In a country wherre 14 million people own an april lavigne album and berny mac is exported to the world, why do some people still wonder why al quaeda and other fundamentalist islamamentalists hate t

I hardly think so.

Bollocks. Either you're being ironic or you're Ariel Sharon.

as for the war on terror, http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040621&c=4&s=greider

Think - you just want to kill. That's all you want to do. You come from the mountains of Afghanistan. You got to the next village and you blow that up. Simple, less hassle and home for tea. You don't go the bother of training to be a pilot, hijack a plane and crash it into NY!

How about an airport runway?

I bet it's a lot easier to say shitty things like that if you didn't know anyone who died, Nick. Because then it somehow doesn't affect you. Because nothing does, right? Above it all?

no, actually, forget it. I'll just go away from here for a little while. please, everyone, continue to make nasty "humorous" and "provocative" statements, so you can hear the sound of your own beautiful fascinating voices echoing around inside your heads.

1. Mother Nature.
2. Dirty water.
3. Suicide.
4. AIDS.
5. Cars.
6. Wars.
[...]
5,390,208. Terrorists.
5,390,209. April Lavigne albums.

Why, to kill as many (and terrorize as much) as possible of course.

The point I'm trying to make is the terrorists are not doing all this for the purpose of trying to *change* anything; they cannot be negotiated with. It's not the same as taking part in an anti-war demonstration, or marching for civil rights or even those groups that commit violence in the name of say, environmentalism. There is no "message" as Queen said upthread. The fundamentalists simply see us as the enemy, their religion says kill the enemy, and they do it.

This is why I can't understand Queen's assertion that picking less populated areas would have "gotten their message across better".

Hang on, isn't terrorism a subset of war?

always happy to help

I mean really it's like saying "if the terrorists wanted to really attack the beating heart of England, they'd attack Yorkshire"

The Fall of Public Man and The Civitas of Seeing.

"Masses of people are concerned with their single life histories and particular emotion as never before; this concern has proved to be a trap rather than a liberation," he wrote. Given that each self is "in some measure a cabinet of horrors, civilised relations between selves can only proceed to the extent that nasty little secrets of desire, greed or envy are kept locked up".

After 9/11, everywhere I went in New York seemed to be playing Radiohead -- the epitome of whiny emo suburban self-pity. Though Thom Yorke would no doubt be loathe to admit it, the terrorist attacks have boosted sales of this kind of music, which could be characterised as a kind of 'white flight' on the emotional level.

Momus, you obv agree w/ the guy already, because this kind of thing is unanswerable -- if you read it in the Sunday Times you'd spit it out. I mean, prove it. As for Radiohead, who I don't like, well I'd have thunk PJ Harvey's last LP, which won the Mercury Music Prize on the evening of 9/11 was the big whiny-emo album that autumn (Thom connection), but it's crazy to call it 'introverted', ie 'X would be better if they wrote songs about Y'.

Since I've been LiveJournalling this year (although using LiveJournal as a place for public life rather than private agonising) I've seen a lot of the 'concern with nast little secrets' Sennett talks about. And yes, PJ Harvey is another symptom of the same malaise. I agree with Sennett that the 'cabinet of horrors' is a kind of Pandora's Box. It doesn't really add much to public life to open that box in a public space, just clutters the agora with demons.

Richard Sennett's thing is to champion some aspects of the 60s -- the public actions of 1968, specifically -- while deploring others -- the Me Generation, Therapy and New Age cultures, etc -- perhaps you could say these were dilutions that happened in the 70s. And perhaps you could say that Sennett is championing an 18th century idea of the city (and of course both the French and American revolutions come out of that tight, dense urban world of coffee houses and public debate, the embrace of pluralism and equality), whereas Radiohead, New Age hippyism, even Therapy culture, come out of a more conservative, frightened 19th century Romanticism, a post-Rousseau notion that Nature is benign and the city corrupt. Let us wander, lonely as clouds, in SUVs, around our leafy suburban streets!

