Everybody’s doing it.

in Iraq:

Palestinians living in Iraq have been warned that they will be killed by Shia militias unless they leave the country immediately. …Now the Shia militias are stepping up their campaign to drive out Iraq’s 20,000 remaining Palestinians – half the estimated 40,000 living in the country at the start of the war, all of whom were welcomed by Saddam Hussein and provided with housing, money and free education. …Hundreds of Iraqis were forced to leave their homes to make way for the migrants, many of whom joined the ruling Ba’ath party. …

“We are sure that all the Palestinians in Iraq are involved in killing the Shia people and they have to pay the price now,” [Sheik Mahmoud El Hassani, a spokesman for the Mehdi Army] said. “They lived off our blood under Saddam. We were hungry with no food and they were comfortable with full bellies. They should leave now, or they will have to pay.”

and in Poland:

POLAND trembled this month when the newly appointed Catholic archbishop of Warsaw, Stanislaw Wielgus, announced his resignation after revelations that he had collaborated with the Communist secret police. The Wielgus scandal seemed to portend a new era in the church’s lustration, or the purging of former secret police collaborators. So far, that has been a slow process, because Pope John Paul II guided the Polish church with principles of reconciliation and mercy rather than revenge. Only after his death did the files on the clergy begin to leak out.

Today in Poland, lustration has become a tool not only of revenge, but of politics. What may look like an effort to reconcile with the Communist past is something else entirely. It is an assault on reconciliation and a generational bid for power.

And in Ireland:

BELFAST (Reuters) - Top officers within Northern Ireland’s police force allowed Protestant paramilitary informers to carry out murders for more than a decade, a report by the province’s police ombudsman said on Monday.

The report, which details findings from a three-year probe, says Special Branch officers turned a blind eye to the criminal activities of a unit of the outlawed Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in order to protect “agents” within its ranks.

Between 1991 and 2003 members of the Belfast-based UVF gang killed 10 people, including a Presbyterian minister and a Roman Catholic taxi driver, and were linked to a catalogue of other crimes including shootings, drug dealing and extortion.

“It would be easy to blame the junior officers’ conduct in dealing with various informants and indeed they are not blameless,” Ombudsman Nuala O’Loan said in a statement.

“However, they could not have operated as they did without the knowledge and support at the highest levels of the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).”

Compared to all that, the blog and pundit wars are nothing. But then we’ve got almost two more years till the election.

Sadly, Newsweek Baghdad correspondent Mike Hastings lost his about-to-be-fiancee in Iraq last week.

Andrea Parhamovich— “Andi” to her friends—was killed in an ambush in Baghdad. A 28-year-old civilian consultant working for the nonprofit National Democratic Institute, she was in a convoy when gunmen opened fire; Al Qaeda-linked Sunni insurgents claimed responsibility.

Reflecting on her death in an e-mail to his Newsweek colleagues, Hastings wrote [emphasis mine]:

“We all take risks over here, and we know the risks. It’s part of the job. But killing a soldier or getting whacked as a war correspondent is one thing—still tragic yet somehow more acceptable—but killing a civilian here to help is just despicable. Shouldn’t have happened. Is it worth it? Good question, don’t have an answer really. I hope it is, have my doubts, but more so, I hope she isn’t forgotten. She wanted to be here, to be a part of history. She loved the adventure and the romance of it all. She loved helping people, making a difference. She loved politics; her heroes were Joan of Arc and Empress SiSi of Austria. (In other words: strong independent women. Like I said, she was a handful.)

“America could not have asked for a better face, a better representative in Iraq. She’s the best and the brightest of her generation, the best of what our country stands for, and she was killed by truly evil people with a bankrupt ideology. I sound like Bush, but I think we can sometimes forget how bad these guys are.”

Well, not to put too fine a point on it… but yes.

Am I taking a cheap shot? Sure. I don’t care. I hope a bit of what Hastings and his Newsweek colleagues learned from this terrible, bitter experience will stick.

On this theme, writing in City Journal, Hitchens contemplates Mark Steyn’s obsession with

the general apathy and surrender of the West in the face of a determined assault from a religious ideology, or an ideological religion, afflicted by no sickly doubt about what it wants or by any scruples about how to get it.

