Harvard-Bound? Chin Up
March 2, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
DAVID BROOKS
I've got great news! You're young and you're smart and next year you're beginning college. Unfortunately, I've also got bad news. The only school you got into is Harvard, where, as Peter Beinart of The New Republic notes, students often graduate "without the kind of core knowledge that you'd expect from a good high school student," and required courses can be "a hodgepodge of arbitrary, esoteric classes that cohere into nothing at all."
But don't despair. I've consulted with a bevy of sages, and I've come up with a list. If you do everything on this list, you'll get a great education, no matter what college you attend:
Read Reinhold Niebuhr. Religion is a crucial driving force of this century, and Niebuhr is the wisest guide. As Alan Wolfe of Boston College notes, if everyone read Niebuhr, "The devout would learn that public piety corrupts private faith and that faith must play a prophetic role in society. The atheists would learn that some people who believe in God are really, really smart. All of them would learn that good and evil really do exist — and that it is never as easy as it seems to know which is which. And none of them, so long as they absorbed what they were reading, could believe that the best way to divide opinion is between liberals on the one hand and conservatives on the other."
Read Plato's "Gorgias." As Robert George of Princeton observes, "The explicit point of the dialogue is to demonstrate the superiority of philosophy (the quest for wisdom and truth) to rhetoric (the art of persuasion in the cause of victory). At a deeper level, it teaches that the worldly honors that one may win by being a good speaker ... can all too easily erode one's devotion to truth — a devotion that is critical to our integrity as persons. So rhetorical skills are dangerous, potentially soul-imperiling, gifts." Explains everything you need to know about politics and punditry.
Take a course on ancient Greece. For 2,500 years, educators knew that the core of their mission was to bring students into contact with heroes like Pericles, Socrates and Leonidas. "No habit is so important to acquire," Aristotle wrote, as the ability "to delight in fine characters and noble actions." Alfred North Whitehead agreed, saying, "Moral education is impossible without the habitual vision of greatness."
That core educational principle was abandoned about a generation ago, during a spasm of radical egalitarianism. And once that principle was lost, the entire coherence of higher education was lost with it. So now you've got to find your own ways to learn about history's heroes, the figures who will serve as models to emulate and who will provide you with standards to use to measure your own conduct. Remember, as the British educator Richard Livingstone once wrote, "One is apt to think of moral failure as due to weakness of character: more often it is due to an inadequate ideal."
Learn a foreign language. The biographer Ron Chernow observes, "My impression is that many students have turned into cunning little careerists, jockeying for advancement." To counteract this, he suggests taking "wildly impractical" courses like art history and Elizabethan drama. "They should especially try to master a foreign language as a way to annex another culture and discover unseen sides to themselves. As we have evolved into a matchless global power, we have simply become provincial on an ever larger stage."
Spend a year abroad. Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland believes that all major universities should require a year abroad: "All evidence suggests this, more than any other, is a transforming experience for students that lasts a lifetime."
Take a course in neuroscience. In the next 50 years, half the explanations you hear for human behavior are going to involve brain structure and function. You've got to know which are serious and which are cockamamie.
Take statistics. Sorry, but you'll find later in life that it's handy to know what a standard deviation is.
Forget about your career for once in your life. This was the core message from everyone I contacted. Raised to be workaholics, students today have developed a "carapace, an enveloping shell that hinders them from seeing the full, rich variety of intellectual and practical opportunities offered by the world," observes Charles Hill of Yale. You've got to burst out of that narrow careerist mentality. Of course, it will be hard when you're surrounded by so many narrow careerist professors building their little subdisciplinary empires.
But you can do it. I have faith.
Friday, May 25, 2007
Monday, February 27, 2006
Graduates Versus Oligarchs
February 27, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Ben Bernanke's maiden Congressional testimony as chairman of the Federal Reserve was, everyone agrees, superb. He didn't put a foot wrong on monetary or fiscal policy.
But Mr. Bernanke did stumble at one point. Responding to a question from Representative Barney Frank about income inequality, he declared that "the most important factor" in rising inequality "is the rising skill premium, the increased return to education."
That's a fundamental misreading of what's happening to American society. What we're seeing isn't the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we're seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite.
