Iranian Diplomacy, American Politics, and the Barrier of Prejudice

For the podcast, please click here.

Bruce Lawrence, a college classmate and distinguished Duke professor, specialized on Islam and the Muslim world, and recently spoke to us about Allah. A classmate asked about the difference between Sunni and Shia Islam. Bruce explained there’s no principled difference. In a seventh century palace revolt, those called Sunni followed descendants of a male cousin of Mohammad against those called Shia, who followed descendants of Mohammad’s daughter, Fatimah and her husband, Ali. Scholars and clerics in the two lines of descent created competing but similar traditions. Iran commemorates Ali’s assassination on holy days.

But Sunni-Shia hostility goes beyond religion. Bruce commented that Iran has been more cosmopolitan and sophisticated than many neighbors. It sat across major trade routes putting its people in touch with other civilizations. Great Persian poets like Ferdowsi, Saadi, Hafez and Omar Khayyam seeped into western culture.

I listened to news of the six-day Arab-Israeli war with my Iranian host, an agricultural engineer. He’d studied in England and Israel, and came back admiring how Israel made the desert bloom. He felt he should support the Muslim countries fighting Israel, but if seven countries couldn’t take Israel on, they deserved to lose, Muslim or not.

Iran’s treatment of women has problems. I met my wife when she needed a male escort to go through the Tehran bazaar.  The locals looked out for her where she worked, though she tells an amusing story of conversing with a Mullah through a translator, even though she understood everything he said. But Tehran was huge and she wasn’t known there. The bazaar would have been dangerous, especially for a blond American. Still, women do better in Iran than in most of its neighbors.

Nevertheless, American Middle-Eastern policy has been a muddle of nonsense.  The US supported Iraq against Iran in “a terribly bloody cataclysm” only to fight two wars against Iraq to undo Iraqi power after that struggle. After 9/11, America went after Iraq and Afghanistan though the attack and ideology behind it came from Saudi Arabia. But taking Iraq out of the Middle-Eastern balance of power strengthened Iran. That bugged both the US and Israel. Iran and our country could put common interests ahead of our disagreements. Iran has strong democratic institutions in spite of the Guardian Counsel, had its own reasons to condemn Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, and repeatedly offered to negotiate disagreements with the US. But while going to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, this country described Iran as the “axis of evil” and pushed them away, leaving us in an endless round of mutual retaliation, and the Middle East continuously unsettled.

Most of us who’ve lived there found Iranians genuinely wanted better relations with the U.S. What they wanted from us was to be treated with respect. Obama understood that, which made possible an inspection-backed agreement to stop development of nuclear weapons. Respect is cheap – done with words, politeness, awareness of the other’s legitimate concerns. That’s why diplomacy is conducted in diplomatic language. Flaunting power, and making threats, drive pushback and make it impossible for world leaders to sell agreements to their own people. Real diplomats are diplomatic.

Our difficulty with Iran reflects a broader American problem – extending the same foolish and dangerous prejudices to Islam abroad that we inflict on people of color here at home leads to wild swings of mob mentality toward the Middle East. America hasn’t been able to distinguish peaceful Islam and Muslim movements from its generic fear of Islam. Some people think every bit of respect shown to non-white people here and abroad is disrespect to white people. I think we save our skin when we welcome friendship and show respect for others. 

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on.  This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on Feb. 22, 2022.

The System of Criminal Injustice

[For the podcast, please click here.]

Questions have arisen about the connections between law enforcement and the owners of Prestige Limo whose limousine crashed into and killed 20 people in Amsterdam. Let’s be clear – connections between criminals and law enforcement are a common problem. Prosecutors will do almost anything for so-called informants to supply what sounds like evidence,  and criminals get all sorts of breaks as a result. Become an “informant” and you’re reset for life.

Two decades ago a panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the 10^th Circuit held that promises of leniency or forbearance from prosecution in exchange for testimony are effectively bribes and fall afoul of federal law and basic democratic principles. The Supreme Court long ago held that such deals must be revealed to the defense, but its holding is too often ignored. The full 10^th Circuit, however, overruled the panel and made its decision disappear from the case reports makjing it almost impossible to find unless, like several of us at the law school, you kept a copy. And the Supreme Court in Van de Kamp v. Goldstein decided that prosecutors can not be sued for such misbehavior even when they deliberately and intentionally flout their responsibilities to put innocent people in prison for a quarter century.

