The New Inquisition - The Nation

by Laila Lalami

At a literary festival in New York City some years ago, I was introduced to a French writer who, almost immediately after we shook hands, asked me where I was from. When the answer was "Morocco," he put down his drink and stared at me with anthropological curiosity. We spoke about literature, of course, and discovered a common love for the work of the South African writer J.M. Coetzee, but before long the conversation had turned to Moroccan writers, then to Moroccan writers in France, and then, as I expected it eventually would, to Moroccan immigrants in France--at which point the French writer declared, "If they were all like you, there wouldn't be a problem." His tone suggested he was paying me some sort of compliment, though I found it odd that he would want the 1 million Moroccans in his country to be carbon copies of someone he had barely met and whose views on immigration--had he asked about them--he might not have found quite to his liking. It was only later, when I had returned to my hotel room, that it dawned on me that the profile of the unproblematic Moroccan immigrant he might have had in mind was based solely on conspicuous things. Some of these, like skin color, were purely accidental; others, like sartorial choices or dietary practices, were in my opinion inessential, but from his vantage point perhaps they suggested a smaller degree of "Muslimness."

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Was this man really suggesting that I was a more desirable immigrant because I did not look Muslim? We had started our conversation as two equals, two potential friends, two writers discussing literature, but we had ended it as judge and supplicant--the former telling the latter whether or not she would make a suitable immigrant. And why on earth did I not say something on the spot? Why did I not ask him what he meant? Instead, I had stared back at him with what I imagine was dumbfounded perplexity, and then changed the subject. Perhaps if I had confronted him I would have been able to remove the sting of the insult that had lain hidden inside the compliment.

In any case, the man's assertion was a purely theoretical speculation. In practice, there is little evidence that even inconspicuous Muslims are fully accepted in France, or elsewhere in Europe. This was made abundantly clear in September, when Le Monde released video footage from an encounter between Brice Hortefeux, the interior minister of France, and Amine Benalia-Brouch, a young Algerian-French activist. Hortefeux and Benalia-Brouch, who were both attending the summer congress of the center-right party Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, were asked to pose for a photograph. A female onlooker touched Benalia-Brouch on the cheek and, in a voice ringing with approbation, said, "[Benalia-Brouch] is Catholic. He eats pork and drinks beer." "That is true," replied Benalia-Brouch, smiling. "He is our little Arab," the woman continued. Hortefeux added, "Very well. We always need one. When there's one, that's all right. It's when there are a lot of them that there are problems."

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However offensive Hortefeux's statements may be, they are not particularly remarkable. In French politics, anti-immigrant posturing is something of a rite, often performed at the height of election season. When he was still mayor of Paris, and preparing to run for the presidency under the banner of the center-right party Rassemblement pour la République, Jacques Chirac bemoaned the plight of the "French worker," who was driven "mad" by "the noise and the smell" of the immigrant family next door, "with a father, three or four wives, twenty kids, taking in 50,000 Francs in welfare payments without working." After serving a term as president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing took to the pages of Le Figaro Magazine to argue passionately that citizenship laws needed to replace the "right of land" (jus soli, automatic citizenship for those born on French soil) with the "right of blood" (jus sanguinis, citizenship determined through French ancestry). If such a distinction were not made, he warned, France would face "an invasion." The "right of blood" definition of citizenship, depending on how it is interpreted, could have ruled out the writer Alexandre Dumas, the footballer Michel Platini, the actress Isabelle Adjani, the physicist Marie Curie, the composer Maurice Ravel, the singer Charles Aznavour, as well as Nicolas Sarkozy, the current president of France, but perhaps Giscard d'Estaing felt his country could have done without any of them. (France eliminated the jus soli definition of citizenship in 1993 and then reinstated it in a limited form in 1997.)

In 2002 Manuel Valls, the mayor of Evry and a member of the Parti Socialiste, shot to national prominence when he tried to close down a halal supermarket because it did not carry pork or wine. He claimed the store had to "help us maintain some diversity." Two years before his election to the presidency in 2007, Sarkozy promised he would "hose down" the "scum" of the Paris suburbs, where many of the city's Muslims reside. Declarations such as these cut across party lines and constitute what the French press euphemistically calls dérapages, or blunders.

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The reactions to the dérapages are also something of a tradition. Members of the offending politician's party rally behind him, while members of the opposition call him a racist. Meanwhile, leaders of the far right gloat that--at long last!--the mainstream is recognizing something they have been saying for years. After Chirac's infamous "noise and smell" comments, for instance, Jean-Marie Le Pen, the avowedly racist and anti-Semitic leader of the Front National, gleefully insisted that the French would always prefer "the original to a copy."

So it would seem that the perfect Muslim immigrant in France is one who cleans the house, picks up the trash, attends to the infant or, increasingly, fixes the computer, heals the sick and runs the bank, and then disappears in a wisp of smoke, before his presence, his beliefs, his customs, his way of dress, his "noise and smell" offend the particular sensibilities of the general population. France is not alone in wishing that its Muslims were invisible. As anyone who has visited Western Europe in the past few years will tell you, the "Muslim question" is a matter of grave concern.

Cover of The Rage and The Pride

European Muslims have unintentionally revived a whole genre of nonfiction--the alarmist tract, billed as a "searing" yet "necessary" exposé on Europe's impending demise now that it has allowed so many millions of Muslims to settle on its shores. The titles are each more ominous than the last: The Rage and the Pride, by Oriana Fallaci (2002); Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, by Bat Ye'Or (2005); Londonistan, by Melanie Phillips (2006); Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's Too, by Claire Berlinski (2006); and While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam Is Destroying the West From Within, by Bruce Bawer (2006). The authors rely mostly on tabloid or newspaper accounts; the arguments are simple, or, more accurately, simplistic, and the preferred method of inference is extrapolation.

The latest offering in this genre is Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, by Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a regular contributor to the Financial Times, The New York Times Magazine and many other publications. However, just as Chirac and Sarkozy prefer to say more carefully what Le Pen says bluntly, Caldwell articulates in polite and embellished language what Bawer and others have been saying aggressively for years: Europe is being overrun by Muslim immigrants; these immigrants show no sign of assimilating to European culture and social mores; and as a result, Europe is in danger of becoming an outpost of the Islamic empire.

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According to Caldwell, European "political and commercial elites" invited immigrants to work on the continent in order to help rebuild the infrastructure that had been destroyed during World War II. These immigrants were expected to take up jobs in construction and, in later waves, jobs that were deemed too menial or too low-paying for "European natives." Immigrants revitalized industries like car manufacturing in the 1950s, but by the 1960s they were already propping up those, like textile mills, that were failing. Deindustrialization, combined with the 1973 oil crisis, resulted in the closing of factories and the loss of thousands of jobs. By then, the immigrants had already settled in Europe indefinitely, had married or brought spouses and had children. "Decade in, decade out," Caldwell writes, "the sentiment of Western European publics, as measured by opinion polls, has been resolutely opposed to mass immigration. But that is the beginning, not the end of our story."

That story, in Caldwell's telling, focuses on the Muslim communities of Europe. The plot involves the physical isolation of rapidly growing numbers of Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians, Turks, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Indians in suburban neighborhoods; high rates of crime and imprisonment; misogynistic practices and anti-Semitic confrontations; and general cultural tensions with mainstream society. The story's climax is the Muslim minority's "demands" for concessions to its religion, laws and customs. The other characters in this high drama are the "self-loathing" European elites, who are in love with the idea of a multicultural society and who close their eyes to any negativity because they feel they have to atone for centuries of colonialism.

However, Caldwell argues, "immigration is not enhancing or validating European culture; it is supplanting it." European Muslims, he warns, are having children at a rate unmatched by the secularized natives. As of 2005, there were approximately 5 million Muslims in France; 3 million in Germany; 1.6 million in Britain; 1 million in Spain; and fewer than 1 million in the Netherlands and in Italy. All told, Muslims account for about 5 percent of the total population of Western Europe; but that may be 5 percent too many, because in Caldwell's estimation, "if one abandons the idea that Western Europeans are rapacious and exploitative by nature, and that Africans, Asians, and other would-be immigrants are inevitably their victims, then the fundamental difference between colonization and labor migration ceases to be obvious."

The comparison between labor migrations of the past fifty years and colonization--the most memorable example of which, in recent history, is European colonialism in Africa and Asia--leaves out such details as invasions by armed troops; the systematic expropriation of land; the exploitation of natural resources to the sole benefit of the settlers; genocide, as happened to an estimated 10 million Congolese; wars of independence that cost millions of lives; and the installation of brutal dictatorships. Unbelievably, Caldwell insists that the immigration of individuals, each one acting independently and for economic or political reasons, not in obeisance to a collective supranational policy or religious mission, is nothing short of colonization.

To continue with Caldwell's story, the Muslims of Europe--and, naturally, the elites who enable them--have led each major European country to a national tragedy: the London underground bombing; the Madrid commuter train attacks; the Paris riots; the murder of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands; and the cartoon crisis in Denmark. He concludes by sounding a pessimistic note on Europe's chances of winning this existential fight for its cultural survival. "Europe finds itself in a contest with Islam for the allegiance of its newcomers," he writes. "For now, Islam is the stronger party in that contest, in an obvious demographic way and in a less obvious philosophical way. In such circumstances, words like 'majority' and 'minority' mean little. When an insecure, malleable, relativistic culture meets a culture that is anchored, confident, and strengthened by common doctriness, it is generally the former that changes to suit the latter."

The assumption here is that Europe's culture was a rigid construct that remained unchanged until the immigrants arrived. But cultures are not static; they change all the time. Of course Europe's culture will change as a result of its demographic shifts, but that change need not (indeed, it should not) be turned into a culture war between Islam and the West. Caldwell's conclusion is also contradictory, coming as it does after 300 pages in which he has argued just the opposite: that Muslims are backward, unemployed, criminal and, until recently, disengaged from the political process. By the time he ends the book, they are suddenly and inexplicably strong enough to "conquer" Europe.

