9/11 Miscellany

Some book related 9/11 miscellany:

Last night I watched the rebroadcast of the excellent PBS Frontline special Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero and noted the presence of Kanan Makiya, profiled in the Rights Readers selection, Calamities of Exile by Lawrence Weschler. The website offers an online interview with Makiya and poking around the site I also found this link to reflections by a number of authors on the legacy of 9/11.

And we can't forget another Rights Readers selection, Tainted Legacy: 9/11 and the Ruin of Human Rights by William Schulz, former Executive Director of Amnesty International USA. Turns out a few months back, Schulz gave a speech at the UC-San Diego's Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice and its available via Google Video! So if you want the short version of the book, need an update, or (for those who are well acquainted) are otherwise feeling nostalgic for those Sufi anecdotes, here you go:

(Yeah! My first video post, just wanted to see if I could do this!) Technorati Tags: 9/11, William Schulz, Kanan Makiya

Kanan Makiya and the Iraq Memory Foundation

NPR offered a recent profile of the Iraq Memory Foundation which is documenting human rights violations from Ba'thist Iraq. The foundation is headed up by Kanan Makiya, himself the subject of a profile in the Rights Readers selection Calamities of Exile by Lawrence Weschler. Be sure to visit the foundation's grim art gallery. Kanan Makiya also offers up some reflections on the current state of affairs at NPQ. On Saddam Hussein's trial:

...it seems to be driven by a purely sectarian agenda, with lists of crimes against Shiites, then against Kurds. There seems to be no focus on the fact that Saddam’s regime terrorized everybody in Iraq in various ways, that the system was totalitarian.

It would have been much wiser to have focused on the ways in which the former regime victimized everyone, irrespective of sect or national origin. Wise leadership in Iraq today cannot be merely about me and what is in my self-interest; it has to be, and to be perceived to be, about “us,” the people of Iraq, and our Iraqi self-interest.