A New Look at Newcomers from the Dutch Left, Jesse credits LBJ with Civil Rights achievements, Rangel uses campaign funds for parking woes
By LisaB on December 31, 2008 at 7:36 AM in Current Affairs
Want some interesting bits that have missed the front page or the “top of the hour” on news channels? Here are a few tidbits buried somewhere else.
1) In the IHT, an interesting article about the Netherlands and cultural tolerance discusses a potential change in how the Dutch hope to assimilate newcomers.
Two years ago, the Dutch could quietly congratulate themselves on having brought what seemed to be a fair measure of consensus and reason to the meanest intersection in their national political life: the one where integration of Muslim immigrants crossed Dutch identity.
Read the rest ->
——————–Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, the Netherlands had lived through something akin to a populist revolt against accommodating Islamic immigrants led by Pim Fortuyn, who was later murdered; the assassination of the filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, accused of blasphemy by a homegrown Muslim killer; and the bitter departure from the Netherlands of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali woman who became a member of Parliament before being marked for death for her criticism of radical Islam.
——————-Two weeks ago, the country’s biggest left-wing political grouping, the Labor Party, which has responsibility for integration as a member of the coalition government led by the Christian Democrats, issued a position paper calling for the end of the failed model of Dutch “tolerance.”
——————–. . . If judged on the standard scale of caution in dealing with cultural clashes and Muslims’ obligations to their new homes in Europe, the language of the Dutch position paper and Lilianne Ploumen, Labor’s chairperson, was exceptional.
The paper said: “The mistake we can never repeat is stifling criticism of cultures and religions for reasons of tolerance.”
Government and politicians had too long failed to acknowledge the feelings of “loss and estrangement” felt by Dutch society facing parallel communities that disregard its language, laws and customs.
Newcomers, according to Ploumen, must avoid “self-designated victimization.”
She asserted, “the grip of the homeland has to disappear” for these immigrants who, news reports indicate, also retain their original nationality at a rate of about 80 percent once becoming Dutch citizens.
——————-And the obligations of the native Dutch? Ploumen’s answer is, “People who have their roots here have to offer space to traditions, religions and cultures which are new to Dutch society” – but without fear of expressing criticism. “Hurting feelings is allowed, and criticism of religion, too.”
Interesting. You may remember the story of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Dutch parliamentarian, who was forced to leave the Netherlands by Muslim extremists’ threats on her life. Here in the US, we’re seeing the same issues.
2) Coincidentally, the WSJ published a piece today about Samuel Huntington. Huntington, a Harvard political scientist, died last week but published many books. The most recent was “Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity.”
He wrote in that book of the “American Creed,” and of its erosion among the elites. Its key elements — the English language, Christianity, religious commitment, English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals — he said are derived from the “distinct Anglo-Protestant culture of the founding settlers of America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.”
Critics who branded the book as a work of undisguised nativism missed an essential point. Huntington observed that his was an “argument for the importance of Anglo-Protestant culture, not for the importance of Anglo-Protestant people.” The success of this great republic, he said, had hitherto depended on the willingness of generations of Americans to honor the creed of the founding settlers and to shed their old affinities. But that willingness was being battered by globalization and multiculturalism, and by new waves of immigrants with no deep attachments to America’s national identity. “The Stars and Stripes were at half-mast,” he wrote in “Who Are We?”, “and other flags flew higher on the flagpole of American identities.”
Three possible American futures beckoned, Huntington said: cosmopolitan, imperial and national. In the first, the world remakes America, and globalization and multiculturalism trump national identity. In the second, America remakes the world: Unchallenged by a rival superpower, America would attempt to reshape the world according to its values, taking to other shores its democratic norms and aspirations. In the third, America remains America: It resists the blandishments — and falseness — of cosmopolitanism, and reins in the imperial impulse.
———————In the 1990s, when the Davos crowd and other believers in a borderless world reigned supreme, Huntington crossed over from the academy into global renown, with his “clash of civilizations” thesis. In an article first published in Foreign Affairs in 1993 (then expanded into a book), Huntington foresaw the shape of the post-Cold War world. The war of ideologies would yield to a civilizational struggle of soil and blood. It would be the West versus the eight civilizations dividing the rest — Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese.
In this civilizational struggle, Islam would emerge as the principal challenge to the West. “The relations between Islam and Christianity, both orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other’s Other. The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.”
He had assaulted the zeitgeist of the era. The world took notice, and his book was translated into 39 languages. Critics insisted that men want Sony, not soil. But on 9/11, young Arabs — 19 of them — would weigh in. They punctured the illusions of an era, and gave evidence of the truth of Huntington’s vision. With his typical precision, he had written of a “youth bulge” unsettling Muslim societies, and young, radicalized Arabs, unhinged by modernity and unable to master it, emerging as the children of this radical age.