I think of Mr. Bernanke's position, which one hears all the time, as the 80-20 fallacy. It's the notion that the winners in our increasingly unequal society are a fairly large group — that the 20 percent or so of American workers who have the skills to take advantage of new technology and globalization are pulling away from the 80 percent who don't have these skills.
The truth is quite different. Highly educated workers have done better than those with less education, but a college degree has hardly been a ticket to big income gains. The 2006 Economic Report of the President tells us that the real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004. Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the average earnings of college graduates rose, but by less than 1 percent per year.
So who are the winners from rising inequality? It's not the top 20 percent, or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much smaller, much richer group than that.
A new research paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, "Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?," gives the details. Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains.
But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint.
Just to give you a sense of who we're talking about: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that this year the 99th percentile will correspond to an income of $402,306, and the 99.9th percentile to an income of $1,672,726. The center doesn't give a number for the 99.99th percentile, but it's probably well over $6 million a year.
Why would someone as smart and well informed as Mr. Bernanke get the nature of growing inequality wrong? Because the fallacy he fell into tends to dominate polite discussion about income trends, not because it's true, but because it's comforting. The notion that it's all about returns to education suggests that nobody is to blame for rising inequality, that it's just a case of supply and demand at work. And it also suggests that the way to mitigate inequality is to improve our educational system — and better education is a value to which just about every politician in America pays at least lip service.
The idea that we have a rising oligarchy is much more disturbing. It suggests that the growth of inequality may have as much to do with power relations as it does with market forces. Unfortunately, that's the real story.
Should we be worried about the increasingly oligarchic nature of American society? Yes, and not just because a rising economic tide has failed to lift most boats. Both history and modern experience tell us that highly unequal societies also tend to be highly corrupt. There's an arrow of causation that runs from diverging income trends to Jack Abramoff and the K Street project.
And I'm with Alan Greenspan, who — surprisingly, given his libertarian roots — has repeatedly warned that growing inequality poses a threat to "democratic society."
It may take some time before we muster the political will to counter that threat. But the first step toward doing something about inequality is to abandon the 80-20 fallacy. It's time to face up to the fact that rising inequality is driven by the giant income gains of a tiny elite, not the modest gains of college graduates.
February 27, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Ben Bernanke's maiden Congressional testimony as chairman of the Federal Reserve was, everyone agrees, superb. He didn't put a foot wrong on monetary or fiscal policy.
But Mr. Bernanke did stumble at one point. Responding to a question from Representative Barney Frank about income inequality, he declared that "the most important factor" in rising inequality "is the rising skill premium, the increased return to education."
That's a fundamental misreading of what's happening to American society. What we're seeing isn't the rise of a fairly broad class of knowledge workers. Instead, we're seeing the rise of a narrow oligarchy: income and wealth are becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small, privileged elite.
I think of Mr. Bernanke's position, which one hears all the time, as the 80-20 fallacy. It's the notion that the winners in our increasingly unequal society are a fairly large group — that the 20 percent or so of American workers who have the skills to take advantage of new technology and globalization are pulling away from the 80 percent who don't have these skills.
The truth is quite different. Highly educated workers have done better than those with less education, but a college degree has hardly been a ticket to big income gains. The 2006 Economic Report of the President tells us that the real earnings of college graduates actually fell more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2004. Over the longer stretch from 1975 to 2004 the average earnings of college graduates rose, but by less than 1 percent per year.
So who are the winners from rising inequality? It's not the top 20 percent, or even the top 10 percent. The big gains have gone to a much smaller, much richer group than that.
A new research paper by Ian Dew-Becker and Robert Gordon of Northwestern University, "Where Did the Productivity Growth Go?," gives the details. Between 1972 and 2001 the wage and salary income of Americans at the 90th percentile of the income distribution rose only 34 percent, or about 1 percent per year. So being in the top 10 percent of the income distribution, like being a college graduate, wasn't a ticket to big income gains.
But income at the 99th percentile rose 87 percent; income at the 99.9th percentile rose 181 percent; and income at the 99.99th percentile rose 497 percent. No, that's not a misprint.
