Category: Personal

Last night, London police chased an Asian man (which in the UK usually means South Asian) onto a tube train and shot him dead. They had been following him for some time as a terrorist suspect, and when they confronted him, he ran. The worry, expressed by the British Muslim Council, is that the British police will now shoot to kill whenever an Asian, or an Asian terrorist suspect, refuses to halt for a police search, for whatever reason. One witness did describe the victim as wearing a “bomb belt with wires coming out,” and after the second set of blasts in two weeks, the police have very little choice but to react as if they are under attack. But it’s still frightening.

Meanwhile, my subway conductor this morning announced that beginning today, bags will be subject to search, and never mind about that pesky Fourth Amendment (“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized”). I suppose the question is what constitutes “unreasonable.” But what I fear is that people carrying things they shouldn’t be — a bag of pot or coke, say, or large sums of cash — will panic and run and wind up full of bullets on the subway floor.

I give enormous credit to the creative thinking that led the South Koreans to offer North Korea not just food aid, but also significant amounts of electricity if the North gives up its nuclear weapons. The surprising offer was enough to get the North Koreans back to the six-party negotiating table, although it remains to be seen whether the North plans to negotiate in anything like good faith.

I’m not an expert on the North Koreans, but it seems to me that their demands and concerns have stayed remarkably consistent over time, at least in recent years. Reuters today, quoting from Xinhua, reported an official of the North Korean Foreign Ministry as saying, “Not a single nuclear weapon will be needed for us if the U.S. nuclear threat is removed and its hostile policy of ‘bringing down the DPRK’s system’ is withdrawn.” This is in line with previous North Korean statements focused on the threat that they justifiably feel from the large U.S. military presence on their border, coupled with our tough talk about the evil of their regime.

Of course, the United States can’t withdraw its nuclear weapons from the Korean peninsula because we don’t have any there (or at least that’s been our line for years, though there are dissenting views). In any case, nuclear-armed submarines and missiles on Okinawa could make quick work of Pyongyang if we so chose, and North Korea is not likely to get us to withdraw all our nukes from the region, especially because of our security commitments to Taiwan. Nor are we likely to satisfy the North Koreans by withdrawing our troops from the peninsula, or even from the DMZ.

Nevertheless, there is plenty that we can do, much of it at minimal actual cost. We could, for example, end the Korean war. To us, the distinction between armistice and peace is irrelevant, and we would be watching North Korea closely either way. But to the North Koreans it would be deeply meaningful. The North Koreans’ evident satisfaction at being called a “sovereign state” by various American officials is a reminder that such recognition has not always been forthcoming. Keep in mind that we only allowed North Korea to join the United Nations in 1991, and it was in 1994 that we nearly went to war with them. One can see why they’re nervous, and we could reassure them that our goal is not to topple their regime or destroy their country, but to coax them toward liberalization.

In such a context, the South Korean electricity offer is a step in the right direction. What is needed, above all, is economic engagement with the North, which would gradually raise living standards — and expectations — among its people, at the same time creating webworks of interdependency that would make bellicosity too costly. I have read that many North Koreans want a war with the South, and soon: they are starving anyway, they figure, and they’ve always been told such a war is inevitable, so if they have to die, they might as well get it over with. Even a small amount of economic opportunity would go far in alleviating this popular sentiment in favor of suicide.

This is, more or less, the model that the West followed with China, and it has been enormously successful. No, China is not democratic, and yes, it violates human rights on a massive scale. But hundreds of millions of people have been lifted from dire poverty to middle-class comfort, while China’s complex economic interdependence with the West means that it must consider the consequences before it makes any dramatic move. And certainly a North Korea that resembled today’s China would be a massive improvement on what we’ve got now.

This kind of engagement with North Korea can only happen if the United States is willing to assure the North that its survival is not in doubt. I don’t see why this should be a problem so long as North Korea agrees to dismantle its nuclear weapons and allow thorough inspections for verification. We could still keep our troops at the ready, and there is nothing in such an assurance that would stop us from defending South Korea, or anywhere else, should the North Koreans commit an act of aggression. At present, our main motivation for attacking the North first is to disable its nuclear weapons. If they give them up, why shouldn’t we give a security assurance?

The talks begin on July 25. We’ll see what comes of them.

Another reason I moved to New York City all those years ago: there are enough Jews here that we’re someone’s fetish.

