Talk Islam

thabet

• 11:24:11 am on June 12, 2008 | # | |
  Tags: books, Iraq, muqtada al-sadr

  Patrick Cockburn’s Muqtada: Muqtada Al-Sadr, the Shia Revival, and the Struggle for Iraq is reviewed at The New Republic.

   

• Tag this post

Comments

• 

  ahmed 8:20 am on June 15, 2008 | #

  This TNR writer is hell-bent on portraying MAS (yeah, we’re on initials-basis like that) as some sort of bloodthirsty tyrant instead of a shrewd politician. Sure, his tactics have occasionally been brutal. He’s probably not a very nice guy.

  But what of George Bush and the American occupation? Are they not evidence of a brutal, even wicked, regime employing the bloodiest, most cynical tactics? The writer casually mentions the U.S.’s wholesale destruction of Najaf (to say nothing of Fallujah) but doesn’t reserve the same bloodthirsty descriptions to describe American intentions. Those imputations of E-vil are saved only for MAS.

  No MAS, TNR. No MAS.

• 

  aziz 2:22 pm on June 15, 2008 | #

  um, Ahmed, Najaf was not destroyed. In fact I have several friends who were just there, and in Karbala. Yes, portions of the city were a battleground but it’s rather an overstatement to argue that the city was “destroyed wholesale” - thats the kind of terminology you might reserve for Dresden.

• 

  aziz 2:24 pm on June 15, 2008 | #

  also in general I think its foolish to demand a kind of rhetorical quota with respect to countig adjectives and divining imputations. Argue with what the writer says, not what they ddn’t say.

  (the same critique applies, for example, to hard-core Israel partisans who make noise about why the Palestinian kids get coverage when they’re killed, but “equal time” or mention isnt given to Israeli kids killed by terrorists.)

Leave a Comment

Name (required)	Email (required)
Web Site Anti-spam word: (Required)* Click on the picture to hear an audio file of the word.	To prevent spam, please type the security word shown in the picture. Click on the picture to hear an audio file of the word.