Procrastination: February 2003 Archives

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جمعہ 28 فروری 2003Friday, February 28, 2003

Work, Lack of Sleep, Spring Break and Blogging

So finally the report is done, the project design is almost complete and under testing and spring break is on to us. There are two problems however. I am really tired right now because of lack of sleep. I have slept only 4 hours the last two nights (and I usually need at least 8 hours every night). And the spring break does not mean spring is here. Especially since I am going home. The weather in New Jersey is definitely colder than here. I hope the roads are ice-free tomorrow when I drive the 14 hours to Piscataway. Bloggin obviously will have to wait until sunday. But don’t worry, I have a free week ahead of me.

By Zack at 3:53 PM in Life | Comments (0) | TrackBack

اتوار 23 فروری 2003Sunday, February 23, 2003

Nigerian 419 scam takes a life

A Nigerian diplomat in the Czech Republic was murdered by a man who was fooled by the famous Nigerian email scam.

A notorious e-mail scam has resulted in the murder of a Nigerian diplomat in the Czech Republic.

Fifty-year-old Michael Lekara Wayid, Nigeria’s consul in the Czech Republic, was shot dead by an unidentified 72-year-old Czech at the Nigerian Embassy in Prague on Wednesday.

According to police reports, the suspect was a victim of the 419 scam, a thriving industry that employs thousands of people around the world. The scammers successfully manage to extort money from thousands of victims by promising them compensation for assistance in moving funds from foreign countries to banks in the United States.

The criminals typically make their money by extracting ever-escalating sums of money for bribes, bank fees and the like from their “business partners,” that is, the folks they scam. But according to early reports in Nigerian and Czech newspapers, the gunman’s bank account was drained after he gave the account number and other personal details to someone posing as a senior Nigerian official.

It is not known whether the suspect was contacted by e-mail or other means. The 419 scams were carried out by postal mail until the advent of e-mail, but, according to FBI reports, most 419 scams are now conducted, at least in the early stages, by e-mail.

According Nigerian newspaper reports, the suspect arrived at the embassy and said he needed to discuss a business matter. He was referred to Wayid. Soon afterward, an embassy receptionist heard raised voices followed by shots and went to investigate.

The killer has been arrested. The fool! First, he lost his money and now his liberty!

By Zack at 1:10 AM in Internet | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Blog Talk

Some time on friday, the 5000th “unique visitor” read my blog. That’s after approximately 3 months of making the blog public.

By Zack at 1:06 AM in Internet | Comments (4) | TrackBack

جمعرات 20 فروری 2003Thursday, February 20, 2003

Busy

Blogging will be light until March 1 as I try to design a project for the VLSI class I TA and work on a research report due next friday.

By Zack at 4:47 PM in Life | Comments (0) | TrackBack

بدھ 19 فروری 2003Wednesday, February 19, 2003

Eenie, meenie, minie, moe

One learns new things every day. Via Eve Tushnet, I found out that two African-American women have sued Southwest Airlines. The reason is said to be the reciting of “Eenie, meenie, minie, moe; pick a seat, we gotta go.” This apparently has some racist history in the US.

When we get around to having kids, please remind me not to teach them the Urdu version of “Eenie, meenie, minie, moe.” When we were kids, we had a few versions of this rhyme in Urdu. How was I supposed to know it has racist overtones half way across the world. Please forgive me, I didn’t mean to offend, even though I was only four at the time!

By Zack at 2:32 AM in Politics | Comments (1) | TrackBack

منگل 18 فروری 2003Tuesday, February 18, 2003

Part of Pi

Our names are represented within the first 4 billion binary digits of pi (=3.14159…) if you encode the alphabet into 5-bit binary numbers. Here are the results:

search string = “zack”
20-bit binary equivalent = 11010000010001101011
search string found at binary index = 1514694396

search string = “ajmal”
25-bit binary equivalent = 0000101010011010000101100
search string found at binary index = 3302046204

search string = “amber”
25-bit binary equivalent = 0000101101000100010110010
search string found at binary index = 2167926308

search string = “ambrin”
30-bit binary equivalent = 000010110100010100100100101110
search string found at binary index = 2595054309

Via Volokh Conspiracy

By Zack at 11:33 PM in Miscellaneous | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Computer Languages

A reader Trevor Anderson of Volokh Conspiracy defends C and blasts Java, Ada and Pascal.

There are other languages, sure, and they are not all bad, I suppose. Java is okay if your objects need to be oriented: it looks a lot like C and its working parts are written in C (I’d bet!), but there is something of the granola-eating, latte-quaffing, socks-with-sandals options-watcher to its aura that I just don’t like. If Java is still too liberal for your tastes there is always Ada, as good an example of totalitarian programming as ever there was. Choc-full of turgid rules and regulations and government interference, invented by comittee with the express intent of keeping incompetent programmers in business. Full of itself, it lets the anal control freaks among us think we’re really in charge. Ugh. Another choice might be Pascal, eminently suited to prescriptivists: no split-infinitives there, pal, just rigid typing and pedantic grammar.

It had me laughing a lot.

By Zack at 11:21 PM in Science and Technology | Comments (6) | TrackBack

Smallpox Vaccinations

Virginia Postrel says:

Speaking of immigrants, I can’t help wondering whether the estimates of how many (or rather, how few) Americans have been vaccinated against smallpox fully account for the immigrant population. I’ve noticed quite a few vaccination scars on the upper arms of relatively young Vietnamese manicurists.

Jay Manifold says vaccinations are good for 50 years, but I’d rather not bet my life on that estimate. My last vaccination was in 1966, as a requirement for entering first grade, but it “didn’t take” because I still had immunity from my vaccination in infancy. See how common these things used to be?

I imagine most immigrants from the developing world were vaccinated at least in the 1970s. Both my wife and I were vaccinated against smallpox when we were kids and have the scars to show for it.

UPDATE: The last case of smallpox infection in Pakistan was in 1974 while the last case worldwide was in 1977 in Somalia.

By Zack at 9:12 PM in Pakistan | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Welcome, MSNBC Readers

I hope you like my weblog. Please look at the archives as well and visit again. Thanks, Will Femia of MSNBC Weblog Central for putting me on the Best of Blogs list.

Here are some of my posts that you might be interested in reading:

Political Islam and Pakistan
Wahabis/Salafis (1, 2, and 3).
Muslims, the West and Media
Global Attitudes Survey
Tribalism and Conservatism
Activist Islam in Pakistan (1, 2, 3, 4).
Bin Ladenism
Antisemitism among Muslims

Pakistan
Joke of a Prime Minister
Islamabad: Pakistani or not?
US/Pakistan Forces Clash
Impressions from Pakistan
Conspiracy Theories

Honor Killings
Posts 1, 2, and 3.

Japanese-American Internment and Relevance for Today
Abduction of Japanese-(Latin)Americans
Japanese Americans and Muslim Americans (1 and 2).
Better than Hilter, Stalin and Castro
Rep. Howard Coble

INS: Immigration and Security
Security: Pros and Cons (1, 2).
Special Registration (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7).
Deported Pakistanis: Illegal Immigrants
INS Bunglings (1, 2, 3).

Terrorism
Condemnations (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
Terrorism and Repression (1, 2).

Race Relations and Discrimination
Trent Lott’s nostalgia for segregation (1, 2, 3).
Employment discrimination study using racially distinct names (1, 2, 3, 4).
States’ Rights and Slavery
Criminal record, race and employment
Eve Tushnet’s series on race
Racism in Death Penalty cases
Racial Profiling in traffic stops

Israel and Palestine
My views on the conflict
Jewish settlers and Israeli Arabs as a political obstacle to a peace settlement.
Look towards the future
Higher standards for Israel
I support Amram Mitzna

By Zack at 8:02 PM in Internet | Comments (3) | TrackBack

پیر 17 فروری 2003Monday, February 17, 2003

Weekend Stuff

If you are wondering what I did over the weekend, wonder no more! On Friday, Amber and I went to Restaurant Serenade in Chatham, NJ for our Valentine’s day dinner. It’s a nice (and expensive) comtemporary French restaurant. The food was good, though I liked the food in France better.