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is the kind of book that will reaffirm the opinions of those who already agree with its author. If you happen to think that the establishment of what is now called "Eurabia" is a matter of time, you will find plenty of support in the many statistics and anecdotes Caldwell culls from newspaper and magazine reports. If, on the other hand, you prefer a more reasoned and complex view of the issues, the simplifications, contradictions and errors in this book will fail to persuade you. Caldwell repeats the thoroughly debunked canard that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were roundly celebrated in the Muslim world: "It was a day of joy in much of the Muslim world, including parts of Muslim Europe." On the contrary, there were demonstrations of solidarity with the families of the victims in nearly every major Muslim capital, from Rabat to Cairo to Tehran. More to the point, when the United States invaded Iraq, under the spurious claim that it possessed weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam Hussein had helped plot the 9/11 attacks, were the bombings not greeted with shouts of "U-S-A" in this country? That does not mean that the vast majority of Americans approved of the wholesale killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Simplifying the facts is expedient for Caldwell, however, as it helps bolster the argument he is trying to make, which is that Islam is locked in an inevitable and perpetual civilizational conflict with the West.

Although a large proportion of Europe's immigrants are not Muslim, and although the continent has faced serious economic, political and social challenges at various times over the past fifty years, European Muslims are held to blame for the rise in crime, violence against women, the resurgence of anti-Semitism and homegrown terrorism. For instance, Caldwell examines rates of incarceration in Europe, finds them proportionately higher for Muslims and attributes this finding to their religion and their culture, neither of which, in his view, equip them with the necessary tools for succeeding in the West. Missing from this grim assessment is the stubborn fact that Muslims are more likely than non-Muslims to be prosecuted for minor offenses. In France, where judges and prosecutors have large discretionary powers, noncitizens are significantly more likely to be forced into pretrial detention while their case is being investigated. The sociologist Devah Pager, who teaches at Princeton, also found a strong correlation between crime-control strategies in French local jurisdictions and the ethnic heterogeneity of these jurisdictions. To put it more plainly, crime is not policed in the same way for everyone. Researchers at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands found a similar pattern; they recently published the result of a study showing that Moroccans sit in jail for lighter crimes than ethnic Dutch.

At no time was the question of crime in Muslim neighborhoods debated more hotly than in the fall of 2005, when the Parisian banlieues erupted in riots that lasted three weeks, leading then-President Chirac to declare a state of emergency. The riots were triggered by the deaths of two teenage boys, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré, who, while fleeing the police, hid in a power station and were electrocuted. Initially, Sarkozy, at the time Chirac's interior minister, claimed that the boys were suspected of robbery, but there was no solid evidence that they committed a crime--they had been playing soccer in a field when they saw police officers and fled to avoid a lengthy process of interrogation. In interviews after the riots, the people of the banlieues often described the teenagers' deaths as a spark but cited as fuel discrimination, isolation and joblessness. The banlieues are ghettos, and as James Baldwin once wrote, "To smash something is the ghetto's chronic need." Though Pascal Mailhos, the head of the French national intelligence services, flatly stated that religious beliefs played no part in the riots, several French politicians blamed, persistently and exclusively, Islam. So does Caldwell: "Even if they did not believe in Islam, they believed in Team Islam." The point here, I suppose, is that Muslims are acting collectively even when they tell you they're not.

Caldwell also suggests that Muslims are far more likely to commit violence against women. Under the heading "Virginity and violence," he writes that "there were forty-five [honor killings] in Germany alone in the first half of the decade." Since the argument here is that Muslims are more inclined to commit homicides against women in the context of "some trespass against sexual propriety," it would have been helpful if Caldwell had included, for the sake of contrast, the number of ethnic German women killed in incidents of domestic violence, as well as numbers for an entirely distinct and recent immigrant group, such as Eastern Europeans. Without such empirical comparisons, it is difficult to see how he can reach the conclusion he does, which is that "such acts make law. They assert sovereignty over a certain part of European territory for a different sexual regime." The label "honor killing" makes violence against women and girls sound like an exotic import rather than the pernicious and all-too-frequent reality that it is. Caldwell doesn't mention that domestic violence has been treated as a criminal problem in Europe thanks to the work of European feminists in the 1960s and '70s, and that now European Muslim feminists are working to create a similar zero-tolerance level about honor killings. Encouragingly, a recent Gallup study found that Muslims in Paris, Berlin and London disapproved of honor killings and crimes of passion about as much as the general French, German and British populations.

One of Caldwell's frequent arguments is that Europeans should be worried about the Islamization of their continent because Muslim women are having children in greater numbers than non-Muslims. As proof for this claim, he cites a working paper from the Vienna Institute of Demography. But recent studies show that birthrates among European Muslim women are declining sharply; for instance, the fertility rate in the Netherlands for Moroccan-born women fell from 4.9 to 2.9 between 1990 and 2005. Turkish-born women had 3.2 children in 1990 and 1.9 in 2005. Similar patterns have been observed in France and Germany. Martin Walker, a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson Center, points out that, "broadly speaking, birthrates among immigrants tend to rise or fall to the local statistical norm within two generations." Moreover, the Financial Times, the newspaper for which Caldwell is a columnist, recently published an article that belied all the alarmist claims about Muslim birthrates, concluding, "in short, Islamicisation--let alone sharia law--is not a demographic prospect for Europe."

The fundamental problem with Reflections on the Revolution in Europe is that Caldwell focuses exclusively on the problems with Muslim immigrants without stepping back to assess the general status of the European Muslim community. While he frequently denounces idleness, urban separation and crime by Muslims, he does not see fit to devote any space to the discrimination they face in employment, housing or the justice system, or the successes they have had in fields like science, sports, arts and entertainment. The French even have a term for this wave of young successful Muslims; they call it beurgeoisie. (The word beur is French slang for "North African.")

This flaw in Caldwell's approach is, unfortunately, entirely intentional. Reflections, he writes in his introduction, is a book about Europe, immigration and the place of Islam and Muslims in it, not "a book about the difficulties faced by immigrants and ethnic minorities." He stresses that he will use the term "native" to refer to those of European blood and "immigrant" to refer to those who are from outside Europe, even when they have been citizens of European countries for two or three generations. But by simplifying his terminology and focusing exclusively on the problems immigrants cause, not on those they face, Caldwell has tilted the scales: he does not present a complete view of the relationship between immigrant and native. On the rare occasions (I counted two) when he does mention discrimination, it is to minimize it: "There was certainly measurable discrimination in the European job and housing markets, although it was mild alongside what one might have found in the United States four decades ago." How easy it is to dismiss discrimination when one is not on the receiving end of it. But the statistics on job discrimination defy minimization: while 27 percent of beur university graduates are unemployed in France, the overall unemployment rate for university graduates is just 5 percent.

In effect, this lack of context mirrors the way Muslim immigrants (even those in second and third generations, or those who are probably Muslim in name only) are talked about in newspapers and magazines, on the radio and television: their religion is at the center of any discussion, as if the only thing that defines their political convictions, their votes, their relationship with their neighbors, with people of other religions or with members of the opposite sex is their ability to tell their nisab from their khums.

The thesis that only Islam is to blame for Muslims' supposed inability to assimilate in Europe is far too simplistic to stand the test of reality. In fact, it's just as simplistic as the argument peddled by the Muslim right wing, which is that Islam is the only cure for whatever ails Muslims. When one looks at Muslims on another continent (America, say) the pattern that Caldwell insists has been replicated throughout Europe (ghettoization, crime, violence against women, a resurgence of anti-Semitism, homegrown terrorism and demands for accommodation) does not obtain. In fact, income and education levels of Muslims in America mirror those of the general public. But save for two paragraphs, which appear ten pages before the end of the book, Caldwell avoids this comparison, presumably because it does not fit with his theory.

Caldwell does contrast Muslim immigration to Europe with Latin immigration to America. "The cultural peculiarities of Latin American immigrants," he argues, "are generally antiquated versions of American ones. Latinos have less money, higher labor-force participation, more authoritarian family structures, lower divorce rates, more frequent church attendance...lousier diets, and higher rates of military enlistment than native-born Americans." This, he says, makes Latino culture "perfectly intelligible to any patient American who has ever had a conversation about the past with his parents." But intelligibility did not prevent Glenn Beck from claiming that immigrants were "trying to conquer our culture" or Lou Dobbs from suggesting that the "invasion of illegal aliens" was responsible for a huge (and undocumented) rise in leprosy cases in the United States. The scholar Anouar Majid has cataloged many similarities between the treatment of Latino immigrants in the United States and Muslim immigrants in Europe in his book We Are All Moors. Ironically, Caldwell behaves much like a new convert to a religion: having found an ideology he agrees with, he looks only for the evidence that confirms his beliefs and disregards everything else.

Not surprisingly, Caldwell's assessment of Europe, like his assessment of European Muslims, leaves little room for nuance or complexity. He portrays the continent as a racially, culturally and politically homogenous place and its natives as extremely tolerant, respectful of human rights and largely secular. In his view, Europeans naïvely believed that Muslim workers who came after World War II would not stay. They welcomed the immigrants and muted their own concerns because they were afraid to be called racist. Caldwell makes the entire process of immigration seem like a giant hoax devious Muslims perpetrated on innocent Europeans. "European natives," he writes, "have become steadily less forthright, or more frightened, about expressing their opposition to immigration in public."

But the truth is that Europeans, particularly of the right-wing persuasion, have not been shy at all about opposing immigration. Anti-immigrant sentiment is as old as immigration itself, and Europe is no exception. Over the past few decades, immigration policy has repeatedly been a major theme of general elections in several European countries, including France, Italy and Spain. Still, the typical European one encounters in Reflections is ashamed of his country and unable to stand up to immigrants. Caldwell writes, rather preposterously, "The singing of national anthems and the waving of national flags became, in some countries, the province only of skinheads and soccer hooligans." Elsewhere, he argues that European natives have become so enamored with the idea of multiculturalism that they "know more about Arabic calligraphy and kente cloth" than they know about "Montaigne and Goethe." Of course, this is hyperbole. But strikingly, Caldwell does not wonder how much European Muslims, a great many of whom are graduates of European schools on the continent or outside it, know about these subjects.

While Caldwell blames Muslim immigrants for a range of problems, he reserves part of his scorn for "the spiritual tawdriness" of Europe--which, in his estimation, may be the "biggest liability in preserving its culture." The increasing secularization of Europe caused it to lose its bearings and gradually become vulnerable to "colonization" by "primitive" cultures. "Along the road of European modernization," he writes, "lie the shopping mall, the pierced navel, online gambling, a 50 percent divorce rate, and a high rate of anomie and self-loathing. What makes us so certain that that Europeanization is a road that immigrants will want to travel?" But in fact polls show that attitudes of European Muslims vary from country to country and often display the same regional differences seen among various European publics. For instance, Gallup polls show that Parisian Muslims are more likely than Muslims in Berlin or London to consider adultery "morally acceptable," a pattern that mirrors the larger proportions of native French who find adultery acceptable when compared with Britons or Germans.

