Wide Awake to Anti-Semitism: Mark Steyn et al

Two years ago, a 23-year-old Paris disc jockey called Sebastien Selam was heading off to work from his parents' apartment when he was jumped in the parking garage by his Muslim neighbor Adel. Selam's throat was slit twice, to the point of near-decapitation; his face was ripped off with a fork; and his eyes were gouged out. Adel climbed the stairs of the apartment house dripping blood and yelling, "I have killed my Jew. I will go to heaven." ...In 2003, a survey by the European Commission found that 59 percent of Europeans regard Israel as the "greatest menace to world peace." Only 59 percent? What the hell's wrong with the rest of 'em? Well, don't worry: In Germany, it was 65 percent; Austria, 69 percent; the Netherlands, 74 percent.

Go read it all. That last number is utterly chilling. We have many Dutch relatives. We travel there frequently. One wonders - if such surveys had been conducted 70 years ago - whether the percentages would have been significantly different.

UPDATE I: David Warren is at least as good in a similar vein today. H/T: Anchoress.

One cannot keep up with all these events -- the wheels of history are turning too quickly. The world in which we will find ourselves, a few years hence, will not resemble the world we inhabited a few years ago... the shape and scale of events is already blotting the sun on our horizon. Even after the experience of the Great War, and the Depression, people on the eve of the Hitler war could not appreciate what was coming. It is only in retrospect that we understand what happened as the 1930s progressed -- when a spineless political class, eager at any price to preserve a peace that was no longer available, performed endless demeaning acts of appeasement to the Nazis; while the Nazis created additional grievances to extract more. This is precisely what is happening now, as we are confronted by the Islamist fanatics

UPDATE II: As if that weren't enough... (H/T: Drudge)

A Paris gang leader was arrested overnight in Abidjan [Ivory Coast] and has confessed to the kidnap, torture and murder of a young French Jewish man... "he denies any anti-Semitic dimension" to the crime... [the victim], a 23-year-old telephone salesman, went missing in late January after being lured into a trap by a woman. He was held and tortured for three weeks in a poor multi-ethnic suburb of Paris by a gang that sent ransom demands to his family...

UPDATE III: Some interesting observations from Joe Carter.

We cannot let the religious fervor of the Jihadists obscure the ideological similarities they share with Europe. At the core of anti-Semitism lies a mistrust of capitalism and a fear of economic liberty... As America pushes to expand liberal democracy throughout the Middle East, we can expect resistance not only from the Arab monarchies but from our Old World neighbors as well. While they will wring their hands and agree that terrorism is a threat to security, the market-driven economy of the U.S. is what they truly fear. As the statist policies continue to degrade the EU economy, the "scapegoat" will continue to expand from the Jews as a people to the homelands of the Jews, Israel and the U.S... Even though the ideologues of Old Europe won’t be turning to radical Islam in droves, we shouldn’t be surprised when the combination of socialism and radical Islam fills the post-Marxist vacuum. Already we have seen signs that the anti-globalization movement will back the forces of terrorism if they believe it will further their aims... As Ulrike Meinhof, a left-wing German terrorist of the 1970s, aptly summarized, “Anti-Semitism is really a hatred of capitalism.”

Intelligence Summit Notes and Impressions - Part II of...

Thanks to loyal readers for their patience while our notes from the Intelligence Summit sat at the bottom of a ski gear bag while we occupied ourselves with more pleasant thoughts and activities last week. As a friend noted recently: "pretty ironic that we may be at the beginning of Armageddon or at least Armageddon Lite, and... you were off skiing." Indeed.

This post continues an abortive start we made on the 18th with too little time and insufficient perspective. Rather than imposing a grand structure on this, we'll mix in impressions with notes and skip around a bit. Stay with us. There's lots to process.

We’ll quote only where we’re certain of what we heard. Elsewhere we are paraphrasing or editorializing. One side effect of this adventure is a heightened respect for the reportorial profession. The MSM may be desperately biased much of the time but the job of a beat reporter isn’t as easy as it looks.

Entering the Hyatt in Crystal City, VA early Saturday morning (February 18th), we were immediately struck by the visibility of security. Dogs in the upper lobby. Dogs in the lower lobby. Burly, determined-looking men in black flak vests and helmets toting automatic weapons. Men (and it was exclusively men as far as we could tell) wearing earpieces - eyes darting, watching everyone and everything - before we even exited the escalator.

This was like no other conference we'd ever attended. That said, we immediately noted holes in this facade that a determined adversary could have easily driven through - literally or figuratively. This was not El Al at Tel Aviv. Much of it - unfortunately - would be better characterized as "security theatre": tight for a conference on industrial fasteners but ridiculously loose given the individuals in attendence and the subjects being discussed. We'll stop there lest the bad guys be reading.

One of the most remarkable speakers was Richard Perle who gave one of several keynotes. He spoke just before lunch on Saturday. His calm, thoughtful, demeanor and deeply rational intelligence were captivating. The term "velvet bulldozer" came to mind. That's the nickname someone gave to a particularly competent and caring hospice nurse who cared for KM's brother in his final days. Anyone seeking to do intellectual battle with this man in person would find themselves nodding in agreement and liking him - even if he had come into the discussion determined to disagree.

We came in a few minutes late as Perle was setting the stage for discussion of the Middle East, talking about intelligence failures during the Cold War and the multi-decade grip that massively flawed frameworks of assumptions can have on foreign policy. Net/net: we underestimated the extent of Soviet military programs (in spending terms) while simultaneously overestimating their economic growth. Together, those assumptions led us to a sense of inevitability: a conclusion that detente was the only answer. Until Reagan, of course - a fact he didn't need to mention specifically to this highly sympathetic audience.

Perle went on to talk about how the CIA has been openly "at war" with the Bush administration since the latter's election to office, engaging he noted (by way of illustration) in a campaign of villification against Ahmed Chalabi. The red meat only got redder, even as Perle never raised his voice or changed his steady, confident pace. The true nature of militant Islam he said, is very poorly understood at the CIA, an agency deeply flawed he opined, by "an appalling lack of knowledge" and that "doesn't understand the big picture": about the Koran, about Arabic language, about the goals of our enemies, about what's at stake and about what sources we should be relying upon in the region.

In what could have been mistaken for the conventional critique of the State Department, Perle went on to criticize the CIA as having - counter to the popular Hollywood impression - a strongly "liberal orientation" without any sense of toughness, military common sense or street smarts, all burdened by the heavy weight of bureaucratic agendas and foolishness that can plague any large, poorly accountable organization.

He related the horrifying story (timeframe unclear but the impression was that it was in the past decade) of a CIA manager who wanted to increase the volume of reporting out of Iran. And he got exactly what he wished for... through the "same bandwidth channel". Lots more reporting... until the mullahs figured out that nobody could possibly be writing that many legitimate letters to their uncle Henry in Des Moines... at which point the entire U.S. intelligence network in Iran was rolled up and summarily executed. Oops.

Perle noted Saudi Wahabbist financing of mosques in Bosnia - an area that "had been multi-ethnic and tolerant before", using that fact to segue into speculation on how the Saudis might react as Iran flexes its increasingly large nuclear and political muscle in the region. "I hope we will prevent" Iran from getting nukes, he remarked. He doesn't believe that diplomacy will work. (No surprise there.) Perle expressed confidence that a limited strike could "destroy" the Iranian nuclear program. (Other commentators and analysts, including yours truly, are not so confident that 'destroy' is the proper word. Set back? Probably. Destroy? No.)

And in a stunning insight of what should be more obvious, Perle noted that discussions about the military options for Iran by the MSM tend to be anti-pre-emption on the theory that we don't know where all of the nuclear facilities are... which gives the lie to any argument for diplomacy. After all, if the West, the U.S., the UN (or anyone else on our side) doesn't know where all of the nuclear facilities are (and the Iranians sure aren't saying), then how can we know to negotiate about them? One either assumes that there are unknown facilities, or one assumes that there are not.

If there are unknown facilities, then neither attack nor diplomacy could be assured of stopping the program (though there remains a strong argument for slowing it down). And if there aren't, then either option could work - in theory at least. It's a true Kobayashi Maru dilemma - a no-win situation.

Yet this apparent logical deadlock serves to turn attention back to intent. (Where have we heard this before?) I.e., since we cannot know whether there are hidden facilities or not (and for the record we believe, given the stakes, that it's prudent to assume that there are), then the individuals in positions of leadership, what they are saying they will do, and what they have done in the past matter a lot. In fact, those become the only things that matter. In other words, it's not the gun but the madman waving what looks like a gun that matters.

Suspending disbelief, assuming benign motives and/or assuming that the large pointy black object being pointed at one's face is really a plastic water-toy are not realistic options when one's life is on the line... something that all cops know. The same logic applies here.

That's about half our notes on the Perle talk but we have work to do. Watch this space for more.

The Cure for Global Warming: Plague

This morning, a reader sends us this.

Europe's "Little Ice Age" may have been triggered by the 14th Century Black Death plague, according to a new study. Pollen and leaf data support the idea that millions of trees sprang up on abandoned farmland, soaking up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This would have had the effect of cooling the climate, a team from Utrecht University, Netherlands, says.

Which reminds us of this from last May.

Our planet's air has cleared up in the past decade or two, allowing more sunshine to reach the ground, say two studies in Science this week... this may add to the problems of global warming... 'global dimming', reversed more than a decade ago, probably following the collapse of communist economies and the consequent decrease in industrial pollutants.

Which resonnates with this absolutely hilarious no-chewing-or-drinking post by the Anchoress poking fun at those on the left who regard babies as 'parasitic infections'.

What do pregnancy and global warming have in common? In both cases, it's easy to focus on the downsides: massive change and disruption to a neat and tidy selfish status quo. Yet in both cases, the result is more life. And whatever disgruntled Malthusians, Paul Ehrlichs and Khmer Rouge holdouts may tell you, that's a good thing.

More fruitfulness, multiplication and human creativity on the one hand; more plant productivity on the other (due to higher CO2 levels). Has anyone ever considered that maybe - just maybe - the two are supposed to go together? Has anyone stopped to ponder how a cold, plague-filled, death-ridden Communist planet is not what God has in mind for us?

Just asking...

China - Making Friends Before They're Necessary

As once and former students of geology, we take some interest in events such as the large (7.4 magnitude) earthquake that hit Mozambique in the wee hours of last Thursday. (Earthquakes of the same magnitude can be very different in effect, but for rough comparison, the one that brought Los Angeles to its knees in 1971 measured 7.2.) This one hit a relatively remote area. Only a handful of people were killed. Damage was relatively light. Story over, right?

Not really.

Two fascinating presentations at the Intelligence Summit last week both noted how China is going out of its way recently to make friends in the third world. Especially Africa. Especially East Africa and the Indian Ocean (e.g., island nations such as the Islamic Maldives, where according to the Maldives ambassador, China recently offered to replace all European tourism).

Why this interest by China in seemingly obscure and little-used parts of the planet? Location, location and location. The same reason the U.S. is happy to have access to Diego Garcia. The same reasons that any major oil-hungry nation would want to be close by the key strategic shipping lanes for Middle Eastern oil (not to mention a few great big honking fiber optic cables running along the seabed connecting the U.S. economy to outsourcers in India).

Which brings us to this.

Chinese President Hu Jintao expressed on Saturday his solidarity with the victims of the earthquake... "I was deeply moved when I learnt of the earthquake that occurred in Mozambique, and that caused deaths and left many people injured and caused many material damages", reads the Hu Jintao message... The document, that was adressed to Mozambican President Armando Guebuza, reiterates that "in the name of the people and the government of China, I am adressing our deeply felt condolences".

And a complete lack of any mention from the U.S. One more pawn moved forward...

The Poor - Always With Us?

