Jack Kemp had many momentous achievements in his life. Among others, he was instrumental in bringing Queen Elizabeth II her first public hug.
You might have thought from the hubbub surrounding President Barack Obama's recent European trip that First Lady Michelle Obama's spontaneous arm around the royal waist -- which the queen immediately reciprocated -- broke all precedents, as well as protocol. Not true.
That distinction belongs, as it turns out, to the late Alice Frazier, then a 67-year-old District of Columbia public housing resident. She wrapped Her Royal Highness in a big bear-hug embrace during the queen's 13-day visit to America in 1991.
Who in the world would bring the queen to a public housing project? I knew it had to be Kemp, then the secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President George H.W. Bush.
Would anyone else in stodgy Washington have had the desire, the enthusiasm and the steamroller perseverance to bring the queen and a rare spotlight of public attention to America's vastly overlooked underclass? I think not.
The stunt was "pure Jack."
He would do anything to bring attention to his urban "empowerment agenda," which included tenant management and ownership of public housing, "liberated" from negligent, fraudulent or incompetent bureaucrats and government contractors.
Memories of the queen's hug come to mind when I heard about Kemp's death. My condolences go out to his family and friends. He will be fondly remembered, I am sure, as the sort of conservative who liberals liked and conservatives probably did not love enough....
#1
I wonder if the scare quotes were Clarence's or an editor's.
"He would do anything to bring attention to his urban "empowerment agenda," which included tenant management and ownership of public housing, "liberated" from negligent, fraudulent or incompetent bureaucrats and government contractors.
If we refuse to call terrorists by their proper name "jihadists" we will never defeat them.
The less accurate words are, the less accurate the knowledge they impart; conversely, the more precise the language, the more precise the knowledge. In the war on terror, to acquire accurate knowledge which is pivotal to victory we need to begin with accurate language.
Would the free world have understood the Nazi threat if, instead of calling them what they called themselves, Nazis, it had opted to simply call them extremists a word wholly overlooking the racist, expansionary, and supremacist elements that are part and parcel of the word Nazi?
Unfortunately, the U.S. government, apparently oblivious to this interconnection between language and knowledge, appears to be doing just that. Even President Obama alluded to this soon after taking office when he said, Words matter in this situation because one of the ways were going to win this struggle [war on terror] is through the battle of [Muslims'] hearts and minds.
According to an official memo, when talking about Islamists and their goals, analysts are to refrain from using Arabic words of Islamic significance (mujahidin, salafi, ummah); nor should they employ helpful English or anglicized words (jihadi, Islamo-fascism, caliphate). Instead, vague generics (terrorists, extremists, totalitarians) should suffice.
A renewed defense of this disturbing trend was recently published by one Colonel Jeffrey Vordermark and deserves examination. After suggesting that Americans love to throw around foreign words, Vordermark writes:
We have fallen into the jihad trap. The term is used in casual banter yet most remain clueless regarding its origin or meanings. We think, therefore we know. Pundits, academics, and laymen profess to know its meaning, and the term is daily news in the mouths of reporters and in the banners of headlines. Unfortunately, its very use assumes that Islam is simple and monolithic. As a nation and society, we could not be more incorrect.
While lofty sounding, this view is riddled with problems. First, by seeking to excise the word jihad from public discourse, due to the erroneous notion that that term is apparently unknowable, this position is self-defeatist.
Jihad has a very precise, juristic definition; more to the point, Sunni Islam which accounts for nearly 90% of the Islamic world is, in fact, simple and monolithic, thanks to the totalitarian nature of Islamic law (Sharia), which categorizes all possible human actions as being either forbidden, discouraged, legitimate, recommended, or obligatory. Indeed, of the major religions of the world, none is perhaps so black and white, so clear cut as Islam, which meticulously delineates to Muslims the correct way of living (way, incidentally, being the literal definition of the word Sharia).