For Caldwell, there is a quality of "Europeanness" that, on the one hand, is in danger of being lost because of the mass immigration of Muslims, and, on the other hand, is so idiosyncratic that it is not easily passed to new generations of European Muslims. He appears to suggest that this quality is innate: "[EU expansion] raised hopes that Western European labor needs could be filled by people who more or less thought like Europeans (say, maids from Hungary and machinists from Bulgaria) rather than people who did not (say, maids and machinists from Pakistan and Algeria)." The emphasis is his.

Caldwell argues that intra-European immigration had a higher degree of success because the immigrants who moved within Europe shared religious and cultural beliefs with the natives. Such an optimistic view leaves out inconvenient facts of history. In the early decades of the twentieth century, France brought thousands of Polish workers to its factories and its mines; many lived in suburban ghettos and, despite being Christian, were deemed by the natives to be too attached to their culture and too religious (they were referred to as calotins, or "Holy Joes"). Some French intellectuals and politicians began speaking of "invasion." (Similar accusations were made about Spaniards, Italians and Belgians who later migrated to France.) When the recession of the 1930s put a crunch on the French economy, the government forcibly put Polish immigrants on trains and sent them back home. So the process by which immigrants integrate in European societies has historically been a slow one, even when immigrants "think" like Europeans.

This undiscerning approach leads Caldwell to severe errors of judgment. It is exceedingly disturbing to find so many right-wing leaders receive one form or another of rehabilitation in Reflections. The British conservative politician Enoch Powell--who famously warned that if Britain didn't stop letting in nonwhite immigrants, it would soon be "foaming with much blood"--is described as "morally" wrong but "factually" right. Elsewhere, Caldwell decries the Dutch media's portrayal of the far-right leader Geert Wilders as a "paranoid and sinister bumpkin," while those who speak more conciliatorily about Islam are "spared ridicule." Wilders once compared the Koran with Mein Kampf and proposed that it be banned. This past September, he argued that a tax of 1,000 euros should be levied against Muslim women who wear a headscarf because they "pollute" the landscape.

Pim Fortuyn, the notorious Dutch far-right leader, "was not a racist," Caldwell informs us, "and his colorful repartee about the Moroccan men he had slept with was adequate to place him above the suspicion of being one." By the same logic, should one forget that Strom Thurmond supported racist laws just because he had a black child? Caldwell writes wistfully that "Fortuyn could well have become prime minister had he not been shot dead days before national elections in May 2002, by an animal rights activist who claimed to be acting to protect Dutch Muslims." Even though Muslims had nothing to do with Fortuyn's murder, this formulation suggests that, somehow, they did.

Not coincidentally, several of the loudest forecasters of European doom were previously best known for their anti-Semitic views. Nick Griffin, the leader of the British National Party, once called the Holocaust an "extremely profitable lie." Nowadays, he asks that Muslims be prevented from flying into or out of Britain and runs ads with the slogan Enoch Powell Was Right. Vlaams Belang, the Flemish far-right party, has also had Holocaust deniers in its leadership, though now they seem most preoccupied with preventing Muslim women who wear the headscarf from working for local councils. And Le Pen, the founder of the French National Front, once described gas chambers as "a mere detail of history" and called a political opponent named Michel Durafour "Durafour crématoire" (the pun can be loosely translated as "Michel-hard-to-cook-in-a-gas-chamber"). Now he warns that it is only a matter of time before the mayor of Marseille will no longer be Mr. Gaudin but Mr. "Ben Gaudin." Recently it emerged that the Vlaams Belang and other far-right groups have formed a coalition called "Cities Against Islamisation." Europe has gone down this road before, and it did not emerge the better for it.

The societies of Europe are undergoing demographic changes, which have economic, social and educational consequences. So far, the debate on these changes has focused exclusively on Islam in Europe. Yet no one in the chattering classes seems to have noticed that the voices of European Muslims are seldom heard. This is a debate about them--not with them. And indeed Reflections on the Revolution in Europe has been reviewed in the American press mostly by people who are not European, much less Muslim. Not surprisingly, the argument that Muslims are collectively trying to "conquer" Europe "street by street" in order to turn it into an outpost of Islam has been taken at face value. But this argument is not serious criticism because it is not based on thorough empirical evidence; it is racism.

When European Muslims are heard from, it is often on the topic of religion, and usually immediately after some disaster caused by one of their co-religionists. Political leaders, eager to show that they are in dialogue with the "immigrants" (large proportions of whom are second- or third-generation citizens), quote from the Koran or invite some imam to tea at the presidential palace. The conversation turns into a battle over religion, over who has the right interpretation of what verse, instead of being expanded to the issues most relevant to the integration of European Muslims--issues like jobs, housing, education and civil rights.

The current debate places far too much emphasis on Islam as a set of codes and on the Koran as a literal text, rather than on Islam as it is lived and the Koran as an experienced text. A Moroccan man may be very devout and yet work as a sommelier in a restaurant in Paris. A Turkish teenager may not be particularly faithful and yet keep Ramadan because it is the only time of year she gets to connect with her community. An Algerian elder may be the imam of his mosque and yet carry credit card debt. Islam is not just its texts; it is millions of people, each one of whom has found an idiosyncratic way of adapting faith to modern life. Our religious beliefs are not the sum total of our lives. To discuss them as if they were puts our very lives up for debate.

The challenge of immigration is not Europe's alone. In our increasingly globalized world, immigrants are moving in all directions, across large distances and at faster rates than ever before. What Europeans--what all of us--need to face is the unavoidability of living together. Caldwell has culled two tercets from W.H. Auden's "The Quest" as the epigraph for his book:

Could he forget a child's ambition to be old
And institutions where it learned to wash and lie,
He'd tell the truth for which he thinks himself too young,
That everywhere on his horizon, all the sky,
Is now, as always, only waiting to be told
To be his father's house and speak his mother tongue.

Yet when I read Reflections on the Revolution in Europe, I was reminded of another poem, one Auden had written a year earlier, at the onset of World War II; and though the poet came to look with disfavor on the line, its truth is the one I would rather cling to: "We must love one another or die."

About Laila Lalami

Laila Lalami, the author of Secret Son, is an assistant professor of creative writing at the University of California, Riverside

Google and the New Digital Future - NYRB

Image by Scriblio via Flickr

by Robert Darnton

November 9 is one of those strange dates haunted by history. On November 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, signaling the collapse of the Soviet empire. The Nazis organized Kristallnacht on November 9, 1938, beginning their all-out campaign against Jews. On November 9, 1923, Hitler's Beer Hall Putsch was crushed in Munich, and on November 9, 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and Germany was declared a republic. The date especially hovers over the history of Germany, but it marks great events in other countries as well: the Meiji Restoration in Japan, November 9, 1867; Bonaparte's coup effectively ending the French Revolution, November 9, 1799; and the first sighting of land by the Pilgrims on the Mayflower, November 9, 1620.

On November 9, 2009, in the district court for the Southern District of New York, the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers were scheduled to file a settlement to resolve their suit against Google for alleged breach of copyright in its program to digitize millions of books from research libraries and to make them available, for a fee, online. Not comparable to the fall of the Berlin Wall, you might say. True, but for several months, all eyes in the world of books—authors, publishers, librarians, and a great many readers—were trained on the court and its judge, Denny Chin, because this seemingly small-scale squabble over copyright looked likely to determine the digital future for all of us.

Google has by now digitized some ten million books. On what terms will it make those texts available to readers? That is the question before Judge Chin. If he construes the case narrowly, according to precedents in class-action suits, he could conclude that none of the parties had been slighted. That decision would remove all obstacles to Google's attempt to transform its digitizing of texts into the largest library and book-selling business the world has ever known. If Judge Chin were to take a broad view of the case, the settlement could be modified in ways that would protect the public against potential abuses of Google's monopolistic power.

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That Google's enterprise (Google Book Search, or GBS) threatened to become an overweening monopoly became clear when the Department of Justice filed a memorandum with the court warning about the likelihood of a violation of antitrust legislation. More than four hundred other memorandums and amicus briefs also provided warnings about mounting opposition to GBS. In the face of this opposition, Google and the plaintiffs petitioned the court to delay a hearing that was scheduled for October 17 so that they could rework the settlement. Judge Chin set November 9 as the deadline when the new version of the settlement would be unveiled.

The great event turned out to be a dud, however. At the last minute, Google and the plaintiffs asked Judge Chin to grant another extension. He gave them four more days, so the witching hour finally took place not on November 9 but on a less auspicious date, Friday the 13th.

Why did the deadline look so monumental? The terms of the settlement will have a profound effect on the book industry for the foreseeable future. On the positive side, Google will make it possible for consumers to purchase access to millions of copyrighted books currently in print, and to read them on hand-held devices or computer screens, with payment going to authors and publishers as well as Google. Many millions more—books covered by copyright but out of print, at least seven million in all, including untold millions of "orphans" whose rightsholders have not been identified—will be available through subscriptions paid for by institutions such as universities. The database, along with books in the public domain that Google has already digitized, will constitute a gigantic digital library, and it will grow over time so that someday it could be larger than the Library of Congress (which now contains over 21 million catalogued books). By paying a moderate subscription fee, libraries, colleges, and educational institutions of all kinds could have instant access to a whole world of learning and literature.

But will the price be moderate? The negative arguments stress the danger that monopolies tend to charge monopoly prices. Equally important, they warn that Google's dominance of access to books will reinforce its power over access to other kinds of information, raising concerns about privacy (Google may be able to aggregate data about your reading, e-mail, consumption, housing, travel, employment, and many other activities). The same dominance also raises questions about both competition (the class-action character of the suit could make it impossible for another entrepreneur to digitize orphan works, because only Google will be protected from litigation by rightsholders) and commitment to the public good. As a commercial enterprise, Google's first duty is to provide a profit for its shareholders, and the settlement leaves no room for representation of libraries, readers, or the public in general.

An extensive argument about the pros and cons could turn Judge Chin's courtroom into a forum where the full range of literary questions would be dramatized by debate. No courtroom drama took place on November 13, because nothing happened other than the filing of the revised settlement (call it GBS 2.0 to distinguish it from the original version of the settlement, GBS 1.0). But the filing was important in itself, because it marked the denouement of years of hard bargaining over who would control a large stretch of the digital landscape that is just now coming into view.

