The latest IPA Review has been released into the wild - subscribers should have it in the first few days next week. This edition is my 10th, 8th with the title of ‘Editor’.

I’ve got a number of pieces, including a piece on the regulatory state, a book review of Radicals for Capitalism, something about Big Brother which isn’t online yet, and of course the editorial, which covers MediaWatch’s uncomfortable relationship with the internet.

There’s more articles available on the Institute of Public Affairs website, as usual, but the full magazine, in luxurious full colour, is available by subscription, membership of the IPA, or at newsagents.

I have an oped in the Australian Financial Review today criticising the remarkably silly ACCC action against Google, with the provocative title of ‘Hands off software, Samuel‘.

I’ve been carrying this around for the last few days.

I will admit that I didn’t see the ABC’s screening of Great Global Warming Swindle (I have, however, seen the documentary in its earlier version online.) But:

The Great Global Warming Swindle does not represent the views of the ABC. It is an independent film and is only opinion.

Well, then what are the ‘views of the ABC’? As far as I am aware, nowhere in ABC’s charter does it say that it has to develop an official position on matters of political importance.

Certainly material screened on commercial networks does not require such a disclaimer - a few years ago Channel Nine screened The Truth Behind the Moon Landings, a predictable conspiracy theory documentary. But few viewers would have interpreted it as the ‘official’ position of Kerry Packer. It is only the ABC’s internal desire to encourage its own institutional gravitas that makes these sorts of preachy disclaimers necessary.

As an addendum: how silly is the special website for the program, and its attempt at encouraging ‘video feedback’? I’m sympathetic to the many ABC discussion forums for various programs. The text-only boards seem to be an effective and relatively popular feature of the website. But let’s keep our pants on - the ABC isn’t going to be YouTube anytime soon.

Previous thoughts on The Great Global Warming Swindle and the ABC.

Debates over media ownership are typically more emotional than wonkish. Media critics argue that liberalised media regulations will inevitably lead to the consolidation of the industry into all powerful mega-corporations. These are headed up by giant, profoundly anti-democratic media moguls, able to manipulate not just public opinion, but the governments as well.

There is no better illustration of this image of the excessively powerful and eccentric press baron than Citizen Kane:

Charles Foster Kane was modeled directly upon William Randolph Hearst, and Kane’s lines “You provide the prose poems, I’ll provide the war” are pulled directly from Hearst’s life.

In 1896 Hearst employed an illustrator, Frederic S. Remington, to join rebel forces in Cuba and send back drawings about the local insurrection. But Remington, in Cuba a year later, sent Hearst back a telegram doubting that there was anything to report: “Everything is quiet. There is no trouble here. There will be no war. I wish to return. Remington.” Hearst immediately responded with his now famous lines: “Please remain. You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war. W. R. Hearst.”

Hearst, the story implies, manipulated the United States into the Spanish American War. As a story of the egotistical display of power by media moguls, it has been enormously influential, inspiring not merely Citizen Kane but providing the basis for a James Bond film - Tomorrow Never Dies, where a Rupert Murdoch-esque character cooks up a war to inaugurate his new television network. Indeed, Murdoch particularly is seen as a latter day Hearst, with the War in Iraq providing his Spanish American War.

But, it turns out, the story of Hearst cooking up the war is probably a myth.

Its sole source was a Hearst correspondent who was at that time stationed in Europe and probably not in a position to know about telegrams between Hearst and Remington. The telegram’s timing does not match the historical record - Cuba was anything but peaceful in 1897. As Remington’s traveling partner wrote at the time, “there is war here and no mistake”. Local Cuban censors would have been unlikely to clear telegrams with that sort of content - it is hard to imagine that any government would not make great publicity from the discovery that their war had been invented by an American press baron. And perhaps most indicatively, the contents of the telegrams go directly against the Hearst editorial line at the time - Hearst papers were not advocating American military intervention.

In fact, the powers of a media mogul have always been dwarfed by the powers of a government. It is indicative that Hearst (and Kane) viewed the media as a stepping stone to even more power, this time in politics. Hearst lost a series of elections for mayor and governor of New York. And as David Boaz writes, Murdoch has often been the target of his adversaries in politics, as they exercise their far greater powers to legislate against his interests.

But the myth of Hearst’s Spanish American War telegrams is not likely to disappear soon - even though their influence is being eroded from all sides by economic and technological change, fear of the press baron is just as strong today as it was in 1897.

