice that adhere to international standards have been so routine in the criminal justice system of the IRI that people may overlook how the lack of any protections for the rights of the criminal accused played into this case. Without any reforms being taken to enhance respect for due process, hordes of new victims will be doomed to suffer in the course of criminal proceedings that can only be called diabolical. Their plight should not be forgotten, even if the sentences meted out to them do not occasion the aversion that the idea of stoning someone to death does.

Honor killings international - "The crimewave that shames the world" (Robert Fisk)

I don't always agree with Robert Fisk, to say the least. But as I've noted in the past, his saving grace is that he genuinely hates cruelty and human suffering. What he says in this piece is right and important, and it's said with the proper degree of passionate outrage. As Fisk observes, "It is difficult to remain unemotional at the vast and detailed catalogue of these crimes." They add up to "a mass crime, a tradition of family savagery that brooks no merciful intervention, no state law, rarely any remorse."

The piece is clear and straightforward, so further explanation is unnecessary, and additional commentary would be superfluous. Just read it through to the end, even if you find the experience painful.

(For more on this awful subject and some closely related topics, see here & here & here & here & here & here.)

--Jeff Weintraub

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The Independent (London)
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
The crimewave that shames the world
It's one of the last great taboos: the murder of at least 20,000 women a year in the name of 'honour'. Nor is the problem confined to the Middle East: the contagion is spreading rapidly
By Robert Fisk

It is a tragedy, a horror, a crime against humanity. The details of the murders - of the women beheaded, burned to death, stoned to death, stabbed, electrocuted, strangled and buried alive for the "honour" of their families - are as barbaric as they are shameful. Many women's groups in the Middle East and South-west Asia suspect the victims are at least four times the United Nations' latest world figure of around 5,000 deaths a year. Most of the victims are young, many are teenagers, slaughtered under a vile tradition that goes back hundreds of years but which now spans half the globe.

A 10-month investigation by The Independent in Jordan, Pakistan, Egypt, Gaza and the West Bank has unearthed terrifying details of murder most foul. Men are also killed for "honour" and, despite its identification by journalists as a largely Muslim practice, Christian and Hindu communities have stooped to the same crimes. Indeed, the "honour" (or ird) of families, communities and tribes transcends religion and human mercy. But voluntary women's groups, human rights organisations, Amnesty International and news archives suggest that the slaughter of the innocent for "dishonouring" their families is increasing by the year.

Iraqi Kurds, Palestinians in Jordan, Pakistan and Turkey appear to be the worst offenders but [an important caveat—JW] media freedoms in these countries may over-compensate for the secrecy which surrounds "honour" killings in Egypt - which untruthfully claims there are none - and other Middle East nations in the Gulf and the Levant. But honour crimes long ago spread to Britain, Belgium, Russia and Canada and many other nations. Security authorities and courts across much of the Middle East have connived in reducing or abrogating prison sentences for the family murder of women, often classifying them as suicides to prevent prosecutions.

It is difficult to remain unemotional at the vast and detailed catalogue of these crimes. How should one react to a man - this has happened in both Jordan and Egypt - who rapes his own daughter and then, when she becomes pregnant, kills her to save the "honour" of his family? Or the Turkish father and grandfather of a 16-year-old girl, Medine Mehmi, in the province of Adiyaman, who was buried alive beneath a chicken coop in February for "befriending boys"? Her body was found 40 days later, in a sitting position and with her hands tied.

Or Aisha Ibrahim Duhulow, 13, who in Somalia in 2008, in front of a thousand people, was dragged to a hole in the ground - all the while screaming, "I'm not going - don't kill me" - then buried up to her neck and stoned by 50 men for adultery? After 10 minutes, she was dug up, found to be still alive and put back in the hole for further stoning. Her crime? She had been raped by three men and, fatally, her family decided to report the facts to the Al-Shabab militia that runs Kismayo. Or the Al-Shabab Islamic "judge" in the same country who announced the 2009 stoning to death of a woman - the second of its kind the same year - for having an affair? Her boyfriend received a mere 100 lashes.

Or the young woman found in a drainage ditch near Daharki in Pakistan, "honour" killed by her family as she gave birth to her second child, her nose, ears and lips chopped off before being axed to death, her first infant lying dead among her clothes, her newborn's torso still in her womb, its head already emerging from her body? She was badly decomposed; the local police were asked to bury her. Women carried the three to a grave, but a Muslim cleric refused to say prayers for her because it was "irreligious" to participate in the namaz-e-janaza prayers for "a cursed woman and her illegitimate children".

So terrible are the details of these "honour" killings, and so many are the women who have been slaughtered, that the story of each one might turn horror into banality. But lest these acts - and the names of the victims, when we are able to discover them - be forgotten, here are the sufferings of a mere handful of women over the past decade, selected at random, country by country, crime after crime.

Last March, Munawar Gul shot and killed his 20-year-old sister, Saanga, in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan, along with the man he suspected was having "illicit relations" with her, Aslam Khan.

In August of 2008, five women were buried alive for "honour crimes" in Baluchistan by armed tribesmen; three of them - Hameeda, Raheema and Fauzia - were teenagers who, after being beaten and shot, were thrown still alive into a ditch where they were covered with stones and earth. When the two older women, aged 45 and 38, protested, they suffered the same fate. The three younger women had tried to choose their own husbands. In the Pakistani parliament, the MP Israrullah Zehri referred to the murders as part of a "centuries-old tradition" which he would "continue to defend".

In December 2003, a 23-year-old woman in Multan, identified only as Afsheen, was murdered by her father because, after an unhappy arranged marriage, she ran off with a man called Hassan who was from a rival, feuding tribe. Her family was educated - they included civil servants, engineers and lawyers. "I gave her sleeping pills in a cup of tea and then strangled her with a dapatta [a long scarf, part of a woman's traditional dress]," her father confessed. He told the police: "Honour is the only thing a man has. I can still hear her screams, she was my favourite daughter. I want to destroy my hands and end my life." The family had found Afsheen with Hassan in Rawalpindi and promised she would not be harmed if she returned home. They were lying.