Just to give you a sense of who we're talking about: the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center estimates that this year the 99th percentile will correspond to an income of $402,306, and the 99.9th percentile to an income of $1,672,726. The center doesn't give a number for the 99.99th percentile, but it's probably well over $6 million a year.
Why would someone as smart and well informed as Mr. Bernanke get the nature of growing inequality wrong? Because the fallacy he fell into tends to dominate polite discussion about income trends, not because it's true, but because it's comforting. The notion that it's all about returns to education suggests that nobody is to blame for rising inequality, that it's just a case of supply and demand at work. And it also suggests that the way to mitigate inequality is to improve our educational system — and better education is a value to which just about every politician in America pays at least lip service.
The idea that we have a rising oligarchy is much more disturbing. It suggests that the growth of inequality may have as much to do with power relations as it does with market forces. Unfortunately, that's the real story.
Should we be worried about the increasingly oligarchic nature of American society? Yes, and not just because a rising economic tide has failed to lift most boats. Both history and modern experience tell us that highly unequal societies also tend to be highly corrupt. There's an arrow of causation that runs from diverging income trends to Jack Abramoff and the K Street project.
And I'm with Alan Greenspan, who — surprisingly, given his libertarian roots — has repeatedly warned that growing inequality poses a threat to "democratic society."
It may take some time before we muster the political will to counter that threat. But the first step toward doing something about inequality is to abandon the 80-20 fallacy. It's time to face up to the fact that rising inequality is driven by the giant income gains of a tiny elite, not the modest gains of college graduates.
Friday, February 17, 2006
Let Hamas Sink or Swim on Its Own
Reprinted here from the NY Times
Op-Ed Columnist of the New York Times
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
RAMALLAH
February 17, 2006
What do you do when good things happen to bad people?
That is the key question raised by the stunning election of a Hamas majority in the Palestinian Parliament, which will be sworn in Saturday. This moment has the potential to open some new, intriguing possibilities for a long-term settlement, or truce, in Israeli-Palestinian relations. And it has the potential to produce utter chaos. We're juggling grenades here, so please, everyone, no sudden movements.
And no illusions, either: Hamas is responsible for unspeakable suicidal violence against Israeli civilians. Israel would be fully justified in saying that the only correct policy toward Hamas today is a fight to the death.
But would that be smart right now? If Israel truly wants to get rid of Hamas, or at least see it disarmed, the only people who can do that effectively are the Palestinians. They have voted Hamas in — in a fair election that President Bush insisted should take place.
If Hamas is going to fail now in leading the Palestinian Authority, it is crucial that it be seen to fail on its own — because it can't transform itself from a terror group into a ruling body delivering peace, security and good government for Palestinians — not because Israel and the U.S. never gave it a chance.
"Any minute that it is evident to the Palestinian public that Hamas is being forced to fail will guarantee that any future elections will only produce another Hamas victory," said the Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki.
And by the way, if Hamas is forced to fail, who is to say that the Palestinians will ever be able to hold another election? You could have prolonged turmoil.
For that reason, Mr. Shikaki argued, both Israel and the U.S. should remain open to the idea of Hamas's becoming part of a Palestinian national unity government under the current president, Mahmoud Abbas — a Fatah moderate who embraces peace with Israel.
"We want to provide Hamas a [Palestinian] context within which to begin to moderate its views — without being forced to do so by the West and Israel," Mr. Shikaki said. If Hamas is going to change, it will change only if it is forced to confront the reality that it can get so much more for Palestinians by negotiating with Israel than by fighting Israel.
Every poll shows that the main reasons Hamas won were that Palestinians wanted more security, less corruption and better governance — not an Islamic state.
Hamas officials are signaling that they know they will have to confront this clash between their ideology and what Palestinians need today. As a West Bank Hamas spokesman, Farhat Assad, remarked to me in Ramallah: "Like others, we understand that politics is not based on principles only. But it is also based on interests."
Who knows whether any of this is true. But Israel has an enormous interest in testing Hamas's ability to evolve. Because if Hamas keeps to the current cease-fire, focuses on better governance and begins to tacitly, but not formally, support a negotiating process with Israel, the benefit to Israel would be enormous.
