Stephens: Can We Be a Little Less Selective With Our Moral Outrage?

2024/08/29 Leave a comment

Valid points. Selective or objective? And what criteria one should use?

    Of all the world’s injustices, perhaps the saddest is that so many of them are simply ignored.

    Protesters the world over loudly demand a cease-fire in Gaza; a dwindling number of people still take note of Russian atrocitiesagainst Ukraine. Otherwise, there’s a vast blanket of silence, under which some of the world’s worst abusers proceed largely unnoticed and unhindered.

    Let’s try to change that. For this week’s column, here are some alternative focal points for outrage and protest, particularly for morally energetic college students from Columbia to Berkeley.

    Venezuela. Last month’s election was stolen in broad daylight by the socialist regime of Nicolás Maduro. He has enforced this theft by using his security services to round up and jail around 2,000 people suspected of dissent, promising “maximum punishment” and “no forgiveness.” This is from a regime that has already caused starvation and the desperate exodus of millions of poor Venezuelans. As of last year, more than 10,000 of them were living in New York City shelters.

    If ever there was a case of “Think globally, act locally,” to adopt the old slogan, this is it. Especially since the usual forces of social protest have something to atone for when it comes to Venezuela: The regime that Maduro inherited in 2013 from Hugo Chávez, his authoritarian mentor, had no bigger cheerleaders in the West than left-wing magazines like The Nation and political leaders like Jeremy Corbyn of Britain. Contrition is a virtue: Now would be a good time for these (hopefully former) comrades to show it.

    Turkey. Anti-Israel protesters sometimes respond to the criticism that they are singling out the Jewish state for unfair censure by noting that it receives billions in military aid from Washington. (This pretext doesn’t fly if protests are in Montreal or Melbourne.) But what about another Middle Eastern recipient of American largess, including the stationing of U.S. troops and nuclear weapons?

    That country is Turkey, on paper a secular democracy and a NATO ally. In reality, it’s an illiberal state run for decades by Recep Tayyip Erdogan, an antisemitic Islamist who has jailed scores of journalists while waging — sometimes with F-16 warplanes — a brutal war against his Kurdish opponents in Syria and Iraq. For good measure, Turkey has occupied, ethnically cleansed and colonized northern Cyprus for 50 years. Shouldn’t those who argue that occupation is always wrong trouble themselves to protest this one?

    Ethiopia and Sudan. Critics of U.S. foreign policy, particularly on the left, often complain that Washington cares more about suffering among white people than Black people. They have a point. So why do those same critics proceed to largely neglect the staggering human rights abuses taking place now in Sudan and Ethiopia?

    In Sudan’s case, the humanitarian group Operation Broken Silenceestimates that at least 65,000 people have died of violence or starvation since fighting broke out last year, and nearly 11 million people have been turned into refugees. In Ethiopia, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed — possibly history’s least deserving recipient of a Nobel Peace Prize — first turned his guns on ethnic Tigrayans in one of the world’s bloodiest recent wars, with a death toll estimated as high as 600,000. Now the government is waging war against former allies in the Amhara region, even as the Biden administration last year lifted restrictions on aid owing to its abuse of human rights. How many college protests has this elicited?

    Iran. The regime in Iran ought to tick every box of progressive outrage. Misogyny? As CNN documented in 2022, the government responded to mass protests against mandatory hijab by systematically raping protesters, men as well as women. Homophobia? Homosexuality is legally punishable by death, and executions are carried out.

    Then there is Tehran’s imperialism. The regime doesn’t merely make a habit of taking unlucky visitors hostage. It takes entire countries hostage, too, none more tragically than Lebanon. Hezbollah, which parades as a Lebanese political movement, is little more than a subsidiary of Iran. The group has turned the south of the country into a free-fire zone while putting thousands of civilian lives at risk for the sake of its ideological aims against Israel. When Lebanese patriots such as the late prime minister Rafik Hariri try to stand in Hezbollah’s way, they tend to wind up dead.

