Islamic Societies Review WEEKLY

Monday, June 11, 2012

Can journalism funded by private generosity compensate for the decline of the commercial kind?

Monday, June 11, 2012 No comments

BANDITS, terrorists, clan rivalries, lawless security forces and corrupt officials make Russia’s north Caucasus the murkiest part of an often opaque country. Journalism there is difficult and dangerous. Much of the best reporting is done by Caucasian Knot, a bilingual online news service. Whereas most of the Russian national media is owned and controlled either by the Kremlin or by tycoons wary of incurring its displeasure, Caucasian Knot is financed by donations.

Media philanthropists are active in calmer places, too. Readers and advertisers have switched to the internet. Profit margins have shrunk or vanished. Papers are dying and journalists being sacked. Costly foreign and investigative reporting has been particularly squeezed, as has local news. One increasingly popular—if limited—response to these travails is the sort of “philanthro-journalism” long practised elsewhere by the likes of Caucasian Knot.

Turkey: Creationists Want to Airbrush Darwin Out of Evolutionary Picture

Monday, June 11, 2012 No comments

by Dorian Jones

As Islam takes on a more visible public profile in Turkey, academia is becoming a battleground over the theory of evolution. Scholars who espouse creationist ideas are becoming more assertive in challenging Darwinism.

The recent push by those who see a divine role in human evolution has alarmed Darwin’s adherents. In May, hundreds of academics and students angrily protested against what was billed as Turkey's first academic conference on creationist ideas, held at Istanbul's Marmara University.

"Bringing the scientific theory of evolution together with creationism undermines the foundations of science,” asserted Alaeddin Şenel, a retired professor of anthropology, in remarks to protestors outside the May 16-17 symposium. “Creationism is not supported by scientific data and doesn't have any place in education at any level."

The two-day conference on intelligent design was titled, "Why Does Science Deny Inter-Species Evolution?” It brought together over a dozen academics from across the country who used the occasion to challenge some of Darwin’s core concepts, in particular the theory of natural selection, which explains how apes developed into humans.

Many of the speakers highlighted what they claim are numerous deficiencies in the theory of evolution, supposed deficiencies that they say leave the door open to religious beliefs when teaching science. "The molecules and everything cannot randomly come together. … This theory disturbs me so much!" said geneticist Ibrahim Pirim of Izmir’s Katip Celebi University, one of the keynote speakers at the conference. "These are not random things; a creator had to put all these things in order."

Tuesday, June 05, 2012

Houla, Syria Stunt Proves: Old Tricks are the Best Tricks

Tuesday, June 05, 2012 No comments

by Tony Cartalucci

As information trickles out of Houla, Syria, near the city of Homs and the Lebanese-Syrian border, it is becoming clear that the Syrian government was not responsible for shelling to deaths some 32 children and their parents, as periodically claimed and denied by Western media and even the UN itself. It appears that instead, it was death squads at close quarters - accused by anti-government "activists" as being "pro-regime thugs" or "militias," and by the Syrian government as the work of Al Qaeda terrorists linked to foreign meddlers.

As the killings were allegedly taking place, US, British, and French representatives were already preparing to accuse, condemn, and level punishment against the Syrian government, calling for an immediate UN Security Council session as well as the convening of the "Friends of Syria" cadre to seek expanded arms shipments and aid to militants. It was politically motivated haste, an opportunity engineered or otherwise, for the West to push forward with its long sought after regime change. NATO during the same period, had just slaughtered a family of 8, including 6 children in Afghanistan, so surely if humanitarian concerns and justice were driving these foreign interests, Afghanistan would have been brought up along with Houla. It unfortunately was not.

Saturday, June 02, 2012

The Failure of the Summit of the Americas VI

Saturday, June 02, 2012 No comments

By Raúl Zibechi

Dilma Rousseff interrupted the speech of Barack Obama. The President of the United States was speaking about the advances of various countries in Latin America, commenting that now there exists “a prosperous middle class” that represents a business opportunity for companies from his country. “Suddenly, they are interested in buying iPads, interested in buying planes from Boeing.” “Or Embraer,” interjected Dilma, yielding applause.

Days before the President of Brazil had been upstaged in Washington by a children’s Easter celebration, which was more publicized more than her visit to the White House. “That little photo opportunity had more visibility than the visit of the President of the sixth largest economy in the world,” complained the Brazilian press, contrasting Dilma’s reception with those of the presidents of China, Russia, and India .

What stood out most from the Summit in Cartagena were the blunders and gossip material. Shakira made mistakes in several verses of the Colombian national anthem. Twelve members of Obama’s Secret Service had to return beforehand due to a scandal with prostitutes whom the bodyguards refused to pay. “It is the worst scandal in the history of the Secret Service,” wrote the Washington Post .

Visit Afghanistan's 'Little America,' and See the Folly of For-Profit War

Saturday, June 02, 2012 No comments

by David Rohde

First with an ill-fated Cold War-era project and now with the war today, Helmand province has been the source of enormously lucrative private contracting that has done little to improve peoples' lives.

