08/18/10 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

Hey everybody, I'm Scott.
It's fundraising time again at antiwar.com.
We need your help and here's how you can help.
Stop by antiwar.com slash donate or call Angela Keaton, our development director, at 323-512-7095.
That's 323-512-7095 or you can shoot her an email over to akeaton at antiwar.com.
Thank you very much for your support.
All right y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Up next is Sheldon Richman.
He's the editor of the Freeman over there at FEE, the Foundation for Economic Education, and he's also at the Future Freedom Foundation, fff.org, and he's my Facebook friend too.
Welcome to the show.
Hey, thanks for having me back.
Yeah, I'm happy to have you here.
Hey, tell me this.
Has America gone completely mad or what?
I mean 9-11 was a long, long time ago, and I understand, I mean, geez, people were absolutely shocked out of their minds for at least two, three years around here in the majority, you know, maybe longer than that, but it seems like now we're backsliding again into madness here.
Sheldon, this mosque thing.
Well, you're assuming we, you said we're sliding back.
That makes it sound like we got out of it.
Well, I mean, it seemed like, you know, after Hurricane Katrina, people were like, man, maybe George Bush isn't a great leader.
You know, a little bit of the veneer was wiped away from the natural disaster, of course, you know, but I don't know.
It seems like it's like watching Star Wars and believing in Chewbacca.
You just have to suspend your disbelief and go with it, you know?
It's called compartmentalization, you know.
You can look at Katrina and say, oh my gosh, what a bunch of losers in Washington, and it's possible for that to have no effect whatsoever on one's thinking about the war on terror, so-called.
That's what I think.
Yeah, I guess it's true.
Well, and, you know, it's the thing I always harp on here is that the reason for the attack was blowback from America killing people before the 21st century began.
Oh, no, wait a second.
Wait a second.
You're sounding like Glenn Beck of last April.
Are you sure you want to do that?
Hey, the fact that he finally said one thing that was close to the truth, and of course it started out with, you know, I didn't know anything about anything before 9-11.
What did I know about American war crimes in the Middle East?
The interesting thing is now that he's denounced the imam in New York for taking the same position, he's now lost the only thing he ever understood.
He's now lost that.
Right.
Now he's back to complete darkness, like when, you know, Carl Sagan, the candle, you know, is all we got to keep in the darkness back.
Glenn's just went back out again.
Ron Paul had fired up there for a minute, but no.
My hat's off to Jon Stewart for exposing that.
I didn't realize that Beck was so two-faced.
I mean, I knew he was two-faced on other things.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, the quote was so perfect, too, you know, and yeah, I urge everybody to look at that.
You can find it on Glenn Greenwald's blog.
You can find the the clip of Jon Stewart showing Glenn Beck quoting the imam and saying what a radical he is for simply saying the Ron Paul, Michael Scheuer-esque blowback theory, the CIA's own theory of how they create problems for us, you know, and then and then denouncing him.
And then Stewart plays the clip of Beck saying the same thing a couple of months ago.
And that was the one that got around on Facebook, like, hey, look, Glenn Beck actually said something.
Well, the imam was very careful.
He said America did not deserve 9-11, did not deserve the attacks, but the policies are accessories.
Right.
That's what he said.
Now, when Beck was saying the very same thing, and only back in April, he went into much more detail.
He had a list on the blackboard.
You'll see if you look at the video of all the things.
We departed from our values.
We did all kinds of bad things, which helped to bring on 9-11.
Glenn Beck saying this.
So, you know, these people, I mean, just when you think politics can't sink any deeper in the muck, something like this happens, and you've got to watch Beck, and you've got to watch Newt Gingrich, and you've got to watch Palin, and you've got to watch these scum, you know, try to pull us down even deeper.
It's just absolutely disgusting.
Yeah, I mean, I'm kind of being repetitive from earlier in the week, but it's, you know, one of the most important points, I think, was that George Bush used part of his political capital to not really ever outright contradict the people on his side who were saying these things, but at least, you know, from his own position, said repeatedly, we're not at war against Islam.
