Entries from October 2006 ↓

There’s a lot of embarrassed muttering about a few news cycles’ worth of negativity, but Austin Bay has a different take on John Kerry:

In the spare space of 24 hours Kerry has resurrected the Vietnam Syndrome –at least his and the left wing of the Democratic Party’s Vietnam (loser’s) Syndrome. This is stupid but particularly stupid in the last week of a national election. Doubly stupid in the midst of a long, grinding war. Kerry is trapped, in an odd sort of amber. He’s stuck on stupid and stuck in the past simultaneously. John Kerry, the stegosaurus of American politics. (Okay, I’m unfair to stegosaurs, they had backbones and spikes on their tails– but the drawing at the link is cute.)

The Feiler Faster theory (hat tip to the inimitable Mickey Kaus) says that voters only start to pay attention toward the end of a campaign. Kerry is certainly an unpleasant reminder of Democrats at their most insular and self-righteous.
Is it the end of the campaign yet? Probably not.

During the Hezbollah-vs.-Israel war, I was surprised to discover that Israelis were required to have bomb shelters in their homes. Now I’m suitably alarmed but not surprised to read that wealthy Israelis are going all-out in their preparations for a nuclear attack by Iran:

AMID mounting fears that Iran is planning to obliterate their country, wealthy Israelis are shelling out on underground nuclear shelters in the gardens of their luxury homes.

The shelters, which cost at least £60,000 for a bargain-basement version, are built to withstand radioactive fallout, have fortified walls and doors and generate their own electricity and decontaminated air.

Predictably, the Goldbergs are trying to outdo the Finkelsteins:

“The shelter looks like a regular flat,” [Goldberg aka Rakib] said. “It is 2,000 square feet, with a living room, two bedrooms, kitchen, self-powered electricity.”

Rakib’s post-nuclear pad, which can accommodate more than 25 people for two weeks, cost about £250,000.

…

Leading the stampede to the nuclear bunker is [Finkelstein aka] Shari Arison, the country’s wealthiest woman, estimated to be worth about £2.7 billion. The Israeli media have reported that she has already made preparations for Armageddon by building two sophisticated underground structures. One is at her home in Tel Aviv, the other in the garden of her holiday villa in Bnei Zion village.

Meanwhile, the Israeli government’s got some ’splainin’ to do:

Seeking to allay public fears, the government insists that the population has little to fear. “We are aware of all these panicky people building atomic shelters. They’re wasting their money,” said a security source.

“Israel will not allow Iran to build an atomic bomb, and even if it did, the Iranians know very well that we’ll bomb them back to the Stone Age before they’ve launched a single missile.”

Oh, but I forgot. There’s nothing to worry about, according to Matthew Yglesias, who spends a lot of time writing about national-security policy, he says, “frequently criticizing the hawkish urge to blend disparate problems together into a unified ‘Islamofascist’ menace.”

So he ought to know: we’ve got nothing to worry about from Iran. Why, it’s not even a totalitarian state:

The Iranian regime, objectionable though it may be, is a run-of-the-mill authoritarian oligarchy with competing centers of power and some space for civil society.

Yes. And Ahmadinejad is just another “Muslim Behaving Badly.”

Tsk-tsk.

Joshua Muravchik tells his pals to chin up

[O]ur ideas have influenced the policies of President George W. Bush, as they did those of President Ronald Reagan. That does feel good. Our intellectual contributions helped to defeat communism in the last century and, God willing, they will help to defeat jihadism in this one. It also feels good to see that a number of young people and older converts are swelling our ranks.

dig deep into their resources

I am shocked to hear that some among us, wearying of these attacks, are sidling away from the neocon label. Where is the joie de combat? The essential tenets of neoconservatism—belief that world peace is indivisible, that ideas are powerful, that freedom and democracy are universally valid, and that evil exists and must be confronted—are as valid today as when we first began.

and prepare for continued battle:

That is why we must continue to fight. But we need to sharpen our game.

Learn from Our Mistakes.

Deploy More Than the Military.

Fix the Public Diplomacy Mess.

Prepare to Bomb Iran.

Recruit Joe Lieberman for 2008.

He’s scores points for being transparent—gotta give him that. Otherwise: arrogant much? Oy. Vey.
Read it here if you dare.

Media junkies of my ilk—people who see “the news” as mass storytelling rather than mass information communication (in other words: infotainment, which we consider a value-neutral term, because we consider infotainment the most effective and efficient way to get a message across)—have known for a long time that the information war is part and parcel of Islamist terrorism, beginning with (but certainly not limited to) 9/11 itself.

For example: The timing of the planes hitting the Twin Towers was calculated for maximum media effect: there was enough time between the two planes to make sure that cameras would already be on the scene when the second plane hit. That way, the whole world would see it. Instantly. And over and over again. When, unexpectedly, both the Towers collapsed, 9/11 was of course imprinted on the global memory.

Both for those who celebrated 9/11 and for those who were horrified and terrified by it, it was an iconic event—and, possibly, much more important symbolically than the death of 3,000 human beings anywhere else in recorded human history: because it was witnessed by so many of them, even if from the safe distance afforded by video and broadband.

So we know that al Qaeda believes in the power of the media. Now we have proof. al Qaeda in Iraq has issued a document laying out goals for a new war against America: in the media.

“The people of jihad need to carry out a media war parallel to the military war … because we can observe the effect that the media have on nations,” said the document, signed by Najd al-Rawi of the Global Islamic Media Front, a group associated with al Qaeda.

It lists targets for a public relations campaign ranging from the obvious — Internet chat rooms — to the surprising — “famous U.S. authors with e-mail addresses” and mentions New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and the academics Noam Chomsky, Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington.

Now that al Qaeda has issued the warning and Reuters has published it, will Western news organizations stop, look, and listen before they cross the red lines?

With torture so much a part of the national conversation—in the blogosphere, at least—I’m wondering why this film not available on DVD (or even VHS, fer chrissake)?

The Confession [L'Aveu], 1970 (Costa-Gavras)

From Vincent Canby’s review in the New York Times (12/10/70):

“The Confession” is the real-life story of Artur London, a loyal Communist who certified his credentials by serving with the International Brigade in Spain and with the Communist anti-Nazi underground in France, and by a long term in a Nazi concentration camp. In 1949, Mr. London returned to his native Czechoslovakia from France to become Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs in the Communist Government of President Klement Gottwald. Two years later, along with 13 other leading Czech Communists (11 of whom were Jewish), Mr. London was arrested for treason and espionage and found guilty in what became known as the “Slansky trial.”

