La Collins’ column is titled “United We Campaign,” and she says that the hard-core Hillary supporters have not yet achieved total unification bliss. Perhaps it’s just that their heroine hasn’t had a chance to reprogram each one individually. Mr. Cohen tells us “Why Obama Should Visit a Mosque,” and says that fear-mongering about Islam is a global industry. Barack Obama has a unique power to break the cycle, not least by emboldening moderate Muslims to denounce terror. With all due respect, Mr. Cohen, you don’t live on this side of the pond and you have no idea how barking mad some of our voters are… Mr. Kristof writes about “Books, Not Bombs,” and says helping young Iraqi refugees is in our national interest, for we’ll regret our myopia if we allow them to grow up uneducated and unemployable, festering in their societies. Here’s La Collins:
Hillary Clinton is so united!
“I’m just trying to move people to where they need to be,” she says repeatedly. Her enraged supporters call, bearing reports of new perceived slights or betrayals on the part of the Obama forces. “It’s all going to be fine. We have to take a deep breath,” she tells them. “This will all work out. Have a good summer. Go to the beach.”
It’s Democratic unity week. Thursday night in Washington, Hillary will be introducing her party’s future presidential nominee to a couple hundred of her gold-standard donors, who will arrive at the festivities bearing large checks, the political equivalent of flowers or a nice bottle of wine. Then Clinton and Obama are scheduled to hop on a jet on Friday morning and fly together to Unity, N.H., for their first postprimary joint appearance.
“Everything will work itself out,” one of her aides says cheerfully. Unity has spread throughout the Clinton offices, where formerly fierce political operatives have taken on the aura of a particularly mellow religious cult.
Hillary has been saying that her supporters are moving through the five stages of grief. But she herself seems to have invented some brand-new sixth stage of chipper serenity. Maybe it’s just that she’s been getting some sleep. Maybe it hasn’t really sunk in yet that instead of spending the next four years negotiating with world leaders, she’ll be fighting to save the Niagara Falls airport. But really, she ought to market her current mind-set as a brand of new age meditation or yoga. Cross your legs, close your eyes and feel yourself unifying from the base of your spine to the top of your head.
Bill may not be there yet. The former president was regarded as insufficiently enthusiastic when he issued a statement that he is “obviously committed to doing whatever he can and is asked to do” to get Obama elected. However, it was an absolute howl of support compared with the comments of Elizabeth Edwards, which so far add up to dead silence.
And let us be fair. For almost a year, people have been complaining about Bill’s failure to shut up and behave like a proper presidential spouse. Now he’s getting out of the way so Hillary and Barack can have the stage, and everyone has decided he’s sulking.
“Are you worried you need to hear more from the former president?” Obama was asked this week at a press conference. This may be the first time in modern history when someone complained about not hearing enough from Bill Clinton.
The hard-core Hillary supporters have certainly not yet achieved total unification bliss. Perhaps it’s just that their heroine hasn’t had a chance yet to reprogram each one individually. (“Repeat after me: ‘This will all work out.’ And let me hear that ocean breath.”) A breakfast for staunch Clinton backers in Manhattan this week was said to have ended in less than total success. “It just felt like old politics,” one of the attendees said. “Would you sign up to volunteer? What committee would you work on? It sounded like the old churchwoman’s auxiliary.”
This brings us to one of the critical problems in political rapprochements. The defeated side would like to have a meeting so it can offer the winning side insights into the issues it needs to address and policies it really ought to tweak. The winning side would like to get back to their campaign and reward the losing side by welcoming them into the ranks of willing workers. No hard feelings!
One matter that particularly upsets some of the unregenerate Hillary backers is the Democratic convention. The Obama campaign has already asked Clinton to make a speech, but it seems pretty clear that they’d also like her to release her delegates before the voting starts so that Barack could be nominated unanimously, cleanly and quickly. (Clean and quick is admirable if you are talking suturing a wound or waxing a floor, but a bit much to expect in a gathering of thousands of politicians.)
Electing a woman president has always been the marker for success in the American women’s movement. Clinton failed to hit the home run, but she certainly scored a triple, and some of her backers feel as if it deserves to be officially tallied, before Hillary releases everyone to support the inevitable nominee. “Many of us feel this needs to be recorded for history,” said Rosina Rubin, a New York delegate who will be attending the Washington fund-raiser.
