CUANAS: 02/01/2005 - 03/01/2005

Monday, February 28, 2005

A Beautiful And Historic Day

Where do we go from here? Who will fill the political vacuum yesterday's events have left? Hariri's sister, MP Bahia Hariri, who spoke both eloquently and movingly in the stormy parliamentary session that preceded the government's resignation, is being talked about as a possible candidate for the premiership.

If Lebanon is ready for a female prime minister she must surely be the first choice.
Whoever it is will have the trust of the people in a way that few politicians can ever enjoy. Let us hope this optimism, this trust and this moment is not betrayed. To paraphrase Karami's last words as prime minister, May God preserve what the people of Lebanon have achieved.

The Astonishing Momentum Of
Democracy In The Middle East

A stellar piece from Ed Morrisey at Captain's Quarters:

In the past two months, we have seen an explosion of momentum in Southwest Asia for political reform and democratization. Despite European warnings that democracy cannot be imposed at gunpoint, two longtime tyrannies (Afghanistan and Iraq) successfully held popular multiparty elections for the first time in their histories, freeing almost 50 million people from two of the most oppressive governments in modern history... and now we see popular demonstrations for liberty where we would least have expected it -- on the streets of Beirut and Cairo. The pro-Syrian puppet Lebanese government has fallen today as a result, while Hosni Mubarak has managed to stay one step ahead by promising multiparty elections later this year for the executive.

After watching nothing but stagnation for decades and an Arab populace that appeared resigned to oppression all along, one has to ask: what changed? Why now? The answer, history will show, will be two men: George Bush and Tony Blair, with John Howard of Australia playing the unsung hero.

For twelve years, the international community sat on its hands while Saddam Hussein, the Assads in Syria, and other tinpot dictators openly oppressed their people and defied international calls for reform. All of that changed for the US after 9/11, when the product of all that simmering rage at political repression took out 3,000 of our citizens who committed the sin of going to work on Tuesday morning. Bush, Blair, and Howard correctly calculated that continuing with so-called realpolitik and cutting deals with the oppressors only created more risk and more opportunity for terrorist groups.

So the Anglosphere changed directions and demanded accountability from the dictators of the worst area for political oppression -- Southwest Asia. After giving the Taliban one chance to cough up the masterminds of 9/11, Bush decapitated them despite opposition predictions of 19th-century quagmires and anarchical results. Within two years, the Afghans had held their own elections and started governing themselves, a story that the Western media has largely ignored despite its historic significance.

Once the Taliban had been driven off, the Anglosphere turned its sights onto Saddam Hussein. Many on the left have argued that Saddam had been effectively "contained" (some used the phrase "in his box") by UN sanctions, but ultimately Saddam had continued to defy UNSC resolutions -- 16 of them -- to disarm, stop committing genocide on his own people, and provide proof of the destruction of his WMD programs. Saddam refused to do any of this. His intransigence demonstrated the UN's inability to act in its own interest, and as we later found out, the UNSC states themselves helped Saddam undermine the containment they argued to continue. Saddam's continued grip on power showed the UN to be helpless to do anything to enforce its own resolutions.

That provides part of the oft-asked question of Why Saddam and why not Iran/North Korea/Syria et al? This map provides the other part.

Geographically and militarily, Iraq holds the key to Southwest Asia, and the Anglosphere leaders proved they can read maps even if their political opponents cannot. Iraq still had the region's most potent military, and after the necessary first strike against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, all further operations in the Gulf region required neutralizing both Saddam and his army. His defiance provided all of the justification necessary for such a step, and the Anglosphere took it. They destroyed the region's best and most battle-tested military in less than three weeks.

... the Iraqis ... proved less than two years later that they wanted to choose their own leaders by braving bombs and bullets to vote in surprisingly large numbers.

On the heels of that surprising success, Bush specifically called Syria out as his next focus during his annual State of the Union speech. I don't think even Bush could have predicted Bashar Assad's stupidity in assassinating a tremendously popular figure in Lebanon as Rafik Hariri, but Bush demanded a complete Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon during that speech. Combined with his inaugural speech ealier and the success of Iraq's election, his words have had a powerful effect on Lebanese developments. The purple fingers of Iraq have led to the red-and-white banners demanding freedom today in the streets of Beirut and the capitulation of Egypt's president-for-life, Hosni Mubarak, to multiparty elections.

Nor have we seen the wave of democratization crest yet. Looking back at the map ..., that wave threatens to crash across Syria from two directions now, especially with its Kurdish minority paying close attention to their Iraqi cousins. Syria, long an undeniable exporter of terrorism, either has to ride that wave to a peaceful transition to true representative government or drown in an attempt to stand fast. The collapse of Syria and a transformation of Egyptian politics would severly undercut the terrorist impulses of populations who have been fed radical anti-Westernism by their oppressors for decades as a means to rechannel their rage towards anyone else but the dictators themselves.

More horizons beckon, notably Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Pakistan, but these will follow in time. One question that arises still is, why now? Was this really the work of the Anglosphere? The answer lies in the 150,000 troops currently stationed in Iraq and the will to act that put them there. Does anyone think that Syria would have stood still for a spontaneous demonstration against their puppet government if Saddam Hussein was still defying the UN in Baghdad? Would Hosni Mubarak have suddenly transformed into a democrat without watching the Anglosphere demonstrate a will to act rather than just continue talking tough?

Would the people of the region had the undeniable personal courage to stand up to their oppressors as they have in Cairo and Beirut if they had not seen the Iraqis and their purple fingers, freely voting for their own government, with their own eyes?

Make no mistake. This transformation didn't just happen to coincide with the terms of Bush, Blair, and Howard. Expect the mainstream media to sell that meme in the next few weeks -- how George Bush, especially, got lucky to just happen to be President when all of this happened. Don't buy it for a second. He saw how to change the world and eliminate terrorism over the long haul and more importantly had the political courage to act in that regard.

I have written repeatedly over the past few weeks that, while all of these developments are great (and really by this point, have moved beyond the possible, into the realm of the astonishing), the success of the whole enterprise depends on whether we allow Iran to aquire nuclear weapons.

I see it going one of the following ways:

1) Europe pulls off an amazing feat of diplomacy and actually talks Iran out of wanting to aquire nuclear weapons. (Don't laugh, they're really, really good at diplomacy.)

2) America, or Israel, attacks Iran's nuclear facilities and renders them useless.

3) America, or Israel, attacks Iran's nuclear facilities, and "misses them by that much", in which case a very interesting war will ensue.

4) Nothing is done about Iran, in which case an even more interesting war will ensue, involving the use of nuclear weapons by Iran and Israel, against each other.

5) Everything works out rosy for some unexpected reason.

Considering the fact that Bush has said, on more than one occasion, that he does not intend to allow Iran to aquire nuclear weapons, you can expect numbers 2 or 3 to be the most likely scenarios. I'm putting my money on number 3.

Actually, there is one more scenario that could occur. Say the people of Lebanon succeed in throwing Syria out of their country, and in establishing a Democratic state within their own borders. If that happens, it is possible that the regime change in Iran, which so many Iranian citizens have been pushing for, could come with little or no bloodshed.

Let's all pray that that is the way it plays out.

Suicide Bomber Kills Jews
BBC Reports On The Grieving Family
Of The Suicide Bomber

The BBC has pulled off some amazing anti-Semitic bias the past few weeks. Really, these ought to go down in the history books. From Melanie Phillips:

Blistering article by Tom Gross in National Review on the BBC's relentless and venomous bias in its Israel coverage. Gross draws attention to its coverage of Sheikh Abdur-Rahman al-Sudais, from Saudi Arabia, who opened London's biggest mosque last Friday. Gross tells us:

'He is the preacher at the Grand Al-Haraam mosque — the most important mosque in Mecca, the very heart of Islam. "Read history," implored al-Sudais to his massed ranks of followers in another of his sermons, on February 1, 2004, "and you will understand that the Jews of yesterday are the evil fathers of the Jews of today, who are evil offspring, infidels ... calf-worshippers, prophet-murderers, prophecy-deniers...the scum of the human race whom Allah cursed and turned into apes and pigs.... These are the Jews, a continuous lineage of meanness, cunning, obstinacy, tyranny, licentiousness, evil, and corruption...."

Al-Sudais has repeated these words, or close variations of them, at several other sermons in recent years. It is because of these and other calls for violence against Christians, Hindus, and Americans, that the Canadian government last month denied al-Sudais a visa to enter Canada. But none of this seems to have penetrated the BBC bubble. In its reports last weekend on TV, radio, and online, on Sheikh al-Sudais's visit to Britain, in which he lead 15,000 worshippers at prayer at the opening of the enormous new six-story Islamic center in east London, the BBC mentioned none of this. BBC Online for example, last Saturday, gave the impression that al-Sudais was nothing but a benign, kindly cleric promoting (to quote the BBC) "community cohesion" between Muslims and their neighbors.'

Now scroll on to the BBC's TV coverage on sunday of the Tel Aviv bombing, in which five people died and 49 were injured. Using a clip entitled 'A family in mourning', the family it showed was not one of the Israeli dead but of the human bomb terrorist instead.

BBC panjandrums are embarrassed enough to put their hands up to this one. In what it coyly calls a 'correction', the Beeb has posted up the following comment by Roger Mosey, head of TV news:

'The programme editors and I agree it was inappropriate to begin the report with footage of the suicide bomber's family in mourning. It was also inappropriate to include this footage without coverage of the suffering of the victims' families. Using this picture sequence in this way was a mistake. However, the report's coverage of the political ramifications of the bombing and this week's London conference was balanced and fair - and we did, of course, report fully the events in Tel Aviv in our bulletins on Friday night and Saturday.'

No, Mr Mosey, it was not 'inappropriate'. It was grotesque, outrageous and despicable. And a 'correction' just won't do. It does not begin to address the moral deformity of BBC journalists who, when Israelis are murdered, automatically direct their compassion instead at the family of the bomber. For BBC journalists, Jewish victims, Jewish dead and Jewish grief just don't seem to exist.

Yep, and my relatives in England tell me the "Jewish Lobby" controls American Foreign Policy.

Islamic Jihad Celebrates The Peace Process
With Children, Knives, and Korans.
Oh Yeah, And With A Car Packed With Explosives

From News 24, via Roger Simon:

Jerusalem - Israeli troops in the northern West Bank on Monday discovered a car packed with explosives.

It is believed to have been prepared by militants from the radical Islamic Jihad movement, who claimed Friday's suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, a military source said.

The car, which was discovered outside Arrabeh village near the town of Jenin, was packed "with tens of kilos of explosives", the source said.

"We believe it is something to do with Islamic Jihad who carried out Friday's bomb attack," she added.

The blast, which took place outside a Tel Aviv nightclub and killed five Israelis, put a major dent in efforts on both sides to observe an informal truce.

I thought we were in the middle of a "Peace Process". What did Israel do wrong this time? They freed, what was it, 800 prinsoner. They held back from retaliating for Friday night's suicide bombing.

What's wrong?

Hat tip to LGF for the pics.

Democracy Shakes The Middle East
CNN Attempts To Ignore It

In the post below, about the Lebanese government resigning, I noted that talk radio news seemed to have ignored the story in favor of the Michael Jackson trial. Now, Roger Simon notes that CNN is listing the Lebanon story third behind Michael Jackson and the suicide bombing in Iraq.

I wondered what the media would do if events started to really prove that Bush has been right all along. I remember that during the period of 1987-89, they credited themselves, for championing Gorbachev over Reagan, and by attempting to turn men like Lech Walesa, and even to some extent the Pope, into heroes of the Left.

But, they really have no way to spin this one in their direction. So, I guess they're going to try to ignore it.

Wow. What a strategy.

It won't work. If Syria really pulls out of Lebanon, and if the Lebanese people are successful in establishing a Democratic government, the media will not be able to ignore the story. It remains to be seen if they will be able to find a way to credit someone other than George Bush.

Tear Down The Wall
Lebanese Government Resigns

I was out of town on business this morning with only talk radio to bring me news of the outside world. All they seemed to be talking about on their news segments was the Michael Jackson trial. So, then I come home and find the government of Lebanon has resigned:

Huge celebrations have erupted in Beirut after the Lebanese government announced its resignation following two weeks of popular protests.

Tens of thousands of people waved Lebanese flags and demanded that Syria remove its troops from the country.

Prime Minister Omar Karami announced the resignation two weeks after the murder of his predecessor Rafik Hariri.

The US hailed it as an "opportunity" for Lebanon, calling for fair elections free of Syrian influence.

Mr Karami said in his announcement: "I am keen the government will not be a hurdle in front of those who want the good for this country.

"I declare the resignation of the government that I had the honour to head. May God preserve Lebanon."

His announcement came as an opposition-sponsored motion of no-confidence in the government was being debated in parliament.

The statement prompted delight from at least 25,000 protesters estimated to have gathered in Beirut's Martyrs Square despite a ban on demonstrations.

"Karami has fallen, your turn will come, Lahoud, and yours, Bashar," the demonstrators chanted, referring to Lebanese President Emile Lahoud and his Syrian counterpart Bashar al-Assad.

Mr Lahoud accepted the resignation of the government and asked it to continue in a caretaker capacity, a statement said.

The immediate reaction from Syria, which backs the Lebanese government, was non-committal, saying only that it was "an internal affair" for Lebanon.

However, a BBC correspondent in Damascus says the Syrian authorities must be worried the situation in Lebanon is spiralling out of their control and might result in a new government demanding the immediate withdrawal of Syria's estimated 15,000 troops in the country.

Both Mr Karami's government and the Syrian government have been accused of involvement in the 14 February assassination of Mr Hariri - charges they deny.

Earlier, US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State David Satterfield, on a visit to Lebanon, called on Syria to withdraw its troops in compliance with UN resolution 1559, passed in September.
Syria says not even the Lebanese want a full Syrian withdrawal, but last week it said it would draw troops back from western Lebanon to areas nearer the Syrian border.

Sometimes You Just Gotta Love Those Men

In followup to the post below, which gives the male perspective on the Anorexia Parade at the Oscars, here's a little bit more male perspective. Vox Day discusses Maureen Dowd, via No Pasaran:

Vox Day: Late to the obvious, again Maureen Dowd discovers the concept of slumming:

MoDo: Even some men I know felt awful for the unwitting slump busters who would now read "Juiced" and realize that the best night of their lives was actually the worst. That really cute baseball player they thought liked them just the way they are, as Bridget Jones likes to say, was really holding his nose to break a curse. Way harsh.At the dawn of feminism, there was an assumption that women would not be as severely judged on their looks in ensuing years. Phooey. It's just the opposite. Looks matter more than ever, with more and more women spending fortunes turning themselves into generic, plastic versions of what they think men want, reaching for eerily similar plumped-up faces and body shapes.

Vox Day: Tune in next week, when Maureen enlightens us to the hot new phenomenon of "beer goggles", which involves intoxicated fraternity boys hooking up with girls they wouldn't pay any attention to when sober. As usual, Dowd is not only decades out of it, but she has no genuine point; her apparent conclusion implies that it would be better if men, like women, were willing have sex with ugly members of the opposite sex because they are wealthy.

As with your enemies, you just gotta love men when they tell you the truth.

Vox Day comments that Maureen Dowd is "late to the obvious". There's a reason she might want to arrive even later to the party, but I won't even mention it. (Hint: It has to do with the "beer goggles")

Water, Water, Everywhere
And Not A Drop To Drink

The Anchoress talks about about the all the beautiful women and gowns at the Oscars. Now, I know that Anchoress is mostly just focusing on the gowns. But, you know, me being me, I've just got to give the male perspective. And that is, well, a question:

Was that the Academy Awards Show or a setup to a commercial for Viagra? Because I definately felt like I needed some after looking at the pictures of all those anorexic freaks.

Thank God I've got got my wife to get me hot.

Well, actually, Selma Hayek looks pretty good as well.

Sunday, February 27, 2005

How Will the "Peace Process" Play Out?

In the wake of the suicide boming in Israel, Ariel Sharon has suspended planned releases of Palestinian prisoners. Ed Morrisey at Captain's Quarters has some predictions of what to expect:

Hamas and Islamic Jihad had already criticized the planned releases as too modest for their tastes, demanding the immediate release of all 8,000 Palestinians held in Israeli jails before considering a formal cease-fire. Now that Sharon has frozen even the preliminary releases, the militants have all the excuse they need to declare open season on Israeli citizens again, and Abbas can blame the intransigence of the Israelis for the collapse of the cease fire. Abbas may make some preliminary noise about taking action against the militants, but in a short period of time he will lay the blame against Sharon for undermining Fatah's credibility among the militants.

Some of you think I'm being far too skeptical. I hope to be proven wrong. So far, however, events have played out exactly as expected, and exactly as they have in the past. Only when the Palestinians start electing peacemakers rather than bombthrowers will peace truly come to the West Bank and Gaza.

I also hope you are wrong Mr. Morrisey. However, I agree that your predictions will probably come true. There are three things one needs to know in order to understand why the Peace Process will likely not work towards peace:

1) The Palestinian people overwhelmingly support the terror organizations,

2) Mahmoud Abbas, the supposedly moderate leader of the Palestinian Authority wrote his doctoral thesis on the subject of how Jews plotted the Holocaust with Hitler in order to build world sympathy, so that they could "steal" the land of Palestine from the Palestinians.

3) The Palestinian Authority official United Nations website still to this day proudly displays the Palestinian Liberation Organization Charter, as the charter of the Palestinian Authority. This charter calls for the destruction of Israel.

An Outbreak of Honor Killings In Germany

From The Telegraph of London, via Little Green Footballs:

Shortly before nine o'clock one Monday evening earlier this month, Hatin Sürücü left her five-year-old son asleep in their small apartment in the Tempelhof district of Berlin and made her way to a bus stop in the main Oberlandgarten Strasse.

Minutes later, a volley of pistol shots rang out but no one came to help Mrs Sürücü, 23, who was of Turkish origin. A bus driver discovered her body, with multiple wounds to the head and chest, about 40 minutes later and called the police.

Last week, Mrs Sürücü's three brothers, aged 18 to 25, who were arrested six days after the attack, were formally charged with the murder. They have pleaded not guilty and were remanded in custody.

Police are investigating whether Mrs Sürücü was the victim of a so-called "honour killing" after she made the decision to leave the cousin with whom she had been forced into an arranged marriage eight years earlier.

The police said that Mrs Sürücü had frequently complained of being threatened by her brothers.
If they are found guilty, Mrs Sürücü's murder will be the sixth "honour killing" within Berlin's 200,000-strong Muslim community in four months. Shocking as that is, the reactions of some Turkish immigrant children at a school whose main gates are yards from the scene of the shooting has caused even graver concern.

Asked by teachers what they thought of the murder, several 13-year-old pupils are said to have implied that they thought Mrs Sürücü had "earned" her death. "Well, she lived like a German, didn't she?" remarked one. Mrs Sürücü got married in Turkey at the age of 15 but returned with her son to her birthplace, Berlin, more than five years ago.

She broke with her family, refused to wear the Muslim headscarf and lived with her child in a hostel.

She had recently completed training as an electrical engineer and friends said that she simply "wanted to live her own life".

The murder has shocked politicians, police and community leaders, and prompted criticism that successive German governments have ignored ritual injustices within immigrant communities for decades. "How many more women have to die before this society wakes up?" asked Necla Kelek, the author of a controversial book on arranged marriages.

In an open letter last week, the headmaster of the school publicly denounced the attitude of his pupils. Other head teachers in Berlin, however, said that they were not surprised by the children's reaction.

"This type of thinking is latent in their minds," said the head of another predominantly Turkish immigrant school in the district, who asked not to be identified. Their remarks, he said, reminded him of the spontaneous "victory dances" which immigrant pupils at his school had staged after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

The five Muslim women killed in recent months were murdered by their husbands or partners because they had "insulted" the family honour by wanting to end the relationship.

One woman was strangled; another drowned in a bath. In another case, a 21-year-old Turkish woman who was forcibly married to her cousin was stabbed to death on the street by her husband in front of their three-year-old daughter. Police records show that 45 "honour killings" have been committed within Germany's two million-plus Muslim community in the past eight years. Now that at least five have occurred in just four months in Berlin alone, the German authorities and local Turkish leaders are desperately trying to find out why.

Karl Mollenhauer, a Berlin police psychologist, blamed Islamic religious leaders for failing to address the problem. Last week, he also suggested that the German authorities were at fault for failing to intervene in case they were branded racist.

"We have silently allowed a parallel society to develop because of fears that we would sow hatred by talking openly about its injustices. The women have paid the price for this," he said. Serap Cileli, a German-born Turkish woman who finds homes for women threatened by "honour murders", said: "If I criticise the Islamic community over these problems, I find that the Germans criticise me for being anti-foreigner. At the same time, many Turks say I am fouling my own nest.

"I am sad to say that we have a Turkish problem in Germany. Official claims that the majority of Turks are well integrated here are pure eyewash."

Notice that the official numbers on "honor killings" are only those convicted. There have probably been many more that have either been attributed simply to domestic violence, or for which there were not convictions at all.

Sad to say, Germany seems wedged in by their history here. After WWII and the Holocaust, the Germans bravely fought to deNazify their country, and to eliminate the traditions of racism within their culture. Because Hitler had spoken out strongly against immigration, it an unacceptable form of speech. Now, that a real problem exitsts, German society does not have a mechanism to deal with the problem. They are, literally, tongue-tied by their newly-bred culture of Political Correctness.

This is a very sad situation.

Confessions Of A 9/11 Conservative

From a column by Cinnamon Stillwell, via the Anchoress:

As one of a handful of Bay Area conservative columnists, I'm no stranger to pushing buttons. Indeed, I welcome feedback from readers, whether positive or negative. I find the interplay stimulating, but I am often bemused by the stereotypical assumptions made by my critics on the left. It's not enough to simply disagree with my views; I have to be twisted into a conservative caricature that apparently makes opponents feel superior. They seem not to have considered that it's possible to put forward different approaches to various societal problems and not be the devil incarnate.

But in some ways I understand where this perspective comes from, because I once shared it. I was raised in liberal Marin County, and my first name (which garners more comments than anything else) is a direct product of the hippie generation. Growing up, I bought into the prevailing liberal wisdom of my surroundings because I didn't know anything else. I wrote off all Republicans as ignorant, intolerant yahoos. It didn't matter that I knew none personally; it was simply de rigueur to look down on such people. The fact that I was being a bigot never occurred to me, because I was certain that I inhabited the moral high ground.

Having been indoctrinated in the postcolonialist, self-loathing school of multiculturalism, I thought America was the root of all evil in the world. Its democratic form of government and capitalist economic system was nothing more than a machine in which citizens were forced to be cogs. I put aside the nagging question of why so many people all over the world risk their lives to come to the United States. Freedom of speech, religious freedom, women's rights, gay rights (yes, even without same-sex marriage), social and economic mobility, relative racial harmony and democracy itself were all taken for granted in my narrow, insulated world view.

So, what happened to change all that? In a nutshell, 9/11. The terrorist attacks on this country were not only an act of war but also a crime against humanity. It seemed glaringly obvious to me at the time, and it still does today. But the reaction of my former comrades on the left bespoke a different perspective. The day after the attacks, I dragged myself into work, still in a state of shock, and the first thing I heard was one of my co-workers bellowing triumphantly, "Bush got his war!" There was little sympathy for the victims of this horrific attack, only an irrational hatred for their own country.

As I spent months grieving the losses, others around me wrapped themselves in the comfortable shell of cynicism and acted as if nothing had changed. I soon began to recognize in them an inability to view America or its people as victims, born of years of indoctrination in which we were always presented as the bad guys.

Never mind that every country in the world acts in its own self-interest, forms alliances with unsavory countries -- some of which change later -- and are forced to act militarily at times. America was singled out as the sole guilty party on the globe. I, on the other hand, for the first time in my life, had come to truly appreciate my country and all that it encompassed, as well as the bravery and sacrifices of those who fight to protect it.

Thoroughly disgusted by the behavior of those on the left, I began to look elsewhere for support. To my astonishment, I found that the only voices that seemed to me to be intellectually and morally honest were on the right. Suddenly, I was listening to conservative talk-show hosts on the radio and reading conservative columnists, and they were making sense. When I actually met conservatives, I discovered that they did not at all embody the stereotypes with which I'd been inculcated as a liberal.

Although my initial agreement with voices on the right centered on the war on terrorism, I began to find myself in concurrence with other aspects of conservative political philosophy as well. Smaller government, traditional societal structures, respect and reverence for life, the importance of family, personal responsibility, national unity over identity politics and the benefits of living in a meritocracy all became important to me. In truth, it turns out I was already conservative on many of these subjects but had never been willing to admit as much.

In my search for like-minded individuals, I also gravitated toward the religiously observant. This was somewhat revolutionary, considering my former liberal discomfort with religious folk, but I found myself in agreement on a number of issues. When it came to support for Israel, Orthodox Jews and Christian Zionists were natural allies. As the left rained down vicious attacks on Israel, commentators on the right (with the exception of Pat Buchanan and his ilk) became staunch supporters of the nation. The fact that I'm not a particularly religious person myself had little bearing on this political relationship, for it's entirely possible to be secular and not be antireligious. Unlike the secular fundamentalists who make it their mission in life to destroy all vestiges of America's Judeo-Christian heritage, I have come to value this legacy.

So I became what's now commonly known as a "9/11 Republican." Living in a time of war, disenchanted with the left and disappointed with the obstructionism and lack of vision of the Democratic Party, I threw in my hat with the only party that seemed to be offering solutions, rather than simply tearing away at our country. I went from voting for Ralph Nader in 2000 to proudly casting my ballot for George W. Bush in 2004. This doesn't necessarily mean that I agree with Bush on every issue, but there is enough common ground to support his party overall. In the wake of this political transformation, I discovered that I was not alone. It turned out that there are other 9/11 Republicans out there, both in the Bay Area and beyond, and they have been coming out of the woodwork.

Like many a political convert, I took it on myself to openly oppose the politics of those with which I once shared world views. Beyond writing, I put myself on the front lines of this ideological battle by taking part in counterprotests at the antiwar rallies leading up to the war in Iraq. This turned out to be a further wake-up call, because it was there that I encountered more intolerance than ever before in my life. Holding pro-Iraq-liberation signs and American flags, I was spat on, called names, intimidated, threatened, attacked, cursed and, on a good day, simply argued with. It was clear that any deviation from the prevailing leftist groupthink of the Bay Area was considered a threat to be eliminated as quickly as possible.

It was at such protests that I also had my first real brushes with anti-Semitism. The anti-Israel sentiment on the left -- inexorably linked to anti-Americanism -- ran high at these events and boiled over into Jew hatred on more than one occasion. The pro-Palestinian sympathies of the left had led to a bizarre commingling of pacifism, Communism and Arab nationalism. So it was not uncommon to see kaffiyeh-clad college students chanting Hamas slogans, graying hippies wearing "Intifada" T-shirts, Che Guevera backpacks, and signs equating Zionism with Nazism, all against a backdrop of peace, patchouli and tie-dye.

Being unapologetically pro-Israel, I was called every name in the book, from "Zionist pig" to "Zionist scum," and was once told that those with European origins such as myself couldn't really be Jewish.

In the end, the blatant anti-Semitism on the left, even among Jews, only strengthened my political transformation.

I was, in effect, radicalized by the radicals.

But more than anything, it was the left's hypocrisy when it came to the war on terrorism that made me turn rightward after 9/11. I remember, back in my liberal days, being fiercely opposed to the Taliban and its brutal treatment of women. Even then, I felt that Afghanistan should immediately be liberated, as Malcolm X once said in another context, by any means necessary. But when it came time, it turned out that the left was mostly opposed to such liberation, whether of the Afghan people or of the Iraqis (especially if America and a Republican president were at the helm).

Indeed, liberals had become strangely conservative in their fierce attachment to the status quo. In contrast, the much-maligned neoconservatives (among whose ranks I count myself) and Bush had become the "radicals," bringing freedom and democracy to the despotic Middle East. Is it any wonder that in such a topsy-turvy world, I found myself in agreement with those I'd formerly denounced?

The war on terrorism is nothing more than the great struggle of our time, and, like the earlier ones against fascism and totalitarianism, we ignore it at our peril. Whether or not one accepts that we are engaged in a war, our enemies have declared it so. It took the horrors of 9/11 to awaken me to this reality, but for others, such lessons remain unlearned. For me, it was self-evident that in Islamic terrorism, America had found a nihilistic threat that sought to wipe out not only Western civilization but also civilization itself.

The Islamists have been clear all along about their plans to form an Islamic caliphate and inhabit the entire world with burqas, stonings, amputations, honor killings and a lack of religious and political freedom. Whether or not to oppose such a movement should have been a no-brainer, especially for self-proclaimed "progressives." Instead, they have extended their misguided sympathies to tyrants and terrorists.

In the end, history will be the judge, and each of us will have to think about what legacy we wish to leave to future generations. If there's one thing I've learned since 9/11, it's that it's never too late to alter one's place in the great scheme of things.

It's as if she took the words right out of my mouth.

An Islamic Europe?
Dutch Emigration Rises To Four Times
Normal Levels
In The Weeks After Theo Van Gogh's Murder

From the New York Times, via Little Green Footballs:

This small nation is a magnet for immigrants, but statistics suggest there is a quickening flight of the white middle class. Dutch people pulling up roots said they felt a general pessimism about their small and crowded country and about the social tensions that had grown along with the waves of newcomers, most of them Muslims.“The Dutch are living in a kind of pressure cooker atmosphere,” Mr. Hiltemann said.

There is more than the concern about the rising complications of absorbing newcomers, now one-tenth of the population, many of them from largely Muslim countries. Many Dutch also seem bewildered that their country, run for decades on a cozy, political consensus, now seems so tense and prickly and bent on confrontation. Those leaving have been mostly lured by large English-speaking nations like Australia, New Zealand and Canada, where they say they hope to feel less constricted.

In interviews, emigrants rarely cited a fear of militant Islam as their main reason for packing their bags. But the killing of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh, a fierce critic of fundamentalist Muslims, seems to have been a catalyst.

“Our Web site got 13,000 hits in the weeks after the van Gogh killing,” said Frans Buysse, who runs an agency that handles paperwork for departing Dutch. “That’s four times the normal rate.”

I guess one could expect that there would be a certain percentage of any population who, when faced with a threat, would just flee, rather than stay and try to fix the problem. Surely, many Dutch people have despaired of their government ever actually getting serious enough to even admit there is a problem.

But, what will happen if this becomes the typical reaction of Europeans as the tide of radical Islam festers in the ghettos of France and Germany?

Mark Steyn comments on George Bush's "charm offensive" and has some thoughts on Europe's future:

The ''violence in the Netherlands'' is a reference to Theo van Gogh, murdered by a Dutch Islamist for making a film critical of the Muslim treatment of women. Van Gogh's professional colleagues reacted to this assault on freedom of speech by canceling his movie from the Rotterdam Film Festival and scheduling some Islamist propaganda instead.

The president, in other words, understands that for Europe, unlike America, the war on terror is an internal affair, a matter of defusing large unassimilated radicalized Muslim immigrant populations before they provoke the inevitable resurgence of opportunist political movements feeding off old hatreds. Difficult trick to pull off, especially on a continent where the ruling elite feels it's in the people's best interest not to pay any attention to them.