The Slansky trial, named for the secretary general of the Czech Communist party, who was also a defendant, was one of the last major gasps of the Stalinist purges that began with the Moscow trials in the 1930’s. All of the Slansky defendants were found guilty and all but three, including Mr. London, were executed.

Mr. London lived not only to see the defendants rehabilitated and to write his book but also to return to Czechoslovakia on the day in August, 1968, when Soviet troops invaded his country to end the short Czech spring.

“The Confession,” with Yves Montand playing Mr. London and Simone Signoret his wife Lise, is the story of a believer’s ultimate betrayal by his belief, of intolerable physical torture and psychological harassment (London is urged to confess to crimes he did not commit to prove his loyalty to the party), and, finally, of survival.

Subtextually, what was notable about this Costa-Gavras film, which came out a year or so after his hard-hitting international sensation Z, was the appearance of Montand and Signoret in the principal roles. Well-known leftists, the French stars broke ranks with their brethren to make what they considered an important political distinction: between anti-Communism and anti-Stalinism. Of course, that was back in the days when celebrities—not to mention public intellectuals—on the barricades informed themselves about the issues and understood the intricacies and nuances of the politics they espoused: the good old days…

In his review, Canby glosses over the gruesomely anti-Semitic character of the Prague show trials and Communist Party purges.

J. Hoberman doesn’t make that mistake in his New York Times review [$$] of A Trial in Prague, a documentary by Zuzana Justman on the same subject:

It was scarcely coincidental that Slansky and all but three of his fellow defendants — many of whom he had imprisoned earlier — were Jews. This had less to do with the prominence of Jews in Czechoslovakia’s Communist Party — which, after World War II, had been the most popular Communist Party in Eastern Europe, with more than 1 million members, as well as the winner of a national election — than with events inside the Soviet Union and elsewhere in the world.

Masterminded from Moscow, the Slansky Trial was of a piece with the virulent anti-Semitic campaign that characterized the last five years of Stalin’s reign. In part, the aging dictator’s paranoia was fed by disappointment with the pro-Western stance taken by the new state of Israel, which had been supported by the Soviets and heavily armed by Czechoslovakia during the war of 1948. Hence the convenience of targeting prominent Jewish Communists.

But the so-called Zionists on trial were all dedicated, lifelong Communists — if not loyal Stalinists — who in embracing that secular religion had largely abandoned their Jewish roots. Representatives of a now antediluvian sort of modernism, they had spent their youth obtaining a particular form of mid-20th-century European education: some survived Nazi concentration camps, most fought in the international brigades on the side of the Spanish Republic, a few had been involved in the French Resistance — all of which would be used to establish their guilt during the trial.

This film was a casualty of 9/11. (I haven’t seen it.) It was scheduled for release on 9/14/01. It is available on video, for $300. At that price, it might as well not be available.

Which is too bad, because the morality tale of the Stalinist show trials in Eastern Europe, which took place only a half-dozen years after the end of World War Two, is one well worth contemplating in this era of feverish partisanship.

Striking while the iron is hot—or before it fizzles—Sacha Baron Cohen makes a deal with Universal to “continue to taunt Middle America with naive-foreigner characters” (according to Defamer). This time he’ll star as Bruno, the gay Austrian haidresser:

Today, they follow up with news that Universal won the Bruno sweepstakes with their $42.5 million offer [for worldwide distribution], which they note covers the film’s budget and features a “significant backend component,” subtle contractual language that we suspect Cohen himself required be included in any report of his agency’s eight-figure buggering of the studio. With this deal completed and his considerable Borat promotional responsibilities dispensed of, Cohen can soon begin the crucial work of devising ways to goad Bruno’s homeland into a prolonged public war intended to dispel the notion that Austria’s population is wholly comprised of neon-mohawked, fashion-obsessed television hosts preoccupied with sexually menacing American college football teams.

The other day, Jeff Jarvis linked to the laments of a couple of comedians, Nick Tanner and Armando Iannucci, both of whom wanted to know why comedy seems to have supplanted the serious national conversation that’s supposed to be taking place in the media and by politicians in these grave times of war—as if politicians aren’t publicity whores and the media isn’t dying to give each and every one of them a roll in the hay, the consequences be damned! (For the record: There is serious debate (i.e., nutritious food for thought) for people who live in free societies and are seriously interested in informing themselves about it; it’s available from all over the globe, 24/7, at the click of a mouse. They do have to seek it out, however. If they’re expecting the media to spoon-feed it to them, they’re asking for a junk-food diet.)

War doesn’t put an end to politics—it inflames politicians. Who are knaves. Who are professional smooth talkers. Politics is amoral, if not immoral. It’s about power. It’s about those who are attempting to scale the heights or who, having attained them, want to cling to them.

For precisely that reason, comedians have always been there to comment on—and puncture—the knavery of politicians, among other evil-doers. Famously, political satire has been a most effective weapon of the powerless against the powerful. I note this obvious fact for the sake of the naive comedians who lament the fact that it’s left up to them to comment on the absurdities of the politics of the day. Ever heard of Lenny Bruce? Mark Twain? Saturday Night Live? Tom Lehrer, Vaughn Meader, That Was the Week That Was? the Smothers Brothers? Comedians, get thee an education! Your stupendous ignorance—of history and of human nature—is showing.

American power players and politicians are way ahead of you, too, as noted in an interesting piece in today’s New York Times. Ostensibly, it’s about how media moguls hire comedy writers to help them craft their lines for important image-making or image-busting public events (a subject that warrants its own post. Someday). But it speaks just as much to comedy, where the bottom line is to know the limits [emphasis mine]:

[T]here is also a small clutch of writers who specialize in the genre of media-mogul laughs. And the reigning king of such humor is Mark S. Katz, a former speechwriter for President Bill Clinton who collaborated on Mr. Freston’s remarks.

Friends of Mr. Freston’s said that after his departure from Viacom, he initially did not want to go through with the event [Katz had been hired for]. But once he decided to do it, Mr. Katz, said, “he dove right in,” adding: “I love the guy. I’ve known him for a week, and I love him.”

The funny thing about Mr. Katz — who actually looks like a cross between a comic and a consultant — is that he takes his methods awfully seriously. (He was initially reticent about being interviewed because he does not want to appear to be diminishing the comedic chops of his clients.)