    It says something about the moral priorities of much of today’s global left that Iran is one Middle Eastern regime toward which they’ve advocated better relations, including the lifting of economic sanctions, while simultaneously insisting on boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. Why that is — the mental pathways that lead self-declared champions of human rights to make common cause with some of the worst regimes on earth while directing their moral fury at countries, including Israel, that protect the values those champions pretend to hold dear — has been one of humanity’s great puzzles for over a century.

    But that puzzle shouldn’t restrain morally minded, globally conscious people from standing up for the oppressed and suffering everywhere they might be. The list I’ve offered above is very partial: There are also Rohingya in Myanmar, Uyghurs in China, Christians in Nigeria and ethnic minorities in Russia, to name a few. They, too, deserve the world’s attention, compassion and, whenever possible, active assistance.

    It could happen if only one cause weren’t consuming so much of the world’s moral energies.

    Source: Can We Be a Little Less Selective With Our Moral Outrage?

    Filed under foreign policy, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

    Stephens: What I Want a University President to Say About Campus Protests

    2024/08/22 Leave a comment

    Essential reading for some of our more “woke” institutions, academics and students. Money quote:

    “It was listening to students and faculty whom we had admitted or hired for their intellectual sophistication, their capacity to understand complexity and nuance, reduce their own thinking to a handful of slogans and mantras written for them by others. It was the absence of intellectual humility and its replacement with moral certitudes.:”

    …Some of you may have heard the term “institutional neutrality.” It is the belief that universities like ours should avoid taking political positions of any kind, either through investment decisions or political declarations by administrators or by academic boycotts of foreign scholars, except when the interests of the university are directly affected — like when the Supreme Court weighs in on our admissions process.

    You may also have heard about the Chicago principles, which make the case for universities to embrace an almost unfettered principle of free expression as “an essential part of the university’s educational mission,” even when the speech is seen by most members of the community as “offensive, unwise, immoral or wrongheaded.”

    Our university embraces both institutional neutrality and the Chicago principles. We do so not because they are ends in themselves but because they are necessary ways to cultivate the spirit of inquiry. That spirit cannot be fettered by formal or informal speech codes that might stop us from asking uncomfortable but important questions, or by university policies that preclude fruitful exchanges with scholars from other countries. At our university you will find scholars from Israel, China, Turkey, Russia and other countries whose policies you may not like; we do not hold them responsible for their governments, nor do we ask them to make political declarations as the price of belonging to our community.

    But necessary isn’t sufficient. If all we accomplish by adopting the Chicago principles is that everyone gets to speak and nobody bothers to listen, those principles will have fallen short. If we embrace institutional neutrality at the topmost level while remaining indifferent to the one-sided politicization of classrooms, departments and administrative offices, we will have done little to advance the pedagogical benefits of neutrality, which is intended to broaden your exposure to the widest variety of views and ideas.

    And if we permit protests that inhibit the speech of others, or set up no-go zones for Jewish students, or make it difficult to study in the library or pay attention in class, we may have upheld the right to speak in the abstract while stripping it of its underlying purpose. The point of free speech is to open discussion, not to shut it down. It’s to engage with our opponents, not to shut them out. It’s to introduce fresh perspectives, not to declare every perspective but our own to be beyond the moral pale.

    I’d like to add a personal note as a Jew. Many people objected to last year’s protests, with their chants of “from the river to the sea,” as antisemitic. I find that calling for the elimination of Israel — indeed, of any state — is inherently repugnant, since it would almost inevitably entail an almost unimaginable level of violence, dispossession and destruction.

    But antisemitism is not what I found chiefly offensive about the protests. I accept that most of the protesters are not antisemitic, or at least don’t think of themselves that way.

    What bothered me, rather, was watching members of our community turn off their critical faculties. It was listening to students and faculty whom we had admitted or hired for their intellectual sophistication, their capacity to understand complexity and nuance, reduce their own thinking to a handful of slogans and mantras written for them by others. It was the absence of intellectual humility and its replacement with moral certitudes. It was the substitution of serious political thought with propaganda. It was the refusal to engage with difference and criticism in any way except denunciation and moral bullying.

