The Muslim Ban

I've heard multiple people invoke a certain idea in defense of a Muslim ban (thank you, Melissa McCarthy for making me shout "your words not mine!" as I typed that) and I want to push back on them a little. They invoke the concept of a "clash of civilizations" between the "noble" values of the West and the "barbaric" values of the Islamic world, often using apocalyptic language. Here's what I want to say: there probably would not BE a modern Western civilization if not for the Islamic world.
Without the Golden Age of Islam there would have been no Rennaissance or Enlightenment - or they would have been much longer in arriving. While Europe saw its centers of learning shrink and struggle after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Middle East's educational system flourished under the patronage of multiple rulers. Books of philosophy and science that had long been lost to Western Europe were preserved - our knowledge of the great Greek philosophers would be much more limited if not for the Islamic world.

But let's not stop there - this wasn't a culture simply poaching the ideas of others. Muslim scientists advanced the cutting edge of all the major fields, from astronomy to optics to medicine to physics to engineering... the list is immense. From Cordoba to Baghdad, scholars, poets, and theologians from around the world gathered together in places of relative tolerance and peace to share learning. If you were in the Middle Ages and you wanted to find a place where a Muslim, a Christian, a Jew, and a Buddhist walked into a bar... let's just say you wouldn't look in Paris.

Where did it all go wrong? It really didn't, not overall, but an anti-scientific thread of Islamic thought really took root as the Ottoman Empire shrank and fragmented under pressure from a resurgent Europe. Let me simplify a very complicated period: feeling threatened, some people embraced modernization and attempted to re-close the gap while others fought to preserve the "traditional" ways that had made Islam great. They fostered a false dichotomy between a modern world and "true" Islam, insisting that polluting influences should be purged from within and fought from without. This thread does not make up the majority of Islamic thought, but its offshoots are what gave rise to both the hardline, hypocritical theocracy ruling Saudi Arabia and various terrorists organizations that now too often represent the face of Islam to the rest of the world.

Like I said - this is a vast oversimplification about topics that individually have required entire volumes to truly dissect. What's more, it's an outsider's view looking in - so I expect I myself missed a lot of nuance. However, with that proviso understood, here's what I want to emphasize as both a lesson and a warning: Islamic faith is not incompatible with an appreciation for modernity, science, tolerance, democracy or human rights. Indeed, many concepts within those arenas would not have been developed without the influence of both Middle-Eastern thinkers and some of the very core values found in Islam itself. That's the lesson, but what follows is the warning.

A group of people, feeling threatened and left behind by the rest of the world, embrace a hardline interpretation of cultural norms and religious values in an effort to re-attain a mythologized "golden time". In order to achieve those goals, they feel they must force others into compliance with these rules and mandate their obedience via violence and government intervention. To maintain purity, they excise parts of the population viewed as tainted or inferior and push away "foreign influences". They purge scientific thought that cannot be brought into accordance with dogma rather than work to adapt dogma to new learning. This tendency is not at all unique to the Middle-East or Islam, as you can find it echoed across all of history in every major culture. Indeed, today I do not need to look very far to hear the same tempting whispers.

It is cliche, but not untrue: be careful you do not become that which you fight. And the more impossible you believe that to be? The more likely it is to happen.

Trump, Israel, and the Media - The Clusterfucking

Okay, it's headlines like this that make people believe in the whole "fake news"/biased media bullshit. "Trump, Meeting With Netanyahu, Backs Away From Palestinian State" is inaccurate and inflammatory. His full and complete quote (as put into the article itself) was "“I’m looking at two states and one state. I like the one that both parties like. I can live with either one.”

It was his usual vapid non-speak, but it changes little RE: actual US policy. Did you think we would refuse to go to the negotiation table to discuss a one-state solution if the Palestinians had come and said "S'alright with us!"? That's basically all Trump is saying here: whatever works for both parties. Now the question is whether he actually *means* “both parties” or is lying through his teeth, but that would've been true even if he had come out to the podium praising the vital necessity of a Palestinian state at the top of his lungs. There's ALWAYS the strong probability that Mr. Trump is blatantly lying about things, so let's focus on that rather than misconstruing his actual words.

Here's a minor aside/confession: I don't disagree with his stated position when it is considered in a vacuum. A treaty with terms and land swaps that would allow BOTH a completely independent, sovereign, and viable Palestine AND a completely independent, sovereign, and viable Israel would be exceedingly difficult to achieve even if one set aside the massive cluster that is the mutual demand for Jerusalem. Unfortunately for a one-state solution, there are also all sorts of devils in the details of creating an *ethical* and *stable* merger.

As the article points out, Israel is founded on the core principles of being a democratic state AND a true Jewish homeland - it's not always been great at achieving or balancing those two goals, but the USA hasn't exactly provided the ability for every citizen to secure "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", so let's set those issues aside for now. On a fundamental level, the integration of so many non-Jewish Palestinians as citizens would completely upend that balance - either the new citizens are accorded the same right to vote as everyone else, which would quickly diminish Israel's character as a fundamentally Jewish state (using the term as it applies to both culture and religion, since plenty of culturally Jewish Israelis are non-religious) OR the newly-minted Palestinian Israelis would be denied some portion of voting rights, which would be an incredible blow against the concept of universal democratic suffrage. From the Palestinian side, there would also need to be a reckoning with their demand to have property their families fled returned to inheritors or suitable individual reparations paid.

On top of that, any merger would look very similar to West/East Germany in the early 90s in terms of infrastructure and economic investment – Israel would be on the hook for (re)building a shattered land that’s dealing with decades of damage at every level imaginable. A not-insignificant chunk of that damage has been DUE to Israel, but another big chunk has been due to corruption and incompetence by the Palestinian Authority. I’m not going down the rabbit hole of assigning blame for the past here, but rather focusing on roadblocks to moving forward.

Looking at these obstacles, my opposition to a one-state solution boils down to the fact that any stability in such a unified state would involve the suppression of basic freedoms or the forced relocation of huge numbers of people to achieve a more “sustainable” demographic mix. I don’t have the stomach for endorsing either option, so some version of a two state solution is all that’s really left. My ideal end? Two geographically coherent states bound together in an economic free trade agreement, with the various outside parties who keep trying to negotiate a peace forced to put their money where their mouth is by sinking resources and capital into rebuilding a viable Palestine that can stand alongside Israel rather than fester and be abused by the various countries around it (its so-called Arab “allies” being very much included).

Even this, though, has massive roadblocks in front of it. An economic union cannot stand without loosening border restrictions, which could only happen if Israel had guarantees that Palestine could keep a lid on terrorist threats. Israel, in turn, would have to respect the territorial integrity of Palestine and come down hard on settlements across the border. Both sides would have to hold onto enough trust and mutual goodwill to tolerate an armed neighbor so closely intertwined with them. Also, third parties would actually have to put financial skin in the game to help prop things up, while trusting that their aid wouldn’t get funneled to some politician’s private bank account. I just don’t see any of that coming soon.

Okay, so that wasn’t a minor aside ;) but hey, at least it was cheery and upbeat!

#yourpersonalraincloud