“Humor is an underutilized tool in the arsenal of strategic and crisis communications,” said Mr. Katz, who calls his consulting company the Soundbite Institute. “It’s about solving problems.”

Having written jokes for President Clinton’s shtick at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner during some of the darker moments of his administration, Mr. Katz said there were similarities between presidential humor and media-mogul humor.

“The are things you can say, there are things that go unsaid and things that are unsayable,” he explained. “What humor does is move the unsaid into the said. But you can’t go near the unsayable — that is true of a president or a C.E.O.”

In Mr. Freston’s case, the unsayable would have been anything directly attacking Sumner M. Redstone, the Viacom chairman who removed Mr. Freston from the job after more than 20 years of building the company and its famous asset, MTV.

Ouch. You can kinda see why the unsayable is unsayable about Mr. Freston.

For the rest of you, here’s the bottom line: if you’re working for the mogul, or you’re working for moguls who are cozy with the first mogul, you can’t say the unsayable.

The job of the comedian, however, especially the purveyor of political humor, is to “move the unsaid into the said.”

Sounds easy enough.

Clive Davis reports on an item that slipped my attention—an enthusiastic piece in The Times (UK) by Bryan Appleyard about the promising future for books (through technology). Davis writes:

I was particularly interested in an article by the Sunday Times cultural critic, Bryan Appleyard, on what could turn out to be the future of the trade. One possibility, he noted, was a move to electronic books as exemplified by the new Sony Reader, the center of much discussion at the recent Frankfurt Book Fair. Yet for those of us addicted to the smell of ink on paper, the notion of downloading a text onto a miniature computer screen lacks a certain romance.
Mr. Appleyard was much more intrigued by another bright idea, called POD (publishing or printing on demand). As he explained,
“The problem with traditional publishing — and the reason publishers are so weak in relation to bookshops — is simple: stock. Publishing a book is, in cash-flow terms, an absurd way to do business . . . Publishers have been forced to take fewer risks. Their cheap-to-run backlists can survive on small sales, and the mass market will look after itself. But the middle element in the equation — consisting of the new, the risky, the strange, the difficult, the ambitious, the non-generic, everything, in fact, one values — has been squeezed out . . .
“In POD, an author delivers his manuscript and the publisher edits, designs and sets it on a computer, but doesn’t actually print any copies at all. Instead, it simply waits until somebody buys one. At that point, the book — a proper one, on paper, with proper binding — can be made on the spot and delivered through, for example, Amazon or direct from the publisher. Alternatively, the buyer can get it from a printing and binding machine rather like the current digital-photo processors. The latter method is the obvious one, and Starbucks is indeed looking at it.”

Appropriately, considering Appleyard’s level of enthusiasm (see the full text of his article here), Davis asks:

Could it all be as simple as that?

Well, no. Appleyard is wildly oversimplifying a complicated picture—certainly we aren’t five years away from the end of books as we know them, and he underestimates many factors that will contribute to the continued existence of the physical book: the power of the retail chains on the one hand and of the cult-of-the-book devotees on the other. Then there are production issues and copyright issues and, not least important, a mind-set to overcome (namely: Luddite and proud of it). The digital revolution in books will not come overnight. When it does come, the transition will not be smooth.

But I love hearing from book lovers who welcome rather than dread the digital revolution.

When I have time to read my local paper at a leisurely pace—and when it doesn’t annoy me to death with its stooopid politics—I find a lot of thoughtful and insightful reporting. Maybe I should call this feature Little Noted Nor Long Remembered: too many of these gems are buried, within the stories themselves and inside the paper—but that’s another story: a boring one.

Without further ado, items to file away from today’s New York Times, filtered [or "mediated" or "edited" (as in selected) by yours truly]:

from “Despite Tension, Millions Vote in Congo,” a gentle reminder that Darfur and Somalia aren’t the only trouble spots in Africa.

Congo is one of the poorest, most chaotic nations on the planet, ruined by unrest that is estimated to have claimed millions of lives in the past 10 years. In many corners of the country, law, order, electricity and medicine are virtually nonexistent.

Even here in the capital, the most developed area of the country, some people are so poor that they eat fried crickets.

It is lawless here, too. Bands of street kids roam ramshackle neighborhoods, swinging iron bars and lengths of wood, and set up roadside checkpoints to shake down drivers.

from “Attackers Set Fire to Bus in Marseille, Wounding One” [the "one" is described; the attackers are not]:

Mama Galledou, a 26-year-old Frenchwoman of Senegalese descent, sustained burns over 60 percent of her body, according to the police.

from “Afghans, Returning Home, Set Off a Building Boom,” very surprising good news from Afghanistan:

The return of Afghan refugees over the last four years, and their ability to adapt and survive, has been one of the real successes of the international intervention here and of President Hamid Karzai’s government. Since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, an estimated 4.7 million refugees have flooded back from neighboring Iran and Pakistan, 3.7 million with assistance from the United Nations refugee agency and another million on their own.

from “Pelosi Serves as Focal Point for Both Parties,” a rare ironic description of a Democrat:

Oops!

I didn’t mean to play Gotcha! Really. I swear. But I’ve got a little news-break. Stop the presses!

Someone at the NYT edited this story between the time the dead-tree copy that showed up at my door at 7 a.m. went to bed and the time the story was put online.

Words included in the dead-tree copy version and elided in the online copy [reprinted below] are bolded:

Her voting record is among the most liberal in Congress. She gets an “A” from the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League and an “F” from the National Rifle Association. She favors alternative sentencing over prison construction, schools without prayer and death with taxes. She voted against the use of force in Iraq, though after the war started she voted to finance it.

Here is the version I found online:

Her voting record is among the most liberal in Congress. She gets an “A” from the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League and an “F” from the National Rifle Association. She favors alternative sentencing over prison construction and opposes prayer in the schools. She voted against the use of force in Iraq, though after the war started she voted to finance it.

“Schools without prayer and death with taxes“—that has a certain je ne sais quoi, dontcha think? [[oops: before I corrected this mistake, I typed "death without taxes"---my bad, ed.]]

Obviously, some paranoid second-guessing busybody at the New York Times doesn’t agree!

And, really, I was trying to tip my hat to the Times, because I enjoyed reading it so much this morning. Now I’m annoyed. Maybe I’ll go back to posting the other interesting tidbits I found in the paper. Grrrrr.