So, what was the IPA on about in publishing such a scandalous betrayal of western cvilisation, (sic) and, for that matter, a complete falsification of the history of classical liberal economics? There are those already speculating on the motivation of the IPA? - What is the deal behind it?, and, there must be something very rum (sic) because they still refuse to retract and correct, why have they sold out to muslims and in such an ugly fashion? The cretins at the IPA may not like it, but senior figures have made their disgust plain.

Andrew Kemp and I wrote a piece in last edition of the IPA Review on a strand of Islamic thought that could be considered sympathetic to the free market. (The article is here: “Islam and the Free Market“). The piece is pretty simple, covering three areas - the aspects of the Qur’an which praise commerce and the exploitation of natural resources for human gain, the economics of the 14th century Islamic historian Ibn Khaldun, and the potential problem of usury for Islamic commerce.

We explicitly did not try to maintain that the Qur’an or Islam itself was inherently pro-capitalist or liberal, or peaceful or something else - I don’t believe that religions can be ‘inherently’ anything. Instead, we argued that it is possible to cherry-pick a tradition of free market or pro-commerce thought out of Islamic intellectual history. As we wrote,

None of this discussion is to imply that the Islamic religion is consistently or inherently liberal, or necessarily free market. If nothing else, the process of discerning a liberal tradition in Islam illustrates the subjective nature of theology - individuals interpret sacred texts, rather than being controlled by them.

This modest argument has not been popular. (The quote which opens this post is from the latest, and certainly the most vitriolic, response at a blog called Mangled Thoughts. He goes on to characterise our piece as a ‘nasty little bit of toilet paper material’, but at least he calls my front cover ‘handsome’.)

Prodos opened the condemnation by accusing us of supporting a “free market dictator” - the Islamic Free Market Institute Foundation which we mentioned in the article approvingly quotes George Bernard Shaw on its website.

A blogger under the name Strider, before having read the article, speculated that the IPA was desperately searching out new sources of funding, (”the IPA was getting strapped for cash”) and that we wrote the piece to try to get support from Emirate Airlines. He went on to read the article, conceding that it may not be all wrong (”That might well be the case, but it is important to avoid the temptation to rewrite history.”) but nevertheless, the IPA should shut down. (”perhaps it is time after 60 years for the IPA to pack up its tents and go away.”) I can assure Strider that we were not paid to write the article, and that for the last two years the IPA has experienced a sustained boom in financial support.

Gerard Jackson, of Brookesnews, has provided the only lengthy criticism of our piece, in this podcast with Prodos, and apparently in a subsequent lecture. Speculating that we were ’spoonfed’ our argument from some nefarious source, he badly misreads our article.

Over the course of an hour, he argues against a strawman - our article does not claim that Ibn Khaldun invented economic theory. Instead, we briefly write that “it is hard not to imagine that the leading scholars of the School of Salamanca did not have at least a passing familiarity with Ibn Khaldun’s work”. We know that Islamic scholarship was influential within the Scholastic movement - Ibn Rushd (Averroes) was highly respected by Thomas Aquinas and others as a expert commentator on Aristotle. Much Greek writing was translated into Latin from Arabic, rather than the original Greek. Furthermore, Medieval European scholars often traveled within the Islamic world and had extensive contact with their Arabic counterparts. It’s unlikely that Ibn Khaldun would have escaped the attention of Christendom.

Regardless, Jackson does not address our main contention - it is possible to detect within Islamic intellectual history a distinct, although not anywhere near dominant, strand of free market or pro-commerce thought. If there is a problem with this argument, I would be eager to hear it, but so far angry rhetoric and misreadings have dominated the critical response.

Why might this be the case? Our article was written for a audience sympathetic to the free market, asking them to reassess their existing views on the viability of Islamic liberalism. We argued that the myopic argument that there can be no free Islamic nation because Islam the religion is somehow internally deficient does not stand up. Liberal thought has existed within an Islamic framework. And perhaps this can be leveraged into a modern Islamic liberal tradition and hopefully provide a basis for a genuinely liberal Islamic state.

The response by Prodos, Gerard Jackson, Strider and Mangled Thoughts illustrates how certain segments of the right treat the War on Terror as simply a War on Islam - and they appear to be angry that Andrew and I would even consider sympathising with their enemy. Worse - we have “sold out to muslims”, as if it is every Australian’s duty to stay strong against the advancing Muslim hordes.

They dismiss Islam as a religion of violence without seriously looking at the importance of different intellectual traditions within Islam, and the way these can and have changed over time. Surely, when the Islamic world is filled will illiberal governments, it is vital to try to rejuvenate those traditions to encourage other, more liberal, paths of development?