Your Action Needed For Choudhury

[Posted by reader_iam]

In our mailbox, from Rabbi Sue Levy (I have changed case to eliminate blocks of caps):

House Resolution #64 in support of Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury will be considered in the House Foreign Affairs Committee this week. The good news: The resolution has sixteen co-signers and is assured of passage on the House floor with a large majority.

The bad news: In order to move the resolution out of committee, there must be ten co-signers who are actually members of the Foreign Affairs Committee. At this time, we have only three, and we have only two business days to accomplish this. (We were only given two days notice that the resolution would be on the agenda for this week.) All the co-signers must be onboard by Tuesday afternoon.

The ACJ and the Simon Wiesenthal Center will focus on contacting the committee members in California.

I am listing the committee members whose co-sponsorship is needed below. To make this easier for you, they are listed by states.

1. Please call a member in your state or one of those with asterisks beside their names. The phone number for the house of representatives is: 202- 224- 3121.

2. Discussion points: Salah Uddin Shoiab Choudhury, moderate Muslim journalist, on trial now for sedition and treason for publishing a newspaper which supports israel - only one in islamic world, for promoting interfaith understanding and for writing about the danger of radical islam. Subject to death penalty. No jury. No defense witnesses permitted. Resolution asks to drop charges. European union has already passed a similar resolution. This is a bipartisan resolution.

3. When you reach a staff person in a congressional office, ask them to call you back the same day to say whether the representative will co-sponsor.

3. Tell that individual to be in touch with Jeff Phillips in the office of Rep. Mark Kirk, 202-225-4835, who is the point person for this resolution.

4. Let me know who you have called and the response.

5. Please forward this post to anyone who might be helpful.

MEMBERS OF THE HOUSE FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE WHO ARE NOT YET CO-SPONSORS OF HOUSE RESOLUTION #64.

*Arkansas: John Borman
Arizona: Jeff Flake, Gabrielle Giffords

California: Howard Berman, Brad Sherman, Dana Rohrbacher, Elton Gallegher, Edward Royce, Diane Watson, Lynn Woolsey, Linda Sanchez, Jim Costa

Colorado: Thomas Tancredo

Florida: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Connie Mack, Robert Wexler, Ron Klein

*Georgia: David Scott

Illinois: Donald Manzullo

Indiana: Dan Burton, Mike Pence

Massachusetts: Bill Delahunt

*Missouri: Russ Carnahan

*Nebraska: Jeff Fortenberry

New Jersey: Christopher Smith, Donald Payne, Albio Sires

New York:
*Gary Ackerman, Chairman, Subcommittee on Middle East and South Asia
Elliot Engle, *Gregory Meeks

*North Carolina: Brad Miller

*Ohio: Steven Chabot

Oregon: David Wu

*South Carolina: Joe Wilson, J. Gresham Barrett, Bob Inglis

*Tennessee: John Tanner

*Texas: Ruben Hinojosa, Ted Poe, Ron Paul, Michael Mc Call

Virginia: Jo Ann Davis

Washington: Adam Smith

Please do what you can, and note the deadline for signatories (Tuesday afternoon).

Moral Foreign Policy

[posted by Callimachus]

Reliving the Ford Administration during the late celebrations of his life reminded me that this was the moment the Republican Party enshrined "morality" in its foreign policy, though it was not Ford's doing and in fact it was a repudiation of the foreign policy Kissinger was running under Ford's authority (or want of it).

The 1976 GOP convention might end up being the last of the old breed, the kind of convention where the nomination really hung in the balance when the hall doors opened. Ford had to hold off Ronald Reagan and it was no sure thing that he would accomplish it. Reagan's performance in conceding at the end just about assured himself the nomination in 1980.

When I read over the "moral foreign policy" passage in the platform today, I can see how much of it was tailored by "Reagan's Raiders" specifically to embarrass Ford, and how much of it was crafted with an eye to the immediate realities of the Cold War. Jesse Helms, among others whom nobody ever accused of being politically high-minded, had a hand in shaping it.

But there it is: Unintended consequences and all.

The goal of Republican foreign policy is the achievement of liberty under law and a just and lasting peace in the world. The principles by which we act to achieve peace and to protect the interests of the United States must merit the restored confidence of our people.

We recognize and commend that great beacon of human courage and morality, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for his compelling message that we must face the world with no illusions about the nature of tyranny. Ours will be a foreign policy that keeps this ever in mind.

Ours will be a foreign policy which recognizes that in international negotiations we must make no undue concessions; that in pursuing detente we must not grant unilateral favors with only the hope of getting future favors in return.

Agreements that are negotiated, such as the one signed in Helsinki, must not take from those who do not have freedom the hope of one day gaining it.

Finally, we are firmly committed to a foreign policy in which secret agreements, hidden from our people, will have no part.

Honestly, openly, and with firm conviction, we shall go forward as a united people to forge a lasting peace in the world based upon our deep belief in the rights of man, the rule of law and guidance by the hand of God.

Ford's snub of Solzhenitsyn; Brezhnev at Helsinki, all now distant chapters in a cold war. Platforms come and go, but somehow, on some level, the thing stuck. "[L]iberty under law and a just and lasting peace in the world ... principles ... the restored confidence of our people ... face the world with no illusions about the nature of tyranny ... must not take from those who do not have freedom the hope of one day gaining it." Probably because four years later Regan won the election and actually began to run the show that way -- at least most of the time.

