Monthly Archive for October, 2010

From Marco Roth, in n+1

Amid the endless oil spill, endless war, and endless unemployment crisis, the past summer brought us the more punctual and considerably more imaginary Shirley Sherrod affair, in which a black Department of Agriculture official was accused of discriminating against white farmers in Georgia. The accusation was made on the basis of a distorted edit of a speech Sherrod gave to the NAACP back in March. In her speech, Sherrod spoke of struggling to overcome her reluctance to help the same kind of people who had murdered her father during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. A classic piece of the Christian forgive-your-enemies rhetoric of the civil rights movement, Sherrod’s talk was misleadingly cut and pasted onto YouTube by the blogger Andrew Breitbart, in such a way as to imply unrepentant “reverse racism.”

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From The Economist

The debate over gay marriage is at the heart of many races in America’s mid-term elections. On Sunday October 10th Carl Paladino, the Republican candidate for governor of New York, said that children should not be “brainwashed” into thinking that homosexuality was acceptable and that he would veto any gay-marriage bill. But that view places him in a minority. For the first time since the Pew Research Centre began conducting polls on the subject in 1995, fewer than half of Americans (48%) are opposed to gay marriage, while 42% are in favour.

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From Democracy Now

On the ninth anniversary of 9/11, thousands take to the streets of Lower Manhattan for and against the plans to build an Islamic community center near Ground Zero. We host a different kind of debate. Tariq Ramadan, one the world’s most renowned Muslim scholars who was barred from entering the United States for six years under the Bush administration, says it should be built elsewhere. He debates Mustafa Bayoumi, an associate professor at Brooklyn College and author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America.

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By Belinda Cooper, in The New York Times

Human rights have come to dominate international discourse, but while this fact is often portrayed as the culmination of a centuries-old tradition, Samuel Moyn, a professor of history at Columbia University, takes a different view. The modern concept of human rights, he says in “The Last Utopia,” differs radically from older claims of rights, like those that arose out of the American and French Revolutions. According to Moyn, human rights in their current form — applicable to all and internationally protected — can be traced not to the Enlightenment, nor to the humanitarian impulses of the 19th century nor to the impact of the Holocaust after World War II. Instead, he sees them as dating from the 1970s, exemplified by President Jimmy Carter’s effort to make human rights a pillar of United States foreign policy.

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