In assessing the frame of mind of the public at the close of the year, the Pew Research Center found that
Consistent with the mood of the nation all year, 2010 is closing on a down note. Fully 72% are dissatisfied with national conditions, 89% rate national economic conditions as only fair or poor, and majorities or pluralities think the country is losing ground on nine of 12 major issues.
Those figures aren’t surprising — but for President Obama and his political team, they must be quite worrisome. Right now the American people, by large margins, believe we’re heading in the wrong direction. And to borrow a favorite Obama metaphor, the president is the person with the keys to the car and his hand on the wheel.
Unless Mr. Obama is able to shift this trajectory by this time next year, his chances for re-election will be long.
while i sadly agree with trager’s ‘j’accuse’ of zakaria’s hypocritical sloth – and slothful hypocrisy – my revulsion is less nuanced: since when does ‘institutional discrimination’ justify, explain or excuse shooting people in cold blood in a hotel lobby?
…the inherent idiocy of these ‘root cause’ analyses is that they invite precisely the sort of repression they ostensibly abhor…at what point does a ‘mainstream’ population collectively decide that islam is a ‘root cause’ of societal unrest and violence?
as george orwell observed, some ideas are so foolish that only an intellectual can believe in them…
if he’s not careful, zakaria runs the risk of making orwell’s aphorism look good
It can be argued, that the “root cause” of people turning to terrorism is, partially, fareed zakarias of the world creating a reason for such marginalization.
Trager’s criticism of Fareed Zakaria is a little unfair.
Zakaria has clearly, and right, sought a career, not as an Indian expatriate, championing his coreligionists back home, but as an American writing from an American perspective about world events.
Trager however rightly notes that an attack by British Muslims on Jews in India cannot reasonably be explained as a reaction to Hindu discrimination of Muslims.
When CNN International reported on the Mumbai siege, the anchorwoman constantly referred to the “gunmen”, not the “terrorists”.
Fareed Zakaria is more often wrong than right. Perhaps that’s why CNN gave him his own television program. Most disturbing is his “American’s wrong” reflexive response to all international matters. In fact, he and Christiane Amanpour are virtually inseparable.
Osama bin Laden found the root cause of Islamic terrorism in the Koran: “I was ordered to fight all men until they say—There is no God but Allah.”
One thing I haven’t seen anyone note in these recent discussions on “root causes” is the obvious fact that the terrorists themselves use these kinds of arguments to craft their own propaganda–they have become proficient at bringing their own “root causes” commonplaces into their various manifestos along with other leftist tripe, regarding global warming, “unfair” election practices in the U.S., etc.–obviously, whatever they pick up in the media and think might be useful in “confirming” the views of the West’s useful idiots. So, in addition to everything else, writers like Zakaria are scriptwriters for the narratives the terrorists construct.
Hindus have their own problems but the Muslims have one overarching cause of their troubles. They exclude one half of their number from education or participation in the life of the mind. “Tying one hand behind my back” is another way of putting it.
People who are rational find it hard to recognize that there are those who are irrational. Jihadism is an irrational movement. There was no way that the Mumbai violence could have helped the cause of those who perpetrated it. The same is true of 9/11 and of the horrible bombings that took place in London and Madrid. Jihadists offer their own lives in order to take the lives of others. They do so because they think it is virtuous and beautiful to die in a jihad.
Every now and then, insanity sweeps over parts of the world. What the Nazis did was utterly irrational. The same is true of the great famine that Mao and the Chinese Communist Party created in 1959. The same is true of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. We shouldn’t expect the motives of insane movements to make sense.
What is shameful is the arrogance of someone (Trager) who knows absolutely nothing about the plight of India’s Muslims using a five-second lexis query to justify slandering one of the finest journalists out there. Ethnicity is not an assignment editor. Do African-American journalists HAVE TO cover only African-American issues? Besides the belittling racist undertone of Trager’s viewpoint, he is wrong on the “empirical” point as well.
Let me put in terms that he could more easily understand: If Jews were being persecuted in country X, and fanatical Jews in country Y attacked country X to avenge their people’s plight, I don’t think it would be a stretch to make it clear the persecution of the Jews in country X had something to do with the attack.
It seems like the only root explanation that would satisfy Trager and his fanatical worldview is that all Muslims are evil and crazy.
Disgusted
Let me put in terms that he could more easily understand: If Jews were being persecuted in country X, and fanatical Jews in country Y attacked country X to avenge their people’s plight, I don’t think it would be a stretch to make it clear the persecution of the Jews in country X had something to do with the attack.
It’s you who understand these terms better, not Trager.
1. In what sense is Zakaria good journalist? What has he been right or impressive about?
2. Do you have any evidence that the “gunmen” in Mumbay were trying to “avenge their people’s plight”? About the only thing I’ve seen is their reference to prisoners and Kashmir, which is routine.
3. I know of only one case which can be considered a jew killing indiscriminately, Goldstein, and even then it was a case of being distraught by personal tragedy. Did Trager rationalize Goldstein?
4. If there were a people who could have been justified to indiscriminate avenging, it’s the jews in history. Yet they NEVER reacted like that.
