The Sciolist

A Short Good-Bye

2004-09-21T16:52:00.000-04:00

Got this in my work mailbox today. Hand delivered.

----- Newspaper policy on personal Web sites and Web logs (blogs)

Editorial staffers (editors, reporters, and photographers) may operate personal Web sites, Web logs (blogs) or chat rooms only with the prior approval of their editor. Such Web sites, blogs and chat rooms may not contain content dealing in any way with the subject areas that the employees cover or reasonably might be expected to cover. The editor may withdraw approval of an editorial staffer's operation of a Web site, blog or chat room at any time.

It is especially important that editorial staffers do not express personal opinions - on their Web sites or in their blogs or chat rooms - on news subjects or issues that they cover. Such publication of personal opinion casts doubt on their impartiality, ultimately calling into question the newspaper's commitment to fairness.

Editorial staffers who operate their own Web sites, blogs or chat rooms may not use ----- Newspaper computers or other office facilities for that purpose. They may not work on their Web sites, blogs or chat rooms during office work hours.

Editorial staffers who operate their own Web sites, blogs or chat rooms are not permitted to trade on their newspaper positions. They may not lingk their personal sites, blogs or chat rooms to the ----- Newspapers' Web site nor to ------ Newspapers' articles. Personal Web sites, blogs or chat rooms may not use column names or any other identifying information or wording that connects the writer to ----- Newspapers.

Editorial staffers who have their own Web sites, blogs or chat rooms must notify their newspaper editor of the existence and the address of these Web publications. Staff members and correspondents agree that ----- Newspapers can access and review these personal Web sites, blogs or chat rooms at any time. Editorial staffers will, when requested to do so, provide reasonable assistance to ----- Newspapers in retrieving any archived or deleted materials from such Web sites, blogs or chat rooms.

An editorial staffer who violates this policy will face disciplinary action up to and including dismissal.

Well, that's the end of the line for me. Since I often sit at the wire desk and make decisions about which national and international news stories get published in the next day's edition of the ------ ------, the line about "may not contain content dealing in any way with the subject areas that the employees cover or reasonably might be expected to cover" precludes me from writing about current events in any form.

Of course, this is the same organization that allows extended dinner breaks to my peers (some of whom also work the wire desk) so they can attend anti-war rallies or protest local appearances by Bush. It's hard to point a camera at a local pro-Kerry rally without catching two or three of our staff, and they're not standing off to the side taking notes.

It's been nice knowing you all.

Rugrats Politics

2004-09-21T15:44:00.000-04:00

This was excerpted on one of the big-deal anti-war/anti-Bush blogs. It comes from a like-minded blogger whose site has "bushlies" as part of its URL. It described the blogger's advice to a Kerry staffer about Iraq:

On a Washington street corner, he now asked me how he had done. You have a tough job, I responded. The Bush campaign has succeeded in convincing the mainstream media that the key question is, what is Kerry's plan for Iraq? Not, say, what is Bush's plan for Iraq?

Notice how the election has three components: Bush, Kerry, media. People -- voters -- are just passive observers. Both sides may do that, but I hate it. But notice, too, how the whole thing starts to look like that old TV commercial about two little kids arguing over which one is going to eat the "cereal that's supposed to be good for you." Does this person really think that if I want to know Kerry's plans for Iraq, that means I don't care what Bush's are?

If Kerry is so fortunate to win on November 2, he won't take office until January 20, and the situation in Iraq could be dramatically different. Any specific plan he tossed out now could be--and probably would be--totally irrelevant at that point.

Yes, we know the calendar. And most of us out here in passive voter land are smart enough to understand that the situation could change. But we'd still like to know just a teensy bit about what your candidate might do if confronted with the present situation. We promise to take it in the spirit of a hypothetical situation, OK? Because Iraq might be totally different in a few months. Or it might not.

Or Kerry could pick some moment in the past year and say, with hindsight, in general terms, "this is what I would have done different in setting up an Iraqi government," or "this is how I would have handled the Fallujah problem."

Instead, Kerry always seems to stop at the water's edge of the decision to topple Saddam. He'll tell us what he would have done at that point -- which is to overthrow Saddam ... or maybe not -- but nothing more. So if I have a choice between the current bungling and someone who won't even give me a hint what kind of bungler he might be, I'm sticking with the evil I know.

Yet Republicans and echo-chamber reporters keep asking Kerry to state precisely how he would undo Bush's mess.

Ah, bingo. "Bush's mess." That "little kid" attitude again. "I didn't do it. It's not my fault." That's exactly what I don't want in a leader, and exactly what I fear about Kerry, whatever he may say. This war isn't his legacy. If he succeeds in Iraq, he'll just be polishing Dubya's image for history, at the cost of time and effort he could have devoted to building a legacy of his own. Men who get themselves nominated to the presidency have enormous vanity.

The kid stuff continues:

"I have two young daughters at home," I said to this Kerry aide. "If one takes a glass jar and throws it on the ground of their bedroom and smashes it into thousands of pieces, I don't point my finger at the other one and say, 'Okay, what's your plan for cleaning this up.' "

Nope. You take the one who "didn't do it" out of the room, and you keep the one who "did it" in charge of the situation till the mess is cleaned up.

Good strategy, guy.

Boy Who Cried Wolfowitz

2004-09-21T13:13:00.000-04:00

In the past six months I've probably seen a dozen pieces saying essentially the same thing as this article in Tuesday's International Herald Trib.

Once upon a time the U.S. secretary of state went to the UN Security Council and cried, "Wolf!" He said that the evil Saddam Hussein had been building weapons of mass destruction and posed an immediate threat to the United States and the world. Over 1,000 American deaths later, there are no WMDs to be found.

Wrong, of course, but let it pass. From there the article recites the usual litany. The 2003 State of the Union uranium claim, "exposed as phony early on." Wrong, too, but let that pass.

The United States cried wolf, and the world shuddered and watched as the most powerful country threw its weight around and took over Iraq and all of its resources, including its future.

There were no weapons of mass destruction, but there was oil and the possibility of redrawing the map of the Middle East to suit the narrow interests of the few. The few who cried wolf in the name of the American republic. The world wondered if it could ever believe the United States again.

All the usual paranoid nonsense. The same people who have said all their adult lives that the U.S. can never be trusted, is never worth trusting, the same people who can recite chapter and verse on Chile and Nicaragua and Vietnam and Wounded Knee, now claim that the U.S. squandered a vast reserve of "moral authority" that they always denied it ever had. They've told anyone who would listen that the U.S. is a greedy criminal hyper-violent corporate-ruled empire. But it's a scandal -- and George W. Bush's fault -- that the world actually believes them.

In this case, the old double standard is put to service in the interest of blaming the suffering in Darfur on the Americans.

Yes, you read that right. Arab militias, backed by an Islamic fundamentalist government which has a major arms deal with Russia, perpetrate the massacres. The U.S. presses the U.N. to act, but the French and Chinese, with huge investments in Sudan's oil industry, keep pulling the teeth of any resolution that reaches the Security Council. Both China and Russia, meanwhile, want to reserve the right to handle their own restive ethnic minorities the way the Sudanese are. Temporary Security Council members like Pakistan and Algeria won't break with the Arab League, which wants to downplay the whole matter and prevent anything that looks like an intervention.

In this crazy world we inhabit, that is America's fault. Because, you see, "the people of Darfur cannot count on the international community to save them from genocide because the country most outspoken against Khartoum is a country that lost its credibility because it cried wolf."

What's depressing is that this nuttiness isn't spewing from some aloof Euro-intelligensia type or a conspiracy-mad "Asia Times" columnist; it's written by the "executive director of Africa Action, the oldest Africa advocacy organization in the United States." So, theoretically, this is someone who has long-term firsthand knowledge of the spirit and complexity of the American people and political scene, as well as a someone whose first mission is to help Africans. Yet all that goes out the window for the sake of a fixation with the "Boy Who Cried Wolf."

The trouble with the boy who cried wolf fable is that it presents a world where "the boy" has all the power. The sheep are, well, they're sheep. Even the wolf is obeying his natural instincts and is blameless. The people in the village do nothing until the boy sounds the alarm. They're presumably baking muffins or playing two-deck canasta, or doing whatever it is villagers in fairy tales do when they're off-camera.

Those stories they told you in Sunday school are homilies. They're morality tales for 50-year-olds. They do not stand in for a mentally muscular geopolitical vision.
There's one power, and one villain, and they unite in the boy. That's the world-view of a lot of people. The odd part is, this false fable-world is claimed by people who also claim not to want to live in that world.

Yet I think I understand that. There's a great convenience in a world haunted by a monster. Hrothgar's great hall in "Beowulf" is dreary and deteriorated. His men -- some blame-shifters and idle boasters like Unferth -- have been sleeping in outbuildings for 12 years: wise men brooding and helpless while the monster reigns. By the time the hero arrives to kill the beast not everyone in Denmark is glad to see him. Everything is simple when all failures are fault of the monster. People who like simple worlds, but are daunted by the complexity and tragedy of living in this real one, can play at being villagers in The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

"Any of the 135 states that are signatories to the 1948 Convention on Genocide could demand international intervention."

But, apparently, only one of them is capable of doing it. I thought that the unilateral world was the nightmare of the anti-Americans. So do something about it, you one-hundred-thirty-four others. Push America off to the sidelines, sit us in the time-out chair and get off your butts and solve a damn problem on your own for once. We won't stop you. France? Germany? Kofi Annan? Go get 'em, tiger. I hope it works out better than it did in Somalia and Rwanda and Bosnia, but go for it.

Oh, and thanks to the author for reminding us all of the better rationale for the legal war against Saddam Hussein. The U.S. government didn't go the "human rights" route for whatever reason, no doubt in part because of the embarrassing truth that it neglected to topple Saddam long ago, and actively propped him for years.

I think that was a mistake. I thought so, and said so, ever since I met Kurdish refugees in Germany in 1979. Plenty of people in the U.S. were calling Saddam a killer all along and denouncing the Western administrations that played ball with him. I seem to be the only one in my acquaintance who is still saying that. To the rest, the only thing worse than the U.S. backing Saddam is the U.S. not backing Saddam. It upsets the "Boy Who Cried Wolf" world.

I'd have said, suck up the humiliation of admitting we were wrong, or that we made a really ugly choice out of necessity. If you've done wrong, don't wallow in it; get up and do right instead. And it would be fair to expect people to understand that 9/11 was, among other things, a great growing-up moment for this country. Like in the other fairy tales, the more complex ones, where the protagonist learns through loss and the weak boy emerges as a man in full.

Having made a mistake for years doesn't require you to keep making it -- unless you're the world's designated Boy Who Cried Wolf. If he stops being the villain, there's no more fable. Then outside America people have to think. And sometimes act.

"But the Security Council procrastinated, preoccupied as it was with Iraq."

Oh, fer chrissakes. The Security Council was done with Iraq in April 2003, after it failed to stop the U.S. and its allies from going to war. That's about the time Darfur moved up the agenda. In the year and a half since then, the U.N. has been incapable of doing anything about Sudan? I never knew preventing the Americans and their allies from overthrowing a dictator was so exhausting. It seems the rest of the world had to take a pill and go lie down for a few years.

Honestly, if the Security Council can't handle more than one issue at a time, it really is as lame as its worst critics say.

Once upon a time, Washington could have exercised its clout as the most powerful nation in the world and handily won over the support of these recalcitrant members. But now, the country that cried wolf has lost the moral authority it needs to rally its global neighbors to real action against genocide in Darfur.

Wait a minute. You "win over" other nations with "clout"? You "rally" them with "power"? And "clout" + "power" = "moral authority"? There are a number of ways to understand this paragraph, but they don't reflect well on the author. Perhaps he thinks bullying equals "moral authority."

Or perhaps he wrote himself into a spot where he had to offer a glowing vision of America as a nation with freedoms worth admiring, a force for good in the world (only for one clause, just long enough to say, "and then it threw it all away") but he just can't bring himself to write anything so positive. He wouldn't be the first, gods know. So the farthest he can go toward expressing America's "virtues" is to write in terms of naked power.

And is genocide really something that the rest of the world won't care about unless the Americans do?

But none of that matters, because the writer is just hurrying past that fleeting vision of a decent America to get to the happy reality that the rest of the world is now off the hook for anything bad that will occur anywhere from now till doomsday.

Thus the war in Iraq has now claimed another 50,000 victims -- this time in Sudan. ... In the tale of the boy who cried wolf, it was the boy himself who suffered the consequences of his actions. This time, it's two million people in Darfur.

The author of this article wants action, swift and sure, to stem the genocide, and he wanted it yesterday. I understand that; Darfur is a crime. Yet he won't leave the comforting myth-world of the "Boy Who Cried Wolf." He wants to be able to kick the Americans for doing nothing, and at the same time scold them for losing their power to do something, and at the same time absolve the rest of the world of any responsibility for itself, and at the same time damn the United States for thinking the rest of the world can't take care of itself.

In the end, to this Africa advocate, the slaughtered Africans of Darfur are just sheep in a story that is all about the boy.

Memo to Mike

2004-09-21T02:53:00.000-04:00

These are Minutemen ...

And these are terrorists ...

Any questions?

Not Evil, Just Misunderstood

2004-09-21T01:59:00.000-04:00

Banagor answers the burning question: "Why don't we just give Osama what he wants?"

Our Front Page Tomorrow

2004-09-21T01:34:00.000-04:00

Big 48-point headline in the lede story position (upper righthand corner): "Kerry Attacks Bush on Iraq." The New York Times version of the story. It celebrates Kerry's "stinging critique" of Bush's "colossal failures of judgment." The fact that Kerry said (this time) he wouldn't have overthrown Saddam is blurred into the text and not explicit anywhere in the top of the story. Bush's reaction -- even the fact that Bush had a reaction -- is buried deeper than CBS's reputation. It doesn't appear until well into the jump -- well after most people will have stopped reading.

Down below the fold, at about 30 point, is the CBS apology story. New York Times version, again. Highly sympathetic to CBS, compared to what might have been written.

Oh, and way down in the lower lefthand corner, in a headline about 18 points high, "American hostage beheaded in Iraq." It's not even a story. Just a little teaser to a story inside, stacked up on top of the weather icon (going to be foggy here tomorrow) and a blurb about interest rates.

That's the world my co-workers inhabit. That's their image of what matters, and how much it matters. I'm sure many of you will say, "what's wrong with that?" That's because it's your view, too, of the relative weight of things, the proper spin.

But for a big swath of America, that's not the world we live in. We've never thought of ourselves as a people of consensus. But the last four years have fractured the illusion of a coherent worldview of the American people. There at least used to be a "center" here, among the fringes. And the mass media both inhabited and buttressed that.

Now the erosion of newspaper readers and viewers who only see network TV news has worn away the center. Everytime we run an obituary, we lose a reader. There are no young newspaper subscribers. The network news for years has subsisted on ads for senior citizen projects. Poli-Grip, Depends, insurance. They know who's watching. America's consensus is a bundle of broken mirrors.

The news media in America sees its purpose as a check against the power of the administration in the White House. Being generally liberal in outlook, reporters and editors will find themselves in a more contrarian position to a GOP administration than to a Democratic one. This will happen even when there is no deliberate attempt to politicize the media.

Local yokel newspaper editorial writers are harder on the county commissioners than they are on street gang criminals. That makes sense, to a point. But only to a point. Just so, in the U.S. media world-view, Muslim fundamentalists are a secondary issue; they don't read newspaper editorials. They don't wither from bad press. As one of my fellow editors said after another Iraq beheading, "terrorism-schmerrorism; it's all Bush's fault."

But to a lot of Americans, the Islamist who slit the throats of "Christian dogs," not George W. Bush, are their enemy, their focus, their fear. And our page 1 that people unfold at their breakfast tables tomorrow will look, to a lot of them, upside down.

Chomskyite Co-Worker Quote of the Day

2004-09-20T18:18:00.000-04:00

Raving about "Fahrenheit 9/11" and the Clarke book:

"I know what I feel. I like to read the facts that support that."

Runner up: Boasting about finding a "triumphant" looking picture of Spanish golfer Sergio Garcia to put on page 1 to "rub the faces" of the readers in the fact that the Europeans defeated the Americans in the Ryder Cup. The Spain element was important to him, for some reason; because they bailed out on us in Iraq, I suppose.

Now, people tell me that strident anti-war politicians and entertainment figures are true patriots, with a love of country in their hearts. But I have to judge the ones I don't know in terms of the ones I do.

Sayonara, Iraq?

2004-09-20T17:40:00.000-04:00

Robert Novak lays out a depressing (to me) vision of the U.S. abandoning Iraq, even if Bush wins re-election.

Inside the Bush administration policymaking apparatus, there is strong feeling that U.S. troops must leave Iraq next year. This determination is not predicated on success in implanting Iraqi democracy and internal stability. Rather, the officials are saying: Ready or not, here we go.

This prospective policy is based on Iraq's national elections in late January, but not predicated on ending the insurgency or reaching a national political settlement. Getting out of Iraq would end the neoconservative dream of building democracy in the Arab world. The United States would be content having saved the world from Saddam Hussein's quest for weapons of mass destruction.

...

The end product would be an imperfect Iraq, probably dominated by Shia Muslims seeking revenge over long oppression by the Sunni-controlled Baathist Party. The Kurds would remain in their current semi-autonomous state. Iraq would not be divided, reassuring neighboring countries -- especially Turkey -- that are apprehensive about ethnically divided nations.

Victor Davis Hanson, on the other hand, makes the case for why this would be a terrible idea.

We have already done something like that before — many times. What rippled out afterwards was not pretty. American helicopters flying off the embassy roof in Saigon in 1975 gave us the climate for the Soviets in Afghanistan, Communists in Central America, and embassy hostage-taking in Tehran. Ignoring murders in Lebanon, New York, East Africa, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen, or lobbing an occasional cruise missile as tit-for-tat payback when terrorists harvested one too many expendable Americans abroad, ensured us September 11. In our loony world, losing credible deterrence (and we would) is an invitation for disaster — as bin Laden himself illustrated when he logically thought that the toppling of the World Trade Center would be followed by another Black Hawk Down American pullback.

...

We also have a moral stake in Iraq, whose people have suffered from 30 years of Baathist state terror and terrible fatalities in three losing wars. Our defeat of Iraq in 1991, our subsequent abandonment of the Kurds and Shiites to a wounded Saddam Hussein, twelve years of occupying Iraqi airspace, the corrupt U.N. embargo, and the recent final defeat of the Baathists brought untold misery to the Iraqi people.

In contrast, for the last year and a half, the United States has paid a high price to ensure the Iraqis a chance for the first humane and civilized government in the entire Arab Middle East. If it was callous to abandon the Shiites and Kurds in 1991, it is certainly right now to ensure that Saddam's gulag is not superseded by either a Taliban theocracy or a Lebanon-like cesspool.

...

For all these reasons and more, something like "See ya, wouldn't want to be ya" is the absolute worst prescription for Iraq — both for America and those Iraqis who are counting on us in their historic efforts to reclaim their country from barbarism. Amid the daily car bombings in Iraq, murder in Russia, and slaughter in the Middle East, we cannot see much hope — but it is there, and we are winning on a variety of fronts as the world continues to shrink for the Islamic fascist and those who would abet him.

Zeyad, at "Healing Iraq," also has a grim, but probably essentially accurate, vision of what would happen if America left in the near future.

All three groups [Sunni extremists/Ba'athists, foreign fighters, and Sadr's Al-Mahdi militia] have a common enemy at the moment, but each has a different goal in mind. The first two groups watch the actions of the third with growing concern, which I think is the reason they postpone their activities when Al-Mahdi take up arms. It is in their best interest that Sadr is neutralised, otherwise he would prove a powerful adversary in the future.

The most likely scenario in the event of a premature withdrawal of occuppation forces is this: Sadr will move to gain control of the south and most of Baghdad, other Shi'ites will submit by intimidation. The Marji'iya will have no power to intervene unless they are willing to allow a violent civil war between the various Shi'ite factions. Iran is likely to interfere, but perhaps not directly.

At the same time, Sunni elements will move to consolidate their power over their areas. The fundamental foreign and Salafi constituent would be too weak to control any area. Each town would be virtually independent until the strongest (and most ruthless) group can control the Sunni areas north of Baghdad. The Kurdish region would break off the rest of Iraq and the Peshmerga would move to control oil fields in Kirkuk. Later, there would be a bloody confrontation between the different groups until one subjugates the others and controls the country, this would probably take years and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis would die, many more would try to leave Iraq.

"Fahrenheit 1941"

2004-09-20T06:15:00.000-04:00

Many people loathe Michael Moore's America-mocking "Fahrenheit 9/11." I'm one of them. But to simply dismiss it and insult the filmmaker's girth is to miss the depth of the depraved genius in it. The movie is a very capable bit of propaganda. It is right out of the school of Frank Capra's "Why We Fight" films from World War II.

Yet the nefarious irony in that comparison is that while Capra's depictions were meant to rally Americans to uphold the torch of freedom and overcome latent isolationism in the name of civilization, Moore's modern equivalent is propaganda made here at home for the benefit of the enemy. The religious authorities in Iran, for instance, scrapped the scheduled program at the Farabi Cinema complex in Tehran to put Moore's masterpiece on display. "This film unmasks the Great Satan America," a spokesman said. "It tells Muslim people why they are right in hating America. It is the duty of every believer to see [this film] and learn the truth."

"Prelude to War" won the Academy Award for best documentary of 1942. Moore wants his to win best picture of 2004. How ironic is it that the most significant piece of Hollywood propaganda produced in this war is lauded by the people who would burn Hollywood to ash and sow its soil with salt if they had the chance?

Yet he fed it to us, and we ate it up.

Capra's propaganda films began as orientation pieces for U.S. troops. At Roosevelt's urging, they were released in public theaters as well. Capra's bright idea was to damn the enemy with his own work. Instead of shooting new film, he picked out snippets of existing footage and pasted them together in a way that presented a grotesque vision of the Axis.

Capra's raw material was millions of feet of confiscated or captured newsreels and propaganda films; he even used Japanese samurai movies and domestic dramas from the 1930s. With his legendary cutting-room skills and his eye for bold juxtapositions he made America and her allies shine (including the murderous Soviet Union), and showed off the Axis -- not just its leaders but the whole people of Italy, Germany, and Japan -- as demonic: regimented nations of ruthless killers, blindly devoted to their leaders. The enemies' menace contrasted with the freedoms and accomplishments of the Americans and their allies; the free world and the fascists; the Allied "way of life" vs. the Axis "way of death."

Like Capra, Moore mostly used footage shot by others when he cobbled together "Fahrenheit 9/11." The IMDB "cast" list for the film names 40 public figures; of these, 37 are credited as from "archival footage." Even the common soldiers portrayed often weren't filmed by Moore. Some are from an Australian documentary, "Soundtrack to War," and were used despite the objection of film-maker George Gittoes.

"I was concerned of course for my soldiers because their interviews were taken out of context," Gittoes told the Nine Network. "There are about 17 scenes from my documentary in his film. I wouldn't go so far as to say he lifted (them). Michael got access to my stuff and assumed that I would be happy for it to be in 9/11. I would actually have been quite happy for it not to be in 9/11." Gittoes said he had no idea his work was in "Fahrenheit 9/11" until it was screened at the Cannes film festival.

Moore's archival footage of Baghdad before the invasion shows the kind of happy glow Capra might have given to the American hearth: "a place filled with nothing but happy, smiling, giggly, overjoyed Baghdadis. No pain and suffering there. No rape, murder, gassing, imprisoning, silencing of the citizens in these scenes." [Jeff Jarvis, Buzz Machine weblog] And where Capra showed the devastated cities of China strewn with civilian corpses, Moore gives us a U.S. military campaign in Iraq that seems to have killed only women and children.

Even when he does use his own footage, Moore edits it mercilessly to make it say what he insists is true. Rep. Mark Kennedy, one of the lawmakers buttonholed by Moore and asked why he won't send his children to fight in Iraq, ends up on the screen looking "bewildered and defensive." It was such a good few seconds that Moore put it in his trailer. But that was the initial shock of the accosting. The rest of the exchange, as transcribed on Moore's own Web site goes, in part, like this:

Moore: Is there any way you could help me with that?

Kennedy: How would I help you?

Moore: Pass it out to other members of Congress.

Kennedy: I’d be happy to — especially those who voted for the war. I have a nephew on his way to Afghanistan.

But that, of course, ends up on the cutting room floor. Meanwhile, another Congressman among those Moore says would not "sacrifice their children" in Iraq is Mike Castle of Delaware, who has no children.

A scene that has been re-enacted at least a dozen times in my hearing by the denizens of my newsroom is the one where Bush speaks to a tuxedoed audience and says, "I call you the haves and the have-mores. Some call you the elite; I call you my base."

The joke follows several segments in which Bush is accused of having started the Iraq war to enrich big corporations. Juxtaposition, juxtaposition, juxtaposition. The speech actually comes from the Oct. 19, 2000, Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner. Bush and Gore were the co-guests of honor at the event, and they followed the dinner's tradition of speakers poking fun at themselves. So far from raking in plutocrat gold, Bush was speaking at an annual dinner that raises money for Catholic hospital charities in New York City.