The new EU ''constitution,'' for example, would be unrecognizable as such to any American. I had the opportunity to talk with former French President Valery Giscard d'Estaing on a couple of occasions during his long labors as the self-declared and strictly single Founding Father.

President Giscard professed to be looking in the right direction. When I met him, he had an amiable riff on how he'd been in Washington and bought one of those compact copies of the U.S. Constitution on sale for a buck or two. Many Americans wander round with the constitution in their pocket so they can whip it out and chastise over-reaching congressmen and senators at a moment's notice. Try going round with the European Constitution in your pocket and you'll be walking with a limp after two hours: It's 511 pages, which is 500 longer than the U.S. version. It's full of stuff about European space policy, Slovakian nuclear plants, water resources, free expression for children, the right to housing assistance, preventive action on the environment, etc.

Most of the so-called constitution isn't in the least bit constitutional. That's to say, it's not content, as the U.S. Constitution is, to define the distribution and limitation of powers. Instead, it reads like a U.S. defense spending bill that's got porked up with a ton of miscellaneous expenditures for the ''mohair subsidy'' and other notorious Congressional boondoggles. President Ronald Reagan liked to say, ''We are a nation that has a government -- not the other way around.'' If you want to know what it looks like the other way round, read Monsieur Giscard's constitution.

But the fact is it's going to be ratified, and Washington is hardly in a position to prevent it. Plus there's something to be said for the theory that, as the EU constitution is a disaster waiting to happen, you might as well cut down the waiting and let it happen. CIA analysts predict the collapse of the EU within 15 years. I'd say, as predictions of doom go, that's a little on the cautious side.

Europe's problems -- its unaffordable social programs, its deathbed demographics, its dependence on immigration numbers that no stable nation (not even America in the Ellis Island era) has ever successfully absorbed -- are all of Europe's making. By some projections, the EU's population will be 40 percent Muslim by 2025. Already, more people each week attend Friday prayers at British mosques than Sunday service at Christian churches -- and in a country where Anglican bishops have permanent seats in the national legislature.

Some of us think an Islamic Europe will be easier for America to deal with than the present Europe of cynical, wily, duplicitous pseudo-allies. But getting there is certain to be messy, and violent.

Until the shape of the new Europe begins to emerge, there's no point picking fights with the terminally ill. The old Europe is dying ... The 21st century is being built elsewhere.

I acutally think Europe is going to pull itself together. Europeans have proven themselves to be merciless, once roused. Depending upon whether they wake up sooner, or later, the mercilessness will be either legislative, or violent. Europe, please wake up soon.

The Arab World Is "Bubbling
With Expectations for Political Reform"

An excellent analysis of current events from Powerline:

The beneficent effects of the administration's Iraq policy continue to be felt. Municipal elections have taken place in Saudi Arabia; Lebanese citizens march for self-rule; Egypt announces a plan for competitive elections, which, the International Herald Tribune says, responds to "stepped-up pressure from the United States," but also to the fact that the Arab world is "bubbling with expectations for political reform."

These steps are, of course, halting and imperfect, but one can only be impressed by the speed with which progress toward democracy in Iraq has sent pressure for reform through other Muslim countries. Somewhat remarkably, I think, the Bush administration is not resting on its laurels, but is continuing to press for more. Thus, Mubarak's announcement of constitutional reform in Egypt followed on the heels of Secretary of State Rice's decision to forgo a visit to Egypt to show concern over the Mubarak government's failure to allow greater political freedom.

And today, Syria demonstrated that it, too, is feeling the heat, by arresting and handing over to the Iraqi government Saddam Hussein's half-brother, Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan, along with twenty-nine other members of Iraq's Baath party who had been operating in Syria. An Iraqi official described the handover of the thirty Baathists as "a goodwill gesture by the Syrians to show that they are cooperating."

There has never been any doubt about the fact that die-hards from Saddam's regime were participating in and directing the Iraqi insurgency from what was thought to be a safe haven in Syria. The fact that the Syrian haven is no longer safe seems enormously significant, for two reasons. First, Assad is obviously worried about his own survival if his regime continues to try to undermine the new Iraqi government. Second, Syria has apparently concluded that the insurgency is being defeated and is going to fail. Why else would it turn on the Iraqi Baathists whom, until now, it has sheltered and encouraged?

... it seems fair to say that all current indications suggest that Bush's Iraq policy may be more successful, and sooner, than even its most optimistic backers had dared to hope.

The most important point in this article is that George Bush refuses to sit on his laurels, but instead, continues to press all the more for the Democratization of the Arab world. I am surprised along with Powerline at the speed with which successes seem to be raking up. But, the wild card in the deck is nuclear weapons. Pakistan has them, and Iran is soon to have them.

It might be rather easy to pursue a policy of deterrance against one nation (that being Pakistan). I'm sure the Bush administration put Musharaff on notice that, were any Islamic militants to ever get their hands on a nuclear weapons, the result would be the obliteration of his country. But, with every Iran, or North Korea, which is added to the list of nuclear nations, the policy of deterrence becomes less likely to work. The question is, would the U.S. be willing to blow up three or four nations if one of our cities got hit?

The Iraq War Was Right

From the International Herald Tribune, via No Pasaran:

... a midmorning conversation with Iraq's human rights minister, Bakhtiar Amin, a Kurd in whom all the injury inflicted by Saddam on the Kurdish people seems concentrated. "Iraq," he says, "is a museum of crimes."

The layout of the museum is a work in progress. Amin is assembling a data base that will list all the dictator's murders; a delegation is being sent to Bosnia and to Kosovo to learn how to organize the data. "We are working with bones, with teeth," he says. "It's hard work to identify victims."

How many are there? Amin does not know. He says his ministry was sifting through 150,000 files and 60 kilograms, or 130 pounds, of material recently delivered by the Red Cross. Perhaps half a million Kurds were killed, he suggested, and hundreds of thousands of Shiites. "For the total numbers, we need time" he says.

Amin knew one of the dead well. His father-in-law, Sheik Taleb al-Suhail, a prominent opponent of the former regime, was murdered by three agents of Saddam in Beirut in 1994. Nobody has been punished for the crime.

"We owe our freedom to Americans," the minister says.

"The real occupation is not theirs, but the one we suffered for 35 years by the group of thugs who brutalized my nation."It is hard to argue with Amin. He wields the weapon of truth with directness.

How many such stories are there? Too many for the Germans and the French to be so comfortable in their conviction that the war was wrong. This war was falsely portrayed, poorly planned, and hurt by hubris. But it was the right war.

Some people in Europe should have the courage to tell that to George W. Bush this week.

Saturday, February 26, 2005

The French Reconnection

From Christianity Today:

Catching a breather at a sidewalk café, Cyril Gordon, a Paris-born American evangelist, told me he was astounded at how well the gospel was being received in France. "I've done evangelism in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Paris," he says, "and of all these, I've been by far best received in Paris. I'm used to getting some broadsides ripped up and thrown in my face or people cussing at me. I haven't had one instance of this in the two weeks I've been here. We are constantly talking to French people who walk up to us wanting to know about Christ." As a result of the four-week campaign, 730 people turned in the tear-off forms, asking that someone follow up with them. Among those who converted was a Muslim studying philosophy of religion at the Sorbonne.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the postmodern French have deconstructed deconstructionism, seen through the utopia of socialism, and realized that wine and other sensual delights only go so far in filling what French philosopher Blaise Pascal described as the "God-shaped void." According to France Mission, an opinion poll conducted in March 2003 showed that 32 percent of those who call themselves Christians have recently returned to the faith. In 1994, only 13 percent said so.

You see this trend in the writings of French intellectuals and philosophers who are products of the 1960s sexual revolution when "it was forbidden to forbid," says Mark Farmer, former pastor of a Baptist church across from the Louvre. The most articulate plea for France to re-examine its Judeo-Christian roots came recently in Jean-Claude Guillebaud's critically acclaimed Re-founding the World: The Western Testament.

"What's this? A French intellectual starting his book with a quote from Psalm 1?" Farmer recalls his reaction to first paging through the volume. "And he's got a chapter on the apostle Paul? He starts the book by saying that the 20th century has been a century of disillusion. Marxism, evolution, socialism, hedonism, wars have all failed us. He says it's easy to be pessimistic, but there are some things that we appreciate about our civilization. For example, the notion of right and wrong that transcends any culture—where does that come from? He stops short of saying that he himself has become a Christian, but he's led the horses to the water."

The sales of another book—the Bible—are at a historic high, according to the French Bible Society. In 2003—which Christians promoted as the Year of the Bible—FBS's publishing house sold an unprecedented 100,000 Bibles and 50,000 New Testaments, says Christian Bonnet, the group's secretary general. At the time of our conversation, the Bible with life application notes for seekers, La Bible Expliquée, had just sold a record 80,000 copies in one month. In the last 15 years, Bonnet says, secular bookstores, "which never wanted to sell Bibles before," and major supermarket chains began selling Bibles.

The search for God in the most secular country of Europe is so universally felt that even a business journal—the equivalent of Forbes or Fortune—was compelled to publish a special issue in July and August of 2003 whose cover exclaimed, "God, the Stocks Are Rising!" Its 72 pages describe the surge of interest in religion and its effect on the business world, says Paris-based International Teams missionary Steve Thrall. The contents page announces that "after a materialistic 20th century, religions are coming back in force. In France, this rise in spirituality is pushing out secularism in both schools and business."

I think this is probably a residual effect of 9/11, and the rise in awareness of Islamofascist terrorism since that date. Before 9/11, I was only vaguely aware of terrorism and Islamofascism. I had seen, on the news, large groups of Iranians, and Iraqi's, in the streets chanting "Death to America", but I believed that it was exaggerated by the media.

As was the case with many Americans, when seeing the towers fall, the first question I asked myself was, "Why do they hate us so much?" In the dark hours afterward, expert after expert came on the news, and explained who Osama bin Laden was and who Al Qaeda was. I had never heard the names.

As I started to understand why those who attacked did so, the second question I asked myself was, "Would the world be better off without America?" Truly, that is the question to ask, especially in light of the fact that Bin Laden has declared his intention to acquire nuclear weapons.

Now, you know that my answer to the second question is yes. I think the French people are probably asking themselves the same question. Islamic militants in France have been caught with chemical weapons. Apparently, they intended to use them on the subway in Paris, if I recall correctly. There have been numerous other arrests, and cases of Intelligence data, suggesting that, even though they did not join in the Iraqi War effort, the Islamofascists intend to hurt France badly as well.

France may be hateful, and a bad ally, but the French people are not stupid. When they ask themselves questions, the answers they come up with are usually more convoluted, but as Samuel Johnson said, "The gallows doth powerfully concentrate the mind." I'm guessing many of them have answered the question of whether the world would be better off without France, and Western Civilization, with a simplistic and resounding, "No."

They might not be confident enough to admit their thoughts as unashamedly as Americans, but they've got to be thinking these things through.

And that brings me finally to my point. The third question that I began asking myself, in the months following 9/11, was "What is it that makes Western Civilization so powerful and productive." The answer is our intellectual framework; the ideas upon which we were founded. Those ideas began with the Judeo-Christian tradtion. In the beginning, Catholicism and Protestantism gave birth to this magnificent culture. There have been many other ideas added along the way, some good and some not so good, but it all began with the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Protestantism, in particular, with it's emphasis on each individual having a direct line to God, organically grows Democracy. For, why would a person who has God's ear take orders from a King or Dictator?

If this article from Christianity Today is true, then it would seem that, at least inwardly, the French are coming to the same conclusions as we Americans.

I am happy for them, spiritually, and I am happy for us, polically.

The Genocide In Darfur
What We Can Do About It

Roger Simon has a good idea. Maybe we should pass this around:

Few people want to be reminded of the ongoing genocide in Darfur, just as they didn't want to hear about Rwanda. It's too frightening and depressing. So Nicholas Kristof deserves support for his strong oped in the NYT this morning - The Secret Genocide Archive. The photographs alone are stomach-turning.

So why has the world largely ingored this? Kristof offers this solution:

What will really stop this genocide is indignation. Senator Paul Simon, who died in 2003, said after the Rwandan genocide, "If every member of the House and Senate had received 100 letters from people back home saying we have to do something about Rwanda, when the crisis was first developing, then I think the response would have been different."

Yes, of course. We should all do what we can. But this shouldn't be an exclusively American problem. It is a world problem. The United Nations, which was formed in the wake of genocide and was supposed to make the repetition (Pastorius note: uh, I think he means prevention. Must have been a Freudian slip) of such horrors its number one priority, has not nearly done its job here, just as it did not in Rwanda. Why? Maybe there just isn't any money it.

I'm going to fire off an email to my Congressman and Senators right now.

Dead?

The above photograph shows Terri Schiavo with her mother. Terri's husband, and some cabal of doctors, lawyers, expert witnesses, and judges, say that Terri is in a Persistant Vegetative State. In other words, they contend that she in Brain-Dead.

When one looks at that photo with the knowledge that a rather large group of experts are in agreement that Terri is essentially dead, one must begin to wonder who else around us would be considered "dead" if these people had their way.

I've always been kind of neutral on the issue of assisted suicide. The fact that Terri Schiavo is considered "dead" has changed me fundamentally. Advocates of her starvation have won me over to side of the staunch pro-life crowd.

That's what happens when the face of evil shows itself in the open. Many people like me, who couldn't pick up on the subtle hints, will recoil in horror at the perverted grotesquerie of the pro-death view of the world.

If our courts do end up allowing Michael to remove Terri's feeding tube, then Terri will have died because we took a nasty fall down the slippery slope.

Was It All For Nought?
"We Want Her To Be Educated Enough
That She Will Not Force Him To Beat Her"

From Mystery Achievement:

Do women who grow up in a culture of domination, submission, and violence see this as some sick form of "caring" on the part of their men? If that sounds to you like I'm stumping for cultural relativism run amok, then let me assure you that I'm not buying in. It simply means that I am totally at a loss to explain why Iraqi women eye Islamic law:

BAGHDAD - Covered in layers of flowing black fabric that extend to the tips of her gloved hands, Jenan al-Ubaedy knows her first priority as one of some 90 women who will sit in the national assembly: implementing Islamic law.

She is quick to tick off what sharia will mean for married women. "[The husband] can beat his wife but not in a forceful way, leaving no mark. If he should leave a mark, he will pay," she says of a system she supports. "He can beat her when she is not obeying him in his rights. We want her to be educated enough that she will not force him to beat her, and if he beats her with no right, we want her to be strong enough to go to the police."

Broadening support for sharia may not have been the anticipated outcome of the US mandate that women make up one third of the national assembly. But Dr. Ubaedy's vision is shared by many members of the United Iraqi Alliance, a list of religious Shiite candidates that won a majority of seats. She says the women on the UIA list are meeting now to coordinate their agendas and reach out to women from other parties.

If the Iraqi women in the National Assembly think like this and vote, along with their male couterparts, for Sharia law to be implemented in Iraq, then we, in the United States, are the beaten women. After all we have done, this would be the ultimate "kick in the head".

Friday, February 25, 2005

Euroworld
Europe As Amusement Park

I found this in my archives and thought it needed to be resurrected. The orignal link does not exist anymore. Sorry.

Weekly World News is an important journal breaking stories crucial to the development of Western Civilization. For instance, one earthshaking scoop was their April 2003 revelation (complete with photos) that Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were sharing a "Gay Love Nest."Anyway, now they have this "scoop." I'll just call it a "suggestion":

Member nations of the European Union have announced plans to discontinue their status as individual countries in order to merge into one giant theme park!

The new park will be called EuroWorld and will cover the entire continent of what is now known as Europe. The decision was made by the EU countries in response to their collective realization that no one in Europe has had an innovative idea in well over a century.

With nothing new to offer visitors, the European countries decided to stop pretending they were still relevant, and to start celebrating their colorful pasts.

"Our stagnant continent has been a virtual museum for decades," explains an unnamed EU representative. "Many could argue that we already were nothing more than an amusement park. The decision to legally become a large theme park is really only a formality."

Each country will now be an exhibit within the park. For example, what was once known as Germany will now be the Germanland exhibit. Only traditional German foods such as bratwurst, sauerkraut and beer will be permitted in Germanland.

The citizens of each European country will now be considered "Euro hosts." The Euro hosts will be required to dress in traditional ethnic outfits from their respective homelands to better entertain visitors.

Thus, Germans must wear lederhosen at all times, Scots must wear kilts, and so forth.

"It's better this way. I remember vacationing a few years ago in Holland and nobody was wearing wooden shoes. And very few of them lived in windmills. I was outraged and demanded my money back from my travel agent," comments sociologist Alan Kennedy, a consultant to the EU for the theme park initiative.

Admission tickets to EuroWorld will actually be one-week passes that allow visitors access to each exhibit.

Much of the entertainment for visitors to EuroWorld will come from creative new activities that incorporate established European traditions.

For example, there will be bungee jumping from the Eiffel Tower in Paris, waffle juggling in Brussels and prostitute races in Amsterdam.

Because of the relatively large size of EuroWorld, it is expected to become a significant competitor to the Disney theme parks in Florida.

Amusement park consultant Dee Hamel explains, "Disney has an advantage because it is an established name and has been in business for more than 20 years. It is also in close proximity to a number of decent hotels.

"EuroWorld needs to establish its own identity and not be simply another cliched theme park with ferris wheels and people dressed like animals. And they cannot possibly allow mimes and expect anyone to want to go there."

Hamel also believes that EuroWorld will need new accommodations. "The park will need to upgrade the antiquated hostels and bed-and- breakfasts found in European cities.

"Nobody wants to go to an amusement park all day and then stay in a crowded hostel with other malodorous tourists. Especially French travelers, as we all know of their aversion to bathing.

"Many experts agree that the reason Europe has become an intellectual wasteland is that all of the industrious and motivated European citizens had the good sense to emigrate to the United States over the past 100 to 150 years.

"The cupboard was left bare, so to speak," notes respected historian Dr. Peter Sanvorth. "While the best and brightest of the Old Country found their way to America's shores, left behind were buffoons like Jacques Chirac and madmen like Adolf Hitler.

"It saddens me that the continent that once developed the printing press, experienced the Renaissance, and built beautiful cathedrals and cities has reached this point of intellectual bankruptcy," says Dr. Sanvorth."

With no new European ideas, inventions or architecture, all that's left is their history. So why not celebrate it with a giant theme park? I think it's a great idea."

Real Or Imaginary?
It Doesn't Matter
When You Want To Get The Jews

From Melanie Phillips:

The row over the Thought for the Day broadcast by the Scottish cleric Rev Dr John Bell has taken an even more surreal and sinister turn. As I noted in a previous post, BBC Radio Four allowed Bell to broadcast a totally unsubstantiated smear that the Israel Defence Force ordered its soldiers to shoot unarmed Palestinian children. He was reporting a conversation he had had with a waiter in a Vancouver restaurant, who claimed to be an Israeli Arab who had resisted such an order. Embarrassed by the fact that Bell had made no effort to discover whether any of this was true, the BBC posted a qualified apology for factual ‘inaccuracies’, although it did not apologise for the libel about the IDF.

Now, an official in the Church of Scotland has weighed into the controversy -- by comparing Bell to Jesus! In a letter to the Herald, Sandy Gemmill, a deputy treasurer in the church, has written:

‘Two thousand years ago there was a man in Israel who used such uncorroborated tales of Samaritans, servants, agricultural workers, sheep, weddings and the like to illustrate various controversial points. Clearly the passage of time has not dampened the enthusiasm of the Israeli authorities to speak out against such tales and take action to suppress apparent lies …Unfortunately, any criticism of the Israeli government is now taken as being anti-Semitic…The term should not be used to deflect unfavourable comments about the way that governments abuse their powers. The Israeli government is no different from those in authority in, for example, Great Britain and the United States. Governments are like monoliths in exercising power on behalf of the people and from time to time must be reminded of the need to see beyond their own self-centred interests to those of the human race. If an uncorroborated story concerning any member of the Israeli Army,

real or imaginary,

can aid that process then that should be applauded.’

I'm going to run that by you a couple more times:

If an uncorroborated story concerning any member of the Israeli Army,

real or imaginary,

can aid that process then that should be applauded.’

If an uncorroborated story concerning any member of the Israeli Army,

real or imaginary,

can aid that process then that should be applauded.’

Boy, we sure are seeing a lot of statements like that out of the left lately. CBS has documents that are "fake but accurate". Congressman Hinchey makes up a story about Karl Rove planting documents, and when questioned says he doesn't have evidence, but it doesn't matter because it's important just to entertain the notion.

Now, here we see that it is ok to libel Israel with "imaginary" stories because it will "aid" the process of criticizing the Israeli government.

Melanie Phillips says:

So faced with a libel perpetrated against the Jews, Gemmill concludes that the Jews who are protesting are trying to suppress the truth and crucify the perpetrator, just like he thinks they did to Jesus! One is aghast at this calumny piled upon calumny, at the anti-Jewish prejudice that is here revealed and at the brazen revelation of the ancient theological underpinning of this prejudice. Gemmill assumes that what Bell said was true, even though there is not a shred of evidence for it and even though his account contained two demonstrable errors of fact which should surely give any rational person grounds for suspecting that the whole thing was a farrago of nonsense. Gemmill nevertheless assumes it to be true because he knows, beyond any shadow of doubt and beyond the small question of demonstrable evidence to support such a claim, that Israel abuses its powers. Indeed, he would like to see even more such uncorroborated claims expressed – even about ‘imaginary’ Israeli soldiers — simply in order to throw mud at Israel. So even lies will do. What pathological spite is this? What terrifying beast has been unleashed here?

Gemmill also claims that claims of anti-Semitism are being used by Jews to ‘deflect unfavourable comments’ about Israel -- in other words, to promote ideological censorship. But this is itself a grossly defamatory and wickedly unfair accusation. Jews like myself do not cry anti-Semitism at any ‘unfavourable comments’ about Israel.

What we are up against is a systematic campaign of falsehoods, ignorance, misapprehensions and grotesque prejudices designed to delegitimise Israel by falsifying current and historic realities and further delegitimising the moral probity of the Jewish people. Israel does not generally abuse its powers. Rather, it is abused by people spreading lies and libels about it, which are believed by the likes of Gemmill because -- as he has so graphically revealed -- they correspond to a vicious theological Christian prejudice against the Jews.

Bell, who has apologised for unintentionally giving offence, has expressed his bewilderment that what he thought was an unexceptional account should have been taken to be an expression of anti-Jewish prejudice. But now we can see that, whatever Bell may have thought he was thinking, there is a strain of thinking in the church which is indeed virulently anti-Jewish -- and can express such prejudice without any shame.

These are indeed the most dangerous and worrying of times for the Jews of Britain. And that's bad news for everyone else.

Thursday, February 24, 2005

The Democratic Evangelist

A week or two ago National Review published an article by Victor David Hanson titles "Why Democracy?" in which he listed ten reasons we need to support Democracy in Iraq. My friend Jack, over at Jack of Clubs, had a "minor quibble with number five:

... point number 5. Here is the full context:

5. In the case of the Muslim world, there is nothing inherently incompatible between Islam and democracy. Witness millions in India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Turkey who vote. Such liberal venting may well explain why those who blow up Americans are rarely Indian or Turkish Muslims, but more likely Saudis or Egyptians. The trick is now to show that Arab Muslims can establish democracy, and thus the Palestine and Iraq experiments are critical to the entire region.

I disagree with both the theoretical assertion and the practical examples that Hanson produces. There is a conflict between Islam and democracy. Because Islam is a religion without grace, there can be no fundamental trust among fellow men. Every sinner will be forced to hide the fact of his imperfection and, therefore, to be all the more critical of the imperfections of others. Furthermore, since only an inhuman standard of achievement is worthy of heaven, the cult of the hero is inevitable. This has two distinct but reinforcing anti-democratic effects.

First, it tempts people to overlook the flaws in their leaders as long as they are capable of command, because to suspect that a particular man may be imperfect opens up the possibility that perfection is impossible.

Second, it tends to make such leaders brutally suppressive of dissent, for obvious reasons. This is why secularization is usually on the lips of those who advocate the advance of democracy in Islamic cultures.

But I suggest that secular government is ultimately without authority. The worst atrocities of history were committed in the 20th century by secular governments: the Nazi concentration camps, the killing fields of Cambodia and Stalin's programs of mass starvation in the Ukraine. Without a moral basis, government becomes hateful to its constituents. Fallen men cannot be trusted with the power of life and death, unless they are subject to a transcendent authority (and not even always then).

This leads me to the "successful" Muslim democracies that Hanson cites: India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Turkey. I have already mentioned the occupation of Cyprus in other posts, but would include oppression of both Kurds and Christians as among Turkey's anti-democratic tendencies. In fact, all of theses countries have problems with religious persecution, although it is admittedly less than in more despotic governments. But the fact remains that Islam has not proven itself capable of tolerance toward non-Islamic religions in any of these places, even in India, where Islam is in the minority. It may well do so, but until then this matter must remain in doubt.

There is, of course, a sense in which all cultures, even those informed by Christianity, are subject to the perfectionist influences that I noted above. This is because even Christians do not fully trust the grace that we profess, and are constantly tempted to justify ourselves. This was visibly the case with the mediaeval Catholic monarchies, but is even evident in the most thoroughly protestant countries after the Reformation. Nevertheless, I think that only under Christianity can democracy prosper.

My support for democracy in Islamic countries is thus diametrically opposite to that expressed by Mr. Hanson. If democracy is only possible under Christianity, it is also true that Christianity has the best chance of thriving, and therefore dominating, within a democracy. Like many real-world processes, the two have a mutually reinforcing feed-back relationship that amounts, absent outside obstacles, to a virtuous circle. It is therefore in order to promote Christianity that I support democracy.

I am well aware that this thesis has yet to bear fruit in history. But that is what makes these times so interesting, hmm?

All's I can say is I hope Jack never has a "major quibble" with me.

But seriously folks, doesn't that post on geopolitical affairs follow nicely from the post below where Someguy talked about the personal affairs of Terri Schiavo and Hunter S. Thompson?

Pride

I thought my man Someguy, over at Mystery Achievement, really hit the nail on the head with this post:

What is it that makes so many of us rush towards death with a determination to drag others along in our wake? Do we in some fashion project onto others our own inability to any longer bear our reflections in the mirror? Or is it that our response to our inability to realize some sort of human perfection via human means is limited either to destroying ourselves out of spite, or destroying anyone or anything that reminds us of how short of omnipotence we fall?These are some of the questions running through my mind as I think about Hunter and Terri.

Hunter S. Thompson took his own life at the age of 67. As Mark C.N. Sullivan notes in his post:

"That Hunter S. Thompson made it to 67 is itself remarkable."

And James Lileks neatly sums up my own feelings about the man and his later work:

A great writer in his prime, but the DVD of his career would have the last two decades on the disc reserved for outtakes and bloopers. It was all bile and spittle at the end, and it was hard to read the work without smelling the dank sweat of someone consumed by confusion, anger, sudden drunken certainties and the horrible fear that when he sat down to write, he could only muster a pale parody of someone else’s satirical version of his infamous middle period.

But even after that period, Thompson was one of my favorite writers. At his best, he was a master storyteller whose strikingly original prose and use of language were Good and at times even Great--something that Trudeau's cruelly-drawn caricature for the chattering classes never came close to capturing.

I still recall an interview he did with Rolling Stone when he said that the best thing you could do for a child was get him to read. When the love of language and literature was his muse, his writing was a marvel of astute observation and original expression. What I think might have happened--and what James Lileks captures beautifully but sadly--is along the lines of what happened to Morgoth when he stole the Silmarils; or to Sauron in the ruin of Numenor. Neither were ever able again to assume outwardly pleasing forms.

Whether from drink, drugs, a worldview with disdain for any condition that wasn't chaos--or some combination of all of the above--Thompson's persona ended up stuck in one gear. Sometime back, his love of language fled and took his muse with it. And whenever someone loses both his true love and the hope of ever finding it again, we should not be surprised if he asks himself whether life is still worth living.

The case of Terri Schiavo is, in a sense, the same thing only with the telescope pointed outward rather than inward. How else to explain the decisions of courts on the fate of a human life that should terrify any sane observer with their Orwellian intrusiveness and naked seizure of power? How else to explain their alacrity and perserverence in carrying out this decision, while people convicted of murder sit on death row for years? Do we really imagine that there is no possible way that any one of us could ever end up like Terri, with our fate in the hands of such people? Or, in so realizing it, do we prefer to destroy any reminders of such a possibility?

I titled this post "Pride" because of Someguy's question about whether we get angry, and set to destroying others and ourselves, because of our lack of ability to achieve perfection. The answer is, of course, yes.

I, more than most probably, suffer from this problem, as I am an odd sort of perfectionist myself. I never feel like I'm living up to some strange standard I carry within myself. And, for some reason, I find it very hard to let go of the reins, and let God, in His Mercy, comfort me. No, most of the time, I'd rather keep the illusion of my omnipotence and sacrifice the blessings of God.

Anyway, I think this is what the Bible means when it says "The wages of sin is death."

Germany Is On The Wrong Side Of History
Says The German Paper Der Spiegel

From Der Spiegel, via No Pasaran:

This, in fact, is likely the largest point of disagreement between Europe and the United States -- and one that a President John Kerry likely would not have made smaller: Europeans today -- just like the Europeans of 1987 -- cannot imagine that the world might change. Maybe we don't want the world to change, because change can, of course, be dangerous. But in a country of immigrants like the United States, one actually pushes for change. In Mainz today, the stagnant Europeans came face to face with the dynamic Americans. We Europeans always want to have the world from yesterday, whereas the Americans strive for the world of tomorrow.

That sounds suspiciously like an apology without the "I'm sorry". You know, really, that's good enough for me. Now, we just need about a half a billion more of those and we'll be all settled up.

The Tipping Point

Tom Friedman and Malcolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point) had a discussion of Nightline about the possibility of whether we are currently at a Tipping Point towards democracy in the Middle East. From Front Page Magazine:

TED KOPPEL: Malcolm, is it ever possible to view the tipping point in anything other than a rear-view mirror? In other words, can you see it when it's happening?

MALCOLM GLADWELL: Sometimes. Of course, it's easiest to see these kinds of things in retrospect. But I think there are moments, and occasions, when it is obvious to us when we're going through one of these kind of cataclysmic shifts. And I think there are -- I mean, I think, clearly the reason we're here is that we have a very, very strong suspicion that what's going on in Iraq right now with the election is such a shift. I mean, I think we can develop a strong suspicion that this is something worth examining and watching.

TK: All right. Tom Friedman is clearly the expert on that region. But before we go to Tom, Malcolm I'd like you to sort of spell out for us, if you can, what some of the factors are that might cause you, as the developer or one of the developers of the theory of the tipping point, that might cause you to believe that what happened last month with the elections meets the necessary standards.

MG: Well, the most important thing in trying to analyze whether something is at the verge of a tipping point, is whether it -an event causes people to reframe an issue. So, for example, an example of reframing is -- a dumb example is the Atkins' diet, which reframes dieting from thinking about it in terms of avoiding calories and fat to thinking about it as avoiding carbohydrates. Which really changes the way people perceive dieting. It becomes a much simpler concept to handle, a much simpler strategy to follow.

TK: All right. Let's look at the elections last month. And Tom Friedman, I'm an avid reader of your column. So, I know that you, in fact, believe that something fundamental has shifted here. Have we reframed the way we think about Iraq, as seen through the prism of those elections? And if so, why?