By using this comparison and impugning the selective understanding to Trager you are revealing the racist kind of argument that you accuse Trager of. Just take your place in line.
Zakaria is just another muslim practicing “taqiya.” He claims that “One of the untold stories of India is that the Muslim population has not shared in the boom the country has enjoyed over the last ten years.”
Really? And how is that relevant? The muslims in India have been perpetrating atrocities for a hell of a lot longer than ten years. The economic boom in India is not the starting point for terrorism there. They’ve been commiting “revenge” massacres and murders ever since they lost power in the seventeenth century. Using phony Hindu oppression of muslims to aplogize for the latest act of muslim terrorism is as disingenuous as claiming poverty and helplessness are the root cause of muslim terrorism. Only morons like “Disgusted” and President elect Obama are stupid enough to fall for this dreck. Both claim any criticism of terrorist apologists is “racist.”
Zakaria is not a shamefully unobservant journalist. He is a blatant apologist for terrorists. He’s a muslim. He is bound by his religion to lie in its service. Just because he’s well groomed and part of the media intelligentsia doesn’t mean he’s honest or trustworthy. Quite the opposite. What could be a more mendacious combination than a muslim journalist, for God’s sake? He will always go out of his way to defend fellow muslims, especially whenever they commit their latest atrocity. Expecting a muslim to honestly portray his religions depravity is like asking a journalist to honestly portray his deceitful profession.
When are you people going to learn?
#10 approaches the Swiftian. Magnificent satire!
I always come back to a simple formulation with this type of argument. It is that while the ends do not justify the means, the means invariably explain the ends. I recall after 9/11 self-parodying “explanations” about how the terorists supposedly were protesting Western support for undemocratic Arab governments. You can well imagine my disappointment then when, in those instances that the terrorists did impose their vision of polity on others in the Muslim world, it turned out to be the same practice of barbarism and slaughter and not the inauguration of liberal democracy. Somehow I imagine that the practitioners of indiscriminate slaughter and murder as we saw in Mumbai are not seeking social justice. It’s not like we haven’t seen this game before and the actual viability of similar root cause analyses over time. And as people have rightly pointed out, if such acts of terror are truly intrinsically unjustifiable acts, then pro forma references to alleged root causes is missing the central issue. The cause doesn’t matter. The act and its perpetrators deserve and require unqualified condemnation, and the moment we engage in such facile explanations (like the multitude of false explanations after 9/11) we begin the process of morally qualifying what we duplicitously claim to be an act of unqualified evil.
The root cause of Islamist terrorism is their beliefs, not some victim status. When rich and/or powerful they remain bloodthirsty.
Great send up of Zakaria. I’ve watched his career since he was a college freshman, and it’s been readily apparent all the while where his greatest loyalty lies: his own self-promotion. Zakaria is Geraldo Rivera for the foreign policy set. Nice, bite-sized pieces of reassuring pablum with a headline hook. A totally overrated blowhard.
Good job! Exactly! Oh, and, Disgusted? Which Muslims in America were being so persecuted that it caused 9/11?
You got your handle wrong. It’s Disgust-ING.
Zakaria engages in what I call “vicarious terrorism.” In fact, he hasn’t a clue what motivated the Islamofascist terrorists to commit their atrocities. He uses their actions as an opportunity to air his OWN grievances, and to demand the changes he wants, based on the implicit threat that the terrorists will kill more innocents unless Zakaria gets his way. He is no different than the guy who reads about a kidnapping in the newspaper and sends his own ransom note trying to cash in for his own benefit.
I usually disagree, on principle, with CNN. However calling the murderers gunmen might be OK. They are pathological thugs getting their jollies by torture and murder hired by rich Muslims to kill Jews, Christians and Hindus.
Good point on Jews attacking other countries to revenge the plight of their brothers and sisters. Can you list those for me? Like Israel attacking Ethiopia for persecuting the ethnic Jews of the Highlands. How about mad Rabbinical students strapping on bomb vests, entering a bus in Cairo to kill innocents to revenge Egypt’s slaughter of the innocents in the time of Moses. Not all Muslims are terrorists but most terrorist are Muslim. Why is that?
Somehow Zakaria’s “institutional discrimination” against Indian Muslims resulted in Abdul Kalam, a Muslim, being elected by the Indian Parliament to the position of President, Head of State, and Supreme Commander of the Indian armed forces in 2002.
And never mind all of the IIT trained Muslim Indian engineers in grad school or industry in the U.S.
All arguments supporting terrorism are invalid and stupid. It amounts to say that people who are discriminated against or meted with injustice have a right to bear arms and start killing innocent civilians. First of all the Muslims in India are one of the most appeased community.
In Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) where Muslims were (and still are) in the majority, the governments have repeatedly discriminated against the Hindus were it in jobs or education. Have the Hindus in J&K bearing arms and killing the civilians? NO! Instead, the Hindus started migrating to the rest of the country to make a better living for themselves. Finally in 1989/1990 they drove away almost all Hindus from Kashmir.
In short, Muslims (especially the hardcore Muslim) will not stop at anything but to convert all non-Mulims to Islam. Even then they will not rest, they will then fight amongst themselves e.g. Sheas and Sunnis.