Another big laugh-line is the one where Condoleezza Rice says, "Oh, indeed there is a tie between Iraq and what happened on 9/11." Here is what Rice really said on the CBS Early Show, Nov. 28, 2003:

Oh, indeed there is a tie between Iraq and what happened on 9/11. It’s not
that Saddam Hussein was somehow himself and his regime involved in 9/11, but, if you think about what caused 9/11, it is the rise of ideologies of hatred that lead people to drive airplanes into buildings in New York. This is a great terrorist, international terrorist network that is determined to defeat freedom. It has perverted Islam from a peaceful religion into one in which they call on it for violence. And they're all linked. And Iraq is a central front because, if and when, and we will, we change the nature of Iraq to a place that is peaceful and democratic and prosperous in the heart of the Middle East, you will begin to change the Middle East ....

Capra didn't want to be a propagandist at first. When Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall approached him with the idea, he demurred, saying he'd never made a documentary before. Marshall told him, "Capra, I have never been Chief of Staff before. Thousands of young Americans have never had their legs shot off before. Boys are commanding ships today who a year ago had never seen the ocean before." Capra apologized and signed on to make "the best damned documentary films ever made." After he began the project he said that all he had to do was let the enemy be himself on film, "and our fighting men will know why they are in uniform."

Michael Moore doesn't have to be talked into propaganda. He wallows in it. And just like Capra, he knows very clearly who the enemy is, who the heroes are, what he hates, and why:

"The motivation for war is simple. The U.S. government started the war with Iraq in order to make it easy for U.S. corporations to do business in other countries. They intend to use cheap labor in those countries, which will make Americans rich."

...

"The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win."

He fed it to us, and we ate it up. The modern-day Capra is working for the benefit of the new Nazis. He's so powerful John Kerry is afraid to speak his name. Yet the most rabid Kerry backers in my precinct chant it like a mantra to one another.

My blowhard Chomskyite co-workers think he's the most important man alive. One dismissed the attrocities of Sherman's march through Georgia in 1864 as of no moral importance, saying, "That was OK because we did it to ourselves." The same person's reaction to our banner headline coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks was, "don't you think we're going overboard about this?"

I recognized the same voice, and the same mentality, when I read Ed Koch's account of a post-9/11 conversation with Moore, in which the filmmaker said, "I don't know why we are making so much of an act of terror. It is three times more likely that you will be struck by lightning than die from an act of terror."

Like a lot of people in this election, I find myself preparing to cast a negative vote. I'm not "for" George Bush. I'm for "anyone but Michael Moore."

As a Matter of Fact ...

2004-09-19T03:03:00.000-04:00

...he does "hate us for our freedoms" (among other things).

Some samples from Bin Laden's 'Letter to America' for the benefit of those who think his objections to America are purely responses to "specific policies."

The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.

We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest. We call you to all of this that you may be freed from that which you have become caught up in; that you may be freed from the deceptive lies that you are a great nation, that your leaders spread amongst you to conceal from you the despicable state to which you have reached.

It is saddening to tell you that you are the worst civilization witnessed by the history of mankind:

You are the nation who, rather than ruling by the Shariah of Allah in its Constitution and Laws, choose to invent your own laws as you will and desire. You separate religion from your policies, contradicting the pure nature which affirms Absolute Authority to the Lord and your Creator. ...

You are a nation that permits the production, trading and usage of intoxicants. You also permit drugs, and only forbid the trade of them, even though your nation is the largest consumer of them.

You are a nation that permits acts of immorality, and you consider them to be pillars of personal freedom. You have continued to sink down this abyss from level to level until incest has spread amongst you, in the face of which neither your sense of honour nor your laws object.

Who can forget your President Clinton's immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he 'made a mistake', after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?

You are a nation that exploits women like consumer products or advertising tools calling upon customers to purchase them. You use women to serve passengers, visitors, and strangers to increase your profit margins. You then rant that you support the liberation of women.

You are a nation that practices the trade of sex in all its forms, directly and indirectly. Giant corporations and establishments are established on this, under the name of art, entertainment, tourism and freedom, and other deceptive names you attribute to it.

And because of all this, you have been described in history as a nation that spreads diseases that were unknown to man in the past. Go ahead and boast to the nations of man, that you brought them AIDS as a Satanic American Invention.

An Immutable Law

2004-09-18T07:17:00.000-04:00

Britain had ruled Egypt for 24 years when Gertrude Bell, travelling in Syria and seeing the local leaders chafing under Ottoman misrule, wrote this:

"Nevertheless, the moral is obvious: all over Syria and even in the desert, whenever a man is ground down by injustice or mastered by his own incompetence, he wishes he were under the rule that has given wealth to Egypt, and our occupation of that country, which did so much at first to alienate from us the sympathies of Mohammedans, has proved the finest advertisement of English methods of government."

To which, editing the manuscript, she added this footnote, addressing the rebellion which had erupted in Egypt in June 1906. It began when peasants, mistaking the gunfire as hostile, attacked British soldiers who were shooting pigeons, killing one, and the British governor ordered harsh reprisals.

"The present unrest in Egypt may seem to throw a doubt upon the truth of these observations, but I do not believe this to be the case. The Egyptians have forgotten the miseries from which our administration rescued them, the Syrians and the people of the desert are still labouring under them, and in their eyes the position of their neighbours is one of unalloyed and enviable ease. But when once the wolf is driven from the door, the restraints imposed by an immutable law eat into the temper of a restless, unstable population accustomed to reckon with misrule and to profit by the frequent laxity and occasional opportunities of undeserved advancement which characterise it. Justice is a capital thing when it guards your legal rights, but most damnable when you wish to usurp the rights of others."

["The Desert and the Sown," 1907]

Truth and Propaganda

2004-09-17T03:18:00.000-04:00

Atop a grieving Statue of Libery, the demonic-looking U.S. president waves a banner reading "democracy," but in his other fist he clutches the club of "dictatorship." Around him, on the statue's crown points, a young woman hangs in fetters, "anti-war" soldiers carouse, U.S. workers protest, and a clown in a dunce cap emblazoned with the Star of David inflates a stars-and-stripes balloon.

The latest from Ted Rall or Michael Moore? Something from the Middle Eastern press or "Le Monde?" No, the president caricatured is Roosevelt, and the image is by the great Japanese illustrator Ono Saseo, and it graced the pages of the January 1942 issue of the Japanese magazine "Manga."

When John W. Dower's "War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War" was published, in 1986, the book was reviewed and analized in terms of the current economic war between the U.S. and Japan. That conflict frames his concluding chapter. But reading the book now, in the light of the U.S. war on Islamist terror, the examples of World War II offer a template to current events.

If that was "The Good War," then the one we're fighting now, in Iraq and elsewhere, is so much "better."

Despite what you've been told. Because of the closing of the World War II generation in these years, we are saluting the veterans of that war with reverence. The current battle is held up, on the other hand, in many quarters, as a shabby and cruel excuse for a real fair fight, a stark contrast to America's great war.

Yet the care taken in Afghanistan and Iraq to avoid killing innocents; the care taken by our people to avoid crude caricatures of the enemy's culture (instead we seem intent on making crude caricatures of ourselves); and the differentiation of the mass of "good" people in the enemy lands, whom we are trying to help, from the handful of "evil" ones, is something utterly alien to the U.S., British, and Australian war against the Japanese. So is the mere possibility of considering that those who attacked us had, on some level, legitimate grievances.

As international geo-political experiences, the War with Japan and the War on Islamism can't be compared. Bin Laden and the Islamists lack a nation, a navy (though they do have kamikaze pilots), a capital, a land, a people. But on the clash of civilizations level, these things are not the defining qualities of a conflict. They affect tactics and strategies, but they are not essentials.

The Islamists can bully governments like Pakistan, Sudan, Yemen, and (formerly) Afghanistan to get the land they need, when they need it. They can strong-arm cowardly dictators like the Saudis when they need cash. Their "people" is dispersed throughout the Islamic world, from which they draw what they need for their military operations, which, being mostly of a smash-and-grab nature, rarely require concentrated forces. And as for weapons, who needs a carrier fleet when one man can sink a destroyer with a balsa wood raft or deliver Hell in the back of a rented van?

The war the U.S. and Japan waged in the Pacific in 1941-45 was incalculably more intense in brutality, mutual racist loathing, and sheer killing power than that waged by the U.S. against Germany and Italy in North Africa and Europe. It was felt to be so at the time, and this was borne out by statistics accumulated later. For instance, of the U.S. and U.K. men captured by the Germans and Italians, all but 4 percent survived captivity, while among Japan's Anglo-American POWs, 27 percent died.

Dower emphasizes the role of propaganda in all this, but he also points out the degree to which the horror stories from the battlefield didn't have to be invented. Genuine atrocities hardened the two sides against one another. Despite censorship and a media that seemed positively Stone Age by today's standards, images and inflamatory speeches found their way across the ocean and galvanized opinion in both nations.

A "Life" magazine photo of a U.S. tank decorated with a Japanese skull, grinning fleshlessly under its helmet, might have done as much as anything to instill in the Japanese soldier the certainty that it was better to die than to surrender to these barbarians.

In the U.S. media, the caricatures against the European Axis powers centered on Hitler and Mussolini. There were "good Germans" in the Western press. The enemies were "fascists" and "Nazis." In the Pacific, the enemy was "the Jap." They were denied even the grammatical multiplicity that would hint at individualism.

To the Japanese, the image of the hated West was stunningly similar to that put forth by Bin Laden and his ilk: decadent, materialistic, racist, bent on world domination. The Japanese felt they were a divine race, with a destiny to lead the world. Yet they felt pressed and weakened by the West, which they perceived as bent on world domination and direct economic strangulation of the Japanese civilization. The Japanese chafed under the disrespect shown in the West toward their civilization's power and glorious history; this situation was an inversion of the divine order. They also held specific and general grievances against the West, some of them more or less legitimate.

Japan told itself it had lashed out in the name of survival against an enemy bent on hegemony and economic control of crucial resources (oil, rubber, and tin in East Asia). What Americans saw as the "sneak attack" on Pearl Harbor was, in Japan, "the counteroffensive of the Oriental races against Occidental aggression."

And Dower writes that each combatant wove out of the other's reality, and of the other's self image, the grotesque parodies of propaganda:

"In everyday words, this first kind of stereotyping could be summed up in the statement: you are the opposite of what you say you are and the opposite of us, not peaceful but warlike, not good but bad. ... In the second form of stereotyping, the formula ran more like this: you are what you say you are, but that is itself reprehensible. On the part of the Japanese, this involved singling out the emphasis placed on individualism and profit making in the Western tradition, and presenting this as proof positive that Westerners were fundamentally selfish and greedy, devoted to self-aggrandizement at the expense of the community and the nation as a whole. Westerners, in turn, accepted Japanese emphasis on the primacy of the group or collectivity at face value, and used this as prima facie evidence that the Japanese were closer to cattle or robots than to themselves. One side's idealized virtues easily fed the other side's racial prejudices."

The propaganda proved tremendously malleable. In the early months of the war, the Japanese rolled up easy victories, and this proved the flabbiness and cowardly nature of the West. When the Allies struck back, their fierce fighting and bombing raids proved to the Japanese that their foes were inhuman savages.

"Why Do They Hate Us?" (Another Try)

2004-09-17T03:16:00.000-04:00

That was the Sept. 11 question, and it got two answers: "they hate us for our freedoms" and "they hate us for our policies." (Discounting the common Euro-elitist answer of, "Because everyone hates fat stupid Americans, of course.") People tended to accept one, scorn the other, and act accordingly. Is it possible that both are right?

Many in the Muslim world were furiously resentful of America before the terrorist attacks -- the dancing in the streets of Cairo as the people fell to their death from the towers certainly hints at that. And opinion polls bear it out. They have grown moreso since Sept. 11. Anger at and hatred of America is what unites the Islamist fanatics and the average Sunni Muslim Arabs who form their active and passive supporters.

And so the two answers converge: Islamist preachers rail against our freedoms and values, which they regard as decadent and irreligious, while our foreign policies and our dominant position in the world irritate many millions of people who otherwise accept and even embrace our "freedoms" (while denying that we actually embody those values).

Yet it is not a clear case of one answer from the Islamists, another from the people. In the section of the 9/11 Commission report titled "Bin Ladin’s Worldview," the authors outline the way Islamists tap in to some natural human instincts -- such as the yearning for order, the desire to be personally important, the dream of a lost golden age, the sense of the importance of one's own group.

Despite his claims to universal leadership, Bin Ladin offers an extreme view of Islamic history designed to appeal mainly to Arabs and Sunnis. He draws on fundamentalists who blame the eventual destruction of the Caliphate on leaders who abandoned the pure path of religious devotion. He repeatedly calls on his followers to embrace martyrdom since 'the walls of oppression and humiliation cannot be demolished except in a rain of bullets.' For those yearning for a lost sense of order in an older, more tranquil world, he offers his 'Caliphate' as an imagined alternative to today’s uncertainty. For others, he offers simplistic conspiracies to explain their world.

Like the German Nazis, the Islamists exploit and pervert genuine situations (the Islamic civilization's current poverty and defeat, and its exaggerated remembrance of its past glory) and leaven them with the poison of a people's willingness to blame its problems on outsiders.

And the Middle Eastern resentment is not simply about specific policies of the U.S. government; down at its roots it also is about the fact that there is a West, flourishing and powerful, while the Islamic religion and civilization remain weak, divided and impoverished.

And here is where Islam itself presents a special problem. Because the religion, like most others but in a more intense degree, is embedded with a sense of its own specialness. It lacks a back-down position in conflict with the outside world. Such a result can be created or imposed on it, but it is artificial to anyone who takes the religion literally and seriously, as a great many of its adherents do.

Furthermore, despite the universality of Islam (which is genuine and scriptural) it always has retained a strong Arab-centered quality. It is a universal religion, but it is the core of the civilization of the Arabs. It can be adopted readily to nationalist purposes in the Middle East the way it cannot in, say, Indonesia or Chechnya. Hence the easy shift of 1950s secular Arab Nationalism into 1990s Islamism.

The presumption that Islam ought to be the dominant religion, and that Arab-led caliphate ought to hold power in the world, creates an intricate carpet-weave of religious fervor and racist nationalism. "Others" are wrong or inferior. Christianity, Judaism, and secularism are held in contempt, either benign or malicious. And the pre-eminence of Islam is continually asserted.

This has the advantage over the pure Arab Nationalism, because it hitches the same movement to God's natural order for the world, and frees it from the ultimately Western and non-Islamic rhetoric of Marxism and anti-colonialism.

So we're told by some that it is our policies that enflame the Arab world, and this has nothing to do with their religion. It merely forces them into the arms of Islamists whom they otherwise would object. But what policies? The answer there usually boils down to two: We encourage or allow repressive dictatorships in the Arab world, and we support the "Zionist entity," a thing so criminal and perverse in their eyes that they cannot even bear to name it.

The fixation with "corrupt rulers" is an immediate response to the anger of Arabs and Muslims who want a better life for themselves and their children. It is a legitimate grievance, and ought to be a source of shame to the United States, though many of the most brutish secular regimes -- Syria, Libya, Saddam's Iraq -- came to power without our intention and often persisted in spite of our opposition.

But this political objection is not divorced from Islam. The "corrupt rulers" theme is central in Islamist rhetoric and the Bin Laden version of history. "The extreme Islamist version of history blames the decline from Islam’s golden age on the rulers and people who turned away from the true path of their religion, thereby leaving Islam vulnerable to encroaching foreign powers eager to steal their land, wealth, and even their souls." [9-11 Commission]

It is true that many moderate Arab Muslims wish to live in peace and equality with other peoples and faiths. But it also is true that a great many others have imbued the promise made to them by their own God, in his own words, that they were destined to be the apex of creation, and that the world was meant to submit to the message they were given and told to spread.

So what of the other objection? Why do the Arabs hate Israel? It is a sliver of a country, that does no direct harm to 99 percent of the world's Muslims, but those in Mindanao talk of its destruction as fervently as those who live in the shadow of the separation fence in the West Bank.

It is an artificial creation of the 20th century. Well, so is Iraq, so is Jordan. It is built on land that once was owned and ruled by another people. Well, take that up with the Sudeten Germans or the Liberian natives or the Sioux or the Celto-Britons. Many Muslims prosper inside Israel; synagogues are car-bombed in Istanbul and no Jew is tolerated to even set foot, except a diplomat, briefly, in Saudi Arabia.

I think Israel is so hated because it, more than anything, symbolizes Islamic/Arab impotence. They did not want this nation to happen, but they could not stop it. They have tried repeatedly to crush it out of existence, but it has only grown stronger, and their arms were humiliated by it. And it is a nation built by the very people their scripture gives them the right and authority to rule and render subservient.

One of the central truths of the Qu'ran is that Islam is the final revelation, the completion of God's plan. If there is one consequence of that, it is that the older, imperfect religions in this tradition, such as Judaism, ought not to call the shots for the ultimate one.

***

Both sides in the American Civil War passionately believed God was on their side. The South, perhaps moreso than the North, held this conviction. Religious revivals swept the Confederate camps in 1863 and 1864, and the people of the South believed that their piety and the Scriptural basis of their social order would bring them divine assistance.

Yet when their cause failed and their armies were defeated, their religion taught them to accept this as a chastisement. They saw the many failings in their leaders and themselves, and they turned inward for repentance and reform. This was based in their religion; Christianity encourages such humility.

In Japan, after 1945, the same cultural and religious forces that had driven the nation into war served it in the transition to peace and acceptance of defeat. The emperor, the descendant of a goddess, was a key player. "Purity" during the war had meant purging Japan and Asia of Western decadent influences and hegemony. After defeat, it served the cause of purifying Japan of militarism and corrupt feudalism. During the war, the Shinto concept of "proper place" had encouraged a racist vision of Japanese superiority in the world; but it allowed the nation, after defeat, to embrace the "place" of being a good loser.

Even the caricatures of the Americans as demons and beast-monsters of Japanese folklore allowed a transition to accepting American military protection; the archetypal folklore demon (like the faeries of Europe) always had two aspects, destructive, but also potentially instructive and tutelary.

But where in Islam is this quality? Where is its ability to stop fighting, to accept that there will be no world caliphate? We are offered the hadith about "lesser jihad" and "greater jihad," but that does not negate the call to religious war.

As if we needed reminders after Sept. 11, the Islamist movement is not an internal matter for Muslim nations only. An isolationist America or Europe can say it is no business of ours if Middle Eastern or North African countries embrace female circumcision, beheading, denial of basic rights to religious minorities (though I have a hard time calling such isolationists "liberals"). But there is an international relations component to this religious movement.

In a world where the most deadly weapons slowly ooze out of their containers, a region festering with petulance and paranoia has to be dealt with, now, not later. It's not a good time to tell ourselves convenient lies about what motivates those who would kill us.

Exhaustive Evidence

2004-09-16T23:59:00.000-04:00

of the CBS Bush memo hoax. Anyone still care to claim these puppies are legit? Loser posts naked self-pics on his/her blog?

That's a scary thought, win or lose. Here's why, and evidence of where I've been the first half of this week. Did you miss me? I though so.

Russian Roulette

2004-09-12T16:04:00.000-04:00

Consider Putin's dilemma after Beslan:

He can strike back at the Chechans; but the worst he can do is kill more of them, and that will harden the survivors. The ones who killed his children are beyond reach of his revenge now, and they already had embraced the cult of death. More violence against that people likely will breed more "black widows," who will go scuttling off into Russia with bombs strapped to their bodies.

But could he do nothing? That response seems to me inhuman. They kill your babies, and you just shrug and keep on walking? Passive resistance is a loving weapon of the strong against the weak; it is the way of an adult who suffers a child's rage. The victims of terror feel neither love nor strength in the presence of their killers. Even Gandhi advised, "It is better to be violent, if there is violence in our hearts, than to put on the cloak of non-violence to cover impotence."

Doing nothing would foster nihilism in Putin's own land as the thousands of grieving find neither justice nor peace while across the border the supporters of the vicious killers gloat. The perception of weakness, among an enemy who despises weakness, grows.

Or he can attempt to negotiate a settlement to the Chechen war. That would mean admitting, at least tacitly, that the past was a train of erring policies and over-reactions on Russia's part. But how can he now make the least concession to moderate Chechens (the majority, I read constantly, do not accept the Islamist rule) without the obvious appearance of caving in to terrorists?

If no concession was made before the hundreds of dead children in Beslan, and concession is made after, what else could be the reason? What but the staggering blow against the innocents will have changed the Kremlin and benefitted the Chechens?

If Russia buys its peace that way, even if it's a good peace brokered with honest people, it will have killed countless other innocents. Its example would teach death cult cells everywhere that, if you kill enough school children, you get your way in the end. You'll be the martyr hero of your people. This would do worse than the horrible example of Spain after March 11, and the Philippines in Iraq.

Consider Putin's dilemma, because, in spite of many differences of particulars, it also remains America's, on the fourth anniversary of 9-11.

The Great Big Newsroom

2004-09-12T15:24:00.000-04:00

I'm enjoying the sight of Dan Rather picked to pieces by bloggers over CBS's claim to have damning evidence of Bush's dereliction of duty in the Vietnam years.

Hugh Hewitt has a good wrap here, linking to the major publications so far, laying out the issues, and meditating on new media vs. old media.

Lord Thomson's dictum about a newsroom having a duty to "provide a refuge and a home for the largest number of salaried eccentrics" was more than just a statement of social obligation. Those people will save your journalistic neck sometimes.

A typical U.S. newspaper newsroom is a staff of, say, 20 or 30 people all of whom write or edit for a living. But they also ought to have expertises beyond writing. One might be a backyard astronomer, another might have spent a decade knocking around Asia in the Merchant Marine, another might be fluent in Homeric Greek. (I've worked with all three over the years).

Add them all together, and you've got Sherlock Holmes. Someone, among all of that crowd, might know that, say, the U.S. minted no half-dollars in the year 1926, or that Key Largo in Florida is named for the John Huston movie, not the other way around, or that a full moon rises the exact time the sun sets.

And just once in the lifetime of a great news institution, that sliver of knowledge could rise from trivial to essential. It might not be the obvious point of some story, but it might be the little red flag, which opens up a suspicion that turns a whole story on its head.

If CBS had had any staffers who had fiddled around with typefaces and fonts in the course of their lives, they might have noticed some of the problems in the supposed Bush memos, which jumped out to some bloggers with Web design skills. A modern word processing program has or does as a matter of course some functions which were missing in typewriters in 1971 or '72 (supposed date of the Bush evidence) -- proportional spacing, superscripts, kerning.

And so Dan Rather ends up egg-faced, and the blogosphere puts another notch in its pistol handle. Because as big media newsrooms have shrunk, and grown more conformist, they know less and less, collectively.

The blogosphere is a great big sprawling newsroom in the old style. Somewhere, out here, there is someone who knows more about any one topic than all the j-school graduates in the nation do. And that person now can publish what he knows.

Odd thing is, in the real old days of newspapers there was a class of men (almost always men) who worked in the back shops, who remembered hot lead and stick-and-rule typesetting, and they would have spotted problems in these CBS letters. I doubt there ever were any such men at CBS, however, and there are none left at newspapers now.

Instead, journalism has changed from a collection of salaried eccentrics with eclectic interests, drinking problems, and half-written novels in their desk drawers, to a "profession." You go to a certain college right out of high school, and you study on a journalism track, and you graduate with a degree that will get you hired in any newsroom in America, but you don't know boo about anything except what's behind that piece of paper. You haven't lived much.

Newsrooms increasingly are made up of people from the same background, the same religion (or lack of it), the same political drift, the same education, the same limited experience of life. Artificial introductions of diversity, like Jayson Blair at the New York Times, often are disasters.

Little Earthquakes

2004-09-10T01:36:00.000-04:00

The start of the Muslim reformation?

Maybe, maybe not. Some softening of the hard-line legal interpretation of Shari'a in India and Morocco, intriguing political discussion in Malaysia and Indonesia. These are important nations, and in the case of India and Indonesia, home to vast Islamic populations. But they are peripheral to the Arab-Muslim core. Malaysia does not lead Mecca.

Funny Pages

2004-09-10T01:08:00.000-04:00

Most newspaper editorial cartoonists break to the liberal side of the political field. That's not surprising, given that their profession merges artistic sensibility, humor, and journalism. (And we all know conservatives are dour, talentless illiterates.)

Just consider the current row over Art Spiegelman's new book, which equates Bush with bin Laden in terms of a threat to Art's life, claims himself as a "victim" of 9-11, says his grief was hijacked by everyone else's, and whatnot.

Well, people who think like that will buy that book, and people who don't, won't. And some wonderful illustrated works have been published in memoriam of the victims of 9-11 without the Marxist-Chomskyite solipsism. But the editorial page cartoons that run in the daily newspapers don't even have that balance. Spiegelman is one of the icons of that craft, but the difference between him and his ink-stained admirers in big city newsrooms is mostly a matter of professional position, not politics.

If you look at the flow of editorial cartoons, the absolute lack of anything like a "right" view in the selection that most newspaper editors are given every day is really pretty stunning. Ten years ago, when I was an editorial page editor, I had to hunt high and low for anything like a conservative perspective. I might find one a week.

I was a liberal myself at the time, an independent who leaned Democrat, but my readership was overwhelmingly Republican, and I did like to present a balanced page to them. Among columnists, we ran Ellen Goodman and Molly Ivins as well as George Will and the flaming Buchanan wanna-be Cal Thomas from the L.A. Times.