Political commentators seem surprised by the fact that negative campaign ads attract media attention, whereas boring old vote-for-me ads don’t:

No Negativity, No News Coverage?

Friday’s Tennessean has an interview with Vanderbilt University political science professor John Geer about negative campaign ads. This segment…

What portion of campaign ads in presidential campaigns did you find were negative?

Over the last 44 years there has been an increase in negativity. But it’s basically a 50-50 divide. But if you were to listen to coverage of campaigns you’d think you only get negative ads.

…reflects directly on The Tennessean and the rest of the Nashville news media, which seem to be covering only those races this election year in which one or both sides are launching negative ads.

Why is anyone surprised by this?

Television thrives on conflict.

Audiences love gossip.

The best attack ads reveal (or make up) the best dirt.

The end.

Just a couple of days ago I was saying how tempting it would be to go back to the September 10, 2001, mindset and do a Scarlett O’Hara (”I’ll think about it tomorrow”).

Noah Feldman, writing in the New York Times Magazine, looking squarely at Muslim-on-Muslim violence and at the threat of nuclear proliferation from the perspective of changing attitudes toward jihad in the Muslim world, reminds me why it is so important for all of us to focus our minds rather than self-narcotize.

Within the world of radical Islam, there are those who believe that the erosion of the laws of jihad has gone too far. There are reports of difficulty recruiting foreign candidates for suicide missions directed at Iraqi civilians. The debate about how jihad may be prosecuted is not over by any means. But it is an unavoidable fact that the classic restrictions on the killing of women, children and Muslims in jihad have been deeply undermined in the last decade.

V.

If the Islamic laws of war are under revision, or at least the subject of intense debate, what does that mean for the question of the Islamic bomb? The answer is that the expanding religious sanction for violence once thought unacceptable opens the way for new kinds of violence to be introduced and seen as legitimate in turn. First Israeli women and children became acceptable targets; then Americans; then Shiites; and now Sunnis of unstinting orthodoxy. It would seem that no one is out of bounds.

It’s a long piece, dispassionate, and well worth reading.

If you don’t have a chance to see the modernist show “From Cezanne to Picasso” featuring 100 pieces from the collection of turn-of-the-twentieth-century dealer Ambroise Vollard, you can still visit the Met’s site and see some excellent images.

Like this Derain:

London: St. Paul’s Cathedral seen from the Thames

Rent it or buy it, watch it, and savor it:

In 1982, Wilder was celebrated at a gala at Lincon Center. Michiko Kakutani wrote:

[F]or all their disparate forms, the movies share a distinctive point of view, a certain Wilder touch. It is a kind of acerbic wit, a willful desire to expose, through drama and often low gags, society’s venality and greed and lusts….

More often than not, his movies involve elaborate deceptions ending in the loss of innocence, and his characters tend to be unconventional, if not thoroughly disreputable.

”After the whole bit in drag,” said Mr. Lemmon, recalling his role as a member of an all girl orchestra in ”Some Like It Hot,” ”I played six more parts with Billy. These are the characters: a weakling who rents his apartment out for assignations, a guy who lives with a prostitute and pays her, a married man who follows dear old Dad’s footsteps - he arranges a yearly European tryst with another lady, a totally unethical newspaper reporter who’d stoop to any unsavory act to get a story, a cameraman in a neck brace trying to collect money for phony injuries and a loser who wants to kill himself because his wife is holed up in a sex clinic with her therapist.”

If you love this non-partisan super-democratic positively Ghandi-esque advice from a commenter at CampusJ  as much as I do, please pass it on.

Tensions between Jewish and Muslim students at UC Irvine peaked recently after an incident involving vandalism with swastikas and “vulgarities” (unspecified). Half a dozen Jewish students met with university officials to discuss both the incident and an atmosphere they described as intimidating to their persons and their freedom of speech. The officials were very sincerely sympathetic. Then:

…[S]ome students asked that Drake place restrictions on where MSU events are held, saying that if their events were held in classrooms as opposed to public spaces, their effect would not be as broad. However, Chancellor Drake told Jewish students at the meeting that he cannot restrict any club, that it would be “violation of law to prohibit certain speech.”
[Vice-Chancellor] Gomez emphasized that though hate speech may be present, he would not seek to curtail it, as “one person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”

Here’s the genius advice from a commenter on how to respond:

Akiva M Oct 27th, 2006 at 8:25 am

My suggestion? Take this opportunity to make Mr. Gomez understand the impact of his words. Stage a rally based on them. If possible, get together with the black student union, the latin american student union, the asian american student union (or whatever the campus equivalents are), but if necessary, go it alone.

The rally should be in a public space, and it should involve loud, repeated chanting of racist slurs followed by “one person’s hate speech is another person’s education”

So:

Rally Leader: “Kike go home”
Crowd: “Kike go home”
Rally leader: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Crowd: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Rally leader: “Monkeys Niggers, don’t belong”
Crowd: “Monkeys, Niggers, don’t belong”
Rally leader: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Crowd: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Rally Leader: “Raghead, towelhead, muslim scum”
Crowd: “Raghead, towelhead, muslim scum”
Rally leader: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”
Crowd: “One person’s hate speech is another person’s education.”

(and so on, with slurs for hispanics, asians, etc. Then repeat from “Kike go home”)

Spend an hour chanting that on the lawn in front of his office, invite some press, and see if that doesn’t have an impact.

Akiva, my hat is off to you.

That’s what I found in the very entertaining satire Thank You for Smoking, which I watched last night.

Bill Miller of the Seattle Weekly also picked up the aroma.

Naylor says, “I talk for a living,” but he also demonstrates the rationale behind his manicured rhetoric—who he’s serving, how he’s positioning himself, what’s his underlying agenda. (There’s a nice scene when he pays off a former Marlboro Man dying of emphysema, played by Sam Elliott; in order to assuage his guilt, since Naylor Jr. is watching, he coaches the old cowpoke on how exactly to stage an outraged press conference to disgrace the cigarette industry.)

He’s very much on point, though, when he explains what’s missing from Jason Reitman’s directorial debut:

Reitman isn’t yet Billy Wilder, but maybe Billy Wilder wasn’t yet Billy Wilder when directing his first movie either.He’s got a better idea of satire than how to execute it—you need to feel the sting outside the theater.

Indeed.

Still, [Reitman's] heart is blackened in the right place: We need more Naylor-esque rascals at the cinema these days, more misbehavior from high-functioning adults, not low-esteem teens.