1968 is an interesting case in point: I think it's a kinda conservative reaction against Gaullist central planning: instead of living in the lovely left bank, students now have to inhabit these vile box-structures out in Nanterre. I sympathise with them, but *because* they were romantics, abhorring the forgetfulness embodied by the modern city, which builds over, represses, what's there. They liked a *certain form* of the city, perhaps.

Anyway, I have to go out into public space now! Or rather, transfer from this public space to the meatspace of an art gallery!

But: Merkin revolution: obviously conservative.
French revolution: well, liberal-conservative, then.
1968: it's a tough call. It isn't conservative, but it clearly is not comparable to definitely 'left-wing' revolutions like Cuba or Russia (good thing too). There was surely a conservative instinct at play, and the reaction of French intellectuals at Tel Quel etc to pop culture and the retreat to rarefied avant-gardism is effectively conservative in that no social revolution is going to happen w/out some engagement with the mass of people.

Lots of little cars, lots of little houses, and public life reduced to the odd trip to the mall or the bowling alley.

This is a strawman that helps you reconfirm your elitist values for yourself. These people whose lives you condemn as empty are figures from a finger-pointing dream you had (you aren't the only one to have had it, of course; the reason people have always hated intellectuals is that they have the nagging feeling that just this sort of "if they only knew how to live!" talk is going on behind their backs) In point of fact, these people don't exist; if you practiced the humanist values you espouse, you'd get to know some of them.

Incidentally, I recently moved to what you'd probably describe, if you saw it, as "one of those white-flight neighborhoods": a development where once were trees and wet clay swampland. Fortunately, this is North Carolina, where there is not now nor will there ever be any shortage of trees & swamps. Our street, which is only two blocks long, is as ethnically diverse as any two-block area you could point at in New York or Chicago or L.A. or Seattle. It isn't actually just white flight from the cities, you see. It's that lots of people think the city, as a space for living, isn't the be-all & end-all. I agree with them! This does not make me or them "afriad of interaction with real people!!!! omg!!!" or racist or behind-the-times or, by the by, Republican.

Interrogate your assumptions!

Lots of little cars, lots of little houses, and public life reduced to the odd trip to the mall or the bowling alley.

-- surely lyrics from Radiohead's 'No Surprises', which is a maybe ambivalent engagement with all those 'burb-dwelling Coldplay fans this board hates so much.

There is no message to terrorism. That's the trap people fall into. Bin Laden and his kind just want you to THINK they have a specific agenda, that they are actually protesting against something, trying to make a point. They're not. They just want to kill and terrorize, that is all. The minute you try to make rhyme or reason out of it, they've won.

Er...no. Saying that they just want to kill and terrorize is just like Dubya when he says they're "cold hearted killers who hate freedom". There's a very specific reason why they seek to do us harm. And understanding them doesn't mean that "they've won".

'The people who inspire/d me most are/were those, who are very different from me and with whom I got in contact only by chance and not on purpose. Somehow this seems very logical to me. When you’re rotating around yourself, thinking the things you’ve always been thinking, planning your life as you’ve always been planning, the people you meet or want to get in contact with are part of this personal plan. The only chance to enlarge your ego-orbit is an unexpected (not necessarily welcomed) hit or disturbance from another planet or another starsystem.'

Now, I would argue that these random, unplanned 'hits or disturbances' are exactly what Richard Sennett is saying the city is about. You cross someone's path, you catch a performance, you have a strange encounter, exchange glances, try to imagine someone else's life. Like many virtues, this is an unplanned by-product of city life. Nobody says, 'Hey, let's live somewhere very dense, where a lot of unplanned things will happen'. Density and the unexpected are seen as necessary evils. But in them lie hidden pleasures and possibilities for growth.

I'd like to know, J0hn, if you get a sense of possibility when you spend time in a city like New York. You're saying NC is just as ethnically diverse, but I take it you sense some difference, and that you detect some 'good difference' in metropolitan centres?

By the way, I don't think you can fairly use yourself as a representative of Mittel-American living. As a touring musician you have the luxury of living somewhere quiet because your travel gives you all the randomness and cosmopolitanism you might need. It would be very different -- and your life would, I think, be radically impoverished -- if you never left NC. I think there's a certain amount of attitudinising and faux-populism in your stance.