In this season -- with the heat of an election year and the war in Iraq -- the total Michael Moore mentality of the editorial cartoonists strikes me as way over the line. A good editorial cartoon thinks, it makes you think just to look at it. I haven't seen anything like thought for a long time. Just party line attacks made as visual and vicious as possible. The pictures are ugly. The anger is intense. Here's the selection that moved for our editors today:

A Toles cartoon with God looking down at a Florida swarming with hurricanes and suggesting it's punishment for the Florida Election Commission's role in elevating Bush to the White House.
Bush holding a big, big gun that says "Bush's War."
A snarling Dick Cheney holding a big, big gun saying "Cheney campaign."
A snarling Putin, holding bombs and a gun, and wrapped up in a snake labeled "revenge."
Rows and rows of U.S. flag-draped coffins, a bouquet on each, and the caption, "... they'll be greeted with flowers."
A Danziger cartoon with an empty jet cockpit strewn with beer bottles and "Sorry, Lt. Bush doesn't feel like going to war. Somebody else please go in his place" scrawled on the side.
A Canadian cartoon with Bin Laden looking up from a newspaper with a big headline that says "Iraq U.S. body count now over 1,000," saying, "Holy smokes, I better get cracking. Bush is catching up to me."

And that's it. That's not a sample; that's the whole list sent to my paper by the syndicate we use. I know my editors, and their only concern will be to determine which makes them laugh hardest at Bush. They bring that one out and show it to the resident Chomskyite copy editor for approval. If he laughs, too, it runs.

If I had to sum up the decision-making, it would be, "What would Michael Moore run?" Though I never heard them put it in so many words. Only the reporters and my fellow copy editors put it in so many words.

On top of that, we run "Doonesbury" and a big ol' weekly "Opus" that most people on staff don't really claim to get, except that it's usually somehow anti-Republican. Oh, well, there's always Cox and Forkum and Day by Day, but don't expect to see those in my paper in the foreseeable future. By which I mean, "not in my lifetime."

The Year of Moving On

2004-09-09T23:51:00.000-04:00

The trope for this year's 9-11 anniversary stories is "getting over it, moving on."

Houston plans to host "events large and small, including seminars and prayer sessions, a candlelight vigil and at least one fire-department barbecue," according to the "Houston Chronicle."

The largest public event in the area is planned for Saturday morning at Texas A&M University, where a twisted, charred steel beam from Manhattan's ground zero will be the centerpiece for an observance at the George Bush Presidential Library and Museum.

But even as candles are lit and prayers intoned, experts note that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks seemingly are beginning their inexorable retreat into history.

"It's a natural part of the grieving process," said Roberta Diddel, a Rice University psychology lecturer. "We are adaptive beings, and part of our nature is to regroup and go on. ... It doesn't make it less horrible, and it doesn't mean the loss doesn't continue, but people are ready to put their energies into life."

In some cases, organizations that previously sponsored 9/11 observances, including the 3,500-member Houston Fire Department, this year will not do so.

"It's not a lack of caring," said Martha Haun, director of University of Houston's Crisis Resource Center. "It's that, for many people, there's a lack of time and resources. There are so many things for us to care about — Vietnam, the war in Iraq, the Persian Gulf War, airliners that have crashed. ... We can't commemorate all of those things on a regular basis or we'll spend all of our time having ceremonies."

Even on the Internet, Michele, at A Small Victory, who has posted emotionally wringing accounts the past two years, is foreswearing 9-11 anniversary posts this year.

I think, above all, reacting to this anniversary with reverence rather than rhetoric, with hope rather than hate, with dared optimism rather than depression, is the best we can do for those who died.

This is the first and last thing I will write about the third anniversary of 9/11. I will attend a sunrise memorial on the beach this Saturday and I will whisper thanks to the heros and feel sorrow for all who died. And as the sun rises, I will greet the new day as another one in which to appreciate that I still can have absolute moments of happiness while still holding onto my piece of 9/11.

Meanwhile, around here "peace activists" are loudly beating the drum over the 1,000 U.S. dead benchmark in Iraq, and I think they hope they'll drown out 9-11, an extremely uncomfortable anniversary for them, altogether. The date confronts them with a truth they'd rather forget, rather see everyone else forget.

Found in Translation

2004-09-09T17:27:00.000-04:00

When U.S. news reports are translated for foreign wire services, they often acquire a slant they don't get at home. What is played up tends to feed into the overseas impression of Americans as selfish, ignorant, bullies. Just read a German newspaper account of a Bush State of the Union speech.

But when foreign news stories get translated into English, an interesting thing happens.

Barcepundit offers this article is from the English version of EFE, the state-run Spanish news agency.

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero called on the world community Thursday to take urgent steps to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the Iraq crisis.

After strongly condemning the wave of hostage-taking in Iraq, he said: "These events are part of a picture in which the world community and the United Nations must reflect on and agree on urgent political steps with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the situation in Iraq."

And so forth. But that's not the lede on the same story in the Spanish version:

El presidente del Gobierno español, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, se ha mostrado favorable a que países que tienen en la actualidad tropas en Irak sigan la decisión de España de retirar sus efectivos militares de este país porque se abriría "una expectativa más favorable."

Which "Franco Alemán" at Barcepundit kindly translates for us:

Spanish Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, has pleaded the countries who currently have deployed troops in Iraq to follow Spain's decision of withdrawing their military forces from that country in order to open "more favorable prospects".

Sort of like the typical Arafat reaction to a Palestinian suicide bombing: denounce it and decry the violence -- but only in English. In Arabic, just nod and smile.

Ivan Aims for the Keys

2004-09-09T17:25:00.000-04:00

The Florida Keys get lucky with hurricanes. When you look at a map, they dangle right down into the middle of the hurricane web. Yet they rarely take a direct hit. Charley originally was supposed to hit them, but at the last minute it took a surveyor's hiccup-type detour around Key West.

When Luke and I were down on Conch Key in 2002, people there told us that they felt lucky when it came to hurricanes. Enough Charley experiences will make you feel that way. On the other hand, you have to feel lucky to tempt fate like they do, living on those little strips of limestone and mud in the middle of the fickle green sea.

When the luck runs out on the Keys, its disaster. I realized that while driving back and forth on A1A that summer, when we'd pass the memorial to the victims of the Labor Day hurricane of 1935.

That Upper Keys hurricane killed at least 408 people (some say 423) and ranks as one of the ten deadliest storms in U.S. history. The Keys were relatively uninhabited then, which was about the only thing that kept it from topping the Galveston storm as the deadliest. At well over Category 5, the Labor Day hurricane was the strongest storm to hit the U.S. in the 20th century, according to the National Hurricane Center.

With a storm surge of perhaps 20 feet, the hurricane literally scoured the islands. The highest elevation in the entire chain is Windley Key, 18 feet above sea level.

There's a gripping account of the storm published here.

After eight o'clock, J. A. Duncan, the keeper at Alligator Reef Light, who had been clutching the rail of the lower platform to steady himself, caught the gleam of light on a black mass of water looming over. He jumped for the ladder and held on as tons of salt water crashed over him. 'Ninety feet high,' he said afterward. It was the nearly twenty-foot hurricane wave. The lighthouse men clung all night halfway up to the light itself, the cold iron jarring in their scalded fists. Wind or spray or both shattered the 3/8-inch glass around the light, and the lenses themselves. One of the sections of the lens was carried six or eight miles away and picked up on the beach unbroken.

The mounded wave reared across The Hawk Channel. The hurricane smashed down on a narrow ten miles of Keys from Tavernier to Key Vaca. The wind was flung like knives, 150 to 200 miles an hour with unbelievable gusts at nearly 250 miles that took everything. The people in the small houses saw black water bubble up over floor boards as roofs were sliced off and chaos crashed down on them. People hung on as they could, clutching children, heaping pillows over children in floating beds as houses tilted and spun off their foundations. Captain Parker's house with his wife and ten children, roofless, was swept south by the northeast wind into the welter of sea.

Matecumbe Key took a direct hit and was denuded of trees and buildings. "You went wherever the waves pushed you and wherever the winds pushed you," a survivor, 17 at the time, said. He lost his mother and three sisters. "It was so dark, you couldn't see what was going on and maybe that was good."

The waves destroyed the railroad that connected the Keys to the mainland. Among the dead were 259 World War I veterans living in three federal rehabilitation camps.

Ernest Hemingway was one of those who went to help look for survivors. "We located 69 bodies where no one had been able to get in," he wrote back to his editor. "Indian Key was absolutely swept clean, not a blade of grass. We made five trips with provisions for survivors to different places but nothing but dead men to eat the grub."

With so many dead and no place to bury them, the rescuers simply stacked up the bodies and burned them.

Putin's Rage

2004-09-08T23:13:00.000-04:00

Some interesting quotes in the Putin strikes back at Western critics story by Susan B. Glasser in the WaPo. Emphasis added.

President Vladimir Putin angrily condemned critics in the West for pushing him to negotiate with Chechen separatists, saying former Cold War rivals were unreliable partners in the war on terrorism and failed to understand that the carnage at a Russian school last week was the work of "child killers" just as bad as Osama bin Laden.

"Why don't you meet Osama bin Laden, invite him to Brussels or to the White House, engage in talks, ask him what he wants and give it to him so he leaves you in peace?" Putin said to a group of Western academics and journalists late Monday night. "You find it possible to set some limits in your dealings with these bastards, so why should we talk to people who are child killers?"

At a time when his government has come under intense criticism in Russia for its failure to prevent the blood bath in the town of Beslan, Putin rejected commissioning an independent inquiry akin to the Sept. 11 commission in the United States and castigated Western journalists for calling the hostage takers rebels rather than terrorists.

He also said surveillance tapes from inside the school had picked up a conversation in which one hostage taker bragged over his walkie-talkie about executing children during the siege. "One asks, 'What's happening? I hear noise,' and the other says, 'It's okay, I'm in the middle of shooting some kids. There's nothing to do.' They were bored, so they shot kids," Putin said, according to detailed notes taken by former CNN Moscow bureau chief Eileen O'Connor. "What kind of freedom fighters are these?"

...

Putin has blamed the siege on international Islamic terrorists -- his government claims 10 out of 35 attackers were Arabs -- and he used his unusual, nearly four-hour session with the Westerners Monday night to complain about what he described as a double standard being applied to Russia. "If these people come to power in Chechnya," he warned, "they'll come to power in your country."

He stopped short of directly accusing the United States or its allies of sponsoring terrorism here and praised President Bush as a "predictable and reliable partner." But he argued that other Western officials hoped to undermine Russia and were willing to use whatever tools available to do so.

The United States officially maintains that Russia should find a political solution to end the Chechen war, but does not push hard for that goal. European governments have been more vocal in promoting talks as the only way to end the war.

"It's a replay of the mentality of the Cold War," Putin said of Western critics. "Certain people want Russia focused on its internal problems. They pull the strings so that Russia won't raise its head." At that, O'Connor said, he gestured with his hands to indicate strings being pulled. "I've seen it with my own eyes. We're seeing partners in the anti-terror coalition having a difficult dilemma. They might want to pull the strings without transgressing the point at which it goes against their own interests."

...

"The mentality of the Cold War is still alive," said Vladimir Vasiliev, chairman of the security committee in parliament. "When the cruelest bandits who committed this awful crime are called fighters for liberty by newspapers in the West, this feeds the mentality of the Cold War. Terrorists were sent here and certain tasks were set for them here," he said in an interview, refusing to specify who he believed sponsored them. "The idea was to make Russia weaker."

Open Source Or Open Sewer

2004-09-08T22:43:00.000-04:00

As some of you know, I run a Web site called the Online Etymology Dictionary. In a few days, inshallah, it's going to be revamped with a spiffy new Space Age design, thanks to a brilliant and altruistic computer programmer named Dan McCormack, who took pity on my current construction of balsa wood and rubber bands.

I make no claims to any expertise in etymology. I've never had a linguistics class in my life, never performed any sort of etymology investigation on my own. But I have a pretty good collection of the standard book sources on the topic in English and German. And from them, I cobbled together this collection of the best scholarly work on the origins of English words.

It is a meeting place of those formidable eccentrics who created the O.E.D.; and of Ernest Weekley, footnoted in literary immortality as the husband of the exuberant Frieda von Richthofen, who left him to run off with his student, D.H. Lawrence; and of Ernest Klein, Rabbi of Nové Zámky in Czechoslovakia from 1931-44, deported to Dachau and returned home after liberation to find "that my father, my wife, my only child Joseph, and two of my three sisters had suffered martyrdom in Auschwitz;" and the anonymous 18th century wags who contributed to the "Dictionary of Buckish Slang, University Wit and Pickpocket Eloquence."

Over the three years that it's been online, I've also had some very good advice from people who use the site, who do have a background in certain languages, who have been able to point me to better, or more recent, sources on some of the words than the ones I used. So while it never was my work to begin with, it's even less so now, which is gratifying to me. New friends from Turkey or Singapore or Germany add their chips to the mosaic, and the dictionary begins to be a work of the human race.

I also get a lot of e-mails like this one, which more than recompense me for the money I lose on bandwidth:

Thank you very much for your etymological dictionary! It is one of two online dictionaries which really deal with etymology of English words and not some exotic nonsense. The other one is Merriam-Webster dictionary. Actually, I have not tried it, I just trust the name. Unfortunately I faced some problems with subscription for it, because I don't have a valid credit card. Credit cards are not so widely used here in Siberia %) So, I can't imagine how I would write my term paper without etymeonline.com.

According to some correspondents, the dictionary got a mention recently on an NPR program called, "Wait Wait Don't Tell Me." Actually, my girlfriend. Amy, told me that, too:

Amy: That's huge!
Amy: I wonder if you could get a transcript of the show?
Doug: I didn't think of that. Ah, it's not worth in. NPR. Feh ...
Amy: Oh, pooh on you! I think it's fabulous that you got a few seconds of national air time!
Amy: That's not a small accomplishment, even if it's NPR.
Doug: I'm holding out for something big. Like that Bulgarian news program where the anchors are all strippers and they get undressed on camera while they read the headlines.

There was no big jump in hits or anything (19,000 a day, which has been pretty steady since school started up again). I can't imagine that a radio plug translates into a Web site boost. It's not like people listening to NPR in their cars are going to grab a pen and jot down a Web address.

But maybe there's a connection between that and the uptick in e-mails from crackpot amateur etymologists pestering me to put their ideas on the page. People who don't know the difference between an amateur's guess and a scholar's work. And the number of people telling me it would be a "great idea" to make the dictionary an open-source site, that anyone and everyone could contribute to. Like Wikipedia. So democratic!

I tell them that's my worst nightmare. The Internet is already one big open source reference work. Anybody with a keyboard can create a Web site and announce anything as fact. That's fine, I don't want to censor the creativity of amateur etymologists. But historical linguistics is a science; it follows certain rules and requires a trail of evidence to prove an assertion. Some things shouldn't be done democratically. Some things should be left to experts. Brain surgery, for instance.

And the Internet already is flooded with false etymologies, a vast river of hare-brained stupidity and intellectual playfulness masquerading as scholarship. Don't believe me? Google "golf" and "acronym" together. I used to think that poetry was the worst thing to democratize and to teach people, "anyone can do this." I was wrong.

Back to War

2004-09-08T20:30:00.000-04:00

Greyhawk at Mudville Gazette is headed for redeployment in Iraq. Wish him well, in your own way. He cites this thoughful analysis, from Austin Bay, another who was there:

Despots and autocrats are the first enemy. The despot, with an arrogance that comes from never being held responsible for his crimes, believes his iron resolve eventually will trump the spineless advocates of democracy. Despots -- like the Saddamist holdouts fighting in Iraq -- believe all they need to do is keep killing until everyone is cowed. Why not? It's worked for them before. The arrogance only ends when a Green Beret -- or, with increasing frequency, an Iraqi cop -- blows his head off in a raid.

...

The second enemy we face feeds off the unfortunate victims of the first. The second enemy is the Islamist religious extremist. I have many Muslim friends, and they are the first targets of the bin Ladens and Zarqawis. Is this enemy a "death cult"? Not really -- note that the top dogs aren't suicidal. This enemy is an aggressive, imperialistic, violent sect that, in one guise or another, has plagued Islam for centuries.

...

If there is one mistake I think we've made in fighting this war, it's been the way we've soft-pedaled the ideological dimensions. This really is a fight for the future, between our free, open political system and the unholy alliance of despots and Islamo-fascists whose very existence depends on denying liberty.

Iraq -- long plundered by despotism -- should be a wealthy country. It has water, an agricultural base, a source of capital (oil) and people willing to work. It is the best place to begin to reform the dysfunctional political systems that shackle and rob the vast the majority of Middle Easterners. The lesson of 9-11, three years on, is that liberty must sustain a focused offensive if it is to survive.

That's his exhibit "A." His exhibit "B" is Kerry's "wrong war, wrong time, wrong place" rhetoric. And his comment, as he packs his gas mask and Kevlar, is, "More A, please. And a lot less B. A is useful information, while B seems to be sending the loud and clear message -- "hang in there, help is on the way!" -- to the people described in A."

Did the Russians Blow It?

2004-09-08T19:45:00.001-04:00

Voice from a Special Ops board says, The outcome would have been the same if it took place in Texas.

Mirror Image

2004-09-08T19:24:00.000-04:00

At the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1996, Harvard professor Marvin Kalb have a lecture on The Journalism of The Holocaust.

It's a question not often asked nowadays: How did Americans fail to know the Holocaust -- murder on such a continental scale -- was happening? Perhaps it's not often asked because those whom we might expect to ask it are entangled in the answer.

On May 18, 1942, The New York Times reported from Lisbon that the Germans had machine-gunned more than 100,000 Jews in the Baltic states, another 100,000 in Poland, twice that many in western Russia. The news appeared on an inside page -- several inches of neutral copy. ... On June 30, 1942, and again on July 2, The New York Times ran reports, first published by the Daily Telegraph in London, that more than 1,000,000 Jews had already been killed by the Germans. The reports were mind blowing, but The Times again placed them on an inside page. ... [O]n July 2, 1944, The Times published what it called "authoritative information" to the effect that 400,000 Hungarian Jews had been deported to their deaths, and another 350,000 were earmarked for similar action. This news was published as four inches of copy on page 12.

Then as now, other reporters, other news organizations took their cues from The Times. Its foreign coverage set the national standard.

As the reporting and the authoritative sources piled up, the picture became clear, yet the story remained buried. In January 1943, even after the U.S. and other Allied governments had confirmed and condemned the Holocaust, a poll revealed that more than half of the American people did not believe that the Nazis were "deliberately" killing the Jews.

To answer how this could have happened, Kalb turned to Elie Wiesel.

Elie Wiesel, in a recent conversation, explained by drawing a distinction between "information" and "knowledge." On its own information meant only the existence of data. It lacked an ethical component. It was neutral. Knowledge, implied Wiesel, was a higher form of information. Knowledge was information that had been internalized, crowned with a moral dimension that could be transformed into a call for action.

For the first secretary of the World Council of Churches at the time, the Protestant theologian W. A. Visser't Hooft, the moment when information became knowledge occurred during the war when a young Swiss businessman told him of a recent trip to Russia. The businessman had been invited by Nazi officers to witness the killing of Jews as if he had been invited to a sporting event. In Visser't Hooft's own words, "group after group of Jewish men, women and children were forced to lie down in mass graves and were then machine-gunned to death. ... From that moment onward I had no longer any excuse for shutting my mind to information which could find no place in my view of the world and humanity." [emphasis added]

This helps me understand how a picture of grieving mothers in Beslan, or of bodies falling in Manhattan, can galvanize my vague awareness of Islamist terrorism into a firm sense of commitment to do something about it, and to join forces with those who want to protect Western liberal/secular culture. For all that I had read about Sarajevo in 1994, it was the image of the bodies of the two lovers on Vrbana Bridge that tilted me into certainty that my government ought to do something, and now, about this.

Kalb's explanation of America's willful blindness to the Holocaust embraces the government and the general population as well as the media. He cites the deep-seated anti-Semitism of the American people at that time, heightened from its usual level by the economic dislocation of the Depression and by xenophobia in general. In 1939, 53 percent of the American people told Roper pollsters that the Jews were "different" and for this reason "deserved ... social and economic restrictions."

And he considers the stunning scale of the slaughter in Eastern Europe, and its coming at the hands of the Germans, who were seen by many in America as civilized, cultured, and decent. "[P]eople simply could not absorb the monstrous dimension of the Nazi crimes."

Not until reporters, such as Edward R. Murrow, described the death camps at Buchenwald in 1945 did the true enormity of the Nazis crimes become apparent to the average listener of CBS News, to the average American.

On the government level, the Allies were determined to win the war and crush the Axis, and to shift or expand that focus to the mission of saving the Jews would dillute that purpose. Also, "Roosevelt did not want to alienate neutral nations, divert vital shipping, arouse false expectations, or antagonize Moslem states, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia."

And journalism itself, in those years, was culturally aligned with the government's goal of defeating fascism first and foremost. The reporters were not that much different than the soldiers. They hated Hitler and Tojo. "The story was the prosecution of the war, the pursuit of an Allied victory, unconditional surrender. Like most other Americans, journalists covering the war had no other objective."

Yet as Kalb tells it, there is another, crucial, dimension to the buried "knowledge" of the Holocaust.

Arthur Hays Sulzberger was publisher [of the New York Times] during the war. According to family history, his ancestors came to America in 1695. Two were among the Jewish notables of Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790, when General-turned-President Washington visited their synagogue. Not surprisingly, Sulzberger considered himself to be a member of the establishment, an American, who just happened to be Jewish. During a trip to Palestine in 1937, he confronted the reality of zionism, and it profoundly discomfited him. "Never have I felt so much a foreigner as in this Holy Land," he later wrote.

On his return to New York, he found that his old fears of divided loyalty led him, to quote journalist Peter Grose, "to minimize, if not ultimately deny, his Jewish identity." Sulzberger helped found the anti-zionist American Council for Judaism, which Isaiah Berlin called "an assembly of mice who say that they will bell the zionist cat." Interestingly, The Times gave this splinter group as much coverage as it gave to all the other Jewish groups combined -- and much, much more than it gave to the Holocaust.

Sulzberger, as high brow among American Jews as Bernard Baruch or Walter Lippmann, was an ultra-assimilationist, a civilized man who simply wanted to avoid being categorized as a Jew. Baruch, denounced by the Jew-baiting Detroit radio priest, Father Charles Coughlin, as "the uncrowned King of Wall Street," fled from too close an association with Jews. Lippmann, one of the great figures in American journalism in this century, frequently criticized Jews as "rich, vulgar and pretentious." He suggested that Harvard limit the enrollment of Jews. He dismissed Hitler's antisemitism as "unimportant," adding that the German leader was "the authentic voice of a genuinely civilized people." From 1933, when Hitler came to power, until 1945, when Hitler was destroyed, Lippmann never wrote a word about the Holocaust, never once mentioned the death camps.

...In The Times, the murder of millions of Jews was treated as minor-league stuff, kept at a proper distance from the authentic news of the time. ... A perception then spread that if the Jewish-owned Times covered the Holocaust in this skimpy manner, then so could they, with impunity.

There's much more, worth reading.

I think of my grandfather, half-Jewish, a fact he hid so thoroughly that even my mother, his daughter, didn't realize it until she was in her 50s.

And, Gods help me, I couldn't get through it without thinking of my piously anti-Iraq War, virulently anti-Bush, and loudly anti-Israel co-worker, and his smug refrain of, "and that's not anti-Semitic, because Chomsky says the same thing, and he's Jewish."

The Secret Word

2004-09-08T18:18:00.000-04:00

Daniel Pipes rounds up the various media euphemisms for the terrorists who slaughtered the children in Russia:

Assailants - National Public Radio.
Attackers – the Economist.
Bombers – the Guardian.
Captors – the Associated Press.
Commandos – Agence France-Presse refers to the terrorists both as "membres du commando" and "commando."
Criminals - the Times (London).
Extremists – United Press International.
Fighters – the Washington Post.
Group – the Australian.
Guerrillas: in a New York Post editorial.
Gunmen – Reuters.
Hostage-takers - the Los Angeles Times.
Insurgents – in a New York Times headline.
Kidnappers – the Observer (London).
Militants – the Chicago Tribune.
Perpetrators – the New York Times.
Radicals – the BBC.
Rebels – in a Sydney Morning Herald headline.
Separatists – the Christian Science Monitor.

And my favorite:
Activists – the Pakistan Times.

Now sometimes a reporter needs more than one word for something, to avoid repeating the same word over and over in a lengthy piece. You call it a "fire" in one place and a "blaze" in another, and in the next sentence you write about "the flames." I don't think the "Times" of London or the New York "Post" have been shy about using "terrorist" when warranted. But what's depressing to me is the number of these media sources that I've checked that simply would not use "terrorist" at all.

The Washington Post studiously avoids it:

The classroom where Tatyana Dulayeva had taught history of civilization was still smoking a bit. "It's just a horror," she said as she surveyed the scene of so many lessons over the last 13 years. Dulayeva, 49, escaped capture only because she was 10 minutes late for school when the guerrillas took over the building. Now she had nothing but memories of so many of the children she taught. "The kids grew up together with us," she said.

In this, one of the most gripping descriptions of the terror ('We Need to See This,' Teacher Says, by Peter Baker) they are guerrillas throughout.

Pipes has a theory as to where and how this began:

The origins of this unwillingness to name terrorists seems to lie in the Arab-Israeli conflict, prompted by an odd combination of sympathy in the press for the Palestinian Arabs and intimidation by them. The sympathy is well known; the intimidation less so. Reuters' Nidal al-Mughrabi made the latter explicit in advice for fellow reporters in Gaza to avoid trouble on the Web site www.newssafety.com, where one tip reads: "Never use the word terrorist or terrorism in describing Palestinian gunmen and militants; people consider them heroes of the conflict."

