The Agonist - Review (book, film, etc.)

300, the Movie

Wed, 14 Mar 2007 10:21:02 -0700

~ Ford, a Texas-based writer, contributes essays on music, Texas life and cultural issues regularly to The Agonist

Sometimes you have to call bull-shit.

Leah and I went to see the movie 300, not knowing what to expect. I’d seen neat looking previews with visual effects similar to those we had watched in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

I must confess; the movie is engaging, the acting good and the visual effects stunning, although at times it seemed as though I was stuck in a giant video game.

But it became apparent to me early on that in light of current affairs—namely a pending conflict with Iran—that this movie is propaganda. It stunk of Neo-con.

Spartans, defenders of freedom. All white, perfect bodies, honorable. Spent plenty of time in a gym building perfect physiques. Not a fag in the bunch. Persian hordes are out to overrun the world. They’re all dark skinned liars, out to ruin the world with perverse behavior, sensuality. They have overwhelming numbers, evil beasts and contraptions. Worship false gods. They offer bribes to the king of Sparta. All he has to do is kneel to the Persian king. Accept Persian rule.

The Spartan king marches to war with a band of 300.

The congressmen of Sparta (can you say Democrats) are subverting the noble cause. One rapes the noble king’s wife while he’s off saving the world, etc.

The movie is entertaining and would be good if there weren’t for flawed depictions bearing unmistakable similarities to our current relationship with Iran (Persia). But then, some prefer to die, or kill, believing fantasies. Believing lies.

Reminds me of the way Hitler sold Nazi superiority to the Germans. And villainized anyone that didn't go along with the plan. Only now it's American exceptionalism that's being sold. Jews were the enemy then. Now it's Islamists out to destroy us.

So I will call this film what it is. Bullshit. Propoganda.

A well-made cartoon/recruitment film.

"Reading Crisis of Legitimation in Iran" by Danny Postel - book review

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 13:01:51 -0800

"Nothing Left of Liberals"

Speaking as a fellow undergraduate of Danny Postel’s, I can testify that his knowledge of academic minutiae was staggering even at twenty. His boundless knowledge reminded me of the ‘buff’ of whatever fetish - like the baseball fanatic who memorizes every player’s stats. Danny developed an interest in academia in boarding school, and watching him quiz elder members of the philosophy department on obscure journals I was reminded of the Bible story where Mary takes the twelve year old Jesus to the temple where he wows the scribes. Danny combines a commanding knowledge of intellectual history and incisive intelligence with a passionate zeal to do the right thing and defend and protect his intellectual heroes.

The book expresses several inarguable lessons for ‘the left’ – really for anyone in politics - but the narrowness of his arcane, ‘inside baseball’ focus turns conventional wisdom upside down. Danny assumes the reader is as familiar as he is with obscure radical journals so the issue of the book’s antagonists looms over its first half. Its rhetorical heart is Postel’s contention that the left in the US doesn’t pay attention to human rights abuses in Iran because of its anti-imperialism bias. Postel repeatedly characterizes this ‘bias’ as “tunnel vision” that prevents radicals from registering human rights abuses on their “radar screens.”

Yet in America, as in Iran, it’s the right wing that is most dismissive of civil liberties and human rights – something Danny alludes to, although he says some complaints about the Patriot Act can be “recklessly hyperbolic.” Still, the notion that the left ignores civil rights is a mighty big pill to swallow. Remember Bush’s criticism of Dukakis in 1988 for his membership in the ACLU? Remember Ashcroft? You must constantly remind yourself Danny is peering through a microscope at radical amoebae, and not gazing through a telescope at conservative stars.

The first half of the book has the unmistakable tone of a grown-up disabusing a child of his foolish notions, but we never learn the identity of the child. Danny doesn’t help his case by naming left wing luminaries who agree with him. He lauds Noam Chomsky for meeting with Akbar Ganji, an Iranian dissident. Chomsky writes almost exclusively about US imperialism, but he’s all for Iranian civil rights. Postel notes that Chomsky was “admonished by numerous radicals” to avoid Ganji because he wasn’t critical enough of the US. But the anonymity of the “numerous radicals” and their failure to influence the one radical with a shred of notoriety leaves the reader unconvinced. The left-wing Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! Radio, interviewed Ganji, and offered enough sympathy to please Postel despite her vision being blurred through “the prism of American Imperialism.” Richard Rorty supports the Iranian cause and he’s the most famous living philosopher in the US. Who exactly are the people Danny is scolding? Are they ‘radicals’ so obscure that they have no influence? Considering the negligible power of radicals in the US, Postel often comes off as shooting (little) fish in a barrel. Perhaps the radical miscreants will know who they are and appreciate Postel’s merciful refusal to scold them by name.