Zakir Hussain Shah slit the throat of his daughter Sabiha, 18, at Bara Kau in June 2002 because she had "dishonoured" her family. But under Pakistan's notorious qisas law, heirs have powers to pardon a murderer. In this case, Sabiha's mother and brother "pardoned" the father and he was freed. When a man killed his four sisters in Mardan in the same year, because they wanted a share of his inheritance, his mother "pardoned" him under the same law. In Sarghoda around the same time, a man opened fire on female members of his family, killing two of his daughters. Yet again, his wife - and several other daughters wounded by him - "pardoned" the murderer because they were his heirs.

Outrageously, rape is also used as a punishment for "honour" crimes. In Meerwala village in the Punjab in 2002, a tribal "jury" claimed that an 11-year-old boy from the Gujar tribe, Abdul Shakoor, had been walking unchaperoned with a 30-year-old woman from the Mastoi tribe, which "dishonoured" the Mastois. The tribal elders decided that to "return" honour to the group, the boy's 18-year-old sister, Mukhtaran Bibi, should be gang-raped. Her father, warned that all the female members of his family would be raped if he did not bring Mukhtar to them, dutifully brought his daughter to this unholy "jury". Four men, including one of the "jury", immediately dragged the girl to a hut and raped her while up to a hundred men laughed and cheered outside. She was then forced to walk naked through the village to her home. It took a week before the police even registered the crime - as a "complaint".

Acid attacks also play their part in "honour" crime punishments. The Independent itself gave wide coverage in 2001 to a Karachi man called Bilal Khar who poured acid over his wife Fakhra Yunus's face after she left him and returned to her mother's home in the red-light area of the city. The acid fused her lips, burned off her hair, melted her breasts and an ear, and turned her face into "a look of melted rubber". That same year, a 20-year-old woman called Hafiza was shot twice by her brother, Asadullah, in front of a dozen policemen outside a Quetta courthouse because she had refused to follow the tradition of marrying her dead husband's elder brother. She had then married another man, Fayyaz Moon, but police arrested the girl and brought her back to her family in Quetta on the pretext that the couple could formally marry there. But she was forced to make a claim that Fayaz had kidnapped and raped her. It was when she went to court to announce that her statement was made under pressure - and that she still regarded Fayaz as her husband - that Asadullah murdered her. He handed his pistol to a police constable who had witnessed the killing.

One of the most terrible murders in 1999 was that of a mentally retarded 16-year-old, Lal Jamilla Mandokhel, who was reportedly raped by a junior civil servant in Parachinar in the North-West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Her uncle filed a complaint with the police but handed Lal over to her tribe, whose elders decided she should be killed to preserve tribal "honour". She was shot dead in front of them. Arbab Khatoon was raped by three men in the Jacobabad district. She filed a complaint with the police. Seven hours later, she was murdered by relatives who claimed she had "dishonoured" them by reporting the crime.

Over 10 years ago, Pakistan's Human Rights Commission was recording "honour" killings at the rate of a thousand a year. But if Pakistan seems to have the worst track record of "honour" crimes - and we must remember that many countries falsely claim to have none - Turkey might run a close second. According to police figures between 2000 and 2006, a reported 480 women - 20 per cent of them between the ages of 19 and 25 - were killed in "honour" crimes and feuds. Other Turkish statistics, drawn up more than five years ago by women's groups, suggest that at least 200 girls and women are murdered every year for "honour". These figures are now regarded as a vast underestimate. Many took place in Kurdish areas of the country; an opinion poll found that 37 per cent of Diyabakir's citizens approved of killing a woman for an extramarital affair. Medine Mehmi, the girl who was buried alive, lived in the Kurdish town of Kahta.

In 2006, authorities in the Kurdish area of South-east Anatolia were recording that a woman tried to commit suicide every few weeks on the orders of her family. Others were stoned to death, shot, buried alive or strangled. A 17-year-old woman called Derya who fell in love with a boy at her school received a text message from her uncle on her mobile phone. It read: "You have blackened our name. Kill yourself and clean our shame or we will kill you first." Derya's aunt had been killed by her grandfather for an identical reason. Her brothers also sent text messages, sometimes 15 a day. Derya tried to carry out her family's wishes. She jumped into the Tigris river, tried to hang herself and slashed her wrists - all to no avail. Then she ran away to a women's shelter.

It took 13 years before Murat Kara, 40, admitted in 2007 that he had fired seven bullets into his younger sister after his widowed mother and uncles told him to kill her for eloping with her boyfriend. Before he murdered his sister in the Kurdish city of Dyabakir, neighbours had refused to talk to Murat Kara and the imam said he was disobeying the word of God if he did not kill his sister. So he became a murderer. Honour restored.

In his book Women In The Grip Of Tribal Customs, a Turkish journalist, Mehmet Farac, records the "honour" killing of five girls in the late 1990s in the province of Sanliurfa. Two of them - one was only 12 - had their throats slit in public squares, two others had tractors driven over them, the fifth was shot dead by her younger brother. One of the women who had her throat cut was called Sevda Gok. Her brothers held her arms down as her adolescent cousin cut her throat.

But the "honour" killing of women is not a uniquely Kurdish crime, even if it is committed in rural areas of the country. In 2001, Sait Kina stabbed his 13-year-old daughter to death for talking to boys in the street. He attacked her in the bathroom with an axe and a kitchen knife. When the police discovered her corpse, they found the girl's head had been so mutilated that the family had tied it together with a scarf. Sait Kina told the police: "I have fulfilled my duty."

In the same year, an Istanbul court reduced a sentence against three brothers from life imprisonment to between four and 12 years after they threw their sister to her death from a bridge after accusing her of being a prostitute. The court concluded that her behaviour had "provoked" the murder. For centuries, virginity tests have been considered a normal part of rural tradition before a woman's marriage. In 1998, when five young women attempted suicide before these tests, the Turkish family affairs minister defended mandated medical examinations for girls in foster homes.