Reading this extraordinary memoir by Nicholas Sparks (picked up in an airport yesterday), and catching up on a few favorite blogs got us thinking about poverty. In particular, SC&A references this fact-filled article ('Understanding Poverty in America') drawn directly from U.S. Census data and "other government reports". For a quick summary, see this chart. Highlights:

Poor children actually consume more meat than do higher-income children and have average protein intakes 100 percent above recommended levels. Most poor children today are, in fact, supernourished and grow up to be, on average, one inch taller and 10 pounds heavier that the GIs who stormed the beaches of Normandy in World War II [!!]... Overall, the typical American defined as poor by the government has a car, air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR or DVD player, and a stereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair and is not overcrowded. By his own report, his family is not hungry and he had sufficient funds in the past year to meet his family's essential needs. While this individual's life is not opulent, it is equally far from the popular images...

All of which raises some difficult questions for those on the left who seem to draw their sense of self worth (and sometimes their sense of piety) from the fantasy that the economy is bad, that George Bush is Herbert Hoover and that the problem of real poverty in third-world hell-holes is entirely separate from (or even the result of) spreading American-style freedom, democracy and rule of law.

Fuzzy-headed if well-intentioned blog posts like this one only make the problem worse, taking a solid concept like power law distribution and misusing it to conflate forced income redistribution with voluntary Holy Spirit-driven charity. Rising living standards across the board force one to consider: why has poverty continually been redefined upwards by the government and liberal mandarins? Why do we define poverty in relative terms (with an entirely U.S.-centric focus) in an era where it should be well understood that communism promotes poverty? (among other evils and ills)

When Jesus admonished that "the poor you will always have with you", it did not necessarily follow that the poor would be the same people in the same places as yesterday, that their numbers would never change, or that the government was the solution. He meant that tending to the sanctity of the individual and his relationship to God must come first. From that, all blessings truly flow.

Vacation From Blogland

We're back on the grid after a very full plate at the Intelligence Summit, plus several long-overdue days of most excellent skiing in a red state... with dear family from another red state. What's not to like? We will be running through notes from the IIS - most of which should age well - and posting more on that in coming days. Really. Promise. They're right here...


Apologies for the abrupt retreat from blogging last week, as well as the delayed moderation of many fine comments. It's nice to be missed. Of course there were also a few comments hardly worth the effort of hitting the delete key - reminders that it takes all kinds. Note to those feeling the need to throw ad hominem insults at us and our religious beliefs: at least take time to post a few innocuous comments first in order to lull us into complacency and maybe respect you a little.

Time is short this evening as we watch the last of this year's Olympics with dear family in a blue state not our own. And speaking of religious beliefs, it didn't take long in looking over this morning's WaPo in paper form to find reason to shake our heads at the yearning by the MSM to seek out and feature something - anything - to stand in opposition mainstream Christianity. The Gospel of Judas. Yes, you read that right.

Sure, they're just reporting the news, but do they have to do it so reverently? And without more than a token quote from the Catholic church as to the sheer blasphemy of the idea that Judas really wasn't such a bad guy after all?

...the manuscript could add to the understanding of Gnosticism, an unorthodox Christian theology denounced by the early church. The Roman Catholic Church is aware of the manuscript, which a Vatican historian called "religious fantasy."

According to scholars who have seen photographs of the brittle manuscript, it argues that Judas Iscariot was carrying out God's will when he handed Jesus over to his executioners. The manuscript could bring momentum to a broader academic movement that argues Judas has gotten a bum rap among historians and theologians as well as in popular culture.

We can't help but speculate - in the larger cosmic sense - why this particularly bold part of the Satanic wedge between ordinary sinners and Christ is coming right now. We suspect - again, in the larger cosmic sense - that it is anything but an accident.

The Saddam Tapes - Firsthand From the Intelligence Summit

Thanks to Manchester Terrier for being our typing fingers this morning in a hurried cell phone de-brief from the Intelligence Summit in Washington, DC. He hit the highlights very well. All errors are ours. We will attempt to correct them today and tomorrow. It was an exciting day, with notes already filling half a notebook - the fodder for many blog posts to come that go way beyond Saddam and WMD: China, Maldives, Iran, NoKo. A very rich vein. We've got another meeting in 20 minutes, so just a few more notes here...

We got to meet Bill Tierney after his two-hour session this morning. Interesting guy. He makes a living as a non-native Arabic translator. He encourages others to review the tapes themselves - to a point. When Roger Simon of PJ Media asked him why more material of this kind wasn't put out there for the blogosphere to vet, he expressed concerns (backed by experience and several anecdotes) that our Arabic translation capabilities, in addition to being inadequate, have been infiltrated by (first) Iraqi agents and (later) by various Islamofascist sympathizers.

In a small hallway gathering of a handful of reporters (including yours truly), Tierney confessed to being an evangelical Christian - something that may have been a factor in his being pushed out of UNSCOM. At least that was his implication. He is clearly a committed American. For a brief moment in the hallway, he broke into genuine tears of frustration and anger when describing how his ideals had been compromised by the UN bureaucracy as well as (sadly) that of the U.S. intelligence community. Says he quit because he was tired of being villified by military personnel because of his association with Scott Ritter - "in the closet" as he put it. Interesting...

The overall picture he painted was one not of a single smoking gun out of Saddam's mouth, but of a climate in which Saddam and his deputies were supremely confident of their ability to evade - and efficacy in having evaded UN inspections... all the way up to 2002. The tapes are subject to varying interpretations because so much depends on one's interpretation of context, the nuance of particular words and guesses as to how to fill in blanks in the conversations.

Much more to come... have to run (family stuff). Lots more later.

Three tidbits to hold your attention from retired Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely (did I say Allen? D'oh!):

• the 81 targets in Iran are all set
• the six U.S. cities for simultaneous nuke detonations by Iran are all set
• Gitmo detainees average 4,200 calories per day (!!)

UPDATE: Vallely's cities targeted by Iran, Al Queda et al for for simultaneous nuclear detonation were: New York, DC, LA, Chicago, Houston and one I didn't hear (not Philadelphia). It was not clear how he knew this or whether he was simply engaging in educated speculation.

Morning Quick Picks

Blogging will be intermittent next week as we travel to visit family, ski and attend a conference - in three different places. The latter may provide for some veeeery interesting blogging this weekend of the kind that 'real' reporters do. I.e., excerpts from these tapes from Saddam are going to be played live. We're officially excited, though sorely embarassed to admit that our flaky wireless connection will not be facilitating live-blogging. Watch for reports tomorrow and Sunday.

This makes me want to take up smoking just to spite the intrusive mandarins of Calabasas, CA. We run marathons and we're on the other coast, but hey... an airline ticket, a Zippo and a pack of Lucky's seem like they're in the spirit of Henry David Thoreau, doncha think?

As we've noted twice before, ("keep an eye on France"), we should not assume that those whom Lance Armstrong has routinely crushed and embarassed each July will behave towards the Iranian situation as they did towards the U.S. on Iraq. The incentives are very different: the lack of an established financial gravy train, two weeks of rioting and being... in range are tending to focus the collective French mind.

Speaking of Iraq, consider how much worse this would be if we were not there...

The U.S. military confirmed yesterday that it had uncovered its own first direct evidence that a death squad was operating from Iraq's Shia-run Interior Ministry, targeting Sunni Muslims.

...which is not how the MSM is likely to see it.

A loyal reader points us to this wonderful, serendipitous find (turn on your audio)... from those days long long ago when even entertainers (other than Bruce Willis, Dennis Miller and Arnold) understood that basic patriotism was acceptable, even socially responsible.

Finally, this makes us very nervous. Very nervous indeed.

The Bush administration on Thursday rebuffed criticism about potential security risks of a $6.8 billion sale that gives a company in the United Arab Emirates control over significant operations at six major American ports.

The company's owners may all wear nice suits and have degrees from American universities and speak flawless English. That does not mean that the second cousin of the Saudi brother-in-law of one of them (who happens to be a jihadist) is not now more able to get a job overseeing U.S. port operations than he was before.

------------------

And one complete shift of gears for a postscript. Fourteen months ago, our friend 'S' from chuch lost his wife and two nearly-viable twins very suddenly, leaving him (a traveling salesman with a startup) with a two year old and a six year old to care for on his own. The following month, his mother-in-law required extensive cancer surgery - the same month that his own mother contracted a rare virus that left her nearly paralyzed. Now we get word that his father is being tested for cancer and will require a quadruple bypass this weekend. We've taken to calling him 'Job' for his steadfastness through these trials. But even Job needed help. Please find a place in your prayers today for our friend Steve that he may find meaning and strength and peace on his difficult path. There but for the grace of God...

UPDATE: We will be working late tomorrow morning via cell phone to try and get the basic facts from the Intelligence Summit and Saddam's WMD out via our friend Chester.

Guns Pointed In Anger... and Not

This will be a short post (relatively speaking). We're up to our eyeballs in preparations for ten days away (and a high-profile presentation on Monday).

Not that it's a terribly big deal, but this past Tuesday marked our one year 'blogoversary'. For a project that started with no particular goal in mind (other than personal journaling and an outlet for rants that would fall on deaf ears where I live) it's a little startling to be coming off a 12,000 visit month in January. Who knows what the future holds? We're pleased to note that a year ago, our focus was on where Iran was heading, e.g., see here and here. Some things never change - they just get caught up in the news cycle.

Which brings us to the current MSM monomania about the Vice President. Yes, it is a major story, but not the story of the century - or even the year. Does it really warrant this much attention? (5,700 stories on Google News for "Cheney + accident" and 5,500 for "Cheney + shooting") Let's play the double standard game for a moment.

Let's change two variables of this story, imagining that 1) the Vice President in question was a Democrat and 2) the accident was the result of the VP say, swerving his car into a tree and injuring his passenger to the same degree as Mr. Whitington was injured by the bird shot. (That last part is vitally important.) In other words: same result; different method; same job title; different political party. What would the media reaction have been? Well... a lot less. Certainly not the ravenous feeding frenzy we see. Certainly not the sense of jackal-like too-good-to-be-true that I sense in some stories about this unfortunate mishap.

Which leads to the next question: Why is that? Why does a gun make for a bigger story? And why does a Republican VP doing this make for a bigger story than a Democratic first lady withholding the suicide note of a top White House aide for 30 hours? Or a drunken Democratic Senator from an American political dynasty allowing enough time to go by before reporting a preventable car accident (nine hours) that the result is materially different? (I.e., death instead of just scrapes and bruises.) Gun deaths and injuries are far rarer than those from cars... which is of course not what the MSM would like us to take away from this. And the frequency with which Democratic political figures make life-level mistakes is well... no better or worse than those on the other side of the aisle. Everyone is human. We're all sinners

Why is it such a big story that one man accidentally shot and injured a friend and apologized and took responsibility when in the Middle East we have millions of men purposely and with no thought of responsibility pointing guns and suicide bombs and maybe nukes at people they do not even regard as human (because they don't share their religion), all with great anger and malice aforethought? Why is a simple accident so much more juicy than the frightening truth that the West is in the cross-hairs of radical Islam and the shooters are not going to be content with bird shot and certainly not with a near miss?

Because the media is on the other side. Because they will do anything to find a reason to take down this administration, just as the Democratic party leaders were prepared to do anything to take down a Supreme Court nominee who didn't meet their narrow ideological tests. The method does not matter. The double standards are to be ignored. The goal is singular and not subject to reason: replace this president and put a stop to everything he stands for. Anything that offers promise of achieving that objective is to be amplified. Anything that might cast doubt on it is to be ignored.

That the misfortune of Mr. Cheney and his friend is cause for quiet celebration in newsrooms around the country is not that hard to imagine, even while it is utterly sickening. Maybe this is it! Maybe this time we've got him! Maybe this is what will sway the midterm elections! Maybe this is the beginning of the end of Bushitleriburton! Maybe we can finally put in place our contract with America... err... or something like that. Think about that for a moment.

Think about a media and political party so committed to seeing the country's leadership fail that they would spend enormous resources on keeping this alive while stories of heroism and quiet progress routinely go unreported or underreported in Iraq.

Unfortunately, it's not all that hard to imagine some individuals secretly hoping that Mr. Whitington would die in order that the administration be stymied. (I haven't the stomach to go sewer-swimming over at Kos or the Democratic Underground to find out.) In the Bush-hatred before all world view, that would be a welcome distracion from the fact that a once great political party has come to the point of having no moral leadership and no constructive or compelling vision to offer other than tearing apart that which they hate.

When Evil Knows HTML

We're in the process this morning of developing a presentation that will have us attempting to say profound, memorable things to a group of several hundred very smart people we've never met in less than a week. Such things tend to focus the mind. In the meantime, some other things that ought to focus the minds of all of us who've come to rather like the free, open society we've created in the West and would hate to see it go:

The Anchoress wonders where the vaunted feminist 'sisterhood' is while Condi Rice is being slandered (quite viciously, in fact obscenely by Western standards) in the Russian press. To which we might add: where are those usually attuned to the barest whisper of 'racism' when it comes from a conservative American politician?

Lee Harris writes about 'Nuts With Nukes' over at Tech Central Station:

Any form of power... is always amplified enormously when it falls into the hands of those whose behavior is wild, erratic, and unpredictable... It is an immense form of power simply to make other people wonder if you might not do something bad and unpleasant to them... Ahmadinejad, who gives off an aura of impulsiveness and self-willful independence [is] the kind of guy who lets nobody tell him what to do, and who is generally admired for this quality, especially by the poor and dispossessed who would love to be able to exercise that kind of self-assertion. That is the source of the populist appeal of such figures: they are living out the common man's fantasy of being able to defy the establishment. In Ahmadinejad's case, the establishment he is defying is America, Israel, and the West in general -- and the more vociferous his defiance, the greater becomes his populist base of appeal among those in the Muslim world who look upon us as their oppressors.

...which causes us think that any harsh words, sanctions or other negative reinforcement that the president of Iran may receive from outside his borders, (much less outside of the Muslim world) are akin to the words of an earnest therapist attempting to get through to the committed addict: "please stop... before you hurt someone... maybe yourself... please..." They are simply no match for the bliss-rush of adoration he receives from the next step towards the brink and the next open-air speech to tell his mini-me's about it. It is the addicting drug of demagoguery.

Readers may find it an eye-opening if somewhat unsettling experience (as we did) to peruse the pages of the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting site (IRIB). One can be temporarily lulled into a sense of normalcy by a fairly professional set of web pages - in English - filled with ordinary stories on benign topics such as the Northeast blizzard, the Katrina hearings and the comings and goings of government officials, only to be jarred suddenly awake by stories (e.g., 'Rushdie Execution Decree Alive') that seem right out of Orwell's 1984:

Martyrs and War-Veterans Foundation in an statement on Tuesday stressed on the implementation of the historic decree issued by the late Imam Khomeini over the execution of the renegade author of a blasphemous novel 'The Satanic Verses', Salman Rushdie.

"The decree will remain alive forever," it pronounced.

The book incarnates the evil plots hatched by the world arrogance and occupying Zionists, played out by the apostate devil, the statement read.

"Such ill and seditious thoughts of the great Satan, America, which raises up people of the like of Rushdie, will not let Islam be," it said, adding, that the recent insulting to the holy Prophet Mohammad (PBUH) further substantiates the claim.

Mixed in are stories like this ('Iran has no Problem With Americans') - a clear and clever appeal to the kumbaya left and the appeasement-oriented MSM:

President Ahmadinejad said that Iran has offered to set up an impartial team to hold inquiry into the furnaces for massacre of Jews by Nazis. "We say that even if the Holocaust is true, the western nations have committed the crime and they should pay the price for the genocide. The international community should not expect the Palestinians to pay the price for genocide of the Jews," President Ahmadinejad said.

Or stories like this ('Palestinian Mother Shot Dead'), which while certainly tragic, are laced with so much anti-Israeli chest-pounding (the word 'Israel' is never used, only "Zionist occupiers") and anti-Semitic hatred-stoking as to erase any lingering doubt about comparisons between the current Iranian regime and the Nazi 'final solution'.

True evil is on the march in the world. It insults and degrades women. It seeks power through demagoguery and sheer unpredictability. It calls for the death of those it disagrees with - based purely on what they think and say, not what they actually do. It also wears a business suit, smiles, speaks English, appeals to reason when it suits its purposes, and knows how to put together a modern website. In short, it knows that to succeed in its aims, it must find allies within its enemies walls - an easier task than it might have suspected. (More on that depressing last bit over at Captain's Quarters.)

A Tale of Two Accidents

One hour versus... Nine hours...

Secret Service spokesman Eric Zahren said that about an hour after Whittington was shot [by Cheney], the head of the Secret Service's local office called the Kenedy County sheriff to report the accident. "They made arrangements at the sheriff's request to have deputies come out and interview the vice president the following morning at 8 a.m. and that indeed did happen," Zahren said.

By failing to report the accident, the Senator [Kennedy] had made Gargan and Markham unwitting accomplices in his effort to conceal it from police for more than nine hours, involving them in a net of intrigue so as to avoid his own responsibility for the death of Mary Jo Kopechne. Now he was invoking lawyer-client privilege to prevent them from telling anybody what they knew.

UPDATE: Some memes spring up everywhere at once. From a devoted reader, a new bumper sticker is discovered: "I would rather hunt with Dick Cheney than ride with Ted Kennedy"

Enlisting With Eyes Wide Shut

We continually marvel at the schizophrenic divide between the Wall Street Journal's editorial page (one of the best on the planet) and its 'news' pages - somewhat to the left of the New York Times... if that's even possible to imagine.

This morning in that vein, we note this Page One article (subscription required), "Biathlon and War Go Together, But Iraq Has Loosened the Tie". The piece strikes a contemptuous tone from the outset, seemingly perturbed that 9-11 has interfered with government-subsidized cross-country skiing. One National Guardsman is dismayed that the service he readily volunteered for when it offered a life of full-time skiing would require him to actually fight:

Ben Kamilewicz, skied cross-country for Williams College and taught high school until the National Guard recruited him onto its biathlon team. That was early in 2001. For four years, he trained full-time, learning to cross-country ski his heart out, pause to let his heartbeat drop, and then fire a rifle at a target. In 2004, he raced for the U.S. at the World Cup in Alberta. He had hopes of making the Olympic team.But his unit was called up last summer, and now, at 29, he is spending his days on Humvee patrol in Ramadi, Iraq.

Note the sleight-of-hand in describing the process of signing up for military service: "the National Guard recruited him" (emphasis added). Well, yes... but the other part of the process is conveniently missing: the part where Mr. Kamiewicz allowed himself to be recruited. Somewhere along the line, he made a decision as a full-fledged adult (at 24 years old) to voluntarily sign on the dotted line. He was not drafted. He is not a victim.

Mr. Kamiewicz took a gamble and arguably won big. For four years - most of it after 9-11, and half of it after the invasion of Iraq - he got to do exactly what he wanted, fulfilling a lifelong dream. We can understand why he might be upset at reality finally coming around. Reality has a way of doing that. As Thomas Sowell likes to say, it isn't optional. He has no right to complain now - no more or less than any other citizen who disagrees with a political outcome.

"My experience in the sport of biathlon," he writes in an email from Ramadi, "has been filled with many wonderful adventures that have led me to many exciting places, and at the end of my journey, by some twist of fate, to the wretched war zone of Iraq."

Many wonderful adventures... at taxpayer expense. Some twist of fate... otherwise known as volunteering for military service in hopes that 9-11 would not happen. Well, it did. And like Mr. Kamilewicz, we wish it were not so. We wish that evil were not currently on the march. Alas it is, and somebody has to confront it. For the record, we're grateful beyond words for the service that Mr. Kamilewicz and all of our other men and women in uniform are providing.

But we could do without the whining. Mr. Kamilewicz's whining seems exceptional because it's so rare. In such times, there are things that take precedence over a pampered and subsidized life of full-time skiing. What's equally stunning is this piece of borderline Euro-gloating:

Most teams still are comprised almost entirely of active-duty soldiers. The British, much occupied in Iraq, have sent only two biathletes to Turin. With no war worries, the French have sent five soldiers and five frontier guards. Germany has a similar mix.

"There's no question of fighting in foreign countries," says the German team's spokesman, Stefan Schwarzbach. "The Germans are in a far better position than the Americans."

We hope that the French and Germans enjoy their time in Turin. We hope they enjoy their medals - if they win any. We hope they enjoy these things almost as much as their grandparents enjoyed being liberated from Nazi horrors by U.S. troops two generations ago. America is still doing the heavy lifting so others can enjoy freedom. Some things never change.

Roundup of Thoughts and Analogies

An eighteen mile training run early Saturday morning left us incapable of blogging anything coherent enough to burden our readers with posting. And today's Nor'Easter (which dropped about 18-20" of fluffy stuff at our house) provided too much incentive to get out, snowshoe, cavort, shovel and generally enjoy the best of an on-again off-again New England winter. Blogging has taken a back seat.

Amidst all this outdoor fun, a few thoughts... (some of which may become posts later this week):

Isn't it interesting how the Danish cartoon controversy around visual references to the prophet Mohammed mimics how characters in the Harry Potter books refer (or rather, decline to refer) to the evil Lord Voldemort? I.e., "he who must not be named"? Harry of course, is the only one with big enough cojones to just call him what he is while everyone else cowers in fear. Sort of like liberals and Islamofascism. Or George Bush and the Axis of Evil. Just asking...

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And speaking of Chris Ofili... the more I think about the Times piece, the more I cannot fathom both their simmering distaste for all things Christian and the degree to which they feel insulated from any blowback from such blatant double standards. A friend and I ranted about this for nearly an hour while running on Saturday and didn't get any closer to understanding it.

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Isn't it interesting how we aren't hearing a lot about global warming just now as the epicenter of the global media elite (New York) and American liberal elites (Boston and Washington) are inundated with one of the biggest regional snowstorms in decades? OK, that's not quite fair. I had an ever-so-earnest conversation with an acquaintance a few weeks ago in which she insisted that cold weather was a sign of global warming because change was a sign of global warming and we should all drive less. Now matter what the actual evidence, the issue is the same. OK...

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And speaking of global warming... why is it that on that topic statistics and future possibilities (as expressed in utterly fallible computer models) are taken largely on faith whereas when it comes to religion the secularists (e.g., Daniel Dennett) insist that coincidence can be proven away as anything but the hand of God?

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The whole Danish cartoon thing may turn out to have more to do with intra-Muslim rivalries and struggles for power than anything else. Factions arguing with factions, using the West as a foil. How else to explain a long history of depicting the prophet not being a problem? How else to explain the Man Behind the Curtain problem? And if it is mostly about intra-Muslim rivalries, then the results of Iran getting nukes are even more dangerous than we might have imagined. Why? Because Egypt and Saudi Arabia and everyone else with more technological expertise than say, Chad (and maybe them too someday) will want in on the action.

Why is This So Hard to Understand: Iran's Dead-Serious Fury

In case we didn't believe Iran before or last year, they torque up the rhetoric yet again. (See here and here).

"...the people of the U.S. and Europe should pay a heavy price for becoming hostages to Zionists. We ask the West to remove what they created sixty years ago and if they do not listen to our recommendations, then the Palestinian nation and other nations will eventually do this for them... Do the removal of Israel before it is too late and save yourself from the fury of regional nations."

