Here’s Judea Pearl, father of the beheaded WSJ journalist Daniel Pearl, on how to watch Al Jazeera. (Hint: carefully)

[F]or two months now Al Jazeera has been taking its mixture of news coverage and extremist propagandizing to our front door through an English-language station. Called Al Jazeera English, the network can be received via satellite or streamed over the Internet. It has bureaus in London and Washington, and has recruited such high-profile Western journalists as Sir David Frost as correspondents.

In part, this is promising. The Arabic version of Al Jazeera and its various spinoffs on satellite TV and the Internet are usually credited with having a positive influence on Arab society. …

Now for the caution [emphasis added]:

But what should concern Westerners is that the ideology of men like Sheik Qaradawi saturates many of the network’s programs, and is gaining wider acceptance among Muslim youths in the West. In its “straight” news coverage on its Arabic TV broadcasts and Web sites, Al Jazeera’s reports consistently amplify radical Islamist sentiments (although without endorsing violence explicitly). …

In short, Al Jazeera’s editors choreograph a worldview in which an irreconcilable struggle rages between an evil-meaning Western oppressor and its helpless, righteous Arab victims. Most worrisome, perhaps, it often reports on supposed Western conspiracies behind most Arab hardships or failings, thus fueling the sense of helplessness, humiliation and anger among Muslim youths and helping turn them into potential recruits for terrorist organizations.

This is exactly what David Kilcullen, counterterrorism expert, has written about—that we need to find ways to “turn” potential jihadists before they actually become jihadists. Meanwhile, Al Jazeera is busy creating new ones every day.

Nevertheless, Pearl is not in favor of shutting down Al Jazeera. Bravo. I agree completely. It’s an unwelcome reality that the Arabic satellite channels are broadcasting anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Semitic material 24/7, but it’s a reality we have to live with. Sooner or later we will have to challenge it—and top it. With effective counterpropaganda.

That is a decades-long project.

Meanwhile: note from Judea Pearl to the Daily Show guys and Rachel Sklar at Eat the Press (even though they’re not journalists), who think Al Jazeera English is the bees’ knees:

I wouldn’t call for banning Al Jazeera English in the United States even if that were possible. It is important to extend a hand to the network because it can become a force for good; but it is as important for our news organizations to scrutinize its content and let its viewers know when anti-Western wishes are subverting objective truth.  

Andrew Sullivan thinks America and the West are morally stained. 

Now John Judis says the United States has become a rogue state.

 What exactly are we doing in the Horn of Africa, where we have encouraged the Christian government of Ethiopia to invade Somalia and replace its Islamic government? As far as I can tell, we have violated international law, committed war crimes, helped Al Qaeda recruit new members, and involved ourselves in a guerrilla war that could last decades. It’s Iraq writ small. And it can’t be blamed on Donald Rumsfeld.

Both writers are driven by worries about America’s image.

What is their suggestion for fighting the war against global jihadism effectively, so as to destroy and discredit it, without making “them” hate “us” even more than “they” have hated “us” for decades? 

How do you eradicate a foul enemy while making nice with the world’s many, many, many humiliated Muslims?

Riddle me that, fellas.

update: I added a link and a quote. 

After listing some of the book’s most egregious errors, the Jerusalem Post has an interesting question for the publisher of Jimmy Carter’s book Palestine: Peace not Apartheid:

The question is why a publisher such as Simon and Schuster should be exempt from fact-checking a book billed and sold as non-fiction history - and from issuing forthright corrections when such serious errors have been printed.

Then the Post answers its own question:

The assumption, evidently, is that the company producing, promoting and profiting from a supposedly non-fiction history on a contentious topic, bears no responsibility for the book’s accuracy - or falsity. Indeed, Simon and Schuster makes no pretense of assuring the factual merit of its product or of planning to redress errors.

That is correct: the author is responsible for the contents of his/her book—and so it stipulates in the boilerplate publishing contract.

But it is interesting to note that Oprah’s wrath caused James Frey’s publishers to go to great public lengths to address the issues she raised. Contrast this with Carter’s publisher:

Vice President of Corporate Communications Adam Rothberg told Publishers Weekly when asked whether S&S will change the book: “We’re going to stick with the president’s version.”

The difference? There hasn’t been enough public outcry over Carter’s book to force the publisher’s hand [no "PR nightmare," to quote the article linked above].

Advice to the forlorn book (and fact) lover: caveat lector.

America has been unalterably morally stained by the war in Iraq, says Andrew Sullivan:

to my mind, by far the deepest damage has been to the idea of America, to the decency of America, and its reputation for responsibility in world affairs. From authorizing torture to the acquiescence in mass murder, this president has stained the honor of this country and the West.

I have a question for the insufferable moralist Andrew Sullivan:

What arrows will be left in your quiver when the United States really goes to war?

So it goes for Lewis “Scooter” Libby, who has been sentenced by the anti-war crowd and the media establishment, among others, to be the neocons’ whipping boy as the Bush administration’s Iraq policy goes on trial.

Following are select phrases from today’s article in the New York Times.