For the first time, the whole "Palestinian street," Hamas and Fatah, would be represented in the negotiations, making any agreement with Israel so much more legitimate.
As the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi noted, "Israelis used to say that one inch given by [Ariel] Sharon's Likud was worth a kilometer given by Labor. We now have a similar situation with the Palestinians. ... Any agreement by Hamas is worth a lot more than a much more agreeable agreement by people who can't deliver."
Israel was obsessed with getting the P.L.O. to renounce its charter, but in the end, that did not affect Yasir Arafat's real behavior one whit. That's why, regardless of the conditions Israel lays down for allowing funds to flow to a Hamas-led government or negotiating with it, Israel needs to ask itself this: What would impress Israelis most — if Hamas recognized the Jewish state today and sang Hatikva, the Israeli national anthem, or if it maintained the cease-fire and the negotiating process?
I think if Hamas recognized Israel today, as some in Israel demand, no Israelis would trust a word. Why would they? The only way Israelis will trust any such Hamas words is if they follow a change in Hamas deeds on the ground — not precede it.
So it is critical that Israel, the U.S. and the Palestinians not get themselves up in a tree right now over words. There is nothing Hamas could say today that would reassure Israelis, but there is a lot it could do on the ground that would have a huge impact over time. That — for now — is where the test should be.
Reprinted here from the NY Times
Op-Ed Columnist of the New York Times
THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
RAMALLAH
February 17, 2006
What do you do when good things happen to bad people?
That is the key question raised by the stunning election of a Hamas majority in the Palestinian Parliament, which will be sworn in Saturday. This moment has the potential to open some new, intriguing possibilities for a long-term settlement, or truce, in Israeli-Palestinian relations. And it has the potential to produce utter chaos. We're juggling grenades here, so please, everyone, no sudden movements.
And no illusions, either: Hamas is responsible for unspeakable suicidal violence against Israeli civilians. Israel would be fully justified in saying that the only correct policy toward Hamas today is a fight to the death.
But would that be smart right now? If Israel truly wants to get rid of Hamas, or at least see it disarmed, the only people who can do that effectively are the Palestinians. They have voted Hamas in — in a fair election that President Bush insisted should take place.
If Hamas is going to fail now in leading the Palestinian Authority, it is crucial that it be seen to fail on its own — because it can't transform itself from a terror group into a ruling body delivering peace, security and good government for Palestinians — not because Israel and the U.S. never gave it a chance.
"Any minute that it is evident to the Palestinian public that Hamas is being forced to fail will guarantee that any future elections will only produce another Hamas victory," said the Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki.
And by the way, if Hamas is forced to fail, who is to say that the Palestinians will ever be able to hold another election? You could have prolonged turmoil.
For that reason, Mr. Shikaki argued, both Israel and the U.S. should remain open to the idea of Hamas's becoming part of a Palestinian national unity government under the current president, Mahmoud Abbas — a Fatah moderate who embraces peace with Israel.
"We want to provide Hamas a [Palestinian] context within which to begin to moderate its views — without being forced to do so by the West and Israel," Mr. Shikaki said. If Hamas is going to change, it will change only if it is forced to confront the reality that it can get so much more for Palestinians by negotiating with Israel than by fighting Israel.
Every poll shows that the main reasons Hamas won were that Palestinians wanted more security, less corruption and better governance — not an Islamic state.
Hamas officials are signaling that they know they will have to confront this clash between their ideology and what Palestinians need today. As a West Bank Hamas spokesman, Farhat Assad, remarked to me in Ramallah: "Like others, we understand that politics is not based on principles only. But it is also based on interests."
Who knows whether any of this is true. But Israel has an enormous interest in testing Hamas's ability to evolve. Because if Hamas keeps to the current cease-fire, focuses on better governance and begins to tacitly, but not formally, support a negotiating process with Israel, the benefit to Israel would be enormous.
For the first time, the whole "Palestinian street," Hamas and Fatah, would be represented in the negotiations, making any agreement with Israel so much more legitimate.
As the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi noted, "Israelis used to say that one inch given by [Ariel] Sharon's Likud was worth a kilometer given by Labor. We now have a similar situation with the Palestinians. ... Any agreement by Hamas is worth a lot more than a much more agreeable agreement by people who can't deliver."