He rails against the left with, to my count, one specific example of an un-named “anti war activist” who discouraged Iranian intellectual Shirin Ebaldi from discussing Iran’s tyrannical government at an anti war rally in London. She ignored him and said what she wanted to say anyway - yet another powerless radical. Z Magazine and New Left Review are some of the very few named names, but their sin was decrying the NATO actions in Kosovo in the 1990s. Postel says the Marxist Monthly Review did a “smear job” on Ganji for his not being Marxist enough, but then you turn the page and find out that Ganji and Iranian intellectuals in general, don’t really like Marx. Postel lists the core values of Iranian liberalism, and none of them concern economics. If Postel can criticize the left in America even as he, to his infinite credit, wholeheartedly agrees with the left about the necessity of preventing war with Iran, then why can’t Marxists criticize Ganji even if they might agree that jailing intellectuals is dirty pool?

Postel’s excoriation of the ‘the left’ also covers sins of omission. “Precious few leftists today have more than a vague clue who Ganji even is. Go to the websites of The Nation, In These Times, The Progressive, and The New Left Review and search for his name – see how many times his name is even mentioned, let alone how many profiles of him or essays on him appear.” In other words, leftists are in the wrong for not being as well informed about Iran as Postel, who has spent the last few years focusing on Iran. One might counter that Bush has kept the left pretty busy over the past six years, and it’s telling that Postel all but ignores the 800lb gorilla of the Iraq war. It’s probably best for him to ignore Iraq because he holds up Kosovo as a triumph of “liberal internationalism” even though some of the same rationales used to invade Iraq (fascist in charge) were employed for NATO’s actions in the Balkans. Liberal internationalist Peter Beinert and the pro-globalization liberal Tom Friedman of the New York Times argued along these lines.

Yet on some crucial principles Postel’s positions are simply inarguable. The first and most important is that thinking liberals should not fall into the trap of opposing whatever their enemies say. Just because George W. Bush says it or Andrew Sullivan sincerely believes it doesn’t necessarily make it untrue, nor should it dictate knee-jerk opposition from the left. Such an un-wise practice would literally be ‘reactionary’ and it allows Bush to dictate the priorities of the left. Related to this notion is the sub-title of Chapter One “We Know What We’re Against, But What Are We For?” It seems to be an object lesson for the US Democratic Party, which has spent thirty years, at best, moderating policies that already started far right wing, or, at worst, just lamenting the right’s unconscionable tactics.

Of Postel, US war protestors might ask, how do you avoid playing into the hands of US war mongers looking for invasion excuses? Conversely, how do you avoid being labeled as a “US lackey” or “outside agitator” by Iranian clerics if you sincerely agree with the White House that the Iranian government is tyrannical? On the other hand, how do you avoid being called a ‘traitor’ if you oppose US military action? Postel cleverly makes a rhetorical end-around run on these questions. He quotes both Akbar Ganji and Shirin Ebaldi maintaining that to beat the conundrum of national loyalty; liberals should avoid lobbying their governments in such cases. Instead they should offer each other “moral support” in Ganji’s words. They can work through N.G.O.s and civil society and, even better, simply make contact with like minded intellectuals across national boundaries to avoid the labels of lackey, traitor or spy.

Danny spends much of Chapter Two, to my mind, wrestling with his own conflicted, thirty-something soul about what a Proper Liberalism should be. He’s careful to separate the wheat (anarchists and independent socialist forces) from the chafe (Stalinists) when offering a noble example of radical internationalists who weren’t imperialist: the anti-fascist brigades of the 1930’s Spanish Civil War. He claims the modern American left’s logic would negate the idea of the brigades, but the obvious response is that ‘the left’ didn’t convince FDR to make a world war out of a civil war. Isn’t sending the Marines completely different than sending Hemingway? That’s a crucial distinction that Danny ignores. It’s not to say Postel is a broad brush-stroke artist. One of Postel’s sterling qualities is his refusal to over-simplify or speak in bumper stickers. That can lead to confusion for the uninitiated, but it’s impossible for anyone to brand Postel as a cliché monger. He takes great pains to make the finest distinctions.

