Peter L. Berger's Blog, page 538

The Impeachment Process Begins

On the heels of the news that Brazil’s recession has deepened, the speaker of Brazil’s lower house, Eduardo Cunha, has announced he will initiate impeachment proceedings against President Dilma Rousseff. Bloomberg:

Cunha told reporters in Brasilia on Wednesday he “profoundly regrets” what’s happening. “May our country overcome this process,” he said.

The impeachment process could take months, involving several votes in Congress that ultimately may result in the president’s ouster. Rousseff would challenge any impeachment proceedings in the Supreme Court, according to a government official with direct knowledge of her defense strategy.The speaker’s decision will put the president’s support in Congress to a test after government and opposition spent months trying to rally lawmakers to their sides. The move also threatens to paralyze Rousseff’s economic agenda as she focuses on saving her political life rather than reviving growth. Her ouster would mark the downfall of the ruling Workers’ Party that won global renown for lifting tens of millions from poverty before becoming ensnared in Brazil’s largest-ever corruption scandal.

For those interested, Bloomberg has a good primer on how impeachment works in Brazil. The gist: If the lower house votes to impeach, it goes to the Senate. At that point, Dilma would no longer serve as President until proceedings end or 180 days have passed. As of now, it’s not clear how much support there is for impeachment, but Cunha presumably wouldn’t move the process forward if doing so weren’t at least somewhat popular.

Needless to say, Dilma’s ouster would be a huge setback for Brazil’s Leftist Worker’s Party. The Latin Lefty meltdown continues.

The Terrible Timing of Tehran’s Oil Resurgence

Iran’s oil minister wants to ramp up his country’s production by one million barrels per day within weeks of the formal lifting of Western sanctions, but as that moment draws nearer the crude realities of accomplishing that task are making the plan look more like a pipe dream. Sanctions are expected to be lifted sometime in the first half of next year, but logistics already threaten to play spoiler. First we learned of concerns over Iran’s oil tanker fleet, and now the WSJ is reporting that Iran’s aging pipeline infrastructure is springing leaks:

Iran’s aging infrastructure is in disrepair after several years without the expertise of the world’s largest oil companies, western and Iranian officials say. The country is likely to be selling as much as 500,000 new barrels of oil into an already saturated market for crude exports, setting up logistical hurdles. […]

There are…serious questions about Iran’s oil infrastructure. The oil fields in southwestern Iran expected to produce the new output are aging, Iranian officials said. Many pipelines are over 40 years old while many operators lack the sort of sophisticated well maintenance techniques of departed foreign companies.When Iran recently conducted a test to see if its infrastructure could cope with a sudden increase, “there was some leaking of pipelines,” Iran’s oil minister Bijan Zanganeh said in response to a question from The Wall Street Journal.

But there’s an even bigger problem with Iran’s plan to boost production: The world is swimming in crude at the moment. Supply already vastly outstrips demand, and with American shale producers, Russia, and the rest of OPEC all seemingly keen on keeping the crude flowing, there’s no sign that this glut might be abating anytime soon. It’s in this market that Tehran hopes to expand its influence—a market with prices hovering above just $40 per barrel, far below the $100+ prices oil was fetching as recently as the summer of last year.

OPEC meets later this week to discuss its strategy, but it doesn’t seem likely that the Saudis are going to budge from their do-nothing strategy—after all, if the decision not to cut production hurts Iran, all the better. And without Riyadh’s cooperation, there’s no chance that the cartel can make the meaningful supply cuts necessary to set a price floor. It’s a very bad time to be selling oil, but if you’re a buyer? Heady times, indeed.

The ACA Debate Isn’t Going Away

Two years ago, the White House, tired of defending the Affordable Care Act against from challenges in court, Congress, and the ballot box, popularized a hashtag for its signature legislative achievement—#ItsTheLaw—intended to convey that the debate had been settled. Despite Democratic exasperation, however, we shouldn’t expect the debate over Obamacare to cease anytime soon—both because major components of the law haven’t been implemented yet, and because, even if the law limps along without any new unpleasant surprises, it will not solve the underlying unsustainability of our healthcare system. Ben Domenech has a perceptive piece in the Daily Beast arguing that Obamacare could end up being a key political issue in the 2016 election:

Don’t look now, but the president’s signature domestic policy, his namesake health care law, is doing very poorly. It just received its worst news yet, when the nation’s largest insurer, UnitedHealth, broached the possibility that it could exit the health insurance exchange due to its inability to find profits.

