Embracing—and challenging—Bruce Bawer’s powerful new book
The Victims’ Revolution: The Rise of Identity Studies and the Closing of the Liberal Mind, by Bruce Bawer (Harper Collins, 400 pp., $25.99)
In his new book, Bruce Bawer has proposed an answer to vexing questions: Why has our culture become degraded? Why have our politics become polarized? And why has our public debate coarsened? Bawer locates the source of these misfortunes in the changes that have taken place in American higher education over the last generation—above all, the emergence of multicultural “identity studies.”
Here in Turkey, we’re consumed by the hunt for the forbidden manuscripts of The Imam’s Army. The police have arrested the author, Ahmet ??k, on suspicion of membership in the Ergenekon conspiracy, and they’re hunting down every copy of the draft of his book.
What’s in that book? Who knows? Supposedly it blows the lid on Fethullah Gülen’s control of the Turkish police, or supposedly it contains the organizational blueprint for overthrowing Turkey’s democratically-elected government. I stress supposedly: I haven’t read it, and Turkey is conspiracy-theory central.
Some virtues are by accidents of history associated with utopianism, hostility to private property, anti-clericalism, and other core beliefs of the Left. I can scandalize a yoga instructor anywhere in the world by declaring myself an avid admirer of Margaret Thatcher, though I challenge you to read the yoga sutras and conclude from them that devotees must favor an overregulated financial sector.
Book Review: The Arab Lobby: The Invisible Alliance that Undermines America’s Interests in the Middle East, by Mitchell Bard
National Review, January, 2011
John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy in 2007. Its arguments are by now familiar; actually, they were always familiar: powerful, disloyal Jews; too many of them; bad for America. The book was, predictably and drearily, a best-seller.
Bin Laden perpetrated or inspired a long list of horrors.
3 May 2011
CITY JOURNAL
We should not forget that Osama bin Laden’s evil extended far beyond the outrages of September 11, 2001. The list of terrorist acts he committed and inspired extends, literally, for pages. “At last, the mastermind of the bombing of the 1998 American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania—which together killed and wounded more than 5,000 people—is dead. At last, the leader of a group that planned to assassinate Pope John Paul II and President Clinton, and to bomb a dozen trans-Pacific airline flights, is dead. At last, the author of the 1996 truck bombing at Khobar Towers and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole is dead.
Newly translated documents show how far Soviet wickedness extended.
WINTER 2011
CITY JOURNAL
In the Spring 2010 issue of City Journal, I described an archive of documents from Soviet government agencies smuggled to the West by the Russian researcher Pavel Stroilov and the Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky. These documents, I noted, were available to anyone who wanted to consult them. But nobody did. Publishers were indifferent. Only a fraction of the documents had been translated into English. This was, I argued, a symptom of the world’s dangerous indifference to the enormity of Communist crimes.
Or, how I learned to stop worrying and love my debt
CITY JOURNAL
24 November 2010
I used to wake up in the middle of the night, here in Istanbul, wondering how I’d pay my bills. As I’ve noted in City Journal, the demand for foreign news is shrinking. The wire services provide coverage from Turkey at low operating costs. To be honest, I also spend a lot of money on things I can’t afford, like my cleaning lady. She’s been working for me for five years and has three kids, so I can’t fire her. If I go down, she’ll go down, and so will my landlord, the guy who sells cleaning supplies to my cleaning lady, and the Iranian refugee who does my odd jobs. The ripple effect on the local economy, in other words, would be calamitous.
I moved here five years ago. In the beginning, I was sympathetic to the argument that Turkey’s ban on headscarves in universities and public institutions was grossly discriminatory. I spoke to many women who described veiling themselves as an uncoerced act of faith. One businesswoman in her mid-30s told me that she began veiling in high school, defying her secular family. Her schoolteacher gasped when she saw her: “If Atatürk could see you now, he would weep!” Her pain at the memory of the opprobrium she had suffered was clearly real.
A trip to the headquarters of the extremist group that sponsored the Mavi Marmara.
WEEKLY STANDARD
June 21, 2010
Istanbul
The street outside the IHH, the Turkish organization that recently dispatched the Mavi Marmara to its sanguinary fate in the eastern Mediterranean, suggests a hopeful world of multi-ethnic and religious harmony. Men and women in various forms of secular and religious dress—beards, clean-shaven, headscarves, burqas—walk in and out of the building in urgent conversation with Africans in dashikis, Swedes in stained proletarian-wear, anti-Zionist rabbis sweating nervously in black suits and payot. A gangly teenager strolls by in a T-shirt that reads, “Virgins required: No experience necessary.” It isn’t clear whether he’s off-message, highly ironic, or yet another Turkish kid who bought a T-shirt he didn’t quite understand.
What we don’t know about the Mavi Marmara incident: just about everything.
3 June 2010
CITY JOURNAL
I live in Istanbul and for obvious reasons have been receiving e-mails and phone calls in the past few days asking what, exactly, is going on in Turkey. The answer is that I’m not sure. This is the only honest answer any journalist can give, unless she has managed to place a listening device in the meeting rooms of the Turkish Cabinet. It’s not, however, the answer all are giving.