The problem is that their specific reason wears several guises, many of which hold intolerance and racism up as justifications for killing people.

I don't argue against your here-are-some-benefits-of-cities schtick. I do enjoy myself in NY, and also in London even though everybody always talks shit about London; I've got love for Portland and Stockholm and Paris. (Though generally all I do on tour is: drive big evil bogeyman cars, soundcheck, eat, play, and go to sleep. And occasionally shop for records.) What I'm arguing is that your characterisation of places in which you've spent little if any time (and which, should you visit them, are unlikely to penetrate your these-places-are-dire colored glasses) is a demonisation lacking much substance. That sense of possibility? It exists, in abundance, in neighborhoods as well as in apartment buildings or crowded public spaces; it exists in remote hamlets; it exists in cloisters, too. It exists wherever people are. Mr. Sennet (as cited by your good self anyhow: I haven't read him) is wrong. The city isn't about synchronicity. Life is.

the bit about "more dynamic & talented people" is a matter of numbers only, not percentages (ditto "endowed/attractive/racially diverse"), so it's just a matter of elevating one's game. Were you a fisherman, would you prefer to fish in a stocked pond, or in the ocean?

Well, Bush did win in NC in 2000 by a 14% margin over Gore. Don't force me to bring Richard Florida into this.

if anything post-9/11 atmosphere has to be more difficult for leafy Suburban anomie bands to trade on because there are more real and visceral events to consider out there, and whether one wants to or not. this doesn't seem an era, like some others, whereby it is quite as easy to remain indulgently solipsistic. so i reject this premise because i believe your hearing this "everywhere" had more to do with people keeping Radiohead totems in their changers as a way of hanging onto a time when they felt they could well, hang. i feel a bit of that (not always) here upon ILx all the time. including in the truly bathetic, not to mention suburban, titling of this thread.

This is complete and utter nonsense. Do you have a single shred of credible evidence to support this sweeping assertion? I'd wager that you don't. Why? Because not only did "white people" return en masse to American cities during the 90s economic boom, to a large extent they've remained there because of attractive housing prices created by low interest rates. If there's a "white flight," it's back to urban centers, not away from them. Indeed, as the 2000 U.S. Census shows, the percentage of black (8.4%), Hispanic (12%) and Asian-Americans (4%)is growing *in the suburbs* as white people have returned to the cities to gentrify areas like Park Slope and Harlem.

I'm no fan of the suburbs. But I'm also not a fan of silly rhetorical canards masquerading as facts.

Ducks Quack In Different Accents!

If we accept that there are two Americas, terrorism is an attack on the values of the liberal urban America that votes Democrat and drinks latte rather than the conservative suburban America that votes Republican and goes to church. The neo-cons and the terrorists are pretty much in agreement that urban, liberal America is the enemy. They work well together. My scenario about 'suicide drivers' was an attempt to imagine a terrorism that pushed America towards different values -- a terrorism that, in fact, would wipe itself out, because it would result in a declining dependence on the car, and therefore less imperialistic adventuring. But a terrorism which created less terrorism would be like a religion which made people feel less sinful. It wouldn't last long.

But I'm rather more circumspect about this whole "two Americas" business for this reason: those of us who were ostensibly the immediate "victims" of the 9/11 attack, those urban, educated professionals who were there sucking in the little bits of asbestos that day, aren't by and large the ones screaming for foreign blood and the Patriot Act. It's the alleged, vast "conservative, suburban America" which seems to be most vocal and insistent in seeking protection from "terrorists." By your logic, they shouldn't need any protection, nor should they seek any -- because of their conservative virtue and basic alignment with the fundamentalist distaste for urban liberalism, they should feel vindicated and immune.

Clearly, things are far from being that simple.

To my thinking, calling terrorism an attack on "values" of any sort affords it a dignity it doesn't deserve. Terrorism seeks to annilhilate, not transform. Terrorism is opportunism, not politics. The reason you can't envision terrorism which decreases terrorism is because terrorism is always already a self-negating enterprise.