To be sure, GBS 2.0 will certainly be challenged by groups and individuals who claim they were not fairly represented in the classes of authors and publishers. The case may take years to work its way through the courts. Meanwhile, Google will go on digitizing; and as the legal situation evolves, it may devise further revisions of the settlement (GBS 3.0, GBS 4.0, etc.). The public will have to study all the new versions of the settlement in order to stay informed about the rules of the game while the game is being played. Who ultimately wins is not simply a matter of competition among potential entrepreneurs but an issue of enormous importance to everyone who cares about books, even though the public is reduced to the role of spectator.

As the first step toward a resolution, the filing on November 13 suggested just how far Google is willing to go in modifying the original settlement. Google's spokesman hailed the revised version as providing all the benefits and none of the defects that one could expect. According to Dan Clancy, Google Books engineering director,

Google is still very excited about this agreement.... We look forward to continuing to work with rightsholders from around the world to fulfill our longstanding mission of increasing access to all the world's books.

But the arguments in favor of the reworked settlement came from Google and the plaintiffs who will become its collaborators if their deal is approved. To get a sense of the counterarguments, one can survey the memorandums and amicus briefs that were filed with the court before November 9.^[*] The protests that came from Europe are the most revealing. Although they concentrate on issues of special importance to foreigners—above all, the incompatibility of American class-action suits with protection for copyright holders who are not Americans—they show how the settlement was seen from a distant perspective.

The governments of France and Germany sent memorandums urging the court to reject the settlement "in its entirety" or at least insofar as it applied to their own citizens. Far from seeing any potential public good in it, they condemned it for creating an "unchecked, concentrated power" over the digitization of a vast amount of literature (this according to the French memorandum) and for doing so (according to the Germans) by a "commercially driven" agreement negotiated "in secrecy...behind closed doors by three interested parties, the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and Google, Inc."

In contrast to the commercial character of Google's enterprise, both governments stressed the higher values represented by their national literatures. The French began their memorandum by invoking Pascal, Descartes, Molière, Racine, and other writers through Camus and Sartre, while the Germans summoned up the line that led from Goethe and Schiller to Heinrich Böll and Günter Grass. Each country cited the number of its Nobel Prize winners in literature (France sixteen, Germany twelve), and each buttressed its case by other evidence of high-mindedness. The Germans insisted on Gutenberg and his contribution to "the spread of science and culture." The French cited the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen from 1789 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 in order to uphold the principle of "free access to information" threatened by Google's "de facto monopoly."

It is an odd spectacle: foreign governments defending a European notion of culture against the capitalistic inroads of an American company, and submitting their case to Judge Denny Chin of the Southern District Court of New York. What Judge Chin, who grew up in Hell's Kitchen in a family of poor Chinese immigrants (and won a scholarship to Princeton University) made of it all is difficult to say. He did not tip his hand on November 13, nor did he say when a hearing would take place.

In playing the cultural card, the French emphasized the unique character of the book, "a product unlike other products"—its power to capture creativity, to enrich civilization, and to promote diversity, which, they claimed, would be compromised by Google's commitment to commercialization. The Germans spoke in the name of "the land of poets and thinkers," but they laid most stress on the right of privacy, which, they argued, Google could threaten by keeping data on who reads what. Both governments then listed a series of subsidiary arguments, which were nearly the same, word for word—unsurprisingly, as they engaged the same legal counsel:

1. The settlement gives Google a virtual monopoly over orphan works, even though it has no claim to their copyrights.

2. Its opt-out provision, which means that authors will be deemed to have accepted the settlement unless they notify Google to the contrary, violates the rights inherent in authorship.

3. It contains a most-favored- nation clause—i.e., a provision that prevents a potential competitor from obtaining better terms than Google in any new commercial uses of the digitized books. The terms of such future enterprises will be determined by a Books Rights Registry composed exclusively of representatives of the authors and publishers. The Registry will keep track of copyrights and cooperate with Google in setting prices.

4. It gives Google the power to censor its database by excluding up to 15 percent of the digitized works.

5. Its guidelines for pricing will promote Google's commercial interests, not the good of the public, through the use of algorithms created by Google according to Google's secret methods.

6. It favors secrecy in general, hiding audit procedures, preventing the public from attending meetings in which Google and the Registry will discuss library matters, and even requiring Google, the authors, and publishers to destroy all documents relevant to their agreement on the settlement.

Above all, the French and Germans condemned the settlement for sanctioning the "uncontrolled, autocratic concentration of power in a single corporate entity," which threatened the "free exchange of ideas through literature." To drive the point home, they both noted that Google has taken in more revenue than many countries—$22 billion in 2008.

The same points were made in a hearing before the European Commission on September 7 by the three most important international library associations: the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA), the European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associates (EBLIDA), and the Ligue des Bibliothèques Européennes de Recherche (LIBER). In nearly identical testimony, all three stressed the danger that "a large proportion of the world's heritage of books in digital format will be under the control of a single corporate entity."

It was Google's sheer power that gave them pause. They summoned up the prospect of a digital library of 30 million books that would cost $750 million, and they concluded that Google would exercise something close to hegemony in the book world. Therefore, they appealed to the European Commission to defend the interests of the public by preventing Google from abusing its power.

Some of these associations submitted similar statements to the New York court. So did hundreds of other groups and individuals. After reading through them, one has the impression of a sense of alarm gathering force and rising to the surface of a collective consciousness. As November 9 approached, it did indeed promise to be a day of destiny, when we would begin to see into our digital future and to face the forces that might determine it.

Where was the Department of Justice in the pre-November debate? It, too, submitted a memorandum for the court's consideration. After months of investigating potential violations of antitrust law, the DOJ pointed to two serious difficulties: the possibility of horizontal agreements among authors and publishers to restrict price competition and the further restriction of competition by Google's de facto exclusive rights to the digital distribution of orphan works. Competitors would be denied access to millions of orphans, the memorandum argued, because they would not enjoy the immunity from suits for copyright infringement that the settlement reserves to Google. Moreover, the settlement's equivalent of a most-favored-nation clause would prevent all competitors from obtaining better terms than Google's even if they could put together an attractive database. Instead of expatiating in the European manner on the danger to the world's literary heritage, the DOJ warned about something concrete: the "risk of market foreclosure."

What to do? Far from sounding hostile to Google Book Search, the DOJ acknowledged its potential to promote the public good and announced, "The United States does not want the opportunity or momentum to be lost." The memorandum could therefore be read as a prescription for a way to save the settlement. It concentrated on the most hotly debated provisions—those concerning the approximately seven million out-of-print but in-copyright books, especially orphans—and it suggested the following changes:

1. Require rightsholders of out-of-print books to participate in the settlement by opting in instead of operating from the assumption that they had agreed to participate unless they opted out. The shift to an opt-out default would remove Google's control of books whose rightsholders cannot be identified or do not come forward.

2. Do not distribute the profits from the sale of orphan books to the parties of the settlement (Google and the authors and publishers) but rather use the money to fund a thorough search for the unknown rightsholders, and extend the search for a long period of time.

3. Appoint guardians to protect the interests of orphan rightsholders by serving on the registry.

4. Find some mechanism by which potential competitors to Google could gain access to orphan works without exposure to suits for infringement of copyright. Presumably this would require legislation by Congress.

5. Prevent Google from using out-of-print works in new commercial products without the owner's permission.

The DOJ said it would continue to investigate the potential violation of antitrust laws, and it concluded with an unambiguous imperative: "This Court should reject the Proposed Settlement in its current form...." But its recommendations for an improved settlement did not go far—not nearly as far as those suggested by the governments of France and Germany and many other critics. The DOJ said nothing about the need for monitoring prices, protecting privacy, preventing censorship, providing representation of the public on the registry, and requiring full disclosure of Google's secret data. If the DOJ encouraged Judge Chin to take a broad view of the settlement, it did not open the door wide.

The revised settlement, or GBS 2.0, released on November 13, reads as if Google and the plaintiffs took most of their cues from the DOJ's memorandum. In a clear concession to the DOJ's criticisms, GBS 2.0 provides that the Registry will include a court-appointed guardian to represent the rightsholders of unclaimed books. But it does not switch to an opt-out provision for such rightsholders—that is, according to GBS 2.0, any owner of a copyright of an out-of-print book would be deemed to accept the settlement unless he or she rejected it. Because millions of books, primarily orphans, fall into this category where the rightsholders are difficult to identify, Google alone would enjoy immunity from prosecution by any rightsholders who might turn up—and the exposure to litigation, which could easily reach $150,000 per title, would be enough to prevent any competitor from entering the field. Instead of providing a solution to the problem of orphan works, GBS 2.0 leaves Google in command of their commercialization, pending eventual legislation by Congress.

As to revenue from the sale of orphan books, GBS 2.0 complies with the DOJ's insistence that the money not go to Google and the plaintiffs. Instead it will be spent in efforts to search for the unidentified rightsholders; and after being held for ten years, the funds will be distributed to charities determined by court order.

GBS 2.0 also follows the DOJ's recommendation to abandon the most-favored-nation clause. Google's competitors would be able to license out-of-print books in retail enterprises —that is, in selling individual works to consumers—although Google would maintain exclusive control of the institutional subscriptions to its gigantic database.

How the price of those subscriptions will be set remains unclear. GBS 2.0 has some language explaining the way its pricing algorithm will work, but it contains no effective mechanism to prevent price gouging, no provision for an antitrust consent decree that would empower a public authority to monitor prices, and no way to protect the public from excessive pricing should Google be taken over in the future by rapacious speculators.

GBS 2.0 does not therefore differ in essentials from GBS 1.0. It largely ignores the objections of foreign governments, except in one crucial respect: it partly meets the objections by narrowing the scope of GBS to books published in the United States and to countries with similar legal systems—that is, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia. Google will not display books published in countries like France and Germany, and it will give them representation on the Registry to protect their interests. Just what proportion of unclaimed works will now be excluded from the settlement by this concession remains to be clarified.

