Islamic mosque, Islamist mosque, or extremist mosque?
How appropriate is animus toward the new Ground Zero mosque?
A few months ago, news emerged of plans for a mosque and Muslim community center two blocks from Ground Zero. In the ensuing and continuing saga, Sarah Palin is but one of the latest to weigh in, tweeting “Peace-seeking Muslims, pls understand. Ground Zero mosque is UNNECESSARY provocation; it stabs hearts. Pls reject it in the interest of healing.”
John Esposito at CNN framed the moral question well: “Why should Muslims who are building a center be any more suspect than Jews who build a synagogue or center or Christians who build a church or conference center?”
What underlies the Palin position is the conflation of Islam, Islamism, and radicalism.
It seems rather improbable that the new mosque in practice will become a magnet for extremists. But the opposition to the mosque is concerned as much with the fear of terror as with the symbolism of a building that represents what is perceived as an alien and hostile culture. Read more
Killing yourself to live?
Apparently, the Knesset has approved the initial reading of a bill that would essentially fine persons who initiate or incite boycotts against Israel. Predictably, Israeli academics are indignant over the possibility of this new law, presenting a petition signed by over five hundred academics.
At first, this seems like a standard case of the interests of national security vs. civil liberties, but the argument presented by Israeli lawmakers is slightly different. “The state must protect itself from the increasing processes of delegitimization,” coalition chairman Zeev Elkin explained. It seems that Mr. Elkin thinks the very foundations of the state can be damaged through what amounts to political dissent, a claim I find suspect. After all, if this is true, then the state’s legitimacy must already stand on very shaky ground.
-Han
Photo by Flickr user ChrisYunker used under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Safety vs. privacy, resolved today
Should high-crime neighborhoods have a say in police staffing levels?
This week the New York Times featured a program which targets high volume of police attention and effort in a small geographical area, a Brooklyn housing development. This mostly takes the form of stop-and-frisks, designed primarily to reduce the number of guns in the development.
Data shows that the stop-and-frisks are useful in reducing crime within the projects but have not been effective in reducing crime for the precinct as a whole. The legal basis for the program appears a bit tenuous. Police are required to have reasonable suspicion before stopping a citizen. In the city-owned projects, police routinely use violations of housing code as a pretense for stops.
The piece presents residents of the development as conflicted between the increase in public safety and the decrease in privacy.
Should residents be given a role in deciding the nature of police involvement? One could certainly envision a neighborhood referendum putting the question of increased police scrutiny to the test.
(Certainly one could just say that increased police involvement is good in principle but should be conducted in some better way; I’d like to bracket that question for now).
There are certainly benefits to society as a whole to decreasing levels of crime. This seems to be a special case in that the program is ineffective outside the walls of the housing complex, but quite successful inside. The key stakeholders are quite clearly those inside the complex. With that in mind, I’d argue that it does indeed make sense to give communities some decision-making power. The proper balance between safety and privacy is one that local police departments are not likely to get right when working on a block-by-block basis. Given that decision-making must be this granular, it makes sense to offer that power to the communities the police serve rather than to the police themselves.
–John
Image from thomashawk used under a Creative Commons license.
The challenge of social science in constitutional interpretation and public policy
Or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the gun
On Monday, the Supreme Court’s majority decision in McDonald v. Chicago affirmed, with some qualifications, that the individual right to bear arms may not be infringed by state or local governments. Was the Court’s decision appropriate? Does the right to bear arms deserve the same special consideration as other civil liberties, such as free speech, assembly, religion, and due process?
Two possible approaches to this constitutional question are the originalist and consequentialist ones. Originalists probe the texts of the Framers of the constitution and their contemporaries for textual evidence favoring or opposing giving such equal standing to the Second Amendment, while consequentialists are more representative of “living” constitutionalism and examine the empirical impact of gun policy on crime, domestic violence, and accidents.
Both approaches face problems. Read more
Who should make you eat your brussels sprouts?