You are welcome to stay at my house should you ever want to actually investigate the place! People are not demographic numbers. If you want to do some research on the history of the Democratic Party, and why the South is less than enchanted with it - well, you may be shocked to learn that they got libraries down here!

For one I've always been puzzled by how people will get into it with Momus even though his methods have been repeatedly called out as trolling, which I agree they are. If Momus wants to argue and discuss, he should learn to do it in a better fashion than just going out and pushing people's buttons repeatedly until their sinuses produce jets of steam and they have to walk away from the keyboard. He's not going to stop acting like a troll, though, if he keeps getting responses out of people. I hesitate to judge how much he enjoys reading posts like this one or Haikunym's above, but imagining that he enjoys them in the slightest has dissuaded me from getting into it with him since shortly after I started posting here.

Something I've learned that's made it a lot easier for me to deal with ILE has been that I now hit back a hell of a lot more often than I hit submit. For a thread like this I can only say I wish more folks would do the same.

Speaking of whom... Momus, again, the interesting thing abt modern Paris is surely that it's been built to deny the possibility of the random -- this is what Situationism/the Arcades Project were all about, the legacy of the incroyable planification of France starting w/ Napoleon III.

i got into a car crash, enrique, that was "stimulating" too.

I have little sympathy with people who simply rise to the obvious outrage, lack of patriotism, etc in such statements, rather than seeing them as a way to break out of stereotypical ways of thinking. Sure, trolling can be stereotypical too. But it's not only fun to look at 'the war on terrorism' from a terrorist's perspective -- what target should we hit -- it's an essential part of fighting terrorism. 'What would I do in their place?' It's war games, it's modelling, it's brainstorming. It's even 'patriotic'! The parallel between a troll and a hacker is clear. People hate hackers too, but their creativity allows us to fill dangerous holes in software. Trolling and hacking, when they're not simple destructions, are, in a way, moral duties. Of a Sunday, try donning a disguise and thinking the unthinkable in public, just to see what happens.

My attitude to trolling is my attitude to 'the other' in general; tolerance. It relates to big city life. I don't know where Mr Tombot lives, but from his eagerness to name, blame and shame, to designate trolls as a self-evidently 'unacceptable other', I'll bet it isn't a big, diverse city.

And it's flânerie which describes the behaviour of the flaneur.

Ha ha.

If you were to feel bad for all the unjust deaths that occur in the world each day, then you'd have a pretty shitty life.

It's not nonsensical in the least! "Western culture is so fucking awful that it deserves to be destroyed" is a totally common shtick/joke/ersatz feeling for teenage angst (tho it doesn't hafta be terrorists - one could also hope for nuclear war, natural disasters, take yer pick.) "So how would we go about it?" is only the logical extension of that train of thought. So you're not getting into the mind of a terrorist so much as that of a fourteen year old boy, really.

Consider his first post:

I'm rather annoyed that the terrorists have targeted high density cities, public transport and so on. These are not symbols of The American Way. It would be better to target the automobile and detached suburban homes. If I were an Al Quaeda strategist I would suggest 'the Carmageddon Plan'; a lot of 'suicide drivers' rushing down the wrong side of freeways and, if they don't manage to hit the traffic, careering into the nearest bungalow.

I believe Momus makes a good point here.

I believe the insular nature of your typical suburban American's lifestyle breeds ignorance and intolerance. Living out in a suburb gives you plenty of space; you don't have to interact with anyone you don't want to. You can drive your car alone wherever you want to go. You have a clearly defined space (your block of land, your house) which is for your own personal use only. This lifestyle makes it easy to be ignorant (and ultimately intolerant) of other cultures, beliefs, etc. (not that this syndrome is entirely confined to American suburbia)

It is this kind of intolerance that feeds the kind of conflict that terrorist organisations like Al Quaeda take part in. The foreign policy that arises from this conservative lifestyle fosters the kind of terrorism we've seen in recent years.

Momus' point, if I'm interpreting it correctly, was that if Al Quaeda wanted to attack the root of their discontent they would do much better not to scare people out of population centres. (the population of New York being extremely unrepresentative of the American populace) If they wanted to fuck with the people that they see as having wronged them, why wouldn't they terrorise the subarbanites, the comfortable, sprawling middle-class? Makes sense to me.

(Disclaimer: just because I have not made statements as to the ignorance/intolerance shown by Al Quaeda and their supports does not mean that I believe said intolerance does not exist. It was simply not relevant to my point.)

Hang on, isn't terrorism a subset of war?

No. Despite the popular misconception.

I'd disagree with that statement. With media saturation greater than its ever been before, people seem to be increasingly concerned with other people's life histories.

In point of fact, these people don't exist; if you practiced the humanist values you espouse, you'd get to know some of them. Incidentally, I recently moved to what you'd probably describe, if you saw it, as "one of those white-flight neighborhoods". Our street, which is only two blocks long, is as ethnically diverse as any two-block area you could point at in New York or Chicago or L.A. or Seattle.

I my experience in Australian suburbia (where I resided most of my life), people tend to assemble themselves in groups dictated by race. I'd assumed (and heard 1st-hand reports) that this was the same in most suburban areas of the USA. If I'm wrong about this then, well, good! :)

agreed. I had the horrible realization a little after 9/11 that if their desire was to create a real sense of fear and paranoia in the average American, they would have sent ten suicide bombers to ten random mcdonalds throughout the U.S. Just writing that makes me sick to my stomach, but it's true.

http://www.newamerica.net/index.cfm?pg=article&pubID=898

Even as Los Angeles evolved into an expansive and decentralized Western city, its cultural elite still took its cues from more traditional Eastern cities. They mimicked the New York intelligentsia's contempt for suburbia, and the San Fernando Valley became the most convenient target for their disdain. Just as sophisticated Manhattanites often deride the "bridge and tunnel crowd," residents of tony West Los Angeles weren't above feeling superior to Valley residents.

Yet, unlike most American suburbs, which developed beyond city limits, the Valley could never find solace in sovereignty. Annexed by Los Angeles in 1915, the San Fernando Valley became a bedroom community where professional and middle-class families could carve out quiet lives within the city limits.

"It's the one suburb that is an appendage to its tormentor," said D. J. Waldie, author of "Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir." "In an era when cultural elites identify themselves by their aesthetic privilege, many feel it necessary to diminish the popular, the ordinary, the everyday, the suburban."

But half-century-old stereotypes do not do justice to America's contemporary suburban reality. Once scorned for being racially homogenous, economically parasitic and culturally vacuous, suburbia is now more likely to be mixed, viable and vital.

"Much of this country's creativity -- like Silicon Valley or the biotech industry -- is being done by people who eat at Fuddruckers, shop at big box malls and live in suburbia," said David Brooks, the author of "Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There."

Last year, a Brookings Institution study found that racial and ethnic diversity in the nation's suburbs rose substantially in the 1990's and that nonwhites were responsible for the bulk of suburban population gains.

=======================================

"Los Angeles was built on the idea that one could create a more perfect place, a New Jerusalem, one's own private Idaho," said Mr. Waldie. The question now is whether voters will be able to reimagine their city as something other than heaven or hell. If Los Angeles is to remain whole, Angelenos will first have to embrace the imperfections of their urban reality and come to terms with the closing of their suburban frontier.

Basically that sums it up.

But regarding Andrew's gracefully placed disclaimer: (Disclaimer: just because I have not made statements as to the ignorance/intolerance shown by Al Quaeda and their supports does not mean that I believe said intolerance does not exist. It was simply not relevant to my point.)

Saudi Arabian kids are taught in schools from an early age to be intolerant of other religions. There is supposedly even a line in the Koran that says kill the infidels or some such thing.

