Entries from April 2006 ↓

That’s what Dick Morris is saying, according to Mickey Kaus, who is all over it, natch, with a link to Jossip, no less! (heads-up for those of you who consider Page Six too risque: this is really nasty snark).

Jason Zengerle at the Plank writes:

Look, I’m no Hillary supporter, but I really hope we spend the 2008 campaign talking about more important matters than Ron Burkle. I agree that the ’90s were a good time (lord knows laughing about Monica’s blue dress was a lot more fun than worrying about Iran’s nuclear ambitions) but can we really afford to relive those days? I never bought the notion that 9/11 was going to bring about the end of irony, but I did harbor hopes that it would make it a lot harder to gin up frivolous political scandals. [emphasis added] Was I as naive as Graydon Carter?

You have got to be kidding me. In this Gotcha! culture?

Expect lots of juicy scandals (aka political theater). We’re in the Infotainment Age.

Amir Taheri coolly lays out the scenarios vis-a-vis Iran:

The Middle East today is passing through what historians describe as “disequilibrium”. This happens when the status quo is shattered while a new one has not yet been formed.

So, who is going to create a new equilibrium and shape a new status quo in the Greater Middle East?

The Arab states, still recovering from the shock of Iraq, plagued by internecine feuds, and preoccupied with Israel, offer no project.

Turkey, one of the region’s leading powers, has turned its face away from it in the hope of joining Europe.

For obvious reasons, Israel is also out of this game.

That leaves only the United States and the Islamic republic to make rival bids for reshaping the region.

The real question, therefore, is simple: Will the new Middle East, which is bound to emerge sooner or later, be an American one, an Iranian one or an Irano-American one?

It’s worth reading the whole thing.

Lately, on the matter of Iraq, emigres and dissidents (Taheri is originally from Iran) haven’t had such a good track record (Ahmad Chalabi comes immediately to mind, and the eloquent Kanan Makiya, author of The Republic of Fear and an important influence on the thinking of Paul Berman and George Packer, has also copped to having been wrong about certain things).

But if you want a view–and possibly a bridge–into in their cultures and homelands that outsiders can rarely reach on their own, emigres are always worth listening to.

Here’s a terrific blog post from an ABC staffer about her reactions to the controversial movie (see this post and this one) and her experiences while attending the premiere with the families of the victim-heroes:

As the final shot faded to black, and the credits began to roll, the theater reverberated with the moaning, wracking, heaving sobs of the family members, seated mostly in the Ziegfeldís balcony. Powerful cinematic feats can do much to transport us to other worlds, but no Dolby-stereo sound system could ever faithfully recreate the real cries of those hurting souls.

Still, United 93 is a mesmerizing and meticulous piece of filmmaking. Shot in a shaky, hand-held, hyperkinetic style, at times it feels like a documentary, with scenes inside simulated air traffic control centers, the Northeast Air Defense Sector, and, of course, the now-menacing United Airlines Boeing 757 itself.

Filmmaker Paul Greengrass has an astoundingly accurate eye for detail, down to the mundane routines that all bleary-eyed passengers on morning flights go through as a young woman applies lip balm, a businessman turns the pages of that dayís newspaper, a stewardess describes the contents of a breakfast omelet. All of these normal, everyday rituals are almost unbearable to watch, knowing what will eventually befall the passenger and crew….

The scenes of the actual hijack of United 93 are the most graphic and terrifying to watch. It is a dark exercise, but one can only imagine what they would have been like to be a passenger, let alone one brave enough to overthrow the hijackers in an attempt to seize control of the cockpit….

In all, the filmmakers deserve credit for honoring the memory of those lost on United 93, for telling the story straight down the middle with very little politics, and for never, ever slipping into melodrama in the telling of this tragic day.

Eve Fairbanks at the New Republic’s “The Plank” makes some devastatingly astute observations about Chinese president Hu’s visit that were entirely missing from the official MSM narrative that I saw:

But I saw my first pro-Jintao demonstrators today, facing off with the Falun Gong-ers in front of the White House, separated by weary-looking mounted police. And my immediate thought was: They must be paid. Not because it’s hard to imagine Chinese who have already immigrated to the United States taking the streets on a hot afternoon in support of China’s communist regime (though it is hard), but because of how strangely choreographed they were[emphasis added]:

While the Falun Gong bunch sported your typical raggle-taggle protest look, the pro-regime demonstration featured entire troupes of costumed dancers and, most bizarrely, men in business suits and official-looking ID tags carrying enormous Chinese flags and occasionally running in victory laps with them like Olympic torchbearers. Maybe it’s a sign of the Chinese regime’s weakness that it felt it had to hire flag-runners and smiling dance troupes to counter the potential bad impression created by protestors hawking a cause Americans are already numbed to from extreme overexposure at subway stations. Or maybe Hu’s just hip to the fact that over here, the Great Leader will always be public opinion.[emphasis added]

Here’s a report from the Seattle Times:

Nearby sidewalks were lined with supporters and protesters, including members of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, Taiwan independence supporters and Tibetan-rights activists. Supporters in colorful Chinese silk dress carried Chinese flags and beat drums….