TOM FRIEDMAN: I think we have, Ted. And I like the way Malcolm really defined the tipping point as a reframing. I would argue that before the election in Iraq, Iraq was perceived -- the meta-story in Iraq was "Iraqi insurgents, against American occupiers and their Iraqi lackeys." I would argue after the election, the whole issue in Iraq has been reframed much more as a civil war between a tiny Jihadist insurgency and Baathist insurgency, against what is clearly an overwhelming Iraqi majority that aspires to some form of constitutionalism and pluralism. I think for it to successfully reframe the issue, the insurgency has to be defeated now by that Iraqi majority.

TK: All right. So, it may or may not be the tipping point. Malcolm, let me come back to you and ask you whether in the course of events -- and let me use a sports analogy: in an exciting football game or an exciting basketball game, there can be half a dozen tipping points. They can turn it first in favor of one team and then back again in favor of another team. When one talks about the tipping point, as you do in your book, it suggests that there's one and that's it. But that's not the way life is.

MG: Yeah. No. There's no question that -- what the whole idea is behind the tipping point is that systems, organizations, institutions, situations, are far more volatile than they appear. So, I think we always have to be on-guard, under the notion. Once we granted the inherent volatility of situations, on guard against the notion that things could go in the other direction just as quickly.

TK: Tom, let me ask you to look at what's been happening over the last two years. ... and point out to me, if you will, where you think the tipping points have gone over the past couple of years. And why you think this one may be "the" rather than simply "a" tipping point.

TF: Well, for me, Ted, as someone who is following this issue, I had my own tipping point in my head, what I was looking for. And I was looking for two things. One was an Iraqi majority that was ready to come together and claim ownership of Iraq. Number one. And for that, we needed an election. And then, that same majority being willing to fight and die for it. And it seemed to me that to have a unified -a decent Iraq, we really required those two things. And that's why, when the election happened, I, for one, you know, was very excited about it because I felt I was seeing the necessary but still not sufficient. Now, this majority's going to have to fight or negotiate to see that its will is sustained for Iraq to really have that outcome we want.

I pretty much agree with Thomas Friedman on this. Yeah, the election looks like a tipping point, but we don't really know yet. The election of an Islamist to Prime Ministership doesn't make me feel all warm and gooey, that's for sure. But events in Syria and Lebanon are seemingly very positive.

The key is what happens in Iran. Will we allow them to develop nuclear weapons? That would be a real "Tipping Point".

The Net Value Of The Charm Offensive?

From World Net Daily:

President Bush went to Europe to launch what has been billed as a "fence-mending charm offensive" designed to heal the "transatlantic rift" existing between Washington and the leaders of the Western European Alliance.

The "rift" was caused when the Europeans refused Washington's call for assistance in both the 2003 invasion and the post-war reconstruction of Iraq.

The "rift" opened even further when post-war documents established that those same European leaders were part of a multibillion dollar ripoff of the Iraqi people and that Europe's opposition was rooted in a conspiracy to keep Saddam in power and the kickbacks flowing freely.
What was a rift became a fissure, and finally, an open chasm, when the Iraqis themselves defied European predictions that Iraqis were incapable of appreciating or grasping the concept of democratic self-rule.

After the European self-delusion of superior political and diplomatic maturity was exposed, somehow, it became the responsibility of the United States to extend its hand across the Atlantic to grasp the European hand only recently removed from the knife in Uncle Sam's back.

The European press – while less vitriolic in its criticism of President Bush than it was when it delighted in reporting the mass mooning of the president by demonstrators during a previous visit – was still critical of the American president's "unapologetic" (some said "defiant") attitude regarding the Iraq War, and continuing U.S. opposition to giving nuclear material to Iran and lifting technology sanctions against Red China.

The president tried to spin the trip as a success by pointing out that, at long last, France, Germany and Belgium have joined the alliance to reconstruct Iraq.

France agreed to aid in training Iraqi police, offering to send a single French national to Belgium, where he will serve as a coordinator in transferring unspecified "equipment" to the Iraqi security services.

Germany agreed to aid in training Iraqi troops as well, provided the Iraqis can come to the United Arab Emirates, since Germany won't send any of its troops to Iraq.

Belgium, not to be outdone by French and German cooperation, promised to send 10 driving instructors to Qatar, where, if they find any Iraqi police officers walking around, they will teach them how to drive back to Baghdad.

And tiny Estonia also made the list of European donors, offering to send a single staff officer to Iraq, equipped with a reconstruction budget of $65,000. It is unclear whether that amount is over and above, or if it includes, the staff officer's salary and expenses. (But at least Belgium can brag it has [a] troop on the ground in Iraq.)

Overall, as a consequence of President Bush's fence-mending tour, the assembled heads of the European Community met at NATO headquarters to announce a joint pledge of just over $5 million to offset America's $5 billion commitment to aid the Iraqi people.

Given the price tag for security and travel for the president and his entourage, the E.U. pledge should come to just about half what it cost the United States to ask for it.

I think it's important for us Americans to be aware of these facts, but I don't think Bush expected anything more. I really believe there's more going on behind the scenes. For one, France is uniting with the U.S. in calling for Syria to remove it's troops from Lebanon. For two, I believe Bush went to Europe to drop a big (albeit behind-closed-doors) hint to the leaders of Europe that Iran is in big trouble.

Hey, I could be wrong. But, think about it. It certainly isn't going to hurt us if Chirac goes and tells Iran that we're headed their way. I believe that while the last three years have been years of great change in our world, 2005 is going to be more astonishing.

Dry Brush Just Waiting For A Spark

From the International Herald Tribune:

Racist incidents jarring the French

By Katrin Bennhold International Herald Tribune Thursday, February 24, 2005

PARIS Swastikas on the walls of a Paris mosque. An arson attack on a railway carriage commemorating French Jews who were deported to Nazi camps in World War II. Blatant anti-Semitic comments by a comedian.

A recent string of racist incidents in France has shaken the political establishment at a time when the country is battling its image abroad as a country where anti-Semitism is making a powerful comeback and anti-Arab sentiments are rising.

President Jacques Chirac on Tuesday telephoned Dalil Boubakeur, the rector of the Grand Mosque of Paris, condemning the neo-Nazi graffiti that was discovered on the outer wall of the mosque a day earlier. The building had been defaced with a dozen black swastikas as well as the insignia of Hitler's SS and the words "Get out!"

On Monday, Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin visited Drancy, outside Paris, where a gasoline bomb had charred a wooden rail car. During the war, the town was a transit point from which the Gestapo and the French occupation government deported Jews by train to concentration camps.

But those incidents have been eclipsed by an uproar over comments by Dieudonné, a black French comedian, who described the recent commemorations of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp as "pornographic."

Justice Minister Dominique Perben has called for a preliminary inquiry into whether repeated anti-Jewish comments by Dieudonné constituted the punishable offense of "contestation of crimes against humanity." The comedian, the son of a French mother and a Cameroonian father, has been widely popular but was first criticized in late 2003 for a television sketch deemed anti-Semitic. He has now been nearly universally condemned for the latest comments, which he made at a press conference in Algiers last week. Two French journalists taped the comments and posted them on the Web. Among other things, Dieudonné called France's main Jewish organization a "band of criminals." Three days later, at a Paris press conference, he declared Zionism to be "the AIDS of Judaism."

Underlying the outrage is the fact that some of Dieudonné's comments may have resonance for France's ethnic minorities. In Algiers, he argued that while funds were readily available for films about the Holocaust, he could not get funding for a film on the slave trade. He said war had been declared on the black world, "and they are trying to make us weep" about the fate of Jews.

Christophe Bertossi, a specialist on Immigration at the French Institute for International Relations in Paris, described the recent incidents here as "symptoms of the same crisis."

Home to Western Europe's largest Muslim and Jewish communities, France is also home to a concept of equality that makes it a taboo to distinguish among citizens on the basis of race or religion. Behind this veil of equality, discrimination has flourished, feeding racial divisions and hindering opportunity for immigrants.

"There is a color bar in French society, but the Republican concept of equality is blind to this reality," Bertossi said. "That means you have no concrete means of tackling the problem, you just deny it."

A third of some six million French residents of North African descent live in suburban ghettos where joblessness is widespread, according to the Paris-based Montaigne Institute. And a recent study by the institute showed that unemployment among Algerians and Moroccans, the largest immigrant groups, is above the 30 percent mark, three times as high as the nationwide rate. Meanwhile, despite the French government's support for the Palestinian cause, anti-Jewish attacks committed by Arabs in France have escalated in recent years. Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, last year called on French Jews to emigrate to Israel.

Europe is such a tolerant culture.

You can be pretty darn sure it wasn't Jews who defaced the Mosque. I'm guessing it was some white French boys 15-28 years old. I'm guessing they feel that their country is being overrun by immigrants who care nothing for "French culture".

Unfair of me to say? Perhaps.

Ward Churchill Has Got To Go

Ward Churchill has been caught on tape advocating terrorist actions against the government and the murder of American citizensFrom Michelle Malkin:

Ward Churchill: If you are Arab, for example, you are automatically profiled as a potential terrorist. Period. And you can be asked to leave a plane because some Nordic-looking woman two rows down tells the stewardess she’s not comfortable with you being there—her presence makes her uncomfortable—why?

And why by the way did it take Arabs to do what people here should have done a long time ago?

Question from audience: You mentioned a little bit ago, ‘Why did it take a bunch of Arabs to do what you all should have done a long time ago,’ that’s my question.

And as a white man standing here in your midst from a fairly liberal/conservative/middle of the road background—and I tell people I’m so far left I’m coming up on the rigt—and I’d like you to respond to, why shouldn’t we do something and how could we move so they don’t see us coming?

Churchill: I’m gonna repeat that, tell me if I got that right: Why shouldn’t we do something and how do you you move so they don’t see you coming.

As to the first part, not a reason in the world that I could see. I can’t find a single reason that you shouldn’t in a principled way—there may be some practical considerations, such as do you know how (laughter from audience)—you know, often these things are processes. It’s not just an impulse. And certainly it’s not just an event. And the simple answer, although it probably should be more complicated, but I’m not being flip and giving the simple answer, is: You carry the weapon. That’s how they don’t see it coming.

You’re the one…They talk about ‘color blind or blind to your color.’ You said it yourself.
You don’t send the Black Liberation Army into Wall Street to conduct an action.You don’t send the American Indian Movement into downtown Seattle to conduct an action. Who do you send? You. Your beard shaved, your hair cut close, and wearing a banker’s suit.
There’s probably a whole lot more to it, you know that. But there’s where you start.

I never agreed with those who thought Churchill should be fired. I'm pretty much an absolutist when it comes to free speech. But, I draw the line at advocating murder. I recognize that many times it is difficult to distinguish when someone is actively advocating murder, versus theoretically advocating murder. But, to my mind, this is a clear cut case.

Ward Churchill should not only be fired from his job as a Professor, he should also be removed from society altogether.

We can be pretty sure that a man who would casually tell an audience of people that they should kill American citizens, in the interest of overthrowing the American government, is very likely actively plotting with people behind the scenes to do the same thing. Or, at the very least, knows people who are.

Wednesday, February 23, 2005

Not Dead Yet
But Getting There

You know you're getting old when you start saying stuff like this:

BOB DYLAN has launched a withering attack on contemporary rock bands in the programme notes for his latest American tour.

"I know there are groups at the top of the charts that are hailed as the saviours of rock'n'roll and all that, but they are amateurs. They don't know where the music comes from," he wrote, adding, “I wouldn't even think about playing music if I was born in these times... I'd probably turn to something like mathematics. That would interest me. Architecture would interest me. Something like that."

I am a big Dylan fan, but really, this is just stupid. Recently, a friend asked me if I wanted to go see Dylan. I was considering it. Now, there is no way I will go. I really don't like bitter old people who think the old days were better.

There's a lot of great music coming out these days. Check out Radiohead, Jet, Muse, Wilco, Ryan Adams, Starsailor, Ben Harper & The Innocent Criminals, Moby. Heck, I don't even pay that much attention to pop music anymore and I know about all those people.

I always admired Miles Davis. No matter how old and decrepit he got, he was still excited about what was going on in the world, and innovating from where things stood in the present. Dylan's last great album was Time Out Of Mind, on which the only innovation was provided by Producer Daniel Lanois.

I'm really disappointed in old Zimmy.

A Call For Moderate Muslims
To Take The Lead In The War On Terror

From Kamal Nawash, in Front Page Magazine:

Muslim-bashing. That's the accusation many of my fellow Muslims now hurl at the various news outlets for their news stories about a Freedom House investigation that found extremist Islamic literature in some leading American mosques. This name-calling is unfortunate.

Since 1980, the Muslim world has experienced an enormous growth of religious fanaticism and extremism the likes of which Islam has not experienced in its 1,400 years. This movement continues to grow because of the spread of Wahhabi Islam; a sect that used to number no more than one percent of all Muslims, but because of money and technology, has spread to more areas around the world.

Extremism is also growing because of an ideology called political Islam. The basis of political Islam is the rejection of secularism and the belief that the mosque and the state should be completely intertwined. Unfortunately, history has shown that when politics and religion are completelyintertwined, disaster results.

Most importantly, extremism in the Muslim world continues to grow because most Muslims are unwilling to admit that we have a problem with extremism and support for terrorism. The response by Muslims to the Freedom House report is not the first time that the Muslim community resorted to denial and accusations of Muslim-bashing when presented with evidence of Muslim culpability.

After September 11, many in the Muslim world chose denial and hallucination rather than face up to the sad fact that Muslims perpetrated the 9/11 terrorist acts. After 9/11, many Muslims, including religious leaders and "intellectuals," blamed 9/11 on a Jewish conspiracy, and went as far as fabricating a tale that 4,000 Jews did not show up for work in the World Trade Center on that day.

Since 9/11, the world has watched in horror as hundreds of schoolchildren were murdered in Russia by Chechen Muslim terrorists. Scores of civilians were murdered by Islamic terrorists in Spanish train bombings. Many others have been murdered in suicide bombings in buses, restaurants and other public places, human beings have been beheaded, two Russian passenger planes were blown out of the sky, and many, many atrocities that are too long to mention. All carried out by Muslims.

With all the evidence that Islam is facing a crisis, one wonders what it will take for Muslims to realize that those who commit mass murder in the name of Islam are not just a few fringe elements. What will it take for Muslims to realize that we are facing a crisis potentially more deadly than the AIDS epidemic? What will it take for Muslims to realize that there is a large, evil movement that is turning what was a peaceful religion into a death cult?

Will Muslims wake up before it is too late? Or will we continue blaming an imaginary Jewish conspiracy and entities like The Dallas Morning News for all our problems? The blaming of all Muslim problems on others is a cancer that is destroying Muslim society. And it must stop.

Only moderate Muslims can challenge and defeat extremist Muslims. We can no longer afford to be silent. If we remain silent to the extremism within our community, then we should not expect anyone to listen to us when we complain of stereotyping and discrimination by non-Muslims. We should not be surprised when the world treats all of us as terrorists. And we should not be surprised when we are profiled at airports.

Simply put, not only do Muslims need to join the war against extremism and terror, we need to take the lead in this war.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

Jacques Derrida Asks
What If God Was One Of Us?

From Inside Higher Ed:

Among the scores of books and essays that Derrida published over the final 15 years of his life, "Force of Law" looms as one of the most important. In 2003, not long before he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, Derrida published a book on the possibility of global democracy called Rogues, just released in an English translation from Stanford University Press. ... "Force of Law" (was) almost a prerequisite to understanding Derrida's final book.

"What is currently called deconstruction," said Derrida in 1989, "would not at all correspond (though certain people have an interest in spreading this confusion) to a quasi-nihilistic abdication before the ethico-politico-juridical question of justice and before the opposition between just and unjust...."

His goal, in effect, is to point to a notion of justice that would be higher than any given code of laws. Likewise, in other late writings, Derrida seeks to define a notion of forgiveness that would be able to grapple with the unforgivable. And, he asks, might it be the case that Levantine traditions of hospitality (of welcoming the Other into one's home) transcend more modern conceptions of ethics?

For someone constantly accused of relativism, Derrida often sounds in these late works like a man haunted by the absolute. There is a sense in which, although he was an atheist, he practiced what a medieval scholar might have recognized as "negative theology" -- an effort to define the nature of God by cutting away all the misleading conceptions imposed by the limits of human understanding.

The implications were political, at least in some very abstract sense. In his keynote talk at the American Academy of Religion in 2002, Derrida proposed a notion of God that, in effect, utterly capsized the familiar world of monotheism by stripping it of all our usual understandings of divine authority. Suppose God were not the all powerful king of the universe (the image that even an atheist is prone to imagine upon hearing the name "God"). Suppose, rather, that God were infinitely weak, utterly vulnerable. What then?

Yeah, just imagine (from Isaiah 53):

3 He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering.
Like one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
4 Surely he took up our infirmities
and carried our sorrows,
yet we considered him stricken by God,
smitten by him, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
7 He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before her shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.

I would like to also mention that these other ideas Derrida was playing with, in his later life, were also directly from the Bible and the Judeo-Christian tradition. The idea that there would be "a notion of justice that would be higher than any given code of laws" (Galatians 5:14):

14The entire law is summed up in a single command: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

The idea that one can find God, or the absolute through the negative way, or the "via negativa", was pioneered by such Christian mystics as Pseudo-Dionysus and Meister Eckhardt, and can be summed up thusly:

Apophatic (un-saying) theology -This theology says that God is not any of the things that he is called. Apophatic theology commonly uses negative words (via negativa), beginning in or im, than positive words:God is invisible, infinite, incomprehensible, immortal.

Some apophatic mystics have described being "pierced by darkness" and living in a "cloud of unknowing". I myself wrote a poem (admittedly crap, but I was only, like, 17 at the time, so you don't have to tell me about it) which went a little something like this:

Confront the Light, Attack the Light
The Light will not fail
All that will happen is we'll shatter the illusion
And finally see beyond the veil

My opinion is, the via negativa is the direct way to find God. The via negativa says, tell God about your doubts and disappointments. Tell Him you are angry with Him. Tell Him that you don't understand. Because in so doing you are expressing the fact that He is real. The Lord will provide. You can be sure of that. By confronting and attacking your doubts, you will find your way through them.

Anyway, enough of the theology study, huh? I ain't exactly an expert.

So, Derrida was working within the Christian tradition whether he wanted to admit it or not, whether he was an atheist or not. It certainly sounds like he was searching for something he could not find. That is sad. However, it sounds like all his thoughts were leading towards a big celebratory "Thank You". I hope he was able to utter those words. "Thank You" is a phrase that's hard to deconstruct, even for God. Thank You, it seems, is the rock that God made that is so big, even He can't move it.

UPDATE: Reader Lynn writes in with a great comment:

The interesting thing to me is that when we express to God our doubts, our anger, our uncertainties, we are affirming God exists. But we are also bringing our false images of God...to God...for God to dispel.

Often our anger, doubts, etc. are based on our human presuppositions about God...not based on who God really is. When we come and reason together with God (as Isaiah 1:18 invites) He teaches us the reality of who He is...which is much larger and more creative than our human minds can fathom.

I think this is why, great thinkers, like Derrida eventually come to the end of their own thinking and ultimately end up with the Divine. If God is indescribable...then perhaps those who spend all of their words trying to prove that there is no God, once they have nothing more to say, realize who God is in what cannot be said.

UPDATE II: Reader tvd says:

After Derrida deconstructed everything he could get his hands on, still, he found himself left with something there. The closest he could come was in identifying a manifestation of that "something," justice, as a universal value. But he found a universal value, and it only takes one to pull us back from the abyss.

Lynne Stewart And
The End of Resistance

From the Evil Pundit of Doom:

In many ways, the case of Lynne Stewart is a microcosm of the Left.

Dedicated to social justice and the assistance of the oppressed, she expanded her concept of the underdog until it included anyone at all who was opposed to the "establishment". Thus she came through gradual stages to a position where she supported terrorists and criminals -- first by way of legal assistance, then with increasing sympathy, and finally with active collaboration.

That she ended up on the side of the Islamofascists who would destroy democracy and eliminate all women's rights, demonstrates the peril of following an ideology of resistance too far.

Go Evil Pundit, go. Evil Pundit is a superhero of truth.

George Washington And The Jews
Everyone Shall Sit In Safety
Under His Own Vine and Figtree

On this day, George Washington's birthday, here' a reminder from Powerline, of what a great Father he was for our country:

In anticipation of Washington's visit to Newport, the members of America's oldest Jewish congregation prepared a letter welcoming Washington for presentation to him at a public event on the morning of August 18. The letter was authorized by the congregation's board and signed by its president, Moses Seixas.

By far the most striking feature of the congregation's letter is its expression of sheer gratitude both to Washington himself and to America for the religious freedom it afforded. Here is the congregation's letter:

Permit the children of the stock of Abraham to approach you with the most cordial affection and esteem for your person and merits ~~ and to join with our fellow citizens in welcoming you to NewPort.

With pleasure we reflect on those days ~~ those days of difficulty, and danger, when the God of Israel, who delivered David from the peril of the sword, ~~ shielded Your head in the day of battle: ~~ and we rejoice to think, that the same Spirit, who rested in the Bosom of the greatly beloved Daniel enabling him to preside over the Provinces of the Babylonish Empire, rests and ever will rest, upon you, enabling you to discharge the arduous duties of Chief Magistrate in these States.

Deprived as we heretofore have been of the invaluable rights of free Citizens, we now with a deep sense of gratitude to the Almighty disposer of all events behold a Government, erected by the Majesty of the People ~~ a Government, which to bigotry gives no sanction, to persecution no assistance ~~ but generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship: ~~ deeming every one, of whatever Nation, tongue, or language equal parts of the great governmental Machine: ~~ This so ample and extensive Federal Union whose basis is Philanthropy, Mutual confidence and Public Virtue, we cannot but acknowledge to be the work of the Great God, who ruleth in the Armies of Heaven, and among the Inhabitants of the Earth, doing whatever seemeth him good.

For all these Blessings of civil and religious liberty which we enjoy under an equal benign administration, we desire to send up our thanks to the Ancient of Days, the great preserver of Men ~~beseeching him, that the Angel who conducted our forefathers through the wilderness into the promised Land, may graciously conduct you through all the difficulties and dangers of this mortal life: ~~ And, when, like Joshua full of days and full of honour, you are gathered to your Fathers, may you be admitted into the Heavenly Paradise to partake of the water of life, and the tree of immortality.

Done and Signed by order of the Hebrew Congregation in NewPort, Rhode Island August 17th 1790.Moses Seixas, Warden

And here is Washington's response:

To the Hebrew Congregation in Newport Rhode Island.

Gentleman.

While I receive, with much satisfaction, your Address replete with expressions of affection and esteem; I rejoice in the opportunity of assuring you, that I shall always retain a grateful remembrance of the cordial welcome I experienced in my visit to Newport, from all classes of Citizens.

The reflection on the days of difficulty and danger which are past is rendered the more sweet, from a consciousness that they are succeeded by days of uncommon prosperity and security. If we have wisdom to make the best use of the advantages with which we are now favored, we cannot fail, under the just administration of a good Government, to become a great and happy people.

The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my Administration, and fervent wishes for my felicity. May the children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.

G. Washington

Of course, it is not quite true that our government gave no quarter to bigotry. But, it is true that we can be proud that the Jews have been treated better here in America, then they ever have been treated by any people in history.

Thou Shalt Not Murder

The following is from the Pro-Life Blogs Administration, and I agree with them absolutely on this:

Today, the courts rejected the pleas of Terri's parents to stop herhusband, Michael, from withholding food and water from her. He haspromised to begin starving her tomorrow at 1 pm.

Most of you are aware that Terri is not a "vegetable" or "brain-dead"as Michael and his lawyers claim, but responds to others and is awareof her surroundings. She laughs, smiles and, according to her nurses, has a small vocabulary.

Terri is not on life support and is healthy. She needs help eating andis fed through a tube (helping someone eat and drink who is impairedhas never been considered artificial life support).

While Michael asserts he is carrying out Terri's wishes, he waiteduntil after he received a large sum of money from a lawsuit againsther doctors before making this claim . During the lawsuit, he allegednegligence and motivated a financial award with the potential cost ofTerri's rehabilitation.

However, Terri has been denied rehabilitation that experts testifycould allow her to eat and talk. The courts in Florida haveconsistently blocked appeals to give Terri proper tests and therapythat would improve her life.Terri may not have the capabilities she once had, but she is no lessvaluable and no less a person.Here is what you can do to help Terri:Pray for Terri and her family.

Blog - communicate the truth about what is going on and rally supportfor Terri and the Schindlers.

Visit BlogsforTerri ( http://www.blogsforterri.com/) for information and tojoin the team of blogs for Terri.Deluge Gov. Jeb Bush with emails and phone calls. He has the power tointervene. Here is his contact information:

Governor Jeb Bushmailto:Bushjeb.bush@myflorida.com

The only thing I would question here is whether it will be fruitful to deluge Jeb Bush with requests for help. I sent him an email, saying, "Thanks for sticking up for Terri." Because he has.

I think it's out of his hands now. Short of strapping on his cowboy hat and six-shooter and going down to the hospital and physically fending off those who would murder her, Governor Bush doesn't have the authority to do anything.

Next stop, Supreme Court. God willing.

Monday, February 21, 2005

Democracy or Bust

The past several weeks have looked good for the spread of Democracy in the Middle East. Beginning with the elections in the Palestinian Authority, which bring new hopes for peace between Israel and the Palestinians, then moving to the thrilling elections in Iraq, and then on to the news from Lebanon today of thousands marching in the streets against the Syrian occupation, and now this (thanks to LGF):

Hundreds of protesters have staged a demonstration against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in the Egyptian capital, Cairo. It was the largest such rally in a series of anti-government protests which began in December. Thousands of riot police stood by as the protesters chanted “No to Mubarak”, but they did not intervene.

Campaigners are opposed to Mr Mubarak seeking a fifth six-year term and are urging freer presidential elections.

The recent cascade of events reminds me of the heady days of Perestroika, and the eventual collapse of Communism, and the fall of the Berlin Wall, circa 1987-89. However, before we get too excited about this news, there are a few factors to take into account. As Charles Johnson of LGF notes:

The danger here is that by opening their long moribund systems to participatory democracy, countries like Egypt and Lebanon risk having Islamist parties stage a bloodless coup by election. We can only hope that in the long term, the power of freedom will overcome these totalitarian forces, and that the people of the Middle East won’t blow this historic chance.

Yes, that is one of the dangers. However, news out of Iraq since the election seems to indicate that the Iraqi's just may have elected themselves the makings of a real working Democracy. The twin gifts of the Iraqi election; that the Shiites did not win a majority, and that the the Kurdish party made a very strong showing, mean that coalition-building will be a must, in order to get anything done in the new Iraqi government. That is good news.

It remains to be seen, however, what will happen in Lebanon. There are very serious, possibly even grave, forces at work against Lebanon at this time. Perhaps understanding that they can't afford to risk yet another Middle-East nation slouching towards Democracy, the mullahs of Iran have announced their solidarity with Syria. One would imagine this solidarity goes both ways. For Iran also surely knows it needs an ally, in the event that it is attacked by either the United States or Israel, who are both intent on making sure that the mullahs do not complete their "Manhattan Project".

Earlier this week President Bush signaled U.S. solidarity with Israel saying,

"... if I was the leader of Israel, and I listened to some of the statements by the Iranian ayatollahs about — that regarded my security of my country, I’d be concerned about Iran having a nuclear weapon, as well. And in that Israel is our ally, and in that we’ve made a very strong commitment to support Israel, we will support Israel if — if there’s a — if their security is threatened."

So, The alliances of the next stage of the War on Terror are clearly delineated.

Meanwhile Iran announced, this past week, that the United States has been flying drone aircraft into Iranian airspace for months, in order to collect intelligence on their anti-aircraft and nuclear systems. The United States has not denied this.

As noted today on this blog, Israel is "prepared" to attack Iran in an attempt to take out their nuclear facilities. The comments of the Israeli Air Force Commander, General Eliezar Shakedi would seem to indicate that he believes they can succeed in their objective. If they do, then that stage of the War would likely be over and done with in one evening. It is unlikely that Iran, left without it's prized nuclear capabilities, would think it wise to risk the possibility of the all-out war with the United States which would likely follow, were they to attack Israel.

However, if Israel were to fail in their attempt to take out the Iranian nuclear facilities, the world would very possibly be in for a war unlike any previous war. Depending upon how close Iran is to completing their nuclear weapons, they might choose to sit back for a few months, and not respond, until their ultimate weapons are ready for usage. I am guessing this would run counter to U.S. strategy. It would seem that the United States would hope that Iran would retaliate in some limited fashion, so that we would be given justification to intervene.

Whatever happens, these are interesting times.

Israeli Air Force Commander Says
Israel Must Be Prepared to Attack Iran

From Haaretz:

Israel Air Force Commander-in-Chief Major General Eliezer Shakedi said Monday that Israel must be prepared for an air strike on Iran in light of its nuclear activity.

But in a meeting with reporters, Shakedi wouldn't say whether he thought Israel was capable of carrying out such a mission alone, as it did when it bombed an unfinished Iraqi nuclear reactor near Baghdad in 1981.

When asked whether Israel has a plan for the Iranian nuclear program, Shakedi replied, "You know that for obvious reasons, I won't say even a word."

But when asked whether he was confident the air force could provide the answer to the Iranian threat, Shakedi replied, "I must be prepared for everything."

Lebanese Protest in Streets Against Syria

"Independance Uprising" In Lebanon

From AP, via Powerline:

BEIRUT, Lebanon - Tens of thousands marched Monday in the biggest anti-Syrian protest in Lebanese history amid signals that Syria will soon withdraw its troops from parts of the country. President Bush (news - web sites) renewed demands for Syrian forces to leave Lebanon immediately.

The protest marked one week since the Feb. 14 death of Rafik Hariri and began at the bomb-scarred site of the former prime minister's assassination, which turned many Lebanese against Syria and increased international pressure on Damascus to extract its army from Lebanon.

Holding aloft red roses and Lebanese flags, the throngs on the streets shouted insults at Syria and demanded the resignation of the pro-Syrian government in a march that began at the seaside site where Hariri and 16 others were killed and ended at his grave in the city center.

The protesters wore scarves of red and white — the colors of Lebanon's flag — which have become the symbol of the opposition's "independence uprising," described as a peaceful campaign to dislodge the government and force the Syrian army out of Lebanon.

Hariri's assassination has brought Lebanese together and strengthened the opposition, but it was unclear if the momentum would force a change in government or push the Syrian army out of the country.

Another former prime minister Gen. Michel Aoun, said Monday he would return from exile before this year's parliamentary elections and that he may launch his own candidacy if the opposition needs his support. The former commander of the Lebanese army fled the country in 1990.

"I will return before the legislative elections, probably by mid-April," Aoun told The Associated Press in a telephone interview from Paris. "And if the situation is critical for the opposition in a region, then I will throw in my personal weight and run in the elections."

As the demonstration was under way in Beirut, Bush issued a strong warning to Syria from Brussels, saying Damascus "must end its occupation of Lebanon."

In Damascus, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said Syrian President Bashar Assad affirmed during a meeting that his country will "soon" take steps to withdraw its army from Lebanese areas in line with a 1989 agreement. It was not clear whether that meant Syria would completely leave Lebanon.

