Duggars name #18 for Iraqi academic

I was intrigued by Michelle and Jim-Bob Duggar’s choice of name for #18: Jordyn-Grace Makiya Duggar. Makiya? At first I thought Jim-Bob had hit a random fantasy name generator, and I regretted that the world had not welcomed Jotil-Snebanina Warsulo Duggar (that was MY choice for the betting pool), but then it occurred to me: perhaps this fella has more on his mind than how to find the inspiration necessary for the procreation of #19 without resorting to ungodly pastimes. Perhaps he has a political agenda.

Meet Kanan Makiya, Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at Brandeis University. This is an interesting guy:

Makiya has collaborated on many films for television, the most recent of which exposed for the first time the 1988 campaign of mass murder in northern Iraq known as the Anfal. The film was broadcast in the U.S. on the PBS program Frontline under the title Saddam’s Killing Fields and received the Overseas Press Club’s Edward Murrow Award in 1992.

From the Frontline interview, “Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero”:

What is your own image of evil? Have you ever had an intimate personal encounter with it? Does it have its own taste and smell and configuration? …

Evil is something that, when you see it, when you know it, it’s intimate. It’s almost sensual. That is why people who have been tortured know it by instinct. They don’t need to be told what it is, and they may have a very hard time putting it into words. … That’s the nature of the phenomenon. It’s hard to put into words. But you have to have that intimacy with it, that kind of shoulder-to-shoulder rubbing. …

In order for me to understand evil, to see something as evil, I have to be able to see myself in it somehow, and yet not be there. If I’m not able to do that, then it’s just a phenomenon. It’s just a thing — terrible, bad, whatever — [but] it’s not got that intimacy.

[Snip]

When I handled the paperwork of the Iraqi bureaucracy, as it has killed tens of thousands of its own citizens, I see evil. I look at the paperwork. I look at the squiggles of the line and I wonder about the person who wrote in his handwriting style. …

I have a register which lists 397 eliminated villages, Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. … The work is called “The Register of Eliminated Villages.” You flip the pages, beautifully scripted and done with a pencil. Then the writer of this book has covered it, folded it very neatly with a nice, great big book cover made of paper, with great big white flowers against a red background. It’s a very decorative, pretty thing. … You look at this person who has taken such immaculate care of this book, which records the destruction of 397 Kurdish villages. … You look at the book and you know you’re touching evil somehow.

So the Duggars have named #18 for a guy who quotes Hannah Arendt. I’m impressed. On the other hand, Makiya does say things that would make him very popular with those Christian Fundamentalists who think that the only thing worse than Teh Islam is Teh Gay . . .

At this point in time, in this place, at this conjuncture in our history, religion did drive those planes into those towers. In that sense, in some deep sense, some deep way, religion is responsible. … Not any religion, but Islam in particular. But you just have to change the time and the circumstance, the moment. Move back 50 years, a hundred years, whatever, and you can have an entirely different circumstance. …

I have always thought there were dark … corners in religion. I took that for granted. That’s not the surprising thing for me. … The frightening thing is rather that, in the Arab world, we have let the darkness of religion flourish. The forces that are dampening it at this moment in our history are weak, and that is frightening. …

I call bullshit. 9/11 wasn’t about religion. It was intensely political and economic — and considering the developments of the last seven years, it was horribly successful.

Any guesses for the name of #19? Considering #18, I’m betting on Jillian-Kristol Wolfowitz Duggar.

D.

Walnut, December 19, 2008. Category: Political rants.

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