Global Culture
Items on Global development, immigration, environmentalism, wealth and poverty, and so on
A European Challenge to Anti-Americanism
Mon 01 Sep 2008 • Responses: 1 • by Joseph Loconte
For the better part of a decade, pollsters, pundits, and politicians have beaten the drums of anti-Americanism with a flamboyance that would rival Big Band legends Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa. Last week, however, America’s friends from across the Atlantic announced an initiative to pound back.
A group of British conservatives has launched America in the World, a London-based international alliance to combat anti-Americanism. Armed with briefings, polling data, policy analysis, and high-level political endorsements, America in the World seeks to become the most important fact-driven resource for people willing to entertain the case against anti-Americanism. The effort is the brainchild of Tim Montgomerie, founder and editor of the influential political website ConservativeHome, and Stephan Shakespeare, the founder of YouGov, a prestigious opinion-polling company in Britain.
The U.N.’s Human Rights Charade
Wed 13 Aug 2008 • Responses: 0 • by Joseph Loconte
The Geneva-based U.N. Watch has just released its critique of the tenure of former U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour. Entitled, “The Right to Name and Shame,” the report offers a clear-eyed look at the record of the U.N.’s most prestigious human-rights official. Sadly—but predictably—Ms. Arbour’s performance, painstakingly examined, receives mixed reviews:
Islamist Ideology in the UK: Doing Fine
Sun 10 Aug 2008 by David Aikman
Three years after “7/7,” the British version of 9/11, when four suicide bombers immolated themselves and fifty-two other innocents—British people, foreign residents, or visitors to the UK, including Muslims and an Israeli woman who feared to return to Israel because of the danger of suicide bombings—any belief that the Islamist rage fueling the murderous rampage grew out of economic resentment has surely been laid to rest.
At least two new two pieces of information back up this view. First, poll after poll has revealed that British-born Muslims at British universities share a view of Islam dangerously sympathetic to Islamism, the preferred technical term for radical Islamic ideology. Second, two former British Islamists, Ed Husain and Maarjid Nawaz, have founded a counter-extremist Islamic think-tank in the UK that exposes the domestic roots of British Islamic extremism and is attempting to counter extremist ideas freely current in the British Muslim community.
Remembering the Soviet Union
Fri 25 Jul 2008 by David Aikman
A museum in Tallin, Estonia, offers an eye-opening glimpse into a terrifying past.
Tallin, Estonia.
The first odd thing you notice in the museum is the collection of ancient suitcases neatly lined up near the main entrance. What are they doing there? Then it hits you. This is not a museum of the history of the travel business, but a history of occupation; Soviet occupation. The suitcases were brought to the museum by hundreds of Estonians who were fortunate enough to have survived deportation to Siberia in the 1940s and who wanted to testify to what happened in their lives when Estonia belonged to the Soviet Union. Tourists on cruise-ships that stop at Baltic ports all the way to St. Petersburg can visit the museum on excursions often called, “Life in Soviet Estonia.” Participation in such a tour is an eerie and eye-opening glimpse into a terrifying past.
Israel-Lebanon: A Clash of Cultures
Fri 18 Jul 2008 by David Aikman
The biggest loser in the “transaction” between Israel and Hezbollah is Lebanon.
In the Middle East last week, no two scenes could have highlighted more vividly the clash of cultures in the Arab-Israeli dispute than the contrasting events in Lebanon and in Israel. In Beirut, there were shouts of acclamation, brass bands, and kisses on the cheek for the returning heroes—along with crowing signs in Arabic that read “humiliation” across a photograph of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. In Israel, the return of the bodies of two Israeli soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, was followed by the mournful sounds of funerals conducted with quiet dignity in Nahariya and Haifa for the two men. The exchange of two dead soldiers for five living prisoners and 199 dead Lebanese and Palestinian fighters was the fruit of some eighteen months of painful negotiation between Israel and Hezbollah that followed the 33-day “July War” in 2006 between Israel and Hezbollah.
America’s Most Important Export
Wed 16 Jul 2008 by Don Eberly and Joseph Loconte
The Upside of Globalization
In the face of reported growing anti-American sentiment, Senior Fellows Don Eberly and Joseph Loconte look at factors critics often overlook—most notably the transformative power of America’s civil society in the developing world.
China’s Olympics: The Earthquake Dividend
Mon 30 Jun 2008 by David Aikman
The long run-up to the opening of the Summer Olympic Games in Beijing in August has been more volatile than for any Olympics since the U.S.-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics. First were the serious questions about the degree of pollution in China’s capital city and pollution’s potential effect on athletes and their performance. Then came the controversy surrounding the much-publicized journey to Beijing of the Olympic Torch. Protesters in several countries tried to snatch or douse the torch because of sympathy for Tibetans who rioted against the Chinese in March this year. Counter-protests brought hundreds of Chinese into the streets of Western cities and inspired often vicious Chinese Internet blog posts against the West in general.
Me Me Me Me!
Thu 26 Jun 2008 by Mark Meador
Jennifer Byrne, in her recent column at PopMatters, posted an excellent piece on the “My” phenomenon that has taken hold of the Internet. The ubiquity of the word struck her as she navigated a “My UPS” page to track a package.
“Out of curiosity, I decided to do a search under the word 'My', just to see what came up. Here’s just a smattering of what I found: My T-Mobile, My New York Times, My Widgets, My Feeds, My Tupperware, My Anime, My Netscape, and My Monster.”
Zimbabwe, the Scandal of Africa
Tue 24 Jun 2008 by David Aikman
It certainly looks as if the Almighty’s help will be needed in removing Mugabe from power.
The average American—or average Irishman or Frenchman, for that matter—could be forgiven for not knowing the answer to the following question: which country in the world has inflation of more than 15,000 percent, unemployment of 80 percent, and the lowest life-expectancy rate in the world (age 37 for men)? The answer—Zimbabwe—is not only the scandal of Africa today, but also the current scandal of world politics.
The immediate crisis in Zimbabwe is that the country’s president, Robert Mugabe, seems quite determined not to permit opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai to assume political power in the country. In an initial election March 29, Tsvangirai, leader of the political party Movement for Democratic Change, won 47.9 percent of the vote, to Mugabe’s 43.2 percent. The election results, however, were not released until May 2, however, leading the opposition to charge that Mugabe’s party, ZANU-PF (Zimbabwe African People’s Union—Patriotic Front), had suppressed the results.
Russert and the Crystal Ball Media
Mon 23 Jun 2008 by Joseph Loconte
The death last week of political journalist Tim Russert prompted a brief burst of media reflection, not only on Mr. Russert’s professional legacy but also on the chronic superficiality of virtually all the major broadcast media. Yet this moment of reflection was merely that—it could not survive a 24-hour news cycle. Meanwhile, media coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign arguably ranks as among the most vapid, irrelevant, and poll-driven in American history. At his best, Mr. Russert swam against this tide during his long tenure at NBC’s Meet the Press.
In the current issue of The National Interest, Glenn Greenwald takes pundits and journalists to task for this self-inflicted problem. In “The Perilous Punditocracy,” Mr. Greenwald sees the same vices afflicting the print media.