Prosecutors get lots more convictions that way. But whom do they convict? As I wrote in my book on the Roberts Court, the story gets worse, because criminals who face time in prison know what they need to do to get out. The revolving door of so-called “informants” and get-out-of-jail-free passes is so well known among the guilty, that the Los Angeles County grand jury found the “District Attorneys Office failed to fulfill the ethical responsibilities required of a public prosecutor” by deliberately refusing to inform defense counsel and taking “the action necessary to curtail the misuse of jailhouse informant testimony.” Two years after the Supreme Court whitewashed the prosecutor’s behavior in the Goldstein case, it whitewashed a prosecutor in New Orleans.

People with experience in criminal law can detail at enormous length the ways that the so-called criminal justice system goes awry. Some prosecutors care more about getting convictions than justice. Some who try to do the right thing describe how police officers take their cases to prosecutors who’ll play it their way, skipping the rules to get convictions regardless of actual guilt. I get very cynical because much too much of the process of criminal prosecution overrides the search for truth and justice.

So now that questions arose about that limousine and how they escaped regulation for so many years, if we ever get the full story, I expect we’ll find that people did misuse their power. It actually gets worse, because the man who owned the company, whose limos were evading the law, also put local people in prison. I went through the trial record in one of those cases and it was pretty obvious to me that there was a glaring gap in his testimony – but in the middle of the scare over 9/11, counsel were not able to get an acquittal and two men spent long years in prison. It’s curious, by the way, why the government used a person as an informant who had been arrested for perjury and was facing a long prison term himself when nothing depended on using such a person except the assurance that he would come up with a story that convicted two other people, in this case two local and well-liked Muslims.

Maybe you don’t believe in systemic racism, but I can tell you that injustice is very systematic.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on February 15, 2022.

The New Cold War – with China

This article in Foreign Affairs describes how the conflict with China is already reshaping the world order – if successful this will be a liberal world order focused on how people are treated – but it is by no means clear whether the American public or the people in other countries will rally around the new struggle or will be split by internal quests for racial purity. This is an important article and it is important to understand the choice, the stakes, and the Biden Administration strategy along with many partner countries.

As The World Changes

For the podcast, please click here.

I’ve often wondered at how much America had changed in my dad’s lifetime. Papa was born in April of 1897 and died at the end of 1996, nearly a century later. He was born in the age of horses and buggies, before electricity and indoor plumbing had come into common use, let alone airplanes, computers or the world wide web. There were no skyscrapers, nothing about the late twentieth century skyline of Manhattan that he would have recognized in his early years. He once told me that he and his family were the first Gottliebs in the phone book – remember phone books! Life has been changing so fast that the impact of last century’s scientific developments now threaten the existence of civilization via nuclear weapons, global warming, and poisoning of the earth, air and water.

But I was thinking very parochially. The world changed in that century. When papa was born, Brittania ruled the waves and the sun never set on the British empire. Barely fifty years later, Brittain became a has-been on the world stage, its empire shattered, and an upstart from America took its place.

Now the world is changing again. International power is never stable. The mantra has to be tend it or lose it. Power and military might are moving east toward what the Chinese call the Middle Kingdom. Maybe someone else will rise to challenge them but India is putting its energy into the search for purity and kicking out or losing many of its best.

The United States might hold on if it invests heavily in science and technology and encourages refugees by the millions to set up here. That’s how we emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century. But the wrong wing who claim to want to make America great again are following the example of India. Their mantra is purity, not development; America for them alone and to heck with progress.

The surest way to lose world leadership is to insist that what was, will be, and do everything to avoid change. The surest way to force the MAGA folks, the Proud Boys, QAnon, Oath Keepers, militiamen, and other white supremacists, to give way to the people of color that they insist are inferior, is to  pass the baton to the Middle Kingdom, in which case our American racists would have to bow East. I believe they would call the Chinese people of color and insist they are inferior. I wouldn’t like the Chinese way of life. But they have all the talents of human beings everywhere, including here, plus the investment in education, science and technology to make them world leaders. In that respect they are copying this country and Germany before us but with a population three times the size of ours.

I think their achilles heel is their prejudice toward people they don’t consider Chinese – Tibetans, Uyghurs and other Muslims and people of faith whom they confine to concentration camps and otherwise do without. Eventually that may catch up to them but we won’t be around to see their downfall.

The surest way to lose our position in the world is navel gazing, focusing on purity instead self-improvement.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on February 8, 2022.

