This report, from The Times of London, holds the key to understanding why we must win the war in Iraq.

It makes for unbearable reading. It makes Daniel Pearl’s beheading—from what we know of it—sound good (because it was swift) by comparison. And Nick Berg’s, too. I didn’t watch either video, so I don’t know.

Just reading this newspaper account makes me sick. The victim was 30, a female Iraqi journalist. The un-Jill Carroll, if you will.

Even by the stupefying standards of Iraq’s unspeakable violence, the murder of Atwar Bahjat, one of the country’s top television journalists, was an act of exceptional cruelty.

Nobody but her killers knew just how much she had suffered until a film showing her death on February 22 at the hands of two musclebound men in military uniforms emerged last week. Her family’s worst fears of what might have happened have been far exceeded by the reality.

You can read the grisly details by following the link. I won’t reprint them here. I will reprint the grim realities:

Bahjat’s reporting of terrorist attacks and denunciations of violence to a wide audience across the Middle East made her plenty of enemies among both Shi’ite and Sunni gunmen. Death threats from Sunnis drove her away to Qatar for a spell but she believed her place was in Iraq and she returned to frontline reporting despite the risks.

We may never know who killed Bahjat or why. But the manner of her death testifies to the breakdown of law, order and justice that she so bravely highlighted and illustrates the importance of a cause she espoused with passion.

Bahjat advocated the unity of Iraq and saw her golden locket as a symbol of her belief. She put it with her customary on-air eloquence on the last day of her life: “Whether you are a Sunni, a Shi’ite or a Kurd, there is no difference between Iraqis united in fear for this nation.”

We say we went to war to free the Iraqis from tyranny.

We have occupied their country for three years and they are not yet free. Not even close.

We must stay, and help them do the job, and make sure that they do the job. And then we can start to think about leaving.

from the brilliant Bruce McCall, on the cover of the New Yorker

(May 8, 2006)

Will believes so much in the “message” of the movie United 93, which he describes thus

We are all potential soldiers. And we all may be, at any moment, at the war’s front, because in this war the front can be anywhere.

that he says it’s our “civic duty” to go to see it:

Going to see “United 93″ is a civic duty because Samuel Johnson was right: People more often need to be reminded than informed. After an astonishing 56 months without a second terrorist attack, this nation perhaps has become dangerously immune to astonishment. The movie may quicken our appreciation of the measures and successes — many of which must remain secret — that have kept would-be killers at bay.

(via InstaPundit)

There are so many things wrong with this that I don’t know where to begin.

However admirable Will may find United 93, however admirable Will’s goal of wanting to honor the memory of those passengers who gave their lives on 9/11, and no matter how much I agree with him that Americans do need to stiffen their collective spine—endorsing a movie for political reasons is … wrong.

It’s a simple point, and I wish more people—on both the right and the left—would get this. While, obviously, art and entertainment have political content and overtones and undertones, and while they, obviously, reflect their culture and era and are open to many kinds of interpretation and should be open to all discussion, we should cease and desist scrutinizing art and entertainment for their political content. Because (not necessarily in this order):

—a) it robs art, upon whose nourishment we depend, of its transcendence

—b) it’s a totalitarian idea and practice that will harm all of us in the long run—namely, when we start pressuring people to perform their “civic duty” by watching this movie and listening to that writer and making sure to ignore that other writer and totally close their eyes and ears to what that other filmmaker says…well, I think you get it. It will never end.

This message brought to you by an Enlightenment fundamentalist and supporter of the Euston Manifesto.

The incomparable Mickey Kaus (recently the subject of a nice, nuanced profile by the NYT’s Gina Bellafante), rounds up all the leads in the sudden, mysterious departure of CIA head Porter Goss (scroll down to May 5).

I know nothing about it, many others are writing about it, and I don’t care to speculate…except to say the obvious: open bureacratic warfare has been going on in Washington for quite some time. Pundits are just now getting around to observing and writing about it).

Kaus (scroll down to May 5) sure gets the infotainment angle [emphasis in Kaus's original]:

This is also a case where the speculation is almost certainly more fun than actually knowing the truth, even if the truth turns out to be salacious.

My conclusion: politics has now regained its rightful place in the entertainment arena. More on this another time.

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edited to add a link to the NYT profile of Kaus

I’m a new reader of Language Log, where today Mark Liberman provides all the primary-source links for the continuing blogospheric, academic, and Talmudic debates on Hitchens vs. Cole.

He offers nuanced analysis of the debate and its aftermath (coming down on the side of Hitchens, eventually). He’s also got the best blog-post title of the day:

The alcoholic orientalist thief vs. the tenth-rate syntactical train wreck

Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate (where Hitchens published his original attack on Cole), also stands firmly behind Hitchens, as he notes in an exchange of emails with Juan Cole.

From Weisberg’s first letter [emphasis mine]:

I don’t know what manuscript or piece you are talking about. And how has Hitchens stolen your email? If someone you sent a message to forwarded it to Hitchens, that is not “theft” by any definition I am familiar with — it is something that happens all the time on the web. I would suggest that you try to respond calmly on the substantive issues.

Weisberg’s second letter:

In my judgment, there is no ethical issue here. Commentators are under no obligation to call people they write about….

Your substantive disagreement about the translation and the issues around it are a fit matter for public debate, which appears to be taking place.

Good for Weisberg.

The Somali-Dutch provocateur and politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali was interviewed in New York this past week during the PEN World Voices event.

