Daily Archives: November 19, 2021

Universally Accepted

To the Editor:

In his recent review of Amor Towless wonderful The Lincoln Highway (Nov. 7), Chris Bachelder says, The book lacks a prominent female traveler and readers might wish

If readers wish that, they should read a different book. In high school English class, most of us were introduced to the concept of universality, which holds that the job of an author is to create characters with whom all readers, regardless of race and gender, can identify.

As a woman, I am far more concerned about the treatment of women and minorities in decisions about which books should be published and reviewed than I am about their inclusion in books where they really dont belong. I cant count the novels written by men that Ive read where I felt that had they been written by women, we wouldnt even be hearing about them.

It is depressing to realize that the creative process and literary criticism are now falling victim to political correctness.

Lupi Robinson North Haven, Conn.

To the Editor:

John Plotzs review of Fiona Sampsons Two-Way Mirror (Oct. 31) praises how the book, a biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, pushes back against the neglect, bordering on amnesia, that has descended on a poet once widely celebrated.

Explore the New York Times Book Review

Want to keep up with the latest and greatest in books? This is a good place to start.

On the contrary, a Barrett Browning revival has flourished in academia for several decades. In the 1990s, in the respected Dictionary of Literary Biography series, Beverly Taylor devoted almost 30 pages to her. In 1995, Angela Leighton and Margaret Reynolds published their anthology of Victorian Women Poets, whose 66 pages of Barrett Brownings poetry pretty much demand a place in relevant course syllabuses. Also in the 90s, publishers of the good old Norton anthologies put out a critical edition of her long but brilliant Aurora Leigh.

Plotzs hope that Two-Way Mirror will inspire a new generation of readers neglects the past 25 years, during which students of Victorian poetry would have needed an especially stubborn amnesia to avoid the possibility of finding inspiration in Barrett Brownings poetry.

Kathleen McCormackWayne, Pa.

To the Editor:

In his review of Evan Osnoss Wildland (Nov. 7), Angus Deaton describes Greenwich, Conn., and its transition from the Greenwich of Prescott and George H. W. Bush to one that largely favors Trump.

The data reflect no such transition, however. After supporting Republican presidential nominees in 11 of the 12 previous presidential elections, including Mitt Romney in 2012, Greenwich voters preferred the Democrats Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 over Trump, each time by a decisive margin. Similarly, Greenwichs Republican voters showed less enthusiasm for Trump than other Connecticut Republicans in 2016; while Trump won the statewide G.O.P. primary with over 58 percent of the vote, a majority of Greenwich Republicans cast ballots for other Republican presidential candidates.

Brice H. PeyreNew York

To the Editor:

Each Sunday, the first section I reach for is the Book Review. And on most Sundays I squirm in frustration with more than half of the fiction reviews because they are littered with detailed plot descriptions. As this is a consistent practice, I must conclude that it is an editorial decision coupled with sheer laziness on the part of many reviewers.

What happened to sticking with a books theme, style, context and quality (in the reviewers mind)? A primary joy in reading fiction is to turn a page not knowing whats going to happen next. Why spoil that?

Pete WarshawChapel Hill, N.C.

To the Editor:

I have often decided to read books based on reviews in the Book Review, but never before because of a single sentence.

I was inclined to skip Steven Pinkers 400-page Rationality, having long ago read Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, until one line in Anthony Gottliebs review (Oct. 31) changed my mind: His deployment of perhaps the finest of Jewish sex jokes as a tool to explain the concept of confounding variables may deserve some sort of prize.

I have ordered the book.

Steven LubetChicago

Originally posted here:

Book Spoilers, Sex Jokes and Other Letters to the Editor - The New York Times

Last week news outlets and social media were abuzz with the announcement of plans to establish a university dedicated to the fearless pursuit of truth and forbidden courses. The new school, the University of Austin not to be confused with the fully accredited public University of Texas at Austin is being created by a group of moderate and conservative intellectuals and writers who are frequently critical of what they see as groupthink on college campuses. Higher education, they argue, has been broken for a long time, and this school is an attempt to begin to fix it.

Accusations of political intolerance and indoctrination on campuses and in the public discourse have been with us for decades. Woke young people have aroused the choreographed indignation of leaders as different as Presidents Donald Trump and Barack Obama. Every president since George H.W. Bush has earned points by attacking political correctness.