Will these concessions be enough to mollify Google's critics outside the Department of Justice who are not parties to the settlement? Probably not, judging from a statement issued on November 13 by the Open Book Alliance, whose members include Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo:

By performing surgical nip and tuck, Google, the AAP [Association of American Publishers], and the AG [Authors Guild] are attempting to distract people from their continued efforts to establish a monopoly over digital content access and distribution; usurp Congress's role in setting copyright policy; lock writers into their unsought registry, stripping them of their individual contract rights; put library budgets and patron privacy at risk; and establish a dangerous precedent by abusing the class action process.

What then is the outlook for the future? No one can predict the fate of the settlement as it bounces from court to court; but if the public good should be taken into consideration, one can imagine two general solutions to the problems posed by GBS, one maximal, one minimal.

The most ambitious solution would transform Google's digital database into a truly public library. That, of course, would require an act of Congress, one that would make a decisive break with the American habit of determining public issues by private lawsuit. The legislation would have to settle ancillary problems—how to adjust copyright, deal with orphan books, and compensate Google for its investment in digitizing—but it would have the advantage of clearing up a messy legal landscape and of giving the American people what they deserve: a national digital library equal to the needs of the twenty-first century. But it is not clear how Google would react to such a buyout.

If state intervention is deemed to go too far against the American grain, a minimal solution could be devised for the private sector. Congress would have to intervene with legislation to protect the digitization of orphan works from lawsuits, but it would not need to appropriate funds. Instead, funding could come from a coalition of foundations. The digitizing, open-access distribution, and preservation of orphan works could be done by a nonprofit organization such as the Internet Archive, a nonprofit group that was built as a digital library of texts, images, and archived Web pages. In order to avoid conflict with interests in the current commercial market, the database would include only books in the public domain and orphan works. Its time span would increase as copyrights expired, and it could include an opt-in provision for rightsholders of books that are in copyright but out of print.

The work need not be done in haste. At the rate of a million books a year, we would have a great library, free and accessible to everyone, within a decade. And the job would be done right, with none of the missing pages, botched images, faulty editions, omitted artwork, censoring, and misconceived cataloging that mar Google's enterprise. Bibliographers—who appear to play little or no part in Google's enterprise—would direct operations along with computer engineers. Librarians would cooperate with both in order to assure the preservation of the books, another weak point in GBS, because Google is not committed to maintaining its corpus, and digitized texts easily degrade or become inaccessible.

This digitizing process could be subsidized as part of the Obama administration's economic stimulus, and the overall cost, spread out over ten to twenty years, would be manageable, perhaps $750 million in all. Meanwhile, Google and anyone else would be free to exploit the commercial sector. The national digital library could be composed from the holdings of the Library of Congress alone or, failing that, from research libraries that have not opened all their collections to Google.

Perhaps other solutions could be devised. If the court did not resolve the Google Book Search problem on November 13, at least it had the potential to concentrate minds and stimulate public debate. We are agreed that something must be done to improve the nation's health. Why not do something to enrich its culture?

—November 18, 2009

Notes

^[*]The texts of the documents can be consulted at dockets.justia.com/docket/court-nysdce/case_no-1:2005cv08136/case_id-273913.

New Hopes on Health Care for American Indians

Image via Wikipedia

By PAM BELLUCK

The meeting last month was a watershed: the leaders of 564 American Indian tribes were invited to Washington to talk with cabinet members and President Obama, who called it “the largest and most widely attended gathering of tribal leaders in our history.”
Topping the list of their needs was better health care.
“Native Americans die of illnesses like tuberculosis, alcoholism, diabetes, pneumonia and influenza at far higher rates,” Mr. Obama said. “We’re going to have to do more to address disparities in health care delivery.”
The health care overhaul now being debated in Congress appears poised to bring the most significant improvements to the Indian health system in decades. After months of negotiations, provisions under consideration could, over time, direct streams of money to the Indian health care system and give Indians more treatment options.
Some proposals, like exempting Indians from penalties for not obtaining insurance, may meet resistance from lawmakers opposed to expanding benefits for Indians, many of whom receive free medical care.
But advocates say the changes recognize Indians’ unique status and could ease what Senator Byron L. Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, calls “full-scale health care rationing going on on Indian reservations.”
“We’ve got the ‘first Americans’ living in third world conditions,” Mr. Dorgan said.
Mr. Obama has emphasized Indian issues more than most presidents. He campaigned on reservations, created a senior policy adviser for Native American affairs and appointed Kimberly Teehee, a Cherokee, to the post, and gave Indians other high-ranking positions.
He has proposed a budget increase of 13 percent for the federal Indian Health Service, which provides free care to 1.9 million Indians who belong to federally recognized tribes, most of whom live on tribally owned land. The service, which had a budget this year of $3.3 billion, has also received $500 million in stimulus money for construction, repairs and equipment.
“This new administration has been much more positive,” said W. Ron Allen, chairman of the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe in Washington State and treasurer of the National Congress of American Indians, adding that the Congressional proposals provide “a very impressive opportunity to close the gap in Indian health care.”
On Thursday, the Senate Indian Affairs Committee is scheduled to discuss other Indian health issues that could end up in the overhaul bill.
Indians could benefit from broader overhaul programs for low-income and uninsured citizens, but they do not want to relinquish the health care they claim as a historical right.
“Indian people have given up a lot,” said Dr. Yvette Roubideaux, director of the Indian Health Service. “They really feel like they have, in a sense, prepaid for this health care with loss of land, natural resources, loss of culture.”
‘List Goes On and On’
In the vast, varied territory called Indian Country, health care is stung with struggle.
Too few doctors. Too little equipment. Hospitals and clinics miles of hardscrabble road away.
In cities, where over half of the country’s roughly 3 million Indians now live (and nearly 5 million including part-Indians), only 34 programs get Indian Health Service funding, providing mostly basic care and arranging more advanced care and coverage elsewhere.
While some Indians have private insurance, often through employers or tribal businesses like casinos, a third are uninsured and a quarter live in poverty. By all accounts, the Indian Health Service is substantially underfunded.
Money shortages, bureaucracy and distance can delay treatment of even serious conditions for months, even years.
Many Indians face multiple roadblocks.
Joanna Quotskuyva’s breast cancer did not require a mastectomy, but she chose to have surgery because radiation would mean months of driving five hours round-trip from her home on the Hopi reservation in Kykotsmovi, Ariz.
Many make similar choices, because “unfortunately, we don’t have the capability,” said Dr. Joachim Chino, chief of surgery at the nearest hospital, the Tuba City Regional Health Care Corporation. Treating large swaths of the Hopi and Navajo reservations — the Navajo alone is the size of West Virginia — is inherently difficult.
Despite its dedicated medical staff, the hospital struggles “to bring, right here, appropriate state-of-the-art, specialty, critical-care medicine,” said Joseph Engelken, the hospital’s chief executive.
While the Indian health system has improved nationally and Indians are living longer, Dr. Roubideaux acknowledged problems, not all from underfunding, saying, “The list goes on and on in terms of areas that need improvement.”
Sometimes urgent “life or limb” cases get attention, while others, some serious, must wait.
Dr. David Yost, clinical director at the White Mountain Apache reservation in Arizona, cited “piles of care we have to put on the back burner,” including 150 cases this summer, some “waiting a year and a half.” This budget year, he said, 40 patients are still waiting, and about “10 people a month” are added to the list.
Ronnye Manuelito, 56, a Navajo in Naschitti, N.M., said he “almost felt like giving up” after waiting for brain surgery to quell blackouts, seizures and headaches experienced over three years from a shifting metal plate in his head from a childhood carousel injury.
One time he “left the stove on in the kitchen and passed out,” and another he had a seizure in a car, said his sister, Brenda. His Indian Health Service doctor “was trying to get him a referral to a specialist in Albuquerque, but they weren’t approving it because it wasn’t life-or-limb,” she said.
Ultimately, two surgical procedures helped him.
Dr. Roubideaux, speaking generally, said, “There are some places where funding is so short and there are so few health care providers, unfortunately people may have to wait quite a long time.”
A former reservation doctor herself, Dr. Roubideaux said she would see “someone who maybe had chronic knee pain and a little bit of surgery would help, yet the person was still walking,” making it non-life-threatening. “It’s really heartbreaking,” she said.
In cities, scarce Indian facilities and patchwork insurance can mean “a woman with a lump in her breast — we can’t guarantee we can get her into treatment in a reasonable period,” said Ralph Forquera, the executive director of the nonprofit Seattle Indian Health Board. “A cardiac problem? We can’t guarantee that person can get to see a specialist.”
Sometimes, Mr. Forquera said, when that woman is treated, “the lump has metastasized.” He added, “We’ve had people actually die on waiting lists.”
Jackie BirdChief, 46, a single mother with thyroid cancer, did not have to wait. She just had to move 200 miles from Phoenix to the Apache reservation she left in 1983, leaving her city, her job and, for months, her daughter, then 14. She moved because cost containment rules link coverage for care to establishing residency on reservations.
Ms. BirdChief, a secretary, was lucky because the Indian Health Service, her employer, “manipulated the system to make it work out for her,” Dr. Yost said. It found her jobs on the reservation, he said, “whereas someone working in a grocery store would have had to quit their job — or decide if they wanted to have the procedure.”
Still, Dr. Yost said, Ms. BirdChief “was a victim of our system, and ironically, she worked for the Indian health system.”
Living on a reservation, however, does not ensure accessible care.
Ruby Biakeddy’s six-sided hogan, a traditional Navajo home, without running water or a phone, is an hour’s drive on a dirt road from drinking water, and even farther from diabetes and blood pressure medication. Since her truck got swept away in a rain-swollen ditch five years ago, Ms. Biakeddy, 67, who tends sheep, must borrow her children’s vehicles.
“I recently ran out of the medicine I inject for a week,” she said in Navajo through a translator.
Serious cases, where getting care within the “golden hour” after problems start is critical, can also suffer. “For many of our patients,” said Dr. Anne Newland, acting clinical director of a clinic in Kayenta, Ariz., “that hour is gone by the time they get to us.”
Ciara Antone, 4, died on the Navajo reservation outside Tuba City from an apparent bowel obstruction. Her mother, Genita Yazzie, called 911, but said that with the distance and road conditions, the ambulance was two hours away.
“I kept telling the dispatcher, ‘My daughter’s coding, she’s not breathing,’ ” Ms. Yazzie said. Desperate, she drove to the closer Hopi reservation to get an ambulance, but by then, “they couldn’t bring her back.”
Whether a closer ambulance could have saved her daughter is unclear (the family has sued the non-Indian hospital that treated her). Henry Wallace, director of Navajo Emergency Medical Services, which Ms. Yazzie called first for an ambulance, declined to discuss the case, but said, “the geographic area is so large that the time factor is probably the biggest problem we have.”
“We really don’t have a golden hour,” he said. “Ours could be the golden three hours.”
Staffing shortages exacerbate things. Recently, Kayenta began closing its emergency room overnight, making Tuba City, at 90 minutes away, the closest hospital. At Indian hospitals and clinics nationally, a fifth of physician positions and a quarter of the nursing slots are unfilled.
Patients contribute to the frustrations. Nearly a third do not show up for scheduled surgery at Tuba City, often citing distance or cost.
Richard White, 61, acknowledged taking his medicine sporadically and drinking, aggravating his diabetes. He went blind, lost a toe and, during a Navajo medicine-man ceremony that he hoped would restore his vision, burned his other foot, which was then amputated.
“Stare at these incredible statistics, you become overwhelmed,” Dr. Yost said. “It’s like drinking out of a fire hydrant.”
Keeping a Promise
Congress’s goal, in using penalty and co-payment exemptions, is to encourage Indians to enroll in proposed programs like subsidized private insurance or expanded Medicaid, while respecting their sovereignty and the conviction that they are owed health care.
That conviction and bureaucratic hurdles have kept many eligible Indians from enrolling in Medicaid. But getting insurance allows Indians to receive care from more providers and allows the Indian system to get reimbursed from Medicaid or other insurers.
That would generate “an influx of capital,” said Jim Roberts, policy analyst for Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board, that “you can use to improve Indian health care.”
Some disagree. Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, said exemptions could discourage insurance enrollment, raise premiums for insured people and further stress the Indian health care system, which he called “poorly managed” and in need of billions of dollars to “keep the promise to Native Americans.”
Even if more Indians become insured, it will not end the problems, especially if providers and insurers, daunted by the alarming health problems, continue avoiding Indian Country.
Proposed legislation would not give Indians everything they want, but the overhaul does include grants for preventive care and research. And the Indian Health Care Improvement Act, which stands a good chance of being reauthorized by Congress for the first time since 2001, would enhance programs, physician recruitment and hospital construction. Although it approves no funding, advocates hope it will prompt additional money.
Representative Frank Pallone Jr., Democrat of New Jersey, said that with the current climate in Congress, and “particularly the president, it’s definitely going to be easier to get Indian provisions in the health care bills.”
Easier, but no sure thing.
With expansions in public coverage or subsidies to buy private coverage, some lawmakers may question whether Indian Country should “still be getting direct payments to run I.H.S. clinics,” said Stephen Zuckerman, a health economist at the Urban Institute, a research group.
“Some people are saying, ‘We can’t make all these adjustments for you guys,’ ” Mr. Allen said, adding that some Indians reply: “Make us pay for health care, then the deal is off. Give us the land back, and we’re good.”