Eight years ago, a 72-year-old American aid worker named Charles Grader told me a seemingly fantastical story. In a bleak stretch of Afghan desert that resembled the surface of Mars, several dozen families from states like Montana, Wisconsin and California had lived in suburban tract homes with backyard barbecues. For 30 years during the Cold War, the settlement served as the headquarters of a massive American project designed to wean Afghans from Soviet influence.

American engineers oversaw the largest development program in Afghanistan's history, constructing two huge earthen dams, 300 miles of irrigation canals and 1,200 miles of gravel roads. All told, the project made 250,000 acres of desert bloom. The town, officially known as "Lashkar Gah," was the new capital of Helmand province and an ultra-modern world of workshops and offices. Afghans called it "Little America."

Intrigued, I hitched a ride to the town with Grader a few weeks later. A weathered New England blue blood, Grader was the last American to head the Kabul office of the U.S. Agency for International Development before the 1979 Soviet invasion. In 2004, he was back in Afghanistan working as a contractor, refusing to retire just yet and trying, it seemed, to do good.

From the moment we arrived in Lashkar Gah, I was transfixed by Little America, its history and its meaning. At enormous cost, a sweeping American Cold War effort had temporarily eased the destitution of one corner of Afghanistan but failed to achieve its lofty goals. Surveying the town, I desperately hoped America could do better.

Over the next eight years, an epic tragedy unfolded in Helmand. All told, 858 American and British troops have died in the province since 2001 - nearly twice as many as in any other Afghan province - and the U.S. and British governments have spent billions of dollars in a province twice the size of Maryland with a population of 1 million. Hundreds of foreign contractors arrived to train Afghan police, farmers and government officials as well.

A clear pattern emerged. When massive international efforts were made, real progress emerged. The provincial capital and other large towns in central Helmand grew more secure and thrived economically, and narcotics cultivation dropped by one-third. But in isolated rural areas poverty, corruption and Islamic conservatism defied a scattershot American effort. As American and British forces prepare to withdraw next year, Afghans fear that the gains will crumble.

Over the course of four years, from 2004 to 2008, I visited Helmand roughly every six months. I embedded with American military units but found myself drawn to the American civilian effort again and again. Creating a crude but functioning Afghan economy, government and schools, it seemed, was the key to long-term stability.

In the end, Helmand proved tragic. I met dozens of well-intentioned American and Afghan civilians who found themselves trapped in a system marred by inconsistency, short-term goals and a focus on American - not Afghan - priorities. Speed, visibility and American political needs ruled. Patience, complexity and deference to Afghans were shunned.

Instead of triumphing, many of the Americans I met there ended up dejected, confused and cynical. What happened in Little America - and what it says about America's place, role and future in the world - haunts me as well.

Thursday, May 24, 2012

Poll of the Day: Americans' Attitudes About Sin

Thursday, May 24, 2012 No comments

Despite the recent controversy over contraception, Gallup finds Americans broadly approve of birth control -- but not porn, cloning, or infidelity.

Americans have few moral qualms about birth control or gambling. They think wearing fur, the death penalty, and abortion are more morally acceptable with porn. And they think suicide, polygamy, and human cloning are more moral than cheating on your spouse.

Inspired by the recent political debate over insurance coverage for contraception, Gallup this month included birth control in its regular survey of Americans' moral beliefs. Rick Santorum notwithstanding, the poll found that Americans overwhelmingly believe contraception is moral: 89 percent said it was morally acceptable, the highest rating of any of the morally questionable behaviors tested. Even among Catholics, 82 percent approved of birth control. No wonder Democrats were convinced they had a winning issue in the contraception debate -- even though the debate was about larger issues of religious freedom and government compulsion, there simply aren't a lot of people who sympathize with moral objections to birth control.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

On "Notes on a Century," The Tale of the Dragoman

Wednesday, May 16, 2012 No comments

by ERIC ORMSBY

It is all too tempting to describe Bernard Lewis, the distinguished historian of the Islamic world, as venerable. Mr. Lewis, who turns 96 on May 31, seems to possess the aura of the sage. Even his harshest critics have sometimes seen him in this light. After Mr. Lewis published a devastating critique of Edward Said's "Orientalism" in 1982 in the New York Review of Books, the injured author responded with a long, angry letter to the editor that mocked Mr. Lewis's "veneer of omniscient tranquil authority."

An attentive reader of Mr. Lewis's books would never come away thinking that omniscience or tranquillity was on conspicuous display. Whether writing about the early history of the Arabs or the development of the modern Turkish state, Mr. Lewis has always been unusually alert to nuance and ambiguity; he is wary of his sources and tests them against other evidence. In "Notes on a Century," his lively new memoir, he writes that his work in archives instilled in him "a profound mistrust of written documents."

As a historian, Mr. Lewis has evinced not only an unswerving commitment to historical truth and a hatred of what he calls "the falsification of history" but also a passionate, at times obsessive, curiosity about other peoples, other places. He is as interested in the history of foodstuffs as in the fall of dynasties. He is simply too inquisitive to settle for mere omniscience.