In 2019, Mr. Obama drew considerable attention for opining: I do get a sense sometimes now among certain young people and this is accelerated by social media there is this sense sometimes of: The way of me making change is to be as judgmental as possible about other people, and thats enough. He added: If all youre doing is casting stones, youre probably not going to get that far. Thats easy to do.

Yes, that is easy to do whether we cast those stones at the longhaired protesters of the 1960s, the environmentalist tree-huggers of the 1990s or the judgmental pronoun policers and woke college students of today. Scapegoats like these are politically useful; they inspire solidarity by providing an object for hostility or derision. But educators, civic leaders and elected officials should know better than to play along with this strategy. Instead, they should strive to cultivate the robust exchange of ideas across differences. Given the extraordinary polarization in the country today, these exchanges are more important than ever.

Like all stereotypes, the image of the woke college student suppressing the speech and thought of others is wildly misleading. My 40 years in higher education have shown me that no student wishes to fit such a stereotype, and the reality is that few actually do.

Sure, there are cases of students and professors who are enraged by the expression of ideas they find objectionable. And they dont just criticize the ideas; they sometimes go after the platforms that publish them. At Wesleyan a few years ago, for example, the editors of the student newspaper were harshly denounced for publishing an op-ed critical of some Black Lives Matter protesters. Students threw newspapers in the trash, and because of the intensity of the reaction, editors became fearful.

Some believed that these students protesting the op-ed had gone too far, that they were more worried about giving a platform to unpopular opinions than they were about the free exchange of ideas. That may have been true. But these worries led, as they often do, to serious reflection and lively debates on campus, and eventually to the hard work of thinking through what editorial autonomy should mean for student journalists.

In the end, the protesters recognized the importance of having a newspaper free to publish unpopular opinions and had succeeded in drawing attention to the barriers that kept some students from seeing the newspaper as a vehicle for their views. But these sorts of healthy debates can be hard to come by; political polarization has made them even more difficult.

Concerns about the intolerant left have been around for a very long time. At Wesleyan, where Ive been president for almost 15 years, political correctness was already being satirized in the 1990s see the film PCU. Its true that conversations about bias, sexual assault, climate change or the winner-take-all economy are complex and tend to elicit strong emotions. But the fear of bruised feelings or the threat of offense is no reason to cut off a genuine discussion, or to censure faculty or students for engaging freely in these conversations. I have argued for some time that colleges must be much more intentional about creating intellectual diversity.

Some students dont shy away from disagreement or argument. I have met conservative students who love standing up to their progressive classmates. As a government major told me recently with a grin, I have fun debating with my classmates, and my professor finds me fascinating.

But some dont want to be outliers as has always been the case. There are students and faculty who complain that they dont want to express centrist or right-wing views because they fear being criticized or stigmatized. They may not see themselves as hypersensitive, but they do crave some protection from students and colleagues whom they perceive as demanding leftist ideological conformity.

Those who complain of such conformity should recognize that their fear isnt the fault of anyones wokeness or hostility toward free expression. It is a sign that they need more courage for it requires courage for students, or anyone, to stay engaged with difference. Whatever your political position, embracing intellectual diversity means being brave enough to consider ideas and practices that might challenge your own beliefs or cause you to change your views, or even your life.

The idea that woke students are merely performing political engagement without truly acknowledging the realities of American life is flatly wrong. During the elections of 2020, students across the country were not just out canceling others they were organizing to create change. According to research from the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University, undergraduates registered in higher numbers and turned out to vote more often than in previous election cycles. More than two-thirds of college students voted in 2020, up more than 10 percentage points from the previous presidential election. Many also helped others get to the polls.

In the current climate of political pessimism and manufactured outrage, we can work with students to reject the tired tropes of the past and embrace what many in the older generations have forgotten: how to engage with and, yes, debate people who have a variety of points of view and who imagine the future with a mix of hopes sometimes very different from their own. No scapegoats required.

See the article here:

Opinion | The Woke Student Is Just a Scapegoat - The New York Times

The bomb blast outside Liverpool Womens Hospital last weekend has thrust the terror threat in Britain today back into the spotlight.

The suspect who died in the explosion 32-year-old Emad al-Swealmeen had first failed in his application for asylum in 2014. During his stay in the UK, he was sectioned under the Mental Health Act for six months over a knife-related incident. Having supposedly converted from Islam to Christianity in 2017, his case has shed light on previous warnings made by senior Church of England clerics that some Muslim asylum seekers were trying to become Christian converts in order to avoid deportation from the UK to Muslim-majority countries where they could be charged with apostasy.