This "Independance Uprising" is a residual effect of America's "cowboy-like" policies. Our "imperialism" has spread democracy to two countries already in the past two years, and now a third country is threatened with democracy.

We live in frightening times, and we have Bushitler to thank for it.

Smug Europe In Denial Of Reality

Denis Boyles summarizes the current state of Europe, in National Review:

Europeans hate the way Americans talk. They think we're loud and uncouth and they don't like our jokes ...

So when the president goes to Europe to give his speech to all the EU-niks in Brussels on Tuesday, it’s important that he speak clearly — or at least clearfully. Because there are a few things he needs to say, and they can all be summed up in seven handy, easy-to-utter phrases:

1. Get a job. With their endless vacations and pint-sized workweeks, Europe can’t produce enough of anything — including more Europeans — to save themselves from doom. So the French and Germans have only one realistic strategy when it comes to revitalizing their comatose economies: Wait for the U.S. economy to rise high enough to float their petits bateaux. Meanwhile, the EU’s own reports have long shown the complete failure of the Lisbon strategy that was supposed to have the EU on a competitive par with the U.S. by 2010. Now, as noted in the EU Observer, the EU is failing to compete in technology and research, lagging behind not only the U.S., but also countries such as India. “The EU is falling behind,” admitted EU commissioner Janez Potocnik. “And we are now under pressure not only compared to our traditional rivals like the U.S. or Japan, but also China, India or Brazil."

2. Clean up your mess. As reported here and elsewhere, French leadership of EU and U.N. missions in Congo and Ivory Coast, among other African countries, have led to massive moral and tactical failures as “peacekeepers” have turned into rapists, thugs, robbers, and killers.

3. Stop taking bribes. Humanitarian groups have been screaming about the crisis in Darfur for a long, long time. The U.S. calls what is happening there a “genocide” — but the EU won’t buy that because if it did, it’d be forced by law to intervene, something it not only doesn’t want to do, but, logistically, could barely do if it had to. The U.N. Security Council is paralyzed because France, Russia, and China have blocked sanctions against Sudan. They blocked the sanctions because they all have very large oil and other investments there. Of course, this was the same reason the French rendered Security Council resolutions meaningless before the Iraq invasion, so not surprisingly, as the BBC reports, France is doing the same thing once again.

4. Since you can’t defend yourselves, get out of our way. NATO became a work-around for the U.S. in Iraq, and the alliance is now paralyzed because of the EU’s own ambitions, as the International Herald Tribune reports. “There is paralysis between the EU and NATO,” the paper quotes an EU official as saying. “We do not discuss anything serious.” If that’s the case, then why are we spending serious billions to keep the thing alive?

5. Knock off the eco-hypocrisy. The Europeans like to parade their agreement to abide by the provisions of the Kyoto pact like members of an Earth Shoe drill team. According to a piece in the IHT, “[Jürgen] Strube, the chairman of BASF’s supervisory board, responds with a hint of impatience when asked how European industry plans to comply with the Kyoto Protocol, which requires Germany and 34 other countries to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. As the treaty takes effect Wednesday, worries about its fairness are mixed with mild resentment [because] in their view… American and Chinese companies will not bear these extra costs.” The item is a pick-up of a New York Times story by Mark Landler, so of course the rather salient fact not reported is that neither France, Germany, nor the rest of the EU will comply with the treaty provisions either.

6. Start a “No European Left Behind” program. Anti-Semitism, like anti-Americanism, is a permanent part of the European cultural landscape. But, according to an EU study reported in Le Nouvel Observateur, the situation has “seriously degraded” in the last five years. Anti-Semitism, needless to say, is a pretty reliable indicator of a lousy education. As a result, it’s impossible to make the French, Germans, Belgians, and others understand that Israel is a consequence of their own bloody history and that they therefore have a responsibility to protect that which they forced into creation.

In France, it’s not at all uncommon to meet schoolchildren who have no clear understanding that their government eagerly collaborated in the Holocaust. “We never learned that in school,” a couple of kids in Provence remarked.

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself

Hunter S. Thompson, one of my favorite authors killed himself this evening, according to the Associated Press:

ASPEN, Colo. - Hunter S. Thompson, the hard-living writer who inserted himself into his accounts of America's underbelly and popularized a first-person form of journalism in books such as "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas," has committed suicide.

Thompson was found dead Sunday in his Aspen-area home of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound, sheriff's officials said. He was 67. Thompson's wife, Anita, had gone out before the shooting and was not home at the time.

Besides the 1972 classic about Thompson's visit to Las Vegas, he also wrote "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72." The central character in those wild, sprawling satires was "Dr. Thompson," a snarling, drug- and alcohol-crazed observer and participant.

Thompson is credited alongside Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese with helping pioneer New Journalism — or, as he dubbed it, "gonzo journalism" — in which the writer made himself an essential component of the story.

I am saddened by this. The seven books I have spent the most time reading in my life are (in order):

1) The Bible

2) The Great Shark Hunt by Hunter S. Thompson

3) Roger Ebert's Movie Home Companion

4) Sexus by Henry Miller

5) The Delicate Prey by Paul Bowles

6) Beyond Good and Evil by Friedrich Nietzche

7) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

Yeah, Hunter is on there with two books. I read him mostly when I was a teen a young twenty something, of course, but his style was a big influence on me. Not on CUANAS. This CUANAS site has actually been an excersize in de-Thompsonizing my writing. I try not to interject myself into the writing. Oh yeah, and by the way, it was his style that influenced me, not his life. I never wanted to be the angry, drug-addled man he was.

Oh, and about the books I've read the most; admittedly, that's a strange list. But, it's true. Quite a strange literary canon, for a guy who is often accused of being a right-wing nut. But, I guess it explains Screaming Memes, anyway.

UPDATE: LGF Commentor, Joe Schmo, left this Thompson quote:

"We're all wired into a survival trip now... no more of the speed that fueled the 60's. That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's trip. He crashed around America selling conciousness expansion, without ever giving a thought to the grim meathook realities that were lying in wait for all those peoples who took him seriously. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy peace and understanding for three bucks a hit. but their loss, and failure, is ours too.

What Leary took down with him was that the central illusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped create... a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the acid culture. The desperate assumption that somebody, or at least some force, is tending the light at the end of the tunnel."

Great Moments In The History Of Communism

Who said this?

[M]oney has become a world power, and the practical Jewish spirit has become the practical spirit of Christian nations. The Jews have liberated themselves in so far as Christians have become Jews...The Jew who exists as a particular member of bourgeois society is only the particular expression of the Judaism of bourgeois society...Out of its own entrails bourgeois society continually creates Jews.

Well, let's see. Who could it be? Oh, I don't know. Could it be Satan?

It's Time To Deconstruct Europe

On the day of the Spanish Referendum on the European Constitution, let's apply the ideas of French Critical Theorist Jean Baudrillard to a Deconstruction of Europe.

I make fun of the concept of "nuance" here quite often. However, as a person who spent the formative years of my life studying (not studying well mind you, but studying none the less) philosophy (Hume, Spinoza, Niethzche, Sartre being my favorites), and critical/social theory (Baudrillard, Marx, Weber) I developed a great respect for real nuance:

nu·ance
A subtle or slight degree of difference, as in meaning, feeling, or tone; a gradation.Expression or appreciation of subtle shades of meaning, feeling, or tone: a rich artistic performance, full of nuance.

I believe nuance requires the suspension of dogmatic belief and the application of what Christians call the Fruits Of The Spirit (Love, Joy, Peace, Patience, Kindness, etc.) to the ultimate end of fairness and objectivity. Nuance is not the goal. The goal is truth and goodness, or to come as close to truth and goodness as is possible given our limitations.

The problem with European nuancin' is, the nuance is the goal. In this sense, it is an endless evasion and obfuscation, expressing a desire to avoid the responsibility of making tough, dare I say it, adult decisions.

The European character has been devastated by the slime and muck of it's own doings. World War I was an absolute horror, followed shortly thereafter by World War II and it's unprecedented genocide (German and Russian) with the participation of almost the entire continent.

Since WWII, Europe has been sitting with the obscene reality of the results of their own minds, and thinking, "This is what we do when left to our own devices? " But, instead of moving on to the next question, ("Why do we do this?") they universalize their horror, and lash out at the whole world. They are like a murderer defending himself in a court of law. "I didn't do it. I wasn't there. And even if I was I was only doing what I was told. It was their fault. They did most of it. They put a gun to my head and made me pull the trigger."

And the most important point in their long, rambling final argument to the jury is Bushhitler. The sick minds of the Europeans have once again conjured up a monster befitting their vision of the world. But this time, it is a monster of projection, a cinematic monster. What an irony that while it is, supposedly, the U.S. that destroyed the dialectic of history, creating a self-reflexive media-dominated society, endlessly regurgitating it's own entrails as enterainment, the reality is it is Europe who killed history. They had to. There really was no other choice. It was either kill history or be confronted with, and take responsibility for, the reality of their own monstrosity.

Bushitler is Europe's vomiting up of the bloody contents of their thoughts and dreams, and the projection of said contents onto the Other; the Americans. Bushitler is a completely self-reflexive construct of the European simulacrum. Bushitler is popular entertainment for a Europe which has unchained itself from the demands and responsibilities of history. But ultimately, Bushitler is Europe's attempt to place their sin on a scapegoat of their own making.

As Baudrillard said,

"Today's abstraction is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror, or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality; a hyperreal. The territory no longer precedes the map, nor does it survive it."

Europe's secular incantation of "nuance", for the purpose of evasion, has brought their culture to an advanced state of hyperreality where anything can be true. And this has led inevitably to conjuration of Bushitler. The Bushitler construct, with one awful psycho-nuclear blast, has accomplished the destruction of memory which Europe required. It has obliterated the real landscape of the world and left Europeans living in a simulacrum. A world without origin or reality.

It is time for Europe to deconstruct itself, to tear down the wall that separates them from history, responsibilty and reality. Europe has a lot to offer. The Europeans, with their belief in the continuous thread of Christianity, and their courageous Reformation, built Western Civilization. This Western Civilization, given our current circumstances in the War On Terror, is the best thing we have, and it is the only hope for the spread of freedom throughout the world.

We need you Europe. Get well soon.

The Winds Of War
Iran, Syria, and Lebanon

From Regime Change Iran comes a report on American Drone Aircraft penetrating Iranian airspace.

More from the Command Post.

And what was that mysterious blast in Iran this week?

"Most of the shining objects that our people see over Iran's airspace are American spying equipment used to spy on Iran's nuclear and military facilities," AP quoted Intelligence Minister Ali Yunesi as saying Wednesday.

And who killed former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri?

And what are the results of it?

BBC Says Israel Targets
Unarmed Schoolchildren For Assasination

From Melanie Phillips:

Last Thursday, BBC Radio Four's religious homily slot, Thought for the Day, featured the Rev Dr John Bell, a Scottish cleric. By way of introducing some platitudes about peace in the Middle East, Dr Bell said the following:

'Two years ago, in a Lebanese restaurant in Vancouver, I talked to awaiter called Adam who was an Arab Israeli. That means that he was of Palestinian Muslim stock, born in the State of Israel and, like his Jewish compatriots, he had been conscripted into the Israeli Army. There he had distinguished himself as a good soldier and was made a corporal. He was also imprisoned for refusing to shoot unarmedschoolchildren. And one day, when off-duty, he saved many lives bykilling a suicide bomber who entered the bus on which he wastravelling'.

Thus in the space of a few seconds, the BBC had transmitted the libellous falsehood that the Israelis order their soldiers to kill unarmed schoolchildren, and had been resisted in this murderous and inhuman objective by a heroic Arab citizen (with the improbable name of Adam). And this in the religious slot,too, thus giving the libel the extra imprimatur of godliness and veracity. Yet Dr Bell was merely recycling something that had apparently been told to him by this self-styled Arab Israeli soldier as the truth, without having done anything to check its veracity. And despite the fact that this was likely to add to the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish venom now coursing through British veins, the BBC had put this poisonous piece of unsubstantiated and racially inflammatory saloon-bar gossip on air, complete with demonstrable errors of fact.

Now the BBC has made partial amends. After today's Thought for the Day, the Today presenter announced that the BBC had posted an apology for 'inaccuracies' in last Thursday's broadcast on its Ethics and Religion website. It says the following:

'We have talked to the Israeli authorities and we are unable to find any evidence to support the story told to Dr Bell and recounted by him on Thought for the Day. We also understand that Dr. Bell made two factual mistakes in his script. Those facts should have been checked before the broadcast. The Religion and Ethics Department apologises on behalf of the BBC and regrets the offence that was caused.

The Rev Dr John Bell has written to the BBC to express his own deep regret as follows:

"It is clear that I made two factual errors. The one was that he [the soldier] was 21 and not 19, thus he would have been of the age to be a corporal. The second is that he did not say he was conscripted. My presumption regarding conscription is wrong as regards Arab Israelis. The purpose of my contribution was to highlight the fact that in any peace process, the concordat is not the conclusion, but a stage in a process which will take centuries before peaceful co-existence is secured. It was my specific intention to avoid any bias against one of the two national communities. I perfectly understand that at a time when Jewish sensitivity in Britain is running high because of anti-Semitism that part of my remarks might have been interpreted as furtive racism. However, such a conjecture would be completely untrue. For any unintended dismay I may have caused, I apologise unreservedly." '

Well, that's ok as far as it goes. And one should not underestimate the significance of the BBC making such an apology. Nevertheless, as HonestReporting.com observes, Dr Bell and the BBC have not specifically apologised for the gravemen of the accusation, that the IDF orders its soldiers to shoot unarmed Palestinian children. Indeed, Dr Bell did not himself acknowledge that he had recycled an unsubstantiated claim without any evidence that it was true.

It is hard to escape the conclusion that Dr Bell -- and the BBC -- saw nothing wrong in recycling such an unsubstantiated claim because they assumed it was true. For this is the poison that has infected British society, and now seems to circulate in the very air we breathe.

For my part, I can tell you that my relatives in England see nothing wrong with blaming American Foreign Policy on the "Jewish Lobby". You might also remember that I mentioned an incident wherein a European relative called me, and started a discussion with me about how the only solution to the Middle-East Conflict would be a one-state solution. When I asked him how that would work considering the Palestinian's would outnumber the Israeli's, negating the Jewish State, he snickered. When I asked him what he was snickering about, he snickered again and refused to answer.

Incidents like this with my relatives, and news stories like the one Melanie points out here, are what have pretty much convinced me that Europe is planning another Holocaust of some sort, whether they explicitly admit it to themselves yet or not.

Norway Says
Theo Van Gogh Murder
Connected To Al Qaeda

Dan Darling, at Winds of Change, does an analysis of the Theo Van Gogh murder, based upon a report by the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment. Here are some excerpts:

Back in November, I wrote on the murder of Theo Van Gogh and concluded that it was far more than the actions of a small group of misguided fanatics but was instead an act carried out by al-Qaeda as part of a far more sinister plot aimed at destabilizing the Netherlands. Now, courtesy of the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, which are kind enough to publish their findings in English in marked contrast to some other countries I could name, we get a professional evaluation of the killing.

I told you so.

After Bouyeri was arrested, Dutch authorities described it as the first Islamic terrorist attack in the Netherlands.

The note pinned to Van Gogh's body was written in Dutch and entitled "Open Letter to Hirshi Ali." Ayan Hirshi Ali is a female Dutch Somali politician, a self-proclaimed ex-Muslim, an MP for the right-wing Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (People's Party for Liberty and Democracy, VVD), and the author of the screenplay for Van Gogh's film "Submission," which deals with the topic of domestic violence against Muslim women.

Another VVD MP known to be critical of Islam, Geert Wilders, has recently been threatened with beheading by a radical Islamist website for insulting Islam. Both Ali and Wilders have been placed under police protection since the Van Gogh killing.

Since the Van Gogh killing, the Netherlands has been engulfed in a wave of violence that has led to more than 20 arson attacks against mosques, churches, and schools in which Muslims and non-Muslims have used violence against one another, with the majority of attacks being carried out against Muslim targets. Opinion polls after the Van Gogh killing show that 40% of Dutch citizens hope that Muslim immigrants "no longer feel at home in the Netherlands" and that more than 80% want tougher restrictions against immigrants.

I'm the first one to condemn what is essentially mob violence and what happened in the Netherlands following the Van Gogh killing is certainly worthy of condemnation. On the other hand, one of the reasons that the townspeople are up in arms is that the Dutch political class has simply refused to address the issue of Muslim immigration and the subsequent issue of immigration. If respectable people aren't willing to take up these issues, then the not-so-respectable people will, hence we get arson and the like in the wake of the Van Gogh killing. Another point to be addressed is that it seems to be a not-uncommon opinion among the chattering classes in the Dutch Muslim community that the Van Gogh murder was a Good Thing, the first time that Muslims have actually had the fortitude to stand up to all those racist Dutchmen spitting on their religion. That's a problem too, and one that the Dutch Muslim community has been equally negligent in addressing.

At first glance, the Van Gogh killing appears a spontaneous, religiously-motivated murder promptly by the release of his film "Submission." However, Dutch investigators believe that the killer belonged to an organized group that subscribed to Islamist ideology and supported al-Qaeda in its war against the United States and its allies. This group planned political assassinations in order to advance that cause and the Norwegian researchers have run their information and conclusions by a Dutch intelligence official in order to verify the reliability of their work. The bottom line is that murder of Theo Van Gogh cannot be reduced to the spontaneous act of a religious fanatic who was acting alone.

The Norwegian analysis holds that the motivations behind the killing went far beyond the release of "Submission" to being nothing less than a desire to escalate the conflict between al-Qaeda and the US and its allies - Van Gogh was simply a target of convenience because of the recent release of his film. Bouyeri believed that Muslims in Holland and around the world are under attack as a result of the war on terrorism and carried out the killing in the context of an escalation of the conflict in Iraq and renewed law enforcement efforts against Dutch members of al-Qaeda and allied groups.

The following patterns are typical in al-Qaeda terrorist cases post-2000: target selection and method of assassination, the assassin belonged to an organized group of North African Islamists consisting of second-generation immigrants, the group operated mainly in the Netherlands but also across state boundaries, and maintained international contacts. Investigations have revealed that Bouyeri's group have been linked to terrorist activities in several European countries as well as Morocco and may have planned assassinations in Portugal in addition to the Netherlands. Bouyeri was a bright, integrated second-generation Moroccan immigrant who became involved in terrorism after 9/11 when his mother died of cancer and he failed at his goal of establishing an immigrant youth center in his hometown.

Bouyeri supported the Iraqi insurgency and two members of his group may have planned to assassinate the former Portuguese prime minister during the 2004 European soccer championship. As both the Netherlands and Portugal sent troops to Iraq and Van Gogh killing occurred as US forces mobilized in preparation for an attack on Fallujah, events in Iraq likely motivated Bouyeri and his group to strike when they did.

Friday, February 18, 2005

Jack and Pastorius Duke It Out

My friend Jack, over at Jack of Clubs, had a post yesterday, entitled The Only Eason Jordan Post I Will Make. The post consists of a story, related to another blogger, about a General in the American Army telling a group of reporters,

" ... that if any of their reporters or crews got into trouble - any time of the day or night - to call him. "Don't worry about protocol," he said. "Get to me as quickly as you can, and we'll try to get help to your people as quickly as we can."

Jack comments:

I mention this not because I care about Jordan or the blogospheric victory that everyone is crowing about, but because this story shows a fine example of modern chivalry.

Hmm. Yeah, I know Jack cares about chivalry. It's in his biline. But wait, he cares more about the chivalry aspect of this story, than he cares about the Eason Jordan story? I couldn't understand his perspective, so I fired off an email to him:

Jack,

You don't care about the blogospheric victory in the Eason Jordan case?

Sorry bro, but it is a big, big deal.

Hugh Hewitt, and myself, I do so unhumbly add (for I also noted thesimilarity) have called this "rise of the blogs" the informationreformation. It is the same thing. It is the destruction of the"intermediary priests" of information, of the central text of ourcivilization.

That is a huge victory not only for democracy, not only for humankind, butfor God's Kingdom on Earth as well.

It's harder for lies to prevail when there are millions fact-checking the central text.

You and I have discussed these issues in the past and have been inagreement. So, I conclude that maybe you were just being loose with yourlanguage when you said that you "don't care about the blogospheric victory".

Note, that I am even more arrogant and obnoxious in real life than I am on this blog. Can you imagine having to be around me day after day. And yet, my wife loves me. Or, so she says.

:)

So, here's Jack response:

The principle is important but I think the application in this particular instance is somewhat trivial. In fact, it is because I see the principle as so important that I am a bit sanguine about the importance of this particular case. Jordan's remarks strike me as simply a typical bit of leftist paranoia on the same order as the "blood-for-oil meme" or the "Bush knew about 9/11" one. Deplorable, but not particularly damaging, since no one but fellow leftists will take it seriously.

Jordan's position as chief news executive makes this a bit more newsworthy than similar sentiments expressed by, say, Maureen Dowd, but in the long run it isn't what he said that matters so much as what he thinks. As Glenn Reynolds points out, this entire controversy could have been avoided if he had simply apologized for the remarks, in which case he would have been able to go back to quietly spinning CNN's news coverage toward the left without much interruption. Maybe the next guy will be a bit more savy, a bit more subtle. I think this is how we got stuck with Clinton in '92: people had gotten so sick of true believers like Carter and Dukakis that Darwinian pressures elevated someone more able to triangulate.

I don't want to minimize the good work that the folks who have covered this story have done. But I do think that the coverage was disproportionate to the importance of the story, and it has distracted some people from covering other stories that are equally important, if not more so. I have temporarilly stopped reading Captain's Quarters because he doesn't seem to have anything else to talk about. Persistance is one thing, but obsession is another. And the self-congratulatory tone of some of the coverage could very well backfire.

When I said I don't care, I meant precisely that. Not that other people should not, but that I don't. My criticism is not directed at people who followed the story, but at those who lost their sense of proportion and, perhaps more important, their grasp of strategy.

Well, I understand the comment about the self-congratulations. Really, the story is done. I believe it was Captain's Quarters who warned, though, that there is a man in line for Jordan's job (his name, I believe, was Kris Craemer) who has made similar comments to those of Jordan, on several occasions. So, the point is, that part of the story is not over. It will have done little good to have gotten rid of Jordan if another anti-American liar steps right in to replace him.

But, I must say, I completely disagree with Jack. I think I'll have to stop being friends with him.

;-)

Perhaps, Jack should personalize this a bit. How would he feel if Eason Jordan had accused him of murder at the Davos Conference?

Update: Jack comments:

I feel the need to clarify that my comments about Captain's Quarters were not intended to single that blog or Ed Morrissey out for particular criticism. Nor did I intend to suggest that all of the negative attributes I mention in that paragraph were characteristic of CQ. CQ has been, and remains, one of my favorite sites and I only mention it in this context because it illustrates my point about the tendency of some bloggers to become inordinately focused on a particular issue. That is, of course, their right and I am glad to a certain degree that others are addressing these issues because it leaves me free to talk about things that interest me more.

The Jihadi's Love Their Children Too

Wretchared from Belmont Club commonly writes important articles containing enlightening analysis. However, his breakdown of the recent testimony before Congress of various "terrorism experts" is downright frightening to ponder, if accurate. Wretchard notes that the experts have finally settled on a name for our enemy; they are Sunni Jihadi's.

Rumsfeld declared that the war is a global war, with fronts in many countries. As such, we will need the aid of allies around the world, all working together to stop future attacks. This is made all the more necessary by the fact that experts believe that terrorists are intent on staging a WMD attack on the United States, possibily employing nuclear weapons. So, Wretchard concludes:

What necessarily follows, though it was not specifically stated in the testimony, is that the consequences arising from the totality of the conflict will apply to the enemy as well. Defeat when it comes, will result in a loss to the vanquished proportionate to the scope of the war. To take one example, the Sunni jihadi WMD threat against America implicitly raises a corresponding threat against the Islamic world. Nuclear war, once started, means nuclear war against Sunni jihadism as well.

Osama Bin Laden's wager on September 11 has been called and raised in Iraq. No one will walk away from the table in the state he sat down. It is already unlikely that Saudi Arabia will survive in its present form, as Porter Goss' survey suggests. One might add Israel, Iraq and Iran to the list of nations which will be radically transform by coming events as well.

The truth of Rumsfeld's observation that the war against terror is largely an ideological battle can be seen in the effect it has had on Islam and the Western Left. The Sunni jihadis have long maintained that war will continue until the Islamic flag flew over Downing Street and the White House. Those being the stakes, it necessarily follows that the War, as described in the testimony of the counterterrorism executives, will if it does not result in the triumph of Islam, mean the ruin of Sunni jihadism and its Leftist allies.

Vast changes have already taken place in the US and Europe, which we are reminded will be nothing compared with what is yet to come.

The Daily Demarche links to a Miami Herald piece focusing on the car-bombing of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Harari, showing how the law of unintended consequences sharpens -- always tends to sharpen -- the issues along the fault lines of the underlying conflict.

The Law of Unintended Consequences warns us to expect the unexpected. Prepare, then, for the unexpected to take shape as the shockwaves pushing out from the smoldering crater in Beirut recast crucial relationships around the world. Whoever orchestrated Hariri's assassination imagined the explosive event would produce results in accordance with a master plan. It is unlikely, however, that the master plan included strengthening the bonds between the United States and France. But closer ties between Paris and Washington will undoubtedly result from the Hariri murder.

The Daily Demarche observes that as each side blunders into each other in their own ways the nature of their antagonism is reshaped in the encounter. The vortex expands and acquires its own dynamic.

Message from the Syrian regime to Washington, Paris and Lebanon's opposition: "You want to play here, you'd better be ready to play by Hama Rules - and Hama Rules are no rules at all. You want to squeeze us with Iraq on one side and the Lebanese opposition on the other, you'd better be able to put more than U.N. resolutions on the table. You'd better be ready to go all the way -- because we will. But you Americans are exhausted by Iraq, and you Lebanese don't have the guts to stand up to us, and you French make a mean croissant but you've got no Hama Rules in your arsenal. So remember, we blow up prime ministers here. We shoot journalists. We fire on the Red Cross. We leveled one of our own cities. You want to play by Hama Rules, let's see what you've got. Otherwise, hasta la vista, baby.

The question is, does one side have to play by the same rules as the other? Is it necessary that we up the ante everytime they do? I guess the answer is, when the pot is all or nothing, then you have no choice.

I pray that it does not come to that.

The solution is to stop Iran before they build nuclear weapons. Yesterday, George Bush was asked about the subject of Israel attacking Iran's nuclear facilities. He answer was surprisingly undiplomatic:

Q: Mr. President, I recall a conversation a small group of us with a very senior administration official about a year ago, and in that conversation, the subject of Iran and Israel came up. And I’m just wondering, what’s your level of concern that if Iran does go down the road to building a nuclear weapon, that Israel will attack Iran to try to prevent that from happening?

THE PRESIDENT: Well, of course the — well, first of all, Iran has made it clear they — that they don’t like Israel, to put it bluntly. And the Israelis are concerned about whether or not Iran develops a nuclear weapon, as are we, as should everybody.

And so the objective is to solve this issue diplomatically, is to work with friends, like we’re doing with France, Europe, and — I mean, France, Germany, and Great Britain, to continue making it clear to the Iranians that developing a nuclear weapon will be unacceptable.

But clearly, if I was the leader of Israel, and I listened to some of the statements by the Iranian ayatollahs about — that regarded my security of my country, I’d be concerned about Iran having a nuclear weapon, as well. And in that Israel is our ally, and in that we’ve made a very strong commitment to support Israel, we will support Israel if — if there’s a — if their security is threatened.

There was no equivocation in that answer. There was no clarification as to what he meant by "if their security is threatened." Instead, the way I read that statement, the President implied that Israel's security is already threatened by the prospect of a nuclear Iran.

When Europe Is Unhappy With America
It Means We Are Doing Good

Victor David Hanson, from the National Review:

In the war against the Islamic fascists and their supporters there have been a number of unheralded victories that have played some role in changing the landscape of the Middle East and eroding the power of the Islamists.

The first bold move was to censure and then ignore Yasser Arafat for his complicity in unleashing suicide bombers, his rampant corruption, and his stifling of Palestinian dissidents. At the time of the change in American policy, other members of the quartet — the Russians, the Europeans, and the U.N. — were aghast. The "moderate" Arab world protested vehemently.

Pundits here alleged Texas recklessness and clung to the silly idea of the Arafat/Sharon moral equivalence, as if a freely elected democratic leader, subject to an open press and a free opposition, was the same as a thug who ordered lynchings and jailed or murdered dissidents.
Review press accounts from the summer of 2002: Neither ally nor neutral approved of Bush's act of ostracism and instead warned of disaster. Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller, whose country then held the EU's rotating presidency, lectured that without dialogue with Arafat "Israel could not stop Palestinian violence through force." A circumspect Colin Powell visited the region often to smooth over hurt feelings and in the process to soften Bush's bold action. Dennis Ross, remember, had met with the American-subsidized Arafat almost 500 times, and it was said that the latter visited the Clinton White House more than any other foreign leader — a fact apparently lost on the Palestinian street, which still spontaneously cheered on news of September 11.

Lost in all the controversy was the simple fact that Arafat had come to power through a rigged vote. He proceeded to corrupt the state, censure the media, and let thugs terrorize Palestinian reformers while he systematically looted public monies. His legacy was a ruined economy, murder, and systematic theft.

All knew this; few would say it publicly; none would do anything about it.

Calumny followed as the Israelis unilaterally went on to start their fence, take out the terrorist elite of Hamas, plan to abandon Gaza, and, pace Mr. Moeller, precisely through force crush the intifada. In those bleak months of suicide murdering, Arafat courted the world's sycophantic press as he railed against Sharon from his pathetic bunker at Ramallah.

Then something unexpected happened. Almost imperceptibly in his last two years, he devolved from a feared dictator to a defrocked terrorist to finally an irrelevant functionary. That metamorphosis proved critical as a prerequisite to his demise, as Arafat slowly lost his four-decade-acquired capital of intimidation — critical for any Middle East autocrat — and with it his grip on the popular imagination of the West Bank. In the Middle East a tyrant can look murderous or even psychopathic, but not impotent — and especially not ridiculous.

Thus when he died, far from being sanctified as a mythical strongman, he was almost immediately forgotten and his legacy is currently undergoing a sort of Trotsky-like erasure.
Postmortem stories almost immediately spread about absconded funds, tawdry fights broke out over his estate, and, mirabile dictu, a few signs of freedom emerged on the West Bank as elections mysteriously followed and with them renewed discussions of peace. The American ostracism did not ensure that we would see a settlement, only the chance that we could — and that is some progress in the Middle East.

Now in hindsight, few seem to object to the ostracism of Arafat. The moral?

As a rule of thumb in matters of the Middle East, be very skeptical of anything that Europe (fearful of terrorists, eager for profits, tired of Jews, scared of their own growing Islamic minorities) and the Arab League (a synonym for the autocratic rule of Sunni Muslim grandees and secular despots) cook up together. If a EU president, a Saudi royal, and a Middle East specialist in the State Department or a professor in an endowed Middle Eastern Studies chair agree that the United States is "woefully naïve," "unnecessarily provocative" or "acting unilaterally," then assume that we are pretty much on the right side of history and promoting democratic reform.