We also watched two movies on the big screen: Chicago and The Hours. Chicago was definitely more entertaining, may be because both of us are suckers for musicals. The Hours was interesting but depressing movie. Having watched the performance of both Renée Zellweger and Nicole Kidman, it’s the consensus opinion in our home that Kidman will get the nod for the best actress oscar.

By Zack at 3:37 AM in Food and Cooking , Life , Movies | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Snowstorm

I arrived in Atlanta 3 hours late due to the snowstorm in the northeast. This might be the biggest storm I think since we started living in Jersey in 1999. I think the previous record for us was the 15 inches on Dec 30 (I forget the year 2000 or 2001). But I am missing this one (I am a big fan of snow.)

By Zack at 3:25 AM in Life | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Iraq and WMD

I think the US is looking for some nasty stuff that it gave to Saddam in the 1980s. The Bush administration is worried since inspectors haven’t found the stuff and nobody destroys WMDs unilaterally and voluntarily.

By Amber at 3:19 AM in International Affairs | Comments (1) | TrackBack

جمعہ 14 فروری 2003Friday, February 14, 2003

Going Home

I am going home for a Valentine’s day weekend. Blogging will be light.

By Zack at 3:14 PM in Life | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Valentine Poem

Kieran Healy, posting from the future, has a neat poem from the blogger to his Valentine.

By Zack at 2:25 AM in Miscellaneous | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Budgets and Wars

CalPundit is worried that the Bush administration has not budgeted for the Iraq war. It seems that’s not the first time. They did not budget for aid to Afghanistan for the 2003 budget either.

The United States Congress has stepped in to find nearly $300m in humanitarian and reconstruction funds for Afghanistan after the Bush administration failed to request any money in the latest budget.

One mantra from the Bush administration since it launched its military campaign in Afghanistan 16 months ago has been that the US will not walk away from the Afghan people.

President Bush has even suggested a Marshall plan for the country, and the Afghan leader, Hamid Karzai, will visit Washington later this month.

But in its budget proposals for 2003, the White House did not explicitly ask for any money to aid humanitarian and reconstruction costs in the impoverished country.

The chairman of the committee that distributes foreign aid, Jim Kolbe, says that when he asked administration officials why they had not requested any funds, he was given no satisfactory explanation, but did get a pledge that it would not happen again.

A spokesman for the US Agency for International Development, which distributes the money, says the reason they did not make a request was that when budgetary discussions began in 2002, it was too early to say how much money they would need.

By Zack at 2:22 AM in Politics | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Valentine's Day and Extremists

I knew that religious conservatives in Pakistan did not like Valentine’ Day, but it was never a big deal. Most of the protests and shattering windows of shops and cars occurred on New Year’s eve. It seems like things have changed somewhat according to BBC:

Conservative forces in the Middle East and South Asia have cracked down on shops marketing Valentine’s Day.

In the Indian capital, Delhi, several people were reported injured when stores selling romantic cards and gifts were attacked by right-wing militants.

Police in Iran, meanwhile, are reported to have closed several shops in Tehran, while religious groups in Pakistan have held protests against the 14 February celebration.

Religious hardliners consider such Western occasions as decadent and an insult to Hinduism and Islam.

In Delhi, about a dozen members of the Hindu Shiv Sena Party attacked two shops selling Valentine items, completely destroying one of the properties. An eyewitness told the French news agency AFP: “They came in two cars and began shouting anti-Valentine’s Day slogans before entering the shop. “They smashed the glass windows, lights and other fixtures, and tore the cards.”

Security has been stepped up across the country to head off violent protests that have occurred in recent years. In the Indian city of Bombay, police will be on full alert to ensure Valentine’s Day passes peacefully, a senior police official, Himanshu Roy, told the BBC.

Authorities in Iran have shut stores selling Valentine’s Day products and ordered others to remove heart-and-flower decorations.

In Pakistan, fundamentalist students condemned Valentine’s Day as a day of shame and lust.

Well, may be Shiv Sena and Muslim fundamentalist groups should march together against Valentine’s day. That would be some sight!

Here is some more news about the crazy extremists of South Asia:

“[Valentine’s Day] is nothing but a Western onslaught on India’s culture to attract youth for commercial purposes,” said senior Shiv Sena leader Uddhav Thackeray, son of group leader Bal Thackeray. Last week, Bal Thackeray said anyone wanting to avoid violence on Valentine’s Day should not celebrate it.

On Tuesday, 20 Shiv Sena activists stole cards from a shop in central Bombay. Shouting “long live Shiv Sena”, they burned the cards on the pavement outside.

Other Hindu fundamentalist parties like the Vishwa Hindu Parishad and Bajrang Dal have also said they will oppose Valentine’s Day celebrations.

In Pakistan, the student wing of the fundamentalist Islamic party Jamaat-e-Islami also called for a ban on Valentine’s Day celebrations. Khalid Waqas Chamkani, a leader of the wing in North-West Frontier Province, said: “This is a shameful day. The people in the West are just fulfilling and satisfying their sex thirst.”

However, celebrating Valentine’s Day, named after the Christian patron saint of lovers, has become increasingly popular in both India and Pakistan. Many hotels in both nations put on Valentine’s dinners and balls, while the media allow lovers radio and newspaper slots to broadcast messages.

One card stockist in Bombay said couples would celebrate the day despite the protests. “It is just sad for poor shop owners who are the unlucky targets,” he said.

Why can’t these extremists just let people be. Let them celebrate love on Valentine’s day or any other day they want. Does it matter if it is a Western thing?

By Zack at 1:59 AM in Pakistan | Comments (29) | TrackBack

جمعرات 13 فروری 2003Thursday, February 13, 2003

Snitch Visas

Via Perverse Access Memory, I found the news about snitch visas for informants about criminals and terrorists.

The logic looked impeccable: Foreign terrorists lurk among foreigners, and foreigners want to live in America. So why not give foreigners a visa in return for ratting out suspected terrorists?

The idea, it turns out, has sputtered in practice so badly in the last 15 months that some experts think it raises questions about the wisdom of this tactic in the Bush administration’s war on terrorism.

The S visas — nicknamed “snitch visas” and good for three years of legal U.S. residence — were granted to just 35 informants and their relatives in the fiscal year after Sept. 11.

Congress created the program in 1994 for foreign nationals living here or abroad, and since has capped the number at 200 a year for criminal informants (S-5 visas) and 50 a year for terrorism informants (S-6 visas). Immigration advocates generally welcome the program as a gesture of cooperative faith in, not antagonism toward, immigrants.

Now, generally the visa stamped on one’s passport has the visa category (S-5 or S-6 in this case) printed on there. So what happens with these S visas? Can someone open up your passport and immediately realize that you ratted out a drug dealer or a terrorist? Is that even a good idea? Also, does “S” have anything to do with “snitch” or is it just a coincidence?

By Zack at 1:19 AM in Immigration | Comments (0) | TrackBack

بدھ 12 فروری 2003Wednesday, February 12, 2003

Zimbabwe Cricketers Protest Mugabe

Two members of Zimbabwe’s World Cup Cricket team, Andy Flower and Henry Olonga, are protesting Mugabe’s despotic rule by wearing black arm bands during their World Cup game against Namibia. Andy Flower is a former captain of the team and Henry Olonga is their first black player. According to BBC,

Zimbabwe cricketers Henry Olonga and Andy Flower knew that they were taking a great risk by making a public protest against the government of Robert Mugabe.

