So glad this is (finally) up! If you’ve got a spare few hours, you can check it against my Huff Post article.
Month: April 2009
Olbermann is sorta right about Obama and torture
I think we need a commission, but not necessarily prosecutions or convictions. My concern is that, with convictions, we’d target a few individuals without acknowledging that the problem was systemic (like with Abu Ghraib). I would very much like to see the masterminds (Bush, Cheney, Gonzalez) convicted. Considering the unlikelihood of this, however, I would prefer a commission–with the power to make broad-ranging inquiries to expose the depth of our government’s misdeeds–over a conviction of a handful of the worst people. The Global War on Terror and what it did to our constitution is much larger than something that convictions of a dozen people could undo… To be clear, I don’t think Obama has done enough, and I hope he doesn’t think we’re going to bury our past this easily.
This is not how the Prendergast/Mamdani debate went down…
I had to share this post from change.org since it refers to my Huffington Post piece.
This change.org post is not a very good description of the debate. It sounds like what Prendergast would’ve written had he been allowed to write a press release rather than actually debate Mamdani.
I agonized over the Huffington Post piece — I didn’t want to paint an overly critical picture of Prendergast’s performance just because I admire Mamdani’s critical thinking. And I don’t think I did a bad job — unlike other bloggers out there, I made no mention of Prendergast’s clothing, hairstyle or any other comments irrelevant to the debate. On the other hand, I also did not dwell on the people in the question-and-answer session who attacked Mamdani for a couple of reasons: (1) they seemed to be speaking with an agenda — not necessarily a bad thing, but their comments did not respond to what Mamdani had actually said and (2) in at least a couple of cases the questions were ugly personal attacks against Mamdani that he did not deserve. Speakers accused him of being a liar, a bad Muslim and basically complicit in the killings in Darfur. Whatever else you may say about him, Mamdani certainly does not deserve that kind of slander. I do not think it would have been valuable to repeat those things in my Huffington Post piece. Continue reading
Another take on the Mamdani-Prendergast debate
This one is better than mine, in a way, though I was trying to give Prendergast as fair a shake as possible.
Huffington Post article on Darfur Debate
[I’ll post the link-heavy version of this in a couple of days, I think. Until then, enjoy…]
Is the war in Darfur genocide? Have American activists done anything to help stop the violence? On Tuesday, John Prendergast and Mahmood Mamdani faced off to try to answer these questions.
The buzz on the Columbia campus this week was that the debate would be the Ali-versus-Foreman of intellectual match-ups.
And that’s pretty much how it happened. On Tuesday, John Prendergast, co-chair of the ENOUGH Project and a prominent advocate working with the Save Darfur Coalition, went toe-to-toe with Mahmood Mamdani, a Columbia University professor of government and anthropology who is Save Darfur’s most scathing critic. Read more…
Lagos snapshots
The Lagosian entrepreneurial spirit.
One of the nice things about writing on a blog is that there doesn’t have to be any false coherency to your observations. For example, I don’t have to pretend that two weeks in Lagos gave me some kind of general insight into all of Nigeria.
I saw Lagos. That’s it. I’ve lived in Ghana and traveled to N’Djamena, Chad and parts of northern Cameroun, so it was interesting to see the city that is the talk of West Africa, and the crossroads for much of its wealth. But I have to be careful about how much I can extrapolate about the country from my brief visit. Of course, I now have the street cred — a very misleading assumption about travel, by the way, on which authors like Thomas Friedman have capitalized — to make all sorts of claims, and people would probably believe ’em. I’m trying to resist the urge.
In that spirit, let me offer a few snapshots of experiences and observations about Lagos. Even my choice of what to report shows something about the lens through which I saw the city, but I’ll save lengthy meanderings on the nature of subjectivity for another place. Continue reading
“Genocide-loving Arab hypocrites embrace mass murderer”
Or so we would be led to believe by the New York Times article on Omar al-Bashir’s recent visit to Qatar!
The reason for Arab states’ rejection of the International Criminal Court arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir is very simple, and should be the nut graf here, not the comparison to Gaza. I’ll try to synthesize it. Here goes:
The reason that the ICC case against al-Bashir exists is that the Security Council referred it to the court. The United States is a member of the Security Council and the lead agitator for this case. However, the United States itself has rejected participation in the ICC. This means that Washington is using a tool whose legitimacy it has rejected, to bludgeon a state it considers an enemy in the Global War on Terror. Continue reading
Eamon Kircher-Allen 