None in the Western media has yet reached the depths of Islamist scholar Tariq Ramadan, who was hired as a lecturer at the University of Notre Dame but couldn't get a visa, who publicly refers to the Islamist atrocities of Sept. 11, Bali, and Madrid as "interventions." But don't be surprised if you live to see it.

News Item: "U.S. Iraq Death Toll Hits 1,000"

2004-09-08T13:18:00.000-04:00

Hemingway wrote, "A defensive war, which must necessarily turn to aggressive at the earliest moment, is the necessary great counter-crime. But never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. Ask the infantry and the dead."

War, like revolution, destroys and takes. We who are involved in any war or revolution, actively or on the sidelines, must face that truth and redouble our will to make sure that the good this war creates in the world will in the end far outweigh the hell it unleashes.

"In Iraq our national security interests and our national values converge. Iraq is truly the test of a generation, for America and for our role in the world. Faced with similar challenges, previous generations of Americans have passed such tests with honor. It is now our turn to demonstrate that our power, ennobled by our principles, is the greatest force for good on earth today. Iraq's transformation into a secure democracy and a force for freedom in the greater Middle East is the calling of our age. We can succeed. We must succeed."

-- Sen. John McCain

The marshlands that Saddam drained are being restored -- one of the greatest ecological success stories of the decade. Some 2,500 schools have been rehabbed by the coalition. Spending on health care has soared thirtyfold, and millions of Iraqi children have been vaccinated. Iraqi athletes, no longer terrorized by Uday Hussein, competed in the summer Olympics in Greece.

The Human Rights Center in Kadhimiya, Iraq, projected that if the invasion had not happened, Saddam would have killed 70,000 people in the past year. That's not counting the dead who would have continued under U.N. sanctions.

"I got to work and there I didn’t find a large difference although I missed those sensational moments when a child dies simply due to the lack of cheap medications and his mother’s cries and the reporters from all over the world who were always around would rush in to get a good shot and make a smashing report about the effects of the sanctions. Things are now very boring, we just treat people and a lot of them even get well!"

[A doctor in Baghdad, writing -- ironically -- about the changes since the liberation]

"I can`t tell you enough How heartsick I feel at just having heard the
news of the terrible bombing & loss 7 treasure guys. My heart bleed for them & their families God Bless them & all of you. On behalf of all REAL Iraqi people we will not stop praying for them as well as the innocent people of Iraq. May God save their friends in the militry & thier families & save you too. All Blessings with you.

Bana, age 21, Baghdad

"Nothing worth doing is completed in one lifetime; therefore, we must be saved by hope. Nothing true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore, we are saved by love."

Reinhold Niebuhr, "The Irony of American History," 1952

Oh, Canada?

2004-09-08T01:30:00.000-04:00

The AP caption says, "Politicians and supporters carry an AFL-CIO Council banner as they lead the Labor Day parade in Detroit, Monday, Sept. 6, 2004. Labor leaders in the battleground state of Michigan are favoring a Democrat in the White House."

And so, apparently, are people from across the lakes. Note the Maple Leaf flag in the middle of the picture.

Islamist Cleric Approves Child-Hostage Taking

2004-09-07T23:00:00.001-04:00

A day after the tragedy of the massacre of schoolchildren in Beslan, Russia, an extremist Islamist cleric in England said he would support hostage-taking at British schools if carried out by terrorists with a just cause.

Omar Bakri Mohammed, the spiritual leader of the extremist sect al-Muhajiroun, said that holding women and children hostage would be a reasonable course of action for a Muslim who has suffered under British rule.

In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Mr Mohammed said: "If an Iraqi Muslim carried out an attack like that in Britain, it would be justified because Britain has carried out acts of terrorism in Iraq.

"As long as the Iraqi did not deliberately kill women and children, and they were killed in the crossfire, that would be okay."

And of course this subhuman piece insisted that all the children dead in Beslan were killed by the Russian forces. How did he determine this, sitting in his home north of London, where he acknowledges that he lives on social benefits from the British government (nearly £300 a week)? He determined it not through forensics, but through theology. Muslims, you see, aren't allowed to kill children.

"The Mujahideen would not have wanted to kill those people, because it is strictly forbidden as a Muslim to deliberately kill women and children. It is the fault of the Russians."

So it can't have been them. Well, that settles that. Bakri's back-story makes interesting reading, by the way, for anyone who thinks the Islamist war on the U.S. begins and ends with George W. Bush.

"Clinton is a target of the Jihad, and American forces are a target of the Jihad wherever they are .... American people must reconsider their foreign policy, or their children will be sent back to them in coffins. They need to think about the consequences of maintaining forces in Lebanon, the Golan Heights, and the Middle East as a whole. Clinton is responsible and he will pay. ... [The existence of Israel] is a crime. Israel must be removed. ... Our duty is to work to establish an Islamic state anywhere in the world, even in Britain ...."

And his definition of "jihad" would surprise apologists. It appears in "Jihad: The foreign policy of the Islamic state," which was posted on the Al-Muhajirun website. Really, the title says it all:

The document included a lengthy, in-depth analysis of the meaning of Jihad. "Jihad, as a term, cannot be translated as 'holy war,'" it said, "nor can it be translated as ... 'struggle.' At best, its legal meaning can be understood as 'using military force, where diplomacy fails, to remove the obstacles the Islamic State faces in carrying
its ideology to mankind.' "

Plutocracy

2004-09-07T22:35:00.000-04:00

We're actually going to run this lede tomorrow, on a story about Teresa Heinz Kerry making a local stop to visit a women's health clinic:

Teresa Heinz Kerry probably was glad for her health insurance Saturday, when she checked into an Iowa hospital complaining of stomach pains.

According to Slate magazine, the Kerrys have a net worth of about $165 million to $626 million. In 2002 financial disclosures, John Kerry stated that assets in his own name were worth $409,000 to $1.8 million, and he had an additional $300,000 to $600,000 in assets owned jointly with his wife. That means Teresa alone is worth a good $163 million, perhaps as much as $623 million.

With that kind of bucks, you don't buy health insurance; you buy hospitals.

Guess Who the "Real Criminals" Are?

2004-09-07T21:48:00.000-04:00

Americans, of course. What's the crime? Take your pick. It seems we are kidnapping French journalists, too.

Erik, at No Pasaran torches the French media's coverage of the hostage crisis in Iraq.

But Mouna Naïm knows whom she is working for. She speaks of the "anger" of the French authorities who qualify his [Allawi's] words as "inadmissable". Compare the image of collective — and justified— anger with the image of a single guy who, rather irrationally, "dips into the resentment that he is visibly feeling" — All we need now is the CIA stooge imagery (don't worry, it's right around the corner).

By the way, I'm not buying the story making the rounds that French intelligence was responsible for the forged Niger-uranium documents that embarrassed Bush and Blair. The French administration is publicly and diplomatically undermining the U.S. at every turn, and its media is unspeakable, but I believe the French are fighting the war on Islamist terror in their own way, in the shadow world of secret services. If you read between the lines of the Senate Intelligence Committee Iraq report and certain recent news stories, cooperation between French and American spies seems to be strong.

Zell's Angels

2004-09-07T17:16:00.000-04:00

Zell Miller speaks for Robert Novak, among many others whom he speaks for. They're people who often still are Democrats on paper (DINOs?), and they're people who have heard Southern preaching, white or black, and recognize the art form in action. I can forgive Andrew Sullivan for missing the point entirely -- he's a Brit who never had the pleasure. But you don't have to be born in the scent of magnolias to get it: a brief acquaintance with the closing chapter of "The Sound and the Fury" will take you close to there.

But if you have an abhorrence of organized religion, and of all things Southern, and of tradition in America, you'll react the way nine-tenths of the media did to Zell's speech.

"Grumpy old man," is what they came up with. "Angry," "exaggerated" (wow, is that to miss the point of this literary genre), and then, as in Joe Klein, "filled with hate." No, Joe, it wasn't hate, it was disdain, and if you felt it coming down on you, look to where you stand and how you think. From where I sit, I think it fits you. I could be wrong about that — that's up to you to decide. But your reaction is giving you away, more than you imagine. And, you know, Zell began with his love for his family, and his love for his country, and his love for the Democratic party we all used to know, and his love for a bygone era of bipartisanship in times of danger and war. Zell's speech was all about love, disappointed love, and if you missed that you did not get the passion, didn't get it at all.

As Novak says, "George Bush is going to win a surprising share of Democratic votes this year. The firemen's and policemen's vote. The Nascar vote. The motorcycle vote. All of them, Zell's Angels." These are the people the Democrats wrote off as racist, ignorant rednecks. They don't want them in their new party of entertainers, unwilling-to-melt minorities, journalists and professors.

But these are the voters I'm warning you about: the ones who don't really care how you pronounce "nuclear," but are instinctively suspicious of anyone who does care too much about how someone else says it.

They are no more naturally Republican than Democrats. They are no more naturally racist than any other people competing for the scraps off the big table. The neglected history of the Southern populist party reveals their potential. But the modern Democrats seem to be more concerned about keeping some people out of their party than trying to understand their concerns, and pitch for their votes. Go ahead, write off every state of the old Confederacy. But try to win a presidential election without one.

Oh, Florida is the best chance for the Democrats. But up above Orlando, the state's just a southern suburb of Georgia. And the people who reacted to Zell Miller as if he were Stonewall Jackson's zombie come to haunt their living rooms are Democrats who only want to believe in the New South -- Connecticut with Spanish moss.

Dukakis Moment

2004-09-07T16:54:00.000-04:00

Next up, presidential debates. The list of moderators is out, but I don't see any certified hardball pitchers among them. Too bad, because this election could use a Bernie Shaw. I suspect most potential voters know what they think about Bush, personally. And we have his record in the White House. We need to see more of Kerry when he's not in control of the situation. As much as I hate to say it, we need a Kitty Dukakis moment.

Remember? In the 1988 U.S. presidential campaign, in the second debate between George Bush and Michael Dukakis. Right off the bat, Bernard Shaw hit the Democrat with a brick:

"You have two minutes to respond. Governor, if Kitty Dukakis [his wife] were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?"

Dukakis said, "No, I don't, Bernard." And he went on to generalize about deterrence and the crime rate in Massachusetts and his proposal to call a "hemispheric summit" to fight drugs.

One commentator summed up the result like this: "The Duke was, by then, already dead meat, but his staggeringly robotic answer was the rhetorical equivalent of stuffing himself headfirst into a sausage grinder."

Dukakis made as much sense as any presidential candidate does in a debate. But something was missing. And that absence was actually horrifying.

I kept waiting for him to say, "you know, I would really, really want to see that rapist put off the planet, castrated with a plastic fork, whatever. And I'd do it with my bare hands; but as an adult and the leader of a nation, I would have to bring my intelligence and self-control to the decision and put my raw emotional reaction in the back seat, and god-damn you, Bernie, what kind of cruel pig-fucker asks a question like that?" Dukakis was already so far back in the polls; getting bleeped on live TV might have actually helped.

What would Kerry do?

News from Spain

2004-09-07T16:27:00.000-04:00

Barcepundit has a wrap-up and some commentary on Spain's equivalent of the U.S. 9-11 Commission. The investigation into the March 11 bombings is taking some tortuous turns over who should, and shouldn't, testify. To some observers it looks like the now-ruling Socialists don't want the representatives of Aznar's party to take the stand, because their testimony might overthrow the CW that Aznar lied about the Islamist connection in the attack to promote his chances in the upcoming election. As Barcepundit points out, that story has problems even without further testimony:

Unlike the myth that has been propagated all around, it was Angel Acebes, then Interior Minister in the Aznar cabinet, who, at 8.30 p.m. of the very same March 11 during a nationally televised press conference, talked about the van which was found with detonators and a tape with Koranic verses inside. As he did in several occasions during these days, as more information was available. No media organization broke the news that there was an Islamic clue, it was Aznar's government.

The sensation that many people were getting that they were lied was due because the media -- particularly the pro-Socialist leading media group PRISA, owner of the leading TV and radio networks, and the main newspaper, El País -- were feeding false information and then blaming the government for not telling the truth. For example, a key moment was when the SER radio informed that according to three separate sources, a suicide bomber had been found in one of the trains but the government was covering it up. They even offered specific details like that the body was completely shaved and was wearing three sets of underwear, saying that this is what suicide bombers do. Of course, autopsies positively denied that there was any suicide bomber.

I Wish Blake Could See This

2004-09-07T02:50:00.000-04:00

Strike One

2004-09-07T02:04:00.001-04:00

Well, Day One of the new swing-for-the-fences John Kerry came and went, and it was ugly. He stepped up to the plate and hit one blooper after another.

"We want those troops home, and my goal would be to try to get them home in my first term."

Brilliant. Telegraph your strategy to the enemy. Remind him that all he has to do is wait you out, and he'll get everything he wants.

Meanwhile, serve notice to the friends in Iraq who have cast their lots with us that they are doomed; they'll never see democracy, or, if they do, it won't have anything to do with us. Come January, we plan to give a damn about nothing but getting home. They never should have trusted America. All the hope we held out to them was a hoax.

America can abandon Iraq, but those good people still have to live in that land once the fence around Fallujah falls, and the monsters feeding in there are let loose.

And, while you're at it, tell your troops that they're fighting in a cause destined to end in failure and retreat. Turn a daring blow for freedom into another Vietnam, so that every American killed there in the next four years dies in vain, and every tour of duty there that takes a soldier away from friends and family becomes a waste of time, and every veteran who comes home from the Middle East does so knowing that he fought in a lost cause, pronounced so by his own commander in chief, and that his legacy will be not victory and freedom in Iraq, but the shame of Abu Ghraib and children maimed in the "wrong" war.

He called the president's coalition in Iraq "the phoniest thing I ever heard."

Well, you walked right into that one, John. Your opponent has been waiting for you to say that. Cheney's counter-punch-line reply was written months ago. You should have seen it coming. There are as-yet undiscovered Stone Age tribes in the Amazon jungle who saw it coming. Paris Hilton saw it coming.

"Demeaning our allies is an interesting approach for someone seeking the presidency," Cheney said. "They deserve our respect, not insults."

Here's some free speechwriting advice. Next time, John, say something like this:

Like many Americans, I'm deeply disturbed about what we've learned about the way intelligence was manipulated within this administration during the build-up to the Iraq war, and by the lack of planning for post-war Iraq. At the time Congress gave its authorization to that war, our decision was a difficult call, but the balance of the evidence presented to us made the case that this invasion was in America's interest.

Now, make no mistake, the overthrow of Saddam Hussein buried one of the most brutal regimes in modern history. Our fighting men and women should be justly proud of what they accomplished, winning a tremendous victory in a difficult fight. I salute them.

And I salute our allies who stood by us, who fought hard and well, and who have helped us in the difficult work of rebuilding Iraq and bringing the sweet taste of freedom to a people who long have thirsted for it. We all should remember these nations and peoples in our prayers and remember them when they need our aid. Many nations, like many Americans, opposed this venture out of honest doubts. But others did so for sheer spite, and for selfish reasons. Like the U.S. Marines, America should strive to show itself to the world as, "no greater friend, no worse enemy."

And to the Iraqi people, I say, we will be as brothers to you, if I win this election. We will not forget how long you dreamed of liberation. And I will not let the wolves who have slunk in among you rob you of the freedoms that we have helped you purchase, adding our blood to yours as the cost.

Yet I remain deeply concerned about what this administration has done. The appearance of a cynical manipulation of information does terrible damage to American's faith in their government. The unnecessary high-handedness of our diplomacy makes every international venture that much more difficult for Americans. It leaves our allies vulnerable for the very fact of having supported us, which we ought to regard as intollerable. It risks all the good work we have accomplished, and are planning in Iraq. And the lack of foresight, to secure the victory once it was won, has left our military men and women in danger that could have been avoided.

I don't want any U.S. president, of any party, to have the ability to deceive the American people about matters so grave. And I want my nation to be a good citizen in the world, without compromise of its own dignity and rights. I believe that goal is best accomplished when our nation respects its neighbors, even in disagreement. And I want the government of the United States to work as hard, and as well, for victory as its soldiers and sailors and Marines do. It's the least we can do for them.

I want to bring home the American troops who have fought so hard and so well in Iraq -- but I want them to come home with every degree of dignity, and every assurance of victory, that they deserve as our son and daughters, who have done well the task we sent them to do.

And regardless of the connection, or lack of it, between Saddam and al Qaida, America has not forgotten the enemy who attacked us on Sept. 11, 2001. I have not forgotten. Islamist terrorism is a complex and deadly foe, and I will not serve a day as your president without working to defeat it, to protect America, and to starve that serpent of new recruits. My plans will be informed, and they will be bold and aggressive. Neither President Bush nor I can tell you precisely how that war will be fought four years from now, because wars are won by resourceful nations with flexible power. Nor should we tell you the detailed specifics of our immediate battle-plans, lest we inadvertently inform our enemies of them at the same time. I believe the American people understand this.

Fight or Flight

2004-09-06T23:25:00.000-04:00

John Kerry had a lousy August, as even his friends seem to admit. But that's good for the election. Because now he'll know (I hope) that it's not enough to be "not George Bush." I used to think he was running a Greg Gross candidacy. Gross was a utility player for the Philadelphia Phillies when I lived down there and saw a lot of games. He was a great protect-the-plate pinch hitter. Kerry wasn't looking for a victory in November, he was looking for a base on balls.

But now, thanks to that mean ol' Zell Miller and Kerry's fellow veterans, that's not going to work. He's got to come out and fight. I don't care for Bush's negative campaigning, per se (though I think the Swifties are Kerry's own chickens coming home to roost). But the ruthless political attacks will have the effect of showing us if John Kerry can, or will, fight back. Nowadays, that's something I'd like to know in advance.

Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. has nicely described this:

If Kerry cannot effectively defend himself in a campaign, the country might well have reason to doubt his ability to defend the rest of us upon taking office. But if Kerry can face down a withering attack from Bush, the very act of campaigning becomes a way of passing the toughness test that Bush has put before him.

The alternative is the word that Dionne dares not utter, the word that a liberal Kerry backer must shun even more utterly than the phrase "Islamist terrorist." But it's the word that whispers in the wind that gusts through the bunting on their stump speech platforms in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania:

Dukakis.

Perspective, Please

2004-09-06T23:17:00.000-04:00

Oliver Kamm gives an object lesson in it:

Contrary to the preposterous claim (regularly aired by by Tony Benn, among many others) that President Bush has launched "what [he] called 'a crusade' against the Muslim world", the United States has, under successive Presidents, taken up arms in defence of Muslim populations: in the first Gulf War, Bosnia, Kosovo and of course the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. President Bush has explicitly declared his support for a Palestinian state alongside Israel. The reason the western democracies did these things (though I acknowledge the disgrace of the then British government's stance on Bosnia -- a subject for another post), and were right to do them, was not to combat "Islamophobia" (like Jonathan Derbyshire, I use the inverted commas because I'm quoting), but to uphold the values that define us. It's those values, which we can't dispense with, that generate terrorism. Islamists oppose us not because of what we do, but because of what we are: secular, pluralist and tolerant. Revulsion at Russia's cruel and repressive policy towards Chechnya is an important principle; we should not tolerate for a moment its degeneration into the type of sophistry we have heard so much of in the past three years.

Brooks Thinks So, Too

2004-09-06T23:08:00.000-04:00

David Brooks, in the New York Times:

We should by now have become used to the death cult that is thriving at the fringes of the Muslim world. This is the cult of people who are proud to declare, "You love life, but we love death." This is the cult that sent waves of defenseless children to be mowed down on the battlefields of the Iran-Iraq war, which trains kindergartners to become bombs, which fetishizes death, which sends people off joyfully to commit mass murder.

This cult attaches itself to a political cause but parasitically strangles it. The death cult has strangled the dream of a Palestinian state. The suicide bombers have not brought peace to Palestine; they've brought reprisals. The car bombers are not pushing the U.S. out of Iraq; they're forcing us to stay longer. The death cult is now strangling the Chechen cause, and will bring not independence but blood.

But that's the idea. Because the death cult is not really about the cause it purports to serve. It's about the sheer pleasure of killing and dying.

It's about massacring people while in a state of spiritual loftiness. It's about experiencing the total freedom of barbarism — freedom even from human nature, which says, Love children, and Love life. It's about the joy of sadism and suicide.

We should be used to this pathological mass movement by now. We should be able to talk about such things. Yet when you look at the Western reaction to the Beslan massacres, you see people quick to divert their attention away from the core horror of this act, as if to say: We don't want to stare into this abyss. We don't want to acknowledge those parts of human nature that were on display in Beslan. Something here, if thought about too deeply, undermines the categories we use to live our lives, undermines our faith in the essential goodness of human beings.

Three years after Sept. 11, too many people have become experts at averting their eyes. If you look at the editorials and public pronouncements made in response to Beslan, you see that they glide over the perpetrators of this act and search for more conventional, more easily comprehensible, targets for their rage.

The Boston Globe editorial, which was typical of the American journalistic response, made two quick references to the barbarity of the terrorists, but then quickly veered off with long passages condemning Putin and various Russian policy errors.

The Dutch foreign minister, Bernard Bot, speaking on behalf of the European Union, declared: "All countries in the world need to work together to prevent tragedies like this. But we also would like to know from the Russian authorities how this tragedy could have happened."

It wasn't a tragedy. It was a carefully planned mass murder operation. And it wasn't Russian authorities who stuffed basketball nets with explosives and shot children in the back as they tried to run away.

Whatever horrors the Russians have perpetrated upon the Chechens, whatever their ineptitude in responding to the attack, the essential nature of this act was in the act itself. It was the fact that a team of human beings could go into a school, live with hundreds of children for a few days, look them in the eyes and hear their cries, and then blow them up.

Dissertations will be written about the euphemisms the media used to describe these murderers. They were called "separatists" and "hostage-takers." Three years after Sept. 11, many are still apparently unable to talk about this evil. They still try to rationalize terror. What drives the terrorists to do this? What are they trying to achieve?

They're still victims of the delusion that Paul Berman diagnosed after Sept. 11: "It was the belief that, in the modern world, even the enemies of reason cannot be the enemies of reason. Even the unreasonable must be, in some fashion, reasonable."

This death cult has no reason and is beyond negotiation. This is what makes it so frightening. This is what causes so many to engage in a sort of mental diversion. They don't want to confront this horror. So they rush off in search of more comprehensible things to hate.

Be-Labor Day

2004-09-06T22:39:00.000-04:00

Lileks has a great Labor Day post, in which he takes on the media, Hollywood know-it-alls, and American dissidents who feel they are victims of 9-11. He also manages a graph for those of us who have long-standing and serious disagreements with Bush and his party but find that something bigger is in the room now.

I got a letter the other day, the daily I’ve-stopped-reading-you-because letter that accused me of being “intolerant” of other points of view. I suspect that for some, “intolerant” means unwilling to agree with points of view I find unsupportable. You will, I hope, note that this site spends very little time on taxes, regulation, stem cell research, abortion, the death penalty, gay marriage, environmentalism, school vouchers, mass transit, clog dancing, circumcision, Central Standard Time, Coke V. Pepsi, or any other major issue of the day. Now and again I’ll bring one of them up. But not often. I do bring up the war more than any other issue, because I happen to believe we’re in one, and it should be won. I have no problem debating strategies and objectives, but there are some arguments that bore me right away. I am not intolerant of these ideas. I’m just tired of them. They come from some Happy-clappy parallel universe where Islamic terrorists do not bayonet little kids in the gut when they ask for water. I do not live there.

I don't dislike John Kerry. I voted for Gore in 2000, and I like Kerry now better than I liked Gore then. I think he'd make a decent president any other time. But this isn't any other time. And he's a Sept. 10 kind of politician.

When I talk politics with my family who hate Bush, all they talk about it Bush. When I talk about bin Laden, Islamist terror, a long-term war, they do that hand-waving, head-shaking gesture that is the adult equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and shouting "NOTLISTENINGNOTLISTENING." They want IT not to have happened. They want IT to go away. What IT? This one:

How Not to Tell a Story

2004-09-06T21:20:00.000-04:00

This isn't about bias, but it is about how the dino-media manages to be boring and irrelevant. And how I almost got fired, again.

Friday night, when Hell broke loose in Beslan, I was working the wire desk. I had to find one story to lead the paper, and the New York Times had the best collective reporting.

On Friday night, this story had two compelling elements: the horror of the scene -- blood-spattered naked children, weeping mothers, burning school with paper flowers still pasted to the windows, anguished faces of rescuers. And the numbers: how many dead? How many terrorists escaped? What was the timeline? It was a story about real people brutally attacked, and about the scale of the disaster.

But the New York Times, being "big media," had to prove its chops by collecting quotes from all the authorities. From Putin's office, and the regional governor, and the school officials, and President Bush. And none of them knew very much or said very much worth quoting. So the story bogged down in boilerplate expressions of outrage, from men whose names and titles took 15 words apiece to list. But the Times has to get them high up in the story, because, well, the AP and the WaPo will have them, too, and you don't want to be the only big media not to have a Putin quote -- even if it says nothing and drags the story out of focus. You want to prove you asked the question.

And then it had to throw in a ton of "background," which really added next to nothing to the story. What other terror attacks have happened lately. Putin's political situation. International relations between the U.S. and Russia in the wake of Sept. 11. Sure there's a place for that, but not when the bloodstains still darken the floor.

The wall of the first-floor math classroom, decorated with figures from Russian fairy tales, was splattered with dark stains that appeared to be dried blood, and an overpowering stench had not been removed with the corpses. On top of a record player was a rotting, blistered piece of flesh guarded jealously by a few flies. Next to the record player was a multiplication table and assorted arithmetic workbooks. More flesh lay on the floor. [WaPo]

To make it worse, the Times followed another journalism reflex that kicks in when you've got a ton of copy. They broke their coverage into story-plus-sidebar. And the usual way to do that is to have "news" as the main story and "scene" as the sidebar. That left all the useless authorities' quotes in the main story and put all the gripping material, the wailing of parents, the tearful reunions, into the sidebar. Yet the sidebar had no news context.

So I jammed them together. Put the anguished mothers back in the news story, stripped out the "we don't know what happened" quotes from the authorities, left the New York Times tagline on it, and if I do say so, made the frigging thing sing. Every word of it was theirs, but I stacked it up differently and left the dull stuff till the end, where most of it got cut for space.

I didn't tell the editor on duty that night what I had done. But as he was reading the Page 1 proof, he said what a great New York Times story it was. The Big Boss reveres the NYT and everything about it. Lucky for me, he was on vacation last week and not reading the news wires. I expect he would have reacted to what I had done the way Christians reacted to learning that Thomas Jefferson had knifed out the passages of the Bible he disliked.

I said at the top it wasn't about bias, but I don't know that. The way the story came through initially is the way you'd tell it if you didn't want people to get too worked up about it, or to feel the natural surge of hate for the kind of person who would kill hundreds of children to get attention. But I really think it was just a lazy media doing paint-by-numbers reporting.

Action Heroes

2004-09-06T19:48:00.000-04:00

Anyone who stops by here regularly (for the free beer, not the conversation) knows that Mark D. Lew (MDL), a regular in the "comments" section has a voluminous knowledge of Islamic history and a deep concern for the future of that culture. At his own weblog, Benzene, he's recently posted his analysis of the decline of classical Islam. When you peel back the clash of civilizations and find what's behind it all, this looms large. I highly recommend his commentary.

He also wonders, "Did Arnold Schwarzenegger really try to represent Austria as if it was a country behind the Iron Curtain?"

Not entirely, but he did mention Soviet tanks in the country, and, despite the "ah-has" of the AP, CNN and a lot of liberal commentators, he seems to me to have been right, as far as that goes:

When I was a boy, the Soviets occupied part of Austria. I saw their tanks in the streets. I saw communism with my own eyes. I remember the fear we had when we had to cross into the Soviet sector. Growing up, we were told, "Don't look the soldiers in the eye. Look straight ahead." It was a common belief that Soviet soldiers could take a man out of his own car and ship him off to the Soviet Union as slave labor.

My family didn't have a car -- but one day we were in my uncle's car. It was near dark as we came to a Soviet checkpoint. I was a little boy, I wasn't an action hero back then, and I remember how scared I was that the soldiers would pull my father or my uncle out of the car and I'd never see him again. My family and so many others lived in fear of the Soviet boot. Today, the world no longer fears the Soviet Union and it is because of the United States of America!

Austria, like Germany, was divided into sectors at the end of the war. The division lasted until 1955. Schwarzenegger was born July 30, 1947, in Styria, in the southeastern part of the country (I've never been there, but I was in nearby Carinthia, which is beautiful). The Soviets had overrun this region at the end of the war, but according to a pre-agreement among the allies, they pulled back and yielded Styria and Carinthia to the British.

But everywhere east and north of Styria was in the Soviet zone. Anyone who wanted to go from Styria to Vienna, the capital, had to pass through the Soviet zone to get there, checkpoints and all. Here's a map.

"It's a fact -- as a child he could not have seen a Soviet tank in Styria," said historian Stefan Karner. Of course it's a fact. But he never said he saw them there.

Russia update

2004-09-06T17:30:00.000-04:00

Logic and Sanity keeps the info flowing on the horror in Russia. He's been translating some stories from Ingushetiya.ru, including this account of a televised interview with one of the terrorists who was captured:

The only terrorist caught alive was shown on channel 1, today. His last name is Kulov -- a Chechen. He was born in the Nozhai-Urt region, Chechnya, but lately resided in Karabulak, Ingushetia.

Kulov told the investigators that the band was led by a Chechen, who went by the nickname "Polkovnik" (Colonel). Only Polkovnik and Hodov knew where the group was going. After the school was seized, the terrorists quarreled -- many were unhappy with the fact that the hostages were children. Polkovnik personally shot one of the terrorists and even blew up the two female suicide bombers (via a remote) to show that he meant business.

According to Kulov:

there were a total of 32 terrorists in the group. (30 bodies have been found. Kulov was caught, meaning that 1 got away)

He doesn't know any last names or ethnicities of the other members in the group. The terrorists called each by arab names to avoid using their real names.

There wasn't a black man amongst them -- authorities mistook one of the terrorists for one, because he was burned and his face got covered with soot, during the storm.

* Hodov (an Osetian), as I reported before was sought in connection with a bombing that took place on a train "Moscow-Vladivakavkz" on May 15th, 2004.

According to lenta.ru, the man shown on Channel 1 (Kulov) was of a dark complexion, unshaved and about 30 years of age. He spoke Russian with a heavy accent, and during the questioning repeated several times "I swear, I want to live. I swear to Allah, that I did not kill a single woman or a child."

Just a side note, as I posted prior, an ex hostage (a boy) told investigators that "When I asked him (one of the terrorists) if we'll be freed, he said: 'I don't know guys, I am not in the know.' " His account seems consistent with the terrorist's testimony that not everybody knew of the details of their "mission."

...

More info about the terrorists. At least four of them are from Nozha-Urt, Chechnya. The terrorist who was caught alive, 24 old, Nur-Pashi Kulaev (this source spells the last name a bit differently) and his brother, 31 year old Han-Pashi Kulaev (killed september 3rd), were Basayev's personal bodyguards. Kulaev also fought along side Basayev in Grozni, 2000 (where Basayev lost his leg).

This group of terrorists consisted of Chechens, Ingushi, Kazakhs, Arabs and Slavs.

Unlike the previous source, gzt.ru is claiming that Kulaev has identified some of his cohorts. In Chechnya, Kulaev is known as a ruthless kililer -- he has killed dozens of soldiers and civilians. Basayev was very close to brothers Kulaeav, so close that (according to sources) he even came to one of their relatives' funeral. Kulaev's were also tightly connected with Rustam Ganiev, who according to a Zerema Muzhahova (female suicide-bomber-to-be who was apprehended minutes before she was about to act), trained many female suicide bomers.

Two others names are known -- Arsen Merzhoev and Mairbek Shibihanov.

Magomed Evloev, was considered the leader of the group, has not been found yet.

According to intelligence:

The school siege was well planned. Terrorists brought explosives, weapons, and food (canned goods and chocolate) back in July, when school was going through renovations. According to hostages, within the first minutes of the siege, the terrorists made male hostages rip up the floor, from under which they extracted their contraband.

Several of the terrorists' bodies have now been identified as the "construction workers" who remodeled the school. Their intent explains the low price they've charged.

How to Help

2004-09-06T17:15:00.000-04:00

If you're looking for a way to help the victims of the carnage in Russia, here's a place. This Web site appears to be nearly overwhelmed by response, but it's keeping up.

Addendum

2004-09-05T18:18:00.000-04:00

When I wrote below about the shortage of moderate Muslims in the Middle East who were bold enough to stand up and in public condemn the Islamist terrorist slaughter of children in Russia, I should have mentioned that the list includes the always brave, always indispensible Iraqi bloggers, such as Alaa:

This is unbearable. As I am watching the horror pictures from Russia, I watch our little one, for we have a lovely young one in the house too. This is unbearable. Nothing and no cause can justify this, no way. And what is more unbearable is that these zombies carry out all these atrocities in the name of my own religion, in the name of my own God. ... Descend Anger of the whole of decent humanity in one great convulsion to exterminate all the zombies everywhere once and for all. No more is to be said. I am speechless with grief and the faces of mothers haunt me as I watch our own little mother and her son here in the house.

May the Lord God preserve humanity and lift this scourge from the earth.

The Way of the Peacemakers

2004-09-05T17:29:00.000-04:00

Unilateralism: one corner of the globe trying to impose upon the rest home-grown values that have served its interests. Long-standing notions of peace and war, sovereignty and national identity, justification and justice, turned on their heads for the sake of a short-term security. The U.S. in Iraq? Nope, try post-modern Europe.

The potential models for post-war Europe, even up to 1989, were intended to keep Germany weak. When the Berlin Wall came down, German unification was opposed by many European politicians, including Margaret Thatcher. The fear of a resurgent German nationalism, and thus European war, has always been an unspoken motivation for the European project. To fulfil this aim, European integration must progress to the point where Germany (and therefore any European country) can no longer wage war against another European state.

Looking at European defence budgets, the idea of a war in Western Europe might seem amusing. However, a look at history shows that the last 60 years have been the quietest in a long time; Europe has been at war with itself for centuries. Apparently, the chosen means of preventing another Franco-German war is to dissolve the national interests of European states – hence the disdain of Chirac, Fischer and so many other European politicians at America acting in its own interest in Iraq. American unilateralism is thus an affront to the world of Kant’s perpetual peace Europe is trying to create.

Tears are Not Enough

2004-09-05T16:39:00.000-04:00

The columnist Mark Steyn has some thoughts about the schoolhouse terrorism in No other word for it but slaughter. It strikes me as a good walk-around look at the tragedy; analysis through indignation.

He scores many of the big media for refusing -- even in this most hideous example -- to call terrorism "terrorism." The New York Times used "guerrillas," and couldn't bring itself to write "Muslim" or "Islamist" in reference to the half of the killing squad that was Arab, not Chechen.

"Chechen separatists," ventured the BBC, eventually settling for "hostage-takers." "Insurgents," said The Guardian's Isabel Hilton, hyper-rational to a fault: "Today's hostage-taking," she explained, "is more savage, born of the spread of asymmetrical warfare that pits small, weak and irregular forces against powerful military machines. No insurgent lives long if he fights such overwhelming force directly ... If insurgent bullets cannot penetrate military armour, it makes little sense to shoot in that direction. Soft targets -– the unprotected, the innocent, the uninvolved -– become targets because they are available."

He rounds on Hilton. If "asymmetrical warfare" is to blame, if the little guys don't stand a chance beyond dynamiting schoolchildren, then how have the Iraqi rabble managed to turn the U.S. overthrow of Saddam into a "quagmire," as Hilton's editors and many other have pronounced it? No, it won't do.

When your asymmetrical warfare strategy depends on gunning down schoolchildren, you're getting way more asymmetrical than you need to be. The reality is that the IRA and ETA and the ANC and any number of secessionist and nationalist movements all the way back to the American revolutionaries could have seized schoolhouses and shot all the children.

But they didn't. Because, if they had, there would have been widespread revulsion within the perpetrators' own communities. To put it at its most tactful, that doesn't seem to be an issue here.

He point the finger squarely at the Saudis, as the ultimate authors of these abominations:

Wealthy Saudis –- including members of the royal family -– invested millions in setting up mosques and madrassas in what were traditionally spheres of a more accommodationist Islam, from the Balkans to South Asia, and successfully radicalised a generation of young Muslim men. It's the jihadist component –- not the asymmetrical one, not the secessionist one -– that accounts for the mound of undersized corpses, for the scale of the depravity.

But he doesn't spare the Russian leadership from a well-deserved scolding, but he keeps it in perspective:

If the Russian children are innocent, the Russian state is not. Its ham-fisted campaign in Chechnya is as brutal as it is ineffectual. The Muslims have a better case in Chechnya than they do in the West Bank, Kashmir or any of the other troublespots where the Islamic world rubs up against the infidels. But that said, as elsewhere, whatever the theoretical merits of the cause, it's been rotted from within by the Islamist psychosis.

Steyn manages, too, to find that rarest of birds, the moderate Muslim in the Middle East who is willing to stand up at a moment like this and be counted among the outraged, and the shamed:

Abdulrahman al-Rashed, the general manager of al-Arabiya Television, wrote a column in Asharq al-Awsat headlined, "The Painful Truth: All The World's Terrorists Are Muslims!" "Our terrorist sons are an end-product of our corrupted culture," he wrote.

There's a huge blogger row going on now over one of the leading liberal blogger's confession that he doesn't have an idea what can be done in cases like this. The proper reaction would be concessions by the Russians (he seems to say), but that's impossible, given what's just happened.

I don't see any way out for Russian policymakers nor any particularly good options for US policymakers. Partisanship and complaints about Bush's handling of counterterrorism aside, this business is a reminder not only of the horrors out there, but also that terrorism is a genuinely difficult problem -- I think we've been doing many of the wrong things lately, but no one should claim it's obvious what the right way to proceed is.

Steyn, without addressing this directly, says there is an answer, and that a tough plan is better than no plan. And it's essentially what America is trying to do right now in the Middle East.

What happened in one Russian schoolhouse is an abomination that has to be defeated, not merely regretted. But the only guys with any kind of plan are the Bush administration. Last Thursday, the President committed himself yet again to wholesale reform of the Muslim world. This is a dysfunctional region that exports its toxins, to Beslan, Bali and beyond, and is wealthy enough to be able to continue doing so.

You can't turn Saudi Arabia and Yemen into New Hampshire or Sweden (according to taste), but if you could transform them into Singapore or Papua New Guinea or Belize or just about anything else you'd be making an immense improvement. It's a long shot, but, unlike Putin's plan to bomb them Islamists into submission or Chirac's reflexive inclination to buy them off, Bush is at least tackling the "root cause."

If you've got a better idea, let's hear it. Right now, his is the only plan on the table. The ideology and rationale that drove the child-killers in Beslan is the same as that motivating cells in Rome and Manchester and Seattle and Sydney. In this war, you can't hold the line against the next depravity.

Right!

Soft Targets

2004-09-03T18:35:00.000-04:00

So many, dead children, so many. Not collateral damage; the Islamist terrorists meant to kill these skinny legs and big eyes.

They walked into the school with the intent to kill the children.

Alla Gadieyeva, 24, who was taken captive with her 7-year-old son and mother, said the militants displayed terrifying brutality from the start. One gunman, whose pockets were stuffed with grenades, held up the corpse of a man just shot in front of hundreds of hostages and warned: "If a child utters even a sound, we'll kill another one." When children fainted from lack of sleep, food and water, their masked and camouflaged captors simply sneered, she said.

More than 200 dead. Years from now -- for the rest of your life -- somewhere in southern Russia some one of those haunted parents will be bending over a cast-iron sink, scrubbing a pot, and will have casual thoughts that drift to a child's smile. And that man or woman will stiffen with the shock of remembering that his child was terrorized and murdered, and realizing with shame that, for just a moment, he'd forgotten all about that.

It's said there are no great poems written about children; that's wrong, there's one, but it doesn't advertise the fact. Wordsworth lost a daughter, a little girl. Every parent knows this feeling: Something strikes you, something beautiful or magical and the first thought is, "my son should see this!" And you turn to call to the child, come, see, the egg is hatching, look at this flower.

Surprised by joy - impatient as the wind
I turned to share the transport - Oh! with whom
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb,
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind -
But how could I forget thee? Through what power,
Even for the least division of an hour,
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss? - That thought's return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more;
That neither present time, nor years unborn,
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

Miller Time

2004-09-03T17:58:00.000-04:00

So now, somehow, Zell Miller, who risked his political career to try to remove the Confederate Battle Flag from the Georgia statehouse, is dismissed as a "Dixiecrat" and a racist. Some people just can't hear a Southern white male raise his voice without seeing a sheet with eyeholes cut out.

Too bad for them. Miller, ragardless of what party he "really" is, is an American original: the kind of man who can be led, but can't be pushed. He has his values, and he knows other people do, too. Most of us are like that, to some degree. Have been ever since George Washington cussed his army of obstreperous Yankees and learned to win their respect. Washington isn't the national hero because he was a born hero; he earned it by learning what his countrymen would respect, and becoming that man.

Miller, out of the Scots-Irish red-dirt hill country of the South, is a scion of the stock of Washington's soldiery. And he understand something about the political mind of middle America that eludes many of his party's leaders.

Miller wrote a piece in June 2001, analyzing the Democrats' defeat in the South the previous year. Concluded that "Southerners —- a decisive number of them -— believed the national Democratic Party did not share their values, and they did not trust the national party with their money."

Let me tell a little story. When I was running for re-election as governor of Georgia in 1994, there were some who argued I should change my position on guns. Poll after poll came back showing that most Georgians favored various forms of gun control -— or so it looked on the surface. But in the South, there's always a lot under the surface.

I decided to ask voters something else about gun control. I asked them if they agreed or disagreed with this statement: "Whenever I hear politicians talking about gun control, it makes me wonder if they understand my values or my way of life." You know how many agreed? Seventy- three percent!

For a politician in the South, gun control is not just about guns. Gun control -— along with a whole bunch of other issues -— is about values. What you are for says a lot about who you are and who you aren't. If Southern voters ever start to think you don't understand them -— or even worse, much worse, if they think you look down on them -— they will never vote for you. Folks in the South have a simple way of saying this: "He's not one of us." And when a politician hears these words, he's already dead.

He used to say that, as governor of Georgia, he should spend his time on issues more important than the Confederate battle symbol on the state flag. But in 1993, as Atlanta prepared to host the 1996 Summer Olympics, some Georgians worried about the state's image. Miller began to push for a change, but with an eye to his constituents, and a respect for their respect for their heritage. "What we fly today is not an enduring symbol of our heritage," he said, "but the fighting flag of those who wanted to preserve a segregated South."

He also steered his proposal for flag change in the direction of tradition, not change for its own sake: he proposed to return the flag to what it had been before the 1950s. From 1879 to 1956, the state flag was essentially the "Stars and Bars," the original national flag of the CSA government, with (after 1902) the Georgia seal off to one side. Miller's proposal would have distanced the flag from the Dixiecrat/segregationist change of the 1950s without erasing the Confederate heritage of the state.

But the notion that this whole issue was being forced on the state doomed the plan before it got a chance. People who support the validity of the Confederate battle flag as a regional icon often do so because the flag stands legitimately for the soldiers and common folk of the CSA. They may also see it as representing many of the qualities that the Southern soldiers fought for, such as resistance to tyranny, regional distinctiveness, honor, and republican virtues. This approach sees the flag as a historic symbol, rooted in the Civil War experience of Southern people.

The drive to tear it down came from non-Southern leadership in the NAACP. Running short of examples of institutional bigotry in the South, to put in its fund-raising appeals in the North, it turns to divisive attacks on symbols. Their anti-flag resolution was bombastic in the absurd: "WHEREAS, the tyrannical evil symbolized in the Confederate Battle Flag is an abhorrence to all Americans and decent people of this country, and indeed, the world and is an odious blight upon the universe," and so forth. To say that Southerners, black or white, are incapable of seeing through this hyperbole is, frankly, insulting.

Afterward, Miller wrote:

I got beaten like a drum in the Georgia General Assembly. I now know why: Many white Georgians who harbored no racist feelings viewed efforts to remove Confederate symbols as a submission to the outside forces of 'political correctness.' It was as though they were being looked down upon and told to hide our history —- even, in a particular and painful way, to hide themselves -— to avoid antagonizing interest groups or embarrassing investors or tourists. That was under the surface.

Miller's successor in the Georgia statehouse, Roy Barnes, failed to learn the lesson. Barnes ramrodded an ugly new flag through the state legislature in barely a week, with little debate. The Peach State was hosting or vying for five NCAA basketball events at the time, and the NCAA, under pressure from the NAACP, was threatening a boycott if the flag didn't change.

Barnes told legislators the popular anger would simmer down by election day. He was wrong. He had redrawn Georgia's state flag and stripped off the part of it that Georgia soldiers had carried in the Civil War; next chance they got, descendants of those soldiers sent Barnes packing. As a former county GOP chairman in Georgia put it, "I tried for months to tell the Republicans down here that the flag was an issue, but they wouldn't believe it. I told them, "You don't understand -- these people won't whine and moan, they'll just go do something about it.' "

You don't have to be a race-baiter or a flag-waver to object to politicians making decisions that way. It's not a Georgia thing or a Southern thing, exclusively, to think that arrogant I-know-better-than-you attitudes deserve to be voted out of office, whatever their political persuasion.

When Howard Dean, early in the campaign, said, “I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks .... We can’t beat George Bush unless we appeal to a broad cross-section of Democrats,” he echoed the gist of Miller's message, but in a crude way that insulted the realities of the South -- which are both complex and simple but above all are fine-tuned to those who do, or don't understand them.

Miller was on a book tour at the time; an interviewer asked him about it, and Miller replied, "Howard Dean knows about as much about the South as a hog knows about Sunday." He described "Michael Dukakis coming to Georgia [in 1988] and having this rally, and they had all these bales of hay stashed around here and there, like it was some kind of set from the television show 'Hee Haw.' That’s not what the South is."

The South right now, if you took its economy, it would be the third largest in the world, next to the United States as a whole and next to Japan. Fifty-five hundred African-Americans right now hold office in the South. In Georgia we have several statewide elected officials who are African-American and who were elected last year in a race where a senator and a governor were being defeated. They were being elected in a state that’s 70 percent white. This is not the South that Howard Dean thinks it is. Sure, we drive pickups, but on the back of those pickups, you see a lot of American flags. It’s the most patriotic region in the country. And you see hardworking individuals that want to instill values in their children, and you see a very, very strong work ethic in the South.

Notce how he slammed Dean without also denigrating the Confederate flag and those who respect it. He talked up the New South without talking down the old one. That's a smart Southern Democratic politician. John Edwards, on the campaign trail, also played it right, at the time of the flap (November 2003):

To stereotype Southerners as pickup-truck, you know, Confederate-flag voters, I think, is also a mistake. But I think it's even bigger than that. ... It's like saying to any group of voters, including voters in the South, 'You know, you don't know what's best for you. We know what's best for you. Even though you don't understand that we're better for you, we're going to come and make sure you understand it. We'll explain it to you.' There's an elitism and a condescension associated with that attitude that's enormously dangerous to us.

That's not the tack John Kerry chose, however. His reaction to Dean was: "It is simply unconscionable for Howard Dean to embrace the most racially divisive symbol in America. I would rather be the candidate of the NAACP than the NRA." Of course, Massachusetts and the South have never been the best of friends.

As Miller wrote in 2001,

The point I'm making is that for Southern voters, the issues you choose to talk about -— or not talk about —- are as important as the positions you take on those issues. Southern voters may say they're for gun control, and they may well be for gun control, but they simply don't trust anybody who spends too much time talking about it. Bill Clinton understood that. Al Gore did not.

That was before 9/11, before Iraq, before a lot of things. But bear that in mind if you re-read his words from the Republican Convention this week:

But don't waste your breath telling that to the leaders of my party today. In their warped way of thinking America is the problem, not the solution. They don't believe there is any real danger in the world except that which America brings upon itself through our clumsy and misguided foreign policy.

Shuffle the Players

2004-09-03T16:45:00.000-04:00

Until the economy numbers kicked in, the Kerry story in the news cycle today remained what it was yesterday: Kerry lashes back at attacks on his record made by Cheney and Miller at the Republican convention.

The write-up looks like this:

Cheney and Sen. Zell Miller, D-Ga., led a chorus of Republicans who challenged Kerry's credentials to be commander in chief, arguing that although they respect his decorated Vietnam War service, his 20-year voting record in the Senate on national security issues makes him unfit for the nation's top job.

Kerry answered his critics with a blistering statement.

"For the past week, they attacked my patriotism and even my fitness to serve as commander in chief," Kerry said. "Here is my answer to them. I will not have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have and who misled America into Iraq."

Bush served stateside in the Texas Air National Guard. Cheney received five deferments and never served in the military.

"The vice president even called me unfit for office last night. I guess I'll leave it up to the voters whether five deferments makes someone more qualified to defend this nation than two tours of duty," Kerry said.

Very good. That last quote is probably what gave Bill Clinton a heart attack. I really don't think it's in the long term interest of the Democrats (or any Americans, but especially, at this moment, the Democrats) to be emphatically stating that only those who served are qualified to lead. That's the kind of quote that will come back and bite you in the ass hard the next election when, say, Edwards and Powell face off.

But notice something else about the AP article. It starts by mentioning Cheney and Miller as the attackers. Then when it compares Kerry's record to his attackers, suddenly it's Cheney and Bush. Bush has said repeatedly that he respects Kerry's record and he's said that Kerry did better than he did in those years. Why drop Miller?

Maybe because he served three years in the Marine Corps during the Korean War and rose to the rank of sergeant. When the story doesn't shine sufficient luster on the candidate you want to win, shuffle the players.

OK, Just One More, I Promise

2004-09-02T23:59:00.000-04:00

Emily, 24, goes to Long John Silver's in Singapore:

Had dinner with Kim at Long John Silver earlier. LJS is such a Cheaterbug!

Ordered a combo one which consists of two pieces of chicken, fries and a drink. The chicken pieces were strunken, much smaller than a goreng pisang. (!!) They probably held just as much(little?) meat as two chicken mcnuggets cojoined.

I looked at the cashier and went, "How come like that? Bird flu then all the chicken pieces become so small ah?! How can???" She laughed and chimed, "Er...all the chicken now become smaller lah" which actually wasnt any explanation at all.

It's appalling how dishonest businesses can get. It's atrocious. Blatantly downsizing and compromising quality while keeping the price the same...or even worse, raising the price altogether.

Check out Ronald's Mcnuggets. They've never tasted worse in the entirety of a millenium. Ronald should be ashamed of himself. Shame on you, you yellow dirty fellow with your dirty little business tricks!

Somebody do a study on Singapore English. Like my friend Sarina writes it ("I have lots of stuffs to do today ..."). It's rapidly morphing into a distinct language in the mouths and minds of 5-foot-tall princesses clacking around the island city-state in high heels and tight skirts.

"Next Blog"

2004-09-02T21:39:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, Blogger redesigned itself and added, among other things, that little blue bug up in the top righthand corner that says "next blog." It really should say "random blog," because each time you hit it it takes you to a different one.

It's addicting. It's like dialing random phone numbers, but instead of getting a voice you show up outside people's windows, peering into their living rooms. I wish I had been cut-and-pasting from all the places its taken me, because the trouble is you never get the same place twice.

If I had, highlights would include the girl from Singapore who was very concerned with the modesty of her dress when going out in public, but then blogged in hair-raising detail about her period. Or the teen-aged guy who was, like, had his eyes opened to the TRUTH, dude, by "Farenheit 9/11." Or the Brazilian guy who described what he did on his birthday, so his friends could check it and fill in the memories for him because he was sure he was so drunk he forgot a lot of stuff. Or the college student who wrote for three or four paragraphs describing her careful perusal of the bookstore before choosing a "presidential biography" to read for this semester, and then her disappointment on getting home and learning that Ben Franklin was not, in fact, a president.

Today I laughed out loud at this chunk from the blog of a 16-year-old girl. I'm a sick bastard:

I visited my grandma today...i cried three times while i was in the hospital. she cant talk. she cant do anything. her right side is paralyzed... and i can tell shes hella stressed out. id be too if i couldnt at least talk!

UPDATE: OK, wait, here's another. People are frigging brilliant. I've found my newest addiction.

As it turns out, having my internet switched off has in effect cut out 90% of my contact with the outside world. Losing my phone cuts out another 6%, leaving me with the 4% that makes up my "person-to-person" contact. Unfortunately, even with 95% of my contact with the outside world cut off I still manage to somehow get roped into helping friends move.

SOMEBODY STOP ME: I just got taken to a glamor and fashion blog from Indonesia, with the subhead title "Where the pornographies are not involved here!"

More Crushing of Dissent

2004-09-02T21:21:00.000-04:00

No, it's not John Ashcroft's work. One of the front-burner issues in Britain this summer is Home Secretary David Blunkett's plan to make inciting religious hatred a criminal offence.

The new offence is likely to be closely modelled on the existing crime of inciting racial hatred which carries a maximum penalty of seven years' imprisonment.

The conservative Sunday Telegraph editorializes against this, in terms of unusual vigor for a Western media outlet. The editor seems to see a civilizational issue here, hence the call to the barricades.

A society in which one cannot revile a religion and its members is one in which there are limits to the human spirit. The Islamic world was intellectually and economically wrecked by its decision to put religion beyond the reach of invective, which is simply an extreme form of debate. By so doing, it put science and art beyond the reach of experiment, too. Now, at the behest of Muslim foreigners who have forced themselves on us, New Labour wants to import the same catastrophe into our own society.

The country's largest Muslim group, of course, is spearheading a campaign to have him sacked.

Been Wondering the Same Thing Myself

2004-09-02T17:34:00.001-04:00

Hitchens on Kerry's Vietnam crusade:

John Kerry actually claims to have shot a fleeing Viet Cong soldier from the riverbank, something that I personally would have kept very quiet about. He used to claim that he was a witness to, and almost a participant in, much worse than that. So what if he has been telling the absolute truth all along? In what sense, in other words, does his participation in a shameful war qualify him to be president of the United States? This was a combat of more than 30 years ago, fought with a largely drafted army using indiscriminate tactics and weaponry against a deep-rooted and long-running domestic insurgency. (Agent Orange, for example, was employed to destroy the vegetation in the Mekong Delta and make life easier for the Swift boats.) The experience of having fought in such a war is absolutely useless to any American today and has no bearing on any thinkable fight in which the United States could now become engaged. Thus, only the "character" issues involved are of any weight, and these are extremely difficult and subjective matters. If Kerry doesn't like people disputing his own version of his own gallantry, then it was highly incautious of him to have made it the centerpiece of his appeal.

Meanwhile, even odder things are happening to Kerry's "left." Michael Moore, whose film Kerry's people have drawn upon in making cracks about the president and the My Pet Goat moment, repeatedly says that you can't comment on the Iraq war—or at least not in favor of it—if you haven't shown a willingness to send a son to die there. Comes the question—what if you haven't got a son of military age? Comes the next question—should it only be veterans or potential veterans who have a voice in these matters? If so, then what's so bad about American Legion types calling Kerry a traitor to his country? The Democrats have made a rod for their own backs in uncritically applauding their candidate's ramrod-and-salute posture. They have also implicitly subverted one of the most important principles of the republic, which is civilian control over military decisions. And more than that, they have done something eye-rubbingly unprincipled, doing what Reagan and Kissinger could not do: rehabilitating the notion of the Vietnam horror as "a noble cause."

Fire on the Right

2004-09-02T17:34:00.000-04:00

Jim Geraghty, who is in MSG, finds something like a catharsis in the GOP delegates' reaction to Zell Miller's speech. Maybe a few days of getting hassled by the "street theater" of the anti-Bush protests all over town has something to do with it.

The protests outside MSG this week are expressing something closer to these Democrats' hearts -- a hatred of President Bush and his values that burns with the fiery passion of a thousand flaming suns. These folks knew they couldn't express it in Boston, so they made the best of it and danced to the Black Eyed Peas and pretended that they really, really liked hearing speeches praising the flag from veterans. Deep down, they wanted to hear Mumia Abu-Jamal.

I can believe it. Reports like this would make me wanna get up and holler, too:

A featured performer at a National Organization for Women rally accused President Bush of having "savagely raped " women "over and over" by allegedly stealing the 2000 presidential election. Poet Molly Birnbaum read aloud to a crowd of feminists gathered in New York's Central Park on Wednesday night, as part of a NOW event dubbed "Code Red: Stop the Bush Agenda Rally." "Imagine a way to erase that night four years ago when you (President Bush) savagely raped every pandemic woman over and over with each vote you got, a thrust with each state you stole," Birnbaum said from the podium. "A smack with each bill you passed, a tear with each right you took until you left me disenfranchised with hands shackled and voice restrained. Thanks for that night, Mr. President, I can barely remember my tomorrows," Birnbaum said to applause.

Birnbaum's reading was followed by a performance by Gina Young, described as a singer of "feminist folk punk." Young's song included the following verse about Bush: "I got better grades than you, you stupid boy W. Your dad was a killer, too, and you know that nobody voted for you," Young sang as the crowd erupted in applause. "I object not just to this war, but to all of the things that you stand for, like dropping bombs to lower the price of gas. I guess the Constitution is just some piece of scrap paper you use to wipe you're a**, you bastard," Young sang to more applause.

But maybe it's deeper than just this week. Geraghty:

There's been a lot of talk about Democrats' anger this year. Well, the Michael Moores, the Al Frankens, the accusations of warmongering for profit and Hezbollah propaganda assistance has generated more than a wee bit of anger on the right. Miller was the first speaker at the convention to let out a bit of that anger from the right.

French Hostages

2004-09-02T17:26:00.000-04:00

Belmot Club comments on the other hostage crisis of the moment, the curious case of the French journalists held in Iraq despite the condemnation of many Islamists of the treachery against their ally, France.

The most diabolical aspect of the terrorist's cruelty is that they have placed the symbolic dagger of execution into the hands of the French themselves. The French open their schoolday with the the subconcious understanding that upholding the headscarf ban may end the lives of two men. This tranferrence of guilt is terrorism's greatest lie: that the ultimate responsibility for a hostage's death lies in the failure of his loved ones to capitulate fully to their monstrous demands. It is a lie which the Left never tires of repeating but it is false all the same. Albert Camus once wryly wrote in the Rebel that "on the day when crime dons the apparel of innocence -- through a curious transposition peculiar to our times -- it is innocence that is called upon to justify itself." He was referring to Stalin, but alas, both for the world and for France, the evil the Left worshipped never died.

Attacks, Direct and Disguised

2004-09-02T16:35:00.000-04:00

I was intrigued by the difference in headline news coverage given to the Dick Cheney speech Wednesday at the GOP convention and that afforded to the John Edwards speech a month before. Edwards, we are told, spoke of "hope," while Cheney's words "attacked" "assailed," or "bashed" John Kerry. Edwards himself said Cheney's speech (and Zell Miller's) displayed a lot of "hate" and "anger."

Edwards did talk a lot about "hope." He never mentioned Bush by name, while Cheney named Kerry more than a dozen times, mostly in the "America sees two John Kerrys" section about three-fourths of the way through. There Cheney ran down the list of Kerry's transgressions, as Cheney saw them, mostly pertaining to Kerry's Senate voting record on military issues and his various denunciations of American foreign policies.

Cheney's speech dealt with Kerry in bulk. Parsing out the negative from the positive in Edwards is more complex. He tended to speak in Pope-like balanced rhetorical couplets: Things are bad now; when we're elected things will be better. On the level of individual sentences, an awful lot of the Edwards speech comes apart neatly into a black half and a white half. His grand finale about "hope is on the way," for instance, was built almost entirely on contrasts. It's an effective tool and he used it well:

"When your parents call and tell you their medical bills are through the roof, you tell them hope is on the way." And so forth. The first half of that paints a dark picture, the second clause shines a light into it. But the darkness is as much a part of that tactic as the light. So in weighing Edwards' words, I count the words in the first part of that as a "negative" statements about the way things are (implicitly blaming the incumbents) and the second part as not negative.

Cheney didn't do that. His speech is in big chunks. When he talks about recovery from the recession or what Bush has done since Sept. 11, he's not contrasting it with anything. Then when he takes on Kerry, he plows straight into him.

The nature of the two parties' positions in 2004 force this, somewhat. As the ruling power, the Republicans can boast of what they see as their accomplishments. Then they can invoke a pure negative image of their rivals as a future to be scorned.

As the "outs," the Democrats have to walk a finer line, painting a picture of a country where just about everything is going wrong (as they see it) without seeming to be utterly pessimistic or anti-American in the good old French elite style. Spreading out the negative, leavening it with visions of hope, was Edwards' solution.

I think I was generous with Edwards. "Our plan will stop giving tax breaks to companies that outsource your jobs. Instead, we will give tax breaks to American companies that keep jobs here in America." That seems to me to be a one half negative, one hald positive statement. He describes what he sees as a specific current reality, and clearly implies it is suffered to continue by the current administration. I scored it as 13 negative words and 15 positive ones.

This was followed by, "And we will invest in the jobs of the future, in the technologies and innovation to ensure that America stays ahead of the competition." Even though this seems to me also to imply that he thinks the current administration is failing to do this, he doesn't say so explicitly. So I'd count that as 24 entirely "positive" words with no attack.

By importing Edwards' speech into a word processing program and trimming every positive (or neutral) passage out of it, I counted 779 words in sentences and phrases that were essentially negative, attacking either what the Bush administration has done, or failed to do. That's actually a larger chunk of text than Cheney's anti-Kerry passage, but Edwards' entire speech (3,617 words) was more than a third longer than Cheney's (2,691 words).

As a percentage, the negative quality in Edwards' speech amounted to about 22 percent of it. Cheney's attacks on Kerry amounted to just under 25 percent of his words.

Not a lot of difference to split there.

(If you want to try this at home, you can get the full text of the Edwards speech here, and the Cheney speech here.)

Here's my rough breakdown of their speeches, by topic:

Edwards

introduces family: 105
thanks party for nominating him: 37
talks about Kerry's military record: 174
segues into John Kerry's values: 165
Talks about negative campaigning of the other side. Asks "aren't you sick of it." Promises "politics of hope": 101
talks about growing up and the opportunities he's had: 201
talks about his adult career making sure everyone else has the same opportunities: 119
talks about the "two Americas." Contrasts the negative reality (implied blame of the other party for either causing it or failing to cure it) with visionary statements about how good it could be, and some specifics: 924
talks about racism in America: 183
talks about fighting terrorism: 250
talks about the military: a little about Iraq war, more invocations of Kerry's Vietnam service, a little about veterans' benefits, military spread too thin: 412
talks about how Kerry will make the world (Iraq and Israel mentioned) and America safer by working with allies: 354
describes suffering Americans (unemployed, high bills, fighting in Iraq) and says "hope is on the way": 592

Cheney

accepts nomination, praises Bush, makes hair joke: 123
talks about modest childhood, schooling, touts Bush education reform: 330
more Bush achievements or attempts: recovery from recession, health care; message "opportunity": 265
Sept. 11 and global war on terror, what Bush has done: 501
praises fighting men and women of America: 113
talks about this election being a defining moment in history: 207
lays out "the alternatives," mostly critical of Kerry's voting record and his denunciations of American policy; "America sees two John Kerrys": 661
praises Bush, rallies party: 490

Something About Cheney

2004-09-02T16:28:00.000-04:00

Cheney's speech interested me by its omissions, not of substance but of sub-stratum.

I typically think of him as the representative of all that I really dislike about the GOP. My inclination to vote for Bush is done with gritted teeth over all the corporate shilling, the environmental damage, the social conservatism, the assertive religiosity, the bungled economics, the unnecessary diplomatic rudeness, the unnecessary Karl Roveness, the knee-jerk anti-science, gay-bashing, and so forth.

I'm a one issue voter: two, if you separate the war against Islamist terror from the liberation and rebuilding of Iraq (and I don't separate them).

Yet Cheney's speech artfully steered away from any of those topics that figure in the Republican platform this year, but not in the GOP of Schwarzenegger, Giuliani, Miller (if he was GOP), or McCain.

The quality I most missed was religion. Cheney never mentioned God. (Edwards did, once, at the end). Living in Lancaster County, I'm intimate with the nuances of evangelistic argot, so I noticed the lack of the usual tags in the places they should have been.

Talking about his family, Cheney said, "We now have a grandson to go along with our three wonderful granddaughters, and the deepest wish of my heart and the object of all my determination is that they, and all of America's children, will have lives filled with opportunity."

And I noticed the plain verb "have" in place of the expected "have been blessed with," and I noted the "deepest wish" in place of "deepest prayer." Cheney invoked a historian (not Scripture, as Clinton was wont to do), who "once wrote that when America was created, the stars must have danced in the sky. Our president understands the miracle of this great country."

"Created" and "miracle," yes, that's about as close as it comes. But it was stars, not angels, dancing in the sky that night. Oh, I don't think it's a sea-change. The platform remains the same. But by omitting what he did, he allowed me to concentrate on the rest of what he said.

Zell in Perspective

2004-09-02T13:24:00.000-04:00

Here's a good piece. You can find plenty of pieces that attack him, of course, but you don't understand a man by listening only to his enemies. If you want a good glimpse at the current state of America the way he sees it, and the road that took him back to that podium 12 years later, here it is.

To my friends from overseas or north of the border, who may be wondering, yes, The South really is a different nation, but it will look familiar because in many ways it holds in a greater degree the qualities of the "America" that you can see from that distance.

Win With Wilkie

2004-09-02T00:20:00.000-04:00

The transcript of Zell Miller's speech is here.

My father's family -- his father was a small-time freelance electrician who once wired N.C. Wyeth's barn -- were dyed-in-the-wool Republicans, and I still have a box of "Wilkie" buttons in the attic, so maybe the part I like best was this tribute:

In the summer of 1940, I was an eight-year-old boy living in a remote little Appalachian valley. Our country was not yet at war but even we children knew that there were some crazy men across the ocean who would kill us if they could. President Roosevelt, in his speech that summer, told America "all private plans, all private lives, have been in a sense repealed by an overriding public danger."

In 1940 Wendell Wilkie was the Republican nominee. And there is no better example of someone repealing their "private plans" than this good man. He gave Roosevelt the critical support he needed for a peacetime draft, an unpopular idea at the time. And he made it clear that he would rather lose the election than make national security a partisan campaign issue.

Shortly before Wilkie died he told a friend, that if he could write his own epitaph and had to choose between "here lies a president" or "here lies one who contributed to saving freedom," he would prefer the latter.

Where are such statesmen today?

Headline News

2004-09-01T23:55:00.000-04:00

"My" newspaper's Page One headlines about the GOP convention this week have been:

Monday: "Thousands of anti-Bush protesters fill NYC"
Tuesday: "GOP opens with attacks on Kerry"
Wednesday: "First Lady Hail's Bush's Leadership"
And tomorrow: "Cheney, Miller Assail Kerry"

Hmmm. Let's have a look back in the newsroom library (the one with the framed Michael Moore quote by the door) at the Page One headlines from the same days during the Democratic convention in July:

Monday: "Kerry asks: 'four more years of what?' "
Tuesday: "Clinton: 'I'm 'foot soldier' for Kerry"
Wednesday: "Kerry: Implement 9/11 plan," with sub-head "Democratic hopeful challenges Bush over leadership on terror battle." And a second Kerry story on the same page: "Heinz Kerry touts husband's record"
Thursday: "Edwards calls for 'politics of hope,' " and a second Kerry story, above the fold: "Kerry arrives to hero's welcome," with a sub-head, "Vietnam vets surround Democratic nominee."

Now, there's no doubt here whom my editors want to see win this thing. Cheney is "pure evil" and the election is "the most important of our time" because they don't think the world will survive four more years of Bush.

Extra-Solar Planets

2004-09-01T23:27:00.000-04:00

Keep track of them as the discoveries pile up on this excellent site. Newspapers get scary when they try to do science (in the latest round of discoveries, the Philadelphia Inquirer identified "mu Arae" as the name of the planet, not the star).

The reporting tends to get breathy as the size of the planets being found get closer and closer to the size of the Earth. But the other side of that is, they're being found in places where planets that big shouldn't be, according to what we think we know about how solar systems form. Massive gas giants circling their suns in orbits tighter than Mercury's? There are three possibilities:

1. Our method of measuring the orbits or sizes of these newfound planets is wrong. (Seems unlikely.)

2. Our understanding of how solar systems are formed is way off. Probably, and that's not entirely surprising. But the range of astrophysics involved here is pretty limited. You can't introduce Mickey Mouse in a wizard's cap to conjure up worlds where they don't belong.

3. The gas giants formed in the "right" places (where our models predict them), and then spiralled in to their current close orbits. This might be the most likely explanation, and it's also the most depressing, because it means any Earth-like planets that once orbited in between have been blown out or chased into the star itself. Depressing development if you're looking for life in space or future homes for homo sapiens.

"Free Speech For Me ..."

2004-09-01T20:02:00.000-04:00

"... but not for thee, FASCIST! FASCIST! FASCIST!"

Truth for the Goose, Slander for the Gander

2004-09-01T19:52:00.000-04:00

Oh, That Liberal Media has the Wilmington News Journal tangled in its own crossfire:

From the News Journal op-ed page, 8/23/04:

There is nothing honorable about the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The group is impugning the integrity of Sen. John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate, with well-funded advertising that twists truth with slander and innuendo.

From the News Journal op-ed page, 2/12/04:

Whether it is a tempest in a teapot or a brewing political scandal, President Bush must answer questions about his National Guard service. And the president ought to silence White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who characterized these legitimate questions as "gutter politics" or "trolling for trash."

Russian School Hostages

2004-09-01T19:33:00.000-04:00

Best blog coverage of the terrorism is here.

Dysfunctional World

2004-09-01T18:59:00.000-04:00

Anyone who follows the developments in the Arab Islamic world will be struck by the complete absence of self-knowledge and introspection that characterizes these vexed cultures. Almost every problem is attributed to hostile external forces. The poverty and underdevelopment that plague most of the Arab world are the result of malicious machinations of Americans and Jews. This is no less true of the disaster in Darfur. Last week UPI reported that the Sudanese foreign minister Mustafa Osman Ismail had told journalists in Cairo that his government possessed "information that confirms media reports of Israeli support (for the rebels in Darfur)." He added that he was "sure the next few days will reveal a lot of Israeli contacts with the rebels."

Arab-Islamic World Is a Hostage of Its Own Delusions, by Leon de Winter, in Outlook Today.

For too many pan-Arabist politicians, the possibility of foreign intervention in Sudan is a greater problem than the currently overwhelming humanitarian disaster in that nation -- never mind the issue of whether Arab militias are actually fomenting genocide. Indeed, as Julie Flint wrote on this page, an audience recently offered Khartoum's ambassador in Beirut loud applause when he stated that allegations against Sudan were part of a worldwide conspiracy against all Arabs. Indeed, for too many Islamists throughout the world, martyrdom has become its own nihilist reward.

Severed Heads and the Arab World's Foul Predicament, by Charles Paul Freund, in The Daily Star.

It's been said that what the Muslim world needs is a Martin Luther. I say it would do better with a John Locke. An intellectual but religious man deeply disturbed by the social chaos of war and revolution in his homeland and religious extremism run amok all around him, he wrote "Essay Concerning Human Understanding."

He does not set reason about revelation; he is an anti-fanatic without being an atheist altar-smasher. He addressed fundamental matters of religion and morality with an eye toward living in a world where social harmony was broken, and tradition had failed. He enlisted reason as a primary agent of thinking, and freed the mind from the medieval notion that rationality consists of studying tradition.

The essential stuff is in Chapter XVIII. Traditional revelation may make us know propositions knowable also by reason, but not with the same certainty that reason doth ... Even original revelation cannot be admitted against the clear evidence of reason ... Revelation in matters where reason cannot judge, or but probably, ought to be hearkened to ... In matters where reason can afford certain knowledge, that is to be hearkened to ... If the boundaries be not set between faith and reason, no enthusiasm or extravagancy in religion can be contradicted ....

One reason change comes to Islam with glacial slowness is not simply that it's legal code and worldview is based on an ancient revelation, but that that revelation has been interpreted via an evolved methodology. The methodology, more than the revelation, is what keeps reform from breaking through.

Without it, one could easily pit the Qur'an against the Qur'an, taking each troublesome verse in some different light to make it conform to a modern standard. Reformers have tried to do that.

For instance, the Tunisian Law of Personal Status (1956) addressed polygamy in a Qur'anic context. The traditional law permitted a man to marry up to four wives. Tunisian reformers found this offensive to modern mores, and attempted to abolish it based on the very Qur'anic verse that permitted it, 4:3: "Marry of the women, who seem good to you, two or three or four; and if ye fear that ye cannot do justice then one only ... It is more likely that ye will not do justice."

No one besides the Prophet was sufficiently perfect to treat two or more wives with complete equality and justice, they reasoned; hence, realistically, the latter part of the verse supplants the former part.

But this was roundly rejected by Muslim legal scholars because it was not sustained by any cohesive legal methodology. It was an argument of convenience, for the sake of one verse, one law. An injection of Locke -- a native, Muslim Locke -- would be a first step toward prying open the gates of unalterable law in the Middle East while respecting the tradition of it. Locke has methodology.

The word "self-evident" appears in English for the first time in Locke's essay. Less than a century later, Thomas Jefferson enshrined the word in the Declaration of Independence. Human freedom begins with a firm first step out of religious fanaticism.

Come Clean First, Then Move On

2004-09-01T00:41:00.000-04:00

Johnann Hari is a young editorial writer with deep roots in the left. And he's capable of casting a cold eye on them, and judging even his idols by a higher standard. If the left is ever again to be more than a loose collection of personality cults and "anti-" mentalities, it will need more Johann Haris.

Almost everything one of my heroes, George Bernard Shaw, wrote about domestic issues -- from homelessness to the arms trade -- seemed to me inspirational. Yet almost everything he wrote about Stalin's Soviet Union takes the form of adulatory, gushing hymns to Stalin. Ditto HG Wells, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Bertolt Brecht ... the list of brilliant, inspirational left-wingers who -- apparently seamlessly -- became apologists for the most murderous tyrannies of the 20th century is long. How?

His exploration of that question is enlightening. So is his conclusion about the current state of the left, and what it ought to be learning, but in too many cases isn't.

And in Michael Moore's blockbuster movie Farenheit 9/11, he depicts Iraq in the era of Saddam Hussein. He describes it as a sovereign country, where small children fly kites and old women laugh merrily. That's it. That's his account of Iraq under Saddam. Most of the left opposed the recent war for decent reasons. Most of us did not deny Saddam's crimes. But can't we all recognise that the impulse that led Moore to gloss over Saddam's programme of genocide is the same impulse that led so much of the 20th-century left to gloss over the crimes of communism?

Couldn't Moore have opposed the war while honestly acknowledging the terrible downside of that choice? If we do not check ourselves against this tendency, aren't we doomed to repeat the worst parts of the left's history?

If we have learned anything from the 20th century, it must be that the disgusting nature of our opponents does not give us a licence to become as disgusting. We cannot allow ourselves to indulge "our bastards"; we cannot set aside democratic norms in order to beat people we judge to be even worse. As the globe warms and over a billion people live on less than one dollar a day, a global left is needed more than ever. But it must be a democratic left. It's time -- at last -- to let Che Guevara and his comrades die.

Anti-GOP Protest Sign of the Day

2004-08-31T22:19:00.000-04:00

"Founded, grown and sustained by mass extermination the USA and peace are a fundamental contradiction. This criminal terrorist government will never be reformed by voting. It must be abolished through REVOLUTION!"