We're at war against this group of terrorists.
And of course, he way over-inflated their power and pretended like Al-Qaeda was the Soviet Union or something, but still, he said, Islam is a religion of peace.
They're American Muslims, and we love them and respect them, and they're Americans, just like all of us.
And, you know, he wasn't great, but he said these things, and now it seems like without the Republicans in that position to say that, from the White House, they'd rather just go ahead and, I don't know what, reorganize the plan to go after Muslims now or something?
Hire the cops to do it?
This is one of the problems when your public statements are not consistent with the real agenda.
So, Bush might have said that, but, of course, he didn't mean it.
So, now it's not convenient to say that, and his, you know, the former Bushies are now willing to drop that facade that we're not at war against Islam and make it clear that we are against.
We are at war against Islam.
I mean, after all, this imam, who wants to open the center at, we're now calling it Park 51, because he got, basically, he got pushed into conceding that Cordova House shouldn't be used as the name or something, I just heard this today, but this imam was put on, wasn't she put on Karen Hughes tours during the Bush years?
In other words, he was sent to the Middle East to assure moderate Muslims that this is not a war against Islam.
George Bush sent him.
How can this guy be now being set up as a symbol for Wahhabism or something, which he doesn't even represent?
Well, I mean, that's the real punchline is he's about to go right now.
There was a thing in the Post about he was, or maybe was, I think still is, about to go on another one of these Karen Hughes missions to explain to the Middle East that in America, it's one of the best countries for Muslims in the world.
You can put a mosque wherever you want.
They got this Jeffersonian thing about freedom of religion and all that.
And now he's the center of this controversy.
And, you know, as Justin points out, Justin Armando points out in his article on antiwar.com today, the guy's a Sufi, which, you know, I'm no expert in all these religions.
I don't care much about them, really.
But, you know, I think the link is to a description of Sufis as they're the hippies of the Muslims.
You know, they're the they're the mystics and the peaceniks of all.
And this guy is the perfect, you know, liaison between the East and West.
Exactly.
Our friend.
In fact, you know, I think it was I don't know if it was.
Yeah, it was.
Stewart also played a clip of Laura Ingram, the warmonger, saying, oh, yeah, this is the terrorists winning and and conquering ground zero and all of this really fear mongering stuff.
And then he played a clip of her from two weeks ago going, oh, yeah, I think it's great.
Mayor Bloomberg's for it.
It's fine.
This guy's a nice guy.
He's an American.
And, you know, they don't even care what the truth is, but they're willing to get the entire American public riled up in, you know, lynch mob form against Muslims in general, as general as you can define them, I guess.
I think I can remember who maybe non practicing Muslims, too.
You know, I can't remember who wrote this because I've been reading a lot of the last couple of days, but either Vargas, Yost at the Independent Institute or Ivan Ilan pointed out that the one the center opens, the people that they really might need to worry about are the bin Laden type, the bin Laden types, because bin Laden would hate this guy.
This guy's for tolerance and getting along with everybody peacefully.
But a lot of what's happened in the back of you was in private with the guy or cut his head off or something.
So to make this guy out to be some dangerous person who we can't have, you know, within a few blocks of so-called hallowed ground, I mean, why should he be allowed in anywhere in Manhattan?
We're the United States.
We're the Western Hemisphere.
I mean, I don't understand why they draw the line at two blocks.
Yeah, I don't know.
In fact, I read a couple of different things about how and I'm not from New York, but apparently, you know, two or three blocks in New York, you could spend your whole life in two or three blocks in New York.
It's not like two or three blocks anywhere else.
Right.
And you can't see you can't even see the place.
There are big buildings, you know, every all over the place.
And it's not as if I mean, I hate to make this point to a certain it concedes too much to the other side.
But it is a fact that you can't see the former site of the World Trade Center from this from that site, even even the 13, even though it's going to be a 13 story building.
But I don't like to point that out, because I'm not saying things would be different if you could see the site.
It's just insanity.
It's just crazy.