Israel was obsessed with getting the P.L.O. to renounce its charter, but in the end, that did not affect Yasir Arafat's real behavior one whit. That's why, regardless of the conditions Israel lays down for allowing funds to flow to a Hamas-led government or negotiating with it, Israel needs to ask itself this: What would impress Israelis most — if Hamas recognized the Jewish state today and sang Hatikva, the Israeli national anthem, or if it maintained the cease-fire and the negotiating process?
I think if Hamas recognized Israel today, as some in Israel demand, no Israelis would trust a word. Why would they? The only way Israelis will trust any such Hamas words is if they follow a change in Hamas deeds on the ground — not precede it.
So it is critical that Israel, the U.S. and the Palestinians not get themselves up in a tree right now over words. There is nothing Hamas could say today that would reassure Israelis, but there is a lot it could do on the ground that would have a huge impact over time. That — for now — is where the test should be.
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
The Weapon of Democracy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Op-Ed Columnist NY Times
February 15, 2006
RAMALLAH, West Bank
I decided that before writing about Hamas's win in the Palestinian legislative elections, I had to talk to people in the West Bank first. I am so glad I did. Everything is now clear to me: What a mess!
The new Hamas parliamentarians will be sworn in on Saturday, and nobody knows what will happen next. Fourteen of the new Palestinian lawmakers are in Israeli jails, including 10 from Hamas. That's more than 10 percent of the whole Parliament.
About the only thing that is clear to me is the radical mood of both Israeli and Palestinian voters. Consider this: Israel is holding its national election on March 28, and the rightist Likud party, led by Bibi Netanyahu, opened its campaign with ads accusing the centrist Kadima Party, led by Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, of planning to pull Israel back to the 1967 borders. The Likud quickly backed off that line, however, when it realized that so many Israeli voters today liked the idea of pulling back to near the 1967 borders that some may have thought the ad was taken out by Kadima — instead of being an attack on Kadima by Likud.
Yossi Beilin, who heads the leftist Meretz Party, opened his campaign with an ad that says: "Beilin Will Divide Jerusalem." Again, if you'd seen that ad a decade ago, you'd have thought it was a wicked libel. Today it's a campaign promise! After the failed peace process and the Hamas suicide-bombing campaign, many Israelis just want total separation from Palestinians — and a barrier.
"Ideologically, Israelis have never been more dovish," said Ari Shavit, an essayist for the Haaretz newspaper. "But that dovishness is based on the condition that there is a partner we can trust. If so, people are ready to give back everything. The overwhelming majority is now for a two-state solution. But we have become sensible at the very moment that Palestinians have lost their senses."
The Palestinians have thrown out Yasir Arafat's old Fatah Party in favor of Hamas, which wants to eliminate Israel and erect an Islamic state in all of Palestine. So just when Israel's majority comes around to two states, Mr. Shavit added, the Palestinians elect a party that favors only one.
Or have they? It's obvious that the ruling Fatah Party and its allies, led by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, ran an incomprehensibly stupid campaign. There was no discipline, so in many districts Fatah and its secular-nationalist allies ran four candidates, while Hamas always ran only one. So Fatah votes got divided, and Hamas ones didn't.
The result, the pollster Khalil Shikaki said, is that "Hamas won only 44 percent of the popular vote, but got 56 percent of the seats. Fatah and its allies won 56 percent of the popular vote, but only 43 percent of the seats."
Hamas was clearly elected to provide clean government and order. But it was also elected because its suicide campaign was seen as decisive in getting Israel out of Gaza, thereby bringing Palestinians a measure of dignity, which Fatah failed to do.
Israel, with U.S. backing, says it will cut off all its dealings and financial flows to a Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority — unless Hamas renounces violence, recognizes Israel and accepts all the P.L.O.-Israel accords. Some Israelis anticipate that a cash-starved Hamas-led government will lead to chaos, and that Mr. Abbas will then be able to call new elections.
I don't think it will be so simple.
The sense I got from Hamas officials here is that Hamas will be low-key and patient, trying to rule as long as possible without money from abroad, working on improving Palestinian governance and hoping that Palestinian society will remain steadfast — and that the Arab world and Europe will somehow intervene to keep Israel and the U.S. from depriving Hamas of its legitimate mandate.