Good news for fans of Lady Sovereign: her album, Public Warning, is due this October, and in the meantime you can watch her new video, a really funny little ska number called 9 to 5, at her website. (As usual, gotta log in to the VIP section.)

For anyone with more than a passing interest in either New York City or the war on terror, this week’s New Yorker has an article you don’t want to miss (unfortunately not online, but additional Q&A here) on how Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has remade the New York Police Department to defend the city against terrorism.

As author William Finnegan tells it, the NYPD has become a model organization in the fight against terror, developing a wide range of strategies and a complex network of information gatherers the world over, all while avoiding histrionics and bringing down the NYC crime rate more generally.

Among other things, the NYPD has managed to hire (or transfer to anti-terrorism and intelligence units) officers who come from the same places as the terrorists, so it has a surprising number of speakers of Arabic, Pashto, Farsi and other languages spoken in the Middle East, Central Asia and beyond. Though the article doesn’t say so, my guess is that this is because the CIA and FBI are seen by many Muslim immigrants as tools of the federal government’s assault on the Muslim world, while the NYPD is seen as a force that protects the immediate communities where many Muslim immigrants live. And because New York cops spend their days enmeshed in the fabric of our multi-ethnic city, the department has taken very naturally to the need to understand the sociopolitical complexities of the Muslim world: it’s not all that different, really, from trying to figure out Italian mob connections, the social patterns behind Irish gangs, the inner workings of the Chinatown or Russian mafias, or any other insular immigrant community that needs policing.

Another important effect of the NYPD’s approach is to make the distinctions between Muslims in general and Islamists in particular a lot clearer to the people fighting against terrorism. Here’s a key passage that shows what I mean:

“We’ve been doing instruction on Islam for the N.Y.P.D.,” [Lieutenant John Rowland, the director of regional training for the counterterrorism bureau,] said. “It’s needed. We’ve got a lot of Catholics in this department.” (I had already noted, in a restroom at the facility, a well-thumbed copy of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam.”)

[Captain Hugh] O’Rourke said, “We’re trying to get our analysis influenced with the proper cultural perspective, because we’re a long way from southwest Asia. Some of our officers were born there, though.”

“Pashtun tribesmen, Pakistanis, Egyptians, Farsi-speakers, Filipinos, Chinese — you name it,” Rowland said. “They’ve been tremendously helpful. One guy here just made his hajj.”

This is an approach that is sorely lacking in the rest of our government, particularly the Pentagon. New York City should be a model that is followed nationally.

This Day in History

1967…Sweaty straphangers breathe a sigh of relief when the first successful air-conditioned subway train goes into service on the F line.

My father always described his vision of hell as a packed subway train at rush hour, pre-air conditioning, where it just runs and runs and never, ever stops. So let us all give thanks for air-conditioned cars.

In its July 16th survey of America, in an article called Centrifugal Forces, the Economist has this fascinating set of facts:

Consider one of the great hidden stories of the past few years: the return of blacks to the South. For decades, southern labourers sought more money and less prejudice in industrial cities. In the late 1960s, black populations dropped most steeply in places such as Birmingham and Mobile in Alabama or New Orleans, Lafayette and Shreveport in Louisiana. Some of the largest gainers were Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco and New York. Yet in 1995-2000, those were the five cities that lost the largest number of blacks. Conversely, Atlanta gained 114,000 African-Americans, followed by Dallas, Charlotte and Orlando. This is helping to erode racial segregation. An index developed by Edward Glaeser and Jacob Vigdor, two economists, shows that in the medium-sized metro areas of the South, segregation has dropped.

To some extent, this is merely a reflection of a wider trend in internal migration: the movement from Rust Belt to Sun Belt. But it also helps to explain the vague sense many people have that racial politics in places like New York City have changed considerably since the era of the Crown Heights riots of 1991, when conflicts between Hassidic Jews and blacks tore the city apart. The old sense of tension between the city’s entrenched ethnic groups has dissipated, if not disappeared. Perhaps it is the combination of black flight and immigration that has changed the dynamic so noticeably.

Meanwhile, anyone who has paid attention to American pop culture for the last ten years is aware of the startling rise of African-American music from the South: Missy Elliot, Ludacris, Outkast, Goodie Mobb, and on and on. I suppose it was all predicted by Arrested Development back in 1992, in their hit Tennessee:

Go back to from whence you came (home)
My family tree my family name (home)
For some strange reason it had to be (home)
He guided me to Tennessee (home)

Flak Magazine has a short article on the Chapman brothers, creators of the fabulously cool Homestar Runner.