They must not get nukes. Not if we have anything to say about it:

Strategists at the Pentagon are drawing up plans for devastating bombing raids backed by submarine-launched ballistic missile attacks against Iran's nuclear sites as a "last resort" to block Teheran's efforts to develop an atomic bomb.

Inflaming - When it Suits; Media Standards Reduced to Formula

Further insights into the double standards of the MSM from The Bidinotto Blog (scroll all the way to the bottom and update #9). Also a source for the actual cartoons!

Did that consideration -- "not unnecessarily adding fuel to the controversy" -- stop CNN or any of the rest of the Western media from displaying those inflammatory photos from the Abu Graib prison scandal, globally, for weeks, and 24/7? No?

Ah, but you see, that case was different! Then they were only inflaming Muslims by trashing and insulting the fascistic American military. But here they would be inflaming Muslims by trashing and insulting anti-American terrorists. You do see the difference, don't you? Unrestricted free speech is contextual: it all depends on whether you're trashing the reputation of America, or that of its enemies.

And of course there's one other difference: the media slimeballs know that they can insult American soldiers without running the risk that their heads will be cut off.

H/T Vodkapundit.

To which we'd add Newsweek and the Quranic flushing story from Gitmo. No, it wasn't an image, but the ease with which they saw fit to publish a highly inflammatory story gives the lie to the MSM's current righteous appeal to restraint and consideration for how Muslims might react. If the real filter is the Bush-bashing potential relative to the threat of being slain like a dog in the street a la Theo Van Gogh, then the MSM standards start to fall into place a lot more logically.

Or in mathematical terms: BB/DT = LP, where BB is the potential for Bush-Bashing, DT is the likelihod and credibility of potential Death Threats against editors and LP is the resulting Likelihood of Publishing a particular story or set of images.

Let's Offend... the Folks Who Won't Try to Kill Us

Why did the New York Times choose this image and only this image - of Chris Ofili's "Holy Virgin Mary" covered in dung - to illustrate its article on offensive depictions of religious figures?


Because they know that Christians aren't going to try to kill them.


The Anchoress has a great little play-let here, imagining the dialogue among editors at the Times:

Editor A...we should be showing our readers what the fuss is about. We’d do it if the cartoons were about Christians, or Jews, of Buddhists…but…but…MOMMY! I scared!

Editor B: I’ve got it! Let’s re-print the picture of Chris Ofili’s Virgin Mary! The one with the elephant dung, that’s the ticket! We’ll illustrate the POINT of the riots, without actually risking the wrath of anyone.

It gets better.

Yahoo Facilitates Crackdown on Chinese Dissidents

Yet another blow to free speech. This just makes me sick:

Writer and veteran activist Liu Xiaobo said Yahoo had co-operated with Chinese police in a case that led to the 2003 arrest of Li Zhi, who was charged with subverting state power and sentenced to eight years in prison after trying to join the dissident China Democracy Party. Yahoo gave public security agents details of Li's registration as a Yahoo user...

Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain!

Iranian author Amir Taheri (whose op-ed in Wednesday's WSJ we blogged here) continues back-filling the real story behind the cartoon 'crisis' in today's New York Post (free registration required). H/T: Powerline.

The destruction of Danish and Norwegian embassies and consulates happened in only two places: Damascus and Beirut. Anyone who knows Syria would know that there are no spontaneous demonstrations in that dictatorship. (Even then, the Syrian secret police failed to attract more than 1,000 rent-a-mob militants.) And the Syrian government refused the Norwegian Embassy's request for additional police protection. It was clear that the Syrians wanted the embassies sacked.

The rent-a-mob attacks in Beirut were more cynical. The Syrian Ba'ath — which has been murdering, imprisoning or deporting Sunni-Salafi militants for years — was suddenly transformed from a radical secular and Socialist party into "the Vanguard of the Faith." The mob that committed the atrocities in Beirut was bused from Syria and consisted of Muslim Brotherhood militants who are never allowed to demonstrate on their own account.

This is all beginning to feel just a little bit like the post-Katrina 'oops' as hyperbolic reports of widespread spontaneous lawlessness are found to be not so widespread and not so spontaneous after all - more in the service of a narrow political agenda than anything else. (Iran's in this case, and a virulently anti-Bush, closet-racist MSM in the case of Katrina.)

Mainstream opinion (including many right-of-center blogs that I deeply respect, such as The Anchoress) have come to regard the Danish editors as unnecessarily provocative. In the larger sense of turning the other cheek, asking the sinless to cast the first stone, and generally counting to ten, I have to agree - even as I defend their freedom to say what they say... by buying Danish beer yesterday. Yum. It's still worth making the distinction however, that the line that they did not cross was of advocating or promoting violence. As we noted Monday in response to the Boston Globe's inept analogy:

Jews in Nazi Germany and blacks in the rural South were not the ones committing wild acts of mayhem and violence - they were the ones being violated to the point that they feared to leave their homes

But if the Danish editors are viewed as provocative (their right in a free society), it's important to ask: provocative of whom? And the answer appears to be: a few who know that they can use the sacred cow of 'offense' to their advantage in the politically correct West. As Taheri notes,

The Muslim crowds that have demonstrated over the cartoons seldom exceeded a few hundred; the Muslim segment of humanity is estimated at 1.2 billion. And only three of Denmark's embassies in 57 Muslim countries have been attacked.

The Danish Muslim gang who lied by adding cartoons that had never been published has done more damage to the Prophet and to Islam than the 12 controversial cartoonists of Jyllands-Posten.

In other words, if there is provocation, it is of the cynical, calculating variety - deliberately amped-up by a few leaders in Syria and Iran for proximate political purposes in opposing the West and Israel (surprise, surprise). Which makes a whole lot more sense than the original theory when we think about the timing of all this amidst the nuclear showdown, the delay from the cartoons' publication in September, and why other depictions of the prophet in the past (e.g., in South Park) have spurred not the barest hint of offense from Muslims - at least publicly.

Yet amidst a yearning to breathe a sigh of relief (that blame for this crisis can be ascribed to a few who were already dead-set against us), we remain troubled at the dearth of opposition to this and other murderous mayhem perpetrated by Islamic terrorists against us as well as their own. As we noted Monday:

...the much talked-about moderate core of Islam doesn't seem to be making a counter-protest, calling on their brothers to tone it down just a little. There is nothing that would provide any foothold for such a debate. To the extent that such moderates exist and do not already sympathize with the radical Islamofascist fringe (or cower in reaction to its calls for fatwa and jihad), then let them speak up. We would be happy to debate them - with words. Until then, I refuse to call it a debate when the starting point - long long before any Danish cartoons were in evidence - was the death or conversion under sharia law of all non-Muslims. That is not a debate. It is a threat.

We have Taheri and Rushdie a few others such as Religious Policeman and... crickets. There may be plenty of silent opposition to this foolishness within the Muslim world but if it exists it is... silent. Which leaves us with three possibilities:

1. the mass of Muslim opinion is largely agnostic
2. they feel well represented by the radical fringe
3. they are not free (or don't feel free/safe) to speak up against the violent radicals

I'm going with #3 as the main dish, heavily seasoned with #2, plus a dash of #1. And given the results of recent Palestinian and Iranian elections, we could easily be convinced to go with #2 as the main dish instead. After all, if the radical fringe is being elected the search for responsibility for the embassy-sacking riots must turn back to the masses. Syria is hardly democratic, but the Iranians as their puppet-masters (not to mention the Palestinians) have made their own beds.

UPDATE I: Bernard-Henri Levy picks up the theme ("Moral Atomic Bomb") in today's WSJ (subscription required).

...it is hard not to see that insidious forces have brought these drawings to the attention of the Muslim masses. And it is hard not to link this provocation, the deliberate circulation of these cartoons, the quasi-home-delivery of a Danish paper that no one could have guessed had so many readers in the Muslim world, it is hard not to link this self-inflicted blasphemy, this calculated offense (calculated, mind you, by the organizers of the distribution of the cartoons), it is hard not to link this blasphemy to a new planetary configuration, itself determined by three recent and major events.

The diversionary tactic of a Syria which we never saw so concerned over religious matters, but which now turns out to be capable of anything -- including infiltrating agents into Lebanon and sponsoring demonstrations in Damascus, where it is well known that nothing of the sort can happen without the explicit assent of the government -- in order to reclaim its role as a great regional agitator and make everyone forget the involvement of its secret services in the murder of Rafik Hariri.

The hardening of Iran's Islamic Republic, ready to make all kinds of theological concessions (including a grand historic alliance of Shiites and Sunnis, which experts have been telling us for decades would be against nature) with the goal of heading up in the Muslim and Arab world the grand anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and antidemocratic crusade.

And then this tragedy in the Palestinian territories of the victory of an ideology whose themes (the call, based on the denial of the Holocaust, for the pure and simple destruction of Israel and the Jews) had up to now been in power only in openly dictatorial, sometimes even crypto-fascist, states...

...faced with this triangulation in progress, faced with this formidable hate-and-death machine, faced with this "moral atomic bomb," we have no other solution than to counter with another triangle -- a triangle of life and reason, which more than ever must unite the United States, Europe and Israel in a rejection of any clash of civilizations of the kind desired by the extremists of the Arab-Muslim world and by them alone.

The heart of this second triangle? First, the affirmation of principles. The affirmation of the press's right to the expression of idiocies of its choosing -- rather than the acts of repentance that too many leaders have resorted to, and which merely encourages in the Arab street the false and counterproductive illusion that a democratic state may exert power over its press.

And second, in the same breath, the reaffirmation of our support for those enlightened moderate Muslims who know that the honor of Islam is far more insulted, and trampled under foot, when Iraqi terrorists bomb a mosque in Baghdad, when Pakistani jihadists decapitate Daniel Pearl in the name of God and film their crime, or when an Algerian fundamentalist emir disembowels, while reciting the Quran, an Algerian woman whose only crime was to have dared show her beautiful face. Moderate Muslims are alone these days, and in their solitude they more than ever need to be acknowledged and hailed.

UPDATE II: For those sick of reading about it, try this funny and informative two-minute film by Junkyard Blog on the background story behind the riots. H/T: The Anchoress

UPDATE III: Spineless EU bureaucrats never cease to amaze... H/T: Sister Toldjah

The European Union may try to draw up a media code of conduct to avoid a repeat of the furor caused by the publication across Europe of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammad, an EU commissioner said on Thursday.

Of course if this same logic were applied to anti-Christian artists... Aw, never mind... Thank goodness we have this over here.

Rights Revisited

LaShawn Barber points us to a brilliant column by Walter Williams, taking up a topic we blogged at length last week: What is the definition of a 'right', and how has it steadily expanded in the liberal world view to include things that take rights away from others?

We wrote:

Where no rights exist, they are invented... to justify political points of view. Calling something a 'right' gives it extra special status in the debate. Taxpayer subsidy of a foreign organization openly hostile to our well being somehow becomes... a 'right' at the expense of not only our financial sovereignty but of our physical safety. Taxpayer subsidy of art and abortion and illegal aliens and a thousand other things becomes a right, well... because it was a right last year and someone thought that it seemed like a good idea at the time so let's just keep writing checks and don't question it. What harm can this extension of 'rights' do? Plenty. Misusing language by calling something a right that is not degrades those rights that are truly fundamental.

LaShawn notes:

New Deal government handouts were more like bailouts designed to stimulate the economy. But this kind of intervention wasn’t yet considered a “right” akin to the freedom to say nasty things about the government without fear of imprisonment or decapitation. People still had a sense of pride.

Sometime in the 60s (and probably before that), attitudes began to change. As blacks struggled to be recognized as first class citizens, the true meaning of freedom stood in stark contrast to government-mandated race discrimination. After legal segregation was dismantled, the government tried to redress wrongs and provide opportunities for those shut out for so long. It was during this time the “right” to be taken care of by the government crystallized.