I've read both the Qu'ran and the Christian Bible (NRSV), and let me tell you the Bible is a lot more graphic with its violence than the Qu'ran. Nowhere in the Qu'ran does it instruct anyone to kill anyone, it placidly and repeatedly states that those who do not follow the word it presents are damned.

as for terrorism, i think theres a lot of semantics and blurredness about what it is. i think, in general, terrorism is non-state war. i think you have to remove the emotive aspect of the phrase though for this to really hold (with war, it is a strangely disassociative phrase, whereas terrorism, it is perculiarly visual and real, despite the fact that net results are similar)

Qur’an 8:7 “Allah wished to confirm the truth by His words: ‘Wipe the infidels out to the last.’”

Qur’an 8:59 “The infidels should not think that they can get away from us. Prepare against them whatever arms and weaponry you can muster so that you may terrorize them. They are your enemy and Allah’s enemy.”

Qur’an 8:60 “Prepare against them whatever arms and cavalry you can muster that you may strike terror in the enemies of Allah, and others besides them not known to you. Whatever you spend in Allah’s Cause will be repaid in full, and no wrong will be done to you.”

Qur’an 9:5 “When the sacred forbidden months for fighting are past, fight and kill disbelievers wherever you find them, take them captive, beleaguer them, and lie in wait and ambush them using every stratagem of war.

Qur’an 2:191 “And kill them wherever you find and catch them. Drive them out from where they have turned you out; for Al-Fitnah (polytheism, disbelief, oppression) is worse than slaughter.”

Qur’an 5:33 “The punishment for those who wage war against Allah and His Prophet and make mischief in the land, is to murder them, crucify them, or cut off a hand and foot on opposite sides...their doom is dreadful. They will not escape the fire, suffering constantly.”

And so on. Then there’s all the authoritative commentary:

Ishaq:208 “When Allah gave permission to his Apostle to fight, the second Aqaba contained conditions involving war which were not in the first act of submission. Now we bound themselves to war against all mankind for Allah and His Apostle. He promised us a reward in Paradise for faithful service. We pledged ourselves to war in complete obedience to Muhammad”

Ishaq:406 “Among us was Allah’s Apostle whose command we obey. When he gives an order we do not examine it. The spirit descends on him from his Lord. We tell him about our wishes and our desires which is to obey him in all that he wants. Cast off fear of death and desire it. Be the one who barters his life. Take your swords and trust Allah. With a compact force holding lances and spears we plunged into a sea of men…. and all were made to get their fill of evil. We are men who see no blame in him who kills.”

Ishaq:414 “If you kill us, the true religion is ours. And to be killed for the truth is to find favor with Allah. If you think that we are fools, know that the opinion of those who oppose Islam is misleading. We are men of war who get the utmost from it. We inflict painful punishment on those who oppose us…. If you insult Allah’s Apostle, Allah will slay you.”

Ishaq:576 “Allah and Muhammad humiliated every coward and made our religion victorious. We were glorified and destroyed them all. By what our Apostle recites from the Book and by our swift horses, I liked the punishment the infidels received. Killing them was sweeter than drink. We galloped among them panting for the spoil. With our loud-voiced army, the Apostle’s squadron advanced into the fray.

Arabs were the first to respond to the Prophet’s call. We are Allah’s helpers. We fight people until they believe in Allah. He who believes in Allah and His Messenger has protected his life and possessions from us. As for one who disbelieves, we will fight him forever in the Cause of Allah. Killing him is a small matter to us.”

Ishaq:204 “‘Men, do you know what you are pledging yourselves to in swearing allegiance to this man?’ ‘Yes. In swearing allegiance to him we are pledging to wage war against all mankind.’”

So are we doing the duet right here?

The funny thing about all this, for me (and if you know me you'll know it's not funny at all) is that while I was railing on this thread against North Carolina, I was recording and editing Mr Ulysses, a song that could have been recorded there. I'm totally about dialectics and 'the return of the repressed', and this song and this thread bounce off each other (in my mind) just as fruitfully and me and J0hn do. What's more, the city is always projecting onto the country, and culture longs for nature as much as nature longs for culture. (It's just the car trip and the landscape in between that bugs me.)