Like an increasing number of immigrants in the West who refuse to have a “victim” label pinned to their lapels, the Dutch-Somalian actress, author, and politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali represents something of a problem for liberal intellectuals. A short film she cowrote, “Submission,” was shown on Dutch television in August 2004. Its subject was the mistreatment of Muslim women at the hands of Muslim men.

Deliberately provocative, the film projected words from the Koran onto exposed female flesh. Just over two months later, the director, Theo van Gogh, was savagely murdered by a Muslim fundamentalist….

[PEN president Ron] Chernow’s introduction was curiously ungracious. It consisted largely of a warning that the audience might find itself in agreement with only some of what Ms. Ali had to say, or perhaps just a small portion of it, or even none of it. Nevertheless, he assured us, we could all agree that she is a woman of uncommon courage and integrity….

“My criticism of the West, especially of liberals, is that they do take freedom for granted,” Ms. Ali [said]. She noted that Western Europeans born after World War II are unused to conflict. “They have lost the instinct to recognize that there can be such a thing as an enemy or a threat to freedom, and that’s what I’m witnessing in Europe now,” she stated. “[There is] a pacifist ideology that violence should never be used in any circumstances, and so we should talk and talk and talk. Even when your opponent tells you, ‘I don’t want to talk to you, I want to destroy you,’ the reaction is, ‘Please, let’s talk about the fact that you want to destroy me!’”…

At the end of the interview, the Dutch politician and author was given rousing applause, and it became clear that whatever cognitive dissonance had been in the room belonged less to those who had paid to listen to her than to those who had invited her to speak.

(from the New York Sun, via Atlas Shrugs)

Two things of note here:

1) the hostility to Hirsi Ali before she even had a chance to open her mouth (which I find curious, since her film Submission was nothing if not “transgressive“—and for a while now “transgressive” has been the highest compliment paid by the critical establishment to a work of art. I guess it’s going out of fashion, or is it only out of fashion if it disapproves of breaking the cultural taboos of “the Other”?)

2) Hirsi Ali’s allusion to the nub of the problem: the liberal West’s denial of the existence evil.

In an expanded version of his recent NYT op-ed (which I wrote about here), Tony Judt sticks it to Israel again—this time in an Israeli newspaper.

Stop talking about the Holocaust!, he advises. The world has moved on—there are other genocides now. You are evil colonialists, you commit atrocities, and now all the world can watch them 24/7 and see the truth. No one believes Israel is a victim. Everyone can see that it’s the Palestinians who are the victims.

Whatever purchase Israel’s self-description still has upon the imagination of Israelis themselves, it no longer operates beyond the country’s frontiers. Even the Holocaust can no longer be instrumentalized to excuse Israel’s behavior. Thanks to the passage of time, most Western European states have now come to terms with their part in the Holocaust, something that was not true a quarter century ago. From Israel’s point of view, this has had paradoxical consequences: Until the end of the Cold War Israeli governments could still play upon the guilt of Germans and other Europeans, exploiting their failure to acknowledge fully what was done to Jews on their territory. Today, now that the history of World War II is retreating from the public square into the classroom and from the classroom into the history books, a growing majority of voters in Europe and elsewhere (young voters above all) simply cannot understand how the horrors of the last European war can be invoked to license or condone unacceptable behavior in another time and place. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint. “Remember Auschwitz” is not an acceptable response….

We can see, in retrospect, that the victory of Israel in June 1967 and its continuing occupation of the territories it conquered then have been the Jewish state’s very own nakba: a moral and political catastrophe…. Until very recently the carefully burnished image of an ultra-modern society - built by survivors and pioneers and peopled by peace-loving democrats - still held sway over international opinion. But today? What is the universal shorthand symbol for Israel, reproduced worldwide in thousands of newspaper editorials and political cartoons? The Star of David emblazoned upon a tank. [emphasis added]

Whatever, dude. We’ll see how it plays out. Remember Masada!

I do get what you mean, though. I too read the disapproving words of the Swedish prime minister about the “warlike history” of the Israelis.

Then I turned again to the words of David Mamet:

Assimilated Western Jews say, “I don’t like this Sharon,” as if to refer to the prime minister simply as “Sharon” were to over-commit themselves. They are like the office assistant raised to executive status who immediately forgets how to use the fax machine. “This Sharon” indeed. Well, there are all sorts of Jews. One dichotomy is between the Real and the Imaginary. Imaginary Jews are the delight of the world. They include Anne Frank, Janusz Korczak, the Warsaw Ghetto fighters and the movie stars in “Exodus.” These Jews delight the world in their willingness to die heroically as a form of entertainment. The plight of actual Jews, however, has traditionally been more problematic, and paradoxically, those same folk who weep at “Sophie’s Choice,” sniff at the State of Israel.

Here, in Israel, are actual Jews, fighting for their country, against both terror and misthought public opinion, as well as disgracefully biased and, indeed, fraudulent reporting. Here are people courageously going about their lives, in that which, sad to say, were it not a Jewish state, would, in its steadfastness, in its reserve, in its courage, rightly be the pride of the Western world. This Western world is, I think, deeply confused between the real and the imaginary. All of us moviegoers, who awarded ourselves the mantle of humanity for our tears at “The Diary of Anne Frank” — we owe a debt to the Jews. We do not owe this debt out of any “Unwritten Ordinance of Humanitarianism” but from a personal accountability. Having eaten the dessert, cheap sentiment, it is time to eat the broccoli. If you love the Jews as victims, but detest our right to statehood, might you not ask yourself “why?” [emphasis added]

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updated to fix typo in title and to add a missing link