This is a WOW – ADL’s Jonathan Greenblatt on the Commonwealth Club

I just heard Jonathan Greenblatt on the radio broadcast of the Commonwealth Club of California talking about the experience of the Anti-Defamation League [ADL] with hate groups. Greenblatt is the CEO of the ADL which has been fighting hate groups for more than a century – the ADL stood with King in the Civil Rights Movement, fought against anti-semitism, fought for the rights of the LBGTQ community, and others. They track and check reports of hate crimes from all sources and are the most current on what Martin Luther King called the fierce urgency of now. And they fight back, giving them a wealth of knowledge about the dangers among us and how to fight it.

Even though I have researched and written about the issues Greenblatt raises, I was stunned by the increase in hate crimes that he describes. I hope you’ll pull up the podcast and listen. This broadcast/podcast is a WOW.

Let me add that the hate groups we are dealing with are the Confederacy’s revenge. Renegades from that conflict have been trying to reverse the Civil War for a century and a half. You may not recognize Yugoslavia as a country because hate groups destroyed it just a couple of decades ago. They must be stopped now before they tear up our country.

The Makings of a Shattering Constitutional Crisis

Bruce Ackerman, whom I know from Yale Law School, and Gerard Magliocca of the Indiana University School of Law provide a shattering and important analysis of what’s in store. Well worth reading, but hold on to your seats.

The Rise of Intolerance in America

For the podcast, please click here.

I have to report a problem and I don’t know how to deal with it.

One of my professors, Karl W. Deutsch, himself a refugee from Nazi Germany, wrote a book in which he showed the connection between violence, the speed of integration and the relative size of the integrating group.[1] Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders were certainly correct that it’s hard to go slower than the centuries it has been taking to incorporate the African-American people into the body politic. But we liberals are changing America and to the wrong wing it seems we are doing it very fast. We’re changing American morals, what you can see in a movie theatre or on your screen (though many of them watch), our sexual codes, who can marry and what they can do together, religious pluralism replacing a strictly Christian perspective and our acceptance of people of darker hues. And the people of color seeking integration into American culture is proportionately large. Frankly I am infinitely more comfortable in gatherings in the Black community than I am with the wrong-wingers who challenge the very idea of mutual acceptance and respect. The polls are making it clear that the pushback, the violent pushback, is coming from the racists who can’t imagine living in a multi-color world, are terrified and outraged by it. What Karl Deutsch uncovered many decades ago scares me.

Some of us have been reporting for years on the connection between so-called patriot militias, gun sales, and a gun culture that has gone way beyond hunting and become political and racist, indeed revolutionary as their literature and signs proclaim. I certainly don’t mean everyone who owns a gun but it doesn’t take all of them to create a huge problem. The political use of weapons became obvious in the shooting of members of Congress like Gabby Giffords, the armed insurrection in Michigan, at the U.S. Capitol and elsewhere. Domestic terrorism, much of it wrong-wing, has become the number one form of terrorism in the U.S. Threats of violence are being built into statutes and “normalized” as part of American politics. The social science literature tells us that the prevalence of guns predicts the end of democracy.[2] But we have not been able to do anything about it until very recently, not just gun control, but combat it via law enforcement and terrorism investigations and prosecutions. In other words the wrong wing has dug in politically and are blocking any attempts to hold them in check. So they get ever more dangerous.

Thomas C. Schelling, wrote a very famous article[3] in which he showed that in any population with a distribution of feelings about living near neighbors who differ in such ways as race or religion, even where most people are fine with it, the community will resegregate because those most nervous will move out and the community will become proportionally more dominated by the other group. Good riddance perhaps except that the next most nervous group will move out until the community resegregates.

My own Albany neighborhoods have been integrated and I like it that way – some of the people of color have been students of mine and I’m delighted to have them as neighbors. It’s also clear that the neighborhood is slowly darkening because there has been no violence and lots of acceptance. I like a polyglot world and feel quite safe in it, but I’ve no idea who will leave, and what part color will play in their decisions. If integration improves understanding, resegregation does not.

In other words I don’t see good and peaceful solutions. Edward R. Morrow used to end his broadcasts by saying “Good night and good luck.” Yes, for all of you, in spades.

— If you think I’m on target, please pass it on. This commentary was scheduled for broadcast on WAMC Northeast Report, on Feb. 1, 2022.

---

[1] Nationalism and Social Communication: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Nationality (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1953).

[2] I described and cited the literature in Unfit for Democracy (NYU Press 2016), particularly Chapter 8, at 175-77.

[3] On the Ecology of Micromotives, 25 Public Interest 59 (Fall 1971).