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| Winter 2003 |
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Steer Clear of Smears To the editor: The Star Telegram reporter who smeared Stein and Bob McTeer hid behind his editor’s skirt. His behavior richly illustrates why I quit reading the Texas newspapers—and the New York Times and Washington Post. Journalism today is news crafting, not news reporting. James A. Glasscock To the editor: Hank Bunker Harry Stein replies: Tear Down That Wall To the editor: Coleen Rowley Build Up That Wall To the editor: The lack of separation of religion and politics is an important factor in the Middle East’s troubles—troubles that have now spilled onto the world stage. The root cause has little to do with Islam’s posited lack of intellectual development—“centuries behind”—but with the more quotidian failings of Middle Eastern states. Weak states seek legitimacy from higher authorities: in the 1950s and 60s, it was Nasserism; now, it is political Islam. On the flip side, religious involvement in politics stems not from the meddling exhortations of Islam, or the imperatives of the Qur’an and shari’a law, but from its role as an organ of political opposition and social provision in failing regimes. The needed reform is not of “Islam,” but of the Middle Eastern state system. The complication is that reform imposed from outside won’t stick. Exhortations like Wilson’s only weaken the hand of reformers like Iran’s Khatami as they try to confront the Islamists. Conrad Smewing James Q. Wilson responds: On one matter, however, he is partially correct: I did not dwell on the long tradition of religious toleration in the Muslim world. Why? Because the observance of that tradition is increasingly rare. After the second (failed) Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683, Muslims began to feel threatened by religions they had once ignored and so started to reduce the toleration they had once supported. That lessening of toleration easily occurred because there was no legal or constitutional support for tolerance. It was to explain the lack of such support that my essay was written. Puzzled About Paris To the editor: Dalrymple opens with a striking anecdote: two youths are vandalizing parking meters in broad daylight. People walk by; hardly anyone seems to object to their behavior. He explains the public’s indifference as rooted in fear of the youths’ reaction if challenged, or disillusion with the French judiciary’s ability to deal with such cases. Both feelings can account for the lack of reaction among passersby, but Dalrymple fails to consider other explanations. One explanation is the fact that the youths are vandalizing parking meters—symbols of that most reviled form of state intervention: taxation. Tax evasion being a national pastime in France, I suspect some passersby looked on the whole scene not with apathy, but with sympathy. I am surprised that Dalrymple—who presumably understands the French, and who is himself no fan of taxation—did not consider the possibility. Another of Dalrymple’s theories simply beggars belief. Noticing only older people challenging the youths, he wonders if younger generations have been so brainwashed by liberal sentimentalism that they think the youths are not to blame for their behavior, that poverty and a lack of education make their behavior understandable. Dalrymple fails to consider that the indifference of the younger generations may be just indifference—a failure to get interested in what lies outside their own lives. As someone famously said: there is no such thing as society, there are only individuals. Dalrymple surely knows the author of that dictum; her ideology still has its attractions for him. Do Dalrymple’s affinities with the Thatcherite Right explain why he casts about for other reasons for the public’s indifference—reasons that allow him to blame the French Left for all the problems he describes? Raphaël Ingelbien Theodore Dalrymple responds: Mr. Ingelbien name-callingly accuses me of an association with the Thatcherite Right, which is to think in slogans rather than to think about real and pressing problems, and is, in effect, the avoidance of thought. Mrs. Thatcher was in many respects a mirror-image Marxist—that is, an economic determinist—who, however, had far less effect on the structure of the welfare state than is usually supposed. In any case, France has not followed Thatcherite policies very closely, so Mr. Inglebein is attempting to throw sand in our eyes so that we may not see what is before our faces, and which he would obviously rather not see. Not that even he denies that it is there.
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