Thursday, February 17, 2005

The Palestinian Army

From Associated Press:

KHAN YOUNIS, Gaza Strip - Palestinian policemen, who have been given the task of restraining militants, say they can't or won't do the job. Interviewed at their front-line positions, some say they feel sympathy for the gunmen, while others fear getting shot at by Israeli troops.

The shortcomings of Palestinian police were evident last week when officers stood by as Hamas militants fired dozens of rockets and mortar rounds at Jewish settlements in Gaza. Officers also did nothing when gunmen broke into Gaza's central jail, killing two inmates and abducting a third who was later slain.

"This is all part of the state of chaos we have been living in," said Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' security adviser, Jibril Rajoub.

But, clearly, it's not the chaos they've been living in, when you take this into account:

In the first decision of its kind since he succeeded Yasser Arafat, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas has ratified death sentences against three Palestinians found guilty of “collaboration” with Israel.

It is not clear when the three men, whose identities were not revealed, will be executed by firing squad.

However, senior PA officials told The Jerusalem Post that the three were Gaza Strip residents who had been convicted of “high treason” for tipping off Israeli security forces about the whereabouts of wanted gunmen.

Sakher Bsaisso, a senior Fatah official who also serves as PA governor of the northern Gaza Strip, confirmed on Wednesday that Abbas had authorized death sentences against three alleged “collaborators.”

Bsaisso said the three had been convicted of assisting Israel in the assassination of a number of Palestinian activists in the Gaza Strip over the past four years, but refused to elaborate.

Yes, it's not the chaos they just happen to be living in. It's the chaos they purposfully have created.

Tell me, if the government supports the "gunmen", and the police support the "gunmen", and the people support the "gunmen", well then, doesn't that make them the official "gunmen" of the Palestinian territories? And what do we call the official "gunmen" who protect a people from their enemies?

Well, where I come from we call them an Army.

And what does a country do when the army of another country attacks it? Well, it is their responsibility to protect their citizens by beating the army of the other country until they agree to terms of peace, or until they are no longer able to be a menace.

The Bonfire Of The Vanities

New Yorker, Kurt Andersen, discusses the mood of his fellow Manhattanites in the wake of the Iraqi elections. From Front Page Magazine:

At a media-oligarchy dinner party on Fifth Avenue 72 hours after the elections, the emotions were highly mixed. The wife of a Democratic Party figure was (like me) unabashedly hopeful about what had happened in Iraq. Across the table, though, the wife of a well-known liberal actor was having none of it; instead, she complained about Fahrenheit 9/11’s being denied an Oscar nomination. And a newspaper éminence grise seemed more inclined to discuss Condoleezza Rice’s unfortunate hairstyle than the vicissitudes of Wolfowitzism. It was the night of the State of the Union speech, but as far as I know, no one (including me) ducked out of the dining room to find a TV. Who really wanted to watch Bush take his victory lap?

Like most New Yorkers, I disagree with the Bush administration politically, temperamentally, and ontologically most of the time. Two years ago, however, unlike most New Yorkers (but probably like most Americans), concerning Iraq I went from 50-50 fence-sitting to fretful 53 percent support of an invasion. So the ups and downs of the war and occupation since have conformed, more or less, to my own deep ambivalence.

But for our local antiwar supermajority, the Iraq elections were simply the most vertiginous moment of a two-year-long roller-coaster ride. By last November, they’d hoped the U.S. would see things their way—and it was some solace that by January, a solid majority of the country apparently agreed with New York that Iraq was a mess and a misadventure.

Until the Iraqi vote: surprisingly smooth and inarguably inspiring and, in some local camps, unexpectedly unsettling. Of course, for all but a nutty fringe, it is not a matter of actually wishing for an insurgent victory, but rather of hating the idea of a victory presided over by the Bush team. (I may prefer the Yankees to beat the Red Sox, but I cannot bear the spectacle of Steinbrenner’s gloating.) Three months after failing to defeat Bush in our election, plenty of New Yorkers privately, half-consciously hoped for his comeuppance in Iraq’s. You know who you are. Last week, you found yourselves secretly . . . heartened—and appalled—by the stories of the Marine general who said it was “a hell of a hoot [and] fun to shoot some people” in Afghanistan, and about the possible Islamist drift of the Shiites who will now govern Iraq. When military officers show themselves to be callous warmongers, and neocon military adventurism looks untenable, certain comfortable assumptions are reaffirmed.

Like “radical chic,” a related New York specialty, “liberal guilt” once meant feeling discomfort over one’s good fortune in an unjust world. As this last U.S. election cycle began, however, a new subspecies of liberal guilt arose—over the pleasure liberals took in bad news from Iraq, which seemed sure to hurt the administration. But with Bush reelected, any shred of tacit moral rationale is gone. In other words, feel the guilt, and let it be a pang that leads to moral clarity.

Each of us has a Hobbesian choice concerning Iraq; either we hope for the vindication of Bush’s risky, very possibly reckless policy, or we are in a de facto alliance with the killers of American soldiers and Iraqi civilians. We can be angry with Bush for bringing us to this nasty ethical crossroads, but here we are nonetheless.

You know, guilt should usually lead to an apology of some sort. Do I hear one rattling around in that guys head somewhere?

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

Anti-Bush Media Darling
Turns Out to Be Anti-Semitic Lunatic

From the Weekly Standard:

MICHAEL SCHEUER has uncovered "the most successful covert action program in the history of man." Or, at least that's what he told an audience at Council on Foreign Relations in New York City on February 3. The CIA's former bin Laden-hunter-turned-public-persona is the widely cited author of a scathing critique of the Bush administration's war on terror, Imperial Hubris. Since his resignation from "the Agency" in November 2004, he has become best known for his view that the West is really losing the war on terror. Perhaps he should also be known for his work uncovering conspiracies.

According to Scheuer, the tiny nation of Israel is not a valuable ally in the Middle East, but instead the author of a vast conspiracy to hijack the direction of American foreign policy. Scheuer explained to the CFR crowd that Israel dictates the course of its relationship with the United States. He explained, "we can no longer afford to be seen as the dog that's led by the tail." Scheuer further warned, "I don't think we can afford to be led around, or at least appear to be led around by them."

How does a nation of roughly 6 million people control the foreign policy of the world's lone superpower? According to Scheuer, Israel accomplishes this feat through a variety of clandestine activities. When asked by a member of the CFR audience to clarify what he meant, Scheuer explained:

Well, the clandestine aspect is that, clearly, the ability to influence the Congress--that's a clandestine activity, a covert activity. You know to some extent, the idea that the Holocaust Museum here in our country is another great ability to somehow make people feel guilty about being the people who did the most to try to end the Holocaust. I find--I just find the whole debate in the United States unbearably restricted with the inability to factually discuss what goes on between our two countries.

His second claim, however, mimics the type of anti-Semitic propaganda that emanates from state-controlled media monopolies in the Middle East every day. Arab propagandists often accuse "the Jews" of winning "world sympathy by playing on the Holocaust and Nazi atrocities." This is a recurring motif, for example, in Saudi state-owned newspapers.

In Imperial Hubris, Scheuer endorsed the view that widespread Muslim hatred of America is an outcome of American policies that are perceived as anti-Islamic and not the result of Muslim hatred of western ideology or culture. In advancing this argument Scheuer ignores the role that state-controlled propaganda plays in shaping popular opinion in the Middle East. He also ignores the argument that U.S. foreign policy has been, on balance, ostensibly pro-Muslim and pro-Arab.

History is replete with examples, but several will suffice: the U.S. saved Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat from Israeli forces in Beirut in 1982; assisted Muslims against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s; freed the Muslim nation of Kuwait and prevented the invasion of Saudi Arabia by a supposedly secular tyrant in 1991; and intervened on behalf of Muslims in Somalia and Bosnia.

Tuesday, February 15, 2005

I've finally entered the 21st century enough to add photos to CUANAS. This is a picture of the great Jaco Pastorius. The man from whom I take my nom de plume.

Jaco Pastorius entered the national stage of the American Jazz Scene in 1975 playing on Pat Metheney first album, "Bright Sized Life", and recording his own debut for Epic. Jaco introduced met Weather Report leader Joe Zawinwul backstage at a concert, shaking his hand and introducing himself, "Hi, I'm Jaco Pastorius. The greatest bass player in the world." Zawinul remarked famously, "I knew then, this guy was either a genius or a fool."

As fate would have it, Pastorius would over the next thirteen years prove himself to be both. The genius was his doing. The foolishness was the result of Bipolar Disorder aggravated, I believe, by the stress of almost constant touring, and drug use.

The brilliance of Jaco music lies not in the compositions he leaves behind, although he did compose and arrange some brilliant and exceedingly joyful. Instead, Jaco's brilliance, to my mind, expressed itself in the awesome lucidity of his playing. Complex ideas seemed obvious and the stuff of destiny when emitted from the mind of Jaco. He could play a flurry of notes, or a gentle melody with equal clarity.

Sometime in the early 1970's Jaco got the idea of removing the frets from his electric bass guitar. He replaced the slots with wood putty and then covered the entire neck of the bass with multiple layers of marine epoxy, the kind they use to cover the woodwork on ships. This excessively hard and slick surface is said to have accounted for the "singing quality" of his unique sound. I think this is partially true.

Certainly, a fretless electric bass was a rarity in those days if not a completely non-existent entity. And Jaco played the fretlessness of his bass for all it was worth, sliding between notes, almost constantly and using a swaying and slow vibrato. At moments of great tenderness in music, Jaco seemed to stoke the eery bittersweetness of the melodies he would play by emphasizing the dissonant ends of this vibrato sway. Whatever the magic technique he used, it never failed to raise the hair on the back of my neck and bring tears to my eyes.

Additionally though, Jaco was an sonic innovator in multiple other ways. He pioneered the use of a larger speaker system, and added sound "effects" to his arsenal, in the form of digital delay and a "chorus" effect. Chorus had not been heard on electric bass before. Prior to Jaco's unique application of the effect, I had only heard chorus used to fatten vocal tracks, or maybe in minute doses on guitar. But, Jaco used the effect liberally serving to give his bass a very thick yet almost liquid sound.

During his career, Jaco played and recorded with luminaries such as Weather Report (for whom he produced, composed, and arranged as well), Joni Mitchell, Pat Metheney, Herbie Hancock, Jack DeJohnette, Michael Brecker, Paul Bley, Ian Hunter (of Mott the Hoople), Toots Thielman, John McLaughlin, Jimmy Cliff, Tom Scott, and Flora Purim.

To my mind, his best work is contained on the albums:

Heavy Weather, and 8:30 by Weather Report,
Mingus, and Don Juan's Reckless Daughter by Joni Mitchell
Word of Mouth, by Jaco Pastorius

Pass The Dutchie From The Left Hand Side

And don't bogart the freedom, bro. From Charles at LGF:

Michael Ledeen calls for a historic referendum against shari’a and for democracy in Iran:

Our victory in Fallujah has had enormous consequences, first of all because the information we gathered there has made it possible to capture or kill considerable numbers of terrorists and their leaders. It also sent a chill through the spinal column of the terror network, because it exposed the lie at the heart of their global recruitment campaign. As captured terrorists have told the region on Iraqi television and radio, they signed up for jihad because they had been told that the anti-American crusade in Iraq was a great success, and they wanted to participate in the slaughter of the Jews, crusaders, and infidels. But when they got to Iraq — and discovered that the terrorist leaders immediately confiscated their travel documents so that they could not escape their terrible destiny — they saw that the opposite was true. The slaughter — of which Fallujah was the inescapable proof — was that of the jihadists at the hands of the joint coalition and Iraqi forces.

Thirdly, the brilliant maneuvers of the Army and Marine forces in Fallujah produced strategic surprise. The terrorists expected an attack from the south, and when we suddenly smashed into the heart of the city from the north, they panicked and ran, leaving behind a treasure trove of information, subsequently augmented by newly cooperative would-be martyrs. Above all, the intelligence from Fallujah — and I have this from military people recently returned from the city — documented in enormous detail the massive involvement of the governments of Syria and Iran in the terror war in Iraq. And the high proportion of Saudi “recruits” among the jihadists leaves little doubt that the folks in Riyadh are, at a minimum, not doing much to stop the flow of fanatical Wahhabis from the south.

Thus, the great force of the democratic revolution is now in collision with the firmly rooted tyrannical objects in Tehran, Damascus, and Riyadh. In one of history’s fine little ironies, the “Arab street,” long considered our mortal enemy, now threatens Muslim tyrants, and yearns for support from us. That is our immediate task.

It would be an error of enormous proportions if, on the verge of a revolutionary transformation of the Middle East, we backed away from this historic mission. It would be doubly tragic if we did it because of one of two possible failures of vision: insisting on focusing on Iraq alone, and viewing military power as the prime element in our revolutionary strategy. Revolution often comes from the barrel of a gun, but not always. Having demonstrated our military might, we must now employ our political artillery against the surviving terror masters. The great political battlefield in the Middle East is, as it has been all along, Iran, the mother of modern terrorism, the creator of Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, and the prime mover of Hamas. When the murderous mullahs fall in Tehran, the terror network will splinter into its component parts, and the jihadist doctrine will be exposed as the embodiment of failed lies and misguided messianism.

The instrument of their destruction is democratic revolution, not war, and the first salvo in the political battle of Iran is national referendum. Let the Iranian people express their desires in the simplest way possible: “Do you want an Islamic republic?” Send Lech Walesa and Vaclav Havel to supervise the vote. Let the contending parties compete openly and freely, let newspapers publish, let radios and televisions broadcast, fully supported by the free nations. If the mullahs accept this gauntlet, I have every confidence that Iran will be on the path to freedom within months. If, fearing a massive rejection from their own people, the tyrants of Tehran reject a free referendum and reassert their repression, then the free nations will know it is time to deploy the full panoply of pressure to enable the Iranians to gain their freedom.

The time is now. Faster, please.

Roger L. Simon writes:

We have been accused of late (falsely, I believe) of being a destructive force, of tearing things down like a mob. Surely, the call for a referendum in Iran is not that. It is the promotion of democracy at its purest. Bloggers on all sides of our political spectrum should be able to get behind that. I’m in.

I’m in too. Challenge the mullahs. The time is now.

I'm in too. Take some freedom and pass it on, my brother. Peace out.

Things Were Better In The Old Days

From an article by Diana West, posted at Townhall:

It would be a hoot to hop into a time machine and travel 40 years back, with press clippings of Paul McCartney's Super Bowl performance in hand, and try to explain to the folks in 1965 the cultural changes that were in store for them. Not that this would be an easy task. Who in 1965 could imagine, as Beatlemania was approaching its anti-Establishment crescendo, that the day would come when Beatle Paul would be the one the whole nation would congratulate, according to one review, for providing "decent half-time entertainment," fulfilling a virtual "guarantee he'll be innocuous," while not minding "his role as the Super Bowl's atonement for past excess."

The fact was, once, "decent," "innocuous" and "atonement" were not the first words associated with young Paul, John, George and Ringo. As The Beatles, they, more than any other rock act, produced the heartbeatingly familiar and practically worshipped 1960s soundtrack of rebellion and collapse. Or was that peace and love? I always get them confused.

In any case, the Fab Four were still combustibly controversial with barely prevailing middle-class culture back in 1965. They were still seen as the flying wedge of rock culture that sundered families and propelled generations along separate tracks. Indeed, The Beatles were rather more likely to be banned from major venues (as they were in Cleveland) than credited with raising the moral tone inside them.

What would help 2005 explain to 1965 the transformation of Paul McCartney from barbarian at the gate to defender of the faith? I'm not sure that simply appending the appearance of the Beatle to the appearance of the breast would make much sense. But even if The People We Used To Be acknowledged that The People We Have Become regard Paul McCartney as mainstream-wholesome, it remains very hard to explain why. Sure, at age 62, Paul McCartney is older. But it's worth noting that the songs he played to be innocuous and decent in the 21st century were the songs he played to be groovy and cool in the 20th. In other words, he didn't change: We did.

Listening to Sir Paul the other night (note: don't forget to tell 1965 that Queen Elizabeth knighted him in 1997) was an unnerving experience for a kaleidoscopic -- dare I say psychedelic? -- mix of reasons. He was in fine, if paler voice, hitting every familiar note and lick (to the point where one critic wondered if he had been lip-synching). It was as though the performance had been frozen in time, his for the remixing.

This is one thing if you're 62-old Pavarotti singing "Pagliacci," or even 62-year-old Noel Coward singing "Mad Dogs and Englishmen." But 62-year-old Paul McCartney singing "Baby, you can drive my car" is something else again. Jingle-catchy though the song may be, there was something more than a little pathetic about "Car/star/car/cuz baby I love you" 40 years down the pike; ditto for "Get Back," with its once ... Shocking? Unsavory? Dangerous? Reference to "California grass." Today, of course, soaked in the tepid wash of a toxic mainstream, we consider it decent.

I'm not sure what I was expecting, but the hollowness of the McCartney music was a little surprising. That hollowness was probably accentuated by the music's place very much at center stage, and by its distance from the psychodrama of the 1960s. Long ago, The Beatles sang the songs that accompanied the upending of a civilization -- the anti-war movement, the sacking of the universities, the explosion of illegal drug use, sexual experimentation, four-letter-language; the cultural and stylistic works. Theirs was a songbook redolent of the revolution that has permanently eliminated the barriers and boundaries that once regulated the mainstream. That revolution, of course, is how we got to Janet Jackson's MTV moment last year in the first place.

Is it just me, or is Diana West kinda hot? I mean, really. She's hot. Click over and check out her photo.

:)

Anyway, listen, she makes some good points. But you know, that reference to "grass" is hardly the death knell of civilization. I'll bet you Diana sat on her Daddy's knee when she was a little kid and laughed at Foster Brooks' drunk act. What's worse, drunkeness, or a reference to marijuana?

Like it or not, marijuana is part of our culture. I know, and have always known, people of enormous responsibility, and enormous success, who are regular everyday marijuana users. One guy I know is the CEO of a major HMO, and he sparks one up every day. It's his martini.

Of course, a lot of what came out of the sixties was bad and has continued to have a residual negative effect on our culture. But, do you want to even start to argue with me about whether things were better in American culture before the 1960's? Come on, Diana, I dare you.

Let's look at one simple thing. I remember standing on the lawn in front of my house with my father and the neighbor, oh this must of been around 1968, and the conversation went something like this:

"Yep, we gotta make sure that ole' Mr. Smith doesn't sell that house to no niggers. Hey, look that faggot hippy over there. Them faggots gonna ruin our country. Pinko faggot hippies."

That man, also, was the CEO of a big medical company. I'm conflating several conversations, and giving the conversation more of a southern bubba sound (for comedic effect hope you laughed) but faggot and nigger were the words used. That was the soundtrack I heard from adults when I was a kid. So, go ahead all you arch-conservatives and try to argue with me. Because I've only gotten started.

The American Thinker
Might Want To Think A Little More

Steven Warshawsky, writing in the American Thinker (such an important name) says Condi Rice doesn't have what it takes to be President. The main body of the argument is that Rice has no Executive experience. He makes the point that most 20th century Presidents have either been state governors, or they have led the military, as did Ike.

Ike notwithstanding, do you really think that heading a government entity is "executive experience"? What kind of Republican are you, my friend? Governments have elastic and artificial budgets. Therefore, leading a government is playland. If someone happens to be a truly effective governor, it is not the result of something they learned from government. It is the application of a practical, intelligent mind to real world problems.

George Bush is not a genius. And I'm pretty sure he is not involved in the nitty gritty details of governing. George Bush is a visionary and an intensely brave man, with an incredible ability to stick to a plan while in the midst of a tornado of criticism. George Bush also knows how to surround himself with people who are good at nitty gritty details. These qualities are the mark of a great executive.

Warshawsky apparently doesn't know what makes a great Executive because he never actually gets around to naming the qualities which he believes Condi Rice lacks.

Anyway, it is in these paragraphs where Warshawsky really demonstrates his foolishness:

Finally, one cannot ignore the demographic factors that would play into a Rice candidacy. First, while I do not believe that Rice’s being black is a negative, neither is it a plus. I do not doubt that there are voters who would not vote for her simply because of her race, but I am convinced their number is too small to make any difference electorally. Nor is there any reason to believe that these voters are more likely to be Republicans than Democrats or to reside in “swing” states versus solidly red or blue states. So whatever political effect such racism would have is likely to be negligible. At the same time, there will be voters who will be energized by the prospect of electing a black President and “sending a message” that racism has been relegated to the dustbin of American history. (Much of the excitement over the prospect of a Colin Powell candidacy in 1996, which I shared, came from these sorts of feelings.) Although such sentiments are honorable, they are unlikely to motivate many Republican voters, who will refuse to play “diversity” games with the Presidency of the United States, or persuade many Democrats – who otherwise revel in diversity games – to vote for a conservative presidential candidate.

Rice’s being a woman is a different issue, however. Whether we like it or not, most Americans – men and women – are not accustomed to having women in positions of significant authority outside the family. Moreover, I think it is safe to say that many Americans – men and women – view women CEOs, women generals, and women political leaders through a rather skeptical lens. Especially women generals. Do many people outside of NOW take them seriously, as leaders of men who go into battle to kill the enemy? I doubt it. Well, the President is commander-in-chief of the most powerful military in world history, one that is engaged in deadly hostilities, and deadly serious stand-offs, across the entire globe. Fair or not, the American people will not easily be persuaded to put a woman in this position.

This guy is, to my mind, profoundly ignorant of the way the world actually works. First off, if Mr. Warshawsky doesn't think we elect our leaders for less than practical reasons, then how does he account for the fact that John Kerry (a man who never articulated a clear position on any issue other than the "global test") got 48% of the vote? And how does Mr. Warshawsky account for the fact that the better looking candidate almost always wins? Practical considerations do factor in, but according to my judgement Condi Rice will likely prove to have enough of the qualities that people look for.

The rise and durability of the cults of Presidents like Reagan and Kennedy teach us of the most important factor in how Americans decide who to vote for. It's all about the story we want to tell ourselves. The candidate who tells the story the most clearly, and with the most force of personality, is the candidate who will set fire to the public imagination and who will win the vote everytime.

Condi Rice, from what little we've seen of her so far, looks to be a rather charismatic woman. She has a winnng smile, and a powerful, but controlled anger. These are very important qualities for a Presidential candidate. But the most important quality Condi Rice has is the story of her and her family and their dignity in dealing with the racism of 1950-60's era Alabama. The story of her rise out of relative poverty to the halls of highest power in the United States. This is the story Americans want to tell themselves about themselves.

I've got $1000 sitting here waiting for you, if you want to bet me on it, Mr. Warshawsky.

Monday, February 14, 2005

Haunted Europe

From the New York Times:

ANTWERP, Belgium - Filip Dewinter, a boyish man in a dark blue suit, bounds up two flights of steep stairs in his political party's 19th-century headquarters building where posters show a Muslim minaret rising menacingly above the Gothic steeple of the city's cathedral.

"The radical Muslims are organizing themselves in Europe," he declared. "Other political parties, they are very worried about the Muslim votes and say let's be tolerant, while we are saying - the new political forces in Europe are saying - no, we should defend our identity."

From the Freedom Party in Austria to the National Front in France to the Republicans in Germany, Europe's far right has made a comeback in recent years, largely on the strength of anti-immigration feelings sharpened to a fear of Islam. That fear is fed by threats of terrorism, rising crime rates among Muslim youth and mounting cultural clashes with the Continent's growing Islamic communities.

But nowhere has the right's revival been as swift or as strong as in Belgium's Dutch-speaking region of Flanders, where support for Mr. Dewinter's Vlaams Belang, or Flemish Interest, has surged from 10 percent of the electorate in 1999 to nearly a quarter today.

Vlaams Belang is now the strongest party in Flanders, with support from a third of the voters in Antwerp, the region's largest city. Many people worry that the appeal of antiIslamic politics will continue to spread as Europe's Muslim population grows.

"What they all have in common is that they use the issue of immigration and Islam to motivate and mobilize frustrated people," said Marco Martiniello, a political scientist at the University of Liège in the French-speaking part of Belgium. "In Flanders all attempts to counter the march of the Vlaams Belang have had no results, or limited results, and no one really knows what to do."

Fear of Islam's transforming presence is so strong that even many members of Antwerp's sizable Jewish community now support Mr. Dewinter's party, even though its founders included men who sympathized and collaborated with the Nazis during World War II.

Many of those supporters are Jews who feel threatened by a new wave of anti-Semitism emanating from Europe's growing Muslim communities. The friction is acutely felt in central Antwerp, where the Jewish quarter abuts the newer Muslim neighborhood of Borgerhout.

From what little I know of the Vlaams Belang, I think that Jews who choose to support the Party do so out of a political expediency which very well may come back to bite them in the ass in the not too distant future.

There, Hasidic diamond traders cross paths daily with Muslim youths, for many of whom conservative Islam has become an ideology of rebellion against perceived oppression. Israeli-Palestinian violence produces a dangerous echo here: anti-Israel marches have featured the burning in effigy of Hasidic Jews, and last June a Jewish teenager was critically wounded in a knife attack by a group of Muslim youths.

Think about that. They protest Israel by burning the effigy of a Hassidic (Eastern European) Jew. And they say they aren't anti-Semitic, they are just against Israeli policy.

Behind the wooden door of a brick Brussels town house, Jean-François Bastin, 61, a Belgian convert to Islam, holds court before a steady stream of Islamic activists. His fledgling Young Muslims Party is one of the new groups aggressively pursuing pro-Muslim agendas in Europe.

He calls Osama bin Laden "a modern Robin Hood," and the World Trade Center attacks "a poetic act," "a pure abstraction." His 23-year-old son is in jail in Turkey on charges that he was involved in the bombings there that killed 61 people in November 2003.

But Mr. Bastin argues that his son's troubles are evidence that Muslim youths feel politically excluded in Europe. He says political engagement is an antidote to militancy.

"There is deviance because people don't find their place here," he said, a long, hennaed beard falling over the front of his Arab-style tunic, his graying hair tucked beneath a turban fashioned from a multicolored head scarf. "If we deny that political voice that can judge and determine what is good for Muslims, from the point of view of their religion and their citizenship, their children are going to look for adventures elsewhere."

Mr. Bastin, who converted to Islam in 1972 after a spiritual quest led him to Morocco, dismisses the far right's fears of an Islamization of Europe, even if he does dream of an Islamic theocracy governing the Continent someday.

"Were not talking about Shariah now," he said, referring to the Islamic legal code that fundamentalist Muslims believe should be the foundation of society. "Were talking about Belgian Muslims being recognized on the same footing as other confessions and ideologies."

I guess he's willing to wait on the Shariah. That makes me feel more comfortable.

Many of the extreme right's supporters see Islam's growing European presence as the latest, most powerful surge of a Muslim tide that has ebbed and flowed since the religion spread to the Continent in the eighth century. They warn that lax immigration policies, demographic trends and a strong Muslim agenda will forever alter Europe.

The Continent's Muslim population, now 20 million, grew from a postwar labor shortage that was filled with workers from North Africa and Turkey. By the 1980's economic malaise and rising unemployment had created tension between the largely Muslim immigrants and the surrounding societies.

But family reunion policies, which granted visas to family members of immigrants already in Europe, fueled another, more sustained wave of immigration that continues today.

"We were very naïve," Mr. Dewinter said of the liberal policies. He called tolerance Europe's Achilles' heel and immigration Islam's Trojan horse.

The trend is even more distressing to the far right when considering the low birthrate of Europe's traditional populations and the likelihood that more workers will need to be imported in the coming decades to broaden the tax bases of the Continent's aging societies.

Already about 4,000 to 5,000 Flemish residents are leaving Antwerp every year, while 5,000 to 6,000 non-European immigrants arrive annually in the city, Mr. Dewinter said. Within 10 years, he predicts, people of non-European backgrounds will account for more than a third of Antwerp's population.

"It's growing very, very fast," Mr. Dewinter said. "Maybe that will be the end of Europe."

It seems like Europe is wedged in by a set of circumstances, somehow, perfectly constructed to expedite the rise of the far-right. Yesterday, I wrote about how the "skinheads" staged a 5000-person strong rally in Dresden. The article noted that they are angry that people do not recognize their suffering in World War II. Leaders of a prominent political party in Saxony had called the bombing of Dresden a "holocaust".

The Germans seem to have a unique ability to take offense at the destruction that bring upon themselves. History tells us that the rise of Hitler was brought about by German anger over the humiliating terms of surrender they were forced into at the end of World War I.

It's interesting to watch, as history unfolds before our eyes, how current events in Europe seem almost like an eery echo of the the 1930's. From Wikipedia:

In the West, those who believe in ghosts sometimes hold them to be souls that could not find rest after death, and so linger on Earth. The inability to find rest is often explained by unfinished business, such as a victim seeking justice or revenge after death. Criminals sometimes supposedly linger to avoid Purgatory or Hell.

What spirit is it that haunts Europe, lingering in the halls of European culture, repeatedly playing out it's vengeful script?

Sunday, February 13, 2005

Thousands of Neo-Nazi's
March In the Streets Of Germany

From Reuter's:

DRESDEN, Germany (Reuters) - Waving black flags and carrying banners, thousands of neo-Nazis marched in Dresden on Sunday, marring the official 60th anniversary commemoration of one of the fiercest Allied bombing raids of World War II.

Before the march Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder pledged to stop far-right groups exploiting the anniversary and portraying Germany as a war victim while ignoring Nazi atrocities.

Police said at least 3,000 people joined the march in the eastern German city, making it one of the biggest far-right demonstrations since the war. Before the march, police said 5,000 attended a neo-Nazi rally.

Once a fringe group, the neo-Nazis have seized on Germany's recognition finally of its own wartime suffering to grab headlines and forge political gains, especially in the east where unemployment remains high 15 years after unification.

Thousands of officers, backed by water cannon, were drafted into the city to stop the far-right supporters -- banned from wearing bomber jackets and boots -- clashing with anti-fascist activists, who chanted "Nazis out" from neighboring streets.

Official ceremonies began with a wreath-laying ceremony at a mass grave for 20,000 victims while neo-Nazi marchers elsewhere in the city carried balloons saying: "Allied bomb terror -- then as now. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden and today Baghdad. No forgiveness, no forgetting."

Dresden, untouched by bombing just months before the end of World War II, was nearly destroyed by two waves of British bombers on the night of Feb. 13, 1945. U.S. planes blasted the city the next day.

"We expect an official apology from Britain," NPD leader Udo Voigt told Reuters on the margins of the march.

The official death toll is put at around 35,000 but many survivors believe the actual number was higher as bodies were reduced to ashes in the ensuing firestorm.

British, American, French and Russian dignitaries attended events meant to send a message of peace and reconciliation, whilst remembering the crimes of the Nazis and those cities which shared Dresden's fate.

Members of the NPD that sits in the Dresden-based Saxony state parliament provoked outrage last month by walking out of a commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp and calling the air raids a "bombing holocaust."

Britain's ambassador to Germany, Sir Peter Torry, told Sunday's Tagesspiegel newspaper likening the bombing of Dresden to the Holocaust was "highly problematic" but played down the threat posed by the NPD. The Nazis killed six million Jews in the Holocaust during World War II.

"I would take the phenomenon seriously but not overrate it. The neo-Nazis got into Saxony's parliament but on a low turnout," he was quoted as saying.

Yeah sure, don't worry about the fact that people have been elected into the German Parliament by running openly as Nazi's for the first time since WWII.