Olonga has already been suspended by his club, Takashinga for wearing a black armband during the Namibia match but that is the least of their worries.

As the statement they released just before taking to the field said:

“People have been murdered, raped, beaten and had their homes destroyed because of their beliefs and… many of those responsible have not been prosecuted.”

While such high-profile people are unlikely to be physically attacked in the middle of the Cricket World Cup, Mr Mugabe and his supporters have long memories.

Certainly, their cricketing careers - in Zimbabwe at least - are in jeopardy.

The Zimbabwe Cricket Union, whose patron is cricket fan Robert Mugabe, is already considering what action to take against them for breaching its “non-political” stance.

[…]And the police have said no political slogans, songs, placards, dress or other “artefact associated with political parties” would be allowed at cricket venues.

But despite this, the cricketers’ action has brought attention back to “the death of democracy” in Zimbabwe.

And the statement is far more powerful, coming from the first black player in the national team, Henry Olonga.

Both players received loud cheers every time they bowled or batted, further adding to Mr Mugabe’s embarrassment.

The government mouthpiece, The Herald newspaper, noted that the two were “able to express themselves without any harassment or intimidation”.

But the police would have handed out instant justice to anyone making similar statements from the crowd.

Olonga says he is ready to pay the price of his action and accepted that he and Flower may now be in physical danger.

“We’ll have to deal with whatever repercussions come along our way as best we can but we believe in the greater good,” he told the BBC.

Here is their statement:

It is a great honour for us to take the field today to play for Zimbabwe in the World Cup.

We feel privileged and proud to have been able to represent our country.

We are, however, deeply distressed about what is taking place in Zimbabwe in the midst of the World Cup and do not feel that we can take the field without indicating our feelings in a dignified manner and in keeping with the spirit of cricket.

We cannot in good conscience take to the field and ignore the fact that millions of our compatriots are starving, unemployed and oppressed.

We are aware that hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans may even die in the coming months through a combination of starvation, poverty and Aids.

We are aware that many people have been unjustly imprisoned and tortured simply for expressing their opinions about what is happening in the country.

We have heard a torrent of racist hate speech directed at minority groups.

We are aware that thousands of Zimbabweans are routinely denied their right to freedom of expression.

We are aware that people have been murdered, raped, beaten and had their homes destroyed because of their beliefs and that many of those responsible have not been prosecuted.

We are also aware that many patriotic Zimbabweans oppose us even playing in the World Cup because of what is happening.

It is impossible to ignore what is happening in Zimbabwe. Although we are just professional cricketers, we do have a conscience and feelings.

We believe that if we remain silent that will be taken as a sign that either we do not care or we condone what is happening in Zimbabwe.

We believe that it is important to stand up for what is right.

We have struggled to think of an action that would be appropriate and that would not demean the game we love so much.

We have decided that we should act alone without other members of the team being involved because our decision is deeply personal and we did not want to use our senior status to unfairly influence more junior members of the squad.

We would like to stress that we greatly respect the ICC and are grateful for all the hard work it has done in bringing the World Cup to Zimbabwe.

In all the circumstances, we have decided that we will each wear a black armband for the duration of the World Cup.

In doing so we are mourning the death of democracy in our beloved Zimbabwe.

In doing so we are making a silent plea to those responsible to stop the abuse of human rights in Zimbabwe.

In doing so we pray that our small action may help to restore sanity and dignity to our nation.

It is great to hear such words from two very good cricketers. They have risked a lot by this protest and the international community and ICC (International Cricket Conference, cricket’s governing body) should make sure they are not punished.

Courtesy of commenter Amy Phillips.

By Zack at 10:19 PM in International Affairs , Sports | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Warne Scandal Bigger Than Iraq in Australia

According to Yahoo! Sports:

Cricketer Shane Warne’s dramatic exit from the World Cup knocked the looming war with Iraq off the front pages in Australia as the sports-mad nation reacted with bewildered anger to the latest scandal engulfing its spin king.

“Devastated” ran the page one headline on Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, with The Australian newspaper concentrating on Warne’s declaration “I’m no drug cheat.”

The Australian labelled Warne the “stupid spinner,” after he was sent home from the tournament in South Africa Tuesday following revelations he had tested positive for a banned diuretic drug in Sydney last month.

Prime Minister John Howard took time out from a series of international crisis meetings on Iraq to express his sympathy for Warne and urge cricket authorities to deal with him fairly.

“He is a great Australian cricketer. My hope is he’ll be back playing for Australia before long,” Howard said in New York.

Warne’s family in Melbourne also spoke of their distress, with a source close to the family telling the Australian Associated Press the bowler had taken a pill given to him by his mother in circumstances that were “totally innocent”.

But there was little sympathy for Warne among newspaper commentators and radio talkback callers following the latest in a string of scandals that have tarnished the reputation of the man hailed as the greatest spin bowler of all time.

Critics cited Warne’s dealings with illegal bookmakers, a sex scandal in Britain where he was accused of bombarding a young nurse with suggestive phone messages and a general air of arrogance as evidence the bowler had “more flaws than the Empire State Building”.

They said Warne had let down his teammates and his conduct was naive, at the very least.

“When he dislocated his shoulder, Shane Warne must have damaged brain cells as well. What else will explain the numbingly dumb decision by one of the greatest cricketers in history to pop a diuretic?” Peter Jenkins asked in the Daily Telegraph.

However, there was some support for the beleaguered leggie. Respected Sydney Morning Herald commentator and former Somerset captain Peter Roebuck concluded: “It does sound like a minor matter, an oversight.”

Shane Warne is considered one of the best spin bowlers in cricket. However, his absence was not felt by the Australian team yesterday as they easily defeated Pakistan.

By Zack at 12:40 AM in Sports | Comments (9) | TrackBack

منگل 11 فروری 2003Tuesday, February 11, 2003

New Readers

Welcome. If you are following a link from Burt Lum’s article in the Honolulu Advertiser, the post he refers to is available here. While you are here, please go through my weblog. I have quite a few interesting posts about politics, Islam, Pakistan, etc.

By Zack at 11:27 AM in Miscellaneous | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Eid Greetings

Eid Mubarak, everyone. Today is Eid-ul-Azha, which the celebration of Abraham’s offer to sacrifice Ishmael (Isaac according to the Bible, but Ishmael in the Quran). To commemorate that event, those Muslims who can afford it sacrifice cows, goats or lambs. Haj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, is also going on at this time. For some links about this month, Haj, Eid-ul-Azha and Qurbani (sacrifice of animals), take a look at this page by Al-Muhajabah.

For those of you who think Muslims are a monolith and a threat, well we can’t even celebrate Eid on one day. My wife in New Jersey will have her Eid tomorrow while I am celebrating it today. (Islamic religious events are based on the lunar calendar and people can’t seem to agree on how to decide on a new moon.)

By Zack at 10:38 AM in Islam and Other Religions | Comments (13) | TrackBack

اتوار 9 فروری 2003Sunday, February 09, 2003

Zionist Church of Swaziland

Browsing through the religious data in the CIA World Factbook, I found out that Swaziland, a small landlocked country in Southern Africa (area 17,363 sq km slightly smaller than New Jersey and population 1.1 million) has a Zionist religion. No, this has nothing to do with Zionism. According to the CIA entry, Swaziland has the following religions:

Zionist (a blend of Christianity and indigenous ancestral worship) 40%
Roman Catholic 20%
Muslim 10%
Anglican, Bahai, Methodist, Mormon, Jewish and other 30%

Does anyone know what this Zionist religion is about?

The list of other religions is also interesting.