British Kurdish Iraqi campaigner Aso Kamal, of the Doaa Network Against Violence, believes that between 1991 and 2007, 12,500 women were murdered for reasons of "honour" in the three Kurdish provinces of Iraq alone - 350 of them in the first seven months of 2007, for which there were only five convictions. Many women are ordered by their families to commit suicide by burning themselves with cooking oil. In Sulimaniya hospital in 2007, surgeons were treating many women for critical burns which could never have been caused by cooking "accidents" as the women claimed. One patient, Sirwa Hassan, was dying of 86 per cent burns. She was a Kurdish mother of three from a village near the Iranian border. In 2008, a medical officer in Sulimaniya told the AFP news agency that in May alone, 14 young women had been murdered for "honour" crimes in 10 days. In 2000, Kurdish authorities in Sulimaniya had decreed that "the killing or abuse of women under the pretext of cleansing 'shame' is not considered to be a mitigating excuse". The courts, they said, could not apply an old 1969 law "to reduce the penalty of the perpetrator". The new law, of course, made no difference.

But again, in Iraq, it is not only Kurds who believe in "honour" killings. In Tikrit, a young woman in the local prison sent a letter to her brother in 2008, telling him that she had become pregnant after being raped by a prison guard. The brother was permitted to visit the prison, walked into the cell where his now visibly pregnant sister was held, and shot her dead to spare his family "dishonour". The mortuary in Baghdad took DNA samples from the woman's foetus and also from guards at the Tikrit prison. The rapist was a police lieutenant-colonel. The reason for the woman's imprisonment was unclear. One report said the colonel's family had "paid off" the woman's relatives to escape punishment.

In Basra in 2008, police were reporting that 15 women a month were being murdered for breaching "Islamic dress codes". One 17-year-old girl, Rand Abdel-Qader, was beaten to death by her father two years ago because she had become infatuated with a British soldier. Another, Shawbo Ali Rauf, 19, was taken by her family to a picnic in Dokan and shot seven times because they had found an unfamiliar number on her mobile phone.

In Nineveh, Du'a Khalil Aswad was 17 when she was stoned to death by a mob of 2,000 men for falling in love with a man outside her tribe.

In Jordan, women's organisations say that per capita, the Christian minority in this country of just over five million people are involved in more "honour" killings than Muslims - often because Christian women want to marry Muslim men. But the Christian community is loath to discuss its crimes and the majority of known cases of murder are committed by Muslims. Their stories are wearily and sickeningly familiar. Here is Sirhan in 1999, boasting of the efficiency with which he killed his young sister, Suzanne. Three days after the 16-year-old had told police she had been raped, Sirhan shot her in the head four times. "She committed a mistake, even if it was against her will," he said. "Anyway, it's better to have one person die than to have the whole family die of shame." Since then, a deeply distressing pageant of "honour" crimes has been revealed to the Jordanian public, condemned by the royal family and slowly countered with ever tougher criminal penalties by the courts.

Yet in 2001, we find a 22-year-old Jordanian man strangling his 17-year-old married sister - the 12th murder of its kind in seven months - because he suspected her of having an affair. Her husband lived in Saudi Arabia. In 2002, Souad Mahmoud strangled his own sister for the same reason. She had been forced to marry her lover - but when the family found out she had been pregnant before her wedding, they decided to execute her.

In 2005, three Jordanians stabbed their 22-year-old married sister to death for taking a lover. After witnessing the man enter her home, the brothers stormed into the house and killed her. They did not harm her lover.

By March 2008, the Jordanian courts were still treating "honour" killings leniently. That month, the Jordanian Criminal Court sentenced two men for killing close female relatives "in a fit of fury" to a mere six months and three months in prison. In the first case, a husband had found a man in his home with his wife and suspected she was having an affair. In the second, a man shot dead his 29-year-old married sister for leaving home without her husband's consent and "talking to other men on her mobile phone". In 2009, a Jordanian man confessed to stabbing his pregnant sister to death because she had moved back to her family after an argument with her husband; the brother believed she was "seeing other men".

And so it goes on. Three men in Amman stabbing their 40-year-old divorced sister 15 times last year for taking a lover; a Jordanian man charged with stabbing to death his daughter, 22, with a sword because she was pregnant outside wedlock. Many of the Jordanian families were originally Palestinian. Nine months ago, a Palestinian stabbed his married sister to death because of her "bad behaviour". But last month, the Amman criminal court sentenced another sister-killer to 10 years in prison, rejecting his claim of an "honour" killing - but only because there were no witnesses to his claim that she had committed adultery.

In "Palestine" itself, Human Rights Watch has long blamed the Palestinian police and justice system for the near-total failure to protect women in Gaza and the West Bank from "honour" killings. Take, for example, the 17-year-old girl who was strangled by her older brother in 2005 for becoming pregnant - by her own father.

He was present during her murder. She had earlier reported her father to the police. They neither arrested nor interrogated him. In the same year, masked Hamas gunmen shot dead a 20-year-old, Yusra Azzami, for "immoral behaviour" as she spent a day out with her fiancée. Azzami was a Hamas member, her husband-to-be a member of Fatah. Hamas tried to apologise and called the dead woman a "martyr" - to the outrage of her family. Yet only last year, long after Hamas won the Palestinian elections and took over the Gaza Strip, a Gaza man was detained for bludgeoning his daughter to death with an iron chain because he discovered she owned a mobile phone on which he feared she was talking to a man outside the family. He was later released.

Even in liberal Lebanon, there are occasional "honour" killings, the most notorious that of a 31-year-old woman, Mona Kaham, whose father entered her bedroom and cut her throat after learning she had been made pregnant by her cousin. He walked to the police station in Roueiss in the southern suburbs of Beirut with the knife still in his hand. "My conscience is clear," he told the police. "I have killed to clean my honour." Unsurprisingly, a public opinion poll showed that 90.7 per cent of the Lebanese public opposed "honour" crimes. Of the few who approved of them, several believed that it helped to limit interreligious marriage.

