Author: Ophelia Benson

Hmm. Topp intellectuals is it.

Number 1, Fethullah Gülen –

An Islamic scholar with a global network of millions of followers…an inspirational leader who encourages a life guided by moderate Islamic principles…a threat to Turkey’s secular order…fled Turkey after being accused of undermining secularism.

Number 3, Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Number 6, Amr Khaled –

…rock-star evangelist, Khaled preaches a folksy interpretation of modern Islam to millions of loyal viewers around the world. With a charismatic oratory and casual style, Khaled blends messages of cultural integration and hard work with lessons on how to live a purpose-driven Islamic life.

Number 8, Tariq Ramadan. Hmm.

Not all bad. Muhammad Yunus fine, Orhan Pamuk fine, Aitzaz Ahsan fine. I don’t know of Abdolkarim Soroush but he sounds good –

Soroush, a former university professor in Tehran and specialist in chemistry, Sufi poetry, and history, is widely considered one of the world’s premier Islamic philosophers. Having fallen afoul of the mullahs thanks to his work with Iran’s democratic activists, he has lately decamped to Europe and the United States, where his essays and lectures on religious philosophy and human rights are followed closely by Iran’s reformist movement.

Shirin Ebadi fine. Hirsi Ali of course terrific, Sen terrific. But 1, 3, 6 and 8…hmmm.

Oh come on. You have to be kidding. This has to be from the Onion, or the Daily Show – this can’t be for real. Can it? Can it? Karl Rove calling Obama ‘arrogant’? And then expanding on the point?

“Even if you never met him, you know this guy,” he said at a Capitol Hill breakfast, according to ABC. “He’s the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone.”

Is that more funny than it is enraging? Or the other way around? I can’t tell, I just can’t tell. Okay, so let’s get this straight – a white powerful privileged guy who helped to get a white unqualified incompetent ignorant incurious lazy disengaged wildly overprivileged guy who would be nothing if his father had not been president, elected president, is calling a black guy with no presidents or senators in his family who made his own success by using his own brains and effort – the guy at the country club with the beautiful date, holding a martini and a cigarette that stands against the wall and makes snide comments about everyone?

What country club? What fucking country club you miserable crawling contemptible stop-at-nothing hack? And as for making snide remarks – your talentless vacuous privilege-using arrogant boss is famous for them, and Obama isn’t. So what are you talking about?

Oh look, I figured it out: it’s more enraging than funny.

Okay, we know what he’s doing, and we know it works, so it’s not surprising that he’s still doing it. It’s not surprising, it’s just shameless. Hillary Clinton tried the same thing. He’s complaining that Obama is too god damn smart; he’s equating intelligence with arrogance; and then he’s insulting the intelligence of everyone present by pretending to think that Obama is country club guy while Bush is a Texas farmhand who got to the White House by being salt of the earth reg’lar folks despite having quite school in the 8th grade.

Country club. Country club. I can’t get over that. Country club. The Bushes are the country club. The country club is built with plaster made from Bush ancestors. The Bushes are the country club and the legacy at Andover and Yale. Humble salt of the earth George Bush went to Andover and Yale because he was a legacy; if he’d had Obama’s family and his own (as opposed to Obama’s) grades, he really would have gone to East Jesus High School.

Okay, so there is nothing those cynical bastards won’t say, no stupidity too stupid to try out. I knew that. But sometimes the actual examples…make little red spots jump up and down in front of my eyes.

Daphne Patai’s What Price Utopia? Essays on Ideological Policing, Feminism, and Academic Affairs arrived in the mail today, and it looks like a big old feast of just the kind of thing I like. That means you’d probably like it too (otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this, would you).

The Economist takes a slightly skeptical look at inter-faith conferences. Then it gets to a real issue.

As well as repeating certain familiar commonplaces and negotiating certain familiar taboos, participants in inter-faith gatherings do sometimes run into real questions, that make a difference to the world at large. One such is how, if at all, freedom of speech can be reconciled with the Muslim demand for a ban on public statements or cultural products that offend Islamic sensibilities. At this week’s meeting in Malaysia, that question was addressed in a way that frightened the relatively few participants whose understanding of civil rights was rooted in a Western, liberal world-view.

Don’t tell me, let me guess. The question was addressed by saying that a ban on public statements or cultural products that offend Islamic sensibilities is desperately needed and freedom of speech is, quite frankly, a colonialist orientalist misbeliever piece of crap. Just a wild guess.

Speaker after speaker called for some formal, internationally agreed restriction on the defamation of religion. “I can never accept that freedom of speech is morally right when it offends my faith,” said Prince Turki al-Faisal, a senior Saudi official.

Oh gee, will you look at that, I guessed right. What do you know.

Adding further to the tension—and an element of this week’s debates in Kuala Lumpur—is the increasingly well-co-ordinated campaign by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference to redefine human rights in a way that explicitly outlaws the defamation of religion.

Why yes, that does rather add to the tension. I know it makes me quite tense. I would really rather not see the OIC succeed in requiring the entire world to shut up about its particular religion.

Dominic Lawson quotes the Department of Health replying to an MP complaining on behalf of a constituent about ‘psychic surgery.’ (Yes, psychic.)

“We are currently working towards extending the scope of statutory regulation by introducing regulation of herbal medicine, acupuncture practitioners and Chinese medicine. However, there are no plans to extend statutory regulation to other professions such as psychic surgery. We expect these professions to develop their own unified systems of voluntary self-regulation.”

Other professions? Other professions? Psychic surgery is a profession? In what sense? If psychic surgery and acupuncture are professions, are divination and palmistry and astrology also professions? If so, what distinguishes a profession from just messing around?

Last week, in fact, the Department of Health published the report which outlines the regulation hinted at by Lord Hunt. It is called the Report to Ministers from the Department of Health Steering Group on the Statutory Regulation of Acupuncture, Herbal Medicine, Traditional Chinese Medicine and other Traditional Medicine Systems Practiced in the United Kingdom…Acupuncture is at the most respectable end of the alternative health spectrum – its practitioners would be affronted to be lumped in with psychic surgeons. Yet what, really, is the difference?…Pittilo and his band of “stakeholders” have come up with their own way of “regulating” the alternative health industry – which the Government has welcomed. It is to suggest that practitioners gain university degrees in complementary or alternative medicine…

Ah, right – so if you get a degree in Magical Dentistry, then you have a profession, and your profession is regulated, and hey presto, Magical Dentistry fixes your teeth.

David Colquhoun read the report.

The report is written by people all of whom have vested interests in spreading quackery. It shows an execrable ability to assess evidence, and it advocates degrees in antiscience…This steering group is, as so often, a nest of vested interests. It does not seem to have on it any regular medical or clinical scientist whatsoever…You can read on page 55 of the report

“3a: Registrant acupuncturists must:

understand the following aspects and concepts for traditional East-Asian acupuncture:

– yin/yang, /5 elements/phases, eight principles, cyclical rhythms, qi ,blood and body fluids, different levels of qi, pathogenic factors, 12 zang fu and 6 extraordinary fu, jing luo/ meridians, the major acupuncture points, East-Asian medicine disease categorisation, the three burners, the 4 stages/levels and 6 divisions

– causes of disharmony/disease causation

– the four traditional diagnostic methods: questioning, palpation, listening and observing”

That’s embarrassing. Or as Colquhoun puts it, “Anyone who advocates giving honours degrees in such nonsense deserves to be fired for bringing his university into disrepute (and, in the process, bringing all universities and science itself into disrepute).”