Culture Briefs

Modern radicalism

“Radical Islamism is in no way an assertion of traditional Muslim values or religiosity. … In a tractional Muslim society, your identity is fixed by the society into which you are born; only when you live in a non-Muslim environment does it occur to you to ask who you are.

“The profound alienation that results makes poorly assimilated second- and third-generation Muslims susceptible to a pure, universalistic ideology like that of Osama bin Laden. Mohamed Atta and the other organizers of 9/11, the Madrid and London conspirators, and Mohammed Bouyeri, murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, all fall into this category.

“This means that more democracy and more modernization will not solve our near-term terrorism problem. I believe that both democracy and modernization are good things and should be promoted in the Middle East for their own sake. But we will continue to have a serious problem in democratic Western Europe, regardless of what happens in Egypt or Lebanon.”

— Francis Fukuyama, writing on “Defending and Advancing Freedom,” in the November issue of Commentary

Left, right, wrong

“Do you believe something can be wrong and constitutional at the same time? Or do you think that something can be right and unconstitutional?

“This is the fundamental question separating the ‘left’ and ‘right’ on judges. … Conservatives, God love ‘em, think the Constitution means something, which is a nice way of saying it doesn’t mean everything. …

“But the proponents of a living constitution don’t want to get bogged down arguing about the meaning of the Constitution; they want to argue about right and wrong. … This is why liberal justices are now fishing for precedents in foreign countries, because they can’t find what they need in actual precedent or text.

“These justices are lawyering themselves right out of a job. Because if the Supreme Court is there to decide what’s right and wrong, rather than what’s constitutional or unconstitutional, then we don’t need lawyers on the bench at all.”

— Jonah Goldberg, writing in the Nov. 21 issue of National Review

Paris intifada

“If France has these kinds of systemic problems with its Muslim population, then it is time to partition France. It’s time for an independent Muslim state to be created. After all, isn’t that what France and other European nations have determined is the proper solution for Israel? …

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