Syria reflects the pattern of Lebanon. While civil rights groups are demanding a stiffening of the laws against women-killers, government legislation only raised the term of imprisonment for men who kill female relatives for extramarital sex to two years. Among the most recent cases was that of Lubna, a 17-year-old living in Homs, murdered by her family because she fled to her sister's house after refusing to marry a man they had chosen for her. They also believed - wrongly - that she was no longer a virgin.

Tribal feuds often provoke "honour" killings in Iran and Afghanistan. In Iran, for example, a governor's official in the ethnic Arab province of Khuzestan stated in 2003 that 45 young women under the age of 20 had been murdered in "honour" killings in just two months, none of which brought convictions. All were slaughtered because of the girl's refusal to agree to an arranged marriage, failing to abide by Islamic dress code or suspected of having contacts with men outside the family.

Through the dark veil of Afghanistan's village punishments, we glimpse just occasionally the terror of teenage executions. When Siddiqa, who was only 19, and her 25-year-old fiancé Khayyam were brought before a Taliban-approved religious court in Kunduz province this month, their last words were: "We love each other, no matter what happens." In the bazaar at Mulla Quli, a crowd - including members of both families - stoned to death first Siddiqa, then Khayyam.

A week earlier, a woman identified as Bibi Sanubar, a pregnant widow, was lashed a hundred times and then shot in the head by a Taliban commander. In April of last year, Taliban gunmen executed by firing squad a man and a girl in Nimruz for eloping when the young woman was already engaged to someone else. History may never disclose how many hundreds of women - and men - have suffered a similar fates at the hands of deeply traditional village families or the Taliban.

But the contagion of "honour" crimes has spread across the globe, including acid attacks on women in Bangladesh for refusing marriages. In one of the most terrible Hindu "honour" killings in India this year, an engaged couple, Yogesh Kumar and Asha Saini, were murdered by the 19-year-old bride-to-be's family because her fiancée was of lower caste. They were apparently tied up and electrocuted to death.

A similar fate awaited 18-year-old Vishal Sharma, a Hindu Brahmin, who wanted to marry Sonu Singh, a 17- year-old Jat - an "inferior" caste which is usually Muslim. The couple were hanged and their bodies burned in Uttar Pradesh. Three years earlier, a New Delhi court had sentenced to death five men for killing another couple who were of the same sub-caste, which in the eyes of the local "caste council" made them brother and sister.

In Chechnya, Russia's chosen President, Ramzan Kadyrov, has been positively encouraging men to kill for "honour". When seven murdered women were found in Grozny, shot in the head and chest, Kadyrov announced - without any proof, but with obvious approval - that they had been killed for living "an immoral life". Commenting on a report that a Chechen girl had called the police to complain of her abusive father, he suggested the man should be able to murder his daughter. "... if he doesn't kill her, what kind of man is he? He brings shame on himself!"

And so to the "West", as we like to call it, where immigrant families have sometimes brought amid their baggage the cruel traditions of their home villages: an Azeri immigrant charged in St Petersburg for hiring hitmen to kill his daughter because she "flouted national tradition" by wearing a miniskirt; near the Belgian city of Charleroi, Sadia Sheikh shot dead by her brother, Moussafa, because she refused to marry a Pakistani man chosen by her family; in the suburbs of Toronto, Kamikar Kaur Dhillon slashes his Punjabi daughter-in-law, Amandeep, across the throat because she wants to leave her arranged marriage, perhaps for another man. He told Canadian police that her separation would "disgrace the family name".

And, of course, we should perhaps end this catalogue of crime in Britain, where only in the past few years have we ourselves woken to the reality of "honour" crimes; of Surjit Athwal, a Punjabi Sikh woman murdered on the orders of her London-based mother-in-law for trying to escape a violent marriage; of 15-year-old Tulay Goren, a Turkish Kurd from north London, tortured and murdered by her Shia Muslim father because she wished to marry a Sunni Muslim man; of Heshu Yones, 16, stabbed to death by her father in 2005 for going out with a Christian boy; of Caneze Riaz, burned alive by her husband in Accrington, along with their four children - the youngest 10 years old - because of their "Western ways". Mohamed Riaz was a Muslim Pakistani from the North-West Frontier Province. He died of burns two days after the murders.

Scotland Yard long ago admitted it would have to review over a hundred deaths, some going back more than a decade, which now appear to have been "honour" killings.

These are just a few of the murders, a few names, a small selection of horror stories across the world to prove the pervasive, spreading infection of what must be recognised as a mass crime, a tradition of family savagery that brooks no merciful intervention, no state law, rarely any remorse.

Surjit Athwal

Murdered in 1998 by her in-laws on a trip to the Indian Punjab for daring to seek a divorce from an unhappy marriage

Du'a Khalil Aswad

Aged 17, she was stoned to death in Nineveh, Iraq, by a mob of 2,000 men for falling in love with a man outside her tribe

Rand Abdel-Qader

The Iraqi 17-year-old was stabbed to death by her father two years ago after falling in love with a British soldier in Basra

Fakhra Khar

In 2001 in Karachi, her husband poured acid on her face, after she left him and returned to her mother's home in the red-light district of the city

Mukhtaran Bibi

The 18-year-old was gang-raped by four men in a hut in the Punjab in 2002, while up to 100 men laughed and cheered outside

Heshu Yones

The 16-year-old was stabbed to death by her Muslim father Abdullah, in west London in 2002, because he disapproved of her Christian boyfriend

Tasleem Solangi

The Pakistani village girl, 17, was falsely accused of immorality and had dogs set on her as a punishment before she was shot dead by in-laws

Shawbo Ali Rauf

Aged 19, she was taken by her family to a picnic in Dokan, Iraq, and shot seven times after they had found an unfamiliar number on her phone

Tulay Goren

The 15-year-old Kurdish girl was killed in north London by her father because the family objected to her choice of husband

Banaz Mahmod Babakir Agha

The 20-year-old's father and uncle murdered her in 2007, after she fell in love with a man her family did not want her to marry

Ayesha Baloch

Accused of having sexual relations with another man before she married, her husband slit her lip and nostril with a knife in Pakistan in 2006

Politics & religious pluralism in New Jersey

Adam Holland passes along the news that in Teaneck, New Jersey, a town whose population is about 40% Jewish, a Muslim mayor was recently elected with heavy Jewish support. Current controversies aside, we should not forget that in the long run events like that represent the more fundamental American story—and we should try to keep it that way.