And Williams writes:

The way our Constitution's framers used the term, a right is something that exists simultaneously among people and imposes no obligation on another. For example, the right to free speech, or freedom to travel, is something we all simultaneously possess. My right to free speech or freedom to travel imposes no obligation upon another except that of non-interference. In other words, my exercising my right to speech or travel requires absolutely nothing from you and in no way diminishes any of your rights.

Contrast that vision of a right to so-called rights to medical care, food or decent housing, independent of whether a person can pay. Those are not rights in the sense that free speech and freedom of travel are rights. If it is said that a person has rights to medical care, food and housing, and has no means of paying, how does he enjoy them? There's no Santa Claus or Tooth Fairy who provides them. You say, "The Congress provides for those rights." Not quite. Congress does not have any resources of its very own. The only way Congress can give one American something is to first, through the use of intimidation, threats and coercion, take it from another American.

Read them all... but if you read only one, go with Walter Williams.

Representing the Prophet - Hypocrisy, Ignorance and Short-Sightedness

In his op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal ("Bonfire of the Pieties", subscription required) Amir Taheri writes:

There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone else. When it spread into the Levant, Islam came into contact with a version of Christianity that was militantly iconoclastic. As a result some Muslim theologians, at a time when Islam still had an organic theology, issued "fatwas" against any depiction of the Godhead. That position was further buttressed by the fact that Islam acknowledges the Jewish Ten Commandments -- which include a ban on depicting God -- as part of its heritage. The issue has never been decided one way or another, and the claim that a ban on images is "an absolute principle of Islam" is purely political... The claim that the ban on depicting Muhammad and other prophets is an absolute principle of Islam is also refuted by history. Many portraits of Muhammad have been drawn by Muslim artists, often commissioned by Muslim rulers. [emphases added]

In other words, as Mr. Taheri notes elsewhere in the piece, at least this aspect of Islamic doctrine has been hijacked and perverted by radicals with a centuries-old anti-Christian agenda. If there is fault for the current spat over iconoclasm, it lies in the distant past - and in a persistently hard-headed and broken human nature.

Also bringing perspective, cool-headedness and firsthand knowledge to the party (along with a big dollop of dry wit) is a new and different addition to the blogroll: The Religious Policeman. Assuming his profile is legit, he's the exception proving a larger rule that at the moment at least, the most publicly visible face of Islam seems to be rather humorless. RP describes himself as "a Saudi man, currently living in the United Kingdom". His site is dedicated to "the lives of 15 Makkah Schoolgirls, lost when their school burnt down on Monday, 11th March, 2002. The Religious Police would not allow them to leave the building, nor allow the Firemen to enter."

We note especially two tongue-in-cheek "memos" from "The Royal Press Secretary" to "His Majesty" here and here. The first provides a particularly good visual review of a rich history of artistic depiction of the prophet that didn't spur fits of widespread mayhem. Also good for a laugh is RP's color-coded guide to cartoon offense levels. Current condition: "Orange - Highly Offended". H/T: OBH.

What's irritating is that the MSM is not making it easy to learn about this larger context. Instead, we are ladled out a large helping of hyper-deferential politically correct pseudo-Marxist foolishness that peremptorily shuts down all further inquiry without either informing or enlightening. That failure to investigate (as much as its bias while claiming to have none) is what's frustrating about the MSM today. The two problems are unfortunately self-reinforcing and inseparable.

Cartoons, Syria and Unintended Consequences

Belmont Club has a fascinating post referencing this piece by Lee Smith in the Weekly Standard. Wretchard speculates on how Syria (as an ally and tool of Iran - well-situated geographically to make mischief in Israel) may have orchestrated the cartoon-inspired embassy torchings to send a message to the U.S. about the cost of taking them on - not an unreasonable fear given what we noted last month:

...the most likely scenario for an Iranian nuclear attack on Israel will originate not from a 'suitcase' (for all practical purposes a Jack Baueresque myth) but from a cargo container - on a ship, a truck, or a civilian airliner. And at least for the latter two, having a nearby partner (nearby to Israel, that is) would make sense. Syria. As we noted last March, Syria "may be a flashpoint"...

...working on toppling Syria's brutal regime (method TBD, but I'm open) may be one of our best strategic options, accomplishing several things at once. It would eliminate an immediate, easy avenue for Iran to reach Israel with nukes, i.e., the map-wiping it says it desires - potential missile programs notwithstanding. It would turn over yet one more highly plausible WMD shell in the area. It would put Iran and others on notice that we ain't screwin' around. It would... free up some of our resources to focus on the Iranian border area which is sure to be an increasing source of trouble under almost any scenario. And finally, it would free a people crushed under brutal oppression...

Wretchard goes on to note how the riots have had the side effect of quietly galvanizing Europe's IAEA participants (sort of). He also observes that terrorist protection rackets vis a vis Europe are becoming chaotic as a result of new players muscling in on a deal too sweet to pass up.

Middle Eastern terrorist organizations had to remind Europe to remember that it was their b..ch. Why else would they strike the countries which had been most generous to them in the past full in the face? ...the terror puppet masters have miscalculated. They should have remembered that the key to every successful protection racket is keeping your own muscle from making independent demands and maintaining the rate of extortion low enough to make it less trouble to pay than to fight.

UPDATE (Wed. AM): In this context of nose-thumbing, testing and reminders of Iran's clout in the world (at least a tiny, backward portion of it), this news makes perfect sense:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has accepted an invitation to visit Cuba from President Fidel Castro, in gratitude for Cuba's support of Iran's nuclear program, the official Granma newspaper said. Ahmadinejad accepted the invitation in Tehran from Cuban Ambassador Felipe Perez Roque. During his visit here, the Iranian leader will attend the September 11-16 Non-Aligned Summit in Havana, the daily said.

A Really Very Stern Harsh Important Serious Grave Warning to Use Even More Forceful Words Later-on

I like Tony Blair. I really do. He has stood by us, by the norms of the long history we share and by a clear-eyed view of the Islamofascist threat despite an unenviably difficult political chasm he has to span at home. Reality, and reality as his Labour constituency would like it are miles apart. So in one sense I can understand a statement like this, aimed at a domestic audience.

Iran is making "a very, very serious mistake" if it thinks the international community will allow it to develop nuclear weapons, Tony Blair has said. But the prime minister insisted that the potential for military action against Iran "is not on our agenda".

We suspect that this is only a politically necessary side trip into Clintonesque nuance. "Not on our agenda" almost certainly means something more like: "Active plans for British forces to be involved in the forward portion of a military operation on the ground in Iran are not being developed by Britain right now."

Unfortunately the mullahs are listening too. And what they hear is "we're going to absolutely forswear the possibility of taking any steps to take anything away from you that you'd actually care about to any great degree". What they hear confirms every incorrect premise on which they have based their unilateral preparation for nuclear war and/or blackmail against Israel and the West.

'Folk' Marxism and the BoGlo: Looking for Victims in all the Wrong Places

The Boston Globe today makes an intellectually sloppy comparison:

...publishing the [Danish] cartoons reflects an obtuse refusal to accept the profound meaning for a billion Muslims of Islam's prohibition against any pictorial representation of the prophet. Depicting Mohammed wearing a turban in the form of a bomb with a sputtering fuse is no less hurtful to most Muslims than Nazi caricatures of Jews or Ku Klux Klan caricatures of blacks are to those victims of intolerance.

Except that Jews in Nazi Germany and blacks in the rural South were not the ones committing wild acts of mayhem and violence - they were the ones being violated to the point that they feared to leave their homes - a point that would seem rather obvious... except at the Globe.

Another implication is that one is somehow excused from responsible behavior (or can appeal to an entirely different definition of responsibility) if one feels - really feels - offended at something. No guideposts or shared norms except the personal. Me, me, me. A non-blogging psychologist author friend would call this a classic case of searching for an external locus of control. I.e., blaming someone else for one's own actions and misfortunes in order to evade responsibility for them.

On the assumption that the Globe's editorial board doesn't really mean that anything is justified by heartfelt offense, it would be interesting to hear exactly what they do mean. What specific acts does the Boston Globe feel are justified by a hurtful cartoon? Rioting? Arson? Beheading? Suicide bombing? Nuking Israel? Perhaps a stern letter to the editor? The latter of course, is all that happened in response to the recent Toles cartoon in the Washington Post - offensive to anyone who cares about our men and women in uniform, but nobody is burning down the Post's offices and calling en masse for the death of their editors... much less doing so.

And while we're talking "obtuse refusals to accept... profound meaning", where is the Globe when it comes to such subjects as Zionism, core Catholic teaching and the heartfelt beliefs of many evangelical and fundamentalist Christians? Reflexively railing against them in a paroxysm of self-congratulatory liberal finger-pointing, that's where. Unwavering holders of those beliefs (more conservative than not) are considered less enlightened by the Globe. Obtuse refusal is just a gussied up way for Globe editors to call their opponents stupid, slow and insensitive. Liberal arrogance once again. We know better who is victim and who is not. You apparently didn't get the memo spelling it out...

James Taranto coins the phrase 'folk Marxism', summing it up by describing what may be at the root of all this knee-jerk "thinking" by the Globe and others:

What accounts for the difference? [between the WaPo Toles cartoon and the Danish cartoons] A combination of fear and ideology. Muslim fundamentalists, or at least some of them, express offense by torching embassies and threatening terrorist attacks. By contrast, U.S. military leaders write firm but polite letters to the editor, and Christian fundamentalists ask their elected representatives to stop spending tax money on offensive stuff. (Never believe a liberal when he professes to find Christian fundamentalists "scary.") There is no need to appease an opponent who respects rules of civilized behavior.

..."folk Marxism," or liberal multiculturalism... sees the world as a series of class struggles--not between economic classes, as in proper Marxism, but between racial, ethnic, religious, sexual or other identity groups, which are defined as either "oppressors" or "victims."

Generally speaking, multiculturalists consider Christians to be an oppressor class, while Muslims are a victim class. A victim class's grievances must be taken seriously and can even trump free expression, while the same is never true of an oppressor class's. (The multicultural worldview sees Jews as an intermediate class--victims of Christians, oppressors of Muslims--which is why liberals can be outraged by anti-Semitic imagery in "The Passion of the Christ" but unperturbed by terrorism against Israelis.) [emphasis added]

Or as we noted yesterday...

The PC police are wrapped up in a world view that sees the West and especially America - no matter what it says or does - as the presumed universal offender, guilty with no possibility of ever being proven innocent while Islam (and especially the Palestinians) are seen as precisely the opposite: victims no matter what they do... all the result of corporate imperialism and white male hetero-Christian oppression, doncha know.

Eugene Volokh does the research on the Globe's hypocrisy here, sounding a moderating note:

...that one is and should be legally free to say something doesn't mean that it's right to say it. And while religious ideas, like all ideas, should be open to vigorous debate, needless emotional provocation generally doesn't much advance the debate.

...which would be nice if there were even the sliver of a debate going on already. I.e., with words. Yet the much talked-about moderate core of Islam doesn't seem to be making a counter-protest, calling on their brothers to tone it down just a little. There is nothing that would provide any foothold for such a debate. To the extent that such moderates exist and do not already sympathize with the radical Islamofascist fringe (or cower in reaction to its calls for fatwa and jihad), then let them speak up. We would be happy to debate them - with words.

Until then, I refuse to call it a debate when the starting point - long long before any Danish cartoons were in evidence - was the death or conversion under sharia law of all non-Muslims. That is not a debate. It is a threat. That the threat is heartfelt and religiously motivated only makes it clear that radical Islam cannot by definition coexist with the open, tolerant, multi-religious society we have built in the West. It must crush it. That it seems to have been laughably impotent in pursuing that objective so far (in the sense of military conquest or casualties) does not diminish its determination to find new opportunities to do so.