Afghan Plan Faces Sharp Questioning From Senators

By ELISABETH BUMILLER and BRIAN KNOWLTON

WASHINGTON — Defense secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the nation’s top military officer laid out a muscular defense of President Obama’s decision to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan on Captiol Hill on Wednesday, but members of Congress of both parties objected to major parts of the new strategy.

At a crowded hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who last year ran against Mr. Obama for president, sharply questioned Mr. Obama’s plan to begin withdrawing the additional American forces by July 2011.

Senator McCain said it was “logically incoherent” to say that the withdrawal would begin that summer, “no matter what,” but also say, as the administration does, that the exit date would also depend on conditions on the ground.

The answer, after a sometimes tense back-and-forth with Mr. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was that the administration would review the situation in Afghanistan in December 2010 and then “evaluate,” as Mr. Gates put it, whether it would be possible for Mr. Obama to begin withdrawals in the summer of 2011.

“Then it makes no sense for him to announce the date,” Mr. McCain retorted. In short, he said, “that gives the wrong impression to our friends, it’s the wrong impression to give our enemies.”

Later in the session, Senator Jack Reed, Democrat of Rhode Island, said, “It strikes me as that the Taliban has been emboldened quite aggressively the last several years without any type of deadline.”

Senator Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who is chairman of the committee, questioned whether sending so many additional troops might keep the Afghans from building up their security forces on their own.

“Where I have questions is whether the rapid deployment of a large number of U.S. combat forces, without an adequate number of Afghan security forces for our troops to partner with, serves that mission,” Mr. Levin said.

Mr. Levin is recognized by members of both parties for his expertise in military matters. So is Mr. Reed, a West Point graduate who served 12 years in the Army, and another panel member, Senator Lindsey O. Graham, Republican of South Carolina.

Two committee members, Mr. McCain and Senator Jim Webb, Democrat of Virginia, fought in the Vietnam war. And another member, Senator Daniel K. Akaka, Democrat of Hawaii, is one of the few World War II veterans still in the Senate.

In his opening statement, Mr. Gates, who pushed for the 30,000 additional troops and was singled out by the White House as influential in Mr. Obama’s decision, sharply differed with some of Mr. Obama’s advisers who have argued that the United States should focus on rooting out Al Qaeda from Pakistan, and that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not present a serious long-term threat to the national security of the United States.

On the contrary, Mr. Gates said, Al Qaeda and the Taliban are inextricably linked.

“While al Qaeda is under great pressure now and dependent on the Taliban and other extremist groups, for sustainment, the success of the Taliban would vastly strengthen al Qaeda’s message, to the Muslim world, that violent extremists are on the winning side of history,” Mr. Gates said.

“Put simply, the Taliban and al Qaeda have become symbiotic, each benefiting from the success and mythology of the other. Al Qaeda leaders have stated this explicitly and repeatedly.”

Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the Connecticut independent who heads the Senate’s homeland security committee, said he was convinced that “there is no substitute for victory over the Islamist extremists and terrorists in Afghanistan. A war of necessity must not just be fought; it must, of necessity, be won.”

Mr. Gates sought to dispel any notion that the United States is being dragged into a conflict without end, and that Washington is motivated by naïve idealism.

“This approach is not open-ended ‘nation building,’ ” he said. “It is neither necessary nor feasible to create a modern, centralized, Western-style Afghan nation-state — the likes of which has never been seen in that country. Nor does it entail pacifying every village and conducting textbook counterinsurgency from one end of Afghanistan to the other.

“It is, instead, a narrower focus tied more tightly to our core goal of disrupting, dismantling and eventually defeating Al Qaeda by building the capacity of the Afghans — capacity that will be measured by observable progress on clear objectives, and not simply by the passage of time.”

Mrs. Clinton said America’s military efforts in the region will be complemented by realistic and practical moves to improve the lives of Afghan civilians.

“It’s a cliche to say we have our best people in these jobs, but it happens to be true,” she said. “We will be delivering high-impact assistance and bolstering Afghanistan’s agricultural sector, the traditional core of the Afghan economy. This will create jobs, reduce the funding that the Taliban receives from poppy cultivation, and draw insurgents off of the battlefield.”

In response to a question from Mr. Webb, Admiral Mullen said his visits to Afghanistan as well as discussions with American military leaders had convinced him that the Afghan people as a whole are “very tired” of war, and not particularly loyal to the Taliban.

Mr. Levin said he was troubled by the numbers being floated. In the vitally important Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan, he said, the current ratio of American to Afghan troops is 5 to 1. “Doubling the number of U.S. troops in the south will only worsen a ratio under which our forces are already matched up with fewer Afghan troops than they can and should partner with,” he said.

In general, the other senators set off few political fireworks, and the event had little of the drama that marked other Capitol Hill hearings on the war in Iraq. At one point Senator Evan Bayh, Democrat of Indiana, offered his congratulations to Mrs. Clinton on the recent engagement of her daughter, Chelsea.

There was more emotion later in the day when the three appeared before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who opposes the war, asked: "What is different about what the president said? Even today, I don’t hear anything that different. Maybe it’s a different facade.”

In the Senate hearing, Mr. Gates offered a dire picture of Afghanistan, should the United States not succeed.

“Failure in Afghanistan would mean a Taliban takeover of much, if not most, of the country and likely a renewed civil war,” He told the committee. “Taliban-ruled areas could in short order become, once again, a sanctuary for Al Qaeda as well as a staging area for resurgent militant groups on the offensive in Pakistan.”

When pressed by Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, why the United States had to invest so much military power and money in Afghanistan when Al Qaeda still had the ability to establish safe havens in other countries, Mr. Gates replied that Afghanistan was unique.

Not only was it the place where the 2001 attacks against the United States were launched, he said, it “is still the wellspring of inspiration for extremist jihadism everywhere.”

He said that the “guidance and strategic leadership” for Al Qaeda comes from the group’s leaders who are in the border area with Pakistan, and that there is an “unholy alliance” that has developed in the past year between Al Qaeda, the Taliban in Pakistan and the Taliban in Afghanistan.

“And these people work off of each other’s mythology, off of each other’s narrative, and the success of one contributes to the success of the other,” Mr. Gates said.

He added, “If anything, the situation, I think, is more serious today than it was a year ago because of the attacks of the Taliban in Pakistan on Pakistan, and the effort of al Qaeda in collusion with the Taliban in Pakistan to try and destabilize Pakistan itself.”

President Obama, speaking on Tuesday before cadets and senior military officers at the United States Military Academy at West Point, announced that he would dispatch 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan in the coming months, but he vowed to start bringing American forces home from Afghanistan in the middle of 2011, saying the United States could not afford and should not have to shoulder an open-ended commitment.

Promising that he could “bring this war to a successful conclusion,” Mr. Obama set out a strategy that would seek to reverse Taliban gains in large parts of Afghanistan, better protect the Afghan people, increase the pressure on Afghanistan to build its own military capacity and a more effective government and step up attacks on Al Qaeda in Pakistan.

Administration officials said that they were hoping to get a commitment for an additional 5,000 to 8,000 troops from NATO allies — perhaps as early as Friday at a foreign ministers’ meeting in Brussels — which would bring the number of additional troops in Afghanistan to close to the 40,000 that Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American and NATO commander in Afghanistan, was seeking.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg reported from West Point, and Helene Cooper and Brian Knowlton from Washington. Reporting was contributed by Peter Baker, David E. Sanger, Mark Mazzetti, Carl Hulse and Mark Landler from Washington, and Carlotta Gall from Kabul, Afghanistan.