That's true despite all the messiness and complications involved. Here's a longer account of this election from a New York Times columnist:

You’d like to think there’s just a feel-good story in the unlikely selection of Mohammed Hameeduddin as mayor of this diverse Bergen County town that is increasingly a stronghold of Orthodox Jews.

And, on balance, that’s probably the bottom line: a Muslim, who first got involved in local politics when his mosque was planning to expand, was picked by his fellow town council members, 5-to-2, as the town’s new mayor on July 1.

“Teaneck is not perfect,” said Adam Gussen, an Orthodox Jew and a friend of Mr. Hameeduddin’s since middle school and the new deputy mayor. “We’re not a shining Camelot beacon to all, but we’ve done a lot of great and noteworthy things we can be proud of, and this shows we still have the ability to get it right.” [....]

Religion aside, there’s a pretty traditional tale in Mr. Hameeduddin’s rise from the son of immigrants from Hyderabad, India. His father, Mohammed Hameeduddin Sr., was a founding member of the Darul-Islah Mosque in Teaneck. The younger Mr. Hameeduddin, an entrepreneur now working in title insurance, is remembered by classmates as one of the cool kids at Teaneck High School, where he and Mr. Gussen graduated in 1991. Friends called him Mo and he is still fondly remembered for the sleek Champagne-colored Ford Probe he drove. (Mr. Hameeduddin, saying he’d had too many interview requests and didn’t want to call undue attention to himself, declined to be interviewed.)

HE first became interested in public life after 9/11 when he decided to speak out about misperceptions of Muslim culture. After getting involved in the mosque issue, he served on the town planning board from 2006 to 2008 and then on the town council.

As a result, Mr. Hameeduddin’s election got a lot of publicity. But it seems few in Teaneck took much notice of his religion and ethnic background.

“I don’t care,” said Rabbi A. S. Teicher, who runs a small religious shop off the main drag of Cedar Lane. “As long as he does the job, why should I have a problem with what he does at home?” [....]

Yes, that does seem like the bottom line. At the same time, this is not a simple tale of sweetness and light. In the real world, democratic politics are never entirely harmonious, nor should they be; and the politics of ethnic and religious pluralism, in particular, tend to be contentious even when they work out successfully.

[I]f the dominant story line was Mr. Hameeduddin’s ascent to the mayor’s chair, there was also bitter disappointment in Teaneck’s black community and intimations of discrimination when another council member, Lizette B. Parker, who had been the deputy mayor and was the top vote-getter in the May election, failed to become the first black woman chosen as mayor.

Sigh. Life’s complicated, particularly in this racially and ethnically diverse town, which became famous in the 1960s as the first community in the nation with a white majority to voluntarily desegregate its public schools. It’s certainly complicated now, with a powerful Orthodox community and 15 synagogues in a town of about 39,000 that is also almost 30 percent black, has a growing Latino population, and enough of a Muslim community to support two mosques and contentious local politics. [....]

And Barbara Ley Toffler, who cast a dissenting vote along with Ms. Parker, said Mr. Hameeduddin’s appointment had more to do with the council majority’s instincts to slash spending than any feel-good vibrations. “It’s not a sweet and happy story,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if they are Muslims or Jews. My concern is this will harm the town and harm the schools.” (Or, more positively, finally a way to bring Muslims and Jews together: the current vogue for cutting taxes and government spending.)

[....] And to some, civic discord along race or ethnic lines is a slightly tired story line. “Taking umbrage is like a sport in Teaneck,” one online poster wrote. [....]

Democracy in America ...

--Jeff Weintraub

Thinking intelligently about the Cordoba House/Park51/"Ground Zero Mosque" controversy

I keep putting off writing something substantial about the ongoing controversy over the proposed Islamic Center near the site of the former World Trade Center—originally to be called Cordoba House, now renamed Park51, and misleadingly labeled the Ground Zero Mosque by many of its opponents. That's not because I feel ambivalent about the matter. As far as I'm concerned, the question of whether or not this project should be allowed to continue is an open-and-shut case. Of course it should. General principles, specifically American ideals and Constitutional traditions, as well considerations of simple fairness and political common sense all point decisively to that conclusion, in my humble opinion. I will elaborate a bit sometime soon.

Meanwhile, plenty of other people have written about these matters. So for the moment I will just say that I am in accord, perhaps with a few qualifications and caveats in some cases, with Christopher Hitchens, James Fallows, Andrew Sprung, Jeffrey Goldberg (also here & here & here), Jonathan Chait, Matthew Yglesias, Isaac Chotiner, Alan Dershowitz, Mark Thompson, Cathy Young, Anthony Wiener (though I would have hoped for more from him), David Frum, Kenneth Adelman, Jacob Sullum and Matt Welch of Reason magazine (who have some valuably pointed things to say about the "loathesome ex-House Speaker" Newt Gingrich, "who has been singularly awful on the Ground Zero mosque issue"), and even (to my slight astonishment) Orrin Hatch ... among others.

I also commend the position taken by President Obama. But the most impressive and admirable statement on this controversy by a public official remains, by far, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's speech on August 3.

=> It ought to be acknowledged that not all the opposition to the Cordoba House/Park51/GZM initiative is motivated by anti-Muslim bigotry and the cynical exploitation of that bigotry by sleazy and irresponsible political demagogues. And it's worth noting that even though national polls show big majorities of respondents opposed to the idea of building a "mosque" at that site, solid majorities also say that the Muslim group promoting this project has a legal and Constitutional right to build it (see also here).