By Zack at 5:39 AM in Islam and Other Religions | Comments (8) | TrackBack

Cricket World Cup Predictions

As the world cup has finally started, I should make my predictions. The teams are divided into two pools. The top three teams from each pool advance to the super-six round where they play each other. Two teams are then eliminated and the rest advance to the semifinals and then the final. So here are the teams in the two pools, in the order in which I think they will end up:

Pool A: Australia, Pakistan, India, England, Zimbabwe, Netherlands, Namibia.
Pool B: South Africa, West Indies, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, Bangladesh, Canada, Kenya.

And my prediction for the winner is: South Africa.

However, I will be rooting for Pakistan.

By Zack at 4:42 AM in Sports | Comments (2) | TrackBack

ہفتہ 8 فروری 2003Saturday, February 08, 2003

Muslim Population

Tom Friedman in an anti-France op-ed in the New York Times argued to replace France with India in the UN Security Council:

Because India is the world’s biggest democracy, the world’s largest Hindu nation and the world’s second-largest Muslim nation, and, quite frankly, India is just so much more serious than France these days.

Now I know it’s popular to bash France in the US and all, but this is not what this post is about. Like a lot of other people in the media, Friedman is a little behind in terms of population data. India is not the “world’s second-largest Muslim nation” nowadays. It used to be for most part from 1972-early 1990s (I think, but any actual data is welcome). Here is the population data for the countries with large Muslim populations from the CIA World Factbook.

Country	Population	Percentage of Muslims	Muslim Population
Indonesia	231,328,092	88.0%	203,568,721
Pakistan	147,663,429	97.0%	143,233,526
India	1,045,845,226	12.0%	125,501,427
Bangladesh	133,376,684	83.0%	110,702,648
Turkey	67,308,928	99.8%	67,174,310
Egypt	70,712,345	94.0%	66,469,604
Iran	66,622,704	99.0%	65,956,477
Nigeria	129,934,911	50.0%	64,967,456
Ehtiopia	67,673,031	47.5%	32,144,690
Morocco	31,167,783	98.7%	30,762,602

UPDATE: Thanks to CalPundit for the link.

By Zack at 10:42 PM in Islam and Other Religions | Comments (321) | TrackBack

Maudoodi: According to Kepel

I have started reading Gilles Kepel’s book Jihad : The Trail of Political Islam”. It is an interesting book with a somewhat different viewpoint about political and militant Islam. Here are some excerpts about Maudoodi (for some background, read my earlier posts [1, 2]):

By contrast with Egypt, where Nasser crushed the Muslim Brothers in 1954 and created a hiatus between the colonial era and our own, the Islamist movement on the Indian subcontinent has developed steadily from the 1930s right up to the present. During the decades of Islamist persecution in Cairo, Maudoodi worked away in Pakistan to fine-tune the theories and concepts that would allow Islamic ideology to adapt to the new political conditions created by the rise of “irreligious” independent states. At a very early stage, Maudoodi laid the cultural foundations for a future Islamic republic, defined in opposition to the Muslim nationalism that led to the birth of Pakistan in 1947.

To a much greater extent than the Arab Islamist theorists, Maudoodi acted squarely within the general framework of his culture. He was a prolific author and journalist in Urdu.

The list of Maudoodi’s writings is available at the Jamaat-e-Islami website. The most well-known of Maudoodi’s works is the Tafheem-ul-Quran (Understanding of the Quran), a translation and commentary of the Quran in Urdu. It is written in regular Urdu instead of most other translations which take a somewhat literal approach. Therefore, it is easy to read and understand. Obviously, Maudoodi’s commentary is quite different than traditional ulema.

Maudoodi’s first book, Jihad in Islam, was published in Urdu in the 1920s, roughly coinciding with Banna’s creation of the Society of Muslim Brothers in Egypt. From the start Maudoodi was against the project for a circumscribed “Muslim state,” which would give power to the nationalists. Instead, he agitated for an Islamic state covering the whole of India. For him, all nationalism was impiety, more especially as its conception of the state was European-inspired. Apart from this, he had nothing but contempt for the ulemas [traditional religious scholars – Zack], whom he accused of having collaborated with the British occupiers since the fall of Muslim-held Delhi in 1857. Maudoodi favored what he called “Islamization from above,” through a state in which sovereignty would be exercised in the name of Allah and the sharia [Islamic law – Zack] would be implemented. He declared that politics was “an integral, inseparable part of the Islamic faith, and that the Islamic state that Muslim political action seeks to build is a panacea for all their [Muslims’] problems.” For him, the five traditional Pillars of Islam (profession of the faith, prayer, the fast of Ramadan, pilgrimage, and almsgiving) were merely phases of training and preparation for jihad, the struggle against those of Allah’s creatureswho had usurped His sovereignty. By the pen of Maudoodi, religion was turned into an ideology of political struggle. To carry out his jihad, he founded, in 1941, the Jamaat-e-Islami [Party of Islam – Zack], which he saw as the vanguard of the Islamic Revolution, on a Leninist model. Maudoodi made explicit references to the “vanguard” of the earliest Muslims, who gathered around the Prophet in 622 during the Hegira (flight), broke with the idolatrous people of Mecca, and departed to found the Islamic state of Medina. His own party was intended to follow a similar course.

Maudoodi was the first twentieth-century Muslim thinker to build a political theory around the original break that led to the founding of Islam. In transforming this break into a strategy for action, he was inspired by the avante-garde European political parties of the 1930s. Qutb and his successors did the same; but instead of building up clandestine organizations and transforming the rupture with ungodly society into violent confrontation, Maudoodi’s party existed in complete legality for most of its history. It continues to do so today, even though its founder and many of its leaders have been imprisoned from time to time. Maudoodi’s holy war to build an Islamic state found expression through full participation in the political system of Pakistan, rather than radical opposition to it.

I think during the 1960s the security screening for military and some other government personnel checked whether someone was a member of Jamat-e-Islami or the Communist Party. That usually was a disqualification.

In contrast to the Egyptian Muslim brotherhood of 1930-1950, but also in contrast to Islamic parties of the late twentieth century such as the Turkish Prosperity (Refah) party or the Algerian Front Islamique du Salut (FIS), the Jamaat-e-Islami did not attract a mass following and its impact on elections remained consistently weak. Its social base was confined to the educated middle class, and it never seems to have penetrated to the poorer levels of society, where the Urdu language was not understood. Significantly, Maudoodi and his acolytes used Urdu for their speeches and sermons.

Even in the recent elections in Pakistan, when the religious parties (Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal or United Assembly for Action) won big (51 seats out of 269 in the national assembly), most of their success (basically of Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam or Party of the scholars of Islam, a Deobandi party) was in the Pashtun areas of NWFP and Baluchistan. However, Jamaat-e-Islami won most of its seats in the urban areas in Punjab and Sindh.

Above all, the social agenda of the party remained highly ambiguous. It proclaimed its absolute hostility to capitalism, but socialism was the real target of its wrath.

For the religious and conservative people in Pakistan, communism and socialism were generally considered to be beyond evil. All communists and socialists were automatically thought of as atheists.

In the gestation of the contemporary Islamic movement, Maudoodi’s contribution was largely as a pioneer; he was the first person to give expression to the theory of cultural rupture with nationalists and ulemas alike. Moreover, he maintained the continuity of his Pakistani party at a time when many Arab Islamists were demoralized by repression. And in general his intellectual influence played a part in reorganizing Islamism to confront the then-truimphant forces of nationalism.

Towards the end of the 1960s, the bisecting influences of Qutb and Maudoodi prepared the ground within the Sunni Muslim world for the emergence of the Islamist movement over the next ten years. One influence came from the Middle East, where Islam had dominated for fourteen centuries and where European colonization had been unable to challenge its primacy. The other came from the Indian subcontinent, where most of the population was still Hindu despite ten centuries of Islamic political domination. When the British empire broke that domination in 1857, Muslims felt besieged and threatened. According to Maudoodi, an Islamic state was the only possible safeguard for endangered Muslims; nevertheless, his call for a cultural break with the past was not an incitement to social revolution so much as a call to take part in the political institutions of Pakistan. The divide between the Islamist avant-garde and society did not translate into guerilla warfare, uprisings, or resistance.