And I, you know, when I, I don't know why Newt Gingrich, you know, gets a hearing from anybody, he can go on Fox and say, would we let the Nazis, or do you say build them some kind of structure next to the Holocaust Museum?
I mean, think about that for a moment.
What he's comparing this he mom and Oh, Sheldon.
Well, it's a good thing we're going out to break right now.
It sounds like Sheldon Richmond's phone is cut off.
I'm here.
Oh, no, there you are.
Boy, you just you heard that music.
You're done.
All right.
Well, that thought we'll get right back.
It's Sheldon Richmond, everybody.
You can watch the LRN studio cam and chat with other listeners anytime at cam.lrn.fm.
That's cam.lrn.fm.
All right, y'all.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott talking with Sheldon Richmond from the Future Freedom Foundation and Sheldon Richmond dot com will forge on to his blog, Free Association.
Urge you to check that out.
Now, Sheldon, I got a couple of emails from people saying, come on, Scott, you act like Islam is libertarian and that if this if it was up to this imam, well, then you just have all the religious freedom in the world for yourself or whatever.
And what I'm saying is I don't care about that.
I don't think that I never thought that.
And that's not my concern.
The point is my standard, not his.
And how the hell are we ever going to teach Muslims or anybody else about individualism if we don't recognize theirs?
You know, I agree with you.
I agree with you.
You know, I'm not an expert on Islam or religion in general, since I'm a non-practitioner, to put it diplomatically.
But I would say this.
It seems to me that Islam, like other the other major religions, is going to have in the past.
Islam is going through and has been now, let's say, for the last who knows how many decades, going through, I think, an inevitable struggle between the traditionalist and the modernist.
I think that's always going to happen.
And that should have been allowed to play out in their part of the world.
The problem is the West injected itself into it through imperialism and screwed the whole thing up, causing blowback and violence and things like 9-11.
And we should have just let them work this out.
And there probably would have been some compromise between the Westernizers, not the Westernizers, but the modernizers and the traditionalists.
And they would have somehow reformed Islam.
But instead, we had to stick our nose into the thing and totally make it our problem and mess things up big time.
Yeah, you know, I ain't no communist.
I don't believe in, you know, some utopia or end where everything is perfect.
And I don't really have grand schemes for new world orders of my own or anything.
But I sure can't imagine an alternative world here where, I don't know, for example, we gave up the empire after the end of the Cold War because, I don't know, the American people insisted on it or something like that.
And then we got to spend this last generation having a giant war of ideas around the world, you know, where shake hands and come out talking and see who can win all the best arguments.
And how different might the world have been?
I mean, geez, that's why you do what I do and you do what you do.
And yeah, you know what I mean?
And I do my thing.
It's because we're trying to spread liberty around the world, right?
Of course, I'd love to have a war of ideas against the backwards parts of Islam or whatever you want to call it, if my American empire wasn't over there, you know, literally killing people.
Well, and another thing to say to this email writer of yours, you know, I don't know this imam.
I don't know what his own personal ideal world would look like, whether he would favor religious freedom or not.
I just don't know.
But I do know of Muslims.
In fact, I have a very old friend, you've interviewed him, who's a libertarian and a Muslim who insists that there's a there is a liberal strain to Islam throughout its history.
And and I trust this man enough to take him seriously.
And I think he knows what he's talking about.
This is the Dina Dina who you've spoken to.
Well, of course, there were Jews and Christians and all different minorities that lived within the Ottoman Empire for a thousand years or whatever it was there.
I'm sure there was a lot of oppression of minorities and that kind of thing.
But then again, there were I don't know what the numbers are, really, but I know it was at least tens and tens of thousands, maybe many more than that of Jews who lived in all over the Middle East before the state of Israel that was created that then went there.
Right.
Well, that's right.
And then, you know, they're not calling it the Cordova house anymore.
But that wouldn't have been an inappropriate, despite what the New Gingrich says, that would have been an inappropriate name, because the Cordova in Spain for a couple hundred years was a center of tolerance, as well as a great progress in philosophy and in the arts and things like that.
