President tunes out cable news

For all its tireless bluster, FOX News is, for all intent and purposes, wasting its time and energy trying to chastise the president or somehow influence policy. Why? Because President Barack Obama isn’t watching cable news, and that includes CNN and MSNBC. Any president worth his wait in salt wouldn’t be influenced by the media anyway, but for all of Obama’s inadequacies at this point, namely his hawkish drone program and his thus far failed promise to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, we can at least take heart in the fact that we have a president who still consumes publications like The New York Times and The Washington Post in written form, whether in newsprint or digital, which, I might add, is more preferable by several large degrees from a vice presidential nominee in 2008 — who would have been one heart beat away from assuming the highest office in the land — not being able to name a single publication that she reads on a daily basis.

Here is former press secretary Jay Carney talking about Obama’s media proclivities:

CNN-bola

Anderson Cooper had the gall today to say CNN isn’t trying to stir up fear with its almost continuous coverage of this Ebola stupidity, but instead, the station is “spreading information.”

Thousands dead in West Africa. Meh. Who cares? A handful of Americans threatened: Time to put the entire CNN machine on the case!

Bullshit.

Missing in action

Where the hell is the Iraqi army we spent eight years and $25 billion training?

As World Watches Kobani Siege, ISIS Eyes Baghdad

Credit: Daily Mail; Location: The militants are understood to have had their advance halted by airstrikes yesterday at Ameriyat Al-Falluja yesterday - a small city about 18 miles south of Fallujah and 40 miles west of Baghdad. But the clashes did not force the bulk of the fighters - with many of them now having made their way to the Baghdad suburbs.

Credit: Daily Mail; Location: The militants are understood to have had their advance halted by airstrikes yesterday at Ameriyat Al-Falluja yesterday – a small city about 18 miles south of Fallujah and 40 miles west of Baghdad. But the clashes did not force the bulk of the fighters – with many of them now having made their way to the Baghdad suburbs.

Affleck, Harris and the ‘liberal’ response to Islam

I’m late to the ball game in commenting on this, but I wanted to offer a few words on the spat that took place last Friday between Ben Affleck, Bill Maher and Sam Harris on HBO’s “Real Time” on the liberal response to radical Islam.

Here’s the relevant clip if you haven’t seen it:

First, I must say that like Harris, I was little surprised, first, by Affleck’s attack on Harris right out of the gate, and second, on Affleck’s seemingly combative attitude when he and Harris had just met on the stage. Affleck, other than what some clueless publicist told him five minutes before he went on the show, knew little to anything about Harris’ body of work, and this was confirmed by Harris after the show when he actually had a backstage conversation with Affleck.

Maher and Harris seemed to be agreement that liberals should stand up for liberal principles like marriage equality, rights for women, free speech and freedom of religion (For the record, unlike Maher, I’m not terribly comfortable with the word “liberal” in identifying with a set of values I think should be self-evidently supported by anyone with a brain and a conscience; I prefer progressive.), but when Harris suggested that liberals have really dropped the ball on criticizing the Muslim world for by and large eschewing these principles, Affleck went off, calling Harris — and by extension, Maher — “gross” and “racist.”

I’ve always thought of Affleck as a sharp and thoughtful guy, but based on this he seems to me to represent the kind of weak-kneed, truly bleeding heart liberal of GOP folk lore who has little understanding of the real world and just wants everyone to play nice and not criticize anything or anyone lest we be called racists or bigots.

Outside of whatever cocooned world Affleck chooses to exist, religion in general is a danger to free and civil society, and Islam, in some of its darkest versions and even in some of its more moderate iterations, threatens to set humanity back to the dark ages. People like Affleck would like to believe that the large majority of Muslims in places like the Middle East and North Africa just want to live and let live and open up the gates to modernity, that Muslims by and large don’t want to encroach on civil society or stand in the way of freedom of religion, marriage equality and the proliferation of women’s rights. That naive and idealist view of the world simply doesn’t hold muster.

Harris only got to briefly mention the main poll that supports his claim, so I’ll do that here.

This report from Pew provides a detailed look at how Muslims in different parts of the world view Sharia law. Nicholas Kristof on the show attempted to cite Indonesia as one nation in the Muslim world that contained more moderate believers that did not agree with the more radical parts of Sharia law, which commands violence against disobedient women and punishment or death for people who leave Islam.

However, the Pew poll indicated that 72 percent of Muslims in Indonesia said they favored making Sharia law the law of the land. The numbers are even higher in places across the Muslim world including Afghanistan, Pakistan, Morocco, Egypt, Niger, Nigeria and others. Indeed, one has to leave what we consider to be the entire Muslim world of the Middle East, Africa, South and Southeast Asia altogether to find a nation in which less than 50 percent don’t want to live under the heel of Sharia law. Between 64-84 percent of Muslims in these four regions support Sharia law.

What about a woman’s right to divorce? Forty-four percent of Muslims in Southeast Asia recognize that right, while only 33 percent favor women’s right to divorce in the Middle East and North Africa. What about justice in this moderate Muslim world? In the Middle East and North Africa, 78 percent favor religious judges overseeing cases of family law, 57 percent support corporal punishment for criminals and 57 percent are OK with executing people for leaving the faith. If you are taking notes on just how moderate this world of 1.5 to 1.6 billion people really is, more than half of the nice folks in these two regions would vote to put someone to death simply for changing their minds. More astonishingly, all three of these figures are higher among Muslims in South Asia. Remember, the regions I just listed contain the lion’s share of Muslims in the entire world, at about 341 million in the Middle East and North Africa and 1 billion in South and Southeast Asia.

Harris’s contention, and I tend to agree with him, was that Affleck has some friends who are Muslims, and they support a peaceful and non-invasive approach to religion, so Affleck reckons that most Muslims everywhere must surely be in favor of modernity, free speech, equal rights and fair systems of justice. And for anyone to say otherwise is clearly an Islamophobic bigot. As Harris said more than once on the show, to criticize the religion, which is clearly anti-humanistic in nearly every category that matters, is not to criticize the individuals who practice it as people. But the larger point is that the Muslim world does not seem to contain enough reform-minded individuals, like Maajid Nawaz, who want to reform Islam and bring it into modernity.

Here’s Harris on Nawaz:

Nawaz admits that the extent of radicalization in the Muslim community is an enormous problem. Unlike Aslan, he insists that his fellow Muslims must find some way to reinterpret and reform the faith. He believes that Islam has the intellectual resources to do this. I certainly hope he’s right. One thing is clear, however: Muslims must be obliged to do the work of reinterpretation—and for this we need honest conversation.

And here is Nawaz on Affleck: