Rod Liddle and his beloved Jihadists

Rod Liddle, whose columns in the GQ (UK Edition) I could not read without at least one loud laugh, carries this style into the more worldly newspapers too. This morning, reading my favourite football news page I came across a link with Rod's smiling face. On the other side of the link was, as you might well have guessed, another piece of political comedie noire about Jihadists of Britain.

A more critical eye will surely have noticed - and questioned maybe - Rod's obsession with Muslim groups and their political struggles, but I am not critical of Rod, not least because I find his writings exceedingly amusing. Consider this passage:

More to the point, these jihadists, allied (so it is said) to the exiled, grinning imbecile Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammed, distributed thousands upon thousands of leaflets to the Muslims of Luton urging them to attend the demo, and all they were left with on the day were 20 bearded lunatics and, hovering behind the arras, a handful of ululating burqa-clad babes doing as they were bidden by their menfolk. In other words, an infinitesimally tiny minority.

The Value of Critical Thinking

In Japan, students are not very used to criticising in class. What they do is sit still, take notes, and nod. There are classes without a single question asked, and the teacher has the privilege of talking without being challenged. This happens even during seminars where students are supposed to speak up, never mind lectures.

Thus, a student more prone to critical thinking might sometimes draw surprised looks both from the instructor and classmates, because he or she would be standing out of the mass. For a student with experience of education in the West, especially in the United Kingdom, this environment may come as something bordering on absurd: how can you learn something without ever challenging things taken for granted? Only here in Japan did I face the necessity to consider the question of conformity, because it is very rare in this country to see someone challenging the conventional wisdom openly.

This raises more important questions: what is the role of critical thinking in social and political development? And it makes me think about the role of culture in development, the cultural differences between the West and Japan. Surely, this will take more than a year to explore and document, but I am more than ready to continue my observations of the Japanese society.

A more secularist America?

Another piece of interesting news comes from Andrew Sullivan, who links us to his Times of London article on atheism in America. A chunk of text he quotes on his blog:

It's a reminder to exercise a little skepticism when you hear of America’s religious exceptionalism. Yes, America is far more devout than most of western Europe; but it is not immune to the broader crises facing established religion in the West. The days when America’s leading intellectuals contained a strong cadre of serious Christians are over. There is no Thomas Merton in our day; no Reinhold Niebuhr, Walker Percy or Flannery O’Connor. In the arguments spawned by the new atheist wave, the Christian respondents have been underwhelming.

I did research on the topic very recently, for a short two-session course named "Politics and Religion in America" which I liked very much. The paper I wrote was on the return of the Religious (Christian) Right to the fore of political debate in the United States during the Bush years. I have always been interested in the roots of American religiosity, which becomes so conspicuous when compared to the European societies. The above article is a piece of good news for me.

Talk to me, babe, talk to me...

In his column-cum-blog on the Foreign Policy website Professor Stephen M. Walt hails a letter by a dozen veteran foreign policy officials that advise Obama to talk to Hamas. This is a realist step in the new president's foreign policy agenda, according to Walt, whose main line of criticism in the last several years was directed towards Bush's largely non-realist policy decisions.

According to the Boston Globe article quoted by Walt, the old foreign policy hands are also preparing a report on how exactly to begin the talks.

If this speculation becomes policy, it will mark a huge turn in the US Middle East policy, the turn long-awaited by the millions across the globe. Of course, there will be conditions dictated by the US, such as renunciation of violence and recognition of Israel, at the very least. But that the US is contemplating talking to an organisation it has defined for the last several years as "terrorist" is a clear sign of a change in political winds.