Hear, hear.

(Great performance from Aaron Eckhart, too.)

Oliver Kamm, author of the excellent book Anti-Totalitarianism, which I wrote about here, writes the most cogent, if long, defense of the war in Iraq that I’ve read recently.

Okay: all I’ve read recently were long-winded criticisms of the war. And all I’ve heard recently (say, for the last year) are Goebbels-esque repetitions of the grim facts about the Iraq quagmire. But Kamm’s piece is worth reading in its entirety. It’s a very long response to, and differentiation from, Norm Geras’s nuanced post on his position on the Iraq war (which I wrote about—and found myself agreeing with—here).

Here’s Kamm’s penultimate paragraph, in which he sums up his defense:

The system of containment and inspections could not cope with a despot of Saddam Hussein’s turpitude and duplicity. If Saddam had remained in power, our knowledge of and influence over his regime would have been nugatory. The regime would in all probability have endured, first because of its unspeakable brutality – in the aftermath of the first Gulf War the Kurdish and Shiite rebellions were snuffed out with the loss of some 50,000 lives in the single month of March 1991 – and secondly because of the dynastic succession of Saddam’s monstrous sons. We cannot make a reliable judgement on the consequences of allowing a state like this to persist in its internal repression, external aggression and flouting of UN requirements. But there is one thing we can say with certainty. In the last few weeks we have gained an insight into the probable future military capabilities of North Korea and Iran. The fact that we no longer have to worry about the military capabilities of Saddam Hussein and his family – not just now but maybe thirty years into the future – is a gain that may be greater than any of us can now conceive of. For that reason, among others, I insist that regime change in Iraq was right and immensely important.

It’s his final paragraph that really shook me, though, because it seems he is virtually alone among British public intellectuals in that he’s willing to defend the war on television:

In the last fortnight or so I have received quite a large number of invitations to appear on radio and television to argue the case for the Iraq War. I realise this is no reflection on my cogency; the programmes’ researchers state frankly that they have severe difficulty finding anyone willing to represent the pro-war view. I have appeared on some of these programmes debating, respectively, allegedly progressive and also High Tory opponents of the Government’s foreign policies. One thing on which my fellow interviewees and I, and everyone reading this, will be able to agree is that if the defence in the broadcast media of Tony Blair’s foreign policies is left to me, then Tony Blair is in trouble. I appeal to anyone reading this who may have influence in government circles to take this issue seriously. The case needs to be made. If we lose the argument at home, we shall fail to sustain our obligations in Iraq.

Unfortunately, I believe that the case was not made, that Blair and Bush tried—tried both to make the case and to change the game in the West’s favor—but failed. Why they failed will be argued for a long time. But fail they did.

And I fear that their having failed to make the case at home may cost us even more dearly than their having failed to change the game in our favor in Iraq. The bitter partisanship will continue, and we will all be distracted from the larger fight—the fight against the far enemy.

The right side of the blogosphere is all atwitter because Mark Halperin of ABC News has taken his self-criticism show on the road (in Act One, he “admits” that indeed the media is liberal and biased agasint conservatives. Says it isn’t fair). Wow!—he must have seen the light. Right?

Well, no. A commenter at Hot Air explains all:

FOX News is kicking their collective butts. This is not an honesty issue. They are trying to court roughly half of the nation because they are losing where it counts the most: their pocketbooks.

Does anyone really think that Mr. Halperin would be having this conversation with Mr. O’reilly if the MSM was kicking the crap out of FOX News?

It’s all about the Benjamins.

(edited and expanded since I wrote this late last night)

“No one likes a Cassandra,” I noted pompously about the heavy-handed sales techniques of Save-the-Earth maven Laurie David. That was back in April, when I was feeling more light-hearted—an eternity ago in the Feiler Faster-paced mediathon we’re on, to borrow the useful concepts of Mickey Kaus and Frank Rich, respectively.

But things are different now. The defeatism about Iraq (that it’s a disaster has become the conventional “wisdom”; that it was all a terrible mistake has, likewise, become the conventional “wisdom” in the MSM—the ideas behind the mission having been intertwined and conflated with the wretched execution of the mission), the rats abandoning the ship—and in many cases even declaring that there was no ship—has got me down. Way down.

Today, as I watch the bitter partisanship in the run-up to the midterms, I find myself turning off the television. At a time when we need to encourage, recruit, and enlist more boys and girls for the mission of defending the things we hold dearest, the relentless message of the irresponsible and ignorant (when not agenda-laden) press is: Bring the Boys Home.

This is the same America, watching out for its own and eager to get on with its own business and endeavors, that wasn’t paying attention on September 10, 2001. Only, we’re even more isolationist than before. (We certainly don’t hear a word about liberal interventionism a la Bill Clinton from the Democrats.) Apparently, there is no stomach in America, or in the West, for this confrontation. We will hunker down, gather in. I see a cautious, realist, accommodationist foreign policy on the horizon into the forseeable future, and even more stringent political correctness at home. On the surface, it seems to work so well for us—for the time being. We don’t yet have a problem with homegrown Islamists.

In these conditions, it’s tempting to stop worrying, to stop looking for trouble, to stop writing about it, to leave it behind, to stop blogging, to just live my life, which is full enough without my obsessively following the news and thinking and commenting about it. After all, “[t]he best thing about the future,” as Abraham Lincoln said, “is that it comes one day at a time.” It was interesting to read the August issue of New York magazine in which various writers speculated wistfully about what if 9/11 had never happened. I understood the impulse that motivated people to write about it, though I wouldn’t have wasted my brain cells on the endeavor. I am constitutionally incapable of saying “Wake me when it’s over.”

Still, it would be so easy to go back to living with, if not love, the threat of an Islamist bomb (figurative and literal) that’s off in some distant future. We have it so good here at home. Despite everything, life is good. To deny it would be a lie. Indeed, that’s America: we are still isolated from the hard realities facing, say, Europe by many, many, many layers. As I said, there is no serious homegrown Islamist threat here in America.