Meanwhile Qutb, in adopting Maudoodi’s notion of an Islamic state, established a much more radical program of action. For him, the vanguard’s role was to destroy the ungodly state, to break with it immediately, and to refuse to be compromised by association with a political system from which it could expect nothing. Qutb promoted revolution as a way to seize power – a concept that was absent from Maudoodi’s thought – and in the process he found many followers and imitators among the radical youth of Islam. But neither Maudoodi nor Qutb gave any explicit social content to their theorizing. Qutb may have depicted Islam as the instrument of social justic, but in no way did he present himself as the mouthpiece of the disinherited, as did the Siite revolutionaries in Iran. He identified the main fault line within society as being between Islam and jahiliyya [period of ignorance – Zack], but nothing in his discourse infers that there might be a contradiction between “oppressed” and “oppressors” – or between the Iranian revolution’s “disinherited ones” and “men of arrogance.”

For more details on Syed Qutb, read Bill Allison’s excellent series on Qutb (1, 2:1, 2:2, 3:1, 3:2, 3:3, 4, 5, 6, 7:1, 7:2, 7:3, 7:4, 7:5, 7:6, 8:1, 8:2).

By Zack at 12:28 AM in Books , Islam and Other Religions , Pakistan | Comments (4) | TrackBack

جمعہ 7 فروری 2003Friday, February 07, 2003

World Cup Cricket

It starts tomorrow in South Africa. Some of the games are in Zimbabwe which has created a few problems. England appealed to the International Cricket Conference (ICC) to move their match against Zimbabawe but failed. Also, New Zealand have refused to play Kenya in Nairobi, because of concerns over a bombing in Mombasa in November which killed 16 people.

You can see the schedule here. The participating teams are Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, England, India, Kenya, Namibia, Netherlands, New Zealand, Pakistan, South Africa, Sri Lanka, West Indies and Zimbabwe. According to the betting market, Australia, closely followed by South Africa, is favored to win. Cricket is very popular in Pakistan and India and a somewhat interesting, though time-wasting, game. CricInfo is a very comprehensive site for news, statistics, laws, etc. If you are interested in the rules and history of the game, go here. There are two kinds of games in cricket: the test match and the 1-day international. A test match lasts for 5 full days and is usually slow-paced while a one-day game is faster and more interesting. The world cup obviously consists of one-day games only.

Due to the efforts of cricket enthusiasts at my school, student government is funding the live broadcast of the games on TV. It would be interesting to watch cricket after a long time, though I can’t obviously watch all day.

By Zack at 7:20 PM in Sports | Comments (5) | TrackBack

Honor Killings: Continued

Al-Muhajabah has linked to a number of articles about the teachings of Islam against honor killing.

By Zack at 4:10 PM in Islam and Other Religions | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Additions to the Blog

I have added an RSS feed for my blog, thanks to David Janes of Janes’ blogosphere. You can also search the archives with the Google search box on the sidebar. Another addition is the list of books I am currently reading.

By Zack at 8:39 AM in Internet | Comments (4) | TrackBack

Taking Quran Out of Context

A Muslim under Progress had an interesting post of which I liked this snippet:

The truth of the matter is that the Qur’an has been misused and abused by Muslims themselves. The dictionary approach to the Qur’an is our own doing. We can complain all we want when Daniel Pipes, or Malise Ruthven, or a whole host of other hostile writers, take snipets from the Qur’an, the source for a Muslims faith, and teach Westeners that this is what Muhammad and Abdullah down the street what to do to them. But it is Muslims themselves, who pick this verse or that, ignore the context, and use it to promote their own sect, ideology, group, motives etc. A case of stones and glass houses.

Via Path of the Paddle.

By Zack at 1:28 AM in Islam and Other Religions | Comments (2) | TrackBack

جمعرات 6 فروری 2003Thursday, February 06, 2003

Honor Killings: Miscellaneous Notes

I should probably add some thoughts to my previous post about honor killings. I should warn you however that this post will not have the moral clarity of the previous one; instead it will be a somewhat wishy-washy post.

I wanted to post something about this topic immediately after Joe Katzman brought it to my attention. However, I wanted to highlight some of the work local organizations have done for women’s rights in Pakistan. That proved a somewhat difficult task since most of the information related to that is not available online. Here are a couple of links to organizations:

Edhi Foundation
Human Rights Commission of Pakistan

The two most famous names in this field are Asma Jehangir and Abdul Sattar Edhi.

So is honor killing in any way related to Islam? Yes and no. It depends on what you mean by that question. If you mean that is it a practice in predominantly Muslim countries, then the answer is yes. If you mean that the perpetrators of these crimes look to Islam and Quran for justification, then the answer is somewhat muddled. The major justification is not Islam but tradition, as evidenced by the support of the Awami National Party (which is secular). However, Islam is in a way part of the traditions in Pakistan. Also, those conservative Pakistanis who won’t even dream of honor killing themselves do find the alleged conduct of those women and the NGOs (nongovernmental organizations) who support them to be abhorent to Islam. This group is much larger than those who do kill women for “honor.” That is why I am of two minds about this. People (for example, Aziz; I can’t find a specific post, read his whole blog, it is good) say this is tribalism and not Islam. And they are correct that it is a cultural thing more than a religious one. However, slavery, apartheid, Jim Crow etc. were also basically cultural issues but there were a lot of people who used religion for advocating racial superiority. And in the end, the boundary between culture and religion is fuzzy.

Are honor killing and violence against women only limited to Muslim countries? Absolutely not. (If you doubt me, go do your own research.)

At the same time as condemning and punishing (through the law) those who committ such henious acts, we must change the whole idea of human rights and women’s rights in these countries. The problem is deeper than a few hundred women killed. In some ways, it pervades the culture. For example, take a look at sex selection (via abortion) in India and China.

By Zack at 8:14 PM in Islam and Other Religions , Pakistan | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Honor Killings

Joe Katzman of Winds of Change pointed me to a post by Adil Farooq (MuslimPundit) on their group weblog. Adil writes about the practice of honor killings of women in the Muslim world.

In a remarkable book, Woman in the Muslim Unconscious, the Morroccan scholar Fatna Sabbah writes these daring words:

“I would like to say to the young men formed in our Muslim civilisation that it is highly improbable that they can value liberty - by which I mean, relating to another person as an act of free will, whether it be in bed, in erotic play, or in political debates in party cells or parliament - if they are not conscious of the political import of the hatred and degradation of women in this culture.”

I recalled these fine words when reading a recent article highlighting the continuing atrocities taking place in the name of patriarchal and tribal honour. It describes the intense anguish of a Ms. Khouri, whose newly-released book recalls how her childhood friend, Dalia, was brutally killed at the hands of her own father.

“At the age of 26, Dalia became a victim, both of the power of unbidden love and the determination of her culture to crush it. She could not help herself. Through elaborate deceptions with the complicity of Ms. Khouri she held secret, though chaste, meetings with a young Catholic man named Michael.

In retrospect, the outcome was inevitable. As with other unmarried women, it was the job of her brothers to monitor her movements like detectives.

The final chapters of Ms. Khouri’s book accelerate with grief and passion.

Dalia was stabbed 12 times in the chest, Ms. Khouri writes, and her father stood over her to be sure she was dead before calling an ambulance.

“I’ve cleansed my house,” he shouted when Ms. Khouri ran in through the door, just a block away from her own home. “I’ve cut the rotten part and brought honor back to my family name.”

