In a grim year for Sino-Japanese relations, the board of education in Otawara, Japan, has chosen to use a contentious history textbook that will widen the rift between the two nations. Some of the most notable editorial revisions to Japan’s wartime history include referring to the Nanjing Massacre, during which anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 Chinese civilians were killed by Japanese troops between December of 1937 and March of 1938, as an “incident,” and neglecting to mention any numbers of civilians murdered during that massacre, and the textbook’s failure to thoroughly explain Japan’s use of Chinese and Korean women as sex slaves, or “comfort women.” All this in the same week that Japan and China have been snarling at each other across the East China Sea over oil drilling rights in a contested maritime region.
Although only 2,300 students will be using the textbooks, and although the publisher, the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, has fallen well short of its goal of installing its books in 10 percent of the nation’s middle schools — at last count only 0.04 percent of middle schools used the first edition of the textbook — the move will escalate the nations’ recently frustrated relations.
Earlier this year Chinese protesters — about 10,000 in Beijing and 3,000 at the Japanese consulate in Guangzhou, which is located in the south — marched and chanted to protest the textbook.
A scant 20 some-odd years since the last time someone was ushered to a prison cell for homosexual behavior, Spain follows the heels of the Netherlands and Belgium to be the third country in Europe to sanction gay marriages, and now Carlos Baturin and Emilio Menéndez — who met during Franco’s reign when homosexual behavior was an invitation to jail — are Spain’s first gay married couple.
For those who are baffled by the hellish maze of technicalities that characterizes gay marriage and partnership rules around the globe, the BBC provides an easily digestible summary of various nations’ policies.
As the death toll mounts and the grim personal accounts of the tragedy surface in the aftermath of the series of four synchronized bombings that tore through London Thursday, Muslims in Britain are now living in their own on sphere of dread under the constant threat of arbitrary assignments of blame; by Saturday The Muslim Council of Britain had received 30,000 doses of hate mail, several of which read: “It’s now war on Muslims throughout Britain.”
The timing of the recent London terrorist attack, according to café babel’s Chris Yeomans, is a threat not only in the practical sense of what terrorism means to people living on British soil, but also because it diverts aid and energy away from other key concerns.
…[T]he attacks could not have come at a worse time for Blair. Hosting the G8 in Gleneagles and at the start of the UK six-month presidency of the European Union, Blair’s mandates to increase aid and debt relief to Africa and for European reform may well fall by the wayside as the powerful nations, especially the United States, become more insular and refocus their efforts on the bellicose notion of a ‘War on Terror.’
Further, as Yeomans points out, energy spent on the “War on Terror” is an investment in the “politics of fear” which “gives credence to the state to further curb the liberties of its citizens.” In case anyone needs a refresher on the “politics of fear,” Matt Stone’s animated sequence in Michael Moore’s 2002 film, Bowling for Colombine, illustrates the concept brilliantly.
Italian politicians might do well to consider Yeoman’s call to place careful thought above reactionism, in the case that Italy does wind up as the target of the next terrorist attack.
However tragic the London attacks have been, we must not opt for a knee-jerk reaction, for if we erode our own democracy then we are doing the terrorists’ job for them.
“Kakutani is a one-woman kamikaze. She disdains white male authors, and I’m her number-one favorite target. One of her cheap tricks is to bring out your review two weeks in advance of publication. She trashes it just to…
“Kakutani is a one-woman kamikaze. She disdains white male authors, and I’m her number-one favorite target. One of her cheap tricks is to bring out your review two weeks in advance of publication. She trashes it just to hurt sales and embarrass the author … But The Times’ editors can’t fire her. They’re terrified of her. With discrimination rules and such, well, she’s a threefer: Asiatic, feminist, and, ah, what’s the third? Well, let’s just call her a twofer. They get two for one. She is a token. And, deep down, she probably knows it.”
Curbing a 10 billion-dollar-a-year business is a painfully ambitious goal, but TIPinAsia is determined to restrain the trade in human traffic. The recently launched website functions both as an educative tool — it outlines the laws regarding human trafficking in Cambodia, Thailand, and East Timor — and as a channel of communication that will link agencies that work on behalf of victims of human trafficking, with the ultimate goal of prosecuting traffickers in addition to raising awareness about the issue.
With the United Nations’ assertion that human trafficking has been on the rise for the past decade, TIPinAsia will be helping to stem the flow of the ever-increasing tide of human traffic.
“[T]he more time we spend thinking about this sensible, pragmatic jurist, the better. Perhaps it will convince President George W. Bush that he can best serve the country, and his own party, by nominating a new justice with the same values.”
According to today’s article on United States Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in the International Herald Tribune, in order to look to the future, the United States — and its president — would be well advised to take a close look at what they’ll be replacing. O’Connor’s decision to retire has come as no great surprise to the nation during this presidential term; the anticipated replacement of judges on the Supreme Court by the incoming president was one of the issues on the forefront of the 2004 election. This is no time to give in to knee-jerk reactions provoked by the omnipresent percolations between political parties. Perhaps the replacement choices aren’t obvious. As the article points out, O’Connor’s own nomination in 1981 was not.
True, O’Connor has the dubious fame of being the “first woman justice in American history.” Her role as a tiebreaker was more consistent throughout her career than her judgments on women’s issues. She is known for her “skepticism about doctrinal and ideological absolutes, and her concern about the effect of her decisions on real people.”