People say now we're at the end of the curve that began in Kansas City that August. That George W. Bush has run that ship on the rocks, and we'll go happily back to realpolitik. People who lay claim to the compassion of others merrily advocate pulling out of Iraq the better to let the Sunnis and Shi'ites butcher one another, as though that conflict was rooted in the people's desires and not propelled from the top down. What are they to us, after all? Just more surly brown people.

Addendum: Good lord, you think we Republicans/Americans are intolerable with our striving for morality? Imagine us without it.

Paddle Your Camus

Marc at American Future links to this wonderful assessment of the international Left's current ethical quagmire by Alan Johnson, Democratiya's editor and co-organiser of Unite Against Terror.

The piece is expanded from a speech he gave in Paris in February, titled "Camus: Moral Clarity on an Age of Terror." Camus was a good choice to hang this on, both for his lifelong opposition to totalitarianism and for his personal tragedy in trying to shore up a moderate's middle and a cross-cultural dialogue in Algeria, in the first modern war between the West and Islam. According to Johnson, "the left has not seen the terrorist threat plain":

Like the dreamy citizens of Oran in Camus' novel The Plague, it has embraced denial ('there are no rats') or worse - incoherent anti-Americanism ('the rats are to be defended') or self-loathing ('we are the rats').

"The left," he writes, "used to think it would be a truly historic moral gain when crimes against humanity trumped the claims of 'national sovereignty' and placed a genuine responsibility to protect, a solemn duty to rescue, upon an 'international community.' " And as recently as the 1990s, "it was the left who argued most strongly for a humanitarian intervention - in the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere – and struggled to make such interventions work for the people not for big power interests." But like incompetent bettors, the left has suddenly swerved into a defense of absolute state sovereignty and international rules-games just as a moment in history when a world ruled and controled entirely by nation-states is in crisis.

The left should stand in relation to this new world as the late Charles Dickens stood to Victorian England - a radical reforming critic, 'fierce and corrosive', as Irving Howe put it, putting cruelty first. Our agenda should be global democracy-promotion, free trade unions, human rights, women's rights, economic development and social justice, making tyranny history, making poverty history. In short, a new global social-democracy.

However, faced with the puzzling contradictions of the new political landscape parts of the left are sullen and negativist - anti-this, anti-that, always anti-American, but deeply unsure what they are for. Faced with the colour-coded democratic revolutions in the ex-Stalinist states (and their US-funded NGOs), or the first signs of an Arab Spring (being cheered on by 'that cowboy Bush'), or the purple fingers of an Iraqi voter (walking out of a polling station guarded by coalition troops), or the smiles of women – women! - cabinet members in Afghanistan's newly elected government (the result of a war fought by the 'Great Satan'), too many on the liberal-left are sitting on their hands. Some are even sneering and scoffing. Eyes are rolled, subjects are changed. Consequence? Large swathes of people are opened up to the reactionary anti-imperialists – who offer to theorise and justify that negativism and that scoffing and that eye-rolling.

It's a bold call to hold on to the dream, in a dark hour. Johnson concludes with an extended soccer metaphor which might lose American readers. Which would be a shame, because if you gave up you'd miss this:

COMBATIVE DEMOCRACIES

Enough, already. We need to create combative democracies marked by the proactive defence of the liberal constitutional order and the open society and promote that order and that society as non-negotiable normative ends. We should seek a more active role for an educated and aroused civil society.

In 2006 British Totalitarian Islamists marched on a public street with placards screaming 'Europe, You'll Come Crawling When the Mujahideen Come Calling'. The police looked on. Incensed passers-by were told that if they did not go away 'in ten seconds' they would be arrested. Here was Camus' 'curious reversal' in which 'innocence is called on to justify itself.' Well, enough of that.

Against Totalitarian Political Islam's anti-modernism, irrationalism, fear of freedom, loathing of the woman, hatred of the Jew, and the cult of master-slave human relations, we must wield a more powerful animating idea and educate citizens in devotion to it. I am in Paris so I do not need to cast around for that idea. It is the great promise of the liberal democratic revolutions of the 18th century – the animating moral ideas of liberté, equalité, fraternité, the rights of man, life liberty and the pursuit of happiness. We make those beautiful ideas the property of every individual by our efforts to continue - and extend globally - the social democratic, feminist and human rights revolutions of the 19th and 20th centuries.

We must not be embarrassed to treat these animating ideas as sacred. It is not the least of the baleful consequences of postmodernism that a trite cynical deconstruction of all ideals, a playful relativising of all values, and an glib mockery of the notion of truth saps the sinews, and erodes the identity, of a combative democracy – terrorism is always 'terrorism' and democracy is always 'democracy'. Inverted commas have come to replace reason. Irony has displaced intellectual responsibility to ones fellows.

We need an alternative intellectual and cultural model to the Zealot and the Deconstructionist. The Italian democratic political philosopher Norberto Bobbio wisely called on us to adhere to 'the most salutary fruits of the European intellectual tradition, the value of enquiry, the ferment of doubt, a willingness to dialogue, a spirit of criticism, moderation of judgement, philological scruple, a sense of the complexity of things'. This mentality we must pit against what Paul Berman has called 'the paranoid and apocalyptic nature of the totalitarian mindset'.