And notice the Nazi's are againt the iraq War. I guess they're peaceful Nazi's

Being Left Means Never
Having To Say You're Sorry

From AP, via Powerline:

Iraqi election results are about as expected. Turnout was a terrific 60%. The Shiite-backed slate (which also includes Sunnis and others) led with 48% of the vote; the Kurdish list got 26%, and interim Prime Minister Allawi's party received 14%. Seats in the new Assembly will be more or less proportional to the vote; somewhat remarkably, I think, only twelve coalitions will be represented in the Assembly.

Behind the scenes politicking will now go on as the Assembly prepares to write a new Constitution. Great. Is it perfect? No. But for Iraqis, it's a wonderful introduction to the normal world after thirty years of living in a nightmare.

I want to point out that Allawi, who many on the left have intimated was in cahoots with Bush, was part of the imperialistic plans that America has for Iraq, received just 14% of the vote, compared to the 48% of the Shiite Party. I guess we're just not very good at executing our imperialistic designs anymore, huh? Looks like Bush better bone up on the Imperialism: Raping and Pillaging for Fun and Profit book they gave him back in Skull and Bones.

Hell, if Diebold could fix the elections for Bush here in the U.S., why couldn't they fix them in Iraq? I guess Bush oughta fire the CEO of Diebold, right?

So, you know, I'm waiting to hear an apology, aren't you?

Sorry to be so sarcastic, but I admit it, I am really, just, you know, pissed off.

When we handed the oil back to Iraq, there was no acknowledgement. When we handed control of the country back to the Iraqi's, there was no acknowledgement. When we set election dates, they opposed them, saying (somehow, I never understood the logic) that elections would bring about the destruction of Iraq. When the election happened, and looked to have been a success, we were treated to one article (by a guy from Chicago Sun-Times, I believe it was) stating grudgingly that he might have to admit Bush was right. And now this. I'm waiting.

Crickets chirp. Frogs ribbit. Lileks bleats. All the chorus of nature swells up in the silence

Dostoevsky The Prophet

From an article by Collin Hansen, entitled Dostoevsky's Disregarded Prophecy, in Christianity Today:

The dogma of progress may never recover from the 20th century. Entire continents razed by war, whole peoples wiped from Earth, generations decimated for no good reason—such an optimistic view of human capacity didn't have a chance. What could possibly cause such catastrophic anguish? How could we fail to adapt, evolve, or learn from our earlier mistakes?

Before the killing started, Europe's brightest intellectuals gathered in fashionable salons to debate Marxism, eugenics, and utopia—ideas that would unleash this destruction. Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky chaired many such meetings during the mid-19th century. By the time he completed The Brothers Karamazov in 1879, Dostoyevsky had established himself as a foremost opponent of secularism and revolutionary Marxism.

His prophetic denunciation of secular totalitarianism—embodied less than a century after his death by Hitler and Stalin—helped me understand the root of rebellion against God that haunted the 20th century and threatens us still today.

You can't learn Dostoyevsky without learning about his Christian faith. And despite majoring in European history and taking a class called "American Evangelicalism," I had yet to hear a compelling or fair case for Christianity until we began reading about the dysfunctional Karamazov family.

Dostoyevsky's Christian faith, like his writing, bears the mark of tortured genius. His biography from 131 Christians Everyone Should Know explains, "Though a devout Christian, he was never a good one." He squandered royalties while gambling and frantically authored his greatest works to stay one step ahead of the creditors.

Perhaps Dostoyevsky owes his unique brand of confrontational apologetics to this messy faith. Never inclined to moderation, Dostoyevsky slaps you in the face with dingy scenes of urban squalor and shady, depraved characters. His Underground Man in Notes from Underground notoriously inspires a prostitute to love him, then seduces her, only to humiliate her by paying her for the occasion. The Karamazov family patriarch cares so little for his children that he forgets they even exist. Dostoyevsky reminds us in Memoirs from the House of the Dead that "the executioner's nature is found in embryo in almost every contemporary man."

Many of Dostoyevsky's characters bore the strikingly complex image of their creator. Troubled in his youth by Russia's dismal poverty and indifferent leaders, Dostoyevsky developed an affinity for revolutionary philosophy. According to these theories, the inherited social order prevented humans from reaching their full capacity for virtue. Therefore people should be freed from the bondage of religious superstition and empowered to overthrow their leaders. This kind of talk earned Dostoyevsky a death sentence from the czar, who pardoned him at the last second in a particularly cruel stunt intended to break his will. It worked.

Dostoyevsky wasn't off the hook, though. He labored the next four years in a Siberian work prison. There he poured over the only book he had—the New Testament. When he regained his freedom, Dostoyevsky devoted himself to defending Christianity and fighting his former allies.

Possibly his most prophetic book, Crime and Punishment details how Raskolnikov, the book's main character, kills two women and wrestles with the moral and psychological effects. Inwardly struggling to justify his crime, Raskolnikov writes an article that cites Napoleon's and Mohammed's bloodshed to argue that "extraordinary" men transcend law.

His friends discuss the article's implications: "In his article all men are divided into 'ordinary' and 'extraordinary.' Ordinary men have to live in submission, have no right to transgress the law, because, don't you see, they are ordinary. But extraordinary men have a right to commit any crime and to transgress the law in any way, just because they are extraordinary." Unaware of Raskolnikov's guilt, a friend then turns to him. "That was your idea, if I am not mistaken?"

Raskolnikov, though, faulted himself for not living up to this "ideal." He couldn't dodge the guilt. But this idea was more than just the ranting of a guilt-ridden killer. The theory had gained wide hearing in Dostoyevsky's day. Friedrich Nietzsche further legitimized the idea of a "superman" unrestrained by Christian values. A superman refuses "antiquated" notions of right and wrong, recognizing only those values that help him get ahead.

Even if you don't recognize these theories, you recognize their effect. Dostoyevsky's beloved Russia eventually succumbed to revolutionary fervor in 1917, and "supermen" Lenin and Stalin justified their murderous barbarism by appealing to visions of communist utopia. Competing forms of superman ideology clashed during World War II, pitting Hitler's genocidal eugenics against Soviet aspirations. Today Osama bin Laden, while not secular, excuses his murder of innocents by claiming a superior morality.

Dostoyevsky's great contribution to Christianity is that he shows us how to combat the destructive theories he so effectively explains. Christians must undermine the attractiveness of such ideas by bringing rebellious humans into a loving relationship with Christ. Sonia, a young woman forced into prostitution to support her step-siblings, models for Dostoyevsky how God uses unlikely vessels to communicate his truth. She accepts Raskolnikov's confession and forgives him, despite her friendship with one of his victims. She further coaxes him to realize his idea's failings and spurs him toward repentance with her unconditional love.

In our study of history, we are bound to wonder how our loving God could tolerate such evil as we experienced in the 20th century. While writing a thesis in college about Christian opposition to Hitler's terror, I couldn't help but cry over horrific tales of senseless murder. Dostoyevsky never shies away from these problems of evil. But even after posing difficult challenges to the Christian faith, he refuses to provide tidy answers. He prefers to illustrate consequences, reminding us what a world without God looks like. Finally, he exemplifies the simple yet determined Christian character that offers a hopeful alternative.

While I appreciate this article, there are two very flawed ideas threaded into the fabric of Mr. Hansen's overall point. One is that Osama bin Laden excuses his murder of innocents by claiming a superior morality. That is an almost wholly inadequate explanation. The truth is, Osama bin Laden justifies his actions through a philosophy of Islamic Supremacism, not at all unlike Hitler's Nazism. Under bin Laden's Sayyid Qutb-influenced Islamist ideology, anyone who is not practicing true Islam is of the Dar al-Harb (House of War), is evil and is doing violence against Islam. In other words, they are inferior to those who live in the Dar al-Islam (House of Submission/Peace).

The other mistake in this article is Dostoevsky's idea that the servant Prostitute could "forgive" Raskalnikov. This idea is laughable. Of course, she could forgive him for the pain caused her by the murder of her friend. But, for the murder he can not be forgiven. The person he murdered is dead, so how can forgiveness be offered? The answer is, it can only be offered by God, since ultimately that's who all our murders are aimed at.

Trading Western Civilization
For A Barrel Of Oil

Here are some important quotes from ex-President of Lebanon Gemayel, brought to us by the folks at No Pasaran:

Relations between Lebanon and the European States deteriorated because the latter also tried to solve the Middle-East problem at the expense of Lebanon. In addition, many European countries had adopted the obsequious policy of fawning on the Arab States in order to secure their oil supplies. This was done, of course, at the expense of the Christians, of their security, their very existence. Bashir referred to both these factors:

"Europe and many other States are not able to digest the Christian presence in this corner of the world, because it is a stumbling-block to most of their ambitions in this area... The Americans and the West have not yet assimilated the fact that we, the Christians of the Orient, represent their last line of defense against a return to the dark ages, against terror and blind fundamentalism, against those who seek to annihilate all the values of civilization and of their culture... Today, they want to ‘sell us down the river’ for a barrel of oil!”...

These two factors led Bashir to condemn the West in these words : “The West, today, is showing signs of decadence in its policies, in its morals, in its economy.”

In his tirade, Bashir did not omit France, and he frankly blamed it for the servile attitude of its former Foreign Minister, Louis de Guiringaud. “Periodically, we were fighting in self-defense here while De Guiringaud and Mondale were criticizing us for standing firm and calling us all sorts of names, alleging that we were a band of outlaws who deserved to be punished...”

Yet, in spite of all this, Bashir reaffirmed Lebanon’s affiliation to the Western democracies : “We are a part of the Free World”.

Bashir Gemayel was assasinated by Syrian agents on September 14, 1982, mere weeks after the Parliament appointed him President of Lebanon.

On 9/11 I had a relative call me an explain, in pseudo-reasonable language, why the United States deserved what had happened. He was absolutely wrong.

On the other hand, Bashir Gemayel makes a very good point here. We are decadent in our policies, morals, and economies. We have been selling the Christian, and Jews, of the Islamic world down the river for "a barrel of oil" for the past twenty-five years. This is a deep shame on us, and it is suicidal. In this sense, we did deserve 9/11.

We need to make sure we do not bring anymore punishment on ourselves. In order to atone for our sins, we need to understand who it is we sin against and what were the results of our actions.

When you meet a person from the Middle East, ask them what brought them here. You will be amazed by the stories. The man who has been fixing my car for the past twenty years is an Armenian Christian, who lived in Iran until the Khomeini revolution. His family had been successful and happy in Iran, but were forced to flee by the often violent religious persecution of Christians.

Another person with whom I do business is a Lebanese Christian whose entire family, in a very similar story, was forced to flee Lebanon, leaving behind all their wealth.

Have you ever noticed how many people who work at gas stations, and serving you from behind counters, have an education and intelligence beyond what you might expect to find? The reason is, in many cases, these people were business owners, Doctors, Lawyers, and members of the ruling class in the countries from which they FLED. From which they were forced to flee.

My wife and her family were fled their country because of Jihadi's. Her father was from an upper middle-class family of business owners. When they arrived here in America they lived in squalor for a good fifteen to twenty years, but it was better than watching heads, literally, roll in the streets.

We live a very blessed life here in America. To continue on in our suicidal behavior is an abomination and a disgustingly ungrateful curse against our blessedness.

The Iranian Government
Formally Protested the Illegal Incursions

Oh know, the United States is violating international law again. Clearly, George Bush is the equal of Hitler:

The Bush administration has been flying surveillance drones over Iran to seek evidence of nuclear weapons programs and detect weaknesses in air defenses, the WASHINGTON POST is planning to splash on Sunday.

Newsroom sources tell DRUDGE: The small, pilotless planes, penetrating Iranian airspace from U.S. military facilities in Iraq, use radar, video, still photography and air filters designed to pick up traces of nuclear activity to gather information that is not accessible to satellites, the officials said.

The aerial espionage is standard in military preparations for an eventual air attack and is also employed as a tool for intimidation.

"The Iranian government, using Swiss channels in the absence of diplomatic relations with Washington, formally protested the illegal incursions, according to Iranian, European and U.S. officials."

Saturday, February 12, 2005

The Rise Of The Blogs

I used to subscribe to Newsweek Magazine, the New Yorker, and the LA Times. Since 1998, I have also gotten news from Yahoo, Drudge and CNN, as well as talk radio. When the war started, I started to read World Net Daily, which I didn't agree with for the most part, but I found news there that I found no where else.

Gradually I expanded outward from there, reading Townhall, Front Page and National Review, along with the previously mentioned news sources. Then one day in mid-2002, I was listening to Dennis Prager, and he had a guest on named Charles Johnson, from the now famous Little Green Footballs. Over the past three years, I have one by one canceled all my subscriptions (except the LA Times, which I keep for the sports page), and stopped watching television news altogether.

I now get all my news from blogs. I read some twenty to thirty blogs per day. I do still read Drudge about once a day, but he's a sort of blogger himself, isn't he?

Now, why the switch?

Because of the fact that the only news I get on the MSM is of the "Suicide Bomber Kills 12" or "Rumsfeld Says We Will Stay the Course" variety. I consider this to be "No Duh" news. We are in a war. Why would I be surprised when the enemy attacks us? Why would I be surprised when our leaders make a statement of continued determination?

What I want from the news is to know, is there progress towards democracy in Iraq? What big fish have we caught? What is the larger vision for the war?

I find that the MSM doesn't give me these things. Instead, I feel they deluge me with a downpour of irrelavancies and minutiae. Don't get me wrong. I don't want to be lied to. When an Abu Ghraib-type incident occurs, I want to know about it. I want to know why we haven't found WMD's. I want our leaders to have to answer to these things.

However, I don't want such stories to overwhelm the more important issue at hand, which is our progress towards victory in this war.

If we don't win this war, the whole world loses. The MSM doesn't seem to understand that fact. They, like John Kerry, seem to think we could merely go back to the way things were previously.

I would venture to guess that those who, like me, have switched over to the blogs for their news, are people who believe the world changed on 9/11.

The blogs speak of the import and nobility of America's path in this war. The MSM does not. The blogs believe that the world fundamentally changed on 9/11. The MSM does not.

In short, we seem to live on different planets. Now, why would I want to leave the Earth to get my news?

Friday, February 11, 2005

Democracy

Victor David Hanson tells us whyAmerica's policy of deporting democracy is something to celebrate:

1. It is widely said that democracies rarely attack other democracies. Thus the more that exist in the world — and at no time in history have there been more such governments than today — the less likely is war itself. That cliché proves, in fact, mostly true. There are gray areas of course in such blanket generalizations: The Confederates, British, Boers, and Prussians all had parliaments of sorts, but were clearly not as democratic as their adversaries in 1861, 1812, 1899, and 1914. Thus should Iraq become a true constitutional government, it is less likely to invade a Kuwait, pay subsidies to suicide murderers, send missiles into Israel and Saudi Arabia, or gas its own people.

2. More often than not, democracies arise through violence — either by threat of force or after war with all the incumbent detritus of humiliation, impoverishment, and revolution. The shame of the Falklands debacle brought down the Argentine dictatorship in the same manner that Portugal's imperial disasters in Africa steered it from fascism to republicanism. Japan, Germany, and Italy arose from the ashes of war, as did South Korea and in a sense Taiwan as well.
Most likely Ronald Reagan's arms build-up of the 1980s bankrupted the Soviet Empire and freed both its "republics" and the enslaved states of Eastern Europe. So the birth pangs of democracy are often violent, and we should pay little attention to critics who clamor that the United States cannot prompt reform through regime change.

3. Democracies are more likely to be internally stable, inasmuch as they allow people to take credit and accept blame for their own predicaments. They keep their word, or as Woodrow Wilson once put it, "A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic nations."

A Hitler, Mussolini, shah, or Pinochet can hijack for a time weak democracies, but they offered no real improvement and only led the people to disaster. Some in desperation talk of the need for a "good" Saddam-like strongman to knock a few heads in the Sunni Triangle — but that vestigial idea from the Cold War would only bring a few months or years of stability at the price of decades of unrest.

4. The democratic idea is contagious. We once worried about the negative Communist domino theory, but the real chain reaction has always been the positive explosion of democracy. When Portugal and Spain flipped, it had an enormous positive effect on moving change forward in the Spanish-speaking world of Latin America — as liberty spread, once-right-wing Chile and left-wing Nicaragua were freed. The Soviet republics and Eastern European satellites without much warning imploded in succession — more quickly even than the Russians had once enslaved them in the late 1940s.

It is not a neocon pipedream, but historically plausible that a democratic Israel, Palestine, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Iraq can create momentum that Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, and eventually even a Syria or Iran would find hard to resist. Saudi Arabia's ballyhooed liberalization, Mubarak's unease about his successor, Libya's strange antics, Pakistan's revelation about nuclear commerce, and the Gulf States' talk of parliaments did not happen in a vacuum, but are rumblings that follow from fears of voters in Afghanistan and Iraq — and a Mullah Omar dethroned and Saddam's clan either dead or in chains.

5. In the case of the Muslim world, there is nothing inherently incompatible between Islam and democracy. Witness millions in India, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Turkey who vote. Such liberal venting may well explain why those who blow up Americans are rarely Indian or Turkish Muslims, but more likely Saudis or Egyptians. The trick is now to show that Arab Muslims can establish democracy, and thus the Palestine and Iraq experiments are critical to the entire region.

6. Democracy brings moral clarity and cures deluded populaces of their false grievances and exaggerated hurts. The problem in the Middle East is the depressing relationship between autocracies and Islamists: Illiberal governments fault the Americans and Jews for their own failure. Thus in lieu of reform, strongmen deflect popular frustration by allowing the Wahhabis, al Qaedists, and other terrorists to use their state-controlled media likewise to blame us rather than a Mubarak, Saudi Royal Family, or Saddam Hussein. Yet just as crowded Germans today do not talk of the need for lebensraum and resource-less Japanese have dropped dreams of a Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere, so too a democratic Middle East will more likely look inward at tribalism, patriarchy, fundamentalism, religious intolerance, and polygamy rather than automatically at Israel and the United States when their airliners crash or a car bomb goes off.

7. We fret rightly about the spread of weapons of mass destruction. But the truth is that we worry mainly about nukes in the hands of autocracies like China, Iran, or North Korea. No American loses sleep that the UK or France has deadly missiles. A Russia that used to paralyze American foreign policy by virtue of it atomic arsenal poses little threat as long as President Putin can be persuaded not to destroy his consensual government.

8. The promotion of democracy abroad by democracy at home is internally consistent and empowers rather than embarrasses a sponsoring consensual society. All sensible Europeans and Americans eventually ask themselves why freedom is fine for us but not for others. And if the novel orthodoxy of the post-Cold War era demanded that democracies must cease their support for rightist thugs, the subsequent wisdom is that they should be even more muscular, actively supporting democratic change rather than postfacto politely clapping after its establishment.

9. By promoting democracies, Americans can at last come to a reckoning with the Cold War. If it was wrong then to back a shah or Saudi Royal family ("keep the oil flowing and the Commies out") or to abandon Afghanistan after repelling the Soviets, it is surely right now not to repeat the error of realpolitik — especially when there is no longer the understandable excuse of having thousands of Soviet nuclear weapons pointing at the heart of America.

10. Like it or not, a growing consensus has emerged that consumer capitalism and democracy are the only ways to organize society. We are not at the end of history yet — wars and revolutions may well plague us for decades. But if we cannot achieve universal democracy, we can at least get near enough to envision it. I doubt whether George Bush's vision of ending tyranny in our lifetime is possible, but he is to be congratulated for grasping that in our lifetime most of the world agrees that it should be.

Why The "Charm Offensive"?

From National Review, Denis Boyles (who lives in France) analyzes Condi Rice's "charm offensive" tour through Europe and how it stands in contrast to the reality of current European politics:

Remember Face-Off, the John Travolta-Nicolas Cage thriller about two guys whose mugs get switched by mad science? I was thinking about the movie as Condoleezza Rice, the Iron Lady of the first Bush term, timidly served up crème brulée to a crowd of jaded French pinheads in Paris last week. Wouldn't it be cool, I thought, if she turned aside for a moment, peeled off her face, and when she turned back to the audience she had become Richard Perle? That would soil a few carpets, mes amigos.

But no such luck. Voice shaking slightly, lips quivering — unless that was the French TV camera shaking — she stood in the front of a crowded amphi filled with more than 500 leftwing Frenchies at Sciences Po and, as Le Monde chirpily reported, made nice.

Granted, nice is not terribly difficult when you're shilling a foreign policy based on a lofty platitude like "democracy cures all," especially in front of a crowd that will fawn lovingly on the sentiment of the idea and thoughtfully explore its airier philosophical implications ...

Like Rice, Bush grew in popularity during his first term because of his apparent willingness to ditch the shuck and jive of political cynicism and say and do the things that needed to be said and done. If Bush does a Condi-style sweetness tour when he arrives week after next and starts mush-mouthing garbage about writing "new chapters" with "traditional allies," it'll make words like "To the Iranian people, I say tonight: As you stand for your own liberty, America stands with you" sound like Hawaiian noises ...

The European Left caricatures Americans as naïve yahoos who just want to be liked and are too stupid to know when they're being shafted. No wonder to the European press, the Rice visit was seen as a success. After all, the French foreign minister, Michel Barnier, welcomed the new chapter stuff, explaining to Le Monde, that France wanted its relationship with America to be based on multipolarity — an "alliance" but, he added, certainly not one that included "allegiance."

To Reuters, to the European and American dailies — and even to Matt Drudge — Barnier's drivel was a sign that France wanted to turn over a "new leaf" in its relationship with the US. Maybe it should be noted that "allegiance" means "loyalty" so the French-style "alliance" Barnier has in mind is not only allegiance-free but also seeks to undermine U.S. power in order to give more power to France. That's what we call turning over an old leaf. When it comes to chapter writing, France is sticking with what it knows.

The European press liked the fact that Rice seemed well-behaved and respectful, and even though she didn't quite apologize for the U.S. war in Iraq, her Paris appearance was seen as properly contrite. In the Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash explained that Rice's "conciliatory speech" was Muzak to European ears. "There's no doubt," he wrote, "that the new US secretary of state has conducted an impressive charm offensive during her lightning tour of Europe. She has presented a more elegant face, spoken a more nuanced language and played a sweeter mood music than those whom most Europeans have come to associate with the Bush administration over the past four years."

That's fine, but as Rice was doing her lullaby gig — followed by even more wussified obsequiousness from Rumsfeld, reported in the EU Observer — the rest of the world was being uncooperative.

The EU, which has taken the responsibility of solving the Iranian nuclear-arms issue with its elegant, nuanced, delightfully musical diplomacy, announced it was going to ignore U.S. policy and lift the arms embargo hated by the French and Germans and start shipping arms to China.

For a while, the U.S. stridently opposed this, pointing to China's threats against Taiwan and its abysmal human-rights record, including the widespread cases of genuine torture of Christians, such as some of those itemized here by China Aid. Now arms for China appears to be an issue on which Rice seems willing to surrender, according to a report in the International Herald Tribune. The crazy thing about selling weapons to China is that, despite U.S. protests, China is selling weapons to — where else? — Iran.

Meanwhile in Germany, according to a round-up in Davids Medienkritik anti-Americanism has reached such a feverish pitch that the leader of the opposition is portrayed on a carnival float in Mainz, which will host Bush when he visits Germany, showing her enjoying Bush's "opening" to Germany by climbing into his butt. Actually, click on that link and check out the whole story. German anti-Americanism is hatred in a style only the Germans can fully master.

In France, according to a poll reported in Le Monde, nearly nine out of ten French citizens dislike U.S. policies — about the same amount of non-support the U.S. gets from Germans. Americans who bother to think about it seem a little better disposed toward the Europeans, but really most of us just don't give a damn.

In Pyongyang, the North Koreans announced they have nukes and are willing to use them. Rice's response, as Hadelsblatt reported, was to issue a warning. That's where international diplomacy got us in Asia.

It's exactly where it'll get us in Iran as well, since the Europeans have no intention of playing hardball with the mullahs. And why should they? The French can't even be made to play it tough with the Sudan, for pity's sake, because their oil deals are more important to them than genocide or near-genocide or quasi-genocide or whatever fecal euphemism the U.N. is using this week. (The BBC reports that the U.N. now thinks what's happening in Darfur is something that has "genocidal intent.") If they did, we'd already have a U.N. Security Council resolution with sharp dentures built-in to get the Muslims in the northern part of the country to please stop slaughtering the natives in Darfur.

The mess in Darfur, like the charade in Iran, is the result of letting those who are defenseless and frightened play at diplomacy while leaving the hard business of enforcement up to the global adult. To the European press, and to the EU governments, the world is somebody else's problem, as this report in Le Monde suggests. Nukes in North Korea? Not our concern, monsieur. The job of the Europeans is to quibble and kibbitz, obstruct and exploit.

Denis Boyles is being foolish if he really thinks that Rice's "charm offensive" is anything more than a sophisticated power play. A quote from The Godfather Part III:

"Power is a gun. Politics is knowing when to pull the trigger."

If I were Europe, I would be very worried. Denis Boyles called the United States the "global adult". All children know that they are never in so much trouble as when their parents speak in excessively calm and measured tones. I look forward to the next few months with much fear and trembling. Bush may very well have some very big plans on the agenda.

"Settler Nation" Saves The World

Let it be known at the outset that the title is kind of a joke. Anyway, here is an excert from a Mark Steyn column, published in the London Telegraph. Mark discusses how Europe lives in an anti-American fantasy world, while great changes are being made in the real world:

... in the Guardian, Martin Jacques has moved on to penning orgasmic fantasies of the mid-century when China will bestride the world and America will be consigned to the garbage heap of history.

Jacques's reasoning - the Chinese are an "ancient civilisation" whereas America is a mere "settler society" - is merely a modish gloss on the traditional argument made by the Germans for the better part of two centuries, that they're an ancient volk while the Americans are an artificial uncultured mongrel "half-degenerated sub-race" (Kant in 1775).

Cornelius de Pauw, court philosopher to Frederick II, was peddling the Jacques line in 1768: Americans were "stunted" and their colonies "degenerate or monstrous"; and "in a fight, the weakest European could crush them with ease". Granted the general retro vibe that hangs over Europe these days, it smacks of desperation to have modified de Pauw's line only insofar as claims to crush America's stunted degenerates with ease are no longer made on your own behalf, but that of Johnny Chinaman 50 years hence.

The obsession of the anti-Americans misses the point: it's not about America. Surely even Fisk and the other "experts" aren't so obtuse that they can't see that the one undeniable fact of the election is that there are millions of Iraqis who want change. That doesn't mean they want to turn Basra and Kirkuk into Cleveland and Buffalo, only that they want something other than the opposing cul-de-sacs of secular pan-Arabist dictatorship and death-cult Islamism, which dead-end alternatives are all the region's had to offer for decades.

For want of a better expression, they'd like a "Third Way": so, just as America has New Democrats and Britain has New Labour, here come the New Shia. Ayatollah Sistani isn't like Khomeini and the other old-school mullahs, and the emergence of a moderate pluralist Shia-led federation in Iraq will be as devastating to the Teheran regime's long-term prospects as any Israeli-American strike on their nuke facilities. As the Arab networks' election-day coverage instinctively grasped, the American angle to this story will be increasingly peripheral.

Now I take the point that "democracy" - as in elections - isn't every thing. In the development of successful nations, the universal franchise is usually the last piece of the puzzle, as it was in Britain. Anyone can hold an election: Mugabe did; so did Charles Taylor, the recently retired Psycho-for-Life of Liberia. The world's thugocracies have got rather skilled at being just democratic enough to pass muster with Jimmy Carter and the international observers: they kill a ton of people, put it on hold for six weeks and then, when the UN monitors have moved on, pick up their machetes and resume business as usual.

I prefer to speak of "liberty" or, as Bush says, "freedom", or, as neither of us is quite bold enough to put it, capitalism - free market, property rights, law of contract, etc. That's why Hong Kong is freer than Liberia, if less "democratic". If I had six or seven centuries to work on things, I wouldn't do it this way in Iraq or Afghanistan. But the "war on terror" is more accurately a race against time - to unwreck the Middle East before its toxins wreck South Asia, West Africa, and eventually Europe. The doom-mongers can mock Bush all they want. But they're spending so much time doing so, they've left themselves woefully uninformed on some of the fascinating subtleties of Iraqi and Afghan politics that his Administration turns out to have been rather canny about.

The thing is, if the Europeans didn't have their anti-American fantasies to occupy them, what would they have? The answer is unemployment problems, a social security crisis exacerbated by declining birth rates, immigrants who have no interest in assimilating, and an almost complete lack of physical power in a world where physical power seems to matter more and more everyday.

I love that settler nation thing. That's freakin funny with it's campy Hitlerian connotations. I mean, who talks like that? The only time I hear language like that in this country, it's coming out of the mouth of some poor loser skinhead on one of the daytime talk shows. But such ideas are considered sophisticated analysis in the esteemed Guardian newspaper.

And comparing the United States negatively to China? Yeah, that makes sense. Millions of people are just clamoring at the doors of China trying to get in for a lifetime of that lifestyle, huh? Just think of the day that China will rule the globe. That will be a brave new world.

But, the most important point here in Mr. Steyn's article is that the War on Terror is a race against time before the Islamofascists toxins wreck Southeast Asia, West Africa and Europe. Yeah, that's true, but he left out the United States. We're not spending billions of dollars to save Southeast Asia. We're doing it because we believe we are legitimately threatened by regimes such as the former Iraq, and the current Iran, Syria, and North Korea.

Of course Mark Steyn knows this. He was just trying to make the point that the whole world has a horse in this race against time. That is true, but it would serve America well to be honest with the world. To not try to dress our war up in the finery of nobility. Democracy is only a tool in this war. We believe that, by installing Democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan, we will create a world that will be safer for us. Likewise with saving the world. Western Civilization has been perfectly willing to allow the world to languish as long as it does not threaten us. So, yes, we will beat back the Islamofascism that threatens all those places mentioned, but we do it because we live in the world, and we are dependant on all those nations

But, while I think we need to be honest about our less than altruistic intentions, I absolutely think we ought to celebrate the good that comes out of this war. The burgeoning democracies of Iraq and Afghanistan are causes for great joy and hope. And there is there is a glory to these victories. And we ought to be allowed to bask in our glory for a time.

Thursday, February 10, 2005

Sometimes You Just Gotta
Love Your Enemies

From Front Page Magazine:

Ayatollah 'Ali Khamenei is the 'Supreme Leader' of Iran and commands the Iranian military. He is on the forefront of supporting Jihad against America. Many of Khamenei's sermons are broadcast live on Iranian state-controlled television and can be viewed on MEMRI's TV Monitor Project (www.memritv.org).

The Supreme Leader frequently threatens the U.S. against interfering with Iran's nuclear program. On July 5, 2004, he stated to a crowd chanting "Death to America": "We will cut off the hand that is sent to invade and work against our people's interests… If the enemy has the audacity to harm and invade, our blows against it will not be limited to the borders of our country…"

This past summer Khamenei gave a speech broadcast on the Iranian channel Jaam-E-Jam 2 about the same subject: "The enemies of Iran – led by the most despicable of all, the U.S. government … opened their filthy mouths… We have no need for a nuclear bomb… The Iranian people has been defeating America for the past 25 years. The world of Islam has been mobilized against America for the past 25 years. The people call 'death to America!'"