“Tears flooded my eyes and I began wailing, as so many centuries of grieving Arab women had done before me,” Ms. Khouri writes.

Then, in language that went well beyond traditional grief, she shouted at him: “Dalia never shamed you, you shamed yourself. You’ve turned your home into a house of murder. The spilling of her innocent blood has stained your name, your hands and your soul forever.”

Ms. Khouri is truly courageous. That one would need to be in the first place is a sad and telling indication of just how rampant is the totalitarianism that she fights against. Ideally, an individual should not have to delve deep to find her inner courage to criticise those aspects of Muslim culture she disagrees with, but only a supreme confidence that the institutions of her nation will unapologetically defend her rights as an individual human being to the end. But this is not the state of affairs in Jordan at the present time, let alone in the wider Arab and Muslim world.

This is a terrible atrocity and it is our duty to condemn acts of violence against women in the strongest possible terms and try to do something to change the societies that do such dastardly acts. Honor killing is common in Pakistan as well. Here is the introduction of the 2001 report by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP: a private organization):

Women too faced acute difficulties. While violence against them continued to increase, with more ‘honour’ killings reported than during previous years, other factors too acted to deprive them of some of their most fundamental rights as citizens. In at least 20 districts of the NWFP, women were prevented, mainly by local orthodox forces and influential individuals, from casting their ballots in the local bodies process. It was clear that this could take place only with the connivance of administrations, which repeatedly failed to ensure women were able to exercise their right to vote.

Unfortunately, their report is not available online. Here are some of the highlights related to women’s issues:

Honour killings seemed to be spreading to areas where they had not previously been known. The number of such killings increased with reports suggesting those responsible for them frequently escaped punishment.
The allocation of 33 percent of seats for women in local councils brought more women than ever before into these bodies. However, it was uncertain how far they would succeed in highlighting problems faced by women.
More reports came in of the harassment of women at places of work. The labour force comprised only 6 percent of women while only 8 percent of women workers held administrative or managerial posts.
The mortality rate for mothers was found to be higher than had previously been estimated according to independent studies, and soared to 700 per 100,000 live births in some parts of the country. The official maternal mortality rate at 340 for every 100,000 live births was also amongst the highest in the world.
Child marriages, sometimes linked to acute poverty, seemed to be on the rise.
Cases of the mutilation of women and burning of their faces and bodies with acid increased.
It was found that safe shelter was one of the most urgent requirements of many women.

Here is a recent report by Amnesty International:

Given that the prosecution of ‘honour’ killings is lax; that the law relating to murder is unable to ensure trial and conviction for ‘honour’ killings; and that members of the criminal justice system are prone to side with the perpetrators, people have tended to present other murders in the garb of ‘honour’ killings. Murderers may also murder a woman in addition to a man to create the impression that an ‘honour’ killing occurred. In May 2000, Naseem Bibi, pregnant with her first child, was pulled out of her bed and strangled in a field by her male relatives in Jhang district, Punjab. They earlier shot dead a man in another town over an unrelated issue. After the murder they were reportedly advised by the head of their clan, a school teacher, to kill Naseem Bibi as well, as a double murder in a supposed ‘honour’ context would lead to a lesser punishment in court than a murder of a man. The six men involved in the killing surrendered to police ‘with their heads held high’ according to The News, while local people donated money for the killers’ defence.

The possiblity of extracting compensation payment from a potential male victim of an ‘honour’ crime has added another layer of fake ‘honour’ crimes. Such fake ‘honour’ killings appear to be on the increase, based on ”pressing economic needs, increasing material greed and the desire to become rich overnight. … Husbands would declare a woman a kari [black woman, the one who brings shame] by levelling charges of illicit relations with a rich man in the village. The killer takes money to pardon the suspected man as well as gets rid of a wife or sister by killing her and her share of property is also saved.”(26) Federal Minister for Women Development Dr Attiya Inayatullah said that the custom of ”karo kari”, [“black man” and “black woman” those that dishonour others] in fact amounted to ”karobari”, a business transaction.(27)

The exact number of honour killings is impossible to ascertain as many such killings go unrecorded and unreported. The HRCP noted hundreds of ‘honour’ killings in different parts of the country in the year 2000, in addition to other forms of violence against women. Of 407 murders of women in Punjab province between January and June 2000, 168 were stated in the FIR to be motivated by ‘honour’ while another 109 were committed by close relatives of the women victims where police suspected an ‘honour’ killing. The Centre for Information and Research in Karachi reported 56 men and 73 women killed on grounds of ‘honour’ in the first six months of the year 2001. Most belonged to the middle or lower middle class. Of the reported cases, 28 women were killed by their husbands, 12 women by their brothers, 10 by their brothers-in-law, eight by cousins, 6 by other male relatives and 5 by their sons and the rest unidentified persons.

Official and NGO figures vary considerably: The HRCP office in Hyderabad in recorded a total of 280 cases of ‘honour’ crimes in Sindh in 2000, the 393 victims of the crimes including 236 women, whereas Sindh police claimed that 294 people, including 189 women had been killed in ‘honour’ crimes in the same period. In the first quarter of the year 2001, police claimed that 32 people including 24 women were killed in an ‘honour’ crimes context, whereas the HRCP spoke of 87 victims, including 62 women.

Media and human rights organizations in Pakistan speak of some three women murdered for ‘honour’ every day. The Chairperson of the National Commission on the Status of Women, Dr Shaheen Sardar Ali said in January 2001, ”the centuries-old problem [of violence against women] is based on traditions and customs involving the honour of rural, feudal and tribal families. It will not stop unless people stop thinking of women as their personal property.” Members of the NGO community agree: ”Women are treated as property and there is a perception that honour stems from the woman in the household. … General Musharraf may genuinely believe this shouldn’t happen but he had shown no clear will to stop it. He needs to change tradition and tradition is one of the hardest things to change.”(28)

Meanwhile the practice persists. Women are murdered on the merest allegation of an ‘illicit’ relationship, because of their perceived insubordination when they chose to marry a man of their choice or when they chose to divorce an abusive husband. Cases of ‘honour’ killings and domestic violence are reported with appalling regularity almost every day in newspapers in Pakistan. Most reports merely record that woman x was shot dead or hacked to death in place y on suspicion of an illicit relationship without giving any further details of the suffering and abuse hidden behind the recorded facts.

While the condemnation of ‘honour’ crimes by the present Government of Pakistan in the Convention on Human Rights and Human Dignity in April 2000 was clear and unequivocal, no immediate action followed to prove its commitment. Even well-documented cases of ‘honour’ killings were not pursued though such measures would have lent immediate and convincing weight to the verbal commitment. Instead, public statements by some government officials sounded like excuses for inaction. Then Governor of NWFP, Lt. General (retrd) Mohammad Shafiq, on International Women’s Day 2000 told a women’s delegation that his government would take strict action against any perpetrators who was pointed out to it but that reports of ‘honour’ killings were ‘unduly projected’. He said that he had received over 500 letters relating to the case of Jamila Lal but said that someone was exploiting the situation. ”I am thinking of writing a letter to Amnesty International to apprise them regarding [the] real situation. We are not so much bad people that we do nothing but slaughter our females. If there is some negligence on the part of police we will take strict action against them. But someone has to point out … we are also a part of this society. How can we allow the killing of women in the name of honour?” He pointed out that the inhabitants of the tribal areas had their own traditions and the government could not interfere in these.

Not only has Amnesty International not received any direct communication from the Governor, but there is also no indication that the case of Lal Jamila Mandokhel [described in Amnesty International 1999 report on ‘honour’ crimes] was subjected to any scrutiny. She had been shot dead in March 1999 after a jirga of Pathan tribesmen in Kurram Agency had found her ‘guilty’ of ‘dishonouring’ her tribe when she had been subjected to rape.