Now I need to add THIS book to the pile.
3) Now he tells us. Apparently, Jesse, Sr also believes that it took LBJ to help achieve civil rights. In the Chicago Sun-Times, Jackson, writing of the coming bad times for the poor, notes LBJ’s war on poverty.
When Barack Obama takes office, he will usher in the greatest period of reform in America since Lyndon Johnson in 1965-66. In a few extraordinary months, Johnson pushed through the Voting Rights Act, immigration reform and Medicare, and launched the War on Poverty. That effort was an early casualty of the war in Vietnam, but by the end of Johnson’s presidency poverty had been dramatically reduced.
Yet Johnson is seldom invoked as a great president. In part that is because his administration was itself a casualty of the Vietnam War. In part that is because his reforms sparked a reaction, with conservatives running against affirmative action, crime and welfare, profiting from the race-baiting politics of division.
———-[Obama] will come with a mandate to get the economy moving, to put people back to work. And across the country, the weakest and most vulnerable Americans will be hoping that he takes up LBJ’s war on poverty, and King’s poor people’s campaign.
In case you’ve forgotten (I haven’t), Hillary got absolutely slammed earlier this year for suggesting that Johnson was pivotal in the civil rights movement. Ted Kennedy was apparently so angry he decided, then and there, to endorse Obama, according to WaPo.
Sources say Kennedy was privately furious at Clinton for her praise of President Lyndon Baines Johnson for getting the 1964 Civil Rights Act accomplished. Jealously guarding the legacy of the Kennedy family dynasty, Senator Kennedy felt Clinton’s LBJ comments were an implicit slight of his brother, President John F. Kennedy, who first proposed the landmark civil rights initiative in a famous televised civil rights address in June 1963.
———–
Kennedy was also apparently upset that Clinton said on the same day: “Dr. [Martin Luther] King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Ac. It took a president to get it done.”Both comments that day, by Clinton and her supporter, were meant to make the point that Clinton would be better equipped to get things done as president than Obama, her chief Democratic rival. Sources say Clinton called Kennedy to apologize for the LBJ comments. But whatever she said clearly wasn’t enough to assuage Kennedy, who endorsed Obama earlier this week.
Of no consideration, whatsoever, was the information found at MediaMatters, that Clinton had been misquoted.
A Washington Times article misrepresented Sen. Hillary Clinton’s January 7 statement on civil rights — which it claimed “seemed to diminish the accomplishments of Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement — by reporting that she said: “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done.” But Clinton actually said: “Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, when he was able to get through Congress something that President Kennedy was hopeful to do, the president before had not even tried, but it took a president to get it done.”
Don’t forget. In politics, truth is optional. And the biggest dust-up may be later quietly repudiated completely.
4) From the “How YOUR Campaign Contributions are Used” department – Charlie Rangel pays parking tickets with campaign funds, from cqpolitics.com.
House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Charles B. Rangel of New York has used campaign funds to pay $1,540 in fines from parking tickets in the District of Columbia in the last two years, according to federal campaign finance records and his office.
Rangel’s campaign committee and his “leadership” political action committee have combined to make 14 separate payments to the D.C. treasurer for “automobile expenses” since March 16, 2007, and a Rangel spokesman confirmed that campaign aides believe they were for tickets.
————-Regardless of any potential legal issues, the congressman is paying parking tickets with other people’s money.
The [parking] fines are the latest in a series of revelations about the Ways and Means chairman’s activities that could cause him ethical, political and public relations headaches.
————The House ethics committee is already investigating allegations regarding Rangel’s four rent-controlled apartments in New York, failure to pay taxes on rental income from property in the Caribbean, and the use of official letterhead to woo donations to a public policy school named for him.
And Rangel’s recently ticketed PT Cruiser is just one of at least three of the congressman’s vehicles to attract attention. Rangel had a car towed from the House garage earlier this year after the New York Post reported that he had been storing the undriveable 1972 Mercedes sedan there for several years in violation of House rules.
The same paper reported in September that Rangel was using a Cadillac DeVille leased by his taxpayer-funded House office — at $778 per month — to travel to campaign events in New York in violation of House rules.
The use of campaign donations to pay for parking violations in the District of Columbia — far from Rangel’s Harlem-based district — raises questions of whether or not all of his contributors feel their money is being spent properly.
Well, yeah. And while paying a few parking tickets seems a small thing, that’s not, after all, the point. Should Rangel use donations to pay for his parking violations? And why can’t this guy just follow the rules?
, the basis for the Best Motion Picture Nominee (Golden Globes) starring Brad Pitt.
, the novel by John Le Carre, a new motion picture starring Gary Oldman and Colin Firth.
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