Its losses from participating in the exchange were simply impossible to maintain. If other insurers follow suit, those left behind will likely raise their rates even more. […]Once Obamacare launched, it was supposed to be a political boon for Democrats. It was supposed to give them the ability to count on a newly engaged group of Americans who saw the government as providing them significant and helpful subsidies that prevented them from being concerned about their health coverage. Instead, its mismanagement and failure to live up to President Obama’s promises has given Republicans an opportunity they intend to exploit.

Domenech is likely right. As we’ve written before, “the Affordable Care Act is looking more like a clown car than an emergency rescue vehicle,” and Republicans are not going to miss the opportunity to point to the failures of politicians that set it in motion.

That doesn’t mean that the law will be repealed—especially as the GOP itself is short on solutions for the America’s health care dysfunction. Rather, it means the debate will stay alive, and it will be fueled by persisting anxieties about the cost of health care. Many voters are finding that healthcare costs are consuming a larger and larger share of their budgets, and the rising cost of insurance is slowing the growth of their incomes.Solving this problem will require major, market-oriented reforms, coupled with new innovations in the private sector (we’ve listed a few potential avenues for future reform). If politicians want to really meet voters where they are on healthcare, they need to do more than point out the health care crisis; they must think creatively about ways to make U.S. healthcare delivery cheaper, faster, and more affordable. The 2016 presidential contenders should have their staffs looking closely as the subject as well—because as Domenech points out, this issue is not going away.

Where are the Muslim Voices Against Islamist Terror?

The question in the title has been raised for some time. It will only become louder following the horrendous events in Paris, even if (as one can only hope) no more such events will occur in Europe or America. Those who are riding on a wave of anti-Muslim feelings assume that the answer is that there are none—which is false. Yet those Muslims who resent the question as “Islamophobic” should answer it instead of brushing it aside. Both President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron have recently urged that ISIS and its ilk must be destroyed by military force (though both are doing it with less-than-Churchillian commitment), but that the foes of ISIS must also engage in a battle of ideas.