But as Emanuele Ottolenghi explains, some Americans seem to be drawing it nearer, simply because of their “natural” sympathies: [emphasis mine]:

For the hard left, Islamism is not just fighting a common enemy. It is a new revolutionary ideology that can give new vitality to its cause after its natural pool of supporters, European workers, became “bourgeois.” Besides, it offers a vast pool of voters: Muslim immigrants are by and large viewed as the new proletariat. Foreign policy issues unite the hard left and the Islamists in their hatred for America and Israel; and the romanticized reading of Islamist terrorism as the new wave of freedom fighters against imperialism offers a new redemptive narrative, the likes of which the hard left has not had since Che Guevara. For their part, Islamists recognize the potency of the human rights narrative and the seductive power of anti-colonialist rhetoric. Cloaking the mantle of the oppressed serves them well, turning their cause into a liberal cause. This is why these two strange bedfellows are forging political alliances across the continent. But their political relevance would be close to nil, were it not for a widespread embrace of multiculturalism and the worst kind of politically correct mentality.

And then he goes on to explain the danger we face as a result of political correctness, aka soft totalitarianism:

Left-wing liberals who justifiably denounce human rights abuses of the West against Muslims (Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, the Intifada, etc.) are often silent when the abuses come from the other side. And I am not talking about genocide in Darfur or the oppression of religious and national minorities across the Arab Middle East. I am not even referring to the frequently mentioned double standard that Israel gets on such scores. It’s much closer to home: it’s the willingness of many liberals to endorse self-censorship when freedom of speech is seen as offensive to Muslims. Just look at how the issue of the Danish cartoons was treated by many a liberal in Europe. A recent leak from internal BBC debates indicates that the well respected news giant would not lose sleep over satirical programs where the Bible is derided but would censor a show where the Koran gets similar treatment. Making fun of Jesus is OK –if Christians get offended, the banner of free speech is always within easy hand reach of the self-righteous politically correct crowd. Making fun of Mohammad is not OK–we cannot hurt the sensitivities of Muslims.

Why not?

Boris Johnson, a Tory MP and former editor of the Spectator, gave the most candid of answers, during the Danish cartoons? crisis. Explaining to his readers why his magazine did not republish them, Johnson said, “the real reason, gentle readers, was nothing to do with taste. We weren’t being responsible. We weren’t respectful. At least I wasn’t. The truth is we were just a little bit frightened and so is everyone else now.”

Moral relativism is the fear of believing that your values are somehow better than others. The minute that you find it distasteful to defend those values because you are not sure they are worth defending or because someone else might get offended, the door is open for freedom to be trampled upon.

That the first ones to be trampled upon may be the Jews is immaterial to the broader picture. For sooner or later, everyone, not just the Jews, will be afraid.

These are stark words of warning.

People won’t listen. They never do.

(visit the Georgetown Book Shop site to order posters—and spread the word)

The so-called president of Iran, Ahmadinejad, is fond of saying that the Jews of Israel should go back to Europe, from whence they came.

Anti-Semitism in Europe has forced Jews to leave their countries of origin - but what they did instead was occupy a country which is not theirs but that of Palestinians,’ Ahmadinejad said in a press conference in Tehran.

The Farceur-in-Chief conveniently forgets to take notice not just of the continuous presence of Jews in the land of Israel for thousands of years but, more to the point for the sake of his argument, the fact that 52% of Israel’s current population is made up of Jews of Arab or North African origin—most of whose families ended up there after the expulsion of 700,000 to 900,000 (figures vary) Jews from Arab countries—Yemen, Iraq, Syria, Lybia, etc.—around the time of, or shortly after, the establishment of the State of Israel.

This was the subject of an interesting piece by Joseph Braude earlier this year in TNR [$$], “Due Recognition: the Jewish Refugee Problem.”

Nine hundred thousand Jews have been forced to flee their homes in Arab countries and Iran since the years leading up to the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. (Most left in two waves–immediately before or after Israel’s independence, and during the years following the Six Day War.) Some were deported outright; others faced widespread campaigns of violence and intimidation so unbearable as to render their ancestral homelands unlivable.

Though a small number of Jews from Arab countries identified as Zionists in the early twentieth century, most had been thoroughly integrated into their societies and embodied the fondest hopes for a progressive, pluralist form of Arab nationalism. They had started no war, yet they came to be overwhelmingly stigmatized as traitors by the majority culture.

Braude writes of his own family’s history (his mother lived through the Farhud—a pogrom/Kristallnacht sort of event in Baghdad in 1941—and was eventually able to flee Iraq along with 120,000 other Jews in the early 1950s). He also notes that Bill Clinton mentioned Jewish refugee problem:

To his credit, Bill Clinton understood that the refugee problem was not one-sided. In July 2000, he told Israeli television that “Israel is full of people, Jewish people, who lived in predominantly Arab countries who came to Israel because they were made refugees in their own land.” He called for an “international fund [to be] set up for the refugees” to resolve the claims of “both sides.”

Well, now there’s a movement calling for recognition of the Jewish refugee problem as part of the larger Middle East refugee problem:

World Jewish groups began a global campaign on Sunday calling for recognition of Jews from Arab countries as refugees in the Middle East conflict.

“The world sees the plight of Palestinian refugees, and not withstanding their plight, there must be recognition that Jews from Arab countries are also victims of the Arab-Israeli conflict,” said Stanley Urman, executive director of Justice for Jews from Arab Countries (JJAC). JJAC, a U.S.-based coalition of Jewish organisations, is one of the groups coordinating the campaign which aims to record testimonies of Jews who fled in the face of persecution, list asset losses and lobby foreign governments on their behalf.

This campaign comes just in time, because Hamas seems to have adopted Ahmadinejad’s impudent rhetoric. Here’s Palestinian foreign minister Mahmoud al-Zahar in an interview with Spiegel:

SPIEGEL: But you reject a two state solution?

ZAHAR: We will never recognize Israel. The Zionists have occupied our land like the Nazis did with France during the Second World War. Israel is a foreign element in the Middle East. Why don’t the Jews establish their state in Europe?

In the run-up to the opening of Borat, here’s Lewis Beale, an entertainment journalist, telling us he’s not in love with creator Sacha Baron Cohen or his character. Also: Beale has some questions:

I was talking to a 20th Century Fox publicist last week about Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, and the conversation wasn’t about its alleged anti-Semitism or the way it picks on America’s rubes and racists. No, I was wondering if actor/co-writer Sacha Baron Cohen was actually going to do interviews as himself rather than in character, as he’s been doing for the past several months. The publicist wanted to know why I asked, and I responded that interviewing Cohen as Borat held absolutely no interest for me.

“It’s shtick,” I said. “And as a journalist, I’m not interested in promoting shtick. I’d really like to know why he chose Kazakhstan as Borat’s home, why all the Jewish stuff is in the film and if he thinks that in many cases, the object of his satire is akin to shooting fish in a barrel.”