Everybody does not agree with this theory. “A lot of people would see that as being counterproductive,” said Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, a former Clinton supporter who has become very, very unified.
It’s Hillary’s call. All the drama of the past few weeks was built around the fear that Clinton did not know what the politically smart thing to do was, or that she did not have the self-control to do it.
But, in the end, she always does. And whatever she decides, this will work out.
Here’s Mr. Cohen:
I’ll admit it: I’m thin-skinned about the kinds of slurs and innuendo about Muslims that have accompanied Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Years of being subjected to them while I covered the Bosnian war did that.
We heard the whole gamut back then: how the European Muslims of Bosnia and Kosovo were really “Turks” engaged in a “demographic genocide” (through high birth rates) against Christians, and how they were engaged in a plot to establish a “Muslim crescent” looping up from Turkey through the Balkans, and how they roasted enemy prisoners alive on spits.
All the while, of course, said Bosnian Muslims were being herded by Christian Serbs into concentration camps that were centers of torture and systematic killing of a cruelty Europe believed it had forever banished.
That was before 9/11, of course, and before the Egyptian-born writer who uses the pseudonym Bat Yeor popularized the term “Eurabia” to express her vision of a Muslim-infiltrated Europe capitulating Munich-like to Islamism, and before Pat Buchanan’s apocalyptic “The Death of the West,” and before Americans were encouraged in numberless ways to equate Islam with terrorists plotting Armageddon.
Give Americans the Rorschach test today and what they’ll detect in the ink blots are bearded Muslim “suiciders.”
I’ll admit something else: my own feelings about Islam have veered back and forth in recent years. Most of us were ignorant when the planes-turned-missiles struck. We’ve been searching for bearings: even the word “jihad” is variously described as a holy war against the infidel and an inner struggle for higher spiritual attainment.
When, in 2005, I talked to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somalian-born Dutch author, in a meeting in The Hague that had to be organized like an undercover operation because of threats to her life from Islamic radicals, I was struck by her words:
“Islam is not a religion of peace, or only of peace with other Muslims. We should acknowledge that it’s a very violent religion, instead of pretending, like Bush, that this violence is not true Islam.”
Certainly, the threat to her made in its name was violent. Certainly, the Koran is a long way from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Certainly, there are Koranic verses that Al Qaeda and other extremists have been able to use in attempts to sanctify their murderous acts. Certainly Islam, politically expressed, has often proved irreconcilable with modern notions of pluralism, democracy and women’s rights.
But a “very violent religion?” No. From Beirut to Baghdad to Cairo to here in Istanbul, I have often felt the wonders of hospitality and generosity and wisdom that seem to well from Islam.
At Obama’s old school in Jakarta earlier this year, an establishment scurrilously described as a madrassa” in all the innuendo, a gentle principal showed me the large mosque and small Christian prayer room. He then invoked the words emblazoned on the coat of arms of Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country: “Unity in diversity.”
That’s what I saw among the kids at the school, 85 percent of whom are Muslim, and the rest Christian. That’s also what America’s supposed to be about, not religious slurring and stereotyping.
Yet, because he’s named Barack Hussein Obama, and because his Kenyan grandfather was a Muslim, and because his commitment to Israel has been questioned, and because the U.S. Rorschach test is Muslim-menace mired, he’s had to tread carefully.
As Andrea Elliott chronicled in an important article in The Times, Obama has visited churches and synagogues, but no mosque. He had to apologize after two Muslim women wearing head scarves were barred from appearing behind him at a recent rally in Detroit.
Obama should visit a mosque. He has repeatedly shown his courage during this campaign; Americans have responded to his intellectual honesty. One of the important things about him is the knowledge his Kenyan and Indonesian experiences have given him of Islam as lived, rather than Islam as turned into monstrous specter.
This enables him to break the monolithic, alienating view of a great world religion that is as multifaceted as Judaism or Christianity.
I’ve no doubt that Obama is a strong supporter of Israel. But what I find as important is that he would come to Islam without prejudice. That’s the precondition for dialogue, whether with Iran or between Israel and Palestine.
Here in Turkey, a Muslim country of myth-dispelling permissiveness, I met with Joost Lagendijk, the chairman of the Turkish delegation of the European Parliament. He’s Dutch. What he hears at home is: “Fear of Islam and fear of Muslims and fear of immigrants.”