One may agree but also ask who should do this. The Pentagon? The BBC? Anyone who has given any thought to this will say that the best candidates will be Muslims. One can be more specific: They should be Sunni Muslims, since this is the community from which ISIS has emerged. (God knows, Shiite Muslims, with Iran in the lead, have engaged in their own variants of terrorism, but ISIS is the more immediate issue.) But also it should probably not be individuals with Muslim backgrounds who are so Westernized that what they say has little resonance among most Muslims—Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Salman Rushdie come to mind. In other words, the want ad should be for conservative Sunni Muslims.(I speak of ISIS. I’m annoyed by the practice of constantly listing every acronym by which this odious outfit has been called: “Islamic State” won’t do, because supposedly that legitimates the pretension that it is the Islamic state. So we get an endless serving of all the acronyms: “IS, ISIS, ISIL, Deash”. This is silly. We know who they are. I prefer the most descriptive acronym “ISIS”—the developing Islamic state in Iraq and Syria. No legitimacy implied.)As a matter of fact, there have been a good many voices raised. Here is a partial list, who spoke up in the course of 2014: Probably the most significant has been that of Shawki Alam, Grand Mufti of al-Azhar in Cairo, the most prestigious Sunni center of learning in the world. He described ISIS as “corrupt”, “a danger to Islam”, “violating Sharia law and humanitarian law”. There have been statements by the Grand Mufti Abdulaziz al-Shaikh, Saudi Arabia’s highest religious authority, who spoke of ISIS as “the number one enemy of Islam”; by Mehmet Gormez, the highest cleric in Turkey, who saw ISIS as “hugely damaging” and “truly awful”; and rather amazingly, 100 Sunni and Shi’a imams in Britain issued a joint statement (this unusual collaboration probably easier in Europe than in the Muslim heartland) calling ISIS “an illegitimate vicious group, who do not represent Islam in any way”. What has been the effect of these statements? I don’t know. But this is not a story of tacit acceptance.My attention was recently drawn to a document that is very relevant to the quest for a conservative Sunni repudiation of ISIS. (I am indebted for this reference to Riyaz Timol, of the Center for the Study of Islam in the UK, at the University of Cardiff.) First issued (I think at al-Azhar) in September 2014, its title is “Open Letter to Dr. Ibrahim Awad al-Badri, alias Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi”. This address is actually a subtle putdown: The sequence of the two names refers to the individual with a minor academic degree who declared himself “Caliph”—successor to the Prophet Muhammad and thereby head of the entire worldwide community of Muslims. (He does not suffer from excessive modesty: Abu Bakr was the name of the first caliph after the death of the Prophet. The shift in the title from the first name to the alias would be something like calling Pope Francis “Jorge Bergoglio, a priest in Argentina, alias Vicar of Christ on earth”.)The original text of the document was in Arabic; it has now been translated into English and several other languages, all available online. It was signed by 126 Islamic scholars, from many countries, several of them from al-Azhar. (One somewhat startling signature is by Salman Tamimi, of the Muslim Association of Iceland! That organization presumably meets in a telephone booth. I guess it was included to emphasize the global range of the signatories.)The document opens with the often-used sentence “bismillah al-rahman al-rahim”, translated as “in the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful”. I suppose that in English “compassion” and “mercy” are almost synonyms, though one may make some distinctions. I don’t know Arabic, but I’m told that some clearer distinctions may be made between the two terms. Both derive from the stem rhm; rahman refers to a quality: God is compassionate/merciful; rahim refers to an action: God acts compassionately/mercifully. After the invocation of the Bismillah and the address of Badri alias Abu Bakr, and “the fighters and followers of the self-declared Islamic State”, the text goes on at some length to show how central mercy is to God’s essence. It quotes a preacher close to ISIS proclaiming what purports to be a Quranic passage: “God bless Prophet Muhammad who was sent with the sword as a mercy to all worlds”; but this wording, clearly meant to refer to jihad, distorts the Quranic text: the sword is smuggled in. The correct text (in the words of God himself, dictated in Arabic by the angel Gabriel to the Prophet) says “We did not send you, except as mercy to all the worlds”. The phrase “with the sword” is taken from a hadith, a non-Quranic but authenticated saying by Muhammad. The Quran, the direct word of God, is general and unconditional; a hadith is specific to a certain time and place which no longer pertain. This important falsification is typical of the faulty hermeneutic of ISIS: “It is forbidden to mix the Quran and hadith in this way, as it is forbidden to mix the general and the specific, and the conditional and the unconditional”. This critique of this faulty hermeneutic is not pedantry; rather it applies directly to ISIS’ distorted use of Islam to justify its murderous use of the sword.The document then expands its view of mercy at the heart of Islam. A Quranic passage: “My mercy embraces all things”. And a particularly eloquent hadith: ”When God created Creation, He wrote in place above His throne – Truly, My mercy is greater than My wrath”. Accordingly, it is forbidden to equate the sword—and thus wrath and severity—with mercy”.Back to the Bismillah: Of course I’m very much an outsider to the method of reasoning deployed in this document. I would have a hard time making it as a student at al-Azhar, even if I learned Arabic! But I’ve tried to get into the argument. I think it has persuaded me that Islam puts the mercy of God at the heart of the faith, and that the merciless sword of ISIS is indeed a blasphemous distortion of that faith—is precisely “un-Islamic”.I read the following sentence some years ago, but I cannot recall its exact provenance; I think it was a mystical (Sufi) text: “The entire meaning of the Quran is in the Bismillah. The entire meaning of the Bismillah is in the ‘ba’ [the Arabic letter ‘B’ with which the word begins]. The entire meaning of the ‘ba’ is in the dot or point (nuqta) underneath the ‘ba’.” As I recall, there was a school of Sufi meditation focusing on the nuqta. In other words, God is everwhere, and so is his mercy. Islam is marked by a profound sense of the majesty, the powerful otherness of God, among other things symbolized by the vast empty spaces in and around many mosques. Yet this God of “all the worlds” is immanent everywhere—as put in another Quranic verse “God is as close to man as the vein in his throat”.In an “executive summary”, the letter to Baghdadi follows the usual form of a legal ruling (fatwa) on what is forbidden. The primary one that totally delegitimates the ISIS rhetoric: “It is forbidden in Islam to issue fatwas without all the necessary learning requirements… It is also forbidden to cite a portion of a verse from the Quran—to derive a ruling without looking at everything that the Quran and hadith teach related to that matter… One cannot “cherry-pick” Quranic verses for legal arguments without considering the entire Quran and hadith.”The document goes on (my comments in square brackets):