    In short, the way in which these protests unfolded was an insult to the spirit of inquiry that this university has an institutional responsibility to protect and champion. So does this mean we will brook no form of protest? Of course not. But we do expect that protests, so long as they happen on our campus, on our property, conform with the aims of education as we see them.

    That means, at a minimum, that we will enforce clearly established “time, place and manner” restrictions, so that the rights of those who protest are never allowed to impinge on the rights of those who don’t. It also means we will invest in serious programming about the Mideast conflict, including by inviting Israeli and Palestinian scholars to campus and hosting moderated debates where you can cheer your own political side but must at least listen to the other. Our goal is never to make you think one way or the other. It’s to make you think, period.

    The spirit of protest will always have a place here, as it must in every free society. Our job is to harness it to the task of inquiry so that knowledge may continue to grow, and human life may be enriched.

    Source: What I Want a University President to Say About Campus Protests


    Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

    Stephens: Thank Ye Very Much

    2022/10/28 Leave a comment

    Good column:

    Dear Kanye West, or “Ye”:

    We’ve never met and I hope we never will.

    Still, I’d like to express a sort of gratitude. With a few outbursts in a few days — you threatened in a tweet this month to go “death con 3” on “JEWISH PEOPLE” and it’s been downhill from there — you’ve probably done more to raise public awareness about the persistence, prevalence and nature of antisemitism than any other recent event.

    It’s remarkable how long it took us to get here. For 2020, the F.B.I. reports that Jews, who constitute about 2.4 percent of the total adult population in the United States, were on the receiving end of 54.9 percent of all religiously motivated hate crimes. On many nights in New York City, Hasidic or Orthodox Jews are being shoved, harangued and beaten.

    So far, this has been one of the most underreported stories in the country — itself a telling indicator in an era that is otherwise hyper-attuned to prejudice and hate.

    At times, the reporting has all but accused Jews of bringing the violence on themselves, with lengthy stories about allegedly pushy Jewish neighbors or rapacious Jewish landlords. At other times — such as after the attack in January on a Texas synagogue by a British Muslim man who had traveled 4,800 miles to get there — reporters seem to have gone out of their way to find non-antisemitic motives for nakedly antisemitic attacks.

    More often, attacks on Jews are treated as regrettable yet somehow understandable expressions of anger at Israel. In May 2021, Jewish diners at a sushi restaurant in Los Angeles were physically assaulted by a member of a group that, according to a witness, was chanting “Death to Jews” and “Free Palestine.” A KABC report of the event was headlined, in part: “Mideast tensions lead to L.A. fight.”

    To suggest that “Mideast tensions” led to a “fight” is to obscure both the nature and motive of the assault. Imagine the absurdity of a headline that read: “High Levels of Crime in Minority Neighborhood Lead Police Officer to Kneel on Man’s Neck for Eight Minutes.”

    Actually, Ye, you probably can imagine it, since you’ve also blamed George Floyd for his own death. But it’s worth pondering the extent to which, in American culture today, Jews are excluded from inclusion and included in the excluded. That is, the Jewish people’s status as an oft-persecuted minority goes increasingly unrecognized, while the Jewish people’s position as a legitimate target for contempt and ostracism is becoming increasingly accepted.

    Take Hollywood, where the new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened its doors last year with a panel dedicated to “Creating a More Inclusive Museum.” Yet, as The Times’s Adam Nagourney reported in March, “Through dozens of exhibits and rooms, there is barely a mention of Harry and Jack Warner, Adolph Zukor, Samuel Goldwyn or Louis B. Mayer” — the Jews who essentially founded the modern movie industry. (After an outcry, the museum now plans a permanent exhibition for them.)

    Or take the law school of the University of California, Berkeley, where nine student groups announced in August that they would not host any speakers who support Zionism, a move that is tantamount to the exclusion of most Jews. In an astonishing defense, law school dean Erwin Chemerinsky noted that the bylaw, which he acknowledged was “discriminatory,” had been adopted by only “a handful of student groups” and had not yet been acted upon — as if Berkeley or any other public law school would tolerate for one instant a single student group that announced its intention to exclude, say, a speaker who believes in trans rights.