Thus to try to portray Islam and its institutions as somehow otherworldly and unfathomable so lets just not bother trying to understand in the first place is not only folly, but precisely what the Islamists themselves most desire: to guard Islams more troubling doctrines, such as jihad, from infidel scrutiny.
Vordermark continues:
Historically the term [jihad] applied to the concept of either a greater jihad, or a lesser jihad. The former denoting the daily struggle of the believer to overcome self in the pursuit of Allahs will, and the latter traditionally meaning defense of religion, family, or homeland [emphasis added].
Lets for the time being overlook the hackneyed stress on the so-called greater-lesser jihad dichotomy which, semantics and sophistry aside, does not invalidate the lesser jihad (i.e., armed warfare). The real problem here is that Vordermarks assertion that the military jihad has been traditionally limited to defensive warfare is totally false. Rest at link
Posted by: ed ||
05/09/2009 16:50 ||
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There is frantic concern in Washington and elsewhere that Pakistan has reached its tipping point and might succumb to the Taliban forces entrenched barely 80 km (50 miles) from the capital, Islamabad.
But the concern is misleading. A country of some 160 million Muslims is not about to be overrun by the Taliban. On the contrary, Pakistan is more or less a Taliban state shaped by its origin and history.
This is the unpalatable reality that cannot be publicly discussed in Washington, London or Ottawa due to diplomatic niceties. It is also complicated by the patron-client relationship the Pakistani elite pursued with the U.S. over the past six decades as a means to counter India's dominant position in the region.
Pakistan was forcefully established by an elite on the basis of an exclusivist and bigoted idea that since India's Muslims constitute a "nation" they deserve a state of their own.
The perversion of Islam into a nationalist ideology hugely aggravated communal politics in undivided India that would not end with the partitioning of the subcontinent in 1947. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, ruthlessly planned this division when he called for direct action -- communal blood-letting -- by his supporters which led to the massive Hindu-Muslim riots known as the Great Calcutta killings of August 1946.
This act of terror made certain that trust between Hindus and Muslims was irreparably broken, and Britain was compelled to depart by partitioning India.
To recall this history is to have an inkling of the sort of a country that emerged as a result of terrorism followed by ethnic cleansing of the non-Muslim population -- most Hindus and Sikhs left or were forcefully driven out from present-day Pakistan.
Subsequently, the Pakistani elite declared the Ahmadiyyas -- a small peace-loving sect of minority Muslims -- to be non-Muslims, and persecuted them as the harbinger of further bigotry to be unleashed in the slide of Jinnah's Pakistan into a Taliban state.
The economic exploitation of former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) by the ruling elite began with Mr. Jinnah imposing Urdu as the national language on Bengali Muslims with their own rich linguistic and cultural tradition. Eventually the two halves of Pakistan would tear apart in 1971 following civil war and systematic massacre of Bengalis by the Pakistani military.
Since 1971 the unremorseful and bloody-minded ruling elite of Pakistan -- civil and military -- pushed Pakistan deeper into a dependency alliance with Saudi Arabia.
It meant importing the Saudi version of Islam -- Wahhabism -- and its spread deep across the country through the rapid expansion of religious schools and mosques funded by money from the Gulf countries. The products of these schools and mosques are the Taliban "jihadis," or holy-warriors, who set forth for Afghanistan in the war against the former Soviet Union.
Steel fist
The Pakistani elite is corrupt, opportunistic and ruthless. Behind the conniving smile of the civilian politician is the steel fist of the military with nuclear weapons.
The fear of Taliban acquiring Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is manufactured by the elite to garner diplomatic and financial support from the West.
This is extortion brazenly practised by the elite responsible for making Pakistan into a rogue state with its people crushed by poverty. It is this reality that makes for terror and war in the region, and threatens peace beyond.
Posted by: john frum ||
05/09/2009 10:29 ||
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why are we letting all these pakis into the US too own the gas station and such, i know that this country was built by immigrants but there is a time too say enough is enough. DEport them and let them live in the great islamic countries in the middle east and now europe
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