When the president’s motorcade arrived in downtown Seattle, Xunzhuo Gong of San Jose encouraged pro-Hu demonstrators to bang their drums to drown out the “Free Tibet” and anti-communism chants.

“The protesters don’t see the big picture,” said Gong, who helped organized the supporters. “This [visit] will help both countries’ economies and help U.S. and China relations. You got two super economic powers working together.”

While Fairbanks’s observations are speculation (she apparently didn’t interview anyone–this was a blog post) and the Seattle Times account is a reported piece, this is a case where reporting the facts is not the same thing as reporting the truth.

By providing context, nuance, and color commentary, Fairbanks went a longer way toward revealing the truth (that China’s regime brutally suppresses its dissidents) than did the MSM. I think it’s cluelesslessness, not a white wash.

But moral innocence is no longer excusable (if it ever was) in our interconnected, globalized world.

Osama was able to get out only a lousy audiotape:

Zarqawi put out a 30-minute campaign commercial:

AP PHOTO/ VIA INTELCENTER

I am pleased to see that there are nearly 800 signatories to the Euston Manifesto and that the list of associated bloggers (including moi) is growing by the day.

It should get a nice boost now that Andrew Sulllivan reached out across the aisle and tipped his hat to the Manifesto–and urged his readers to remember that “the left” is not a monolith (for which he deserves thanks: thank you, Andrew) and that

we have to make sure that our criticism of Bush and his dreadful, criminal defense secretary does not mean a capitulation to the anti-Americanism, moral relativism and defeatism of the cut-and-run left. We must fight that tendency as relentlessly as we must fight Christianism and Islamism.

And Austin Bay, who has also endorsed the Manifesto, took the words right out of my mouth with his post “Tony Blair Should Sign the Euston Manifesto.” (I was thinking the same thing today, while still mulling over what I wrote here about the fracture on the left.)

Sullivan ends his post with these hopeful words:

But a new coalition is forming - against all these isms. For freedom. For the West.

I wish I shared his optimism, but I find that the spirit of the Manifesto hasn’t yet traversed the Pond in any meaningful way.

Here at home, “liberals” and “leftists” and “progressives” are still going at each other. As Eric Alterman notes with glee, his favorite persona non grata, Joe Klen, is getting beaten up all over the place.

Arianna Huffington, after a two-day attempt to talk sense into the rabid mob that posts at her place and that took umbrage at her suggestion that converts from the “right” should be accepted into the fold, has dropped the subject entirely. The headlines on her site scream “Bush Hatred Welcome Here.” (Arianna has referred to this as “passion”—and she likes it.)

Too many lefty bloggers—and too many members of the cohort in general—insist on making the Iraq war a litmus test. More about this another time.

From the mouths of Aussie-accented second-generation Muslims, who belong to
Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT):

[The group] has been invited to speak at Sydney Boys High at least twice, and often addresses students at Sydney University.

Borrowing its methodology and ideology from Marxist-Leninist groups, HT calls itself a political party which works to “change the situation of the corrupt society so that it is transformed into an Islamic society”, its website says. …

“On the collective level everyone accepts you have to have one set of laws and no Muslim in this country is demanding today the implementation of sharia law.

“In this country, yes, we believe this is the best way forward but . . . our current struggle is the implementation of Islamic law in the Muslim world and that will serve as a model for the rest of humanity. [But] if governments want to interfere in the individual, personal affairs of any citizen, they are going to create the conditions of civil unrest and chaos like in France.”

Soadad had a message for youth: “They must be aware of the plot of the kafir, the plot of the Western society to enforce on them a palatable Islam . . . Secularism is a clear assault on the fundamental belief of a Muslim. Democracy is a clear assault on the fundamental belief of a Muslim also.”

HT says it advocates non-violence, and yet, terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna, from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, told a conference in 2004, “key members of the al-Qaeda organisation [such as Abu Musab al-Zarqawi] formerly belonged to the HT organisation . . .

“The upper echelons of organisations of key interest to us, operating at a violent, extremist, radical level, consist of former members of HT.”

In Australia, HT’s threat is its anti-integration message.

via the Sydney Morning Herald 

Chinese president Hu’s U.S. trip may have been marred by protocol slip-ups and “gaffes” such as letting a “heckler” **sneak onto the White House lawn and dare speak up in protest of official Chinese repression of the Falun Gong.

Indeed, according to the Times,

The Chinese Embassy in Washington sent a delegation to the White House on Friday to demand a detailed explanation of how an adherent of the Falun Gong spiritual sect, which is banned in China, managed to infiltrate the welcome ceremony for Mr. Hu on the South Lawn of the White House on Thursday and heckle Mr. Hu for several minutes before being escorted away.

On the other hand, Mr. Hu received an extra-warm welcome from his new best friends, the Saudis.

Meanwhile, the NYT’s crusading Nicholas Kristof is accusing China of “underwriting its second genocide in three decades” (the first was in Cambodia; this one is in Darfur).