We wish that all of this were not coming into such absolutist focus. We wish that we could live side by side and let the case for each religion be made quietly in living rooms, conversations and peaceful places of worship. Unfortunately, events make it increasingly clear that the other side cannot abide such such tactics. They cannot abide a protracted reflection by free individuals on the merits of each faith. There is no debate or compromise as far as they are concerned. There is no quiet process of letting the Holy Spirit win hearts and minds. There is only conversion at the point of a knife - lest it be plunged into one's chest in righteous, frothing hatred.

Lest anyone think that this is new or that we're exaggerating, I highly recommend this watershed piece by scholar Bernard Lewis 'The Roots of Muslim Rage' from the September, 1990 issue of the Atlantic Monthly which we read in the hot tub this morning. Western decadence, doncha know. Yes, sixteen years ago. The only thing that's changed are the daily details of radical Islam executing on its strategy of conquest.

UPDATE I: Tried to blog this last night but Blogger was down for scheduled maintenance. With this development, we do not expect to see Jews rioting in the streets, burning embassies and calling for the death of all Muslims...

Iran’s biggest-selling newspaper has waded into the Muhammad controversy by launching a competition to find the 12 "best" cartoons about the Holocaust. Farid Mortazavi, graphics editor for Tehran's Hamshahri newspaper, said that the deliberately inflammatory contest would test out how committed Europeans were to the concept freedom of expression.

What we expect this silly tit-for-tat gesture to demonstrate is that Europeans and others really are committed to free speech to the extent that it does not include a credible threat of violence. Which is not to say that many won't refuse to show the cartoons or roundly condemn them. (It will be interesting to see what the MSM does.)

Then there is the matter of context and state sponsorship.

Having some two-bit Danish newspaper show the prophet with a time-bomb turban is just a little different from a terrorist-harboring nation pursuing an accelerated nuclear program in defiance of the entire international community and non-proliferation framework it agreed to while its leaders declare repeatedly that they plan to wipe Israel from the map and destroy Western Civilization and oh-by-the-way on the side we're going to have a cartoon contest deliberately detached from any connection to established historical fact. Hint for Iranian leaders (and the moral equivalence crowd): when the civilized world is forced reduce Iran's infrastructure to rubble, don't think it's because of your cartoons.

UPDATE II: Case in point re. where "speech" goes over the line into incitement to violence.

A British jury Tuesday convicted firebrand Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri of inciting followers to kill non-Muslims in speeches at his London mosque, which has been linked to Sept. 11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui and "shoe bomber" Richard Reid. The jury found the one-eyed, hook-handed cleric guilty on 11 of 15 charges against him, including counts of soliciting murder, stirring racial hatred, possessing a terrorist document and possessing threatening or abusive recordings. Al-Masri, Britain's best known Islamist orator, could receive a maximum sentence of life in prison.

Must-Read Synopsis of Iran Situation

The Anchoress points us to this succinct appraisal of the pending Iranian conflict as penned by a former German intelligence official familiar with Chinese and Russian war games on the subject:

An initial Israeli air attack against some Iranian nuclear targets, command and control targets and Shahab missile sites. Iran retaliates with its remaining missiles, tries to close the Gulf, attacks US naval assets and American and British forces in Iraq. If Iranian missiles have chemical warheads (in fact or presumed), the US will immediately use nuclear weapons to destroy the Iranian military and industrial infrastructure. If not, an air campaign of up to two weeks will prepare the ground campaign for the occupation of the Iranian oil and gas fields.

Mass mobilization in Iraq against US-British forces will be at most a nuisance - easily suppressed by the ruthless employment of massive firepower. And Israel will use the opportunity to deal with Syria and South Lebanon, and possibly with its Palestinian problem.

The character of this war will be completely different from the Iraq war. No show-casing of democracy, no "nation-building", no journalists, no Red Cross - but the kind of war the United States would have fought in North Vietnam if it had not had to reckon with the Soviet Union and China.

Extremely sobering but mildly encouraging. We note the once nearly inconceivable leadership of Europe on this issue, (hey, some of them are within missile range and their cities are already burning), as well as the reluctant acquiescence of China and Russia to the fact that Iran is unwilling to act rationally. Even for those two criminal enterprises (read: Thugocratic Russia and Communist China) wild, unpredictable, messianically-inspired behavior is no good for business.

Anti-Bush Incontinence

Too funny. Had to share. Protestors who could use some organization... and sense.

Bloodthirsty Christians Riot Across American Heartland

Can anyone imagine the following news story?

The furor over satirical artwork depicting Jesus Christ molded in dung and another depicting him in a bottle of urine has intensified across the American South and Midwest as protesters in Nebraska set fire to the Iranian and Syrian embassies in Omaha (see photo at right)...

Two tabloid editors were arrested in Kansas on Saturday after their respective newspapers published the cartoons...

In Missouri on Saturday, a crowd of 1000 Christians clutching placards calling for death to all Muslims demonstrated outside the Iranian embassy in St. Louis...

The outrage in recent days has been particularly fierce in the Deep South (aka, the 'Bible Belt')... Government and religious leaders have called for calm but Christian anger in the streets from Little Rock to Savannah has been marked by burning flags and calls for bloodshed.

On Saturday hundreds of demonstrators in Indiana stormed through concrete barriers and set the Syrian embassy ablaze... Demonstrators also set fire to the Egyptian embassy in Indianapolis.

Riot police pushed Christian crowds back with tear gas and water hoses and prevented an attack on the Saudi embassy in Boise, Idaho...

Iran has advised its citizens to leave the American heartland and said it was pulling out its diplomats from those regions to the safer 'blue states' where populations are more 'tolerant'. Jordan has given similar advice...

I can't imagine it either. Try the original version.

To implicitly argue that unrestrained violence is excusable in the special case of offended Muslims out of respect for and tolerance of their belief system is the worst kind of racist double-standard: The cartoonists were stupid to provoke 'those people', some seem to suggest, including - quite explicitly - New Zealand's Prime Minister and our own U.S. State Department. Everyone knows they're all incendiary fanatics... why make things worse than they already are, seems to be the outrageous subtext.

The same line of reasoning extends the concepts of respect and tolerance into the terrain of utter meaninglessness. The concept of respecting freedom of belief (internal conscience) was never intended, and could hardly even be said to be related to the tolerance of violent action. Were the philosophy of the rioters unknown, the same actions as we observe would be called crime and punished as such. Why does religion justify it here? And when the philosophy being 'tolerated' completely rejects any reciprocation of that tolerance whatsoever, the eventual result is not a freer world, but gradual acquiescence to tyranny. (Test: Try starting a Christian church in Saudi - or even Turkey. Try starting an Islamic mosque in Boston - or even Alabama.)

Those who routinely rail against the Bush administration under the banner of 'peace' are often the same ones who in cases like this shrug their shoulders and conclude that it's the fault of the West for having offended Muslim sensibilities somehow. Words, policies, actions and their results are held to an entirely different standard depending on who is behind them. Last time I checked, that was called hypocrisy. Last time I checked, that kind of reasoning provided fertile ground for a whole host of 'isms' that the left used to be against.

The left can watch embassies burning, weeks or street rioting, thousand of cars burned, sharia law viciously carried out in corners of their cities in contradiction to prevailing law, hundreds if not thousands of civilian-targeted bombings, three thousand innocents dead in a single unprovoked morning, the subjugation of women and the total absence of free speech, free markets, free elections or freedom of conscience in a vast swath of the world and shrug it off as the understandable reaction of people entitled to do whatever they want in pursuit of their beliefs - even if it means hurting a lot of other people.

Islam, in the left's view, is made up of people we must have offended somehow. We can placate the thinking goes, if we will only strive just a little harder to understand their different world view and what must be some valid justifications they have for this excusable violence. Hogwash. It's an approach that's been useless if not utterly counterproductive before... but maybe it will work this time.

Well ya' know what? I'm offended when I see my religion mocked and derided. I'm hurt when I see protestors carrying placards calling for the death of me and my fellow citizens. I do not feel welcomed anymore when world leaders openly call for wiping Israel off the map. Ever since 9-11, I've felt like the climate in which my kids will grow up is hostile to their safety, e.g., when traveling abroad. Those are my feelings.

So where are the PC police when we need 'em? Where are the righteous enforcers of the "rights" they hold dear on so many other subjects? Where is their defense of my right to live out my life without ever having to hear or see anything derogatory to my views or my person? Of course there is no such right - never has been. The sad answer is that the PC police on the left are tripping all over their own philosophical contradictions on this one. They are trying to hold together a twisted logic that says that the recipient of speech has unilateral power over its purveyor and that speech is really just another form of violence, so what's the big deal anyway?

The PC police are wrapped up in a world view that sees the West and especially America - no matter what it says or does - as the presumed universal offender, guilty with no possibility of ever being proven innocent while Islam (and especially the Palestinians) are seen as precisely the opposite: victims no matter what they do... all the result of corporate imperialism and white male hetero-Christian oppression, doncha know.

We neither hope nor believe we'll see the day when our satire here comes true (i.e., Nebraskans rioting and burning Middle Eastern embassies). What we'd like to see (but also aren't holding our breath for) are left-leaning thought leaders and politicians applying to Islam, the Middle East and their leaders the standards of behavior and tolerance to which they've so loudly and self-righteously held this president and this country - not to mention Israel, Christianity, Judaism, Republicans and the West in general. That would be an interesting development...

UPDATE I: Our friend 'GED' points us to this uncharacteristically good piece in the Boston Globe in a similar vein (Hindus riot over beef sales) by the quite characteristically good Jeff Jacoby.

UPDATE II: Mark Steyn is funny, biting, deadly serious and on-target... as usual, echoing themes we expressed here last week... but oh so much more concisely. :)

Say what you like about the Islamic world, but they show tremendous initiative and energy and inventiveness, at least when it comes to threatening death to the infidels every 48 hours for one perceived offense or another. If only it could be channeled into, say, a small software company, what an economy they'd have.

Double Standard Revealed: Firebombing Chomsky?

New Sisyphus has the winning in-council entry in this week's Watcher of Weasels voting and it's well deserved. (We thank the council for its recognition of two of our posts here and here that ShrinkWrapped - in fourth place this week - nominated on our behalf.) Since last I checked, New Sisyphus has a great new look (for the blog, that is) and has retired from the foreign service. With posts like this we hope he is devoting himself to writing full time.

When Cody's, the famous Berkeley bookstore, was fire-bombed for carrying The Satanic Verses, the reaction was not what I would have then expected, yet another nail in the coffin of my leftism. I tried to imagine if the muted reaction would have been the same if a militant Christian sect had bombed the store for carrying Chomsky and found myself laughing at the very thought.

We also note this post that simply cannot be summarized by fellow New Englander neo-neocon (aka, green apple lady) chronicling her long post-9-11 change of heart and mind. Read it.

Acquiescing in the "Inevitable" - Fiction and Complacency

Picking up on the theme we were sounding last night, the WSJ's feature editorial this morning (free at OpinionJournal) delves into Iran's thinking about gambling on Western fecklessness and shoulder-shrugging:

...the weight of elite [Western] opinion, sighs and laments aside, seems to be on the side of acquiescence. And the Iranians know it...

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has publicly mused that the Jewish state should be "wiped off the map," and former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has said that "the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground whereas it will only damage the world of Islam." Why should we assume they don't mean this?

All the more so because Iran's current leaders seem possessed of an apocalyptic Islamist vision that wouldn't mind an episode of pan-global martyrdom. "We must prepare ourselves to rule the world and the only way to do that is to put forth views on the basis of the Expectation of the Return" of the Mahdi (Shiite Messiah), says Mr. Ahmadinejad.