But it would be foolish to ignore or whitewash the fact that most of the agitation against the Cordoba House/Park51/GZM initiative, especially the noisiest and most intense part of it, clearly is driven by anti-Muslim bigotry and the demagogic exploitation of bigotry and xenophobia for political advantage, whether the demagogues involved sincerely share that bigotry themselves, or are just acting out of cynical calculation, or both (some examples come to mind). Without those factors, this certainly would not have become a national controversy.

Opponents of the project who don't fit into those categories are, in my (possibly fallible) opinion, confused about the issues, carried away by their immediate reactions ... or just honestly mistaken.

=> Leon Wieseltier recently wrote a very fine set of reflections on this controversy, "Mosque Notes," from which I will quote a few paragraphs because they cut though cleanly to some of the crucial issues.

Sacred space. Nationalism has always arrogated to itself a hallowing power, and the sanctification of Ground Zero is the natural expression of the memory of a nation. But this is a secular sanctity. I see no justification for establishing a mosque, a church, or a synagogue at Ground Zero, even though Muslims, Christians, and Jews died there. (Irreligious people also died there.) Yet nobody is proposing to establish a mosque at Ground Zero. Sacralization is an act of demarcation: its force is owed to its precision. Outside the line is outside the line. Park Place is outside the line, in the “profane” realm. Or has the right finally found a penumbra in which it can believe? On September 13, 2001, a construction worker at Ground Zero discovered two large steel beams in the shape of a cross. Given the design of the towers, the likelihood of such perpendicularity was high—when I visited the unimaginable place a short while later there were smoldering right angles everywhere—but the discovery of this cross was deemed a miracle, and it was raised on a concrete base, and there was talk of incorporating it into the memorial at the site. (It now stands a block away, at a church on Barclay Street.) I was always discomfited by the sight of it. Christianity was not attacked on September 11. America was attacked. They are not the same thing. The image of the Ground Zero cross now appears in TV ads excoriating the “Ground Zero mosque.” The people behind those ads do not deplore a religious war, they welcome one.

Insensitivities. There are families of the victims who oppose Cordoba House and there are families of the victims who support it. Every side in this debate can invoke the authority of the pain. But how much authority should it have? I do not see that sentiment about the families should abrogate considerations of principle. It is odd to see conservatives suddenly espouse the moral superiority of victimhood, as it is odd to see them suddenly find an exception to their expansive view of religious freedom. Everybody has their preferred insensitivities. In matters of principle, moreover, polling is beside the point, or an alibi for the tyranny of the majority, or an invitation to demagogues to make divisiveness into a strategy, so that their targets come to seem like they are the ones standing in the way of social peace, and the “decent” thing is for them to fold. Why doesn’t Rauf just move the mosque? That would bring the ugliness to an end. But why don’t Palin and Gingrich just shut up? That, too, would bring the ugliness to an end. Certainly the diabolization of Rauf, an imam who has publicly recited the Shema as an act of solidarity and argued that the Declaration of Independence “embodies and restates the core values of the Abrahamic, and thus also the Islamic, ethic,” must cease. In a time when an alarming number of Muslims wish to imitate Osama bin Laden, here is a Muslim who wishes to imitate Mordecai Kaplan. Turn away, from him? But he may be replaced at his center by less moderate clerics, it is said. To which I would reply with a list of synagogues whose establishment should be regretted because of the fanatical views of their current leaders. I also hear that there should be no mosque on Park Place until there are churches and synagogues in Saudi Arabia. I get it. Until they are like us, we will be like them.

A night at the J. At the JCC on Q Street a few weeks ago, there was a family night for “kibbutz camp.” As the children sang “Zum Gali Gali,” an old anthem of the Zionist pioneers, I noticed among the jolly parents a Muslim woman swaddled in black. Her child was among those children! Her presence had no bearing on the question of our security, but it was the image of what we are protecting. No American heart could be unmoved by it. So: Cordoba House in New York and a Predator war in Pakistan—graciousness here and viciousness there—this should be our position. For those who come in peace, peace; for those who come in war, war.

There's more, and the piece is short, so read the whole thing. Further thoughts on these matters soon ...

--Jeff Weintraub

Why aren't people happy about health care?

Aaron Carroll at The Incidental Economist explains some of the reasons. (That's an interesting and intelligent blog to follow, by the way.) Highlights:

Every year, the Kaiser Family Foundation publishes its annual survey of Employer Health Benefits. Here’s the summary. Here’s the chart pack. Let’s wade right in.

The average premium for coverage by an employer provided health insurance plan for an individual in 2010 is $421 per month or $5,049 per year. The average premium for family coverage is $1,147 per month or $13,770 per year. [JW: Those figures include the portions paid by employers.] Think about that for a second. That’s not the Cadillac plan. That’s the average. Twenty percent of plans for families cost $16,524 or more. How has that changed over time? [....]

Health care premiums have more than doubled in the last decade. Has your salary more than doubled in the last decade? I doubt it. [JW: Actually, for the bottom 80% of households, average inflation-adjusted income has barely increased since 1979.] We are putting more and more of our income every year into health insurance premiums. Do you feel healthier? Do you feel safer? Do you feel happier? [....]

[... N]ot only are the premiums going up; so are the percentages of those premiums that individuals and families have to pay. So their costs are going up even faster than premiums are. In fact, this year was the first statistically significant increase in the percentage of premium paid by employees in a decade.

Economists will say–and they have the studies to back it up–that employees actually pay the full cost of premiums (including the “employer” share) in the form of slower wage growth. Nevertheless, few workers understand this. The perception is that only the employee share is paid by workers. But that’s gone up too, so perception and truth align. Employees are paying more.

But remember, that’s just the premium. It doesn’t include cost-sharing – things like co-pays, out of pocket costs, or deductibles. So how much are deductibles?