As Farhat Assad, the local Hamas spokesman, remarked: "I thank the United States that they have given us this weapon of democracy. But there is no way to retreat now. It's not possible for the U.S. and the world to turn its back on an elected democracy."
But Hamas will have its hands full managing the West Bank, where it doesn't have as many people or arms as Fatah. As the Israeli strategist Gidi Grinstein put it, Hamas "is like a snake that swallowed an elephant." It has a lot to digest before it can move sharply in any direction.
Hisham Abdullah, the West Bank A.F.P. reporter, told me that when he went into Ramallah's main bookstore the other day and asked what was selling, the owner said he'd noticed Hamas people buying Dale Carnegie books on management. ...
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Op-Ed Columnist NY Times
February 15, 2006
RAMALLAH, West Bank
I decided that before writing about Hamas's win in the Palestinian legislative elections, I had to talk to people in the West Bank first. I am so glad I did. Everything is now clear to me: What a mess!
The new Hamas parliamentarians will be sworn in on Saturday, and nobody knows what will happen next. Fourteen of the new Palestinian lawmakers are in Israeli jails, including 10 from Hamas. That's more than 10 percent of the whole Parliament.
About the only thing that is clear to me is the radical mood of both Israeli and Palestinian voters. Consider this: Israel is holding its national election on March 28, and the rightist Likud party, led by Bibi Netanyahu, opened its campaign with ads accusing the centrist Kadima Party, led by Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, of planning to pull Israel back to the 1967 borders. The Likud quickly backed off that line, however, when it realized that so many Israeli voters today liked the idea of pulling back to near the 1967 borders that some may have thought the ad was taken out by Kadima — instead of being an attack on Kadima by Likud.
Yossi Beilin, who heads the leftist Meretz Party, opened his campaign with an ad that says: "Beilin Will Divide Jerusalem." Again, if you'd seen that ad a decade ago, you'd have thought it was a wicked libel. Today it's a campaign promise! After the failed peace process and the Hamas suicide-bombing campaign, many Israelis just want total separation from Palestinians — and a barrier.
"Ideologically, Israelis have never been more dovish," said Ari Shavit, an essayist for the Haaretz newspaper. "But that dovishness is based on the condition that there is a partner we can trust. If so, people are ready to give back everything. The overwhelming majority is now for a two-state solution. But we have become sensible at the very moment that Palestinians have lost their senses."
The Palestinians have thrown out Yasir Arafat's old Fatah Party in favor of Hamas, which wants to eliminate Israel and erect an Islamic state in all of Palestine. So just when Israel's majority comes around to two states, Mr. Shavit added, the Palestinians elect a party that favors only one.
Or have they? It's obvious that the ruling Fatah Party and its allies, led by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, ran an incomprehensibly stupid campaign. There was no discipline, so in many districts Fatah and its secular-nationalist allies ran four candidates, while Hamas always ran only one. So Fatah votes got divided, and Hamas ones didn't.
The result, the pollster Khalil Shikaki said, is that "Hamas won only 44 percent of the popular vote, but got 56 percent of the seats. Fatah and its allies won 56 percent of the popular vote, but only 43 percent of the seats."
Hamas was clearly elected to provide clean government and order. But it was also elected because its suicide campaign was seen as decisive in getting Israel out of Gaza, thereby bringing Palestinians a measure of dignity, which Fatah failed to do.
Israel, with U.S. backing, says it will cut off all its dealings and financial flows to a Hamas-dominated Palestinian Authority — unless Hamas renounces violence, recognizes Israel and accepts all the P.L.O.-Israel accords. Some Israelis anticipate that a cash-starved Hamas-led government will lead to chaos, and that Mr. Abbas will then be able to call new elections.
I don't think it will be so simple.
The sense I got from Hamas officials here is that Hamas will be low-key and patient, trying to rule as long as possible without money from abroad, working on improving Palestinian governance and hoping that Palestinian society will remain steadfast — and that the Arab world and Europe will somehow intervene to keep Israel and the U.S. from depriving Hamas of its legitimate mandate.