But what's wrong with Avril Lavigne and Bernie Mac? Why shouldn't 14m own her album?

hate the US?

yeah, my translation is pretty different - it's a copy presented to my Grandfather in Saudi Arabia, so maybe they didn't want to give him a more 'radical' version. I'll post my translations if anyone is interested...

I actually looked up David Brooks and didn't agree with a single one of his opinions, so I think you're going to have to do a bit more work for that $5, Herbert Stencil.

like, fer shure

It means that ppl enjoy art/entertainment, and if they have the financial resources to do so, they will pay money to obtain said art/entertainment. Yeah it would be great if the world could just stop for a minute and go "hang on, no more spending any wealth before we have this poverty/environment/diseases thing worked out", but that's never happened in any nation, and unless you don't own a single piece of pop culture in your home, or in fact any sort of commodity at all, you'll have to realise that, if you think the hatred is justified, it's just as justified against *you* as it is against Avril fans.

Mind you, if you want to establish Avril and Bernie Mac as symbolic of things Al-Quadea despises about western culture, go right ahead - I suspect that seen under this light, they're also symbolic of what I treasure the most in it (w/o much enjoying Avril musically, mind you.)

The second part was also as serious question - if those terrorists ever for one second happened to think about significant public edifices that would be more symbolic than WTC, the Pentagon and a field in Pensylvania, without causing a loss of life but raising similar issues about US dominance/arrogance etc (again, I don't want to justify any of this), what might have happened?

It would've been less successful because a) it wouldn't have been a direct attack on the capitalist system, just a symbolic attack on some very ill-defined aspects of american cultural life; and b) the loss of lives hits people much harder than the loss of any beloved symbol.

Brooks: much talk of 'upper class', 'elite', 'leaders'.

Sennett: much talk of public life, pluralism, ethics.

"Although U.S. export controls to Iraq were tightened up in the late 1980s, there were still many loopholes. In December 1988, Dow Chemical sold $1.5 million of pesticides to Iraq, despite U.S. government concerns that they could be used as chemical warfare agents. An Export-Import Bank official reported in a memorandum that he could find 'no reason' to stop the sale, despite evidence that the pesticides were 'highly toxic' to humans and would cause death 'from asphyxiation.'"

Qur'an 8:7 "But God willed to justify the truth according to his words, and to cut off the roots of the unbeleievers"

Qur'an 8:59 "Let not the unbelievers think that they can get the better (of the godly): They will never frustrate (them).

Qur'an 8:60 "Against them make ready your strength to the utmost of your power, including steeds of war, to strike terror into (the hearts of) the enemies, of GOd and your enemies, and others besides, whom you may not know, but whom God does know. Whatever you spend in the Cause of God, shall be repaid unto you, and ye shall not be treated unjustly."

Note "The immediate occasion of this injunction was the weakness of cavalry and appointments of war in the early fights of Islam. But the general meaning follows. In every fight, physical, moral or spiritual, arm yourself with the best arms against your enemy, so as to instil wholesome respect into him for you and the Cause you stand for."

Qur'an 9:5: "But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)" it goes on "But if they repent, and practice regular charity, then open the way for them, for God is oft-forgiving, Most Merciful."

Notes: The emphasis is on the first clause: it is only when the four months of grace are past, and the other party shows no signs of desisting from their treacherous designs by right conduct, that the state of war supervenes - between Faith and Unfaith"

Qur'an 2.191
actually, lets take 2.190 first "Fight in the cause of God those who fight you, but do not trangress limits, for God loveth not transgressors"
Now 2.191 "And slay them wherever ye catch them and turn them out from where they have turned you out; for tumult and oppression are worse then slaughter.

Notes 191 : War is only permissable in Self-defence, and under well-defined limits. When undertaken it must be persued with vigour, but not relentlessly, but only to restore peace and freedom for the worship of God. In any case strict limits must not be transgressed : women, children, old and infirm men should not be molested, nor trees and crops cut down, nor peace withheld when the enemy comes to terms."

notes 191: "This passage is illustrated by the events that happened at Hudaibiya in the sixth year of the Hijra, though it is not clear that it was revealed on that occasion. The Muslims were by this time a strong and influential community. Many of them were exiles from Mecca, preventing them from visting their homes, and even keeping them out by force from performing the pilgrimage during the universally recognized period of truce. This was intollerance, oppression and autocracy to the last degree, and the mere readiness of the Muslims to enfore their rights as Arab citizens resulted without bloodshed in an agreement which the Muslims faithfully observed. The Pagans, however, had no scruples in breaking faith, and it is unncessary here to go into subsequent event.