    Or take Israel itself. Is the Jewish state so uniquely evil that, alone among 193 U.N. member states, it has no moral right to exist? Or is it the unique evil of antisemitism that directs this kind of obsessive hatred at one state only — while generally ignoring or downplaying the endless depredations of regimes in, say, Caracas, Ankara, Havana and Tehran?

    These are surely not the things you had in mind when you decided to go “death con 3” on my people. Nor were they necessarily top-of-mind for many of the celebrities who denounced you in tweets and Instagram posts. But your bigotry is as good a place as any to begin to have an honest conversation about antisemitism — one that will hopefully last longer than your own career’s self-destruction.

    Honest would be to acknowledge that antisemitism is as much a left-wing phenomenon as it is a right-wing one. Honest would be coming to grips with the fact — as Henry Louis Gates Jr. did in these pages in 1992 — that antisemitism infects corners of Black politics as much as it infects the politics of white supremacy. Honest would be holding to account people who were complicit in your antisemitism — such as Tucker Carlson, who praised your “bold” beliefs while editing out your antisemitic remarks from his interview with you. Honest would be coming to terms with the extent to which anti-Zionism has become the antisemitism of our day, echoing the same sordid conspiratorial tropes about Jews as swindlers and impostors.

    Honest would also be admitting that you speak for more people than many Americans would have cared to admit. For that, but only that, you deserve thanks.

    Source: Thank Ye Very Much

    Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

    Stephens: What Should Conservatives Conserve?

    2021/08/06 Leave a comment

    Of interest and relevance even if the conclusion is likely over-optimistic:

    In 1990, V.S. Naipaul delivered a celebrated lecture on the subject of “Our Universal Civilization.” The Berlin Wall had fallen, liberal democracy was ascendant, and Naipaul wanted to reflect on what the universal civilization — by which he meant the West — meant for someone like him, a Hindu son of colonial Trinidad who had made his way “from the periphery to the center” to become one of the great novelists of his time.

    Naipaul intended his lecture as a celebration of the West. But he sensed an undercurrent of disquiet, which he found expressed in Nahid Rachlin’s 1978 novel, “Foreigner.” The book is about an Iranian woman who works in Boston as a biologist and seems well assimilated to American life. But on a return visit to Tehran she loses her mental balance and falls ill. The cure, it turns out, is religion.

    “We can see that the young woman was not prepared for the movement between civilizations,” Naipaul observed, “the movement out of the shut-in Iranian world, where the faith was the complete way, filled everything, left no spare corner of the mind or will or soul, to the other world, where it was necessary to be an individual and responsible.”

    I’ve been thinking of Naipaul and Rachlin while reading Sohrab Ahmari’s new book, “The Unbroken Thread.” Ahmari, now the op-ed editor of The New York Post, is a friend and former colleague with whom I’ve had a political falling out. About three years ago, he made an abrupt switch from being a NeverTrump conservative, railing against the new illiberalism, to being something of a new illiberal himself, railing against “nice” conservatives who, he believes, fail to appreciate that rights-based liberalism is a sucker’s game that only the left can win.

    Ahmari’s elegantly written book matters because it seeks to give moral voice to what so far has mainly been a populist scream against the values of elite liberalism, above all its disdain for limits, from moral taboos to national borders to religious rituals. His device is a series of capsule biographies of important thinkers — Confucius, Seneca, Augustine, C.S. Lewis, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Andrea Dworkin, among others — who led richer lives by observing and celebrating the limits.

    There’s much to admire here, particularly in the fact that many of Ahmari’s exemplars chose the lives they did, swimming against the current of their times.

    The same might be said of Ahmari himself, an immigrant from Iran who arrived in America in impoverished circumstances, rose swiftly up the ranks of conservative intelligentsia, bounced between Seattle, Boston, London and New York, converted to Catholicism and switched from neoconservatism to paleoconservatism — all by his mid-30s.

    It’s a trajectory that resembles Naipaul’s. But Ahmari has a political purpose at odds with the personal one. He’s grown disenchanted with the society that has provided him with such a bounty of choice.