In response to President Bush's State of the Union message on February 3, 2005, Khamenei called the U.S. "one of the lands of a Seven Headed Dragon." As a main propagator of anti-Americanism, the Supreme Leader often compares President Bush to Adolf Hitler and the U.S. to Nazi Germany. An article was devoted to this subject in the Persian daily Jomhour-e Eslami, paraphrasing comments made the week of August 30, 2002 by Khamenei: "The language of the U.S. president resembles the language of Hitler… If Hitler had to show the face of a bloodthirsty dictator, he would have had to adopt [the face of] George W. Bush."

The article continued, describing Khamenei's philosophy that the U.S. is the modern incarnate of Nazi Germany: "There is a great resemblance between the behavior of today's Americans and the behavior of the Nazis… The Americans are infected today with satanic pride and arrogant egotism… Bush is heading towards a dead end on the same path on which the dictators who caused the two world wars."

In a sermon Khamenei gave on April 5, 2002, he declared: "The world has already seen these Hitlers. Earlier [in world history] Hitler intended to do the same. Anyone wishing to challenge the nations' will and power … will be crushed and annihilated… This will be America's bitter end."

Khamenei is confident that the U.S. will soon collapse. He was quoted in Jomhour-e Eslami on May 20, 2004, stating that "the end of the U.S. will begin in Iraq. As the Imam [Khomeini] said, 'One day the U.S. too will be history.' In light of what happened in Iraq, we can see now that he is right, because such events move the U.S. down the slope, and they will taste the bitterness of sure defeat."

One of the Supreme Leader's weapons to be used to defeat the U.S. is Jihad by Iranian students who are willing to become martyrs. Speaking to a group of students in the first week of 2005, the Iranian paper Sharq quoted Khamenei calling on them to embrace Jihad: "The enemies of Iran tried to humiliate and diminish the value of martyrdom [shahada] and the culture of Jihad in the eyes of the youth, particularly students… This [ideal] is the same wondrous element that gives those fighting Jihad for the path of truth the strength to overcome any scheme of the front of hostility."

On January 20, 2005, urging students to continue to promote the culture of Jihad and martyrdom amongst themselves, he stated: "When we encounter the name of a student who committed martyrdom we are confident that the acceptance of martyrdom and of the Jihad that led to this martyrdom stemmed from [the martyr's] self-awareness… This intensifies the value of the act. Sanctify and praise your exalted martyrs…"

In an address broadcast on Iranian TV on October 22, 2004, Khanemei explained: "Jihad means to strive for the lofty values… Whoever fights for these values … Allah's angels point to him in heaven.

You gotta love your enemies when they tell the truth. Here the Supreme Leader of the nation of Iran is encouraging his people to forge a clandestine war on the United States. Well, that is a declaration of war every way but name.

But, of course, when we do finally attack Iran, we will be accused of having made up the threat.

Right.

Anti-Semitic Attacks
Reach Alarming Level In Britain

From Reuters, via Little Green Footballs:

LONDON (Reuters) - Violent anti-Semitic attacks in Britain have reached "alarming" record levels, according to a report released, prompting calls by Jewish leaders for more to be done to protect their community.

The Community Security Trust (CST), which represents Britain's 290,000-strong Jewish community on security matters, said on Thursday there had been 532 "anti-Semitic incidents" -- defined as malicious acts toward Jews -- in 2004, including a record 83 assaults.

The total, which included abuse and threats, was a rise of 42 percent from the CST's 2003 figure, and well above the previous record high of 405 in 2000.

"This increase is extremely alarming. The transfer of tensions in the Middle East to the streets of Britain has resulted in an unprecedented level of anti-Semitic incidents," said Michael Whine, director of communications for the CST.

The Trust said 100 incidents were reported in March 2004 alone. In the worst incident, a Jewish teenager had his jaw shattered in the English south coast city of Southampton.

Last month London police said they were hunting a group of black and Asian men said to be behind a string of racist attacks on orthodox Jewish men in the capital.

A few days earlier, vandals daubed swastikas and other Nazi symbols on 10 gravestones in a Jewish cemetery in Aldershot, southern England, the second time it had been targeted.

Britain's Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, said the figures were a cause for concern. "The single most important thing is for our community to enlist others to join in the protest against the attacks," he said in a statement.

"Jews must not be left to fight anti-Semitism alone."

I've been the victim of hate crime in my lifetime. I have been beat up for being a "white boy". I don't want to make too big a deal out of it. I was only fourteen at the time, and so were my attackers. I didn't get beat up badly. But, the reason I bring it up is because when you have been attacked because of your race, or you know that people around you are being attacked because of their race, you begin to worry that you are a target, wherever you go. You wonder to yourself, "If I go down this street, or walk into this bathroom, or park my car here, am I going to be attacked?"

I don't really have any sense of the scope of these numbers. I am not familiar enough with Britain to know if the numbers are outlandish. Certainly, the fact that they are a record levels, and the 42% increase, indicate that things are going in the wrong direction. And given the way things are in the media, and among Muslim immigrants in Britain, this is not surprising.

Wednesday, February 09, 2005

Peace In Out Time?

From Joel Rosenberg at National Review:

Are we really in the last days of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or is this all another Middle East mirage? There are many here in Washington and in Israel who remain understandably skeptical that Abbas is a true peacemaker at heart. But inside the White House and the upper echelons of the State Department there is a real and growing sense that Abbas may, in fact, be the moderate, pragmatic leader for which they have been waiting so long.

Last week I ran into a senior political adviser to President Bush at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington. We chatted for a few moments about the president's powerful State of the Union speech and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's whirlwind tour through Europe and the Middle East. I asked him about the administration's remarkable warmth towards a man who was for years Arafat's chief deputy. "Abu Mazen appears to be the real deal," he told me. "We think we can do business with him, and if we can, we're about to make history."
Consider these recent developments:

Abbas has deployed Palestinian security forces to stop suicide bombers and those trying to launch rocket attacks against Israel — the first time a Palestinian leader has taken such concrete steps to crack down on violence.

Abbas is also threatening to arrest militants if they persist in fomenting violence. As one Associated Press report put it, "Palestinian security forces on Saturday briefly detained three top members of a faction that claimed an attack that wounded two Israelis, officials said, marking the first such move since Mahmoud Abbas was elected leader last month."

Abbas has ordered Palestinian television and radio stations to stop glorifying the Islamic radicals in general and suicide bombers in particular, and to allow the free exchange of ideas on their airwaves. "[Abbas] does not want a screen full of blood," Radwan Abu Ayash, head of the Palestinian Broadcasting Corporation, told the London Sunday Telegraph (cited the other day by the Washington Times). "We must avoid bloody things, which are not a good image for our people. He also said that he does not want songs praising him or for us to report on all his activities — only if there is some news value. He wanted a 'free screen' and said that all sides should have the right to talk. These are big changes."

It is early, to be sure. Abbas still has much to do to prove his seriousness about reducing violence. Hamas has already announced it does not consider itself bound by Abbas's ceasefire pledge. And the more Abbas positions himself as a Palestinian Anwar Sadat, the more he risks Sadat's fate — assassination at the hands of extremists.

But there is evidence that even the first few steps by Abbas and his team are already beginning to bear fruit. Since Arafat's death, for example, Palestinian violence against Israel is down 75 percent. And this is why Sharon agreed to a summit with Abbas without direct U.S. participation. It is why President Bush sent Secretary Rice to the region on her first foreign trip. It is why the president has invited Sharon and Abbas to visit him in Washington later this spring, after refusing even to meet with Arafat for the first four years of his administration. It is also why the president decided to elevate the Middle East peace process to top priority status during his recent State of the Union address — because he believes real progress is suddenly possible.

"The beginnings of reform and democracy in the Palestinian territories are showing the power of freedom to break old patterns of violence and failure," President Bush told the nation. "To promote this democracy, I will ask Congress for 350 million dollars to support Palestinian political, economic, and security reforms. The goal of two democratic states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace is within reach — and America will help them achieve that goal."

It is without question among the president's most ambitious goals. But with the Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat, and the Taliban out of the picture and al Qaeda on the run, it suddenly seems within reach for the first time since the Jewish state was reborn in 1948.

I hope so. It is always wise to keep in mind the fact that Abbas' dissertation claimed that the Jews conspired with the Nazi's to create the Holocaust in order to generate sympathy for a Zionist state. That is a particularly hateful libel. But, ultimately it doesn't matter if your neighbor hates you, it only matters that he doesn't try to hurt you. So, if Abbas turns out to be a practical man who understands that violence will not get his people anywhere, then I say great. It will take a lot of effort to make the Palestinian ship turn around, but I truly hope it happens.

Melanie Phillips has her doubts though:

... what the world finds so hard to acknowledge -- and what we must never lose sight of -- is that the source of this terrible conflict is not Israel’s behaviour. It is not the settlements, the road blocks, the prisoners. It is not, despite the near-universal assumption, the absence of a Palestinian state. The source is the Arab world-backed Palestinian terror war against Israel’s existence.

The onus is therefore squarely on Abbas to end that war by dismantling the entire infrastructure of Palestinian terror. It is possible — and we must all pray that this is so — that he will turn out to be capable of the statesmanship necessary to end this 100-years war of ethnic cleansing against the Jews of Israel, and to give his own community an identity other than the impulse to destroy another people. But the signs are not auspicious.

Abbas, whose own doctoral thesis comprised a piece of Holocaust-denial, has repeatedly said he will not forcibly disarm Hamas, Islamic jihad et al because he will never cause a civil war among the Palestinians.

The uncomfortable reality is that, while it is possible that Abbas will turn out to be a world-class statesman, what looks rather more likely is that he is instead a world-class tactician, who will be able to pose with ostensibly clean hands — and the approval of the gullible, Israel-hating west — disclaiming the murderous terrorism that Hamas and co will continue to inflict upon Israel, thus forcing Israel to react and casting it even more decisively as the regional bully. If this is so, then Israel is in even more danger now than it was in before — the danger of being trapped inside a far shrewder and more sophisticated dance of death.

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Does Fox News Count
As Mainstream Media?

Earlier today, I heard a conversation, about the Eason Jordan story, on the Hugh Hewitt show (I think the PowerLine guys were hosting) where Kathryn Lopez of NRO was saying that what will be needed for the Davos Summit people to release the videos of their conference would be for an MSM outlet to start covering the story.

I just heard a great conversation on the Hannity and Colmes Show with Brent Bozell of Media Research Center and Danny Schechter of Weapons of Mass Deception. Bozell and Hannity were demand that Jordan give evidence for his charges. Colmes and Schechter were both trying to deny that Jordan meant the "targeting" was intentional.

I'm glad to see a MSM network is dealing with the story. Hopefully, we'll all get to the bottom of this.

Hey Europe
Submit To The Jizya

As I posted about last week, the Rotterdam Film Festival in Holland canceled the showing of Theo Van Gogh's movie Submission, which was about the abuse of women under Islam, and for which Mr. Van Gogh was murdered in gruesome fashion. The "authorities" were concerned it's showing might incite anger within the Islamic community. Well, guess what. They had no problem with showing Islamist propaganda films. Hmm. From Little Green Footballs:

ROTTERDAM, February 7 (IslamOnline.net) — Two European films shown at the 34th Rotterdam international film festival caused quite a stir among cinema critics and the audience.

Reason? Presenting anti-western attacks by extremists as a retaliation for the mounting hate and persecution campaigns targeting Muslims in the West in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

An Arab film critic hailed the two movies as “a way more effective than bullets to expose the unjust practices” perpetrated by some Western governments against their Muslim communities.

As Charles at LGF notes, this is an excellent example of European Dhimmitude:

... one book published in Saudi Arabia argues:

In a country ruled by Muslim authorities, a non-Muslim is guaranteed his freedom of faith.... Muslims are forbidden from obliging a non-Muslim to embrace Islam, but he should pay the tribute to Muslims readily and submissively, surrender to Islamic laws, and should not practice his polytheistic rituals openly.

Each of the following were forbidden to dhimmis at some point somewhere in the world:

Holding public office. This was very rarely enforced: in reality, many non-Muslims held high positions in Muslim states, including Samuel Ha-Nagid in Spain, as well as others in Egypt and Iraq.

Bearing weapons

Riding camels or horses. Also rarely enforced.

Building houses of worship higher than mosques

Mourning loudly

Dressing in the same way that Arabs dressed. Dress codes, such as forcing all Jews to wear a yellow badge, were sometimes -- but not always -- enforced, so that dhimmis would be visibly distinct from Muslims.

Oh yes, and Europe, you'd better be prepared to submit to the jizya:

Jizyah was applied to every free male member of the People of the Book, non-Muslim communities living in lands under Muslim rule. The collection of the tax was often the duty of the elders of those community, mainly Bishops or Priests.

In return, those who pay such a tax are not required to serve in the military, and are considered under the protection of the Muslim state, with certain rights and responsibilities.

Protection money, huh? Wow, Europe. Sounds like they're offering you a great deal Europe. I advise you to take it, quick, before they change their mind.

The Limits Of Deterrence

Wretchard from the Belmont Club:

Steve Coll of the Washington Post (hat tip: Little Green Footballs) was at a conference on the future of nuclear terrorism at Los Alamos and asked the 60 weapons scientists in attendance to indicate, by show of hands, who thought a Hiroshima-class attack on the US was less than 5%. About four did. That doesn't tell us about the distribution of the degrees of belief of the rest. But Coll's point is made: the possibility of a nuclear attack on the US can't be dismissed.

Although Coll admits that Al Qaeda itself is much reduced, he argues that the sheer proliferation of knowledge has reached the point where a small band of Islamic professionals, inflamed by the idea of Jihad can plot and carry out an attack on their own.

Today al Qaeda is no longer much of an organization, if it can be called one at all. Its headquarters have been destroyed, its leadership is scattered or dead or in jail. Osama bin Laden remains the chairman of the board, increasingly a Donald Trump-like figure -- highly visible, very talkative, preoccupied by multiple wives, but not very effective at running things day-to-day. ...

[But] Imagine the faculty lounge in the theoretical physics, metallurgy and advanced chemistry departments of an underfunded university in Islamabad or Rabat or Riyadh or Jakarta. The year is 2015. Into the room walk a group of colleagues -- seven or eight talented scientists, some religiously devout, all increasingly angry about events abroad. At night, between sporadic electricity outages, they watch satellite television and chat in cyberspace, absorbing an increasingly radical, even murderous outlook toward the United States. By day, as they sip coffee and smoke furtively in each other's company, these scientists spontaneously form a bond, and from that bond emerges a resolve to act -- by launching a nuclear or biological attack on American soil.

Unlike states, which so far have proved deterrable by the threat of retaliation even when led by madmen, this faculty cell may be utterly indifferent to and beyond the reach of the traditional mechanisms of nuclear deterrence.

It is debateable whether al Qaeda was ever deterrable and the hypothetical Islamic faculty cell would be no different. What the GWOT did was deter the states which may have considered supplying al Qaeda-like organizations with the material for building nuclear weapons with the threat of collective responsibility. Deterrence has always, from its inception, been based on this immoral principle and it isn't necessary to approve to recognize it was the case.

For most of the Cold War, opposing nations held each other's civilian populations hostage. Early delivery systems were too inaccurate to target the threatening military assets themselves. With the so-called "counterforce" strategy unavailable, only "countervalue" was available. That meant, in effect, that America was prepared to incinerate every man, woman and child in the Soviet Union in response to a nuclear attack. In most Cold War-game scenarios enemy leaders buried deep in bunkers or circling in command aircraft would be the last to die. Some believed they should not be targeted at all in order to preserve a command structure with which one could negotiate a post-holocaust peace.

To the question 'who might America retaliate against if a shadowy group detonated nukes in Manhattan' the probable answer is 'against everyone who might have stood to gain'. The real strategic effect of the GWOT was been to convince many states that this would indeed happen to them. That the decline in Al Qaeda is possibly due to the implicit threat of collective punishment on the Islamic world is a sad commentary on human nature. But there it is.

Yet 'Islamic faculty cell' example of Coll suggests a day when even the threat of collective punishment will not be enough to obviate the WMD threat. With the proliferation of knowledge and the increasing sophistication of commercially available devices a time will eventually come when small groups can build nuclear or biological devices without state assistance. When private and personal WMD attacks become possible deterrence will lose effectiveness entirely.

But the situation will be even more dangerous than Coll suggests. Long before a faculty lounge in Islamabad or Riyadh realizes it can build a bomb alone and secretly, the same thought will have occurred to individuals in Tel Aviv, New Delhi or Palo Alto. Any Islamic group that believes it can attack New York deniably should convince itself that no similar group can nuke Mecca at the height of the pilgrim season. In fact, the whole problem that Coll describes should be generalized. The only thing worse than discovering that New York has been destroyed by persons unknown is to find that Islamabad has been vaporized by a group we've never heard of.

Perhaps in the long view of history it will be President Bush's commitment to "return humans to the moon by 2020 and mount a subsequent human expedition to Mars" that will prove prescient.

Wow, Wretchard is in a bad mood. He might need to start eating more fiber. Unfortunately, I think he's right. What's to stop us from destroying ourselves? Maybe we had better start looking more seriously into those Peace Studies courses.

;-)

The only thing we can do is the best thing we can think of to do right now. So far, that has gotten us through our problems. The best thing right now is deterrence. Perhaps some technology will become available which will allow the detection of all radioactive materials, and their relative concentration, across the face of the entire glove. A kind of Lojac system for nuclear weapons. Every country would then be notified of all points of radiation within their borders, and would thereby be made accountable. In such a case, deterrence would still be effective.

But, that's just speculation. I'm not very old. I'll probably still be here in 2020. Let's see.

The Road To Joy

File this under, "Gee! Who woulda thunk it?" From Marlowe's Shade:

A very interesting report has come out recently from the Commission on Children at Risk. The commission is made up of a team put together by Dartmouth Medical School, the YMCA and the Institute for American Values.

It paints a bleak picture of children and teams growing up in the modern world:

The commission was convened because of a growing sense that children and teens today are facing a widespread and deepening crisis. "In the midst of unprecedented material affluence, large and growing numbers of U.S. children and adolescents are failing to flourish," the commission said.

Mental and emotional difficulties seem to have afflicted our youth at staggering rates, including depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorder, conduct disorders, and thoughts of suicide – and a wide variety of physical ailments that have their roots in emotional troubles, such as heart disease, irritable bowel syndrome and ulcers.

The report said: "Despite increased ability to treat depression, the current generation of young people is more likely to be depressed and anxious than was its parent’s generation. According to one study, by the 1980s, U.S. children as a group were reporting more anxiety than did children who were psychiatric patients in the 1950s." (Emphasis in original.)

The report compares this profile of youth at risk with that of young people brought up with a strong moral and religious upbringing.

Morality was also one of the things emphasized by the commission’s report. In fact, Hardwired stressed even more than morality – it stressed religion. The commission said a significant body of scientific evidence is beginning to demonstrate that "we are hard-wired for meaning, born with a built-in capacity and drive to search for purpose and reflect on life’s ultimate ends."

The report stated that the human brain appears to have a built-in capacity for religious experience. Using brain imaging, for example, scientists have discovered that such spiritual activities as prayer or meditation actually increase the activity in specific areas of the brain.

Many scientists still don’t delve into those kinds of issues, but some are beginning to see the importance of religion. Psychologist Lisa Miller of Columbia University said, "A search for spiritual relationship with the Creator may be an inherent developmental process in adolescence."

While such science appears to be in the early stages, it does give some added weight to the theory that adolescents who are involved in religion are not simply responding to the way they were raised. As the commission put it: "[T]he need in young people to connect to ultimate meaning and to the transcendent is not merely the result of social conditioning, but is instead an intrinsic aspect of the human experience."

The report suggests that the emphasis on the spiritual makes for healthier, more resilient kids:"

Compared to their less religious peers, religious teenagers are safer drivers and are more likely to wear seatbelts. They are less likely to become either juvenile delinquents or adult criminals. They are less prone to substance abuse. In general, these young people are less likely to endorse engaging in high-risk conduct or to endorse the idea of enjoying danger," the report said.

It added that "religiously committed teenagers are more likely to volunteer in the community. They are more likely to participate in sports and in student government. More generally, these young people appear to have higher self-esteem and more positive attitudes about life."

The key to this is identified by the report as a family and social environment that they term an "authoritative community""

Authoritative communities are groups that live out the types of connectedness that our children increasingly lack," the report said. "They are groups of people who are committed to one another over time and who model and pass on at least part of what it means to be a good person and live a good life."

Among the characteristics that define an authoritative community: It is a social institution that is warm and nurturing; establishes clear limits and expectations; is multigenerational; has a long-term focus; reflects and transmits a shared understanding of what it means to be a good person; encourages spiritual and religious development; and is philosophically oriented to the equal dignity of all persons and to the principle of love of neighbor.

The commission stated: "We believe that building and strengthening authoritative communities is likely to be our society’s best strategy for ameliorating the current crisis of childhood and improving the lives of U.S. children and adolescents."

This is a fascinating concept. From a marketing perspective the name might be a little loaded, I guarantee that if Bush were to use it in a speech tomorrow, the liberals and leftists would go nuts. From a parenting standpoint it makes perfect sense. From my own experience I would describe it like this: The high-road that a child travels on has two curbs on either side. One is Discipline [or Justice] and the other is Love [or Mercy]. If either is lacking the child will go astray. And if we were in the habit of naming roads after their destinations, we would call it Joy.

Well said.

Beasts Imbued With Divine Spirit
Which Way Shall We Go?

My man bls, over at the Topmost Apple chimes in with this important post, wherein he quotes from Saltblog and then has some comments of his own:

From Salt Blog:

For reasserters the the category of sexuality seems to be explained by Gagnon's thesis that homosexuality is essentially a problem of differentiation. This argument assumes that homosexuals are, fundamentally, disordered or defective and should either be celibate or marry someone of the opposite sex. This is called, I gather, a sacral architecture theology, that God created maleness and femaleness.

The second implicit assumption is that this understanding is essential to being a Christian [one is a Christian WOMAN or a Christian MAN]. Interesting to consider, but one worth rejecting. You don't need to be a Christian to recognize that men and women procreate, have children, and this is, numerically, most human beings. But the story, is, fundamentally, a myth - one that explains something about our world, but has little ethical content. It is still an important story to tell.

Surely differentiation is a part of Judeo-Christian culture, but it is not an essential part of Christian theology. The hermeutical challenge is to differentiate between the parts of scripture that are merely cultural; and those that are properly part of Jesus' reign. This is hard work because God speaks through words, which are always culturally laden. If words did not have cultural cues or connotations, they would be incomprehensible.

The problem with Robert Gagnon's argument, and others like it, is that it reduces human beings to their biology, tout court. But all animals reproduce, and some in seemingly quite violent ways. The "unitive" aspect of sexual relations is nowhere in evidence in the animal world, although we recognize that it's an important part of human sexual relations.

In any case, the rules about "marriage" have changed quite a bit since the days of the Hebrew Scriptures. According to Leviticus, a virgin who was raped was required to marry her own rapist. Women could not own property in many cases; in fact, as far as I can tell, women were property in many cases. Adultery was the prohibition against sexual relations with another man's wife; there was no penalty if a married man had relations with a single woman. Men were allowed to visit prostitutes, for instance. In fact, "one man and one woman" is not remotely Biblical; a short list of polygamists in Scripture includes Abraham, Jacob, Esau, Gideon, Moses, Aaron, Davd, Saul, Simeon, and Solomon. 700 wives and 200 concubines, in the latter case!

So haven't we actually improved marriage over the years - particularly where women are concerned? Isn't it "love" and "relationship" that separates human beings from the rest of the animals? And isn't it ironic that the "reasserters" have to end up scoffing at love itself, and at relationship, in order to make their "sacral architecture" theory hold together? Human beings are not defined as their bodies. Our bodies are part of us, of course, and an important part, but what makes human beings human beings are our minds and our hearts. Our minds are what enabled the species to rise out of the ooze and begin civilizing: planning, designing, building, maintaining. Our hearts are what enable us to live together and to help one another. What we actually do is fight together against Nature, because we have no survival tools except for these two.

We are beasts imbued with divine spirit. And so: which of these, then, is the critical aspect of our natures?

We live in a new era in many ways; we're all living longer, many times using artificial means to prolong life. We conquer disability and disease every day in the laboratory. Women worldwide are having fewer children, because they do not have to bear ten and twelve children in order to raise two any longer - and they don't want to, either. Don't we, therefore, perhaps need to have a discussion about "sexuality" in general - not "homosexuality" in particular - and come to some sort of new understanding?

Good stuff, my friend. I'd love to hear more of the arguments on this one. I've never paid attention to the intricacies of theological arguments on the subject of homosexuality.

What I do know is that when I was a kid and my parents weren't taking care of me, it was a lesbian couple who fed me when I was hungry, and gave me water to drink when I was thirsty, and dried my tears when I cried. They did the work of Christ in my life, in a season when my parents were unable to bring themselves to take care of me.

The Derbyshire Derby

I must admit, sometimes, I have such a hard time understanding how a person can arrive at a certain viewpoint that I find myself unable to think that the viewpoint is anything other than immoral. That's the way I feel about this piece by John Derbyshire from National Review. I'm going to give my opinion, but I am asking for help here. Can anyone help me be more fair?

Well, here goes:

I supported the Iraq war as a punitive exercise. After 9/11 it seemed to me that we were in great danger from terrorists getting a nuclear weapon and deleting a couple of our cities. There were, I figured, two things to do about this.

The first was of course to chase down and kill as many terrorists as we could find. This, however, would be like trying to get rid of roaches in a New York City apartment. No matter how many you kill, there are always more; but at least you can keep them on the run, their numbers down at a decent level.

The second thing was to act against terrorist-friendly states. Making nuclear weapons is hi-tech work, needing a large industrial infrastructure. Barring some horrible breakthrough in physics, no terrorist group is going to be able to do it in caves and rooming-house basements. They need help from substantial nations with suitable infrastructure, nations that are inclined to help them. The appropriate action is therefore to either trash those nations' infrastructure, or make them no longer inclined to give help to terrorists. The trashing requires military action, either overt, covert, or delegated; the attitude adjustment might be accomplished by intimidation through example — "killing a chicken to scare the monkey." The Iraq war filled the bill, and I thought it was beautifully done.

Ok, so far, so good.

At what point it turned into an exercise in saving the world, I am not sure.

Wait a minute here. Who's saving the world? What's the moral alternative to helping the Iraqi's rebuild their nation? And what would be the advantage of letting the power vacuum just suck up another dictator and propel him into power?

I don't see the point in saving the world if the world doesn't want to be saved,

Hmm. What is that supposed to mean? Really. Can anyone help me here. I know what I think it means. I think it means that the Iraqi people aren't like us. They don't want to be free. Those little monkeys. They may drive cars, and read books, and build stuff, but they're still monkeys. Just let them go on, and live in the squalor of the country that we wrecked in the interest of our freedom.

... and I can't see that world-saving is anyway essential for our national security.

Derbyshire can't see the ample proof that democracies don't make war on each other? No, I'm guessing Derbyshire is aware of that fact. So, once again, we are back to that he just doesn't care about those monkeys.

Would we, the U.S. of A., be more secure if all the countries of the world were like Denmark? Surely.

No, actually, Mr. Derbyshire, we wouldn't be more secure if all countries were like Denmark. That's the problem. No one else has been doing anything about the Islamofascists. So, we have to step up. Countries like Denmark are too busy giving up the ghost to help out much.

Do we actually have a clue how to bring this happy state of affairs about? I doubt it.

I honestly don't know, my friend. But, I do know that nothing gets done if you don't try. America has gotten where it is by fighting against seemingly insurmountable odds, and pulling out victory, over and over again. I start to wonder if you've actually paid attention to the things you have read in History classes.

But don't all people, everywhere, want to live in freedom? No, they don't. I once spent a year living and working in Communist China. I met many people who yearned for freedom. My rather strong impression, though, was that the majority couldn't have cared less.

Is that because the Chinese are monkeys too, Mr. Derbyshire? No, I don't think any human beings are fundamentally different. We Americans don't deserve to be free any more than any of the other peoples of the world.

Now, here's my opinion. Get ready, this is very politically incorrect. The problem in China is the problem everywhere where freedom does not flourish. The problem is bad ideas.

In China, the particular bad ideas come predominantly from Buddhism, Confucianism, and the paganistic "Chinese Religion" with it's ancestor worship. Buddhism and Confucianism both have very beautiful qualities as religion.

I have read quite a few books on Buddhism. I am a fan of Thich Nat Hanh, for instance. I practice meditation. I have actually been able to heal myself of digestive problems, which plagued me throughout my life, through the practice of meditation. So, I am very aware of the good points of Buddhism. In fact, since I believe that I am proof that meditation works, one could say that I am a believer, in some form, of the tenets of Buddhism.

But, Buddhism's main idea is that of acceptance. The central problem of life, as far as the Buddha was concerned, is suffering (dukkha). The cause of suffering in desire (tanha). The way to eliminate suffering is to overcome desire. The way to overcome desire is to learn to accept. To understand that the world is as it is. To accept the world as it is.

Confucianism, similarly, emphasizes acceptance, in the form of adherence to tradition.

Now, what happens when an entire nation of people are trained that acceptance and adherence to tradition are the central tenets of life? What happens when they are trained that way for thousands of years?

The answer is they become slaves to the tradition. Those who are slaves to tradition are going to have a very hard time trying to motivate anyone to rebel against the government. I do not accept the idea that this means the Chinese people do not want to be free deep down. No, I believe that Chinese people are the same as us. To believe that they are different seems racist to me. Am I wrong here? Help me out.

I could, to some degree, understand making a Nietzchean power-based argument to the effect of "The Iraqi's and Chinese are weak because they won't stand up for themselves. And, if we make it our business to save the weak, then all that does is propagate weakness, and then the weak will gain power through procreation."

I can understand such an argument. But, few people are willing to say such things in public. Maybe this is what Derbyshire thinks.

I wouldn't make such an argument myself for two reasons.

1) because I am a follower of Christ, and as such, I believe we are supposed to feed the hundry and clothe the needy.

2) because the history of America has not born out the Nietzchean argument. What was the American Revolution if not the empowering of the weak, the masses, the rabble, the bungled and the botched, to use Nietzche's phrase?

The empowering of the weak has only shown the endless resources of the human spirit when it is given a chance to flourish. It is true that there are many people, maybe even most, who squander their freedom for a life of addiction and slavery of various kinds. But, the question then becomes, would you sacrifice everything America has given the world because of those who squander their freedom?

The answer should, be "No", Mr. Derbyshire, if you're sitting there scratching youself with a quizzical look on your face.

To his, uh, credit, Derbyshire does go on to admit that he just doesn't care about the Iraqi people. They can descend into chaos, for all he cares. As long as they don't have a infrastructure with which to build nuclear weapons. What a vision. That'll be something to ponder when you're on your death bed, Mr. Derbyshire. My contribution to the world was the, "Let them descend into chaos" Plan for Geopolitical Affairs.

Wow.

Monday, February 07, 2005

The Fanatics Have Fewer and Fewer Answers

From Christopher Hitchens, participating in a symposium, in Front Page Magazine, on the inevitabity of Democracy:

Christopher Hitchens: Since the overdue removal of Saddam Hussein, and the extraordinary elections in Afghanistan, there have been unmistakeable signs of democratic and modernising tendencies in Syria, in Lebanon and in Iran. One cannot therefore capitulate to fatalism and say that Islamic societies are immune to the common human wish for a civilized, law-governed, open society. To that extent, Mr. Sharansky is quite right, and it is very moving to see that the ideas of Academician Sakharov can be promulgated and re-transmitted in this way. Sharansky was also quite correct in pointing out the authoritarian subtext of the so-called "Oslo accords", and would no doubt agree that Arab Palestinian members of the Knesset were demonstrating the virtues of democracy, often against considerable odds, even when many of them were Communists.