There are different shades of liberalism, and Postel advocates a specific one for the left. Obviously we don’t want “neoliberalism” because that’s the Republican, NeoCon, Paul Wolfowitz, World Bank variety. In opposition Postel proposes a new “Third Worldism” brand of “radical liberalism” that would rival the washed up, dumbed-down anti-globalization movement. Given that the project of the globalization is literally trade “liberalization” that would seem to amount to replacing the ferocious wolf of the anti-globalization movement with a lap dog that heels on command. Postel is not blind to these contradictions. He admits that on civil rights liberalism is on its “home court” while the radical anti-globalization team has home court advantage on third world economics. Postel says activists do all the global economic leg work while liberals do virtually nothing – undoubtedly true. What’s inexplicable is Postel’s conviction that, despite liberalism’s inherent weakness in matters of global economic justice, his vision of a center left liberalism could rival the foolish anti-globalization movement. Not only do center-left liberals apparently not care much about globalization, centrist liberals in the mold of Tom Friedman are actually the anti globalization movement’s sworn enemies.

Postel devotes a few paragraphs to outlining a center-left vision of economic justice with wince inducing phrases like “piecemeal, reformist organizing” and “tinkering with the (global economic) institutional architecture.” He even advocates “insinuating ourselves pragmatically into these institutions” - institutions like The World Bank - headed by Paul Wolfowitz. This prescription smacks of joining the Nazi Party to spare Jews. Danny doesn’t mince words about these literal contradictions in terms when he asks, “What exactly is our critique of neoliberalism and US imperialism? And how do we make sense of liberalism’s complex historical entanglement with (European) imperialism? I don’t propose any one set of answers to these questions.” Darn. It’s like reading a tract by Da Vinci that says “You know what we need to do? Square the circle. Unfortunately I don’t have the space to do that here.” Postel seemingly can’t accept that liberalism might be a Phillips head screwdriver that just doesn’t work in the flat-head screw of global economic justice.

Danny sees his youthful involvement in left wing movements concerned with 1980’s Central American conflict as an example of ‘good’ radicalism. These youthful activities also represent his radical bona fides. Yet it seems we now have a “latter Postel” who rejects everything about radicalism except his role in it. I see his radical liberalism program as an attempt to push the fools to his left off the side of the earth so that he will stay, at least relatively, ‘radical.’

The crux of the Second Chapter is that ‘boring’ Western texts become exciting in Iran because people voraciously consume them as forbidden fruit. By extension, it’s true that in Iran liberalism is indeed relatively radical, and not the boring mainstream it is in Western nations. This situation fits Postel’s conflicted mentality perfectly. Because his outrage is real, he can use a radical’s word like “solidarity,” which is antithetical to a liberalism founded on liberty and individual rights, and be perfectly sincere about it.

Adults like Danny, not to mention Iranians, are no longer swayed by simplistic radical slogans and are wary of the hazards of revolutions. How did intellectuals fare under Ayatollah Khomeini, let alone today where they’re lucky to be beaten instead of killed? It’s no wonder Liberalism appeals to grown ups. It subdues the Tomfoolery from both extremes. Then again, liberalism is an ideology. It isn’t wisdom, it isn’t experience and it isn’t prudence – just ask the liberals who supported the Iraq war. It’s honest and honorable to ‘call them as you see them’ which is largely the advice Postel offers, but no ideology, even one as pragmatic as liberalism, guarantees that you’ll be honest with yourself.

Even within its ideological borders, liberalism is littered with contradictions and absurdities. Liberalism promotes ‘pluralism,’ but for whom? Pluralism is an inherently paradoxical notion – or outrageously hypocritical depending on which direction the missiles are pointing. Iraq war advocate Peter Beinert enthusiastically lobbies for a new “cold war” on Islamic nations because, in some sense, they refuse to adopt the tenets of liberalism – that is a circle in great need of being squared.