"Notes on a Century" is at once an autobiography and a statement of principle. Over the course of his long life, Mr. Lewis has met with everyone from Golda Meir to Moammar Gadhafi—and has bedded down in obscure Syrian villages and desert tents as well as sumptuous palaces. But his description of his beginnings is the most winning part of his account. Like the late man of letters John Gross, whose lovely 2002 memoir, "The Double Thread," describes growing up Jewish and English in London, Mr. Lewis evokes his Jewish-English childhood with great tenderness.

Tuesday, May 08, 2012

Arab Spring has washed the region's appalling racism out of the news

Tuesday, May 08, 2012 No comments

by Robert Fisk

The Long View: Migrant workers from the subcontinent often live eight to a room in slums – even in oil-rich Kuwait

How many tracts, books, documentaries, speeches and doctoral theses have been written and produced about Islamophobia? How many denunciations have been made against the Sarkozys and the Le Pens and the Wilders for their anti-immigration (for which, read largely anti-Muslim) policies or – let us go down far darker paths – against the plague of Breivik-style racism?

The problem with all this is that Muslim societies – or shall we whittle this down to Middle Eastern societies? – are allowed to appear squeaky-clean in the face of such trash, and innocent of any racism themselves.

A health warning, therefore, to all Arab readers of this column: you may not like this week's rant from yours truly. Because I fear very much that the video of Alem Dechasa's recent torment in Beirut is all too typical of the treatment meted out to foreign domestic workers across the Arab world (there are 200,000 in Lebanon alone).

Many hundreds of thousands have now seen the footage of 33-year-old Ms Dechasa being abused and humiliated and pushed into a taxi by Ali Mahfouz, the Lebanese agent who brought her to Lebanon as a domestic worker. Ms Dechasa was transported to hospital where she was placed in the psychiatric wing and where, on 14 March, she hanged herself. She was a mother of two and could not stand the thought of being deported back to her native Ethiopia. That may not have been the only reason for her mental agony.

Brain Scans Reveal Dogs' Thoughts

Tuesday, May 08, 2012 No comments

New fMRI images of unsedated dogs represent a first peak into what dogs are thinking and open a door into canine cognition and social cognition in other species

Fido's expressive face, including those longing puppy-dog eyes, may lead owners to wonder what exactly is going on in that doggy's head. Scientists decided to find out, using brain scans to explore the minds of our canine friends.

The researchers, who detailed their findings May 2 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, were interested in understanding the human-dog relationship from the four-legged perspective.

"When we saw those first [brain] images, it was unlike anything else," said lead researcher Gregory Berns in a video interview posted online. "Nobody, as far as I know, had ever captured images of a dog's brain that wasn't sedated. This was [a] fully awake, unrestrained dog, here we have a picture for the first time ever of her brain," added Berns, who is director of the Emory University Center for Neuropolicy.

Saturday, May 05, 2012

Two Hundred Years of Surgery

Saturday, May 05, 2012 No comments

by Atul Gawande, M.D., M.P.H.

Surgery is a profession defined by its authority to cure by means of bodily invasion. The brutality and risks of opening a living person's body have long been apparent, the benefits only slowly and haltingly worked out. Nonetheless, over the past two centuries, surgery has become radically more effective, and its violence substantially reduced — changes that have proved central to the development of mankind's abilities to heal the sick.

SURGERY BEFORE THE ADVENT OF ANESTHESIA

The first volume of the New England Journal of Medicine and Surgery, and the Collateral Branches of Science, published in 1812, gives a sense of the constraints faced by surgeons, and the mettle required of patients, in the era before anesthesia and antisepsis. In the April issue for that year, John Collins Warren, surgeon at the Massachusetts General Hospital and son of one of the founders of Harvard Medical School, published a case report describing a new approach to the treatment of cataracts.1 Until that time, the prevalent method of cataract treatment was “couching,” a procedure that involved inserting a curved needle into the orbit and using it to push the clouded lens back and out of the line of sight.2 Warren's patient had undergone six such attempts without lasting success and was now blind. Warren undertook a more radical and invasive procedure — actual removal of the left cataract. He described the operation, performed before the students of Harvard Medical School, as follows:

The eye-lids were separated by the thumb and finger of the left hand, and then, a broad cornea knife was pushed through the cornea at the outer angle of the eye, till its point approached the opposite side of the cornea. The knife was then withdrawn, and the aqueous humour being discharged, was immediately followed by a protrusion of the iris.

Into the collapsed orbit of this unanesthetized man, Warren inserted forceps he had made especially for the event. However, he encountered difficulties that necessitated improvisation:

The opaque body eluding the grasp of the forceps, a fine hook was passed through the pupil, and fixed in the thickened capsule, which was immediately drawn out entire. This substance was quite firm, about half a line in thickness, a line in diameter, and had a pearly whiteness.

A bandage was applied, instructions on cleansing the eye were given, and the gentleman was sent home. Two months later, Warren noted, inflammation required “two or three bleedings,” but “the patient is now well, and sees to distinguish every object with the left eye.”