It is forbidden in Islam to oversimplify shariah matters (in making legal rulings) and ignore established Islamic sciences. […]

It is forbidden in Islam to kill the innocent.It is forbidden to kill emissaries, ambassadors, and diplomats; hence it is forbidden to kill journalists and aid workers.Jihad in Islam is defensive war. It is not permissible without the right cause, the right purpose and without the right rules of conduct. […]It is forbidden in Islam to harm or mistreat – in any way – Christians or any “People of the Scripture.” [Usually referred to as “People of the Book”—originally Jews and Christians, then, as Islam burst out of Arabia, this protected category came to include Zoroastrians and Hindus, even Buddhists.]It is obligatory to consider Yazidis as “People of the Scripture.” [Under the category of Zoroastrians—they were of course persecuted with special savagery by ISIS in Iraq.]The re-introduction of slavery is forbidden in Islam.It is forbidden in Islam to force people to convert.It is forbidden in Islam to deny women their rights. [A bit vague, that one!]It is forbidden in Islam to enact legal punishments (hudud) without following the correct procedures to ensure justice and mercy. [If one is concerned with the way in which criminal law is practiced in, say Saudi Arabia and Iran, not to mention the territories controlled by ISIS or the Talibans, this sentence is an ambivalent hole through which a truck could be driven. Islamic penal provisions include quite an assortment of permissible methods of execution—beheading, hanging, stoning—for a wide array of offenses—including murder, homosexuality, blasphemy, adultery. It will all be a matter of how the definition of “justice and mercy” is practiced. Optimally (from the Western point of view on human rights), a liberal interpretation of sharia would follow the Jewish example: The provisions for capital punishment in the Hebrew Bible (such as in Leviticus) are as ferocious as those in Islamic law (probably not by coincidence). Very few of those were ever formally revoked by rabbinical courts. They were left standing (supposedly to underline the seriousness of the offences), but very rarely inflicted. Sentences of death were surrounded by numerous requirements that were almost impossible to meet. A sanhedrin (the highest rabbinical court that could pronounce sentences of death) that did so even once in seven years, was called a “bloody Sanhedrin. There was no Jewish sovereignty between the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans (70 CE) and the establishment of modern Israel (1948), so the issue was purely theoretical. Yet the reluctance to inflict capital punishment persists. The Israeli state can be quite brutal in dealing with Palestinian terrorists, but not one has been sentenced to death. The only individual who ever was executed was Adolf Eichmann (and even ardent foes of the death penalty might hesitate to protest that decision).]It is forbidden in Islam to torture people.It is forbidden in Islam to declare a caliphate without consensus from all Muslims.

The statement discussed in this post is not the last critique of ISIS-type Islamism by a conservative Sunni scholar. For example, see this book-length case: Shaykh Muhammad al-Yaqoubi, Refuting ISIS: A Rebuttal of Its Religious and Ideological Foundations (2015). It will surely not be the last.

What are the prospects for conservative Sunni opposition to ISIS? It is very difficult to predict, even if one assumes (in Herman Kahn’s dubious phrase) a “surprise-free future”. Recent events have shown that the Middle East in particular is capable of bringing about some very surprising futures—and mostly unpleasant ones at that.There is always the old debate of the role of ideas in history. I think the most empirically viable view of this is interactive. Ideas do matter, but history is not an ongoing philosophical seminar; religious history is not an ongoing theological debate. Demographic, social, political and economic factors always interact with religious ones. Islam began with the solitary experiences of one man on Mount Hira, overlooking the commercial city of Mecca, an environment of trade routes across Arabia, and the battleground between the Byzantine and Persian empires. Yet this one individual with extraordinary contacts with the supernatural (or what he believed to be that) unleashed forces that changed the world. We cannot predict what the coming decades will bring about, but we can be confident that the future will again see the interaction between “ideal” and “material” factors. In odd ways, military developments and fluctuations in the oil market will be affected by debates between scholars at al-Azhar and in the Shiite lecture halls in Qom, and vice versa. Whatever happens, it will be fascinating to observe.It is unlikely that ISIS will be defeated unless its territorial bases are conquered and occupied by “boots on the ground” (whether American, Turkish, or whoever else’s). But there is also an influential battle of ideas. In that battle authentic Muslim voices like the ones discussed here could be very helpful.