The second half of the book sweeps in as a breath of fresh air because Postel returns to his self-created niche of academic journalist. He has earned his keep for some years doing this sort of thing, so he’s bound to be better at it than conceiving new ideologies. All the tension – both of his reproach of ‘the left’ and in the crippling contradictions of his “radical liberalism” - evaporates. Postel seems to actually be having fun in Chapters Three and Four, rather than valiantly defending endangered Iranians, which was his sacred charge in the first two chapters.

Chapter Three is an edifying take on the 2005 book Foucalt and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islam by Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson. Postel writes in first person so the book sounds like a speech, but it’s a good speech and it relates all the important information about a hifalutin subject of some controversy. As in the first two chapters, he says things like “My friend Max Cafard poignantly captures the psychodynamics…” which gives the feeling Postel is taking you into his confidence. Postel manages to not only swiftly and deftly summarize Foucalt’s ideas, but bring out the controversial contention of Afray and Anderson’s book. Their theory is that Foucalt may have repudiated some of his ideas right before his death - possibly after seeing how badly the 1979 Iranian Revolution (which Foucalt more or less endorsed) turned out. The theory also happens to coincide with Postel’s own intellectual pilgrimage. Danny confesses that he swooned for Foucalt on first reading his radical critique of Western liberal institutions, but perhaps like Foucalt, he seems to have had second thoughts.

The last and longest chapter is an e-mail interview between Postel and Ramin Jahanbegloo, an Iranian liberal academic. The exchange is densely packed with name dropping intellectual gymnastics – brush up on your Marcuse, Arendt and Popper for this one. However, this exchange gets Danny out of the hot water into which he jumped in the second Chapter. Jahanbegloo attempts to square the circle of the inherent contradictions in a pluralist exchange between the West and Iran. Jahanbegloo suggests a way to establish a dialogue with liberal crusaders like Peter Beinert that would maintain the cultural integrity of both parties. In my mind it boils down to mutual respect – not really an ideology - but he offers a beginning point for rapprochement that sidesteps thorny obstacles. The long exchange shows us the rich and variegated political and intellectual life of Iran. By letting an Iranian paint the picture himself, Danny is relieved of his White Knight role. His probing questions allow Jahanbegloo to strut his intellectual stuff and display the intelligence that motivated Postel to defend him in the first place.

Reading Legitimation Crisis in Iran succeeds as intellectual reportage. It fleshes out the “contours,” as Postel calls them, of liberal Iranian thought. It’s also illuminating on the intersection of Western texts with Persian minds, factions and history. Postel’s attack on anonymous, powerless, radicals amounts to tilting at windmills, and his radical liberalism program is a concept at war with itself. But even amongst the rhetoric there are principled words of political wisdom from a mature “latter Postel.” Anyone interested in Iran – particularly current thinking of its intellectuals, can buy the book at Prickly Paradigm Press http://www.prickly-paradigm.com/catalog.html.

By Robert Harless

Nicole Over At Crooks and Liars . . .

Wed, 07 Mar 2007 12:01:05 -0800

. . . has news that the news organization AP went cold turkey on Paris Hilton for a week. The results?

Better than you think.

I guess there is hope for us all.

So, Ron Fournier . . .

Thu, 01 Mar 2007 20:17:14 -0800

. . . will return to the AP after a very short stint at Hotsoup, which seems to be faring rather poorly. One can only hope the same fate befalls The Politico, right?

From the Edge of Disaster

Tue, 27 Feb 2007 21:30:48 -0800

I'm a little behind on my reading, and didn't get well into the February 19th issue of U.S. News and World Report until this evening. Part of the procrastination was due to its lurid cover which shrieks, "Terror's Next Target?" over a photo of a domestic chemical plant.

It runs out the material for the piece is from Steven Flynn's book The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation. Don't know why U.S. News decided to run a book report as their cover story, but hey, it's a grabber and this rag doesn't normally fly off the newsstands at the same rate as Time, Newsweek, and People.

I decided to skim the first couple paragraphs so as to get the gist of the article without getting bogged down into Scary Stuff.

It starts off in maximum paranoid mode, setting the scene for a lo-tech bombing of the Sunoco refinery in Philly on a pleasant summer evening while the nearby ballpark is packed for a game.

