Without the right political, social and moral institutions, it’s just a utopian theory.
LOS ANGELES TIMES
October 21, 2008
The free-market system, it is now fashionable to say, is to blame for the current financial crisis. By way of rejoinder, a growing cohort of commentators have argued that the crisis should be understood not as a failure of free-market economic theory but as its vindication. They argue that the U.S. government perverted the wisdom of the market by encouraging banks to make loans no rational actor would make — and that the players took the risks they did because they held a reasonable expectation of a government bailout should things get hairy.
New York Sun, March 21, 2008
A Review of Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East
In suggesting that Islamic extremism may be, if not a spent force in the Middle East, no longer the most dynamic or important one, Robin Wright has more credibility than most. In 1983, Ms. Wright surveyed the wreckage of the United States Embassy in Beirut. Beneath it lay the remains of her friends. Two years later, Ms. Wright wrote “Sacred Rage: The Wrath of Militant Islam.” The title is self-explanatory and its thesis, unfortunately, has hardly passed into obscurity.””
A review of The Last Days of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent.
Last month, en route to the British Library, I strolled past the Tiger Tiger nightclub in Piccadilly. I was on foot because it was a beautiful day and because there is a distinctly creepy mood, these days, on London’s tubes and busses. Signs everywhere remind passengers that they are on CCTV. The police presence is heavy and visible. To be sure, the odds of any one bus blowing up are tiny, but the ubiquitous security prompts the unwelcome thought that there are people about who seek to better those odds. Days later, I flew out of Heathrow airport, where the mood was creepier still.
In 1995, having read Olivier Roy’s The Failure of Political Islam (1992), Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes asked, “How can someone who knows so much be so completely wrong?” Mr. Roy’s latest work, Secularism Confronts Islam, prompts the very same question. It is a remarkable book: articulate, original, lucid, without a paragraph that fails to contain an interesting thought. It is clearly the product of a wide-ranging intelligence in possession of a refined analytic sensibility, a first-rate historical education and a generous spirit. And one wonders how someone who knows so much could have written it.
According to the dust jacket, church historian Philip Jenkins intends God’s Continent: Christianity, Islam, and Europe’s Religious Crisis ( Oxford University Press, 289 pages, $28) to function as a calming salve, a reassuring counterpoint to “overheated rhetoric” about Christian Europe’s imminent collapse under the weight of secularization and Muslim immigration.
IT TAKES ON average 62 working days, 16 separate documents, and the equivalent of $5,000 to acquire the permits to open a business in Italy. In France, it takes 53 days, 15 documents, and $4,000. In America, it takes a mere four days, four documents, and $166. In The Future of Europe (MIT Press, 172 pages, $24.95), economists Alberto Alesina and Francesco Giavazzi provide a wealth of such examples to buttress their argument that Europe is on a state-subsidized train to economic and political irrelevance, but as anyone who has tried to do business in Europe knows, those statistics alone are all you really need.
THE FILM SUBMISSION aired in the Netherlands on August 29, 2004. It was promptly and predictably decried by Muslims as blasphemous. Fair enough; it was. If you make a film that depicts verses of the Koran printed onto the skin of half-naked women, you must expect to be called a blasphemer. Expecting to be murdered is another story. Filmmaker Theo Van Gogh expected no such thing; he continued to cycle through the streets of Amsterdam unarmed and unprotected, dismissing the threats against him as empty bluster.
We know you don’t really give two shits about the Palestinians, and you sure as hell don’t give a rat’s ass about Islam, either. And we know you’re a practical kind of man. So here’s a little suggestion that might meet both of our needs.
ATHEISM, AS THEOLOGIAN Alister McGrath understands the term, is not merely the asseveration that no God exists. It is a distinct movement in intellectual, cultural, and political history and may be mapped to particular historic events — the arc of its rise and decline demarcated at either end by two tumbling edifices, the Bastille and the Berlin Wall. This movement, curiously, has behaved much like a religion: It has produced gurus and proselytizers; it has been appropriated to serve political ends; and, ultimately, it has been embraced not for its compelling internal logic but on faith — or at gunpoint.
THE UNITED NATIONS Economic And Social Commission For Western Asia (ESCWA) has released its preliminary overview of economic developments in the ESCWA region in 2001. The news is no cause for celebration. According to the report, which contains an annex treating the economic and social consequences of the United Nations sanctions on Iraq, economic growth in the ESCWA region – Bahrain, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Yemen – slowed to a crawl last year.