India’s Economy Grows, Yet Modi Struggles

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has been having a tough time lately, with his party losing a big election in the populous state of Bihar and intellectuals, artists, and a major Bollywood star speaking out about a climate of “growing intolerance.” Yet despite these setbacks, India’s economy grew at an annualized rate of 7.4 percent in the last quarter, improving on last year’s 7 percent growth in the same period. The BBC:

Higher domestic demand and manufacturing activity fuelled the pace, taking the rate of growth above that of China.

India’s central bank is meeting to set the level of interest rates on Tuesday.Last month it cut rates by half a percentage point to 6.75%.India’s economy has benefitted from a fall in commodity prices, which have made imports of heavily bought-in goods such as fuel and gold less expensive.India’s growth has recently been outpacing China, which is growing at a rate of 6.9% according to the latest figures.

Exogenous factors—low commodity prices—and competent monetary policy stewardship by University of Chicago and IMF veteran Raghuram Rajan appear to account for most of that success. Meanwhile, many of Modi’s more ambitious reforms, like his proposal to unify India’s 29 states under a national sales tax, remain stalled in parliament.

The editorial board of Bloomberg View is encouraged by Modi’s less controversial plans to reform India’s complicated and “dysfunctional” bankruptcy law, which they think ought to be able to pass muster with the opposition. And it looks like Modi’s administration plans to privatize several loss-making state-owned companies—another smart move that may be difficult for obstructionist parliamentarians to gum up.India has a lot going for it, as evidenced by its strong economic performance amid both a darkening global outlook and domestic political gridlock. Should Modi manage to clear the impasse domestically, India’s economy could grow even faster. Yet thus far, even with all his early popularity, he has not been able to get his ambitious agenda through. And his Hindu nationalism, though helping galvanize his supporters, has otherwise driven the country apart and failed to generate any kind of sense of national purpose. Can he improve on his early record? The degree to which he succeeds will likely determine his legacy.

Israel and Jordan Agree on Red-Dead Canal

Some rare good news out of the Middle East: Israel and Jordan have issued a joint tender for an approximately $750m canal from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea. The Times of London reports:

The 180-kilometre (111-mile) pipeline will carry 200 million cubic metres of water annually from the Red Sea, at the southern tip of both countries.

About a third of the water will be desalinated and pumped to towns and farms in Israel and southern Jordan. The brackish by-product will be pumped north and dumped in the Dead Sea, which is receding at a rate of about one metre each year. The canal on the Jordanian side of the border will take five years to complete and marks the most ambitious joint project since the countries signed a peace treaty in 1994.[..]A canal was proposed more than a decade ago, and the two countries agreed to build it in 2013. The Palestinian Authority also signed the agreement because part of the sea is in the occupied West Bank.Israel and Jordan issued a tender for the project yesterday. Officials said that the winning contractor would dig the canal and operate it for 25 years. The project is expected to receive funding from the US, the European Union and the World Bank, which has studied the scheme and declared it feasible.

This is good news for Israelis, Jordanians, and Palestianians on the economic front: more of the desert will bloom. That in turn means more peaceful economic ties, and productive interactions between the three nations.

It’s also great news for the environment—because the Red Sea is in real trouble:

Scientists believe that it will vanish by 2050. Its main source of water, the Jordan River, has been heavily diverted for agriculture in Syria, Lebanon and Israel. Water scarcity is a running sore in relations across the region. Mining operations around the Dead Sea also suck up vast quantities of water.

A third of the sea has already dried up and the remaining portion has receded by more than 30 metres since 1977. The evaporating sea has become a danger on the Israeli side, where hundreds of sinkholes appear every year, some as deep as a two-storey building. They have sucked in power lines.

Israel has a long history of successful diplomacy through civic engineering projects (see for instance this account of how Israeli experts helped run water projects in Iran under the Shah). As the most advanced state in a region beset with governance problems, it has a real advantage in this area. Mutually beneficial projects such as this one, the hope goes, should have a virtuous cycle effect—as cooperation leads to increased benefits for both sides, both sides look for more cooperation, and so peace results.