His fanaticism suggests a mindset that isn't vulnerable to the normal calculations of deterrence that governed during the Cold War. The complacent tell us not to worry because no state would dare use a nuke because that would only guarantee its own destruction. But what if you're a cleric who likes that trade-off?

...last month Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the IAEA, told Newsweek that if the Iranians "have the nuclear material and they have a parallel weaponization program along the way, they are really not very far--a few months--from a weapon."

One sign of a psychopath is their capacity for resolute action in pursuit of utterly selfish goals devoid of human empathy. The mullahs' sabre-rattling is so over-the-top that it invites us to discount it. It is easy not to take it seriously because it's so similar to the bad dialogue we've come to expect from Hollywood uber-villians. It looks, sounds and feels like adolescent fiction.

What we're hearing from Iran is so specific and horrific and utterly insane that - reading the news - one feels just as one does when watching a hokey action movie: squirming in the seat yelling (at Dirty Harry or James Bond or Austin Powers or Vin Diesel or Mr. Incredible): "Take him out now! Take him out while you still can! Aren't you listening? Don't you see? He means it! You've already seen the underground lab with the gazillion-megaton poison death ray... what on earth are you waiting for?"

In the movies, of course, the good guy never acts when the bad guy can be easily neutralized. For the plot to work everything has to get crazy first. Things have to go right to the edge of destruction to show - finally and without question - that the bad guy really did mean what he said because the missile launch sequence (or bomb timer, or giant laser beam or whatever) was at T-minus one second when the good guy finally had the sense (and sheer, blind luck) to step in and stop it.

The only problem is that in the movies we know that that's what's going to happen and thus we're lulled into not thinking about it too hard. In the world as my generation (and the vast majority of people) have known it, Hitler does not roll into Poland. Tojo does not take over half of Asia. Everything is pretty much held at bay save for a few skirmishes here and there with dozens or hundreds of casualties and maybe 2,000 over several years if things get really hot.

We have no template in our minds - outside of our experience of movies - for tens (much less hundreds) of thousands of people dying in the space of a few hours. And yet... it is possible.

In the movies we let our adrenaline run a little, but we don't really consider what the delays are costing in terms of loss of life down the road when options are fewer. In the movies, we know that the good guy will stop it at the last second so we don't actually soil our pants. It's fiction! We can admire the hero's cool restraint and feel increasingly superior as evidence of just how evil the bad guy really is piles up to the point of ridiculousness. Doubt is finally erased when the villain slaps the heroine across the face. Ah!, we think at that point, now it's clear beyond the shadow of a doubt that he's the bad guy.

Only this isn't fiction and we were out getting popcorn during the misogynist face-slapping scene. There's no reason to think that if we allow events to unfold as we've become accustomed to them doing in the movies that we might not miss the countdown sequence by two seconds and find ourselves with a very messy and unhappy ending and the villain laughing triumphantly in his deep underground bunker.

What people continually fail to grasp in a world with WMD in the hands of psychopaths like Ahmadinejad is that a viable defensive strategy cannot be allowed to play out the way it does in the movies. A viable defensive strategy requires offense and pre-emption. I wish it weren't so. I like the movies. Unfortunately reality is different.

A Hypothetical re. Iran

Imagine a world in which U.S. media and Congress supported the war in Iraq - not without questions and debate, but say 80/20 broadly in favor of it, much like after we'd engaged with Nazi Germany after D-Day, or say, in October, 2001 when heads had cooled down a bit and everyone was thinking fairly clearly about what 9-11 implied and what we had to do.

Now imagine - in that hypothetical climate, open for the world to see: the U.S. media and Congress with their resolve and common sense intact - that the Iranian leadership is tempted to throw around a lot of smack talk about nukes and 'wiping' Israel. They're starting to have the debate amongst themselves about whether they should mock the Great Satan and up the ante bigtime or go on about their business and be a good global citizen and make some money selling their oil and generally join the world economy and get on with being comfortable.

Can anyone then imagine - in a world where Cindy Sheehan is just another anonymous grieving mom and the flags are still on the cars and supporting the troops means supporting their job too - that the tough talkers and confrontationalists would be dominating the debate in Iran... taking things as far as they've gone? Can anyone imagine in that scenario, that the nut-case mullahs would be convincing their people in arguing that they could get away with anything - anything!!! - because the West is weak and divided (just look at their media and how much they hate that man Bush!!) and really just wants to stay home and make it all go away and we can move in?

I cannot. The mullahs would be shouted down quickly. We cannot get away with it!, they would say (and be right). The U.S. means business! Look at all of the support their troops get! Read the (fantasy) New York Times for goodness sakes! They're all behind this man Bush and they're not afraid to take casualties and finish the job!

Alas, it is but a dream. They do read our media and become emboldened. It affects what they choose to do and what they think they can get away with. And they might just be right.

Saddam's Trial Update

Just as at Nuremberg, there abruptly comes a point when the witnesses (both silent and living) finally get to speak and the defendent realizes he's completely screwed:

A woman described being stripped naked and hanged by her feet, while Saddam Hussein's half brother kicked her in the chest until her ribs cracked... A former Baath Party guard said he saw documents signed by the ousted president ordering security forces to destroy farms and orchards near the town of Dujail, north of Baghdad... Testimony from witnesses included graphic descriptions of torture and killings... Several of the defendants, though not Hussein, were fingered by witnesses as having been present or having participated at various points during the Dujail crackdown, which allegedly included mass killings and the round-up of hundreds of residents suspected of involvement in the attempt on Hussein's life.

Noonan on the Death of a Party

Peggy Noonan sparkles - as usual - over at OpinionJournal today. Check it out:

...the Democratic Party seems to be near imploding, and for that most humiliating of reasons: its meaninglessness. Republicans are at least arguing over their meaning.

The venom is bubbling on websites like Kos, where Tuesday afternoon, after the Alito vote, various leftists wrote in such comments as "F--- our democratic leaders," "Vichy Democrats" and "F--- Mary Landrieu, I hope she drowns." The old union lunch-pail Democrats are dead, the intellects of the Kennedy and Johnson era retired or gone, and this--I hope she drowns--seems, increasingly, to be the authentic voice of the Democratic base.

How will a sane, stable, serious Democrat get the nomination in 2008 when these are the activists to whom the appeal must be made?

Republicans have crazies. All parties do. But in the case of the Democrats--the leader of their party, after all, is the unhinged Howard Dean--the lunatics seem increasingly to be taking over the long-term health-care facility. Great parties die this way, or show that they are dying.

Giving Away Freedoms: Twisted Victimology on the Left

Dr. Sanity posted yesterday on Bill Clinton's recent call to tone down cartoons critical of Islam such as the one that appeared in a Danish newspaper last year. That may appear to be a narrow issue. It is not. She makes a critical point that should get far more airplay than it's getting, noting that the Islamofascists:

...demand death for artists and filmakers (has anyone heard an apology for the killing of Theo van Gogh??) [and] issue fatwas against writers who displease them... Are you [Mr. Clinton] suggesting that to further appease this violent, irrational, and pathological religion we must be willing to give up some of our fundamental liberties? ...it is clear who symbolizes the greatest threat to our most precious civil liberties. [The left] would willingly give away these precious freedoms to appease and further enable the bullies and butchers of Islam. [emphasis added]

While the MSM is focused on the bogeyman of tapping of terrorist phone calls, the indignity of being searched in an airport and by-the-book legal procedure in a library in the midst of a live terrorist threat situation, real civil liberties are being threatened by the kind of cowering (and ineffective) self-censure Mr. Clinton proposes. And it is only one small step from self censure to government censure in attempts to appease the aggressor.

One would think that the parallels with rape law would be apparent, especially to members of a political party that claims to stand up for womens' rights: No, she did not "ask for it" by wearing a halter top. No we (and the Danes) did not "ask for it" by pointing out the hypocrisy of Islam. The perpetrator is not excused. The victim is not on trial.

This is the sad outgrowth of a rancid assumption at the heart of the seemingly benign political correctness movement. Assigning to the listener the power to determine at a whim whether speech is 'hurtful', and then leveraging that whim with the force of legal censure or violence is an idea that holds individual liberty in utter contempt.

It is not the Danes (or we) who need to tone down the rhetoric. It is the mullahs, the Clintons and those who would listen to them who need to find a wise retort, get a thicker skin and learn to live in a world of competing ideas and frequent insults. It is only when the rhetoric involves violence or the threat of same that that equation changes. At that point, the roles of aggressor and victim come into focus. At that point, the latter has a more than legitimate gripe.

UPDATE I: In a related vein, The Anchoress has an extremely insightful piece this morning entitled "'Will and Grace', Muslim cartoons and free speech":

...a free society is one that allows non-believers to make perfect and ignorant asses of themselves in waves of adolescent daring... it takes no courage or daring at all to mock Christians in America, anymore than it is “brave” or “daring” to make fun of President Bush when you are before a crowd in Hollywood. It’s actually the safest, most cowardly thing to do, because you are running with, not against, the current in which you and your pals swim. And your friends will reward you for taking on those big, bad Christians.

...we’ll do something more constructive. We’ll pray for you. We’ll turn the other cheek because there is enormous power in doing so, as the last 2000 years have demonstrated... we’ll pray for you “daring” types. And you know what’s going to sting? That Augustinian moment when grace has stuck you, and you are desiring to cling to your old ways even as you realize you no longer can. Ouch. It smarts, but only for a little while.

A Tai-Chi master will use his enemy’s own force and thrust to lay him low. Turning the other cheek is just as discreet and just as effective... I had a good teacher, who said, “my grace is sufficient.” All of these things will pass. What is Eternal will endure. And surprising changes of mind will occur in His time. Some of our greatest evangelists and teachers started out persecuting the Christians, like St. Paul.

Don't miss her good catch in the same piece regarding a clever street survey in Australia that measured peoples' (mis)perceptions of the Pope vs. the Dalai Lama.

UPDATE II: Bullwinkle Blog juxtaposes the reaction to two different cartoons.

Economics Lesson: Dependence on Foreign Oil

At least one part of the president's SOTU speech Tuesday night struck us as pure political butt-covering: the bit about reducing U.S. dependence on foreign oil. One would think that countless real world demonstrations of markets working and socialism not working would have freed presidents from having to tag this particular base.

Not that the idea isn't strategically wise. It is. Some extremely angry and deranged people hold sway over world oil supplies: reactionary misogynist Islamofascists in the Middle East who want to return us to the 9th century on the one hand and reactionary Bush-hating Envirofascists who want to return us to Woodstock on the other. When the subject turns to a teeny weeny little corner of a very cold and barren part of Alaska that nobody I know of has ever visited or plans to, the trade-offs involved tend to launch the latter group into fantasies of a pedestrian, agrarian society wallowing in mud... sort of like Woodstock.

We've been here before and should have learned that a government bureaucracy is not the way to free ourselves from the grip of such people.

Ronald Bailey, science correspondent for Reason magazine notes in today's WSJ (subscription required) that every president since Nixon (with the possible exception of Ford) has done what Mr. Bush did on Tuesday night - with no impact other than the rhetorical. Declare a goal. Charter a government agency. Kick the can down the road to your successor until everyone has forgotten. Alas, markets are not moon shots. They do not respond well to command and control and a monomaniacal insistence on "one best way" (It's wind! No, it's solar! No, hydro! No, hydrogen! No, don't you understand?... It's hamsters on treadmills!) Bailey notes:

But despite these bold [presidential] proclamations, the only way we've ever cut back on imported oil is in response to higher prices. World oil prices peaked in real terms in 1980 at about $90 per barrel. In 1977, U.S. imports were 6.6 million barrels per day. By 1985, imports had been cut in half to 3.2 million barrels. Why? Simple economics: Higher prices boosted domestic production and reduced consumption. And despite more than 30 years of government-sponsored initiatives only about a half-million alternative fuel vehicles roam America's highways, and none are wholly electric or hydrogen powered. Today's higher prices will do far more to free us from dependence on foreign oil imports and spur energy technology innovation than any federal program ever will -- even a so-called Advanced Energy Initiative.