What this means it that even after paying for an increasing percentage of an all time high premium, more than one in four workers in an individual plan still has an annual deductible of $1000 or more. That’s a lot. [....]

So, benefits reduced. Cost-sharing increased. Share of premiums paid increased. Total premium cost at an all time high. And this is for employer provided health benefits, which are usually much better and cheaper than what’s available in the individual market. Depressed yet? [....]

For the rest, including more graphs, see here.

--Jeff Weintraub

Brad DeLong revisits some 20th-century nightmares from which, perhaps improbably, we escaped

Brad DeLong has just re-posted a review of Alan Furst's novel Dark Star that he wrote back in 2003. It's a wonderfully insightful and evocative review. And having read Dark Star a few years ago myself, on the recommendation of a good friend to whom I remain grateful for the advice, I know that Brad is right to describe it as "a very fine novel."

But it's also more than that. I will just quote the first three paragraphs of Brad's discussion, which zero right in on the key points:

When I talk to practically any of my undergraduates these days, I have a nearly impossible task to do when I try to convince them that the twentieth century has, after all, ended much better than it might have been. The half-full undergraduates talk of how wonderful and advanced our industrial civilization is, and how human progress to this point was nearly inevitable. The half-empty undergraduates talk about poverty in the developing world, inequality, and injustice, and seem deaf to the idea that the world we live in is much better than the world that we seemed headed for during the second quarter of this century. The Great Depression. Stalin's purges. World War II. Hitler's genocides--they have read about these, but they are not real, and the idea that for decades people thought that the forces headed by Stalin or by Hitler were the wave of the future (or the last chance to stop an even greater evil) does not penetrate below the surface.

So the next time I teach a course on the entire politico-economic history of the twentieth century, I think I may assign Alan Furst's novel Dark Star, for it does a better job than anything else I have read to catch the atmosphere of the days when Josef Stalin seemed to be the lesser of two evils--and it is a very fine novel besides.

This is not my judgement alone. Historian Alan Bullock calls Dark Star "a classic.... Furst brings to life better than most historians the world of fear in which so many human beings felt trapped." Reviewing it for Time, Walter Shapiro sees it as a "classic black-and-white movie that captures the murky allegiances and moral ambiguity of Europe on the brink of war.... Nothing can be like watching Casablanca for the first time, but Furst comes closer than anyone has in years." And a third reviewer calls it "exceptionally fine... Kafka, Dostoevsky, and le Carre..." [....]

Now you can read the rest of the review here ... and then read Dark Star.

--Jeff Weintraub

What they really think of us (contd.)

Via David Hirsh at Engage, here is one more story in which an important European official accidentally gets quoted about what he really thinks. From the Guardian:

A top European official was accused of antisemitism tonight after declaring that there was little point in engaging in rational argument with Jews and suggesting that the latest Middle East peace talks were doomed because of the power of the Jewish lobby in Washington.

Karel De Gucht, the European commissioner for trade, and a former Belgian foreign minister, sparked outrage after voicing his scepticism about the prospects for the negotiations which opened in the US this week. He told a Belgian radio station that most Jews always believed they were right, and questioned the point of talking to them about the Middle East. [....]

"Don't underestimate the opinion … of the average Jew outside Israel," he told the radio station. "There is indeed a belief – it's difficult to describe it otherwise – among most Jews that they are right. And a belief is something that's difficult to counter with rational arguments. And it's not so much whether these are religious Jews or not. Lay Jews also share the same belief that they are right. So it is not easy to have, even with moderate Jews, a rational discussion about what is actually happening in the Middle East."

Explaining why he thought the peace talks were probably doomed, he added: "Do not underestimate the Jewish lobby on Capitol Hill. That is the best organised lobby, you shouldn't underestimate the grip it has on American politics – no matter whether it's Republicans or Democrats." [....]

It's not as though such views are exceptional or idiosyncratic. In many western European circles they have become common, even mainstream. What's embarrassing is to have "one of the most powerful officials in Brussels," as the article describes De Gucht, saying this sort of thing to a journalist on the record. Top Eurocrats are supposed to be more diplomatic.

This incident has, of course, let to an unconvincingly pro-forma not-quite-apology:

Officials in Brussels stressed the remarks did not represent EU views or policies. De Gucht was forced to issue a statement clarifying his remarks.

"I gave an interview … I gave my personal point of view," he said. "I regret that the comments that I made have been interpreted in a sense that I did not intend.

"I did not mean in any possible way to cause offence or stigmatise the Jewish community. I want to make clear that antisemitism has no place in today's world." [....]

Why on earth should we take offense? I happen to know some Jews myself with whom it's pointless to try to engage in rational argument, about politics or anything else. (And non-Jews I know have remarked that it can be especially dangerous to get in the middle of two Jews arguing about Israel.)

Not that the goyim are necessarily any more reasonable, to be honest. For example, when it comes to the Middle East, Europeans always seem to believe that they are not only right but morally superior, too, despite the frequent cynicism, smugness, superficiality, bigotry, fecklessness, and moral irresponsibility of their views and policies on these and other matters. But that's just my personal point of view, and I would certainly regret it if my comments were misinterpreted in a sense that caused offense.

Some Jews, however, did take offense at De Gucht's remarks.

Jewish leaders were incandescent. "This is part of a dangerous trend of incitement against Jews and Israel in Europe that needs to be stamped out immediately," said Moshe Kantor, the head of the European Jewish Congress. "What sort of environment allows such remarks to be made openly by a senior politician? Once again we hear outrageous antisemitism from a senior European official. The libel of Jewish power is apparently acceptable at the highest levels of the EU."

See? Jews are hysterical. How can one reason with such people?

--Jeff Weintraub

Paul Krugman identifies the single biggest, most consequential economic policy mistake of 2009

Every time I consider re-posting one of Paul Krugman's columns lately, I confront a dilemma that makes me hesitate. Almost all of them have been on-target, illuminating, and indispensable ... so if I start highlighting some of them, pretty soon I'll be doing it all the time, and things will get out of hand. The New York Times is not exactly an obscure newspaper, so readers can just follow his columns there.