As Farhat Assad, the local Hamas spokesman, remarked: "I thank the United States that they have given us this weapon of democracy. But there is no way to retreat now. It's not possible for the U.S. and the world to turn its back on an elected democracy."
But Hamas will have its hands full managing the West Bank, where it doesn't have as many people or arms as Fatah. As the Israeli strategist Gidi Grinstein put it, Hamas "is like a snake that swallowed an elephant." It has a lot to digest before it can move sharply in any direction.
Hisham Abdullah, the West Bank A.F.P. reporter, told me that when he went into Ramallah's main bookstore the other day and asked what was selling, the owner said he'd noticed Hamas people buying Dale Carnegie books on management. ...
Thursday, February 09, 2006
Drafting Hitler by David Brooks - NY Times
February 9, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Drafting Hitler
By DAVID BROOKS
Drafting Hitler
You want us to know how you feel. You in the Arab European League published a cartoon of Hitler in bed with Anne Frank so we in the West would understand how offended you were by those Danish cartoons. You at the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri are holding a Holocaust cartoon contest so we'll also know how you feel.
Well, I saw the Hitler-Anne Frank cartoon: the two have just had sex and Hitler says to her, "Write this one in your diary, Anne." But I still don't know how you feel. I still don't feel as if I should burn embassies or behead people or call on God or bin Laden to exterminate my foes. I still don't feel your rage. I don't feel threatened by a sophomoric cartoon, even one as tasteless as that one.
At first I sympathized with your anger at the Danish cartoons because it's impolite to trample on other people's religious symbols. But as the rage spread and the issue grew more cosmic, many of us in the West were reminded of how vast the chasm is between you and us. There was more talk than ever about a clash of civilizations. We don't just have different ideas; we have a different relationship to ideas.
We in the West were born into a world that reflects the legacy of Socrates and the agora. In our world, images, statistics and arguments swarm around from all directions. There are movies and blogs, books and sermons. There's the profound and the vulgar, the high and the low.
In our world we spend our time sifting and measuring, throwing away the dumb and offensive, e-mailing the smart and the incisive. We aim, in Michael Oakeshott's words, to live amid the conversation — "an endless unrehearsed intellectual adventure in which, in imagination, we enter a variety of modes of understanding the world and ourselves and are not disconcerted by the differences or dismayed by the inconclusiveness of it all."
We believe in progress and in personal growth. By swimming in this flurry of perspectives, by facing unpleasant facts, we try to come closer and closer to understanding.
But you have a different way. When I say you, I don't mean you Muslims. I don't mean you genuine Islamic scholars and learners. I mean you Islamists. I mean you young men who were well educated in the West, but who have retreated in disgust from the inconclusiveness and chaos of our conversation. You've retreated from the agora into an exaggerated version of Muslim purity.
You frame the contrast between your world and our world more bluntly than we outsiders would ever dare to. In London the protesters held signs reading "Freedom Go to Hell," "Exterminate Those Who Mock Islam," "Be Prepared for the Real Holocaust" and "Europe You Will Pay, Your 9/11 Is on the Way." In Copenhagen, an imam declared, "In the West, freedom of speech is sacred; to us, the prophet is sacred" — as if the two were necessarily opposed.
Our mind-set is progressive and rational. Your mind-set is pre-Enlightenment and mythological. In your worldview, history doesn't move forward through gradual understanding. In your worldview, history is resolved during the apocalyptic conflict between the supernaturally pure jihadist and the supernaturally evil Jew.
You seize on any shred — even a months-old cartoon from an obscure Danish paper — to prove to yourself that the Jew and the crusader are on the offensive, that the apocalyptic confrontation is at hand. You invent primitive stories — like the one about Jews who kill children for their blood — to reinforce your image of Jewish evil. You deny the Holocaust because if the Jews were as powerful as you say, they would never have allowed it to happen.
In my world, people search for truth in their own diverse ways. In your world, the faithful and the infidel battle for survival, and words and ideas and cartoons are nothing more than weapons in that war.
So, of course, what started in Denmark ended up for you with Hitler, the Holocaust and the Jew. But in your overreaction this past week, your defensiveness is showing. Democracy is coming to your region, and democracy brings the conversation. Mainstream leaders like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani are embracing democracy and denouncing your riots as "misguided and oppressive."