Flip. Flip. I'm ready to move on to the next feature when some actual reportage catches my eye:

Homeland security has become a decidedly second-rate priority today in a world where the United States has chosen to combat terrorism as essentially a military and intelligence activity. In 2006, the defense budget accounted for more than half the federal government's discretionary spending and included $16.5 billion the Pentagon requested specifically to protect itself from terrorist attacks. That means the Department of Defense is spending 10 times more protecting its own military bases, naval ships, and barracks-two thirds of which are located inside the United States-than the federal government is spending on our major cities. The U.S. Navy, meanwhile, is bankrolling a Coast Guard force to protect its vessels moving in and out of Puget Sound in Washington that is several times larger than the entire Seattle port police force, which is responsible for protecting that city's long and densely populated waterfront. Any objective analysis would conclude that terrorists would be more interested in targeting crucial civilian structures on U.S. soil than taking on the U.S. military.

All right, a money shot! Let's read on:

Similarly misplaced priorities have allowed infrastructure like levees and power plants to crumble, putting our country more at risk for catastrophic, Hurricane Katrina-like failures. In 2005, the American Society of Civil Engineers assigned grades to 15 categories of infrastructure based on hundreds of studies. With four C's, 10 D's, and one incomplete, it reads like a survey that could have been conducted on the eve of the collapse of the Roman Empire. Roads, dams, water purification facilities, the power grid, and wastewater systems have gone from very bad to worse in the past four years. More than 3,500 dams around the country are unsafe, and many pose a direct risk to human life should they fail. And nearly half of the country's 257 river locks, powerful gates that allow ships and barges to travel rivers that rapidly change elevation, are functionally obsolete, a number projected to rise to 80 percent by 2020. The U.S. power system is in urgent need of modernization spending, yet maintenance spending has dropped each year since 1992. Last July, a power outage in Queens, N.Y., left 100,000 people without power in sweltering heat for a week.

Scary? Yes, but after the breathless doomsday scenario of the first couple pages, the piece gears up into a reasoned rant about the neglect our infrastructure (electric grid, dams, locks, ports) has suffered as the Corporatocrats have taken their profits, sustainability be damned. A sidebar also goes into the unconscionable downsizing of emergency, burn and trauma centers:

"Keeping our fingers crossed" seems to be an apt metaphor for how America is dealing with its aging and ailing infrastructure. Chillingly, this applies to our emergency management and public health system, as well. Years of hospital cost cutting and slim state healthcare budgets have taken their toll. In a mass-casualty event, our healthcare system will almost certainly fail us.

I promise to hunt down the just-published book and give it a read to see if it offers more of the glimpse of rational proposals for fixing our country shown in the article.

Retired U.S. Coast Guard officer Stephen Flynn is a prominent homeland-security expert and a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. He frequently testifies before Congress on port- and border-security issues and authored the bestselling book, America the Vulnerable, in 2004. He also served as an adviser to the U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, a task force led by former Sens. Gary Hart and Warren Rudman that issued seminal reports on terrorism, including one just before 9/11. In a new book, The Edge of Disaster: Rebuilding a Resilient Nation, Flynn argues that ailing infrastructure like weakened dams, levees, and power grids-as well as America's underinvestment in homeland security-makes the country susceptible to a catastrophe that could kill thousands.

"An Inconvenient Truth"

Sun, 25 Feb 2007 20:22:25 -0800

Al Gore just won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Congratulations, Mr. Gore, next stop, Stockholm and then the White House.

Melissa Etheridge just won the Oscar for Best Song, as well. That makes two for 'An Inconvenient Truth.'

So here we are, the great conflater soldiers on.

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 18:34:18 -0800

The Guardian

``You also have to be accountable for the results. What are the consequences of that? What happens if we withdraw from Iraq?,'' he said. ``And the point I made and I'll make it again is that al-Qaida functions on the basis that they think they can break our will. That's their fundamental underlying strategy, that if they can kill enough Americans or cause enough havoc, create enough chaos in Iraq, then we'll quit and go home. And my statement was that if we adopt the Pelosi policy, that then we will validate the strategy of al-Qaida. I said it and I meant it.''

So if we leave Irag, Osama wins? Which means our foreign policy is now being dictated by a man in a cave in Pakistan.

"An Intentional Culling Of Subscriptions?"

