Month: March 2006

  • ‘Islamophobia’ Worse in US

    Analysts say ‘demonisation’ of Islam by politicians and the media has eroded tolerance.

  • Satirists, Nervous, Try Not to Offend Muslims

    Fallas festival in Valencia has survived attacks by Church, Franco, but now self-censors.

  • Creationism Included on Science Syllabus

    Exam board is accused of confusing pupils by including religion.

  • Denmark Hosts Meeting With Muslims

    Danish government has apologised for the distress, but not for the cartoons themselves.

  • Historical Accuracy Matters

    ‘Historical accuracy has prevailed over mythological ideas of history,’ says Michael Witzel.

  • Dworkin

    Dworkin also good. I don’t agree with all of it, but there’s plenty of welcome clarity.

    Freedom of speech is not just a special and distinctive emblem of Western culture that might be generously abridged or qualified as a measure of respect for other cultures that reject it…Free speech is a condition of legitimate government…So in a democracy no one, however powerful or impotent, can have a right not to be insulted or offended. That principle is of particular importance in a nation that strives for racial and ethnic fairness…Whatever multiculturalism means – whatever it means to call for increased “respect” for all citizens and groups – these virtues would be self-defeating if they were thought to justify official censorship.

    Yes, what does it mean to call for increased ‘respect’ for all groups – and ‘cultures’ and religions and practices and beliefs? It means complete and total abdication of judgment, as far as I can tell, and that seems like a bad idea. It’s disrespectful to people who recognize the need for judgment.

    It is often said that religion is special, because people’s religious convictions are so central to their personalities that they should not be asked to tolerate ridicule of their beliefs, and because they might feel a religious duty to strike back at what they take to be sacrilege…But religion must observe the principles of democracy, not the other way around. No religion can be permitted to legislate for everyone about what can or cannot be drawn any more than it can legislate about what may or may not be eaten. No one’s religious convictions can be thought to trump the freedom that makes democracy possible.

    That’s the basic point. No religion can be permitted to legislate for everyone – about anything, actually, not just what can or cannot be drawn or eaten or worn or read, but about anything. Religion is the wrong tool for legislation, so it can’t be treated as universally applicable.

  • Disrepute

    Wole Soyinka asks: who is really bringing Islam into disrepute? He mentions the riots and death fatwa over the ‘Miss World’ contest and a journalist’s comment in Nigeria two years ago.

    Predictably, I denounced the murderous orgy. To my astonishment, some liberal voices of the Western world, always liberal with the blood of others, and liberal in defense of the aggressor, chose to concentrate on the “impropriety” of importing “Western decadence” to the pristine innocence of and polluting her cultural values…The core of the main discourse was nearly lost – the sanctity of human lives over and above the claims of any icons of faith, however universally revered. Through such distractions is impunity born, and the law of the mob and its manipulators tacitly endorsed by the appeasers of the world.

    As we have been seeing for the past several weeks – impunity is born, and the law of the mob and its manipulators is tacitly endorsed by the appeasers of the world. The more violent the protests are, the more bashful mumbling there is about respect and sensitivity. I wonder – were there a lot of liberals wandering around German towns the day after Kristallnacht, saying everyone should be sensitive and respectful about Nazis’ feelings and beliefs?

    The Danish government, thank goodness, declined to assume the burden of guilt by succumbing to the call to apologize for the conduct of one of its citizens, an individual who at no time was accused of being its official, representative or spokesman, but a free agent in his own cause, however censurable. The proposition that a government should act as monitor for individual choice within a free society is repugnant.

    The Danish government has done some apologizing now, unfortunately – perhaps understandably, in the circs, but unfortunately.

    Even more determinedly, however, must we reject the attempt of any sectional authority or quasi-state to foist its will on those who do not subscribe to the mandates of its beliefs, cultures and values.

    That’s exactly what we must reject. We must not embrace it or applaud it or sympathize with it or march beside it, we must reject it. Will-foisting is held in oddly high esteem at the moment, and that is a catastrophe. That’s a giant step down the road to theocracy, and we must reject it.

    What the atavists of religion have done is to expand the “territory of insult” into a limitless one…More to the point, they have raised questions about the followers of the Prophet and their understanding of the world’s complexity.

    And not only their understanding of the world’s complexity, but their priorities, and their compassion – as Soyinka also notes.

    Is it in the midst of this rampaging, racist obscenity called Darfur that the world is being invited to shift even its hazy focus, close down shop on vital concerns, wallow in an orgy of remorse, while the United Nations suspends its operations on behalf of traumatized humanity, all on account of some obscure cartoonist possessed by the Muse of irreverence? Clearly the world is askew, but not in the way some see it.

    Spot on. Stonings and beheadings, fine; cartoons, the end of the world. Disrepute.

  • Kitchener Poster

    Your time has come at last. Remember last November I did a post called Things Fall Apart about the way bits were dropping off B&W which I couldn’t fix, and great crowds of you came surging forward to offer to help? Yes you do. Come on, of course you do. You said. Come back here right now –

    No but really, it’s not much. I promise. It’s just to do with the update, and sending it out. I still keep getting sad emails from people who really liked reading the update every week, and passed it around to other people and discussed it, and miss it terribly. Each one is like a stab from a serrated dagger. So I’m going to send it out by hand. That means I have to put it together by hand, which means a lot of extra copying and pasting, which takes up some time; and after all that, I have to send it to about a thousand addresses, about fifty at a time. That’s twenty sends. If just a few of you dear loyal fans would help with the sending, that would cut down on the extra pasting and clicking at my end, thus freeing up more time for me to write hectoring nagging screeching N&Cs. The webmaster is going to send me the list of addresses, and I hope to send the first resurrected update on Monday, so if any of you would like to volunteer (you there in the back, creeping out the door, I see you, we all see you), email me to that effect. Love and kisses.