You fundamentalists have turned yourselves into a superpower of dysfunction, demanding our attention week after week. But it is hard to intimidate people forever into silence, to bottle up the conversation, to lock the world into an epic war only you want. While I don't share your rage, I do understand your panic.
February 9, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Drafting Hitler
By DAVID BROOKS
Drafting Hitler
You want us to know how you feel. You in the Arab European League published a cartoon of Hitler in bed with Anne Frank so we in the West would understand how offended you were by those Danish cartoons. You at the Iranian newspaper Hamshahri are holding a Holocaust cartoon contest so we'll also know how you feel.
Well, I saw the Hitler-Anne Frank cartoon: the two have just had sex and Hitler says to her, "Write this one in your diary, Anne." But I still don't know how you feel. I still don't feel as if I should burn embassies or behead people or call on God or bin Laden to exterminate my foes. I still don't feel your rage. I don't feel threatened by a sophomoric cartoon, even one as tasteless as that one.
At first I sympathized with your anger at the Danish cartoons because it's impolite to trample on other people's religious symbols. But as the rage spread and the issue grew more cosmic, many of us in the West were reminded of how vast the chasm is between you and us. There was more talk than ever about a clash of civilizations. We don't just have different ideas; we have a different relationship to ideas.
We in the West were born into a world that reflects the legacy of Socrates and the agora. In our world, images, statistics and arguments swarm around from all directions. There are movies and blogs, books and sermons. There's the profound and the vulgar, the high and the low.
In our world we spend our time sifting and measuring, throwing away the dumb and offensive, e-mailing the smart and the incisive. We aim, in Michael Oakeshott's words, to live amid the conversation — "an endless unrehearsed intellectual adventure in which, in imagination, we enter a variety of modes of understanding the world and ourselves and are not disconcerted by the differences or dismayed by the inconclusiveness of it all."
We believe in progress and in personal growth. By swimming in this flurry of perspectives, by facing unpleasant facts, we try to come closer and closer to understanding.
But you have a different way. When I say you, I don't mean you Muslims. I don't mean you genuine Islamic scholars and learners. I mean you Islamists. I mean you young men who were well educated in the West, but who have retreated in disgust from the inconclusiveness and chaos of our conversation. You've retreated from the agora into an exaggerated version of Muslim purity.
You frame the contrast between your world and our world more bluntly than we outsiders would ever dare to. In London the protesters held signs reading "Freedom Go to Hell," "Exterminate Those Who Mock Islam," "Be Prepared for the Real Holocaust" and "Europe You Will Pay, Your 9/11 Is on the Way." In Copenhagen, an imam declared, "In the West, freedom of speech is sacred; to us, the prophet is sacred" — as if the two were necessarily opposed.
Our mind-set is progressive and rational. Your mind-set is pre-Enlightenment and mythological. In your worldview, history doesn't move forward through gradual understanding. In your worldview, history is resolved during the apocalyptic conflict between the supernaturally pure jihadist and the supernaturally evil Jew.
You seize on any shred — even a months-old cartoon from an obscure Danish paper — to prove to yourself that the Jew and the crusader are on the offensive, that the apocalyptic confrontation is at hand. You invent primitive stories — like the one about Jews who kill children for their blood — to reinforce your image of Jewish evil. You deny the Holocaust because if the Jews were as powerful as you say, they would never have allowed it to happen.
In my world, people search for truth in their own diverse ways. In your world, the faithful and the infidel battle for survival, and words and ideas and cartoons are nothing more than weapons in that war.
So, of course, what started in Denmark ended up for you with Hitler, the Holocaust and the Jew. But in your overreaction this past week, your defensiveness is showing. Democracy is coming to your region, and democracy brings the conversation. Mainstream leaders like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani are embracing democracy and denouncing your riots as "misguided and oppressive."
You fundamentalists have turned yourselves into a superpower of dysfunction, demanding our attention week after week. But it is hard to intimidate people forever into silence, to bottle up the conversation, to lock the world into an epic war only you want. While I don't share your rage, I do understand your panic.
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