The case most thoroughly covered in the media in Pakistan, including in NWFP, relates to Samia Sarwar, a 29-year-old woman who was shot dead by her father’s driver on 6 April 1999 in a lawyer’s office in Lahore as she was seeking divorce from a severely abusive husband. The killing occurred in the presence of Samia Sarwar’s mother and uncle and was probably instigated by Samia Sarwar’s father. To date neither of them have been arrested. Samia Sarwar’s father is a prominent businessman and heads the Chamber of Commerce in Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province of which General Mohammad Shafiq was the Governor.(29)

Similarly, the case of Uzma Talpur in Sindh who is at risk of honour killing, was well-documented and is on record in the files of the Human Rights Advisor of the Government of Sindh. But no action was taken by Sindh authorities to ensure the recovery and safety of Uzma Talpur.(30)

You can also read a detailed report on honor killing in Pakistan by Amnesty International published in 1999 here.

Here is a BBC report about the Pakistani Senate refusing to condemn honor killings in 1999:

Pakistan’s upper house, the Senate, has rejected a resolution condemning the growing incidence of murder of women in the name of family honour.

The resolution was moved by the main opposition party of former prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, but members from the highly conservative tribal region of the north-west frontier province prevailed upon the house to stop the move.

Recently, it became a major issue when a woman who had fled her home in the north-west frontier to avoid a forced marriage was shot down by a hired killer in the office of a human rights activist.

The incident sparked a bitter debate in the country, with human rights groups asking for a new and strict law to discourage the practice.

It was against this backdrop that the opposition Pakistan People’s Party wanted the Senate to pass a resolution to condemn the so-called “honour” killings of women.

But when it tried to move the resolution, the governing party members belonging to the conservative tribal region of the north-west frontier province put up a forceful opposition.

Much to the surprise of many, they were fully backed by a left-wing opposition group, Awami National Party, whose members also come from the same province.

This report refers to the Samia Sarwar case mentioned in the Amnesty International report. Samia was with a human rights lawyer Asma Jehangir. Conservatives in Pakistan call all kinds of names and have strange conspiracy theories about Asma Jehangir because of her work on women’s issues (she also runs a women’s shelter.)

Aside: Also note that the Awami National Party opposed the condemnation. They are Pashtun nationalists and are considered “progressive” in its meaning of the political left during the cold war years. They are also dominated by the family of Abdul Ghaffar Khan, also known as Bacha Khan and Frontier Gandhi.

I’ll end this post with a comment from Adil:

Those under the aegis of a modern, liberal nation must not therefore feel guilty in actively condemning such practices, identifying their roots, and calling for them to be purged forever. Our human rights and freedoms are far too important for us to ignore their stark absence elsewhere.

By Zack at 6:46 PM in Islam and Other Religions , Pakistan | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Visits and Page Views

Yesterday I passed 5,000 page views and today crossed 4,000 unique visits. It has taken me about 2.5 months.

By Zack at 6:24 PM in Internet | Comments (7) | TrackBack

SUVs

I really liked the “That’s Quite Interesting to Mo Rocca” on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Here are some quotes:

“SUVs: They are big, they are bold and they consume ungodly amounts of fuel. In short, they embody America.”

“Now you may say, yes the car is an improvement over the horse, but why must it be so big? Well for one thing, Americans need their space. Just ask the Indians.”

“Yes the SUV is dangerous and environmentally irresponsible. But what other vehicle has the high torque 4-wheel drive essential for dropping the kids off, delivering the laundry or picking up prescriptions. Soon everyone will have an SUV, making roads obsolete and saving millions of dollars in highway costs. Besides, smaller, fuel-efficient cars are terribly unsafe, especially if you are hit by an SUV.”

Kidding aside, I think a lot of people who have SUVs do not really need them. However, need is not exactly the most important factor in most people’s decisions. For example, I like roadsters and will buy one if I can afford it. Regarding fuel-efficiency standards (CAFE), I believe the present requirements distort the automobile market. Either there should be no CAFE standards or they should be applicable on all vehicles including SUVs and light trucks.

By Zack at 6:15 PM in Miscellaneous | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Democracy or Dictatorship

Zachary Latif recently wrote against democracy in the Muslim world:

In fact one remains hopefully that there will be no significant upheaval within the Islamic Crescent since autocracy, in a convoluted way, is the one redeeming aspect of the Islamic Crescent. There is no need to consider the popular sentiment thus demagogues do not arise and religious fanaticism is inhibited, in dire contrast to India and Israel where the far right (it is virtually impossible to find the a party like BJP - with such a notorious history, shady associations and parochial views - in charge of an Islamic nation) firmly entrenched in power.

The very nature of the Islamic nations is inherently predisposed to a strongman leadership and that is a cultural tendency imbedded within the Muslim world. This is not a necessarily a bad thing far from in fact since it allows visionary leaders to recast their nations in their own modernistic mould. How else could have Ataturk successfully secularised and modernised Turkey to such an extent that the population now considers itself European rather than Eastern.

It is not within the Muslim tradition to cultivate a Western democracy nevertheless I remain thankful that there remains within the crescent the continual ability to subtly imbibe concepts and values that are conducive to future growth. The Islamic Crescent is certainly not a failure and I find it to have made immense progress within the past century(Pakistan being the foremost example, for how else could a Muslim elite so eloquently and effectively pursue their dreams of a nation state without resorting to violence) in spite of the severe handicaps endured (and perpetrated) by Muslim polities & ethnicities throughout the world.

The main idea here seems to be that democracy would be more illiberal and hence we should support visionary dictators. I find that argument completely and wholly wrong. Dictators very rarely have the ability to change the course of a nation for the better. The best they can do is to keep the status quo and that ain’t enough in the Muslim world now.

Regarding Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf, of whom Zachary is a big fan, I think he is following the same line as General Zia did a couple of decades ago within the constraints of their time. General Zia was about the worst thing that happened to Pakistan and I hope Musharraf doesn’t turn out to be as bad. Zachary is young and probably has no recollection of the Zia years. I was the same age as Zachary is now when Zia was killed in a plane crash in 1988 and almost as naive at the time as he is now.

Daniel Drezner has a good critique of a similar idea from Fareed Zakaria’s new book “The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad”. According to Daniel, Fareed Zakaria says:

It took a long time for constitutional liberal democracy to develop properly in the West;

When democracy has been installed in places without a prior decentralization of religious, commercial, and political authority, bad things happen to democracy, i.e., Nazi Germany;

Encouraging the acceleration of democracy in the developing world will lead to democracies that are fundamentally illiberal, which would be bad. So, rather than cajole China into democratizing faster than it is currently doing, let nature take it’s course, otherwise you wind up with backsliding democracies, such as Russia.

Daniel disagrees (as do I):

Stable democracies have emerged without the preconditions Zakaria spells out. Some (big and small) examples: Botswana, Costa Rica, India, Japan, and the Baltic states.

The slow processes stressed by Zakaria have equally adverse consequences. States that are in the middle of Zakaria’s process are more dangerous than even illiberal democracies. As Jack Snyder has pointed out, these sort of states often have a sufficient mix of particularistic coalitions that lead to overexpansion, which leads to war. Snyder and Ed Mansfield have statistically demonstrated that states undergoing regime transition are far more likely to initiate wars than either democracies OR autocracies (click here for a precis of this argument).

As for illiberal democracies, it is undoubtedly true that their first few years are volatile ones, with lots of potentially aggressive leaders getting elected and then causing problems. However, as Stephen Walt has shown, these revolutionary states tend to mellow, and act as responsible members of the international system.

This doesn’t mean that illiberal democracies are necessarily better for world politics than slowly reforming authoritarian states are. But they are not necessarily worse, either. It’s more a question of timing – illiberal states that become democratic are more likely to have problems sooner rather than later, while authoritarian states that are slowly democratizing are likely to have problems later rather than sooner.