That's where Moses, Maimonides, the great Jewish philosopher, studied great libraries there.
So that's true.
It's true.
There are different strains, just like there's different strains in other religions.
You can find you can go and pick and choose and find the most violent strains and others, and then also find the more pacifist strains.
I'm not an expert in Islam, but, you know, people who I know who do know a lot more about it than I do tell me it's not monolithic.
And, you know, I've read books like Lawrence Wright's book, and they were a big fan of his, of that book, what is it, the...
The Looming Tower, yeah.
But he points out there that Bin Laden and those types were sort of confronted by the idea that the Quran says you can't kill innocent people, and you can't commit suicide, and they had to find a way around that, those prohibitions, to justify their tactics.
So there's more than one thing going on here.
Yeah.
Well, and you're right that...
Well, it's sort of like the argument that you guys have about the terminology about libertarianism and people understanding capitalism to be the fascist system we have, and so we need to call what it is that we want something else, even though that's still kind of the proper term for it.
The same thing goes on here, where the West in general becomes associated with fighter bombers.
Simple as that.
The West, those are the people who kill my neighbors all the time.
And people act like, oh, you know, what goes on in Palestine shouldn't really matter to somebody in Iraq or something.
But that's like saying, you know, if the Muslim caliphate really was the threat the Republicans and Democrats wanted to believe, and they were just bombing South Carolina all day, that, oh, Californians and Texans and people in Colorado, they wouldn't mind that, you know.
But it's the same thing, right?
Yeah.
It is the same thing, but, you know, we have to get over this American exceptionalism.
All the rules are different for us, according to the establishment view.
So something that's clearly bad, when we're subjected to it, is, well, maybe totally justifiable when we subject other people to it.
I mean, that's something, that's such a huge hump we have to get people to get over, because you will make no progress arguing.
And, you know, and if you say this, then you're accused of what?
The magic indictment that, you know, moral equivalence.
Right.
There used to be a conversation stopper, huh?
Moral equivalence.
You still find it in the Wall Street Journal, you know, and then all the descendants of Jean Kilpatrick.
Right.
Yeah, of course.
It's always the accusers who are the worst about, when they accuse, they call it, the other term for it is more relativism.
That's more relativism.
Of course, that's their bread and butter.
Moral relativism.
Well, so, geez, you think this is going to kind of, well, apparently the guy's not backing down.
They're going to go ahead and make this, but apparently the Republican Party has decided this is their issue for the coming election.
I mean, this is going to just get worse.
It's so ridiculous.
A couple of things.
First of all, I think Governor Patterson won't just shut up.
He keeps saying, well, let us find you another site.
They don't want another site.
Go away.
Stay in Albany.
Shut up.
And then, okay, the Republicans are going to make it an issue, but I also read in the Washington Post that some of, I guess, the calmer heads in the Republican Party are saying, I don't think this is a good issue for November.
So I don't know what's going to happen.
You know, what a different world would be if the Republicans decided, you know, let's really shake things up in November.
I mean, this is obviously crazy fantasy, but let's be anti-war and pro-tolerance and anti-war on terror, and let's beat the Democrats at their own game.
Yeah, it would work.
Hey, that's how the Democrats took the House and Senate in 2006, man, by opposing the wars.
Yeah, you know, I just saw, actually, walked to the Quicken Mart to get coffee this morning.
On the way back, I saw the bumper sticker, Kerry Edwards 2004, keep America strong, make America stronger or something.
Man, that guy could have won the election if he had just said, let's end these wars that you all know we shouldn't have done in the first place.
Come on.
And everybody would have said, really?
Okay, yeah.
And Obama's carrying on the Kerry tradition.
Yeah, exactly.
I don't know how anybody got roped into this.
If he wasn't just another Bill Clinton coming down the pipe, I don't know what he ever was.
That's all I saw.
First day I ever heard his name.
Anyway, we're out of time here.
Thanks very much for your time.
Thank you for being a reasonable person and not an anti-Muslim bigot.
It's very nice of you.
That's all I've got any time.
Bye-bye.