As Adam Liptak writes in his article for the same paper, O’Connor was not the obvious choice at the time she was nominated by President Ronald Reagan, who fulfilled a campaign promise to appoint a woman to the Supreme Court. Twenty-four years ago, there were few women at the time with the necessary credentials while now the number is significantly higher: in 1981, 48 of 700 active federal judges were women; today there are 201 women and 622 men.
Current speculation holds that Bush will aim to please the conservatives or the growing Hispanic population. As to whether he will replace O’Connor with another woman, according to a recent article in The Christian Science Monitor, political scientist Linda Fowler of Dartmouth College believes that “ideology…trumps gender.” In other words, the political climate of the moment seems to hold political beliefs as a factor of higher significance than the current gender of potential nominees.
Are they right? As reporters Linda Feldmann and Warren Richey write, “[if Bush] replaces O’Connor with a man, the high court goes back to eight men and one woman, hardly a balance that looks like America.” They also quote the venerable Justice O’Connor at the beginning of their article:
“Wise old men and wise old women usually decide cases the same way.”
As people across the United States commemorate the Fourth of July with beach trips, fireworks, and barbeques, there is a semblance of unity among people of all backgrounds in this country. We all have a reason to celebrate — not just the United States’ independence, but also a much-needed extended weekend.
Published in the midst of this temporary concord, this issue of InTheFray highlights those who don’t quite fit in, those who are — both literally and figuratively — strangers to the space they occupy and the air they breathe. In Ayesha and me, we see what happens when ITF Contributing Editor Anju Mary Paul attempts to understand the experiences of a young Muslim immigrant. What she discovers about being “American” and being Muslim isn’t what you — or our immigrant-reporter — might expect. The same could be said for ITF columnist Russ Cobb. During a road trip from Texas to California, he confronts the Red State/Blue State divide head-on, only to discover that the 2004 election results don’t tell the full story of American politics.
Across the pond, meanwhile, American transplant Karen Ling discovers a way to compensate for her feelings of inadequacy in Paris — helping American tourists who have an even tougher time fitting in. And in Tofu and toast, Rhian Kohashi O’Rourke explores, through her eyes, what it means to be an outsider for her aging grandfather who has become a foreigner to his own life.
For those who still feel like they belong, Dave A. Zimmerman challenges you to think again. In Everything silly is serious again, he explores how Batman Begins gives us a taste of a comic book character quite different from the one we grew up with. Silly or serious, though, the newest Batman, Zimmerman contends, plants the seeds of truth about our own lives.
“Europe is no longer Europe, it is ‘Eurabia,’ a colony of Islam, where the Islamic invasion does not proceed only in a physical sense, but also in a mental and cultural sense. Servility to the invaders has poisoned democracy, with obvious consequences for the freedom of thought, and for the concept itself of liberty,” is how Oriana Fallaci characterizes what she perceives as the decline of Europe into the grabby and presumably immigrant hands of Muslims encroaching on her continent.
It may be hard to believe that such immoderate and inflammatory rhetoric is in fact a defense of her recent book, The Force of Reason, which in turn is a defense of her previous book, The Rage and the Pride, which was written in response in the September 11th attacks, but Fallaci is hissing out her defense for all it’s worth. Fallaci now faces a trial and potential imprisonment for her diatribe in her native Italy on charges of vilifying Islam; ailing with cancer but still snarling in New York, Fallaci has stated that she refuses to attend her upcoming trial.
Two countries in the world now offer gays and lesbians equal rights when it comes to marital union: Canada and Spain. Tuesday, Canadian lawmakers approved a measure that legalized same-sex marriages throughout the country. Today, Spain’s parliament followed suit.
Unlike similar measures in the Netherlands and Belgium, where gay marriage has become legal but same-sex couples possess a second-class status without the full range of rights that their straight counterparts enjoy, the legislation in Canada and Spain redefines the institution of marriage so that it applies to all couples, regardless of gender. In fact, as The New York Times noted, the Spanish measure adds just one sentence to the existing marriage law: “Marriage will have the same requirements and results when the two people entering into the contract are of the same sex or of different sexes.”
(Yes, one sentence is all it took. And now Canada and Spain don’t have to deal with all the added bureaucratic paper-shuffling and color-coding that this “civil union”/“marriage but not real marriage”/etc. tomfoolery entails.)
The two gay marriage proposals beat back determined opposition in both countries. In Canada, Conservatives joined with defiant Liberals in decrying the legislation; a junior cabinet member of the ruling Liberal Party resigned in protest. Earlier this month, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marched through downtown Madrid to voice their opposition to gay marriage. The mayor of Valladolid pledged not to carry out the law, and Catholic leaders urged other government officials to become conscientious objectors.
Using language that Senator Richard Durbin would surely not approve of, the Archbishop of Barcelona likened those officials who disagree with the law but nonetheless carry it out to the Nazis at Auschwitz, who “believed that they had to obey the laws of the Nazi government before their own conscience.”
You know, I seem to remember that the Nazis had some pretty strong views on gays and lesbians, too — do pink triangles ring a bell?
“Before Allah punishes us with a second tsunami here in Jakarta, let us ask the police to disperse this event.”
— Soleh Mahmud, head of Indonesia’s Islamic Defenders’ Front (FPI) party, speaking as members of his faction stormed into a club in Jakarta that was hosting a transvestite beauty pageant.
Such a disruption is not unusual for the FPI, which has several thousand members and has previously conducted raids on bars and other venues that it considers to be flagrantly flouting Islamic values as codified in Sharia law. Unsurprisingly, the FPI materialized during dire economic times, as a result of the 1997 financial crisis in Indonesia, and the group advocates the implementation of Islamic law in Indonesia.
Inside the sick world of a serial bomber.