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 13:26:36 -0800

At one time, I loved reading the New Republic, and Rick Perlstein's recent columns for the magazine have brought a much needed and fresher voice to the magazine. But I have to say I am not surprised by this development. Cutting back on a publication schedule is not good, regardless of how you spin it:

The New Republic’s circulation, which was about 101,000 in 2000, has slipped to slightly more than 60,000 now. Mr. Foer attributed the decline in part to an intentional culling of subscriptions sold at reduced rates, a move that has helped save costs. Since then, he said, with the help of “buzzy” articles, “we’ve been growing at a slow but steady clip,” and circulation last year within Washington grew by 30 percent.

Circulation growth within Washington of 30%? Well, sounds to me like the neocon market has been tapped out.

Actually, I think it is sad that the magazine that brought us Walter Lippmann has sunk so low. What would he think of "buzzy" articles?

The Bottom Line . . .

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 20:50:58 -0800

. . . is that the mainstream media is just flat out scared of us. There is no other way to explain it.

Seriously, when was the last time you heard something like this on anything other than NPR?

I tempted to quote Atrios but I'll hold off for now.

My favorite quote comes from Richard Wolffe of Newsweek: "A lot of the blogs are unduly devoted to media criticism." Sure Richard, as if you've never made a mistake in your life, yeah?

Folks, this is exactly why they are scared. Not only do we try and hold our leaders accountable we try and hold the media accountable too. It's a great concept, Wolffe ought to give it some thought some time.

Wolly on Gilliard On Everyone

Tue, 20 Feb 2007 20:46:43 -0800

Wolcott comments on this post of Steve Gilliard's where he calls just about everyone out on everything. Both are must read material.

Steve will be on the radio show next Wednesday.

Just A Few Moments Ago . . .

Sat, 17 Feb 2007 12:41:21 -0800

. . . Shaula emailed me this link and this link. Both are from Scobeleizer. Both are comments about teevee, one a question on why our teevee is so 'watered-down' and the other an interesting rumination on the values of HD-TV and analog.

Just something random and interesting to ponder on a Saturday afternoon.

Another Fraud Rewrites History

Thu, 15 Feb 2007 16:58:27 -0800

There seems to be a market for the faud pseudo-snob, the person who can proclaim what has "value". Generally it is someone whose tastes are knowledgeable about that which people wish they were knowledgeable about, and their purpose is to tell people not to bother with being knowledgeable about that which is a single step farther into depth and desire of art and thought. Clive James is the latest old foggey to be set up as an authority. Often wrong, but never in doubt, he is now going to subject us to his encyclopediac narrow mindness. That he takes joy in the Duke is a joy - Ellington is the Haydn of Jazz, the man who it keeps coming back to. But Clive James' inability to appreciate bop shows that what he is is a verbose philistine. A generation ago, Ellington would have been sniffed at by such an individual, and a generation from now, the needle of acceptability will have inched a bit forward, and the next old bore will be telling us that the line is now someplace like 1960 or 1970.

Some people lived in 1941, Clive James died there.

Not an easy read . . .

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 13:30:23 -0800

. . . but a necessary one.

The Bagnews ad on The Agonist front page took me to the site where a lot of comments of varying stripe and quality weighed in on the posted photograph, and others in the collection. Halfway down the comment list is one from a writer calling himself Scarabus who linked to this article in the Washington Post about a soldier assigned to an interrogation team in Iraq.

If this doesn't make your gorge rise, check your pulse.

(Let me echo Doug's comments and simply add: there's a lot of honesty in the comment thread over there. Check it out. ~spk)

Please note . . .

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 13:26:54 -0800

. . . that Glenn Greenwald has a new home.

Double Standard?

Fri, 09 Feb 2007 20:35:53 -0800

It seems to me there is a bit of a double standard here. On the one hand the author in question writes a book, called Stealing Jesus, which the Times article in question called, "a harsh critique of Christian fundamentalism." The book is lauded by liberal critics.

Then the same author writes a hard-hitting book about the risks of Islamic fundamentalism in Europe, called While Europe Slept. One liberal critic called it, "racism as criticism."

Now, I've not read either book, but the author's approach seems fair to me. If you're going to tackle one religious 'ism' troubling the world, might as well tackle the other. As to the author's method, well, has anyone read either book? Care to comment?