A Second Hand Conjecture

Roland picks up an interesting piece by Jacob Heilbrunn for the National Interest, describing an ongoing purge of neoconservative intellectuals from the American Enterprise Institute, allegedly instigated by Vice President Danielle Pletka. So far Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht are gone, with Joshua Muravchik soon leaving. Others are said to be soon in following.

This could signal the reemergence of an old conflict over machtpolitik and just war doctrine, which used to exist in Republican security policy circles (ie, coercion-for-values vs. coercion-for-interests). If Pletka is indeed purging with intent, we may even expect AEI to shift its attitude toward the Middle East, Asia and Africa, given how much more amenable authoritarian regimes tend to be to interest pressure.

And the idealism of the AEI departed is considerable. Gerecht for instance wrote a fascinating but bizarre book I read in the late 1990s under the pen name Edward Shirley, in which he smuggled himself into Iran in the trunk of a car, essentially for the romance of it.

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Italian economist Loretta Napoleoni (of Rogue Economics fame), blames the lingering financial crisis in part on the American War on Terrorism, which inaugurated an allegedly “suspicious attitude…toward Muslim investors.” She goes further though, and argues that the only solution to the turmoil lies in embracing the financial rules mandated by the doctrines of medieval Islamic Sharia:

Islamic finance is a system based in shariah law. Central principals include a prohibition against charging interest and a code of ethics for investments – for example, barring investments in prostitution. Napoleoni said these principals are actually quite similar to the principles of classical economics.

“A bank should be a profit organization, but the moment in which the social role is forgotten and the profit role takes over, then a bank is actually working against the people who are putting their money into the bank, the clients. Now that, of course, in Islamic finance could not happen, because there is this partnership between the client and the banks. There is a social commitment within finance which we had before, but we lost it.”
(UNM)

Makes sense. When you’re looking for lessons in the administration of an advanced, adaptive, and sophisticated modern financial system, clearly we have a lot to learn from economic titans like Yemen. Lately financial sharia in that country has produced a permanently premodern economy with 40 times the population of Vermont, subsisting on about 80% of Vermont’s annual GSP. Sounds like a good deal to me.

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Ramadan always means new soap operas in the Arab world. I learned today it also means not even thinking about masturbation. A small thing to you perhaps, but in a repressive sexual society where the curves of the female figure are a matter of imaginative mystery, this is a serious lifestyle sacrifice for young men.

For me, Ramadan always means sharing a cigarette on a dirty floorboard outside Cairo. I’d offered my driver my last smoke in the midst of the holy month when he’d picked me up from a camel train. I’d held it out with an appeal that God was after all merciful. Tobacco is haram, forbidden, during the daylight hours of Ramadan. He’d stared at it for a long time. ‘Western devils and their temptations’ might have been in his thoughts. Finally he said “Yes. But not here.”
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Jihad Watch
I have seen a few articles that say something like – if the left dislikes McCan-Palin so much they must be doing something right. Here is a similar argument about views from the Muslim world. “whenever your taqiyya-practicing enemy tries to give you “advice” — such as who or who not to vote for — do
the opposite”.

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Indian women may soon face imprisonment for wearing their traditional saris in Nigeria. The mid-riff exposing garments have run afoul of Muslim conservatives as being too sexually provocative. There are estimated to be about 25,000 Indians living in Nigeria, primarily employed in the oil sector. A strange experience for them. India typically regards itself as a sexually conservative culture, despite Western literary opinion to the contrary.

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(photo: Mani Babbar)

After 9/11 widened Al Qaeda’s ambitious war against most of the world, Osama bin Laden described his own axis-o-evil as being composed of “Crusaders, Zionists and Hindus.” But at some point, without anyone much noticing, that seems to have changed for Hindus.

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photo: Martin Dixon

Here’s a grim laugh for your Friday morning. A Muslim propaganda video which preposterously seeks to explain the death and burial of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 1st century, as the result of the wrath of Allah against the decadent Roman empire. The video marvels at how people were struck down with little warning by the eruption of Vesuvius, and cites the Quran as evidence of divine retribution. Particularly offensive is the implication that slavery was a uniquely Roman institution. Something that no doubt would come as a great surprise to slaves who suffer to this day, under cruel ownership by devout Muslim masters in Africa and Saudi Arabia.

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Ali Eteraz takes a lengthy, sober and sympathetic look at the various arguments for granting jurisdiction to Sharia courts over Muslims in UK law. He rejects them all to good effect.

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