"In general, it may be said that Islam is the religion of peace, goodwill, mutual understanding and good faith. But it will not acquiesce in wrong-doing. And it'smen will hold their lives in defence of honour, justice, and the religion which they hold sacred. Their ideal is that of heroic virtue combined with unselfish gentleness and tenderness, such as is exemplified in the life of the Apostle. They believe in courage, obedience, discipline, duty, and a constant striving, by all the means in their power, physical, moral, intellectual, and spiritual, for the establishment of truth and righteousness. They know that war is an evil, but they will not flinch from it if their honour demands it and (a most imprtant condition) a righteous Imam (such as Muhammad was par excellence) commands it. For they know that they are not serving carnal ends. In other casesm war has nothing to do with their faith, except that it will always be regulated by humane precepts."

Qur'an 5:33 "The punishment for those who wage war against God and His Apostle, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of the hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the hereafter."

Notes - "For the double crime of treason against the State, combined with treason against God, as shown by overt crimes, four alternative punishments are mentioned, any one of which is to be applied according to the circumstances, viz., execution (cutting off of the head), crucifixion, maiming or exilr. These were features of the Criminal Law then and for centuries afterwards, except that tortures such as 'hanging, drawing and quartering' in English Law, and piercing of eyes and leaving the unfortunate victim exposed to a tropical sun, which was practised in Arabia, and all such tortures, were abolished. In any case sincere repentancebefore it was too late was recognised as a ground for mercy."

weighing in on this, i'll point out that the yusuf ali translation is generally accepted as the authoritative english translation of the qur'an. (minding that a translation != the qur'an because the word of god is in arabic, not english or any other language)

???? but there aren't any newbies involved in this discussion, Dan! Queen G, as Suzy has mentioned, has been here for ages (or are you using the quotes here to indicate that you are aware of this, but think that most ILErs responding to the thread aren't? You *might* be right about that, but I don't think he's gotten that much more agression here than Momus has.)

(which sounds like classic scenester behaviour but never mind)

Sennett: much talk of public life, pluralism, ethics.

Gershwin: much talk of potato, po-tah-to, tomato, to-mah-to

sorry

But of course he does write fiction! He's written three novels. Victoria Glendinning cites this as a reason he isn't taken more seriously:

'His work isn't always as acknowledged as it should be because he's not just a sociologist but also a novelist, so his work doesn't fit into any easy slot. It is kind of uncategorisable and all the better for it.'

As Suzy has already noted, your parenthetical aside is correct. Furthermore, I am arguing that if Dave Q had posted this exact thread verbatim, people would have spoken to the core issues Queen G later explicitly stated almost from the get-go, or people would have at least asked for more clarification on what was meant by the original question before dismissing the topic.

But it goes both ways, you know: as a regular, Queen G should be pretty much aware that making a post where Avril Lavigne selling records (of all the artists that he could have chosen!) is shown as being some kind of reason (not justification, I know) for terrorists to hate America will raise some sparks on ILX.

This is not some sort of syndrome particular to ILX. This happens everywhere. People are inherently distrustful of people they know nothing about, in that if all you know about someone (be it a stranger on the street, or a random googler, or whatever) is one sentence they have uttered, then that's all you have to go on. Daniel_rf OTM.

'His work isn't always as acknowledged as it should be because he's not just a sociologist but also a novelist, so his work doesn't fit into any easy slot. It is kind of uncategorisable and all the better for it.'

oh, sorry - thanks for the info. i've never come across his novels. he's an interesting person. did you see he warned, in the sixties, of the coming Puritanism? and it's here.

i want to read his book on 'authority'.

thanks for giving me some ideas on summer reading material.