Iraq Deadline Helped Elect Obama; On Afghanistan, It Could Hurt His Chances for Re-Election - Capital Journal - WSJ

By Peter Brown

Peter A. Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, is a former White House correspondent with two decades of experience covering Washington government and politics. Click here for Mr. Brown’s full bio.

The idea of a time limit for ending a war worked well for President Barack Obama when he ran for president the first time, but by adopting that strategy for Afghanistan, he may be betting his chances for success the second time.

By essentially pledging that American troops will be out of Afghanistan by the end of his current term, the president is throwing a bone to his core supporters, who for the most part are uncomfortable with an increased U.S. military effort there in what is now an eight-year-old war.

Let’s put aside the debate on the wisdom of the deadline policy, and look at the politics: Mr. Obama’s deadline pledge creates a benchmark against which his actions will be judged, for better or for worse.

In other words, the withdrawal timetable he and his aides outlined in December 2009 will be used to judge his actions regardless of what happens on the ground in Afghanistan. By taking such a firm stand, he makes himself politically vulnerable should events cause him to decide troops have to stay longer, or that the U.S. goals there have to go unmet in order to keep his original deadline.

Of course, the president may well be able to end the U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan by then and accomplish his goal of ridding the country of al Qaeda and Taliban forces who otherwise might use it as a safe haven to plot terrorist actions against the U.S.

But if things don’t go the way the president expects, his line in the sand could get kicked in his face in the give-and-take, to put it nicely, that will characterize the 2012 campaign when he is expected to seek a second term.

Coming Home in 18 Months

In his nationally televised speech Tuesday night from West Point, Mr. Obama explained why he was sending an additional 30,000 U.S. combat troops to Afghanistan. He said those troops would begin coming home in just 18 months, in the summer of 2011. Earlier in the day, CNN reported it had been told by senior Obama administration officials that their goal is to have “most U.S. service members” out of Afghanistan within three years.

Although his promise to begin pulling out troops in 18 months may soothe the worries of some in his own party about a military buildup now, the 2012 presidential election will be held in two years and 11 months and voter reaction then is what matters most to his political future.

Mr. Obama’s speech and his troop decision are unlikely to solve his political problem, however, since public opinion is split on the issue. He is trying to finesse the sizable gap between those who want the U.S. to get out of Afghanistan and those who wanted him to send the larger number of new troops that the Pentagon requested.

The political problem for the president is more complicated than other big issues filling his plate. On Afghanistan, liberals/Democrats who are usually with him on almost all issues are skeptical of the U.S. military involvement there. Conservatives/Republicans, who on issues like health care and the stimulus are almost unanimously against the president, are strongly in favor of a military buildup in Afghanistan.

For example, a Quinnipiac University national poll last month found that when voters were asked if they thought the U.S. was “doing the right thing by fighting the war in Afghanistan now,” 48% answered yes, 41% said no. But the split along partisan lines was dramatic. While 68% of Republicans and 51% of independents agreed it was the right thing, only 31% of Democrats felt that way.

A More Important War

When Mr. Obama ran in 2008, he made setting a firm date for the exit of U.S. combat troops from Iraq his prime foreign policy promise. At the time, he said the war in Afghanistan was more important and one that deserved a larger American commitment.

President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee against Mr. Obama last year, said Mr. Obama’s plan for a hard deadline for leaving Iraq was bad policy because the enemy would just wait until after the deadline to make their move. But Mr. Obama’s election was at least, in part, due to American voters’ exhaustion with Iraq.

Last spring, Mr. Obama approved sending another 22,000 U.S. combat troops to Afghanistan, less than the Pentagon wanted. In his speech Tuesday, he gave the generals three-quarts of the increase they wanted this time.

The analogy with the American involvement in Vietnam during the 1960s and early ’70s is on everyone’s mind at the White House, and Mr. Obama took time to explain why he did not think the situations are analogous.

But clearly, the president’s best and brightest want to avoid the same kind of open-ended commitment that President Lyndon Johnson made when he was willing to send as many troops as it took to keep South Vietnam from falling to North Vietnam.

While setting a deadline for withdrawal may allow Mr. Obama to avoid repeating the mistakes that led LBJ not to seek a second full term in 1968, it also creates a potential problem for Mr. Obama in 2012.

Write to Peter Brown at peter.brown@quinnipiac.edu.

Fouad Ajami: The Arabs Have Stopped Applauding Obama - WSJ.com

A foreign policy of penance has won America no friends.

By FOUAD AJAMI

'He talks too much," a Saudi academic in Jeddah, who had once been smitten with Barack Obama, recently observed to me of America's 44th president. He has wearied of Mr. Obama and now does not bother with the Obama oratory.

He is hardly alone, this academic. In the endless chatter of this region, and in the commentaries offered by the press, the theme is one of disappointment. In the Arab-Islamic world, Barack Obama has come down to earth.

He has not made the world anew, history did not bend to his will, the Indians and Pakistanis have been told that the matter of Kashmir is theirs to resolve, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the same intractable clash of two irreconcilable nationalisms, and the theocrats in Iran have not "unclenched their fist," nor have they abandoned their nuclear quest.

There is little Mr. Obama can do about this disenchantment. He can't journey to Turkey to tell its Islamist leaders and political class that a decade of anti-American scapegoating is all forgiven and was the product of American policies—he has already done that. He can't journey to Cairo to tell the fabled "Arab street" that the Iraq war was a wasted war of choice, and that America earned the malice that came its way from Arab lands—he has already done that as well. He can't tell Muslims that America is not at war with Islam—he, like his predecessor, has said that time and again.

It was the norm for American liberalism during the Bush years to brandish the Pew Global Attitudes survey that told of America's decline in the eyes of foreign nations. Foreigners were saying what the liberals wanted said.

Now those surveys of 2009 bring findings from the world of Islam that confirm that the animus toward America has not been radically changed by the ascendancy of Mr. Obama. In the Palestinian territories, 15% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 82% have an unfavorable view. The Obama speech in Ankara didn't seem to help in Turkey, where the favorables are 14% and those unreconciled, 69%. In Egypt, a country that's reaped nearly 40 years of American aid, things stayed roughly the same: 27% have a favorable view of the U.S. while 70% do not. In Pakistan, a place of great consequence for American power, our standing has deteriorated: The unfavorables rose from 63% in 2008 to 68% this year.

Martin Kozlowski

Mr. Obama's election has not drained the swamps of anti-Americanism. That anti-Americanism is endemic to this region, an alibi and a scapegoat for nations, and their rulers, unwilling to break out of the grip of political autocracy and economic failure. It predated the presidency of George W. Bush and rages on during the Obama presidency.

We had once taken to the foreign world that quintessential American difference—the belief in liberty, a needed innocence to play off against the settled and complacent ways of older nations. The Obama approach is different.

Steeped in an overarching idea of American guilt, Mr. Obama and his lieutenants offered nothing less than a doctrine, and a policy, of American penance. No one told Mr. Obama that the Islamic world, where American power is engaged and so dangerously exposed, it is considered bad form, nay a great moral lapse, to speak ill of one's own tribe when in the midst, and in the lands, of others.

The crowd may have applauded the cavalier way the new steward of American power referred to his predecessor, but in the privacy of their own language they doubtless wondered about his character and his fidelity. "My brother and I against my cousin, my cousin and I against the stranger," goes one of the Arab world's most honored maxims. The stranger who came into their midst and spoke badly of his own was destined to become an object of suspicion.

Mr. Obama could not make up his mind: He was at one with "the people" and with the rulers who held them in subjugation. The people of Iran who took to the streets this past summer were betrayed by this hapless diplomacy—Mr. Obama was out to "engage" the terrible rulers that millions of Iranians were determined to be rid of.

On Nov. 4, on the 30th anniversary of the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran, the embattled reformers, again in the streets, posed an embarrassing dilemma for American diplomacy: "Obama, Obama, you are either with us or with them," they chanted. By not responding to these cries and continuing to "engage" Tehran's murderous regime, his choice was made clear. It wasn't one of American diplomacy's finest moments.

Associated Press

Mr. Obama has himself to blame for the disarray of his foreign policy. American arms had won a decent outcome in Iraq, but Mr. Obama would not claim it—it was his predecessor's war. Vigilance had kept the American homeland safe from terrorist attacks for seven long years under his predecessors, but he could never grant Bush policies the honor and credit they deserved. He had declared Afghanistan a war of necessity, but he seems to have his eye on the road out even as he is set to announce a troop increase in an address to be delivered tomorrow.

He was quick to assert, in the course of his exuberant campaign for president last year, that his diplomacy in South Asia would start with the standoff in Kashmir. In truth India had no interest in an international adjudication of Kashmir. What was settled during the partition in 1947 was there to stay. In recent days, Mr. Obama walked away from earlier ambitions. "Obviously, there are historic conflicts between India and Pakistan," he said. "It's not the place of the United States to try to, from the outside, resolve those conflicts."

Nor was he swayed by the fate of so many "peace plans" that have been floated over so many decades to resolve the fight between Arab and Jew over the land between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. Where George W. Bush offered the Palestinians the gift of clarity—statehood but only after the renunciation of terror and the break with maximalism—Mr. Obama signaled a return to the dead ways of the past: a peace process where America itself is broker and arbiter.

The Obama diplomacy had made a settlement freeze its starting point, when this was precisely the wrong place to begin. Israel has given up settlements before at the altar of peace—recall the historical accommodation with Egypt a quarter century ago. The right course would have set the question of settlements aside as it took up the broader challenge of radicalism in the region—the menace and swagger of Iran, the arsenal of Hamas and Hezbollah, the refusal of the Arab order of power to embrace in broad daylight the cause of peace with Israel.

The laws of gravity, the weight of history and of precedent, have caught up with the Obama presidency. We are beyond stirring speeches. The novelty of the Obama approach, and the Obama persona, has worn off. There is a whole American diplomatic tradition to draw upon—engagements made, wisdom acquired in the course of decades, and, yes, accounts to be settled with rogues and tyrannies. They might yet help this administration find its way out of a labyrinth of its own making.

Mr. Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author of "The Foreigner's Gift" (Free Press, 2007).

Seeing History Through Arab-American Eyes - VOA

Mohamed Elshinnawi | Washington, DC 01 December 2009

Photo: Mohamed Elshinnawi

Author Alia Malek says she wrote "A Country Called Amreeka" to put a "human face" on the Arab-American community, and to counter the public fear and misunderstanding fueled by the 9/11 terrorist attacks

In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Alia Malek, a successful Syrian-American civil rights attorney, was shocked by what she saw as a dangerous and misguided public backlash against Arab-Americans. Malek was confident that somebody would write a book that would put a human face on the Arab-American community and educate Americans about a culture that was so poorly understood.