War Sketches

2004-08-31T21:07:00.000-04:00

David Brooks has an intriguing piece in this Sunday's NYT Mag about "How to Reinvent the G.O.P." I like the historical perspective of it, and heartily approve of the idea of basing the party's identity on Hamilton.

Along the way, he outlines a "New Conservative Platform," the first element of which is "The War on Islamic extremism." This short section seems to me a good summation of the essential nature of our enemy, and a sensible account of what we've learned so far from successes and failures:

The first great agenda item has been thrust upon us. This has been miscast as a war on terror, but terror is just the means our enemies use. In reality, we're fighting a war against a specific brand of Islamic extremism, a loose federation of ideologues who seek to dominate the Middle East and return it to the days of the caliphate.

We are in the beginning of this war, where we were against Bolshevism around 1905 or Fascism in the early 1930's, with enemies that will continue to gain strength, thanks to the demographic bulge in the Middle East producing tens of millions of young men, politically and economically stagnant societies ensuring these young men have nothing positive to do and an indoctrination system designed to turn them into soldiers for the cause. This fight will organize our politics for a generation, as the Cold War did.

The first task is to build a new set of strong federal and multinational institutions to defeat this foe. Obviously the intelligence community needs to be reorganized. The military needs to be bulked up, and public diplomacy needs to be rethought. Somebody has to develop a counterideological message that is more than just: "We're Americans. We're really decent people. We're nice to Muslims."

We need to strengthen nation-states. The great menace of the 20th century was overbearing and tyrannical governments. The great menace of the 21st century will be failed governments, because those are the places where our enemies will be able to harbor and thrive, where violence can nurture and grow, where life is nasty, brutish and short.

We are going to have to construct a multilateral nation-building apparatus so that each time a nation-building moment comes along, we don't have to patch one together ad hoc. In the 1990's we thought free markets were the first things new nations needed to thrive and grow. Now we know that law and order is the first thing they need. We are going to have to construct new institutions to help nations develop rule of law within their boundaries, for if that is not accomplished, all the economic development in the world will not help.

More on Atefeh Rajabi

2004-08-31T18:08:00.000-04:00

This piece has some eyewitness accounts and a lot of comments from people in the town. The contradictory accounts of her character given by her neighbors I think strengthen, rather than weaken, the notion that, sadly, the story is true.

A pharmacist, whose shop is not far away from the Railway Square, where Atefeh was hanged, recalls her final, painful hour. “When agents of the State Security Forces brought her to the gallows, I felt cold sweat running down my back. She looked so young and innocent, standing there in the middle of all these bearded men in military fatigues. Judge Reza’i must have felt a personal grudge against her. He put the rope around her neck and left her dangling on the gallows for 45 minutes. I looked around and everyone in the crowd was sobbing and damning the mullahs for doing this to our young people.”

A couple of days ago, Alasdair Palmer at the Telegraph damns the lack of attention to this story in the Western media and the double-standard it implies.

That disgraceful and disgusting "punishment" has excited a great deal of condemnation in Iran among the reformists. As far as I can see, it has not produced any comment here. Amnesty International issued a statement expressing outrage at the execution (the tenth of a child in Iran since 1990) - but no British newspaper or television station has reported this.

Why not? The two extremes of pro- and anti-Muslim sentiment in Britain are now united in not expecting even the most minimal ethical standards from Islamic countries such as Iran: the pros because they think that Islamic laws should not be criticised for fear of giving offence; the antis because they think all Muslims are just a bunch of irredeemable barbarians.

Those two extreme views have infected media coverage. What would be headline news if it happened in America (can you imagine the response if a 16-year-old girl was executed for having sex in Texas?) is, because it happens in an Islamic state, apparently too banal to count.

That attitude guarantees that more children will suffer Atefeh's fate. Of course, it suits our Government -- which is pushing for greater trade links with our new-found ally, Iran -- just fine if people think that criticism of Islamic judges is inappropriate because standards are different. But respecting Islam does not require accepting the judicial murder of 16-year-olds (or indeed anyone, of any age) for having sex. That's wrong wherever it happens. We need a Government, and a press, that says so. [emphasis added]

I Don't Think You Can Win It

2004-08-31T16:48:00.000-04:00

"I don't think you can win it," Buth replied. "But I think you can create conditions so that those who use terror as a tool are less acceptable in parts of the world."

So what's so hard to understand about that? If there's one thing War-on-Terrorism supporters and anti-war activists agree upon, it's that this isn't like any other war. It defies our common image of war. It involves both a military effort and a building up of some of the world's most forlorn regions, so that decent people don't turn to the awful last resort of terror.

It will be fought differently, and victory won't be something you measure by History Channel standards. There will be no Army divisions parading under the Arc d'Triumph, no U.S.S. Missouri sailing into Tokyo harbor, no handshake on the Elbe, no scribbling at Versailles, no Berlin Wall ripped apart into concrete dust and rusty rebar.

But this is an election year, and so Bush spent the next day explaining what he meant. To a veterans' group: "It's a different type of war. We may never sit down at a peace table, but make no mistake about it, we are winning and we will win."

And on talk radio: "Listen, I should have made my point more clear about what I meant. What I meant was, was that this is not a conventional war. It is a different kind of war. I probably needed to be a little more articulate."

Forget it. The remark is beyond recall, and it's gone stomping off like an Al Frankenstein's monster in the Kerry camp: Bush, the gung-ho trigger-happy unilateralist cowboy, also is a defeatist!

Kerry campaign spokesman Phil Singer derided Bush's latest remarks.

"What today showed is that George Bush might be able to give a speech saying he can win the war on terror. But he's clearly got real doubts about his ability to do so and for good reason," Singer said.

Consistency? Common sense? Forget it! This is the Anybody-But-Bush age.

The Reuters headline today is, "Bush Reverses Himself, Says Terror War Can Be Won". That seems to me disingenuous. When big media correct themselves, they are careful to distinguish between "correction" and "clarification." A correction is a "We were wrong." A clarification is, "we said what we meant to say, but it could have been said more completely or more clearly."

What Bush said in regards to his earlier remark clearly was a clarification, not a correction. It certainly wasn't a "reversal." If he had said, "we will lose," and he says now, "we will win," that's a reversal. But it just makes a so much more jucier anti-Bush headline to write "Reverses."

Anti-War Protester Quote of the Day

2004-08-31T16:25:00.000-04:00

From Texas delegation greeted by pig protesters, published by Scripps Howard News Service:

"The delegates aren't well-informed on the issues," said Jodie Evans of Los Angeles. She said the groups were protesting to educate delegates about Halliburton's involvement in the war and said that Iraqis should be hired to help rebuild the country. "Iraq was an amazing country," she said. "And they basically destroyed it."

Sympathy for the Devil

2004-08-31T15:06:00.000-04:00

The Democrats in my newsroom (OK, that's a redundancy) rejoiced yesterday that Ralph Nader was bumped from the ballot here in Pennsylvania. They pronounced his failure a triumph of the democratic process, based on the simple fact that his ballot petition didn't have enough legal signatures. "If he played by the rules, he would have been allowed to run," is how one put it (emphatically enough for me to hear across the room). It was as simple as that.

But wait, not it wasn't.

Kerry-backers had challenged Nader's signatures, and it looked like they were going to bump him on that basis alone. But that wasn't what the three-judge Commonwealth Court panel ruled yesterday.

It said Nader could not run as an independent because he had filed to run on the Reform Party ticket in Michigan.

The challengers celebrated anyway. As long as Ralph's off the machines, that's a good outcome, right?

Well, it depends if your commitment is to "democracy" with a big D or a little D. Nader's attorney in the case pointed out that the statute which the judges relied on for their ruling was misapplied here. It was meant to prevent candidates for most Pennsylvania offices from cross-filing in more than one party.

[The relevant clause of the state election code seems to be this one: "Each candidate for any State, county, city, borough, incorporated town, township, ward, school district, poor district, election district, party office, party delegate or alternate, or for the office of United States Senator or Representative in Congress, shall file with his nomination petition his affidavit stating ... (f) unless he is a candidate for judge of a court of common pleas, the Philadelphia Municipal Court or the Traffic Court of Philadelphia, or for the office of school director in a district where that office is elective or for the office of justice of the peace that he is not a candidate for nomination for the same office of any party other than the one designated in such petition; ...." (emphasis added)]

This sudden re-interpretation has national consequences. In 2000, when Nader ran in 43 states and in the District of Columbia, his party affiliation was listed in 13 different ways. The convolutions necessary for a non-two-party candidate to offer him or herself to voters in all 50 states all but require such a byzantine effort. But now even that won't be enough.

The Pennsylvania case wasn't a victory for the legitimacy of the electoral process. It wasn't a boon to the voters. It was a victory for the continued domination of the two-party system, putting any reasonably hope of success by any outside candidate all but out of reach.

Inverted Pyramid

2004-08-31T14:36:00.000-04:00

Today's sickening suicide bombing story, as it could have been written. The same elements from the Reuters story (with one graph from AP), stacked up a different way. After the "Five W" writing, what decision-making process determines the juxtaposition of facts? Who decides? Based on what?

Palestinian suicide bombers killed at least 16 people in simultaneous attacks on two Israeli buses.

The Islamist group Hamas, sworn to destroy Israel itself, claimed responsibility for the new attacks.

Tuesday's blasts gutted the buses and scattered bloodied remains. Many of the passengers were leaving a market.

"I saw horrible sights. Two bodies were hanging from a window," rescue worker Moshe Zikstein told Reuters.

Thousands of Palestinians took to the streets of Gaza City in joyful celebrations after the bombings. Muslim leaders praised the "heroic operation" — a phrase referring to suicide bombings — over mosque loudspeakers.

The bombers came from the nearby West Bank city of Hebron. Israeli officials said the unfinished section of the barrier near Hebron underlined the urgency of finishing its construction to keep out such attackers.

Israel says the 120 miles of its barrier erected so far have thwarted dozens of would-be bomber infiltrations into its densely populated north and coastal regions.

But sections between Jerusalem and Hebron have been held up by an Israeli court order that they be rerouted to avoid cutting off Palestinians from their farmlands.

The World Court has ruled the entire barrier illegal.

Earlier in the day, Sharon had set out a timetable for steps toward pulling 8,000 Jewish settlers out of Gaza. He said a draft bill establishing rules for compensating uprooted Jewish settlers would be put to his cabinet by Sept. 26.

Israeli soldiers at a Gaza border terminal captured a would-be suicide bomber on Tuesday who was wearing a new form of explosives belt hidden in his underwear, the army said.

Hamas said Tuesday's attack was vengeance for Israel's assassination of two top leaders in helicopter missile strikes soon after two suicide bombers hit the port of Ashdod nearly 6 months ago.

Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Qurie, visiting Egypt, officially bemoaned the bombings.

If the definition of "conservative" ...

2004-08-31T12:58:00.000-04:00

... is, as was revealed to me this weekend, "one who supports the war to liberate Iraq from Saddam Hussein," should the definition of "liberal" also not be re-defined, in the 2004 American political lexicon, as "one who wishes the Iraqi people had remained enslaved to a fascist tyrant and his two psychopathic sons"? That's a shame. I don't recognize Jefferson or Wilson or Eleanor Roosevelt or Bobby Kennedy in that "liberalism."

Alternate Quote of the Day

2004-08-31T00:44:00.000-04:00

From Ron Silver:

"Even though I am a well-recognized liberal on many issues confronting our society today, I find it ironic that many human rights advocates and outspoken members of my own entertainment community are often on the front lines to protest repression, for which I applaud them, but they are usually the first ones to oppose any use of force to take care of these horrors that they catalogue repeatedly."

Ignorance as an Excuse

2004-08-31T00:13:00.000-04:00

I know Bush is supposed to be The Dumb One, but consider this.

In 1971, John Kerry, back from Vietnam, was accusing U.S. troops of widespread atrocities in Vietnam, of "crimes committed on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." He was saying that "war crimes in Vietnam are the rule, not the exception." On June 30, he finally faced his rival, John O’Neill, who had commanded the same Swift boat during the Vietnam War that John Kerry did.

They debated on "The Dick Cavett Show." It wasn't much of a contest: the suave Ivy Leaguer had been trained in the art of debate since he was 14, and his opponent was an angry physically wounded man with a Navy Academy degree, wearing "the only suit I had," a less-than-suave blue serge number over white socks.

At first, when O'Neill asked Kerry whether he had participated or seen atrocities first-hand, Kerry put up a smokescreen of cant then shifted the topic from himself to the U.S. government without answering:

"On the question of war crimes, it is really only with the utmost consideration that we pose this question. I don't think that any man comes back to say that he raped, or to say that he burned a village, or to say that he wantonly destroyed crops or something for pleasure. I think he does it at the risk of certain kinds of punishment, at the risks of injuring his own character, which he has to live with, at the risk of the loss of family and friends as a result of it. But he does it because he believes intensely that people have got to be educated about the devastation of this war. We thought we were a moral country, yes, but we are now engaged in the most rampant bombing in the history of mankind."

Again and again, the question was asked. "Kerry stuck to his script." But he went so far as to say this:

"I personally didn't see personal atrocities in the sense I saw somebody cut a head off or something like that," Kerry said. "However, I did take part in free-fire zones, I did take part in harassment and interdiction fire, I did take part in search-and-destroy missions in which the houses of noncombatants were burned to the ground. And all of these acts, I find out later on, are contrary to the Hague and Geneva conventions and to the laws of warfare. So in that sense, anybody who took part in those, if you carry out the application of the Nuremberg Principles, is in fact guilty. But we are not trying to find war criminals. That is not our purpose. It never has been." [Emphasis added]

"I find out later on"? Kerry has since backed off, in a general way, the more forceful things he said in those years. I don't know if this quote is inculded in that. But how can it be that this Ivy League graduate didn't know that shooting up sampans and wrecking villages for no good reason wasn't a violation of something? Had he ever heard of the Geneva accords? And who was it, "later," who filled him in on his unfortunate knowledge gap?

I bet Bush, getting his teeth cleaned in Alabama, knew about that.

You have to wonder about such things when a self-proclaimed war criminal runs for president as a self-proclaimed hero in a war that most of his backers who were alive at the time loathed and mocked as unjust and unconscionable.

Defining Vietnam

2004-08-31T00:11:00.000-04:00

So what was Vietnam, anyhow?

I'm not asking for my sake. I know how I see it: a big campaign in the long Cold War -- someday to be known as World War III. A failed campaign, in the end, in what was, in the end, a winning war. Like the Spartans at Sphacteria, like Grant at Cold Harbor, like the Aussies at Gallipoli. As brutal as Korea, but far more damaging at home because of its coincidence with a worldwide youth rebellion, new media mentalities and technologies, general American discontent, and fractures surfacing via the Civil Rights Movement.

Rather, I'd like to ask the Democrats I work alongside, and those I'm related to: what was Vietnam?

A just war now, a good cause, after 40 years of telling us it was the worst example of America's barbaric militarism? If so, why nominate a self-professed war criminal from that era as our next leader? And why let him run his campaign so largely based on his military service?

It all seems odd to me, because when the same people wish to cast the most damning epithets at the war for Iraq's liberation, they use the terminology of Vietnam.

But I've stopped expecting any coherence from the anti-Bush party. Gods know the Republicans are full of contradictions. But generally their view of history jibes with their present policies. In the Democratic brain, the view of Vietnam is irreconcilable with sanity, but it serves a reactionary mentality that will see black as white as black again depending in which does the most damage. Just like Michael Moore's view of modern American soldiers: innocent boys, the underclass dupes of the recruiters in one scene, and merciless murderers in the next.

One of my co-workers is a 50-something, who in the Vietnam era was an out-and-out draft dodger and anti-war activist. He blasts Bush for being "AWOL." One of my relatives is half his age but routinely protests at the School of the Americas in the name of repressed peoples. Yet all she seems to have to say to the people of Iraq is, "the world would be better off if you still wore your chains."

To these other folks, there's only one issue: Bush. "He has such a phony posture at the podium," "he didn't give the U.N. a chance," "did you see 'Farenheit 9/11'?"

I guess I'm foolish to expect some historical coherence here.

As Richard Holbrooke writes in the Washington Post, Kerry was "a man who volunteered for duty in the Navy and then asked for an assignment on the boats that were to ply the dangerous rivers of Vietnam -- when most of his college-educated contemporaries (including George W. Bush and Dick Cheney and Bill Clinton) -- found easy ways to avoid Vietnam."

Was Vietnam a just and justified war? Then how could Kerry be justified in leading such a vocal opposition to it. Was it unjust? Then a soldier dragooned into the ranks can be forgiven. But Kerry went in willingly, with a gung-ho mentality, and confessed that his unit slaughtered civilians, including children.

He apparently fought hard there for a time, then got himself home and harshly criticized the war and the soldiers who were fighting it. I've said I have no gripe with his record there, and I still don't. The mentality of his supporters does interest me, though.

The glory-mongering of a young soldier before he sees combat is as old as the world and shouldn't count against him. The fog of war obscures the details of what he did on the Mekong. His subsequent change of heart about the whole enterprise is understandable, too. His very public pronouncements about that, however, are a matter between him and his fellow veterans, men who were in the line of fire or in enemy prisons when he stood up in front of the world and denounced them as a pack of murderers. Plenty of them seem plenty peeved about it.

When Tim Russert asked about your claim that you and others in Vietnam committed "atrocities," instead of standing by your sworn testimony, you confessed that your words "were a bit over the top." Does that mean you lied under oath? Or does it mean you are a war criminal? You can't have this one both ways, John. Either way, you're not fit to be a prison guard at Abu Ghraib, much less commander in chief.

One last thing, John. In 1988, Jane Fonda said: "I would like to say something ... to men who were in Vietnam, who I hurt, or whose pain I caused to deepen because of things that I said or did. I was trying to help end the killing and the war, but there were times when I was thoughtless and careless about it and I'm ... very sorry that I hurt them. And I want to apologize to them and their families."

Even Jane Fonda apologized. Will you, John?

And so forth. I'm not a veteran. I won't take part in that family quarrel. But ... ouch.

What a Class Act

2004-08-30T22:38:00.000-04:00

The AP photo caption is: "Filmmaker Michael Moore gestures as Senator John McCain of Arizona addresses delegates at Madison Square Garden during the Republican National Convention in New York, Monday, Aug. 30, 2004. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)"

The "loser" sign is unmistakable. But it seems to have eluded the big media writers covering the convention. Describing McCain's speech, and Moore's reaction, the Chicago Tribune writes that Moore "smiled and waved in the limelight," Knight-Ridder says he "smiled broadly and raised a red baseball cap in salute," and AP reports that Moore "seemed to relish the attention, thrusting his arms over his head, laughing and saying, 'Two more months.' "

Now, imagine what they'd have written if some Republican blowhard, say Limbaugh, had flashed the "loser" sign to, say Max Cleland.

Quote of the Day

2004-08-30T22:27:00.000-04:00

John McCain's speech:

After years of failed diplomacy and limited military pressure to restrain Saddam Hussein, President Bush made the difficult decision to liberate Iraq.

Those who criticize that decision would have us believe that the choice was between a status quo that was well enough left alone and war. But there was no status quo to be left alone.

The years of keeping Saddam in a box were coming to a close. The international consensus that he be kept isolated and unarmed had eroded to the point that many critics of military action had decided the time had come again to do business with Saddam, despite his near daily attacks on our pilots, and his refusal, until his last day in power, to allow the unrestricted inspection of his arsenal.

Our choice wasn't between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war.

It was between war and a graver threat. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Not our critics abroad. Not our political opponents.

And certainly not a disingenuous film maker who would have us believe that Saddam's Iraq was an oasis of peace when in fact it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves and prisons that destroyed the lives of the small children held inside their walls.

Good News from Iraq

2004-08-30T16:50:00.000-04:00

Here's the latest in Chrenkoff's bi-weekly round-up of good news and good reporting from Iraq, hosted by the Wall Street Journal.

French 'Tude

2004-08-28T00:35:00.000-04:00

Bret Stephens parses the soul of French political culture a little more carefully than most U.S. observers (pro- and anti-Chirac) have done in these days of Freedom Fries.

Usually, the explanation comes down to adjectives: cynical, hypocritical, Machiavellian, cowardly. Yet the adjectives don't capture the reality. France is not hypocritical: It simply holds contradictory positions. Or to put it more precisely, France has attitudes and it has policies. And while the two are frequently confused (often by the French themselves) they serve radically different functions: the former is psychological; the latter is political. To have an attitude is a way of saying, this is who I am. It's a matter of self-identification. To have a policy is to say, this is what I'm going to do about it. It's a matter of will and capacity.

Poll Roll

2004-08-27T23:05:00.000-04:00

Want to follow the horse race? RealClear Politics wraps the polls.

This Just In: It's a Sick World

2004-08-27T22:58:00.000-04:00

Hialeah, Fla., candy seller recalls toy that recreates terrorist attack
By Gregg Fields
The Miami Herald

Aug. 28 -- A Hialeah company that sells 99-cent bags of Mexican candies recently recalled thousands of the packages after discovering, to its horror, that a free toy included inside re-created the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York.

"We were offended by it," said Luis Padron, national sales manager for Lisy Corp. "We're Cuban-American owned, very thankful to this country."

Padron said his firm became aware of the situation when a customer complained. He said he launched an immediate recall six weeks ago by sending distributors into the field to retrieve the bags.

... While the toy's two towers have tiered roofs, rather than the flat tops of the World Trade Center's twin towers, Padron noted that the bottom of the toys was stamped "9011."

Connecting the toy towers is a plane.

Padron said the toys were purchased from L&M Importing and Exporting in Miami. A receptionist there said she knew nothing of the subject and hung up. A message left in a follow-up call went unreturned.

... In the order that included the twin-tower models, an invoice described the toy, which is about 1-1/2 inches tall, as a plastic swing set, Padron said.

... The toy was made in China, he said, and he intends to investigate exactly where. He said a caller told him that it was widely distributed in Asia.

[emphasis added]

The Old Man and the Left

2004-08-27T20:55:00.000-04:00

"Back with the Progressive Party in 1948, we used to laugh and laugh at how dumb the other side was. We’re still laughing, and we’re further behind now."

--Norman Mailer

Back to the Future

2004-08-27T00:02:00.000-04:00

Harper's apologizes for Lewis Lapham's time warp trip. Sort of. He calls it a "rhetorical invention," and says "the author mix[ed] up his tenses" then lapsed "into poetic license." Whew; three different shades of excuse-making in one paragraph. Fact is, he tried to pull a fast one on his readers, passing off prejudice as judgment, and tripped over his own calendar.

My Problem with Islam

2004-08-26T23:38:00.000-04:00

Religion, sincerely held, tends to make individuals more intense in their native qualities. It's difficult to deny the stamp of individual character in a single religious tradition with devoted followers as diverse as Tammy Faye Bakker and Dorothy Day.

When a religion has a collectivist, communal ethos, that quality is magnified, into the national and international community. Civilizations driven by monotheistic religion tend to have a fiercer certainty than those without such a faith. Certain monotheisms hold this quality more prominently than others. That has consequences.

My sainted mother, who calls herself a Christian and often attends the local UCC church, lives her life according to her own ethics, right and wrong, mostly highly utilitarian. Where she disagrees with the Bible or the minister, she simply ignores them. I tell her that's not true Christianity. She tells me to get a haircut.

She suits Ambrose Bierce's definition of a Christian as, "One who follows the teachings of Christ in so far as they are not inconsistent with a life of sin." There's a lot of her in the world, in any religion. That, not unbelief, is the behavior behind the English word often used wrongly to translate Arabic kufr -- "infidel." "Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving;" Tom Paine wrote, "it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe."

I respect Christianity; I take the Bible seriously. That's why I don't practice it or call myself a Christian. I feel spirituality in the Catholic Mass and a Quaker meeting, but I don't believe in dabbling in a faith.

Islam gives me the same reaction, in its own way, with its legalistic logic and mathematical art. When I immerse myself in study of it for a time, it becomes exhilarating to feel, not the free-fall sensation of free will in the wide-open world, but a path through a defined space, with firm walls and open courses.

Some people would instantly feel stifled there. That's fine. Not all traditions fit all people. Huston Smith, the great religious scholar, writes a telling anecdote in an introduction to a book on Islam by Seyyed Hussein Nasr. Smith writes that he felt an instant affinity for the supple music of the Upanishads, but was repelled by the legalistic rigidity of Islam. Then he met another Western religious scholar who confessed he had no idea what the Hindu texts were talking about, "but when I read the Koran, I'm home."

Like most people of basically secular, Western outlook, I have a suspicion of religion when it rises out of the personal and becomes a political experience. Not all religions are equally prone to this. Hindu nationalism and Roman civic paganism aside (and I think those are more political/tribal than religious), polytheisms seem less prone to the "jihad/crusade" quality than monotheisms.

If there are many gods, the god of that tribe or nation is as valid as the god of mine. But if there is one God and only one, and He has spoken to me and my people in our language, then the god of that other tribe or nation is a demon or a lie.

In the modern world, such tribal cults can be deadly. (A-religious or atheist systems can be even worse, of course: Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia proved more murderous in the 20th century than all the monotheisms in history.) Certain people in every religion always will attempt to make it the core of the civilization. Some have political motives, primarily. But I believe many are sincere in their fundamentalism. They will try to twist all society -- politics, economics, education, science -- into subservience to God. We in America know this type well. Those of us with the longer tenure here are descended from boatloads of such people. And we also see how they falter, every time.