This single project won’t overnight transform the Israel’s position in the region. But it’s good news—and right now, that should be celebrated where we can get it.

Oil Takes Nosedive Ahead of OPEC Summit

Oil prices are flirting with their lowest levels since the financial crisis as markets prepare for what is expected to be an unproductive semiannual OPEC meeting in Vienna on Friday. Analysts believe Saudi Arabia will ignore the calls of some of the cartel’s more cash-strapped members like Algeria and Venezuela to cut production, and instead stay the course in the hopes of squeezing out non-OPEC producers in a highly competitive and heavily oversupplied market. The FT reports:

“It appears highly unlikely that Opec will agree on a change of its course on Friday, as not all targets have been accomplished and uncertainty concerning non-OPEC supply effects prevails,” said analysts at JBC Energy in Vienna.

Brent crude oil, the international benchmark, fell 1.25 per cent to $43.89 a barrel on Wednesday, not far above the six-year low of $42.23 a barrel hit in August. US crude oil benchmark West Texas Intermediate fell 1 per cent to $41.40.The group is expected to either roll over its 30m barrel a day output target — which it has pumped well above for 18 months — or to raise it by around 1m b/d to accommodate the readmittance of Indonesia to the cartel. Neither outcome should alter the amount of crude its members actually produce…Iraq and Saudi Arabia have increased output close to record levels, while Iran is gearing up to increase its exports when sanctions are lifted next year.

But even as the Saudis continue pumping oil as if there was solid demand for their product, and Iran prepares its own crude resurgence, non-OPEC producers are also doing their part in flooding the market. Russia’s oil production is nearing post-Soviet records. This November’s output was up 1.3 percent over last year’s, and according to one Russian oil analyst December could “finish the year with another high.” Upstart U.S. shale producers are employing a range of innovative new techniques that are staving off the sorts of production drops for which Riyadh might have hoped.

Virtually every big player in the global oil market seems hell-bent on fighting tooth and nail for its market share. The result is a massive glut and the bargain prices consumers are now enjoying. If we’re reading the signs right, OPEC has no intention of shifting course later this week, and that means cheap crude isn’t going anywhere.

More Evidence that ISIS Fails the Reality Test

ISIS’s attempt to build a state is faltering under the strain of both external attacks and internal failings as its ideology collides with reality. The New York Times reports:

Some fighters have taken pay cuts, while others have quit and slipped away. Important services have been failing because of poor maintenance. And as its smuggling and oil businesses have faltered, the Islamic State has fallen back on ever-increasing taxes and tolls imposed on its squeezed citizens.[..]

Stories abound of the Islamic State putting loyal members in positions they are not qualified for. The head of medical services in one town is a former construction worker, residents said. The boss at an oil field was a date merchant, according to a former employee.

In Raqqa, the National Hospital featured in a propaganda video about health services in the caliphate is all but closed because so many doctors have fled, according to an aid worker with relatives in the city.[..]

Also driving people out is an onerous tax system carried out in the name of zakat, or Islamic alms. The jihadists collect, among other taxes, a yearly share of every harvest and herd of livestock, and make shopkeepers pay a share of their inventory.

ISIS is selling a dream, as we’ve written before. But everyday life grinds away at the fantasy world ISIS wants to live in.

Nothing kills an ideology like success. This is what happened to Communism: the Marxist-Leninists had 70 years and half the world’s population as a laboratory. They produced misery, oppression, poverty, pollution and corruption. The fantasy of a utopian Communist world could not survive reality.The caliphate crazies claimed that a “pure Islamic state” with a real, live caliph and strict sharia law would bring victory and prestige to Islam and good governance to its inhabitants. In fact, ISIS has damaged Islam more than its worst enemies could hope, wrecked the lives of millions, and created a gangster state that mistreats and exploits its residents.The failure of ISIS as a state means more trouble for the rest of us, at least in the short- to medium-term. To keep the fantasy alive, the brain-sick fanatics and true believers are likely to try more Paris style massacres and acts of spectacular terror. But the ideology that undergirds ISIS isn’t just bad in the sense of evil. It is bad in the sense that it does not provide a framework that can organize the life and work of a community on a productive and enduring basis.Even more than was the case for Communism, failure is baked into the ISIS cake. That doesn’t mean we can sit and wait serenely for the forces of history to destroy it; Stalin and Mao between them after all managed to murder something like 100 million people before the forces of history kicked in, and the Soviet Union managed to drag the world to the precipice of nuclear war before it imploded. So the intrinsic shortcomings of jihadi ideology doesn’t justify a passive policy. But the wrong-headed ideas at the core of this nonsense should give us hope: real victory over this nasty perversion of religion is not just possible; it is likely.