  • Roya Hahakian on Tehran Bus Strike

    What did enlightened people do to support the strikers? Very little.

  • On International Women’s Day in Iran

    ‘Stop executions and stoning,’ the large gathering of women chanted.

  • Aventis Prize for Popular Science Books Longlist

    ‘The science is so absorbing and surprising it can make fiction seem dull.’

  • Dworkin Defends Ridicule

    In a democracy no one, however powerful or impotent, can have a right not to be insulted or offended.

  • On Grayling’s Among the Dead Cities

    Only by acknowledging where mistakes were made in the past can we avoid making them in the future.

  • The Psychopaths of Faith and Their Appeasers

    Wole Soyinka says the atavists of religion have expanded the ‘territory of insult’ into a limitless one.

  • Extract from Breaking the Spell

    Having religious convictions is not very much like having either epileptic seizures or blue eyes.

  • Einstein’s Wife: Mileva Marić

    In the more innocent world of the 1950s there used to be on BBC radio a comedy programme called (appropriately) “Does the team think?” in which the participants were called upon to answer such tricky questions as “Who composed Beethoven’s 5th symphony?” An up-to-date version of this line of question might take the form “Who produced Einstein’s theory of special relativity?” Only in this case some people take the view that this is an entirely pertinent question, and indeed go further and would ask who wrote Einstein’s celebrated papers of 1905 on Brownian motion, special relativity, and the photoelectric effect.

    It is not the case, of course, that they are suggesting that Einstein had no hand in writing these papers, only that he didn’t do it alone – he had a collaborator, his first wife Mileva Marić. The story goes that from their student days (1896-1900) they worked together on his extra-curricular interests in physics, and that this collaboration continued up to and beyond their marriage in January 1903. In fact, it is claimed, Marić co-authored the 1905 papers, only her name was removed from the papers when they were published in the prestigious German journal Annalen der Physik.

    These contentions acquired something akin to official respectability in
    the US with the broadcasting of an Australian Government funded documentary
    called “Einstein’s Wife” on PBS in 2003, under the auspices of Oregon
    Public Broadcasting. The documentary, Oregon PBS reported in a press release, “reveals the long-hidden relationship between Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić and the collaboration that revolutionized the world of physics.” That collaboration, we are told, was extremely successful: “In 1905, the pair submitted five papers for publication, three of which (Brownian Motion, Special Relativity Theory and the Photoelectric Effect) formed the most significant concepts of twentieth century physics. Soon after, while visiting Mileva’s family in Novi Sad, the two continued their work surrounding a particular problem. Some believe this is where Albert and Mileva discussed and debated what would become the formula E = mc2.”

    In spite of these definitive pronouncements we are told: “Scholars continue to debate the scope of Mileva’s actual participation. For some, Mileva simply filled the role of a ‘sounding board’.” On the other hand: “Desanka Trubohvić, the first biographer to write about Mileva Marić, boldly suggested in her book that Mileva’s name was actually included in the original documents detailing the formula. If Trubohvić’s assertion is true, why was the name removed when the paper was published? As Dr Evan Harris Walker summarizes: ‘What are the facts? The facts are that there are about a dozen statements in Albert Einstein’s own hand stating that they were collaborating on our theory, our work, our work on the relative motion’.”

    So what are the facts? The Oregon PBS press release states that the “Einstein’s Wife” documentary “reveals the truth behind one of the great scientific collaborations of the twentieth century”. On the other hand Robert Schulmann, an historian involved with the Albert Einstein Collected Papers project, and the physicist Gerald Holton have written: “All serious Einstein scholarship, by Abraham Pais, John Stachel and others, has shown that the scientific collaboration between the couple was slight and one-sided…The true collaboration which they originally planned when they intended careers as high-school teachers never did develop. Nor is there a shred of documentary proof of [Marić’s] originality as a scientist.”

    In articles below I investigate the “Einstein’s Wife” documentary and the PBS website material, and closely examine the claims of the main proponents of the contention that Mileva Marić contributed substantively to Einstein’s early scientific achievements.

    Allen Esterson

    Internal Resources

    Allen Esterson on PBS’s complicity in the dissemination of tall stories about the alleged role of Einstein’s first wife in his early scientific achievements.

    Alberto Martinez on Einstein’s wife and the need to inspect historical claims carefully.

    Allen Esterson issues a challenge to PBS.

    Allen Esterson asks how the notion that Mileva Marić helped Einstein with his mathematics got around.

    Allen Esterson offers an open letter to PBS.

    An update to the open letter to PBS.

    Update November 2007.

    External Resources

  • Multicultural Correctness Gets it Wrong

    Most Western academic feminists have not focused on gender apartheid in the Islamic world.

  • Women to Be Allowed on Buses in Afghanistan

    In dramatic UN plan, drivers will be expected to stop for women.

  • Marina Mahathir on Muslim Women in Malaysia

    Second-class citizens held back by discriminatory rules that do not apply to non-Muslim women.

  • Protests in Sudan Over UN as Darfur Peacekeeper

    Death threats against Western diplomats have been published, militia groups have warned of a holy war.