David Aikman
Musings and commentary on the world scene from Senior Fellow David Aikman
China, Tibet, and the Olympics
Mon 05 May 2008 • Responses: 0 • by David Aikman
Placing the Olympics above world politics is a valiant but vain hope.
When the French nobleman and historian Baron Philipe de Coubertin revived the idea of the Olympic Games in Paris in 1894, he was motivated by both nationalism and idealistic internationalism. He felt the French had lost their war with Prussia in 1870 because of their poor physical conditioning. But de Coubertin had also been inspired by an English physician, botanist, and magistrate, William Penny Brookes. Another eccentric idealist and philanthropist, Brookes had first organized an “Olympian Games” in 1850 in the English rural village of Much Wenlock, Shropshire. De Coubertin visited the Much Wenlock Olympics in 1890, and returned to France inspired.
Obama’s ‘Bitter’ Comments
Sun 27 Apr 2008 • Responses: 3 • by David Aikman
The rigors of the campaign lead to what may be a landmark moment.
Every presidential campaign cycle has its landmark moments. Television viewers watching the debate in 1960 between Richard Nixon and John Kennedy were shocked by how unattractive Nixon’s five-o’clock shadow appeared. He lost the debate on television, even though those who heard the debate on the radio thought Nixon had scored more points. Then there was the moment when Ronald Reagan seized the microphone during a 1980 Republican primary debate in New Hampshire and announced that he had “paid” for the microphone and was going to hold onto it. And who can forget Michael Dukakis, George Bush’s opponent in the 1988 election, trying, by driving a tank on camera, to look manly and in-charge and to demonstrate he was commander-in-chief material? Unfortunately, he simply looked absurd.
Barack Obama and Rev. Jeremiah Wright
Tue 01 Apr 2008 • Responses: 0 • by David Aikman
By many observers’ reckoning, Senator Barack Obama’s major speech on race in the U.S. at Philadelphia’s Constitution Center March 18 was one of the rhetorical highlights of the 2008 presidential election season. Obama’s 5,000-word address was skillfully crafted, eloquent, and a powerful attempt to bring balance—and the views of both blacks and whites—into discussion of “America’s original sin” of racial injustice over the centuries. As the son of a white woman from Kansas and a black man from Kenya (which raises the question why people of mixed race with one black parent and one white parent are almost always deemed to be black and not white), Obama is certainly in a good position to shed light on this often poorly illustrated topic.
Death in a Jerusalem Yeshiva
Mon 24 Mar 2008 • Responses: 1 • by David Aikman
Where Do They Go from Here?
The murder in early March of eight Jewish students at the Mercaz Harav yeshiva in Jerusalem established some disturbing precedents. To begin with, it was the first major outbreak of violence in Jerusalem since 2004 and the first in Israel as a whole since a suicide-bomb blast in Tel Aviv in 2006. Second, it was committed by an Arab resident of East Jerusalem with no previously known ties to terrorist groups. That shook the nerves not only of Jewish residents of West Jerusalem, in which the murders took place, but of Arab East Jerusalemites worried about potential reprisals against them. Whatever their views on Israeli-Palestinian relations in general, East Jerusalemites have not usually been involved in major violence between Jews and Arabs. Third, an official daily newspaper of the Palestinian Authority, with which Israel is attempting to negotiate a peaceful settlement of issues leading to a Palestinian state, praised the murder without reservation. Al Hayat al Jadida placed a picture of the shooter, Alaa Abu D’heim, on its front page, proclaiming him to be a shahid—that is, as a fighter who had given his life in jihad, he had earned instant placement in the Muslim version of paradise, complete with access to seventy-two virgins.
America’s Religious Supermarket
Fri 07 Mar 2008 • Responses: 1 • by David Aikman
If anyone doubted that America has become a national supermarket of different world religions, with people changing brands at a dizzying pace, they need doubt no more. A new survey by one of the country’s most prestigious research organizations, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, shows how rapidly and dramatically the religious scene in the U.S. is changing. The U.S. Religious Landscape Survey was conducted during the spring and summer months in 2007, and involved interviews with no fewer than 35,000 Americans.
