A sincere plea for the US not to let a Burqa Curtain descend on more Islamic countries, undercut by stolid academese and...
Lost cause, bright future, or something in between? A Rhodes scholar with a doctorate in Islamic thought surveys the prospects for democracy in countries dominated by Islam.
Although Islamic fundamentalism, which Feldman (Law/NYU) also calls “political Islam” and “Islamism,” has understandably grabbed the headlines, he insists that the possibility of a looser relationship between mosque and state exists. Democracy and Islam can clash, but they can also be synthesized. With subtlety and discernment, Feldman identifies the rhetoric of justice not only as a principal appeal of Islamic fundamentalism but as a potential bridge between the religion and democracy. Just as helpfully, he discusses the diverse conditions and histories that underlie Islam around the world. Oil-driven states, such as Saudi Arabia’s monarchy, offer little chance for peaceful change, since petrodollars eliminate the need for significant taxation and, consequently, the consent of the governed. In contrast, other governments have better odds of becoming more progressive; Jordan, for example, has been edging toward greater parliamentary participation under King Abdullah. It is difficult to argue with Feldman’s contention that American pressure on dictators such as Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak would stand in the best moral tradition of our foreign policy while also refuting anti-American sentiment. Yet his arguments for recognizing Islam’s “rich if imperfect history of tolerating intra-Islamic diversity of opinion on matters of religion” lose some persuasiveness because he fails to really acknowledge that the Koran and its interpretations are often as ambiguous as they are rich, giving rise to the sword as much as to peace. More devastating, the words “perhaps” and “maybe” appear so often that they begin to sound like wishful thinking. “Perhaps Islam has a greater capacity for flexibility and accommodation than Westerners tend to believe on the basis of incomplete information and nervous projections” is the kind of waffling that may well provoke the response, “Perhaps not.”
A sincere plea for the US not to let a Burqa Curtain descend on more Islamic countries, undercut by stolid academese and unduly rosy speculation.Pub Date: April 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-374-17769-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.
Known for her often contentious perspectives, New York Times opinion writer Weiss battles societal Jewish intolerance through lucid prose and a linear playbook of remedies.
While she was vividly aware of anti-Semitism throughout her life, the reality of the problem hit home when an active shooter stormed a Pittsburgh synagogue where her family regularly met for morning services and where she became a bat mitzvah years earlier. The massacre that ensued there further spurred her outrage and passionate activism. She writes that European Jews face a three-pronged threat in contemporary society, where physical, moral, and political fears of mounting violence are putting their general safety in jeopardy. She believes that Americans live in an era when “the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream” and Jews have been forced to become “a people apart.” With palpable frustration, she adroitly assesses the origins of anti-Semitism and how its prevalence is increasing through more discreet portals such as internet self-radicalization. Furthermore, the erosion of civility and tolerance and the demonization of minorities continue via the “casual racism” of political figures like Donald Trump. Following densely political discourses on Zionism and radical Islam, the author offers a list of bullet-point solutions focused on using behavioral and personal action items—individual accountability, active involvement, building community, loving neighbors, etc.—to help stem the tide of anti-Semitism. Weiss sounds a clarion call to Jewish readers who share her growing angst as well as non-Jewish Americans who wish to arm themselves with the knowledge and intellectual tools to combat marginalization and defuse and disavow trends of dehumanizing behavior. “Call it out,” she writes. “Especially when it’s hard.” At the core of the text is the author’s concern for the health and safety of American citizens, and she encourages anyone “who loves freedom and seeks to protect it” to join with her in vigorous activism.
A forceful, necessarily provocative call to action for the preservation and protection of American Jewish freedom.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-593-13605-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 22, 2019
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
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