Nobody that Mr. Bush needed to convince would ever consider believing him. And nobody he'd already convinced needed this 'AEI' in order to support him. Ah, life inside the Beltway...

Watering Down Security - From Someone Who Knows

Debra Burlingame, sister of the late Charles F. "Chic" Burlingame III, pilot of American Airlines flight 77 (the one that was crashed into the Pentagon on September 11th) writes a must-read piece in Monday's OpinionJournal on the amnesia, shifting logic and outright foolishness of those seeking to undo the Patriot Act, prevent the tapping of international terrorist phone calls and re-erect the 'wall' preventing intelligence-sharing.

NBC News aired an "exclusive" story in 2004 that dramatically recounted how al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, the San Diego terrorists who would later hijack American Airlines flight 77 and fly it into the Pentagon, received more than a dozen calls from an al Qaeda "switchboard" inside Yemen where al-Mihdhar's brother-in-law lived. The house received calls from Osama Bin Laden and relayed them to operatives around the world. Senior correspondent Lisa Myers told the shocking story of how, "The NSA had the actual phone number in the United States that the switchboard was calling, but didn't deploy that equipment, fearing it would be accused of domestic spying." Back then, the NBC script didn't describe it as "spying on Americans." Instead, it was called one of the "missed opportunities that could have saved 3,000 lives."

Another example of opportunistic coverage concerns the Patriot Act's "library provision." News reports have given plenty of ink and airtime to the ACLU's unsupported claims that the government has abused this important records provision. But how many Americans know that several of the hijackers repeatedly accessed computers at public libraries in New Jersey and Florida, using personal Internet accounts to carry out the conspiracy? Al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi logged on four times at a college library in New Jersey where they purchased airline tickets for AA 77 and later confirmed their reservations on Aug. 30. In light of this, it is ridiculous to suggest that the Justice Department has the time, resources or interest in "investigating the reading habits of law abiding citizens."

...More Americans should not die because the peace-at-any-cost fringe and antigovernment paranoids still fighting the ghost of Nixon hate George Bush more than they fear al Qaeda. [emphasis added]

The library part strikes close to home - about a mile to be exact. Some may have missed a story last week that in any other part of the country may sound rather bizarre. But this is Massachusetts and a particularly liberal corner of of it. We went 9:2 for Kerry in 2004 and would have gone 10:1 except fora couple of very red precincts on the edge of town.

Law enforcement and Newton Free Library officials were embroiled in a tense standoff for nearly 10 hours last week when the city refused to let police and the FBI examine library computers without a warrant. Police rushed to the main library last Wednesday after it was determined that a terrorist threat to Brandeis University had been sent from a computer at the library. But requests to examine any of its computers were rebuffed by library Director Kathy Glick-Weil and Mayor David Cohen on the grounds that they did not have a warrant. While one law enforcement official said he was "totally disgusted" with the city’s attempt to hold up a time-sensitive investigation of potential terrorist threat, Cohen is defending the library’s actions, calling it one of Newton’s "finest hours." [emphasis added]

Yes, our "finest hour" - a gross insult to Winston Churchill. For background, Mayor Cohen is a longtime Democratic party hack and Mike Dukakis wannabe who never quite made it in state politics here. His views make John Kerry and Ted Kennedy look like card-carrying members of the John Birch Society, while his managerial effectiveness and fiscal responsibility make Jimmy Carter look like a veritable Jack Welch. As the Boston Herald noted the next day:

This wasn’t, after all, some idle FBI fishing expedition with agents looking to peruse the reading list of some “person of interest.” This was an immediate threat, traced to a specific computer in a public building. Even the now controversial domestic surveillance rules under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act legally provide for warrantless eavesdropping for 72 hours before the government has to go to court. Imagine the consequences of a nine-hour delay because some nitwit bureaucrat decides she needs to see a warrant. The only thing worse than the conduct of these Newton officials is their utterly misplaced pride in putting Brandeis students and faculty at risk while they postured for the hometown crowd.

Had Brandeis turned into the anti-semitic bloodbath that it might have (the school is >50% Jewish, as is Newton), the same "hometown crowd" would have scrambled for someone to blame. Someone other than the jubilant fools who see an exceptional, time-sensitive request by the FBI as more suspect than the credible terrorist threat that triggered it. Somehow, some way - if I know how my neighbors' minds work - the person catching the blame if the terrorist strike had taken place would have been George Bush. After all, his 'provocative' policies in the Middle East are only inciting this kind of thing.

Riiiiight...

UPDATE: Apologies on forgetting the link to OpinionJournal in the original post. See here and above. H/T: OBH by way of Doc Sanity, who (sagely) adds:

...this kind of contradictory discourse is something I have talked about before and it must be exposed for what it is: a fundamental distortion of the truth to make it conform to whatever the feelings du jour happen to be; and those feelings are almost always related to their rage at George W. Bush. [The media's] reporting -- particularly on this issue -- demonstrates how truth is manipulated and distorted by their unacknowledged ideological biases; and any consistency found in their positions from one moment to the next is... purely accidental (and likely just as opportunistic). They insist that all truth is relative anyway; so by applying their own standards, why should anyone bother to listen to them? They are, of course, hoping you won't notice the blatant contradictions.

Saddam's Trial vs. Nuremberg: "Danger, Will Robinson"

Saddam has learned from history. That's a problem... if we let it become one. And it may already be too late. Boycotting. Grabbing attention. What Saddam is doing at his trial can lead to sympathy (e.g., from the moral-equivalence loons) as well as frustrated Iraqis (especially Sunnis)... which can lead to support, which can lead to... disaster.

I watched a PBS 'American Experience' on the Nuremberg trials last night. Several things stood out as extremely odd in the modern context. When Hermann Goering attempted to turn a plea into a speech for example, he was told to shut up and sit down... and he did... without having to be restrained or even approached. Other defendants didn't even try to make a stand.

Goering and the other defendants put up with a masterful four hour introductory speech by prosecutor Robert Jackson... without any significant distracting antics. They were allowed to walk around the courtroom during breaks... with no restraint save a guard trailing several paces behind. Goering spoke for himself... with no attorney present. He naively answered questions... even when those answers were obviously damning. (Prosecutors and judges later admitted that those admissions were instrumental to his conviction.)

The news media was clearly on the side of the prosecution. Walter Cronkite, a youthful reporter at the time, reflected on his disgust - to the point of physical illness - at the evidence brought against the Nazis, e.g., a shrunken head used as a paperweight, films of bodies being bulldozed into mass graves. The international wrangling prior to the trial was essentially a debate between whether to summarily shoot them all immediately or summarily shoot them one by one in a week or two.

Just a few voices argued that it was best to give Nazi leadership a constrained context within which to offer a defense... the primary purpose being the deterrence of similar crimes. (Like that really worked...) Interestingly, consensus was reached before the trial that any evidence or argument about alleged Allied war crimes would not be allowed. And hundreds of Nazis were on trial. Not just one man while his former cohorts wandered the streets fomenting trouble and running for office. Forgiveness is a virtue, but it doesn't necessarily follow that those who have just been overthrown (i.e., the Baathists) should keep the kind of influence and power that one can read into the Saddam trial judge quitting suddenly a few weeks ago.

What's most remarkable of course, is that in a global culture steeped in South Park and Austin Powers and Howard Stern, all of these pieces of decorum seem absolutely ridiculous to a captured dictator trying to save his own skin and return to power.

The average American teenager (or war protestor or Democratic Senator or pretty much anyone who hasn't been in a coma since the 1950's) could tell you that the best strategy for Saddam is to flip a giant bird at the entire proceeding, refuse to cooperate with anything, control the pace and the agenda, baste himself in moral equivalence (inviting the loons to crap on his enemies), stoke the natural sympathy of his supporters by grabbing the limelight whenever possible and get his cronies to create a climate of disorder outside that increases the possibility of the proceedings failing altogether. In other words: exactly what he is doing.

It seems odd in light of what we know now about the wind-down of WWII that it was a legitimate fear of those running the Nuremberg trials that the Nazis could come back to power if the proceedings were not carefully constrained. And that was with a wide array of factors in place that played to Allied objectives - things we do not have today in Iraq.

In an era where the limited (and punished) crimes that took place at Abu Ghraib under U.S. auspices are seen by a delusional if substantial fringe as no better than what went on there for decades, we are fighting an uphill battle. When Saddam is given a chance to refuse our rules and rally his troops he will do so. He is doing so. His trial may seem like a sideshow and a foregone conclusion. It is anything but.

If we learned anything from Nuremberg (in the positive sense) and the 1990 Gulf War (in the negative sense) it should be that failing to completely rout out our enemies, shying away from fully impressing our will on their leaders, being half-hearted about the merits of our culture and being overly solicitous in how we apply our systems of justice makes a huge difference to the ultimate outcome. Given our 'light touch' approach at this point, it may be too late. I hope it's not.

I give credit to Ann Coulter for nailing this one within hours after the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in an inspired bit of political Tourette's Syndrome: "We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity". How and at what pace that gets done is up for debate. Shrinking from that necessity is a recipe for disaster.

Whither the Democrats' Political Strategy?

Blogging will be intermittent the next few days. We're wrestling with learning Dreamweaver in order to get a business website up (help!), taking a sick kid to the doctor, entertaining tonight and training for a marathon. Oh, and sleep... forgot about that...

Re. Sam Alito's confirmation to the Supreme Court: about time. Can we get on with the real news now? As a conservative, I'm all for due process. Much of his confirmation however, was not process in good faith. It was not process within the bounds set for the role of the Senate in such matters: advise and consent on qualifications. Instead, it was grasping: a circus with an inevitable conclusion, used by the Democrats to wring maximum media attention out of the Bush-hating crowd through a collective and highly public venting of impotent rage.

To what end they did that, I don't know. That both John Kerry and Hillary Clinton would choose to pursue a filibuster is mind-bogglingly stupid. Since I believe that they both care about running competitively for the presidency in two years, it signals that they're either irrationally hoping for a massive turnaround in public sentiment (suddenly counter to the trend of the last 25 years) or they really don't have any clue at all as to how middle America thinks. Since they're both reasonably well educated individuals I can only conclude that truth lies in the latter explanation. I.e., they are absolutely tone-deaf beyond the confines of their circles of elite friends on Beacon Hill and the Upper West Side.

There's a third theory of course, and it is this: even if Hillary and Kerry are unaware of the political self-immolation they just committed, their fellow Democrats may not be. Other Dems may think that they're setting the stage for the party's Goldwater-esque retreat into the political wilderness based on principle - hoping for a triumphant return in 10-20 years.

But if that's true, then it's not clear what principles it is that they're retreating on.

The preservation for all time of every iota of the Roe v. Wade decision? (A position that has given the structural advantage to the opposition for three decades - inviting moderation of a position that's impossible to defend in its most extreme form.) An entitlement-driven, Godless, victim-centric view of "civil rights" that MLK would scarcely recognize? (Has anyone noticed who's rising to power these days?) Opposition to all use of American military power in defense of our security and our interests? ...while "supporting" the troops, of course. (How does that work in light of what happened on 9-11? In light of the positive changes in the Middle East since then? In light of opposition to ANWR drilling and to nuclear power?)

The flawed (or at least heavily veiled) reasoning behind each of these ideas, plus their collective incoherence as compelling political vision make them poor and flimsy planks on which to rebuild a party in disarray, garner broad support for it and win popular elections - outside of Cambridge and San Francisco anyway. They are not the basis for an orderly and strategic retreat. Their unquestioning adoption by formerly mainstream Dems signals chaos, fear and failure. I.e., the signs of a strategic rout.