    He frets that his son will grow up to become a member of a ruthlessly meritocratic but spiritually vacuous Western elite. He mourns North Dakota’s decision to abandon its blue law against doing business on Sundays. He laments that the “American order enshrines very few substantive ideals I would want to transmit to my son.”

    In short, Ahmari, rather like the protagonist in Rachlin’s novel, thinks it would be better to put some limits on choice, not just for himself but for others as well.

    There’s a charge of hypocrisy to be made here, to which Ahmari partially owns up. What he doesn’t mention is that his admiration for the unflinching high-mindedness of a Heschel or an Aquinas somehow didn’t stop him from becoming a late but enthusiastic convert to the cult of Donald Trump — that is, of the hedonistic bully.

    But the larger charge against Ahmari’s book is its failure of moral and political imagination. Choice is no enemy of morality. It’s a precondition for it. It’s why, theologically speaking, temptation must exist. It’s why America, for all of its flaws, tends toward a certain kind of easygoing decency. It’s also why virtue-obsessed countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia tend to be so publicly brutal and so privately corrupt.

    Ahmari’s larger falsehood is that the American order transmits few substantive ideals. “This idea of the pursuit of happiness is at the heart of the attractiveness of the civilization to so many outside it or on its periphery,” Naipaul said in that speech.

    “So much is contained in it: the idea of the individual, responsibility, choice, the life of the intellect, the idea of vocation and perfectibility and achievement. It is an immense human idea. It cannot be reduced to a fixed system. It cannot generate fanaticism.”

    Today, what remains of conservative intelligentsia is split. On one side are those who think that what conservatism should revert to is a kind of anti-liberalism, in the reactionary 19th-century European tradition. On the other, there are those who believe that the purpose of American conservatism is to conserve the substantive principles of 1776 — that is, of the open mind and the ever more open society.

    Naipaul could have set Ahmari straight: The universal civilization “is known to exist, and because of that, other more rigid systems in the end blow away.”

    Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/03/opinion/what-should-conservatives-conserve.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

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    World War II and the Ingredients of Slaughter

    2019/09/03 Leave a comment

    Some uncomfortable parallels:

    World War II began 80 years ago this Sunday after Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed a “nonaggression” pact that was, in fact, a mutual aggression pact. Adolf Hitler invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939. Russia’s invasion of Poland, no less murderous, followed two weeks later.

    On Nov. 3 of that year, Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister, gave Hitler a report of his trip to Poland. “Above all, my description of the Jewish problem gets [Hitler’s] full approval,” he wrote in his diary. “The Jew is a waste product. It is a clinical issue more than a social one.”

    For several years many commentators, including me, have written about the parallels between the prewar era and the present.

    There’s the rise of dictatorial regimes intent on avenging past geopolitical humiliations and redrawing borders: Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia then; China, Iran and Russia now.

    Filed under Antisemitism, Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with

    Stephens: The New Conservative Pyrite “National conservatism” is another road to serfdom

    2019/07/29 Leave a comment

    Good post by Stephens on the bankruptcy of contemporary American conservatives:

    Friedrich Hayek, whose thoughts used to count for something among well-educated conservatives, made short work of nationalism as a guiding principle in politics. “It is this nationalistic bias which frequently provides the bridge from conservatism to collectivism,” he wrote in “The Constitution of Liberty.”

    That point alone ought to have been enough to dim the right’s new enthusiasm for old-style nationalism. It hasn’t.

    A three-day public conference this month on “national conservatism” featured some bold-faced right-wing names, including John Bolton, Tucker Carlson and Peter Thiel. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page published a piece from Christopher DeMuth, a former president of the American Enterprise Institute, on the “nationalist awakening.” Yoram Hazony, an Israeli political theorist, has gained wide attention among U.S. conservatives with his book, “The Virtue of Nationalism.”

    And, of course, Donald Trump: “You know, they have a word, it sort of became old-fashioned, it’s called a nationalist,” the president said last October. “And I say, really, we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am, I’m a nationalist.”

    Filed under Government Tagged with , ,