Because you cannot devise a code of laws based on the Gospel of Christ, even if you include Paul's letters. There's just not enough law-stuff in there. And you can't devise a Christian foreign policy -- it would be suicide.

Attempts to formulate a Christian government invariably have to go back to the Old Testament, and call themselves "Judeo-Christian" and bring in all sorts of niggling Leviticus rules that Christ made a point of telling his followers to ignore.

Islam is different. Amid the religious and moral prescriptions of the Qu'ran are many pieces of outright legislation, dealing with such topics as treatment of unbelievers, homicide, property inheritance, eating swine flesh, and sexual intercourse.

Muslim jurists count 500 verses with legal content. Their proportion in the Qu'ran is even greater than that appears, because the rest of the Qu'ran often repeates itself, both thematically and verbatim, but the legal subject matter in it almost never does. And the average length of the legal verses is two or three times that of the average non-legal verses. Some have argued, and it would be difficult to refute them, that the Qu'ran contains "no less legal material than does the Torah."

Even in Mecca, Muhammad was organizing his followers into a community, a political and social unit. In Medina, he not only set up a "constitution" for governing the city, he served as an arbitration judge. "Law can never be deemed Islamic without being somehow anchored in these two sources (Qu'ran and Sunna)" [Wael B. Hallaq, "A History of Islamic Legal Theories"]. But taken altogether, the legalistic aspects of Islamic tradition fall short of a full code of laws. And they fail to take into account, obviously, anything that has gone on in the world since about 800 C.E.

"In propounding his message, the Prophet plainly wished to break away from pre-Islamic values and institutions, but only insofar as he needed to establish once and for all the fundaments of the new religion. Having been pragmatic, he could not have done away with all the social practices and institutions that prevailed in his time." [Hallaq]

That leaves Islam in the worst possible situation, commitment to religious law, but with an incomplete and badly dated system of law. A tendency toward legal structure without a finished form. That leaves it vulnerable, eternally, to determined minds that would install their own dark, bloody, reactionary, anti-humanist desires into the word of God.

There are other ways to interpret Islam. Brilliant minds and brave hearts in the Islamic world have advanced them from time to time. But they never seem to make much headway. Even in the modern-day "crisis" of Islamic thought, the bid to give reason a place alongside revelation must be rooted in God, not man. When humanistic and positivist tendencies collide with the imperatives of revelation, in the Muslim world, revelation wins. Even among those who reject the medievalism of the old ways as irrelevant to the modern age. "Except for a minority of secularists, the great majority of modern Muslim thinkers and intellectuals insist upon the need to maintain the connection between law and the divine command." [Hallaq]

The failure to break through that impasse, I think, is why many Muslims reject the liberalizing tendency to try to align revelation with reason, and turn in the opposite direction, and reject rationalism and modernity as Western corruptions, and seek a "puritan" Islam. And since Islam was born in a time of war to the death against unbelievers, only a few small steps stand between fundamentalist Islam to jetliners plowed into skyscrapers.

Until the reformers start to get some traction, I -- and we -- have a problem with Islam. It's not that Christianity is good and Islam is evil. But if you find fundamentalist Christianity to be a bad influence on George W. Bush and America generally, show me one such quality that fundamentalist Islam does not promote in a measurably more intense degree. Yet too often my fellow Western liberal secularists, who articulately skewer the relatively benign "religious right" in America, throw their arms in warm embrace around hate-spewing imams.

The greatest gift from the Gods, I think, is the one even a good Christian or Muslim or Jew uses when you read those blood-curdling Old Testament genocide stories, or those Qu'ranic beheading commandments, and say, "that is cruel" -- say it even in the face of God, before you correct yourself. The discernment of right and wrong that can weigh even a god's actions is a holy power.

Ontario Update

2004-08-26T00:36:00.000-04:00

alt.muslim has a good roundup of links to recent articles and opinion pieces, pro and con, about the implementation of shari'a law as an alternative form of dispute resolution in Canada.

Dirty Secrets

2004-08-25T17:57:00.000-04:00

Salim Mansur in the London Free Press execrates the supposed internationalist humanitarians who have no interest in saving the victims of Darfur:

There, in the arid deserts of the eastern Sahara, where living is a bitter daily struggle against sand and sun, a genocide is unfolding, with nary a whimper from the folks at the UN and sophisticates in cosmopolitan centres who remain outraged over American "imperialism" dismantling brutal rogue regimes in Afghanistan and Iraq.

And he also puts this genocide in the context of the ongoing Sudanese civil war. In Darfur, the victims are Muslim, black and non-Arab. The killers are Muslims of Arab origin:

The tragedy unfolding in Darfur has been well-documented by reputable international human rights agencies such as Human Rights Watch. There is no disputing in this instance the facts of a state-supported ethnic cleansing being repeated in the heart of Africa.

But Sudan is a member of the Arab League, an organization representing 22 Arab countries of the Middle East and North Africa. Hence, the Arab League immediately rallied around Sudan at the UN to ease pressures being placed on Bashir's regime.

The diplomatic manoeuvres of the Arab League are predictable. It exists to defend the interests of Arab states -- meaning regimes in power -- and not the Arab people.

And he looks to the Muslims of the West. I'm sure most of them would prefer to live anonymous and unobserved lives, just like their Christian or Jewish neighbors. Many of them will be perfectly happy to enjoy the secular freedoms of the West, without feeling compelled to become politicized. Yet sometimes history doesn't give you that luxury:

Freedom and democracy are sorely lacking among the Arab League members, and popular condemnation of an Arab regime would not be tolerated.

Arabs and Muslims, however, now live in growing numbers in cosmopolitan centres of the West, and enjoy freedoms denied their people elsewhere.

Here they came out in unprecedented numbers, protesting American-led wars to liberate Afghans and Iraqis from despots. But in their unconscionable silence over Darfur, they disclose how selective is their outrage.

Because another quality European-Americans and their Arab-Muslim neighbors share is a discomforting legacy of racism:

This silence is also revealing of culturally entrenched bigotry among Arabs, and Muslims from adjoining areas of the Middle East.

Blacks are viewed by Arabs as racially inferior, and Arab violence against blacks has a long, turbulent record. The Arabic word for blacks ('abed) is a derivative of the word slave ('abd), and the role of Arabs in the history of slavery is a subject rarely discussed publicly.

Here, the contrast between the Arab treatment of blacks, irrespective of whether they are Muslims or not, and the Israeli assimilation of black Jews of Ethiopia, known as Falashas, cannot go unnoticed.

The tragedy of Darfurians ironically has exposed to the world the racial dimension of Arab-Muslim culture and the hollowness of rhetoric proclaiming the brotherhood of Muslims.

Old-Time Religion

2004-08-25T16:58:00.000-04:00

The woman's husband drags her across the floor to a bed where he forces himself on her -- again. But when she goes to police after years of abuse, the male leaders of her religious community (where there are no female leaders) banish her from among them. They won't take her back until she promises to submit to her husband and never call the police again.

Yet another case of abuse in a conservative Muslim community? Think again. That's a story from a series my newspaper recently ran on abuse, and the failure of religious leaders to address it, in the Amish and Mennonite communities of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania.

As Ontario has authorized the use of shari'a law in civil arbitrations, Canadians might want to consider the impact of allowing social codes based on centuries-old faiths to dominate the lives of women and children. Especially in close-knit communities where those who break from the group are ostricized or worse.

Mennonites and Amish live a life strongly rooted in religious values. Moreso than many Christians, and not unlike many Muslims, religion guides their personal lives, and Scripture verses are used to establish guidelines for family relationships.

I know many Plain people around here. They deserve their good reputation for work ethic, humility, gentleness and good humor. When people anywhere need help, they respond. They send tons of food to poor countries and send strong men at a moment's notice to raise a barn in a day. Many are exactly the God-fearing, family-loving people they appear to be.

But when that world goes wrong, it can go horribly wrong, and the religious basis of their culture offers no safety net. In fact, it often greases the skids to Hell.

Statistics are sparse, but it's likey that the abuse rate among the Plain Sects is no greater than the average among their neighbors in the general population.

The difference is the way abuse is handled. As members of a tightly controlled church system and tradition-bound culture, the victims, primarily women, turn to their male deacons, ministers and bishops for help. They often come away blamed and shamed, in a system centered on Biblical injunctions about the sanctity of marriage, men's authority over women, forgiveness, and extra-legal resolution of conflict.

Work in the recent newspaper series began after two women who didn't know each other contacted the editors about their experience with abuse in Mennonite churches. A couple of reporters began investigating, and they found a pattern. The result was a multi-part series that ran in July. They spoke with at least 10 counselors and 20 victims of abuse and/or their families. Not one of the victims, family members or conservative church leaders who talked to the newspaper would allow their names to be used. Even some counselors only agreed to be interviewed if their names were not used.

The county district attorney said he knew of 24 cases of child sexual assault involving Amish and Mennonites during the past 10 years, but only six were prosecuted (two offenders went to jail and four were put on probation). In the rest, he said, the victims wouldn't testify.

Domestic violence is seldom, if ever, reported, according to police chiefs in the rural townships where the Plain folk live. "They're a little different when it comes to reporting things to the police; they don't like law involvement," said one township police sergeant. He hears stories, he said, but there's "a lot of church involvement in family issues."

Doctors, nurses, dentists, day-care workers and teachers are required to report cases of suspected child abuse. Yet Amish women and children rarely see such professionals.

The concept of "submission" is central, just as it is in Islam. "Jesus died for the church, which is his bride," a conservative Mennonite leader told us. "We husbands are commanded to love our wives with that kind of love -- so much so that we're willing to die for our wives. Under those guidelines, no woman would have trouble with submission."

Plain Sects -- the Old Order Amish and Mennonites, avoid involving law enforcement in their internal disputes. Their historical identity as religious communities is based on the Biblical call to be "separate from" and "not conformed to" the world.

"Agree with thine adversary quickly, while thou art with him in the way; lest haply the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer and thou be cast into prison. Verily I say unto thee, though shalt by no means come out thence, till thou has paid the last farthing." [Matthew 5:24-26]

That's one of the scriptures Mennonites and Amish invoke as Biblical directive not to involve the law in personal disputes. Other scriptures support the spirit of the concept, such as turning the other cheek and loving your enemies.

In the more conservative churches, injecting the law into family matters is considered a violation of Biblical instruction. Church leaders eye professional counseling with suspicion; they fear therapists will lead their people away from the church and its ways. People who need help are expected to turn to church leaders. But most conservative Mennonite or Amish leaders have no schooling beyond eighth grade, and certainly no training in dealing with the psychology of abuse.

"We firmly believe God instituted marriage," said one Mennonite leader. Any problem, no matter how big, can be resolved by God if the husband and wife are willing to work at it. Church leaders give primacy to the marriage, not the couple in it or their children. "Divorce is a continuous state of adultery, with or without the paperwork."

One important difference: Muslims in the West often came here to put distance between themselves and the faith of their homelands. Plain sects in North America came here specifically to practice their faith without government interference.

The legalistic aspect of the Christian Gospel is much less prominent than it is in the Islamic Shari'a. Yet both embody concepts of men and women, family and force, that modern Western societies find, essentially, unacceptable.

More progressive religious minds, in both faiths, would say that God spoke to the people of ancient times in terms they understood, leading them away from bad habits gradually without intending to enshrine as God-ordained for all times practices like wife-beating and slavery.

But fundamentalist religious views do not see it thus. Certainly the excesses of Christian fundamentalism do not extend to sanctioned honor killing, jihad, dhimmitude. Yet they can stand as a warning of what happens when secular societies defer authority to ancient religious codes.

Enter Sistani

2004-08-25T16:56:00.000-04:00

NAJAF, Iraq (AP) - Iraq's most powerful Shiite cleric returned from Britain on Wednesday and his aides called for a nationwide march to Najaf to end nearly three weeks of fierce fighting between U.S. forces and Shiite militants in this holy city.

If this was the plan all along (and some thing it was), it's brilliant. The U.S. Army in Najaf, with its Iraqi allies, has been learning to fight in the traditional Arab way: a grand charge, then pull back, but always end up with more ground than when you began. The noose around al-Sadr is drawn tight.

So finish him off? Perhaps, but there's a risk in that, even if it's Kurdish Shi'ites who storm the mosque. Better, probably, to let Grand Ayatollah Ali Husseini al-Sistani be the deus ex machina who saves the day.

Even if al-Sadr lives -- and every breath he draws is a small victory for him -- his reputation is shot. There never was much of it beyond a certain segment of the Shi'ites.

More important is that the Shi'ite population remains committed to its senior leaders, and that those leaders remain committed to the cause of a free, secular, democratic Iraq.

It's been noted that they have the most to gain, in terms of proportional representation, under such a system. But there's another reason. There's a sound theological reason that the Shi'ites are the key to secular, democratic rule in the Muslim world. America's 25-year conflict with Shi'ite Iran somewhat obscures the fact that Shi'ites, more than Sunnis, are receptive to a non-religious representative democracy.

It springs from the concept of the imam, which in Arabic means roughly "leader," and in the usual Sunni sense would mean "leader of daily prayers in a mosque" or even "religious scholar." But it has a much deeper meaning to the Shi'ites, something like "person of intrinsic spiritual power, perfect interpreter of prophetic revelation, intermediary between man and God."

There were only 12 of them (in the main branch of Shi'ism), and all were descendants of the Prophet. They were hounded and assassinated by the caliphs, who rightly saw them as a threat to their political authority, and the last one vanished in the 10th century C.E. The Shi'ites say that, like King Arthur in some British legends, the last Imam is not dead but in hiding, still in the world, directing affairs unseen. And he will return at the end as the Mahdi (hence the4 name of al-Sadr's army).

But until then, he can't be consulted, and with the Imam in "occlusion," the world is left in an imperfect state. Every form of government is necessarily imperfect, since the imperfection of people is reflected in their institutions. The political position of the Shi'ites, then, is a search for the least imperfect form of government.

Historically, the Shi'ites generally do not look to the "caliphate" as the legitimate Muslim political authority, though they often have supported it as a matter of accepting the prevailing political situation. They have been monarchists in the past, and democrats in the present. And they could set an example in Iraq that the rest of the Middle East, in spite of political prejudice, will come to envy and emulate.

Jihad

2004-08-25T02:34:00.000-04:00

These legal guidelines concerning jihad are taken from the commentaries of 'Umar Barakat (c.1890) on the 14th century writings of Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri, in the Shafi'i school, one of the four major schools of Islamic jurisprudence. Within the range of Islamic thought, Shafi'is have a rationalistic interpretation of shari'a, unlike the extremism of some of the fundamentalists. Yet I think you'll find these plain-spoken accounts eye-opening, if you haven't seen them before.

The Muslim schools are identical in about three-fourths of their legal conclusions, and most of the differences are methodological. I am not aware of serious variances over the issues of jihad presented here; the one I can see clearly is outlined in the quoted text.

Though these texts are in some cases ancient, they are still in print, taught and learned and revered in the Islamic world. They are the basis of proper behavior for observant Muslims.

Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word mujahada, signifying warfare to establish the religion. And it is the lesser jihad. As for the greater jihad, it is spiritual warfare against the lower self (nafs), which is why the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said as he was returning from jihad,

"We have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad."

The scriptural basis for jihad, prior to scholarly consensus is such Koranic verses as:

(1) "Fighting is prescribed for you" [Koran 2:216];

(2) "Slay them wherever you find them" [Koran 4:89];

(3) "Fight the idolaters utterly" [Koran 9:36];

and such hadiths as the one related by Bukhari and Muslim that the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said:

"I have been commanded to fight people until they testify there is no god but Allah and that Muhammad is the Messenger of Allah, and perform the prayer, and pay zakat. If they say it, they have saved their blood and possessions from me, except for the rights of Islam over them. And their final reckoning is with Allah";

and the hadith reported by Muslim,

"To go forth in the morning or evening to fight in the path of Allah is better than the whole world and everything in it."

[Jihad is obligatory upon Muslims, but there are two kinds of obligations in Islam, the personal and the communal. A personal obligation is required "from each and every morally responsible person." A communal obligation is required "from the collectivity of those morally responsible." If no one from the community undertakes it, then all are guilty of a serious sin. If one or some undertake it, then the obligation is fulfilled.

In normal situations, for Muslims at home in their own country, jihad is a communal obligation. But "when non-Muslims invade a Muslim country or near to one, ... jihad is personally obligatory upon the inhabitants of that country, who must repel the non-Muslims with whatever they can."]

"It is offensive to conduct a military expedition against hostile non-Muslims without the caliph's permission, though if there is no caliph, no permission is required."
"Muslims may not seek help from non-Muslim allies unless the Muslims are considerably outnumbered and the allies are of goodwill towards the Muslims."
"The caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians, provided he has first invited them to enter Islam in faith and practice, and if they will not, then invited them to enter the social order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax -- which is the significance of their paying it, not the money itself -- while remaining in their ancestral religions. And the war continues until they become Muslim or else pay the non-Muslim poll tax, in accordance with the word of Allah Most High,

'Fight those who do not believe in Allah and the Last Day and who forbid not what Allah and His messenger have forbidden -- who do not practice the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book -- until they pay the poll tax out of hand and are humbled.' [Koran 9:29]"
"The caliph fights all other peoples until they become Muslims, because they are not a people with a Book, nor honored as such, and are not permitted to settle with paying the poll tax, though according to the Hanafi school, peoples of all other religions, even idol worshippers, are permitted to live under the protection of the Islamic state if they either become Muslims or agree to pay the poll tax, the sole exceptions to which are apostates from Islam and idol worshippers who are Arabs, neither of whom has any choice but becoming Muslim [al-Hidaya sharh Bidaya al-mubtadi']."
"It is not permissible in jihad to kill women or children unless they are fighting against the Muslims. Nor is it permissible to kill animals, unless they are being ridden into battle against the Muslims, or if killing them will help defeat the enemy. It is permissible to kill old men, meaning someone more than forty years of age, and monks. ... It is permissible in jihad to cut down the enemy's trees and destroy their buildings."
"When a child or a woman is taken, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman's previous marriage is immediately annulled."
"When an adult male is taken captive, the caliph considers the interests of Islam and the Muslims and decides between the prisoner's death, slavery, release without paying anything, or ransoming himself in exchange for money or for a Muslim captive held by the enemy."
"In Sacred Law truce means a peace treaty with those hostile to Islam, involving a cessation of fighting for a specified period, whether for payment or something else." A truce is "a matter of the gravest consequence because it entails the nonperformance of jihad." "There must be some interest served in making a truce other than mere preservation of the status quo."

Diversion du Jour

2004-08-24T21:42:00.000-04:00

Henry Raddick's hilarious mock-book-reviews on Amazon.com. A sample, "The Art of Flamenco" by D.E. Pohren:

I bought this book for my wife. Flamenco is the dust of the bull-ring, the flounce of the gypsy's skirt and the crazy clatter of castanets. Flamenco swaggers. Flamenco pleads. Flamenco is the beating heart of Andalusia. Flamenco is NOT a tanked-up Englishwoman embarrassing her husband in a hotel bar in Seville.

Saigon Syndrome

2004-08-24T20:44:00.000-04:00

With an unfinished War on Terrorism, a complex struggle with nation-building underway in Iraq, nuclear weapons proliferating, an economy in the throes of transformation and time running out for America to find real energy and health-care policies, I can't believe we're about to decide an election based on what two men did or didn't do 30 years ago in Vietnam.

I blame the candidates. Kerry more than Bush, since he has made his service such a central pillar of his campaign -- propping those medals on his shoulder and daring Bush to knock them off.

But in either case, except as a minor point to ponder, I really don't care. Count me among those who say, Let It Alone.

Choosing Sides

2004-08-24T18:34:00.000-04:00

The leaders of the Socialist Alliance met on Sept. 20, 2001, to state its position on the terrorist attacks on America. Here's a result:

We do not believe that the use of the word ‘condemn’ is appropriate in relation to the tragic events in the US.

Clearly we do not support the attacks on working class people and it should go without saying that we oppose the strategy of individual terrorism. This would be our preferred way of stating our case. But the language of ‘condemnation’ is that which is always required of socialists and national liberation movements by the media and the ruling class. It would have been better to avoid it for this reason.

The most important task of socialists is to patiently explain why the US government is hated so much and why there are people who are prepared to kill themselves and many others in opposing the US. The answer is US imperialist foreign policy.

At the moment we are in the eye of a media storm directed at mobilising international and popular domestic support for a bloody and destructive imperial intervention. We should not allow either the really terrible events of September 11 in New York or the media campaign that has followed to drive us to use language that we may regret when the real balance of terror is revealed by the war the major powers are now planning.

There are lines to draw here - we believe the Socialist Alliance should be part of an unstinting and principled opposition to US and western imperialism and the further mass murder Bush and Blair intend to unleash on the world.

Good work, guys. Deliberate hijackings of jetliners full of civilians and plowing them into skyscrapers are "tragic events." Such attacks are not to be supported -- when they involve "working class people." Presumably if you could have sent the dishwashers home from "Windows on the World" before imploding the building, leaving only stockbrokers to die at their desks, the socialists would be fine with the whole deal.

Kerry's Troubles

2004-08-24T18:32:00.000-04:00

Belmont Club tries to frame the Democratic candidate's essential problem, and sees it much as I do:

John Kerry's troubles have largely been forced on him by the Democratic Party platform. He has been given the unenviable task of presenting it as the War Party when in fact it is not, nor does it want to be. The Democrats could have chosen to become a real anti-war party, in which case it would have nominated Howard Dean or it could have elected to become a genuine war party and chosen Joseph Lieberman. Instead it chose to become the worst of all combinations, an anti-war party masquerading as the war party.

To carry out this program, it required a Janus-like figure and found it in Senator Kerry; the only man of sufficient stature who could look two ways at once. It would have been a desirable trait, as Christopher Hitchens pointed out, in a peacetime President.

He still gives, to me at any rate, the impression of someone who sincerely wishes that this were not a time of war. When critical votes on the question come up, Kerry always looks like a dog being washed. John McCain was not like this, when a president he despised felt it necessary to go into Kosovo. We are looking at a man who would make, or would have made, a perfectly decent peacetime president. ...

Ateqeh Rajabi, Again

2004-08-24T18:25:00.000-04:00

The Ateqeh Rajabi story is getting some legs, but it hasn't got a foundation to put them on yet.

A post at a Free Iran Web site by "Ramin Etebar, MD" gives it a source in "Radio Farda" and cites interviews with "locals."

Meanwhile, Amnesty International added its outrage today to "the reported execution of a girl who is believed to be 16 years old, Ateqeh Rajabi, in Neka in the northern Iranian province of Mazandaran, on 15 August, for 'acts incompatible with chastity' (amal-e manafe-ye 'ofat). Ateqeh Rajabi was reportedly publicly hanged on a street in the city centre of Neka."

The only new detail here seems to be that Rajabi was said to be "mentally ill," but that also was in the Ramin Etbar post from three days earlier. Depending on what is meant, that detail could be seen as at odds with the earlier account of the girl that suggest she was sharp-tongued and articulate. Of course, to an Islamic fundamentalist, independent thinking in a woman might look like insanity.

Yet, although AI goes on to write about the execution as an established fact, it gives no details that haven't been in the Internet reports cited by me and others, and does not establish any authoritative source for the story beyond Peyk-e Iran, the original of the Internet posts.

As a journalist of 20-some years, I'm cautious about this story. Nothing I can explain, just a faint odor of rat. Too many details, not enough sourcing.

Caught Red (State)-Handed

2004-08-24T17:54:00.000-04:00

Back in the '80s I used to enjoy reading "Harper's" magazine. At the time, because I was looking for a job in publishing, I wished there was some genealogical connection between my family and that of the founder of that magazine. No such luck. My Harpers were ne'er-do-well small planters from the Maryland Eastern Shore.

Nowadays, though, I'm pleased to disavow any connection with those other Harpers. It's been more than a decade since I got through a "Harper's" article without losing interest. And now this, from Lewis Lapham

The speeches in Madison Square Garden affirmed the great truths now routinely preached from the pulpits of Fox News and the Wall Street Journal--government the problem, not the solution; the social contract a dead letter; the free market the answer to every maiden's prayer--and while listening to the hollow rattle of the rhetorical brass and tin, I remembered the question that [Richard] Hofstadter didn't stay to answer. How did a set of ideas both archaic and bizarre make its way into the center ring of the American political circus?

The issue's dated September. But "Harper's" always goes to print about a month ahead of its official publication date. So that piece, in which Lapham records his scorn for the speeches made at a Republican Convention that hasn't happened yet, has been in the hands of readers for several weeks now.

Electoral Collage

2004-08-24T17:46:00.000-04:00

Fascinating electoral tidbits (and depressing conclusions) in Louis Menand's "The Unpolitical Animal" in the "New Yorker."

Rephrasing poll questions reveals that many people don’t understand the issues that they have just offered an opinion on. According to polls conducted in 1987 and 1989, for example, between twenty and twenty-five per cent of the public thinks that too little is being spent on welfare, and between sixty-three and sixty-five per cent feels that too little is being spent on assistance to the poor.

And ...

When you move downward through what Converse called the public’s “belief strata,” candidates are quickly separated from ideology and issues, and they become attached, in voters’ minds, to idiosyncratic clusters of ideas and attitudes. The most widely known fact about George H. W. Bush in the 1992 election was that he hated broccoli. Eighty-six per cent of likely voters in that election knew that the Bushes’ dog’s name was Millie; only fifteen per cent knew that Bush and Clinton both favored the death penalty. It’s not that people know nothing. It’s just that politics is not what they know.