Following the Liverpool terror blast and the recent killing of MP Sir David Amess, the national terror threat has been raised from substantial to severe meaning that the authorities believe that another terrorist attack is highly likely to take place in the UK.

So, what is fuelling ideological extremism in the UK? And what can be done by the UK government to counter the spread of extremism and enhance national security?

According to leading counter-terrorism officials, such as Metropolitan Police assistant commissioner Neil Basu, the fastest-growing terror threat is far-right extremism. But this does not mean it is the prevailing terror threat in modern-day Britain. Far from it.

MI5s broader terror-related watchlist contains 43,000 individuals. In 2020, it was reported that the vast majority of these suspects as many as 39,000 are Islamist extremists. A few thousand were classified as far-right extremists. Little wonder that an independent review of terrorism acts in 2019, by Jonathan Hall QC, concluded that Islamist terrorism remains the principal threat in Great Britain. The review also looked at cases going before the family courts in 2019, and noted the relatively high number of parents seeking to indoctrinate their children many of whom were very young with (mainly Islamist) terrorist sympathies.

Prison-population patterns also demonstrate that Islamist extremism represents the prevailing terror threat in the UK. As of 31 March 2021, there were 215 persons in custody for terrorism-connected offences. Of those in custody, nearly three in four 73 per cent were categorised as holding Islamist-extremist views. This dwarfs the one in five people in custody for terrorism-connected offences who were categorised as adhering to extreme right-wing ideologies.

The centre-piece of the governments counter-extremism strategy is the Prevent programme. This requires teachers, lecturers and many other professionals to report those they believe to be at risk of radicalisation to the authorities. Those deemed most at risk are then referred to Channel, which provides more intensive support.

Yet, recent data suggest that there is a fundamental mismatch between the ideological composition of cases referred to Prevent (and eventually diverted for de-radicalisation through Channel) and the overall nature of the national terror threat. So, while the prevailing terror threat in the UK is Islamist extremism, this is not reflected within our counter-terrorism structures.

From April 2020 to March 2021, over half of Prevent referrals fell into the mixed, unstable and unclear ideology category (51 per cent). The percentage of Islamist-radicalisation cases referred to Prevent (22 per cent) was lower than the share falling into the right-wing radicalisation category (25 per cent). When cases referred to Prevent are upgraded and discussed at a Channel panel, right-wing radicalisation and Islamist radicalisation account for 42 per cent and 25 per cent of cases respectively. Of the 688 cases adopted as fully fledged Channel cases, fewer than one in four cases (22 per cent) were associated with Islamist radicalisation, while nearly half 46 per cent were categorised as cases of right-wing radicalisation.

Why do the types of cases referred to the UKs de-radicalisation programme not reflect the ideological character of the overall terror threat we face? It is likely because the main organisations involved in referring cases to the Prevent scheme police forces, educational institutions, healthcare agencies and local councils have succumbed to the prejudices of identity politics and political correctness. It is entirely plausible that the UKs left-leaning public institutions feel more comfortable referring potential cases of right-wing radicalisation to Prevent than they do referring cases of Islamist radicalisation. It is also hardly far-fetched to believe that individuals in politically correct settings are concerned about being accused of racism or Islamophobia if they air their suspicions that an individual is at risk of Islamist-inspired radicalisation. Such accusations especially in the public sector can ruin ones career.

The public discussion of the terror-related killing of David Amess provided further evidence of a country paralysed by political correctness. The killers alleged link to Islamist extremism has been routinely ignored in favour of blaming other factors. Some have blamed the UKs confrontational political culture. While others have bizarrely asserted a tenuous connection between the killing of Amess and people posting abusive messages on social media. These narratives, in which an adversarial political culture and online rudeness have been held responsible for an MPs murder, are scarily divorced from reality.

Perhaps this refusal to look Islamist terrorism in the face is down to fear. Our elected representatives have seen one of their colleagues stabbed to death by a suspected Islamist extremist they may be frightened of reprisals if they stress the dangers of religiously inspired extremism. Nevertheless, if politicians cannot bring themselves to discuss the ideological underpinnings of the UKs principal terror threat, then they are letting down the public.