So, to conclude: a) states do not necessarily have to go through the same long-term evolution that England or America endured to become a liberal democracy, and b) over the long term, illiberal democracies are not necessarily more violent actors than other non-democratic states.

NOTE: Yes, I quoted two people with whom I share a name. None of us are related as far as I know.

By Zack at 5:02 PM in International Affairs , Islam and Other Religions , Pakistan , Politics | Comments (3) | TrackBack

Full Moon

A crop of the original image taken at full telephoto (190mm).

By Zack at 1:30 AM in Photography | Comments (1) | TrackBack

Japanese American Internment

Representative Howard Coble (R-NC), chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, agrees with the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II (“for their own protection”).

Rep. Howard Coble, R-N.C., made the remark Tuesday on WKZL-FM when a caller suggested Arabs in the United States should be confined. Another congressman who was interned as a child criticized Coble for the comment, as did advocacy groups.

Coble, chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, said he didn’t agree with the caller but did agree with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who established the internment camps.

“We were at war. They (Japanese-Americans) were an endangered species,” Coble said. “For many of these Japanese-Americans, it wasn’t safe for them to be on the street.”

Like most Arab-Americans today, Coble said, most Japanese-Americans during World War II were not America’s enemies.

Still, Coble said, Roosevelt had to consider the nation’s security.

“Some probably were intent on doing harm to us,” he said, “just as some of these Arab-Americans are probably intent on doing harm to us.”

Rep. Mike Honda (D-CA) disagreed:

Rep. Mike Honda, D-Calif., a Japanese-American who spent his early childhood with his family in an internment camp during World War II, said he spoke with Coble on Wednesday to learn more about his views.

“I’m disappointed that he really doesn’t understand the impact of what he said,” Honda said. “With his leadership position in Congress, that kind of lack of understanding can lead people down the wrong path.”

Eric Muller, who is an expert on the topic, had this to say on his “is that legal?” blog:

Representative Howard Coble (R-NC), who explained today that 120,000 Japanese Americans were placed into internment camps during World War II for their own protection, did not come to his bizarre views of the internment recently. Fifteen years ago he rose on the floor of the House of Representatives to speak and vote against the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, which offered an apology and a token redress payment of $20,000 to the surviving internees.

Folks, this is the guy running the show on homeland security in the House of Representatives. The guy who will have oversight over how well Tom Ridge’s new department is balancing national security with individual liberties.

If he’s not already doing so, Dennis Hastert should be looking for a new Chairman for Judiciary’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.

Dave Neiwert of the Orcinus blog also has a good post about this.

My take on this is the same as it was for Trent Lott. This is not a freshman representative. He has been in Congress since 1984. He is in a position to decide homeland security policy. I think Howard Coble should either apologize profusely, resign or be thrown out from the homeland security subcommittee.

By Zack at 12:23 AM in Civil Liberties , Politics | Comments (0) | TrackBack

بدھ 5 فروری 2003Wednesday, February 05, 2003

The Early Bird Bites Dust

I did my taxes really early this year and e-filed my federal return yesterday. Today, I received a W-2 from a company I had interned for a couple of years ago. They paid me a bonus or something last year. I had forgotten all about it. So now I have to file an amended return. That sucks. Fortunately, I use tax software (TaxCut Deluxe), so it is a somewhat easier process.

By Zack at 11:58 PM in Life | Comments (2) | TrackBack

Comment Problems

Haloscan seems to be having problems. The comments have been off and on since yesterday. Now they are working but some recent comments are gone. A notice on the Haloscan website says that server work is in progress. Hope they fix the problems soon.

By Zack at 11:43 PM in Internet | Comments (0) | TrackBack

National Minorities

Jonathan has a very interesting article talking about legal and political systems for indigenous populations and minority groups. He does a great job at outlining the solutions adopted in the EU and elsewhere and then discusses it in the context of the Israeli Arabs. I can’t recommend the article enough. Any excerpt cannot do it justice, so you should go there now to read it.

By Zack at 11:34 PM in International Affairs | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Marijuana

I don’t discuss drug policy since I don’t know much about it and also because I am a little conflicted about soft drugs like marijuana. The drug war is probably a bad idea in my opinion, but I don’t agree with my libertarian friends that making drugs legal would be an improvement. Free markets and capitalism can make big business out of marijuana use. That’s why I like Mark Kleiman’s posts on drug policy. Here is an excerpt from one of his recent posts:

If marijuana proved to be a substitute for, rather than a complement to, alcohol (the studies conflict) then making it legal would probably reduce crime and accidents. Legalizing it would also reduce the population behind bars by about 60,000, or 3%. Legal cannabis would eliminate a $10 billion per year illicit market, which even if its contribution to terrorism is negligible is still a noticeable social headache, and get several million people whose only current criminal activity is using pot back on the right side of the law: not a negligible benefit, in my estimation.

But if that meant that the current population of 2 to 3 million wake-and-bake potheads tripled, I’m not sure that would be a good trade. And legalization on anything like the alcohol model could easily lead to such an increase. Just think what the people who have convinced so many American kids to smoke tobacco cigarettes and drink beer could do if given free rein to market what in some ways is a much more attractive product. A legal cannabis industry, like most industries, would be heavily dependent on its steady, high-volume customers: the frequent flyers. (In the case of alcohol, 50% of the total industry volume goes to people who average four drinks a day, year-round, or more.) That means that a legal pot industry would be in the business of creating and sustaining potheads. The free market is a wonderful thing, but you don’t want it working against you in a situation like that.

If I got to make the laws, I think I’d make selling cannabis, or trading it for anything of value, a crime, but legalize growing your own, using it, or giving it away. That wouldn’t eliminate sales activity entirely, but it would eliminate mass-marketing. Yes, I can think of a bunch of objections to a “Grow your own” policy, but it may still be the least bad of our options.

Mark is a Professor of Public Policy at UCLA and is an expert on drug policy.

By Zack at 1:41 AM in Politics | Comments (0) | TrackBack

پیر 3 فروری 2003Monday, February 03, 2003

INS Document Shredding Case

Previous post here.

Here is the INS side of the story:

In response to the discovery of the document destruction, those who had filed applications and petitions at the California Service Center but had not yet received a receipt for their applications were urged to call a hotline at the Center to inquire about the status of their cases (1-949-831-8427). Applicants and petitioners who had received receipts during the period in question could also call the hotline to check the status of their cases. Where cases could not be found, applicants were then assisted in reconstructing their cases for processing by the Center. Also, INS re-mailed to applicants all requests for additional information that were sent out during the period in which the shredding took place.

By Zack at 7:06 PM in Immigration | Comments (2) | TrackBack

اتوار 2 فروری 2003Sunday, February 02, 2003

Columbia Tragedy

My prayers for the families of the seven astronauts, Rick Husband, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, William McCool and Ilan Ramon. May they rest in peace. When Challenger blew up, I was in the 10th grade and had a lot of interest in space travel. I was shocked by the accident but my thoughts were about its implications for space travel and not for the astronauts and their families. I am much older now as is the space program. So my thoughts today are for the people. I think the space program has reached a stage where this is not as big a setback as the Challenger disaster.

There is lots of coverage of the catastrophe in the blogosphere. Check Seth Johnson, InstaPundit, Rand Simberg or many others.

Since I am a later riser, I miss morning news. I was asleep at the time of the terrorist attacks on September 11 and was awakened by a phone call from my very scared wife (who was in New Jersey). I still remember the shock as my wife told me about the attacks. I was also asleep yesterday and the news of the shuttle breakup was the first thing I heard when I woke up in the afternoon.

By Zack at 2:37 AM in Miscellaneous | Comments (2) | TrackBack