For the prosecution:

 He is the White House policy enforcer …

alter ego to Vice President Dick Cheney …

he is charged with repeatedly lying to a grand jury and to the F.B.I.

nothing was more political than the administration’s use of defective intelligence to take the country to war, in which Mr. Libby was deeply involved

the trial will inevitably carry symbolic weight beyond the legal question of whether Mr. Libby lied.

 helped assemble a dossier on Saddam Hussein

[fought] to keep in [Powell's] speech evidence that Mr. Powell found questionable

It was Mr. Libby, at Mr. Cheney’s direction, who repeatedly spoke to reporters to rebut Joseph C. Wilson IV

“Libby didn’t plan the war,” said John Prados, a historian of national security who wrote a book in 2004 on the flawed Iraq intelligence. “But he did enable the administration to set out on that course. He was the facilitator.”

at Yale, Mr. Libby took courses from a young political science instructor, Paul D. Wolfowitz, who became the chief intellectual theorist of the Iraq war. Seven years older, Mr. Wolfowitz was the critical mentor in recruiting Mr. Libby to the neoconservative camp,

Some experts find the seeds of the current president’s assertive foreign policy in a 1992 military policy paper that Mr. Libby helped draft.

Many in Washington saw his views as indistinguishable from the vice president’s,

Some colleagues later wondered whether his focus on [terrorist threats long before 9/11] had became too single-minded.

particularly after the shock of Sept. 11 “Scooter considered it to be part of his job to think about dire possibilities.”

By all accounts, Mr. Libby brought his worst-case approach to the debate over Mr. Hussein’s threat.

His legal defense fund has a board that would be the envy of any conservative institution, including five former cabinet members, five former members of Congress and seven former ambassadors.

 For the defense:

 a buttoned-down Washington lawyer who likes knocking back tequila shots in cowboy bars and hurtling down mountains on skis and bikes; and a 56-year-old intellectual

“I don’t often use the word ‘incomprehensible,’ but this is incomprehensible to me,” said Dennis Ross, the veteran Middle East troubleshooter who is now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “He’s a lawyer who’s as professional and competent as anyone I know. He’s a friend, and when he says he’s innocent, I believe him. I just can’t account for this case.”

“He’s going to be the poster boy for the criminalization of politics, and he’s not even political,” said Mary Matalin, Mr. Cheney’s former political adviser

At college, Mr. Libby began writing a novel, a mystery set at a country inn in 1903 in Japan, where he had spent the summer of 1969. He rewrote the book off and on for 25 years before it was published as “The Apprentice” in 1996, to glowing reviews (“a small triumph of meticulous craftsmanship,” The Washington Post said), though after his indictment The New Yorker mocked its sex scenes.

“[His liberal wife] probably cancels his vote every four years,” said Jackson Hogen, a friend of Mr. Libby since his Andover days, a ski partner and a liberal Democrat. “It’s a credit to Scooter that he can maintain a friend like me and a wife like her all these years.”

Kenneth Adelman, a friend from the Reagan administration, invited the family for a week’s vacation in Colorado last summer and took Mr. Libby to lunch with a liberal, pacifist local columnist, Paul Andersen. … Mr. Andersen learned later that he had been talking with a man whom he had considered a symbol for all that was wrong with an administration that he holds in contempt.

If Mr. Libby broke the law, Mr. Andersen said, he should be held accountable. …”It [seems] a dreadful shame that circumstances can sometimes ruin lives.”

 What a dreadful shame. Tsk-tsk.

A must-read column from Spengler, who has a unique take on Jimmy Carter, his dread of “the horror! the horror!”, his otherwise incomprehensible animus against Israel… and what it all means for the United States and the Middle East:

White southerners who dwell on the subject of forgiveness and reconciliation can evince a unique sort of self-serving hypocrisy. They cannot come to terms with the evil of the ancestors whom they portray as gallant, aristocratic warriors. It is not the descendants of African slaves whom they pity as an oppressed class, but rather themselves.

Think of Frodo Baggins in Lord of the Rings explaining to Samwise why he cannot give up hope for Gollum’s redemption from the curse of Sauron’s ring, because that would weaken Frodo’s hope for his own redemption. This form of obsessive self-pity produces the unctuous forms of expression that make it so painful to listen to a Jimmy Carter or a Bill Clinton talk about political morality. …

Americans invented the war of extermination in the modern world - the total war that only can be won killing so many of the enemy that not enough young men are left to be put into the line. The US south chafes in anger and shame at its defeat, and the north recoils in horror from its own victory. Americans, in their amnesia and denial, blot out the idea that other peoples also must fight until they have exterminated the recalcitrant among their own populations.

Jimmy Carter personifies the “white guilt” that Shelby Steele wrote about in May:

After World War II, revolutions across the globe, from India to Algeria and from Indonesia to the American civil rights revolution, defeated the authority inherent in white supremacy, if not the idea itself. And this defeat exacted a price: the West was left stigmatized by its sins. Today, the white West–like Germany after the Nazi defeat–lives in a kind of secular penitence in which the slightest echo of past sins brings down withering condemnation. There is now a cloud over white skin where there once was unquestioned authority.

I call this white guilt not because it is a guilt of conscience but because people stigmatized with moral crimes–here racism and imperialism–lack moral authority and so act guiltily whether they feel guilt or not. …

White guilt makes our Third World enemies into colored victims, people whose problems–even the tyrannies they live under–were created by the historical disruptions and injustices of the white West. We must “understand” and pity our enemy even as we fight him. And, though Islamic extremism is one of the most pernicious forms of evil opportunism that has ever existed, we have felt compelled to fight it with an almost managerial minimalism that shows us to be beyond the passions of war–and thus well dissociated from the avariciousness of the white supremacist past.

This Marxist rot, which, Carter claims, doesn’t get a fair hearing in the United States, is pretty much what’s being fed to “elite” students across America. See, for example, Frank Luntz’s 2004 study of the thinking of American graduate students about the Middle East.

Think on that awhile.