Which Colleges Are Actually Diverse?

“Diversity” is in many ways the organizing principle of elite American higher education. Colleges tout their commitment to diversity in promotional materials and saturate their campuses with diversity centers. U.S. News publishes an annual ranking of colleges by their level of diversity. Of course, in all these instances, diversity refers to racial and ethnic diversity—not diversity of viewpoint. You won’t find political diversity statistics in any college brochures or popular rankings.

But that may be about to change: Heterodox Academy, a new, reform-minded organization we’ve written about before, is in the process of creating a “systematic assessment of viewpoint diversity at America’s most prestigious colleges and universities.” Jon Shields, a contributor to the site and professor of government at Claremont McKenna, just came out with a post highlighting some preliminary findings:

When Joshua Dunn and I began searching for conservative professors to interview for our new book, Passing on the Right: Conservative Professors in the Progressive University, we assumed that nearly all elite universities and colleges were equally monolithic, more or less. That was not such an unreasonable assumption, given that only 4 percent of all humanities professors and 5 percent of all social scientists self identify as conservative. But after locating more than 200 self identified libertarian and conservative professors in six disciplines in the social sciences and humanities (economics, political science, sociology, history, philosophy, and literature), we discovered that they are not evenly sprinkled across elite colleges and universities. In fact, many prestigious universities have no libertarians or conservatives at all. But, happily, a few excellent schools, though still dominated by progressive academics, employ at least some right-of-center professors across a range of departments in the social sciences and humanities.

Where are these special places? They tend to be located in the South or in Catholic colleges. Among top public universities, the University of Virginia, Texas A&M, and the University of Texas are unusually diverse… Emory University is among the most diverse elite private institutions.

Click through to Shields’ original post to read which other schools are high on the list. Racial diversity is important, but so is viewpoint diversity. It’s hard to see how a student could get a well-rounded education in fields related to politics, history, and international affairs from an ideologically homogenous faculty. At a time when campuses are cementing their reputations as some of the most ideologically monolithic institutions in the country, prospective students and parents should be very interested in the kind of data Heterodox Academy is producing.

Will the EU’s Bargain with Turkey Last?

In the wake of the EU’s refugee bargain with Turkey this weekend, NPR provides a useful summary of what Turkey will get in exchange for clamping down on refugee outflows:

Under the terms of the deal, the E.U. will provide three billion euros, or $3.2 billion dollars, in aid for the approximately 2.2 million Syrian refugees in Turkey. In addition, Turkish citizens could be allowed to travel visa-free in Europe as early as October 2016. And talks on Turkey potentially joining the European Union will be restarted.

But will it hold? The money certainly will—as Walter Russell Mead wrote on Wednesday, Erdogan knew the Europeans were desperate and took full advantage.

But don’t be so sure about the rest. The EU is happy to talk about accession, but the idea that anyone will agree to it—in the age of Erdogan, in the age of the dual crises of both Europe and the Islamic world—seems highly unlikely. Then, there’s the visa-free travel issue. Right now, Turks who want to visit Europe must apply (and pay for) visas at consulates. You can see why Turkey, which has a large middle class and a land border with Europe, would be keen to change this.Unfortunately, Europeans will today be especially conscious of the need to screen visitors from Turkey. The complicated history of Turkey’s tolerance for ISIS in its early stages and security concerns will both certainly be factors inviting heightened European scrutiny (particularly given, as WRM has pointed out, that Turkey cannot entirely control its on border with Syria). But there’s also the recent moment when Turkish soccer fans booed and chanted “Allahu Akbar” through a moment of silence for the Paris victims:We’re sure the French won’t forget. And for so this and many other reasons, we wouldn’t count on those visa-waivers coming into place. However, the Eurocrats will, as ever, be happy to talk. . .