The market, responsibility and perfectionism
The New York Times has an article from last week on a duo of internet filmmakers, known as the Internet Celebrities, who use humor and YouTube to spread a unique brand of social criticism. One of their most watched videos has them entering the world of Bronx food bodegas to highlight the diverse, yet disgusting food options available to many New Yorkers.
Beyond the humor – for example, the bodega food pyramid – their video raises important normative questions about the availability of healthy foods in low-income communities.
It is a well documented fact that middle- and upper-income communities have many times more supermarkets than low-income neighborhoods. As a result, people in these communities are forced to purchase food at corner markets, convenience stores and bodegas. And these food providers have little in the way of healthy options. This matters because a diet short on healthy foods increases the risk of diabetes, heart disease, cancer, obesity and other illnesses. So if healthy foods have such a direct impact on the life of individuals, whose responsibility is it to ensure that everyone, including those in low-income communities has access to them?
The myth of a “national security” limitation on free speech
Israel and the barring of Noam Chomsky
On Sunday, Noam Chomsky, the American leftist professor, was denied entry by Israel on his way from Jordan to Bir Zeit University in the West Bank to deliver a lecture.
The Chomsky incident comes on the heels of several other recent decisions by the Israeli government to turn away Americans on the basis of their belief. As reported in the New York Times, this includes an editor for a Bethlehem-based paper who left and was barred from re-entry in January; Richard Falk, the former UN weapons inspector, who was told in December he could not enter to investigating human rights in the West Bank because he was hostile to Israel; and controversial scholar Norman Finkelstein who was denied entry last year after visiting Lebanon. Other events within domestic society, including an April decision by a major bookstore to stop selling a book critical of the occupation following protests by Israeli settlers, have raised serious questions about the extent of freedom of speech within Israel. This particular event caused the former head of the left-wing Meretz Party to bemoan that “Israel has not been democratic for some time now.” Read more
Miranda rights and wrongs
Attorney General Eric Holder announced this weekend that the Administration will seek to loosen the terrorism exception to Miranda rights law, allowing law enforcement even more flexibility to interrogate terrorism suspects before reading them their Miranda rights. Not surprisingly civil liberties advocates are not happy. So what do you think? Should there be more of an exception for suspected terrorists? Or is the law already flexible enough? How do we balance our desire for security with our belief in civil liberties?
-Marc
Guest Post: Back to the burqa
Dissecting the complexities of banning burqas
In his May 1st post, Jake brought our attention to the plans under way in France to ban the full-face veil, or burqa and I’d like to take a deeper drive on the issue.
One obvious concern has to do with the rationale and scope of the law. A key justification of a modern democracy’s legal system is that it meets a certain standard of generality and applies to all citizens equally. Legislation that targets a specific subset of a population might be seen as violating this principle. Read more
Is it ever ok to discriminate?
The Supreme Court today heard arguments in the case of Christian Legal Society v. Martinez. In the case, the University of California refused to recognize or provide funding or meeting space to the Christian group because it restricted membership to those who signed a “statement of faith.” The University argued that it had the right to insist that any student group it officially recognized admit any student. The Christian Legal Society challenged this, appealing the case all the way up to the Supreme Court.
Constitutional law aside, should an organization be allowed to restrict membership — that is discriminate — on the basis of an individual’s belief?
Tea Partyers for Medicare
Inconsistency or philosophical conservatism?
The New York Times had a fascinating look yesterday at the demographic and ideological makeup on the Tea Party movement. Long discussed, but little studied, The New York Times and CBS commissioned a poll this month to get a detailed look at the profile and attitudes of Tea Party supporters.
The poll found that the 18 percent of Americans who associate with the Tea Party movement tend to be white, male, married, over 45 and on the “very conservative” end of the ideological spectrum. Tea Partyers express “fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, [ ] rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.”
But here’s the surprising stuff. While Tea Party supporters believe the goal of their movement is reduce the size of government and favor doing so even if it means cutting domestic programs, most happily partake in the three most expensive domestic programs: public education, medicare and social security. And they assert that these programs are “worth the cost to taxpayers.”
So what gives? Read more
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