The basic outline of the landscape is not so new to those who have studied the American religious scene in the recent past. Though 78.4 percent of adult Americans (according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates, in late February 2008 the total estimated U.S. population was 303.5 million people) describe themselves as Christian in some category or other, Protestants, the majority religion of Americans for most of our history, may soon be a minority. Today, they hold onto a narrow majority of 51.3 percent. Catholics comprise 23.9 percent and Evangelicals, a sub-category of Protestants, a robust 26.3 percent of American adults.
Bush in Africa: Unexpected Encomiums
Mon 25 Feb 2008 • Responses: 1 • by David Aikman
President Bush has not exactly been above the fold of the front pages of most American newspapers these days, let alone on prime-time TV news. Understandably, with one of the most interesting presidential election cycles in decades well under way, attention has been focused on whoever is considered most likely to be Bush’s successor as the tenant of Washington’s 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in just eleven months. Many people—especially Democrats, who smell blood and victory in November 2008—wish that the President would just go away. His popularity is quite low, with poll numbers regularly in the 30s. Past months have even had him rated in California within two points of President Richard Nixon after Watergate, and Reuters last October pegged him at 24 percent. (At the same time, however, Gallup had him in the 30s).
But the President doesn’t have to go away until noon on January 20, 2009, and as President Nixon once famously remarked, even three weeks is a long, long time in American politics. Every president holds onto the possibility of a turnaround in popularity. In fact, the President for the past week has been in one continent of the world where he is decidedly popular: Africa. During a five-day tour of five countries—Benin, Tanzania, Rwanda, Ghana, and Liberia—Bush was welcomed by ecstatic crowds and told by one African leader, “You have been a good friend of our country, and of Africa.”
Political Democracy at Its Most Interesting
Thu 14 Feb 2008 • Responses: 2 • by David Aikman
Can anyone recall a presidential election in the U.S. more interesting than the current one? I can’t. In the more than four decades since I moved to the U.S. (initially not being qualified to vote), I’ve encountered everything from apathy to zealotry, with cynicism and despair in good measure in between. But I never can recall the degree of excitement that has been elicited among voters, especially by Barack Obama.
When I was in graduate school in the late 1960s, I was taken aback by the dismay of most college undergraduates in 1968 that Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson’s vice president, was running against Richard Nixon. Nixon? Many young people in the 1960s would rather gag than pronounce that word. American intellectuals since that time have developed a cottage industry of running down the quality of American politicians. But they have no case to make in 2008.
The Rise of Political Hatred
Mon 04 Feb 2008 • Responses: 1 • by David Aikman
An article in the Wall Street Journal last November by Peter Berkowitz, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, had a disturbing observation. After he had carefully explained to a group of politically liberal academics whom he was hosting for dinner that he was dismayed by the vitriolic hatred expressed in attacks upon President Bush, he was harangued by several of the guests. According to Berkowitz, one guest responded in a loud, seething, in-your-face voice, “What’s irrational about hating George W. Bush?”
Eyeless in Gaza
Thu 24 Jan 2008 by David Aikman
In case you didn’t know it, “Eyeless in Gaza” is the name of a British, post-punk New Wave musical duo who chose the name of their band from the novel by the same name by British writer Aldous Huxley. Huxley’s novel, which has nothing to do with the Middle East, was first published in 1936. Its title is borrowed from a line in Milton’s poem, Samson Agonistes, portraying the fate of the Biblical character Samson, who finally achieves revenge on the Philistines by pulling down the temple of Dagon with the last remains of his strength, and killing, in his dying act, more Philistines than he slew when he was a strong young man.
But less than two months after the much-publicized one-day conference in Annapolis, Maryland, hosted by President Bush to re-launch Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, “eyeless in Gaza” might well be an appropriate subhead—to use journalistic jargon—for anyone associated with negotiations over the future of Gaza and of Israeli-Palestinian relations as a whole.
A Church in China
Wed 16 Jan 2008 • Responses: 3 • by David Aikman
Independent, But Not Underground
“Sauna City” is a commercial building in the Asian Games district of Beijing that is only a few years old but already is beginning to look distinctly shabby. The main entrance to the building has a sign over it, “Night Club,” and there are advertisements for various kinds of bath-house activity; it doesn’t look like the most salubrious location in the Chinese capital. But as a visitor approaches the right-hand-side front entrance, his attention is captured by a most unexpected sound wafting down from somewhere above: Christian hymn singing.