Said flack was amazed I wasn’t interested in a Borat interview; everyone else was dying to query the Kazakh buffoon. (If you don’t believe me, read this. And watch a Borat “press conference” here).

Yep, Borat is shtick (I guess we are still allowed to use the word). And Beale’s questions are in fact interesting ones, but he’s unlikely to get them answered in the run-up to the movie. He suggests that Baron Cohen appearing only in character is merely a way to peddle the film, and that the craven entertainment press is only too eager to lap it up, because that’s standard operating procedure:

It’s not just that editors and writers seem to be uninterested in real reporting (under the mistaken assumption that readers don’t care), there’s also the fact that slowly but surely, they’ve allowed the PR machine to dictate what they write, and even how it gets played.

Don’t believe me? Just check out the outlets who will willingly sign legal documents stating that the piece being written, or the photo being shot, can only show up in the publication, Web site, etc. that the interview was scheduled for. In other words: You want the interview, you have to promise you won’t sell it to another outlet. You want the photo, you have no resale or syndication rights. In some cases, you have to promise specific placement before you get the access you want.

Yep, the entertainment press is craven. But in this case Baron Cohen is also shrewd. The social commentary and satire aspects of his film and character require him to be Borat, rather than Sacha Baron Cohen, in public…for the moment. Whether the creator will actually comment on the meaning of Borat the character, and of Borat the movie, remains to be seen.

Meanwhile: Beale’s point is very well taken. The entertainment press is craven. And so is a lot of the rest of the press. Which is one reason journalism is in such deep trouble.

Last week, I mentioned that Reuters had taken a small step for man and a giant leap for mankind by establishing a news bureau in the online simulation-world-site Second Life. Well, miracle of miracles, as the Guardian reports, it turns out that book publishers got there first.

The first time I meet Penguin’s digital publisher, Jeremy Ettinghausen, I crash land at his feet. Admirably unperturbed, he shows me his house, we have a chat about Penguin’s latest digital initiative, then fly to a library before he teleports me into the future….

Businesses as diverse as car manufacturers (such as Toyota) and clothing companies (including Adidas and American Apparel) have established a presence in Second Life; the news agency Reuters recently made the news itself by announcing that it is to embed a journalist within Second Life to hunt down stories to report back to the real world.

Penguin, however, is the first major publisher to dip its toe into the virtual world and, appropriately, it has chosen Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash as the book with which to test the waters. With its invention of the notion of a “metaverse” (a contraction of “metaphysical universe”) it is acknowledged as the inspiration behind Second Life and other virtual worlds.

Penguin went whole-hog with this experiment, working with Rivers Run Red, a “virtual world design agency” (who knew??), to create a version of Snow Crash that would appeal to Second Life visitors:

[T]his offers readers excerpts of the text, an audio clip and a link which clicks through to a dedicated Second Life page on the Penguin website, complete with the opportunity to buy the book at a discount. They are now developing a virtual bookshelf of other Penguin titles for the Second Life resident.

Penguin isn’t the only publisher to latch on to the Second Life phenomenon. A small press has opened shop there too:

This “ground-up” approach to publishing within Second Life is interesting a publisher at the other end of the commercial spectrum. Neal Hoskins (avatar name Fernando Proctor) is the publisher-founder of Winged Chariot, a real-world small press specialising in children’s literature in translation. He is a relatively newcomer to Second Life but, when we meet for a (virtual) cuppa by a (virtual) roaring fire in a (virtual) log cabin, he is keen to talk about the opportunities for developing literature within the world rather than bringing it in from outside.

In the virtual world there are benefits to being a small publisher, says Hoskins. You can move more quickly to experiment with new ideas, and there is less competition from the “big guys”.

“I’d like to look for talent in here,” he muses, “I envisage starting small with something like a poetry or secrets wall where residents can leave notes about their Second Life experiences, and then publishing the best of them, like Paul Auster’s True Tales of American Life. The book could even be brought back into the real world. We could open a fiction imprint list in Second Life, something that’s really difficult for an independent publisher in real life.”

Whether these experiments pay off in dollars remains to be seen, but Second Life has certainly captured the imagination of a lot of people: there are 1 million subscribers so far.

You can follow Penguin UK’s discussion about virtual publishing here, on their blog.

It’s particularly important to me to post this about Hitchens on the fiftieth anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution:

He knows he’s right, and I know he’s right.

That makes two of us willing to admit it, even if one of us is pseudonymous.

Too bad the New Yorker profile isn’t online. It’s hilarious the way Ian Parker makes Hitchens’s friends Salman Rushdie and Ian Buruma seem so very worried about their pal. (What a joke!) But then as we can see from Alexander Cockburn’s reminiscences, Parker initiated his “interview” with the question “What happened to Hitchens?”, which, to his credit, Cockburn asked for elucidation on:

Parker to AC

Many thanks. It’s good to hear from you. Here goes: What happened to Christopher Hitchens?

AC to Parker

Thanks, Ian.
Hello Ian, Sorry for pause; there have been a couple of mechanical crises. I write this from south eastern Utah. But what an odd question. Nothing happened to Christopher Hitchens. Best Alex C

Parker to AC

Hi. I suppose I meant: You were friends and allies, and now you’re not; how would you describe what happened in between?

While everyone else is wondering “what happened to Hitchens,” I’m wondering what the hell is wrong with the rest of you…

On the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the Hungarian Revolution, during which students, patriots, poets, workers, and intellectuals tried to throw off the totalitarian Russian yoke and died in their thousands as they faced off against Soviet tanks, it’s a question I must ask as a supporter of  America’s effort to liberate Iraq from Saddam:

Where are the Iraqi freedom fighters?

(please see below for copyright information crediting Time magazine, January 7, 1957) 

The Hungarian Revolution lasted two weeks. During the next two weeks, I’ll try to write more about the similarities with Iraq, and about my despair regarding the differences.

This image is a scan of a cover of an issue of TIME magazine, and the copyright for it is held by Time Warner, the parent company of TIME. Under fair use doctrine, the use of a low-resolution image of this TIME magazine cover, along with the several other aspects of fair use may allow me to use this image in this post.

It is believed that the use of this image qualifies as fair use under United States copyright law.