But yesterday's column does seem especially worth highlighting, because it manages to boil down more than a year and a half of debates into a clear, compact, forceful statement that is clearly right (in my opinion) about a question of great importance. Here's the bottom line:

When Mr. Obama first proposed $800 billion in fiscal stimulus, there were two groups of critics. Both argued that unemployment would stay high — but for very different reasons.

One group — the group that got almost all the attention — declared that the stimulus was much too large, and would lead to disaster. [....] The other group, which included yours truly, warned that the plan was much too small given the economic forecasts then available. [....]

The actual lessons of 2009-2010, then, are that scare stories about stimulus are wrong, and that stimulus works when it is applied. But it wasn’t applied on a sufficient scale. And we need another round. [....]

We won't get it, of course. That looks politically impossible now. And it may be that, back in 2009, passing a stimulus bill that was big enough to adequately address the economic crisis would have been politically impossible, too. So perhaps this major blunder could not, realistically, have been avoided. That's a matter for argument.

But what does seem pretty clear is that the economic "stimulus" that actually got passed—technically, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act—wasn't big enough. Contrary to propaganda from the Republicans and other right-wing sources, which unfortunately has been swallowed by too many voters, the ARRA definitely did a lot of good, preventing the economy from getting significantly worse and perhaps even going over the edge into a full-scale depression. Unemployment rates are still terribly high, but without the ARRA they would certainly have been even higher. But the scale of the ARRA was not big enough to fully do the job.

And the ones who will suffer politically in November will be Obama and the Democrats—whereas the Republicans, who fought tooth and nail to prevent constructive measures from getting passed at all, and to sabotage and whittle down any that did get passed, will almost certainly benefit politically from the consequences. Well, no one said life was fair.

Read the whole piece (below). More on these issues soon ...

--Jeff Weintraub

==============================
New York Times
September 2, 2010
The Real Story
By Paul Krugman

Next week, President Obama is scheduled to propose new measures to boost the economy. I hope they’re bold and substantive, since the Republicans will oppose him regardless — if he came out for motherhood, the G.O.P. would declare motherhood un-American. So he should put them on the spot for standing in the way of real action.

But let’s put politics aside and talk about what we’ve actually learned about economic policy over the past 20 months.

When Mr. Obama first proposed $800 billion in fiscal stimulus, there were two groups of critics. Both argued that unemployment would stay high — but for very different reasons.

One group — the group that got almost all the attention — declared that the stimulus was much too large, and would lead to disaster. If you were, say, reading The Wall Street Journal’s opinion pages in early 2009, you would have been repeatedly informed that the Obama plan would lead to skyrocketing interest rates and soaring inflation.

The other group, which included yours truly, warned that the plan was much too small given the economic forecasts then available. As I pointed out in February 2009, the Congressional Budget Office was predicting a $2.9 trillion hole in the economy over the next two years; an $800 billion program, partly consisting of tax cuts that would have happened anyway, just wasn’t up to the task of filling that hole.

Critics in the second camp were particularly worried about what would happen this year, since the stimulus would have its maximum effect on growth in late 2009 then gradually fade out. Last year, many of us were already warning that the economy might stall in the second half of 2010.

So what actually happened? The administration’s optimistic forecast was wrong, but which group of pessimists was right about the reasons for that error?

Start with interest rates. Those who said the stimulus was too big predicted sharply rising rates. When rates rose in early 2009, The Wall Street Journal published an editorial titled “The Bond Vigilantes: The disciplinarians of U.S. policy makers return.” The editorial declared that it was all about fear of deficits, and concluded, “When in doubt, bet on the markets.”

But those who said the stimulus was too small argued that temporary deficits weren’t a problem as long as the economy remained depressed; we were awash in savings with nowhere to go. Interest rates, we said, would fluctuate with optimism or pessimism about future growth, not with government borrowing.

When in doubt, bet on the markets. The 10-year bond rate was over 3.7 percent when The Journal published that editorial; it’s under 2.7 percent now.

What about inflation? Amid the inflation hysteria of early 2009, the inadequate-stimulus critics pointed out that inflation always falls during sustained periods of high unemployment, and that this time should be no different. Sure enough, key measures of inflation have fallen from more than 2 percent before the economic crisis to 1 percent or less now, and Japanese-style deflation is looking like a real possibility.

Meanwhile, the timing of recent economic growth strongly supports the notion that stimulus does, indeed, boost the economy: growth accelerated last year, as the stimulus reached its predicted peak impact, but has fallen off — just as some of us feared — as the stimulus has faded.

Oh, and don’t tell me that Germany proves that austerity, not stimulus, is the way to go. Germany actually did quite a lot of stimulus — the austerity is all in the future. Also, it never had a housing bubble that burst. And with all that, German G.D.P. is still further below its precrisis peak than American G.D.P. True, Germany has done better in terms of employment — but that’s because strong unions and government policy have prevented American-style mass layoffs. [JW: On these US-German comparisons, see also here & here & and here.]

The actual lessons of 2009-2010, then, are that scare stories about stimulus are wrong, and that stimulus works when it is applied. But it wasn’t applied on a sufficient scale. And we need another round.

I know that getting that round is unlikely: Republicans and conservative Democrats won’t stand for it. And if, as expected, the G.O.P. wins big in November, this will be widely regarded as a vindication of the anti-stimulus position. Mr. Obama, we’ll be told, moved too far to the left, and his Keynesian economic doctrine was proved wrong.

But politics determines who has the power, not who has the truth. The economic theory behind the Obama stimulus has passed the test of recent events with flying colors; unfortunately, Mr. Obama, for whatever reason — yes, I’m aware that there were political constraints — initially offered a plan that was much too cautious given the scale of the economy’s problems.

So, as I said, here’s hoping that Mr. Obama goes big next week. If he does, he’ll have the facts on his side.