Some British parliamentarians may feel that by robustly discussing the threat posed by Islamist extremism, they will offend British Muslims. This is the bigotry of low expectations. Being concerned over the most significant terror threat facing the UK is not a form of anti-Muslim prejudice. Indeed, a report by Crest Advisory found that much like the wider public a comfortable majority of British Muslims are concerned about Islamist extremism. It is also worth noting that when compared to the general population, British Muslims are more likely to say that they would report someone at risk of radicalisation to the relevant authorities. For example, before the Manchester Arena bombing, the perpetrator, Salman Abedi, was banned from a local mosque over his radical views on ISIS and reported by Muslims to the authorities.

Political correctness must not obscure our efforts to tackle violent jihadism. But at the moment, that is exactly what is happening.

There has also not been enough discussion over the role in the rise of Islamist extremism played by state-backed multiculturalism which has encouraged the segregation of communities and cultivated parallel societies.

Indeed, British Islamism has taken root as a serious problem in Englands two largest cities London and Birmingham. Londons eastern boroughs Tower Hamlets and Newham are a particular cause for concern. Both contain largely segregated Muslim communities, whose members originated in deprived agricultural parts of Sylhet in north-eastern Bangladesh. Several Birmingham wards, such as Springfield and Sparkbrook in the citys Hall Green parliamentary constituency, contain deprived, poorly integrated, predominantly Pakistani-origin neighbourhoods. Much of Birminghams Pakistani-heritage population originates from economically dislocated rural villages in the Azad Kashmir region.

In Manchester, Libyan-origin communities have provided breeding grounds for Islamist extremism. Leading counter-terrorism officials, including Neil Basu, have even suggested that the British-Libyan jihadi nexus had not been given sufficient attention by the authorities.

The existence of these segregated hubs of anti-British ideological extremism is telling. It shows how the British political establishment has overestimated the willingness of people from vastly different religious and cultural contexts to integrate into British society. There is therefore a clear need for any counter-extremism strategy to have social cohesion at its heart.

The difficulties of successfully integrating refugees and asylum seekers from unstable Muslim-majority countries have been laid bare in recent years. The case of Emad al-Swealmeen is merely the latest in a string of terror-related incidents involving foreign nationals who have either claimed or been granted asylum in the UK. This includes Libyan refugee Khairi Saadallah, who was convicted of a string of criminal offences before stabbing three park-goers to death in Reading in 2020.

Iraqi teenage asylum seeker Ahmed Hassan was sentenced to life, with a minimum prison term of 34 years, for planting a homemade bomb on a London Underground train and injuring 51 people in 2017. Recent research by the Henry Jackson Society found that, since 1998, around a quarter of foreign nationals convicted of Islamist-related terror offences had an asylum background.

This clearly shows that the UK has a dysfunctional asylum system that is contributing to the terror threat.

The reality is that the UKs border-security system is not fit for purpose. It signally fails to prioritise national security. The UK should take pride in its rich history of re-homing some of the worlds most persecuted peoples. But openness should not come at the expense of public safety. Existing vulnerabilities within the asylum system exploited by a brigade of profit-making legal firms and human-rights activists must be identified and addressed. And the Home Office should investigate localised clusters of Muslim-to-Christian religious conversions among asylum seekers.

But it is the threat of homegrown Islamist extremism that should really trouble us. The combination of the UKs disorderly immigration system and the laissez-faire approach to multiculturalism has been toxic from both a national-security and social-cohesion perspective. In Britain today, there are segregated pockets of anti-British radicalism counter societies which are separated from the rest of society and have produced far more than their fair share of Islamist extremists. The British political class has seriously underestimated the security risks that come with failed integration.

Britains metropolitan political establishment is plagued by identity politics and paralysing forms of political correctness. If politicians are unwilling to acknowledge terrorisms potential association with Islamist extremism, even when one of their own colleagues is stabbed to death at a constituency surgery, then we are serious trouble.

The government needs to grasp the nettle and embark on a courageous agenda of radical reform. This should include: identifying the parts of the country that are socially segregated, materially deprived and have a history of Islamist activity; developing localised social-cohesion and counter-extremism plans; and addressing the corrosive effect of official multiculturalism.

Above all, we need to address the failings of our counter-extremism system and its failure to prioritise public safety. And all too often, those tasked with the rehabilitation of Islamists convicted of terror offences have overestimated their ability and willingness to change their beliefs.

There is much work to do for those in positions of power and influence. It is time they showed some courage and faced up to the reality of the Islamist terror threat.

Rakib Ehsan is a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society.

Picture by: Getty

Excerpt from:

We need to get real about Islamist terrorism - Spiked