Many of those Palestinian leftists and democrats were and are Christian, which brings me to another point. The Muslim world, especially under Turkish rule, was often exemplary in its attitude to minorities. But the contemporary Arab world is not. The Berbers, the Copts, the Jews, the Kurds, the Maronites....it's an awful record, which we do nothing to improve when we unconsciously accept the claim that Iraq, say, is an Arab and Muslim state when it is, in reality, no more so than America is a white and Christian one.

The critical argument concerns the possibility, to put it no higher, of a "Reformation" within Islam. In one sense, this is unlikely, because - rather to its credit - Islam has no Papacy or clergy which can simply ordain a change of doctrine or a revision of faith. However, from Indonesia to Western Europe, there is a struggle over the interpretation of the religion and its book, and the adaptation of both to other cultures and to modernity in general. The "fit" between this and democratization is not by any means an exact one, because it very often happens that the "reformers", like our Puritan forebears, are more exacting in their religious zeal than some of the Islamic regimes that they seek to challenge.

However, the process has at least begun, and the fanatics have fewer and fewer answers, which is why they employ ever-crueller and more stupid tactics. We must be ready at all times and in all ways to lend a hand in forwarding and encouraging this debate, which is why the nonsensically-named "war on terror" is actually a struggle, as an earlier Russian hero put it, "for your freedom - and ours".

Clearly, there is a tendency in human beings to see their enemies as monolithic, unchanging, and all-powerful. Being that our enemies are human beings, constrained by the same forces of humanity and nature as we, this is never the case. Hitchens here makes a great point that as we provide more and more positive answers for the Muslim world, the Islamofascists reasoning will come to look increasingly inhuman and barbaric to the peoples of the Arab World.

Ward Churchill
Anti-American, Anti-Semite

Wretchard, from Belmont Club, discusses Paul Campos' editorial stating that Ward Churchill is a fascist:

The most interesting part of Professor Campos' article lies in his description of fascism, all the elements of which, he argues, are present in Churchill's work.

As a political inclination and an aesthetic style, fascism is marked by, among other things, the following characteristics:

The worship of violence as a purifying social force.

A hyper-nationalistic ideology, that casts history into a drama featuring an inevitably violent struggle between Good and Evil, and that obsesses on questions of racial and ethnic identity.
The dehumanization and scapegoating of opponents ... demands that the evil in our midst be eradicated "by any means necessary," up to and including the mass extermination of entire nations and peoples.

The treatment of moral responsibility as a fundamentally collective matter.

Campos argues that these propositions would probably have been intolerable if uttered by a white man but were possibly countenanced because they emanated from an oppressed Native American who may happen to be -- oops -- a white man. But despite its potential for comedy, Professor Campos finds nothing funny in the matter. He asks how such a ridiculous situation could have arisen in the first place.

The question of whether a serious research university ought to hire someone like Churchill is laughable on its face. What's not so funny is the question of exactly how someone like him got hired in the first place, and then tenured and named the head of a department.

That, in the end, is a more important question than what will or ought to happen to Churchill now. Churchill is a pathetic buffoon, but the University of Colorado is far from alone in having allowed itself to toss intellectual integrity and human decency overboard in the pursuit of worthy goals. ...

That through whatever combination of negligence, cowardice and complicity we have allowed Ward Churchill to besmirch those ideals by invoking them in the defense of his contemptible rantings is now our burden and our shame.

While the University of Colorado is casting the Churchill controversy as a freedom of speech issue (that's simplifying it a little. See Eugene Volokh for a real lawyer's take) some thought ought to be given to University's obligation to provide a reasonable standard of instruction to students. Students attend a university to receive a sound education and a credential. There is an implicit contract between the student and university that a reasonable education will be provided in exchange for the time, effort and money spent studying. It is hard to see how the University's end of the bargain will be kept if it allows it students to be instructed in ethnic studies by a fake Indian teaching fascism. One might be forgiven for wondering whether the students aren't being shortchanged.

So, what are Ward Churchill's credentials? Edward Alexandre, at Front Page Magazine, provides some insight:

Prior to this incident, Churchill's scholarly reputation was based mainly on a squalid tract called A Little Matter of Genocide (1997), in which he argues that the murder of European Jews was not at all a "fixed policy objective of the Nazis," and accuses Jews of seeking to monopolize for themselves all that beautiful Holocaust suffering that other groups would very much like, ex post facto, to share.

He also argues that Jewish "exclusivism" had nearly erased from history the victims of other genocidal campaigns, and that Jewish scholars stressed the Holocaust in order to "construct a conceptual screen behind which to hide the realities of Israel's ongoing genocide against the Palestinian population."

He not only likened Jewish scholars who have argued for the unique character of the Holocaust to neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers; he said that the Jews are worse than the latter-day Nazis because "those who deny the Holocaust, after all, focus their distortion upon one target. Those [Jewish scholars] who deny all holocausts other than that of the Jews have the same effect upon many."

Given the current academic atmosphere, it is a safe bet that what might delicately be called Churchill's shortage of sympathy in the Jewish direction made him a strong candidate to head Colorado's Ethnic Studies program. Such "academic" extremism is the order of the day on campus, and Churchill’s ideology of hatred is just one small example of an all too prevalent phenomenon on campus.

In the aftermath of 9/11, a professor at University of New Mexico effervescently declaimed: "Anyone who can blow up the Pentagon gets my vote." An academician at University of Massachusetts told his students that "The American flag is a symbol of terrorism and death and fear and destruction and oppression."

At Columbia University, Professor Nicholas DeGenova vaulted to national renown when he declared, at an anti-war rally in March 2003, that "U.S. patriotism is inseparable from...white supremacy" and then expressed the "wish for a million Mogadishus in Iraq." (This was a reference to the 1993 incident in Somalia when eighteen U. S. troops were killed.)

In June 2002, Trent University philosophy professor Michael Neumann declared (in Alexander Cockburn's online publication Counterpunch) that "if an effective strategy [for promoting the Palestinian cause] means encouraging vicious, racist anti-Semitism or the destruction of the state of Israel, I still don't care." And Noam Chomsky, the godfather of anti-Americanism (and the person whom historian Arthur Schlesinger long ago (1969) called the consummate "intellectual crook") pontificated: "Let me repeat: the U.S. has demanded that Pakistan kill possibly millions of people..." And so on ad nauseam.

These professorial fulminations all follow an anti-American, anti-Semitic, tenacious attachment to the motto: "the other country, right or wrong." And this uniformity of opinion often has a comic element to it, for these extremist professors nearly always present themselves as brave dissenters confronted by a mob of thick-skinned louts; in fact, they belong, more than any other segment of American society, to a community of CONSENT, in which "diversity" means that people look different but think exactly alike.

But what is more disturbing than the opinions uniformly expressed is the hysteria, bordering on mental imbalance, which characterizes them. People we used to think of as harmless drudges pursuing moldy futilities are now revealing to us the explosive power of boredom, a power that may well frighten us.

God, it gets old, me pointing all these anti-Semitic, anti-American people from around the world. It almost seems like I'll just call anybody these names, for almost any reason. But, come on, I mean how could you call Ward Churchill anything else. Campos' declaration that Churchill is a buffoon is accurate, but, as Edward Alexandre points out here in the Front Page article the level of hysteria is disturbing and, even, frightening.

People like Churchill may not live in the real world, but their words impede on the real world and have an effect. We need to start taking them very seriously.

Eason Jordan
The New Benedict Arnold?
Malkin Talks To Senator Frank
About Eason Jordan

I have ignored the Eason Jordan story on this blog til now merely because I have been overwhelmed and I don't think I have anything to add to the great work of Hugh Hewitt, Captain's Quarters, LGF, Powerline, or Michelle Malkin. But, here's a news scoop I can't help but post. Michelle Malkin talked to Senator Barney Frank and he confirmed the story that Jordan did, in fact, claim, at the Davos Conference, that the American Military has "targeted" journalists:

Just got off the phone with Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who spoke with me about Easongate. Rep. Frank was on the panel at Davos.

Rep. Frank said Eason Jordan did assert that there was deliberate targeting of journalists by the U.S. military. After Jordan made the statement, Rep. Frank said he immediately "expressed deep skepticism." Jordan backed off (slightly), Rep. Frank said, "explaining that he wasn't saying it was the policy of the American military to target journalists, but that there may have been individual cases where they were targeted by younger personnel who were not properly disciplined."

Rep. Frank said he didn't pay attention to the audience reaction at the time of the panel, but recalled that Sen. Dodd was "somewhat disturbed" and "somewhat exercised" and that moderator David Gergen also said Jordan's assertions were "disturbing if true." I have a call in to Sen. Dodd's office and sent an e-mail inquiry to Gergen.

I asked Rep. Frank again if his recollection was that Jordan initially maintained that the military had a deliberate policy of targeting journalists. Rep. Frank affirmed that, noting that Jordan subsequently backed away orally and in e-mail that it was official policy, but "left open the question" of whether there were individual cases in which American troops targeted journalists.

After the panel was over and he returned to the U.S., Rep. Frank said he called Jordan and expressed willingness to pursue specific cases if there was any credible evidence that any American troops targeted journalists. "Give me specifics," Rep. Frank said he told Jordan.
Rep. Frank has not yet heard back yet from Jordan.

***
Jay Rosen interviewed BBC director Richard Sambrook, who was also on the panel, and has significantly different recollections of what Jordan said.

(Pastorius note: Here's why you shouldn't believe Richard Sambrook):

Captain Ed, intrepid Eason-watcher, reacts to the Sambrook statement with proper skepticism and once again puts Jordan/CNN's stake in proper perspective.

***

Bill Roggio of Easongate.com will be on the radio at 1:20pm EST today to discuss the latest developments.

And Jim Geraghty asks: Is this about right and left? Or right or wrong?

Jordan's claims are either true (which I seriously doubt) or they veer very close to the treasonous. My opinion is that if it is proven that Jordan is lying, then we have a new bar set for traitorous behavior. Eason Jordan appears to be the new Benedict Arnold. He should not only lose his job, but he should be ostracized from American society altogether. Let him move to France. They'll love his lies there.

I love how the BBC's Sambrook is covering for Jordan. What a load.

British Police Refuse to Protect Muslims
Threatened With Death For Apostacy

Maybe posting won't be so light after all.

:)

Anyway, this is from Melanie Phillips' blog:

Another important article by Anthony Browne in the Times last Saturday reported on the horrifying consequences for British Muslims who try to leave Islam for Christianity. They face not merely being shunned by their family and community, but attacked, kidnapped, and in some cases killed. And yet the police do not offer them protection:

'For police, religious authorities and politicians, it is an issue so sensitive that they are accused by victims of refusing to respond to appeals for help. It is a problem that, with the crisis of identity in Islam since September 11, seems to be getting worse as Muslims feel more threatened...Mr Hussein told The Times: “It’s been absolutely appalling. This is England — where I was born and raised. You would never imagine Christians would suffer in such a way.” The police have not charged anyone, but told him to leave the area. “We feel completely isolated, utterly helpless. I have been utterly failed by the authorities. If it was white racists attacking an Asian guy, there would be an absolute outcry,” he said. “They are trying to ethnically cleanse me out of my home. I feel I have to make a stand as an Asian Christian.” '

The government wants to create a new crome of incitement to religious hatred because it says it wants to combat 'Islamphobia'. Isn't this the real Islamophobia, where the police -- and, for that matter, the astonishingly silent churches -- are too frightened to confront the intimidation and violence being carried out in the name of Islam?

The "new crome of incitement" to which she refers is legislation which is being considered by Parliament on a law which would make it a crime to criticize Islam. In other words, in a time when the bulk of racism, and sometimes deadly racism, is coming from Muslims, the British government is working to give Muslims, and thus the racists within their rank, even more protection.

The Saudi Government
Publishes Racist Hate Material
and
Sends It To American Mosques

Yes, the headline is true. And, in addition, the American Mosques display the material. This is a big problem. And for some reason the mainstream press is ignoring it. The Dallas Morning News has to my knowledge, been the only paper in the U.S. to carry the story. From the Dallas Morning News, via LGF:

Anti-Jewish and anti-American propaganda published by the Saudi Arabian government has been on display at U.S. mosques, according to an American human rights group.

The publications — including some found in the largest mosque in the Dallas area — urge Muslims to hate Christians and Jews and to refuse service in “infidel” armies.

The preachings are in keeping with tenets of Wahhabi theology, the brand of Islam that prevails in Saudi Arabia.

The Freedom House report on Saudi writings quotes from 57 publications collected from 15 mosques. Statements from the publications include:

“[T]he cursing of the Christians is permissible, same as the cursing of the Jews.” — Islamic Research Magazine, 1999, found in the Islamic Society of Greater Houston North Zone
“Zionism ... is the worst racism in history because of its violence, atrocities, selfishness and arrogance.” — Writings at the Dawn of the Fifteenth Century, no publication date, found in the Dar al Hijra Islamic Center in Falls Church, Va.

“To be dissociated from the infidels is to hate them for their religion, to leave them, never to rely on them for support, not to admire them, to be on one’s guard against them, never to imitate them and always to oppose them in every way according to Islamic law.” — Loyalty and Dissociation in Islam, no publication date, found in the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C. — Reality of Monotheism and Polytheism, 2002, collected from Al-Farouq Masjid, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Update from LGF. This very morning the Dallas Morning News ran an editorial condemning the Saudi hate evangelism:

The 9/11 Commission report said America isn’t fighting a war on “some generic evil” called terrorism, but a war on Islamist terrorism. What are we to make, then, of the startling fact that some of our Saudi allies are seeding U.S. mosques with enemy propaganda?

The nonpartisan Freedom House recently released a report on the spread of Saudi-sponsored hate literature. In 2003, investigators visited leading American mosques and collected written material available to congregants. The documents, originating either with the Saudi government or Saudi-funded sources, advocate Wahhabism, the extremist form of Islam that Freedom House describes as a “fanatically bigoted, xenophobic and sometimes violent ideology.”

According to the report (available at freedomhouse.org/religion), investigators gathered literature that teaches contempt for Jews, Christians and tolerant Muslims, as well as hatred for America. Material found in a Houston mosque even commands the faithful to establish a revolutionary fifth column.

Some of these documents came from the Dallas Central Mosque in Richardson. Unfortunately, this kind of thing is not altogether alien to this mosque. Last spring, it hosted a youth quiz competition, sponsored by two national organizations closely tied to the worldwide Islamist movement. Kids were tested on the work of premier jihad ideologist Sayyid Qutb.

The mosque’s imam, Dr. Yusuf Kavakci, has publicly praised two of the world’s foremost radical Islamists, Yusuf Qaradawi and Hasan al-Turabi, as exemplary leaders. Dr. Kavakci also sits on the board of the Saudi-backed Islamic Society of North America, described in congressional testimony as a major conduit of Wahhabist teaching. Yet Dr. Kavakci tells The Dallas Morning News he rejects Wahhabist teaching. Something doesn’t add up.

Charles provides links to the various Islamofascists cited in the article:

Sayyid Qutb is the author of “Milestones,” the Mein Kampf of the global jihad movement—and it’s highly disturbing to learn that Muslim children are being indoctrinated with this foul work of fascist xenophobia, in the United States.

You can find the document containing Dr. Kavakci’s praise of Yusuf Qaradawi and Hasan al-Turabi at the Islamic Association of North Texas web site; see the link titled “Hamidullah: A Biography.” (The document may disappear now that we’ve linked to it; we saved a copy.)

In the post above I comment on how the British government is going in the wrong direction in it's fight against Islamofascism within it's country. While America is doing a little better job, it is clear that our politically-correct Media is doing everything it can to ignore the Islamist racists in our midst. Once again, the Dallas Morning News is the only major media outlet who have covered this story.

Freedom Is The First Law Of God

Someguy, at Mystery Achievement posted some thoughts on Law and Freedom the other day. I think they are very much worth consideration. Someguy says his hopes for democracy taking root in the Muslim world has been buoyed by the recent elections. In addition, his hopes have been strengthened by a book he is reading call We Hold These Truths, by Fr. John Courtney Murray. Somguy summarizes some of Fr. Murphy's thoughts:

--Good laws commend themselves to (potentially) the consciences of all people because they all have the capacity to recognize the Good by virtue of their having been made in the image of God. This is what, in theory, makes the rule of law possible.

--The most important freedom protected by law is the freedom of worship (which includes the freedom not to worship).

--Laws designed to protect freedom of worship are properly understood not as articles of faith (that is, statements of creedal content which are owed what the New Testament refers to as "the obedience of faith"), but rather as "articles of peace" (that is, arrangements that establish and maintain social peace by ensuring fair and impartial treatment of all religious groups before the law in a religiously pluralistic society).

If the above is true, then what I propose is this: That Iraq--or any other Muslim nation adopting democracy and the rule of law--is capable of establishing and maintaining a peaceful, religiously pluralistic society.

Yes, I agree. My friend Jack, over at Jack of Clubs, has articulated, in personal conversations we have had, the need for an absolute free market of ideas. Jack is convinced that if all ideas are given the same opportunity to prove their worth, then the good ideas will win out.

I agree with Jack. Freedom of choice is the most basic component of the nature of man.

To me, the fact that we are free is the first Law of God. When God created us in His Image, we were created free. That is before everything else, and must be protected ahead of everything else. I think of this as an article of faith, and do not separate it from faith, as Fr. Murray does, because it is the first necessary thing required for us to worship God in the fullness of our nature.

Since 9/11, I have come to agree with John Milton in believing that the Fall of man was a "Fortunate Fall." I believe this because, watching events such as the Iraqi election reveal that there is no greater manifestation of God's Power and Glory than seeing things put right. It is fortunate that we have been given, by Grace, the ability to play a role in the expression of God's Glory.

Light Posting Ahead

I may not be posting as much for the next couple of weeks. I have bitten off a little more than I can chew personally, and I have found that for the last four or five days my inclination to actually think through the things I read has suffered.

Therefore, when I do post an article, I doubt that I will add much in the way of analysis.

Saturday, February 05, 2005

The Democratic Bloodbath

From the Media Research Center:

On Monday’s Early Show, CBS’s Dan Rather was ebullient. “This is an inspiring story and this is a joyful place today. Iraqis awoke today with a glint, a sparkle of freedom in their eyes,” Rather exulted one day after millions of Iraqis voted in a free democratic election. “Even some areas influenced most by Sunni insurgents had a solid turnout yesterday,” Rather noted. “The insurgents have suffered a significant setback.”

Rather was right to be cheered by Sunday’s events, but if the Iraqis had listened to the chorus of negativity coming from reporters in the days and weeks before the vote, he might not have had any good news to report. Pessimistic journalists suggested the election would be worthless and dangerous: Too few would vote to make the results “legitimate” while at the same time an army of terrorists would create a “bloodbath.”

■ Election Might “Demolish” Iraq: On his syndicated Chris Matthews Show this weekend, the openly anti-war MSNBC anchor comically suggested that the election might destroy Iraq. In a show taped before voting began, Matthews set up the topic: “Birth of a nation — will elections unite Iraq or ignite civil war? Will this weekend's vote create a country or demolish it?...For Iraqis, a moment teeming with risk and potential: liberation or devastation.”

■ A “Bloodbath” on Sunday: FNC war reporter Steve Harrigan, who spent most of the last two years in Iraq, was deeply pessimistic in a Friday morning appearance on Fox & Friends. “I think there’s going to be a bloodbath on Sunday,” he predicted. “All over the place, especially in Baghdad and a few other cities, Mosul....About half the country’s in big trouble.” NBC’s Matt Lauer hit the same theme as he began that morning’s Today: “Bloody countdown. Amid growing violence, will Iraq be able to hold its first free elections in more than 50 years?”

■ “No Way” Election Can Happen: Two months ago, some reporters suggested that the plan for holding elections on January 30 was an optimistic fantasy. On the November 26 Today, NBC’s Katie Couric said elections “seem to be really questionable at this point in time.” A few days later, on the December 5 Evening News, weekend anchor Mika Brzezinski declared that the situation in Iraq “seems only to worsen as election day gets closer and closer....Some are now saying there is no way the election deadline can be met.”

■ ...And No Legitimacy: Reporters argued the vote would mean nothing if the minority Sunnis stayed home. “If nearly a quarter of the population does not participate,” ABC’s David Wright wondered on World News Tonight January 5, “will the vote be legitimate?” And anyone predicting a high participation rate was labeled an “optimist,” i.e., unrealistic. “Election officials optimistically predict a 50 percent voter turnout,” reporter Kimberly Dozier announced on CBS’s Early Show January 25. In fact, the turnout was much higher, with early estimates that 60 percent of Iraqis voted.

■ Jennings Still Unsatisfied: On Sunday’s World News Tonight, ABC’s Peter Jennings seemed less than impressed. “It seemed a strange way to experience the democratic process, from the back of a heavily-armored vehicle,” he grumped. In “parts of the Sunni Muslim heartland, it looks as if the election process has been rejected,” Jennings sourly suggested. “Without Sunni participation, somehow, the future here is still pretty bleak.”

I'm waiting to hear aplogies. Have you heard any yet?

A Summary Leftist Idiocy
Since 9/11

From Victor David Hanson at the National Review:

Do we even remember "all that" now? The lunacy that appeared after 9/11 that asked us to look for the "root causes" to explain why America may have "provoked" spoiled mama's boys like bin Laden and Mohammed Atta to murder Americans at work? Do we recall the successive litany of "you cannot win in Afghanistan/you cannot reconstruct such a mess/you cannot jumpstart democracy there"? And do we have memory still of "Sharon the war criminal," and "the apartheid wall," and, of course, "Jeningrad," the supposed Israeli-engineered Stalingrad — or was it really Leningrad? Or try to remember Arafat in his Ramallah bunker talking to international groupies who flew in to hear the old killer's jumbled mishmash about George Bush, the meanie who had ostracized him.

Then we were told that if we dared invade the ancient caliphate, Saddam would kill thousands and exile millions more. And when he was captured in a cesspool, the invective continued during the hard reconstruction that oil, Halliburton, the Jews, the neocons, Richard Perle, and other likely suspects had suckered us into a "quagmire" or was it now "Vietnam redux"? And recall that in response we were supposed to flee, or was it to trisect Iraq? The elections, remember, would not work — or were held too soon or too late. And give the old minotaur Senator Kennedy his due, as he lumbered out on the eve of the Iraqi voting to hector about its failure and call for withdrawal — one last hurrah that might yet rescue the cherished myth that the United States had created another Vietnam and needed his sort of deliverance.

And then there was the parade of heroes who were media upstarts of the hour — the brilliant Hans Blixes, Joe Wilsons, Anonymouses, and Richard Clarkes — who came, wrote their books, did their fawning interviews on 60 Minutes, Nightline, and Larry King, and then faded to become footnotes to our collective pessimism.

Do not dare forget our Hollywood elite. At some point since 9/11, Michael Moore, Sean Penn, Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange, Whoopi Goldberg, and a host of others have lectured the world that their America is either misled, stupid, evil, or insane, bereft of the wisdom of Hollywood's legions of college drop-outs, recovering bad boys, and self-praised autodidacts.

Remember the twisted logic of the global throng as well: Anyone who quit the CIA was a genius in his renegade prognostication; anyone who stayed was a toady who botched the war. Three- and four-star generals who went on television or ran for office were principled dissidents who "told the truth"; officers in the field who kept quiet and saved Afghanistan and Iraq were "muzzled" careerists. Families of the 9/11 victims who publicly trashed George Bush offered the nation "grassroots" cries of the heart; the far greater number who supported the war on terror were perhaps "warped" by their grief.

There were always the untold "minor" embarrassments that we were to ignore as the slight slips of the "good" people — small details like the multibillion-dollar Oil-for-Food scandal that came to light due to the reporting of a single brave maverick, Claudia Rosett, or Rathergate, disclosed by "pajama"-clad bloggers without journalism degrees from Columbia, sojourns at the Kennedy School, or internships with the Washington Post. To put it into Animal Farm speak: elite New York Times, CBS News, and PBS good; populist bloggers, talk-radio, and cable news bad.

In place of Harry Truman and JFK we got John Kerry calling the once-maimed Prime Minister Allawi a "puppet," Senator Murray praising bin Laden's social-welfare work, Senator Boxer calling Secretary of State Rice a veritable liar for agreeing with the various casus belli that Boxer's own Senate colleagues had themselves passed in October 2002. And for emotional and financial support, the Democratic insiders turned to George Soros and Michael Moore, who assured them that their president was either Hitlerian, a dunce, or a deserter.

Then there was our media's hysteria: Donald Rumsfeld should be sacked in the midst of war; Abu Ghraib was the moral equivalent of everything from Saddam's gulag to the Holocaust; the U.S. military purportedly tried to kill reporters; and always the unwillingness or inability to condemn the beheaders, fascists, and suicide murderers, who sought to destroy any shred of liberalism. Meanwhile, the isolation of a corrupt Arafat, the withdrawal of 10,000 Americans from a Wahhabi theocracy, the transformation of the world's far-right monstrosities into reformed democracies, and the pull-back of some troops from Germany and the DMZ went unnoticed.

What explains this automatic censure of the United States, Israel, and to a lesser extent the Anglo-democracies of the United Kingdom and Australia? Westernization, coupled with globalization, has created an affluent and leisured elite that now gravitates to universities, the media, bureaucracies, and world organizations, all places where wealth is not created, but analyzed, critiqued, and lavishly spent.

Thus we now expect that the New York Times, Harper's, Le Monde, U.N. functionaries who call us "stingy," French diplomats, American writers and actors will all (1) live a pretty privileged life; (2) in recompense "feel" pretty worried and guilty about it; (3) somehow connect their unease over their comfort with a pathology of the world's hyperpower, the United States; and (4) thus be willing to risk their elite status, power, or wealth by very brave acts such as writing anguished essays, giving pained interviews, issuing apologetic communiqués, braving the rails to Davos, and barking off-the-cuff furious remarks about their angst over themes (1) through (3) above. What a sad contrast they make with far better Iraqis dancing in the street to celebrate their voting.

Jihad Education Preschool
Through High School

From Jihad Watch:

BONN - A Koran school in the German city of Bonn has come under renewed official pressure with the revelation that a staff member's son-in-law supported al-Qaeda and was planning to blow himself up in a terrorist attack in Iraq.

The infants-to-teens King Fahd Academy narrowly escaped closure last year after education officials discovered teachers were calling for a holy war against Christendom at school assemblies and the children spent more time in indoctrination than on the three Rs.

Though reading, writing and arithmetic were well behind the standard at German state schools, hardline Islamists from around Germany were moving their families to Bonn to enrol children at the school.

Here you have an Islamofascist school in the middle of Germany, call for war against their people, and the Germans can't figure out what to do about it.

A generation of children will be infected with the idea and goal of destroying German society.

Is Germany intent on committing suicide?

Thursday, February 03, 2005

There Can Be No End To Jihad

Here's another excerpt from Christianity Today's interview with the Islamofascist Shiekh Omar Bakri:

Q: On what basis could America have peace? Could you explain the Hudaibiyya Treaty and its implications? Is it one-off or renewable?

A: What the U.S. 9/11 Commission Report stated was untrue—it is not necessary for America to convert to Islam to have peace. Muslims fight America because they are aggressors; we fight apostate Muslim governments because they are aggressors against Islamic law.

Peace could come if America withdrew its forces from the Muslim world, stopped exploiting Muslim resources such as oil, have decent relationships with Muslims, and stopped supporting the Zionist aggressors and Muslim puppet governments. In other words, "Hands off Muslim lands!" Muslims did not attack the USA—the reverse is true. 9/11 was an act of retaliation. As Bin Laden said, peace will come when the U.S. withdraws from the Muslim world.

The Hudaibiyya Treaty was a 10-year truce between Muslim Medina and the pagan Meccans, and it is a basis for today. It is also renewable. It establishes a Covenant of Security. However, this is not possible with occupiers—so it could not be established with the Zionists or their supporters.

(Pastorius Note: A Zionist is an Israeli to the Shiekh. So, we are supposed to stop supporting the existence of the state of Israel. And what is supposed to happen to Israel then?)

Q: Could you explain the concepts Bin Laden employs in his statements regarding 9/11 and other events: the House of War versus the House of Faith, and the other sphere, the House of Truce or Pact? Is the latter a basis for the end of hostilities? Can jihad ever end?

A: Dar al-Harb, which is somewhat misleadingly translated "House of War," refers to the sphere that wars against God or Muslims. The non-Islamic domain is either at war with Muslims or under treaty. Under Dar al-Ahad—the Domain of Security—the area becomes a suspended Dar al-Harb, because treaty prevents conflict, wherein there is freedom of speech, the right of religious propagation and no military aggression.

(Pastorius note: Wow, that treaty sounds like a real good deal; a "suspension of war". Wow, thanks.)

Today there is no Dar al-Islam—the whole world is Dar al-Harb because it is the sphere of non-shari'ah. (Pastorius note: Got that, anti-War protesters?) There is Dar al-Harb in terms of military aggression and occupation.

The aim of the Khilafah [Caliphate]—the ideal Islamic State, which does not presently exist—is to conquer the world, either militarily or intellectually through people converting to Islam. Under the Islamic State there is no compulsion to convert to Islam, just to have an Islamic political order.
The USA ceases to be Dar al-Amen for Muslims in America if: (1) America declares Islam to be the enemy; (2) it starts arresting or killing Muslims; (3) it bans Islamic preaching. Muslims are not allowed to fight America from within its borders when they normally live there—they must leave and then fight.

There can be no end to jihad—a hadith [narration of Muhammad] states this, but treaties can be a form of jihad. An example is the treaty relationship established between Medina and the Christian state of Najran, or the Jewish entity of Khaybar, where both were self-governing, but within Dar al-Islam.

(Pastorius note: So, wouldn't that make a treaty merely a rest stop on the way to and Islamic state? Answer, yes.)

Q: You have talked about the Islamic flag flying over Downing Street, and I have seen a hadith on your website saying that the end would not come until the White House is captured. How do you envisage these goals being achieved?

A: "The final hour will not come until the Muslims conquer the White House" is a hadith related by Tabarani, a great Muslim scholar. How?

The Khilafah is necessary for offensive jihad, though it could occur if Muslims warred to liberate captive Muslims. Realistically, it will probably occur through intellectual da'wah [Islamic missionary activity].

Q: How would a Caliphate operate?

A: Under the Khilafah, authority is centralized, but not administration. The Caliph appoints ministers, judges, governors, army commanders, etc. Constitutionally, although all analogies are imperfect, the Khilafah is closer to the U.S. presidential system than to the U.K. parliamentary system with a Prime Minister, although the major difference is that the Caliph operates under a divine mandate.

There could be no non-Muslim judges. Effectively, the Qur'an and Sunnah [practice and narrations of Muhammad related in Hadith] are the Constitution, Shari'ah is the law. The Caliph is chosen by Muslims, whether by popular election, or selection by Majlis as-Shura [Consultative Assembly]. Non-Muslims can enter the Majlis to represent their own community.

(Pastorius note: Once again, doesn't that sound like a good deal for u