—–

**On Thursday night after the event, I heard every anchor and broadcaster on CNN repeatedly refer to the protester as a “heckler”–they seemed to want to underscore this point, completely (and cluelessly, as usual) missing the point that this woman was doing in America what Chinese are not free to do in China: protest against their government. For which she should have been applauded for her bravery—and damn the diplomatic consequences. China, despite its capitalist fervor, is still run by totalitarians.

By Friday night, CNN had redeemed itself a little bit. Wolf Blitzer had a sit-down with the “heckler,” who was now miraculously transformed into a “brave” and “courageous” protester.

The MSM works in very mysterious ways…

In his pro-Mearsheimer and Walt op-ed in the New York Times last week, Tony Judt told readers that Christopher Hitchens had used the word “smelly” to describe the classically anti-Semitic undertone of the professors’ “The Israel Lobby” paper.

On Saturday, Hitchens responded in a letter to the editor, which I reprint in full:

To the Editor:

Tony Judt says that I characterized the work of John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt as “slightly but unmistakably smelly.” But I was not referring to their criticism of Israeli conduct in the occupied territories: criticism that I stipulated was weaker than that policy deserves.

I was challenging their two further assertions that Israel (a) has induced the United States government to intervene in Iraq and (b) has brought the wrath of Al Qaeda on the United States.

Mr. Judt himself does not defend either of these highly dubious propositions. If an Israeli “lobby” were covertly manipulating our foreign policy, we would have intervened first in Iran. And if Osama bin Laden were moved principally by the suffering of the Palestinians—rather than by his demand to impose a caliphate on Afghans, Iraqis, Turks, Egyptians and others—then he would be at least morally in the right.

That last assumption probably deserves a much stronger condemnation than the word “smelly.”

Christopher Hitchens

Why Judt used Hitchens, as opposed to, say, Dershowitz, as an example of a critic who had charged the professors with prejudice against Jews is anyone’s guess. This might be an old feud between two British expats. I suspect, however, that it’s a left-sectarian feud, occasioned by Hitchens’s very public break with The Nation magazine and his old comrades (among them, one assumes, the anti-war Judt, who is a professor at NYU) in the wake of 9/11 and the run-up to the war in Iraq.

In the fall of 2002, Hitchens wrote:

I am on the side of the Iraqi and Kurdish opponents of this filthy menace [Saddam's depraved rule]. And they are on the side of civil society in a wider conflict, which is the civil war now burning across the Muslim world from Indonesia to Nigeria. [emphasis added] The theocratic and absolutist side in this war hopes to win it by exporting it here, which in turn means that we have no expectation of staying out of the war, and no right to be neutral in it. But there are honorable allies to be made as well, and from now on all of our cultural and political intelligence will be required in order to earn their friendship and help isolate and destroy their enemies, who are now ours–or perhaps I should say mine. …

Moreover, it’s obvious to me that the “antiwar” side would not be convinced even if all the allegations made against Saddam Hussein were proven, and even if the true views of the Iraqi people could be expressed. All evidence pointed overwhelmingly to the Taliban and Al Qaeda last fall, and now all the proof is in; but I am sent petitions on Iraq by the same people (some of them not so naïve) who still organize protests against the simultaneous cleanup and rescue of Afghanistan, and continue to circulate falsifications about it.

I was reminded of Hitchens’s moral stand when I read a Con Coughlin interview (from a forthcoming book) with Tony Blair, whose thinking is in line with Hitchens’s (and, for what it’s worth, mine). From the Telegraph:

“…My view is that the origins of these security problems - with their mixture of secular dictatorships, religious fanaticism, failed nation states, governed, in every sense, by oligarchies - are the Middle East. This is a struggle that will only be won when, across the whole of the Middle East, there is a place for greater democracy, human rights, religious toleration and so on—”

[Q] That makes you sound like a neocon, you know that?

“Yeah, but I think spreading democracy and human rights is very progressive. I can’t quite get this idea it is supposed to be neocon.”

[Q]The neocons, I pointed out, originally came from the Democrat wing of American politics.

“I just go with my instinct. But I keep saying to people: one of the greatest failures of progressive politics in my lifetime has been that, in the anti-American parts of the progressive Left, we have ended up on the wrong side with someone as evil as Saddam. Even now, when we have been there with a UN resolution, we are on the wrong side of the battle between terrorism and democracy. I can’t understand how progressive people can be on the wrong side of that argument. [emphasis added]

“It’s not, unfortunately, as simple as saying, ‘Deal with Afghanistan and leave Iraq for a bit.’ You’ve got to deal with the whole element. That’s why, when I spoke to the American Congress [July 2003], I tried to outline an agenda that would encompass Afghanistan, Iraq, the spread of democracy across the Middle East, the resolution of the Israeli-Palestine problem. All of these things are major factors. But the one thing I know for sure is, we are never going to get anywhere by showing weakness. You can see this in respect of Iran now, where I think it is very important that the world gives a strong signal. This is why, in respect of Afghanistan, it was never going to be over in two or three years. But what is the alternative? To let al-Qaeda be and continue to inflict misery on the people. I have never found it very difficult to justify removing the Taliban.”

The betrayal of the cause of human rights by “progressives” is so far merely a moral failure. Unless we breach divisions on the left and reconcile with the “right,” it may become a political failure with devastating consequences.