The Japanese called them “comfort women” during World War Two. Now the idea has been revived by a Dutch “mayoress” (that’s the word used by The Age [Australia], which reports the story):

“The army must consider ways its soldiers can let off steam,” Annemarie Jorritsma, mayor of the town of Almere in central Netherlands and a member of the ruling VVD liberals, told Dutch television.

“There was once the suggestion that a few prostitutes should accompany troops on missions. I think that is something we should talk about,” she said, adding that the prostitutes would keep soldiers from turning to local women.

Her comments have drawn a mixed response in the Netherlands, renowned for its liberal prostitution laws.

No word on what Dutch Islamists have to say on the subject…

For the second time in a month, I am surprised by the official reaction of the United States to international incidents—I don’t know what else to call them—that it did not attempt to control.

On October 8, I wrote about the controversy that had erupted over  so-called “insurgent videos” from Iraq that were available on YouTube and Google Video, which were matched by videos posted from our side of the conflict. I noticed the military’s hands-off approach:

Presumably, the military hopes the videos from our guys will also act as “force multipliers” for our side. It’s part of the information war: we can’t afford for that to be asymmetrical. We need to answer fire with fire. And so the gruesome videos appear, until YouTube or Google deems them offensive.

Now comes the insurgent sniper video showing “insurgents” targeting and hitting U.S. troops that was obtained and aired—endlessly, it seems—by CNN. This second incident has caused a much bigger public controversy, with several outraged congressmen writing to Rumsfeld to demand that the videos be taken off YouTube and GoogleVideo.

No response from Rumsfeld yet, as far as I know. The president, however, is playing it cool:

[Rep. Duncan] Hunter said he suspected that CNN’s hunger for ratings might have factored into the decision to air the video.

In their letter to Rumsfeld, the congressmen recommended that “all CNN reporters presently embedded with U.S. soldiers be removed from their embedded positions immediately.”

White House spokesman Tony Snow declined yesterday to second-guess CNN’s decision.

“Those are editorial judgments, and I’m not going to tell you what you do and don’t run,” Snow said at a White House briefing. “This is a free country.”

He said, however, that the president worries that insurgents are providing such images in an effort to break the will of the American people.

“It’s not going to work,” Snow said.

Snow can afford to play it cool while the hotheads in Congress go way over the top and do Bush’s job for him by demanding that the government censor the Internet. Which of course is completely undemocratic and illiberal, not to mention idiotic. However, one idiocy from the shrill right wing doesn’t need to be matched by an idiocy from the shrill left wing. But guess what?

Jeffrey Dvorkin, formerly the ombudsman for NPR and now executive director of the Committee of Concerned Journalists in Washington, thinks that CNN “did an important journalistic job in reporting this.”  Then he generously

said Hunter and others were free to criticize CNN, a frequent target of conservative media critics. But he noted the timing of the complaints: a few weeks before the midterm elections.

The San Diego Union-Tribune helpfully goes on to explain the context:

In recent months, dozens of graphic, insurgent-made videos showing attacks on U.S. troops have been posted on YouTube and other Internet sites.

YouTube has removed many of the tapes due to complaints from users.

But Dvorkin is utterly misleading in his condemnation, because people are specifically condemning a cable news network—which is, presumably, seen by more viewers than are YouTube videos—for airing what they consider a snuff film. And the Union-Tribune is equally misleading in itsreporting, because it fails to draw the distinction between videos posted on YouTube and video aired in heavy rotation on CNN. Unless CNN now plays second fiddle to YouTube in influence. Which the paper ought to report if that’s what it’s suggesting, because it would be kind of mind-blowing.

The hands-off reaction of our government and military is what interests me most about these stories. I wonder if it’s because they know they can’t control the media war (they can only play it) or because they suspect that condemning CNN—or giving any kind of official reaction—would enhance the effectiveness of this kind of terrorist weapon.

Stand up, Hungarians, your country calls.
The time for now or never falls.
Are we to live as slaves or free?
Choose one. This is our destiny!
By the God of all the Magyars, we swear.
We swear never again the chains to bear.

—Sandor Petofi

My inner grammarian was aroused by a sentence in “Olbermania,” a piece at TNR’s The Plank:

The reason Olbermann sticks out like a sore thumb (and I assume the reason that NR wanted to run a piece on him) is that he is really the only major television host who espouses explicitly left opinions.

There’s a misplaced modifier in that sentence. It’s not that his opinions are explicitly left. It’s that Olbermann is the only major television host who explicitly espouses them. The rest of them deliver their bias through defamatory innuendo, as Bret Stephens wrote long ago in connection with Eason Jordan’s claim that journalists were being targeted in Iraq [emphasis mine]:

I’ll leave it to others to draw their own verdicts, but here’s mine: Whether with malice aforethought or not, Mr. Jordan made a defamatory innuendo. Defamatory innuendo–rather than outright allegation–is the vehicle of mainstream media bias. Had Mr. Jordan’s innuendo gone unchallenged, it would have served as further proof to the Davos elite of the depths of American perfidy.

For what it’s worth: I find Olbermann creepy, bordering on unhinged at times. That’s the Infotainment Imperative at play, I guess: everyone needs a schtick. (Are we still allowed to use Yiddish words? or are they uncool in the post-Tribal, anti-Zionist era?)

Yvonne Ridley, a pal of George Galloway’s, writes in today’s Washington Post: “How I Came to Love the Veil“:

I used to look at veiled women as quiet, oppressed creatures — until I was captured by the Taliban.

It’s all downhill from there, since she converts to Islam—after she discovers that only through Islam can she be liberated as a woman:

I was a Western feminist for many years, but I’ve discovered that Muslim feminists are more radical than their secular counterparts. We hate those ghastly beauty pageants, and tried to stop laughing in 2003 when judges of the Miss Earth competition hailed the emergence of a bikini-clad Miss Afghanistan, Vida Samadzai, as a giant leap for women’s liberation. They even gave Samadzai a special award for “representing the victory of women’s rights.”

Some young Muslim feminists consider the hijab and the nikab political symbols, too, a way of rejecting Western excesses such as binge drinking, casual sex and drug use. What is more liberating: being judged on the length of your skirt and the size of your surgically enhanced breasts, or being judged on your character and intelligence? In Islam, superiority is achieved through piety — not beauty, wealth, power, position or sex.

I don’t know whether to laugh or weep. I urge my readers to pick up a copy of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Lipstick Jihad, or Persepolis for views about what it’s like behind the veil for those who have no choice but to wear it.