Many of us share this obsession. Hitchens asks:

How does one respond, in other words, when an enemy challenges not just your cherished values but additionally forces you to examine the very assumptions that have heretofore seemed to underpin those values?

That is the question, isn’t it? Since 9/11 and up until now, liberals have consistently disappointed by falling back on Frantz Fanon:

[Liberals] cannot shake their subliminal identification of the Muslim religion with the wretched of the earth: the black- and brown-skinned denizens of what we once called the “Third World.” You can see this identification in the way that the Palestinians (about 20 percent of whom were Christian until their numbers began to decline) have become an “Islamic” cause and in the amazing ignorance that most leftists display about India, a multiethnic secular democracy under attack from al-Qaida and its surrogates long before the United States was. And you can see it, too, in the stupid neologism “Islamophobia,” which aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.

This kind of thinking is old, tired, and simply not good enough. Hitchens again:

Islamist suicide-terrorism has mutated into new shapes and adopted fresh grievances as a result of the mobilization against it. Liberalism has found even more convoluted means of blaming itself for the attack upon it. But at least the long period of somnambulism is over, and the opportunity now exists for antibodies to form against the infection.

Still:

The Islamist threat itself may be crude, but this is an intricate cultural and political challenge that will absorb all of our energies for the rest of our lives: we are all responsible for doing our utmost as citizens as well as for demanding more imagination from our leaders.

So I take my cheap shots where I can get them in order to preserve energy for the long fight ahead.

Back in April, after the New York Times ditched its BoldFace column in the wake of the Ron Burkle non-scandal, I joked “NYT Ditches Gossip Column, Goes Tabloid.”

At least I thought I was joking. Today, however, I note that gossip has gone mainstream: in today’s Times, Caryn James devotes an entire article to analyzing the ups and downs of movie star Angelina Jolie’s popularity during the past few months.

Before she set a toe on the red carpet at the Golden Globes last week, Angelina Jolie’s carefully molded image as humanitarian and mom was already showing some cracks. The Internet had been flooded with reports, picked up from European interviews, that she had called her biological daughter “a blob” with less personality than her two adopted kids, and had criticized Madonna’s adoption of a baby boy from Malawi. Women’s Wear Daily reported she was being difficult about designs from St. John, the staid company whose ads she appears in and whose conservatively elegant gown she wore to the Globes.

By the time she reached the end of a haughty, humorless walk down that red carpet on Brad Pitt’s arm, the Good Angelina image had crumbled to dust.

There are sure to be squeals of distress from media critics, who will cluck about how the Times has clearly lost its way. What has gotten into them? Since when do Times readers care about movie star gossip?

Let me pre-empt them. The gossip is a) fun and b) instructive in a world where the manufacture of images—be they of movie stars or of political stars—is important to understand. Caryn James says this outright [emphasis mine]:

Once famous as a tattooed wild woman, Ms. Jolie has soared to the saintly realm and plummeted again in record time. Madonna, her only rival in shape-shifting, has maintained the devoted wife and mother image for more than six years now, despite her recent adventures in adoption. Good Angelina didn’t even last two. That shattered image, a lesson in the limits of spin, is the product of a lethal combination: a public that never bought into the reformed persona and a star who may have bought into it too much.

The backlash had been building all along, and not simply because, while married to Billy Bob Thornton, she wore a vial of his blood around her neck. (No fair blaming the press for her vampirish image.)

At least that’s how I’d answer the critics if I had to defend James’s piece. Indeed, I’d write a lot more in general about the celebrity-manufacturing aspect of politics and of all public life. Celebrities have enormous power to grab and hold the attention of the public, and thus to persuade the public; it is only fair that they—the real people behind the public images, that is—be subject to scrutiny.

This applies, of course, to media stars such as Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Hassan Nasrallah much more than it does to, say, the Jolie-Pitts. But the star-making machinery behind both kinds of celebrities operates on the same principles. You can read all about the celebrity-making machinery in sociologist Joshua Gamson’s Claims to Fame and also in Rein et al’s High Visibility.

Or you can read Caryn James and extrapolate a bit. But there’s a lot more to this. As the mood strikes, I’ll write about it.