"People seemed to think that Arabs only existed 'over there,' that there weren't actually Arab-Americans who had been part of the United States since the late 1800s. And I sort of went about my life practicing law, thinking that inevitably, somebody was going to write a book like this. And by the time I decided to do a career switch and go to journalism school at Colombia University four years later, nobody had yet written the book that I thought was so inevitable. So that is why I decided to write the book," Malek says.

Her new book is titled, "A Country Called Amreeka: Arab Roots, American Stories." It is a collection of narratives about some of the 3.5 million people of Arab descent who live in the United States - individuals with roots in Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, the Palestinian territories and Syria. Set against the backdrop of the past 40 years of American history and international developments, Malek's subjects share their stories and demonstrate that, even as they play football, work assembly lines and hold public office, they have remained largely shut out of the national conversation.

Malek, who began her legal career as a civil rights attorney at the U.S. Department of Justice, contends that U.S immigration laws before 1965 were racially biased. And she says they hindered the naturalization of Arab immigrants to such an extent that most Americans were unaware there was an Arab-American community.

"I think that is why they assimilated and became almost invisible. And then, in that post-1965- immigration pop culture, [in] the media, Arab-Americans were not part of their discourse, it was not a part of the American consciousness. You did not have a TV show of Arab-Americans; there was something that remained very foreign about 'Arabs'," she says.

Stories mark historic moments in past 40 years

Each chapter of "A Country Called Amreeka" focuses on a major historical event as seen through the eyes of an Arab-American, allowing readers to relive the moment in that person's skin. In the chapter exploring how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict played out for Arabs living in the United States, Malek tells the story of Luba, the wife of a Palestinian refugee who yearns for her hometown of Ramallah after it is occupied by Israel during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war.

In one passage from the book, Luba struggles to explain her heartache to her young American-born daughter, Mona, whose puzzlement at her mother's distress highlights the gap between Arab heritage and life in Amreeka:

"Now all Jerusalem is with the Jews and now it is Ramallah's turn to be taken," Luba explained. "And that is why I am crying and that is why I want you to shut up and stop asking questions!"

But Mona continued: "The Jews, aren't they human beings? Aren't they people?"

"Yes, of course they are human beings," Luba responded. "They are people like us."

"Then why can't they be in Ramallah?" Mona demanded.

"Mona, this is your house. Do you want your neighbors to come and tell you to get out and take your home and they live here? Is this right?" (Malek, 2009).

In another chapter, the reader sees the 1963 burning of a black church in segregated Birmingham, Alabama, through the eyes of a dark-skinned Lebanese-American. There's a Palestinian-American surrounded by anti-Arab violence during the Iran hostage crisis in 1979 and a homosexual Arab-American who was afraid to be gay in the Middle East and is now afraid to be an Arab in America.

And there is Lance Corporal Abraham, a Yemeni-American Marine who is deployed to Iraq in the 2003 U.S. invasion. Because he is an Arab, Abraham is rebuked as a traitor by an Iraqi mother, whose two young daughters had been killed during a U.S. military operation.

Malek says,"I hope people sort of sympathize with Abraham and the difficulties he was going through, both as a young married father with a wife half-way across the world, and also the concerns he has as he and his Marine brothers come back alive from the war, as well as just seeing 'the good, the bad and the ugly' of the American invasion of Iraq."

Book mentions earlier immigrants

The author also recalls the Lebanese, Syrian and Palestinian Christians who were part of America's first great wave of immigration starting in the 1880s, and who found work in the mines and opened grocery stores. She examines the impact of the 1965 immigration reform legislation that allowed Arabs to escape political upheaval in their own countries and settle in Detroit, Michigan, where many found work Ford Motor Company assembly lines. Malek hopes her American readers will come to know these people in a new and more positive light.

"I hope they can see that the history of Arab-Americans is basically as old as the history of a lot of immigrant groups that we easily accept as part of the American mosaic. And that they see that we are in American society; we are voters and consumers and producers and teachers, and husbands and wives and neighbors and everything else that we think that other fellow Americans are. I mean, there needs to be rightful re-insertion into the American imagination of the place of Arab-Americans," she says.

Obama’s Afghanistan dilemma - The New Yorker

by Hendrik Hertzberg

November 30, 2009

In the sixty-four years since V-J Day, the United States has fought five wars big enough to be styled “major.” Two of these, Vietnam (1962-75, by the most common reckoning) and Iraq (2003-11, with any luck), were conceived in sin. Their beginnings were fatally compromised by deceptions that congealed into lies, abetted by profound geostrategic misjudgments. In Vietnam, illusions piled on illusions. The Tonkin Gulf incident was not even an incident, since an incident, to be an incident, has to occur. The fear that Communism would spread throughout Asia and beyond if it was not stopped in Vietnam turned out to be groundless; so did the belief that the other side was motivated more by totalitarian ideology than by national feeling. The Iraq War, too, was midwifed by falsehoods and follies: the falsehoods that the Baghdad regime possessed “weapons of mass destruction” and that Saddam Hussein’s was a hidden hand behind Al Qaeda and the attacks of September 11, 2001; the follies that the war would be a “cakewalk” and, most seductively, that it would “transform” the Middle East. In both wars, our enemy was only sometimes a conventional army; as often, if not more so, it was an elusive guerrilla force that was frequently indistinguishable from the civilian population.

Another two of our five big-scale wars, Korea (1950-53) and the Gulf War (1991), were legitimate in their origins and (by the standards of mechanized slaughter) scrupulous in their execution. The Korean “police action”—a euphemism, but one that carried real meaning at a time when hopes for a global order of international law were fresh and high—was fought with the sanction (and partly under the flag) of the United Nations. The Gulf War, too, had the sanction of the U.N. and its Security Council. Four decades apart, the two wars shared many features, starting with the moral and temporal clarity of their beginnings. Both were fought in response to armed aggression across international borders. In both, the American Administration resisted powerful political pressures to expand its objective to include the destruction and conquest of the regime responsible for the original aggression. And, after both, the cessation of hostilities along the restored borders has held, even if its form does not quite deserve the name of peace.

The war in Afghanistan scrambles the familiar categories so thoroughly that the customary rubrics for making judgments don’t fit. As in Korea and the Gulf, we went to war to punish an unmistakable act of aggression—this time on our own soil. But the aggressor was not a state; it was a band of freelance fanatics protected by a state. The goals of our response were as clear as the morning of September 11th: to call to account those who sent the murderers and the government that harbored them. Our action had the backing of NATO, which, for the first time in its history, activated the provision of its charter that declares an attack against one an attack against all. The support of the “international community” was nearly unanimous. Even Iran lent a hand.

During the election campaign, Barack Obama and the Democrats put forth a story—a “narrative,” as political reporters now like to say—about two wars. According to the story, the “good” war was the war in Afghanistan. But it failed to fully achieve its principal goal because at the crucial moment the Bush Administration, in its obsession with Saddam, diverted resources and attention to Iraq—a “bad” war. The diversion allowed Bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban leadership to slip the noose at Tora Bora—a guerrilla Dunkirk. “I don’t oppose all wars,” an Illinois state senator had famously told a rally on the very afternoon in October, 2002, that the Iraq War Resolution was introduced in Congress. “I’m opposed to dumb wars.” Iraq was a dumb war; Afghanistan was, or could be, a smart one.

There was considerable truth in the narrative. But it contained an almost subliminal suggestion that somehow the clock could be turned back—that the events of the Afghanistan war’s first months could be replayed, this time with a better outcome. When Obama moved into the White House, he brought the narrative with him. In August, at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention, he said of the conflict, “This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.” By October, he had ordered in thirty-four thousand more troops, doubling the overall American deployment in Afghanistan. But he had also begun an intensive review of the entire policy.

On Armistice Day, at a full-scale meeting of his national-security team, Obama was presented with four options. According to what little has leaked out from under the closed doors, all four options called for more American troops, from ten thousand at the lower end to forty thousand at the upper. Though some in the Administration favor a smaller military footprint instead of a larger one, that was not among the choices offered to the President. For this fifth war, there was no fifth option.

The President rejected all four. He has apparently decided against anything like a quick drawdown, but he wants a map that plots an eventual way out, not just an abundance of ways further in. As he told an interviewer, there can be no “indefinite stay,” no “permanent protectorate.” And he has questions he would like answered.

So do the rest of us. Does it make sense, for example, to spend lives and treasure trying to eradicate “safe havens” in Afghanistan when Al Qaeda has so many other—well, options, from Sudan to Hamburg? Will a bigger, longer, and presumably bloodier occupation advance or retard the ultimate aim of discouraging Islamist terrorism? Will adding American troops—at a million dollars a year per soldier—encourage Afghans to fight for themselves or prompt them to leave the fighting to us? Can Afghanistan’s nominal government, with its President elected by fraud and its recent rating as the second most corrupt on earth, be finessed or somehow remade?

The sum we are already spending annually on Afghanistan is greater than its gross domestic product. Are there nonmilitary ways we could deploy that sum which would advance our goals as efficaciously? Would even forty thousand additional troops suffice for anything resembling the ambitious nation-building program that General Stanley McChrystal, the top military commander in Afghanistan, has proposed? (Counterinsurgency theory suggests that it would take more than ten times that many; would forty—or ten, or twenty—thousand be only a first installment?) Any counterinsurgency campaign, we’re told, requires a very long commitment. Is the voluntary association of democracies called NATO, organized to deter war more than to wage it, capable of sustaining a twenty or thirty years’ war? For that matter, does the United States—a decentralized populist democracy struggling with economic decline and political gridlock—have that capacity? And what about Pakistan?

The President has come under heavy criticism for taking the time to ponder the imponderables. “The urgent necessity,” a respected Washington columnist wrote the other day, “is to make a decision—whether or not it is right.” Really? Does the columnist suppose that a country unable to find the patience for weeks (even months) of thinking could summon the stamina for years (even decades) of killing and dying? What Obama seems to have discovered is that this is no longer the war that began eight years ago. That war was an act of retribution and prevention. But now who are we punishing? What are we preventing? The old narrative is broken. The fifth war is becoming a sixth