Fear-mongering about Islam is a global industry. It thrives on ignorance. Obama has a unique power to break the cycle, not least by emboldening moderate Muslims to denounce terror. Nothing would do more in the long run for the security of the world.
Here’s Mr. Kristof:
The dirty little secret of the Iraq war isn’t in Baghdad or Basra. Rather, it’s found in the squalid brothels of Damascus and the poorest neighborhoods of East Amman.
Some two million Iraqis have fled their homeland and are now sheltering in run-down neighborhoods in surrounding countries. These are the new Palestinians, the 21st-century Arab diaspora that threatens the region’s stability.
Many youngsters are getting no education, and some girls are pushed into prostitution, particularly in Damascus. Impoverished, angry, disenfranchised, unwanted, these Iraqis are a combustible new Middle Eastern element that no one wants to address or even think about.
American hawks prefer to address the region’s security challenges by devoting billions of dollars to permanent American military bases. A simpler way to fight extremism would be to pay school fees for refugee children to ensure that they at least get an education and don’t become forever marginalized and underemployed.
We broke Iraq, and we have a moral responsibility to those whose lives have been shattered by our actions. Helping them is also in our national interest, for we’ll regret our myopia if we allow young Iraqi refugees to grow up uneducated and unemployable, festering in their societies.
“My husband and I have decided to pull our three children out of school,” said Yussra Shaker, a college-educated English teacher who fled Iraq and went to Jordan when her 15-year-old son was shot in the leg in a kidnapping attempt. Ms. Yussra deeply believes in education, and her eyes welled with tears as she described the decision to withdraw her children because of school fees and beatings by Jordanian students.
“My children are very good students, and the teachers like them,” Ms. Yussra explained, “and so the local children beat them up even more.”
Ms. Yussra’s family is Christian, but most of those fleeing Iraq are Sunni Muslims — and some of them may have shot at Americans or brutalized Shiites in the ongoing sectarian conflict. One Sunni family I visited came from Falluja after their house was blown up, possibly by Americans, and they have decorated their leaking apartment with a huge poster of Saddam Hussein.
This family was composed of two wives of one man (who was back in Iraq, living in a tent) and their five children. The eldest son was a surly young man in his 20s who looked as if his preferred interaction with Americans might have involved an AK-47 in his arms.
Yet the family also has four small children and was nine months behind in its rent and in danger of being thrown out on to the street. I visited them at 2 p.m., and nobody in the house had eaten anything so far that day.
Iraqi refugees don’t get help in part because this is a problem that almost everybody wants to hide. Syria and Jordan worry that if the refugees get assistance, then they will stay indefinitely. The U.S. doesn’t want to talk about a crisis created by our war, and Iraq’s Shiite leaders don’t much care about Sunnis or Christians displaced by Shiite militias.
“It’s among the largest humanitarian crises in the world today,” said Michael Kocher, a refugee expert at the International Rescue Committee, which recently published a report on the crisis. “It’s getting very little attention from the Security Council on down, which we feel is scandalous and also bad strategy.”
It’s easy to blame the surrounding countries, such as Jordan and Syria, for not being more hospitable to Iraqis. But those countries have, however grudgingly, tolerated the influx despite the burden and political risk.
Iraqi refugees are hard to count but may now amount to 8 percent of Jordan’s population of six million. The average Jordanian family, which opposed the war in the first place, is now bearing a cost that may be as much as $1,000 per year for providing for the refugees.
In contrast, last year the United States took in only 1,608 Iraqis. European countries have done better, but they believe that America created the refugee crisis and should take the lead in resolving it.
“Apathy towards the crisis has been the overwhelming response,” Amnesty International said in a report last week.
We have already seen, in the case of Palestinians, how a refugee diaspora can destabilize a region for decades. If Jordan were to collapse in part from such pressures, that would be a catastrophe — and the best way to prevent that isn’t to give it Blackhawk helicopters, but help with school fees and school construction.
If we let the Iraqi refugee crisis drag on — and especially if we allow young refugees to miss an education so that they will never have a future — then we are sentencing ourselves to endure their wrath for decades to come. Educating Iraqis may not be as glamorous as bombing them, but it will do far more good.
