Entries Tagged 'tyranny' ↓

I’m not part of the gun culture and I don’t know anything about it (although I do have a home in a corner of rural Red America where there is a gun culture—the local gunshop is called Big Toys for Boys—and many of the local men hunt: for food. The venison from one deer can go a long way to feeding a family).
Knowing nothing about them but their name, I have to say that “assault rifles” sound like overkill to me (no pun intended) when it comes to hunting. (I repeat: that’s how the term sounds. Hunting isn’t about “assaulting” animals. It’s about killing them.)

Now a once popular big-time outdoorsman/writer has been purged—overnight—for suggesting that assault rifles are “terrorist” weapons.

Modern hunters rarely become more famous than Jim Zumbo. A mustachioed, barrel-chested outdoors entrepreneur who lives in a log cabin near Yellowstone National Park, he has spent much of his life writing for prominent outdoors magazines, delivering lectures across the country and starring in cable TV shows about big-game hunting in the West.

Zumbo’s fame, however, has turned to black-bordered infamy within America’s gun culture — and his multimedia success has come undone. It all happened in the past week, after he publicly criticized the use of military-style assault rifles by hunters, especially those gunning for prairie dogs.

“Excuse me, maybe I’m a traditionalist, but I see no place for these weapons among our hunting fraternity,” Zumbo wrote in his blog on the Outdoor Life Web site. The Feb. 16 posting has since been taken down. “As hunters, we don’t need to be lumped into the group of people who terrorize the world with them. . . . I’ll go so far as to call them ‘terrorist’ rifles.”

The reaction — from tens of thousands of owners of assault rifles across the country, from media and manufacturers rooted in the gun business, and from the National Rifle Association — has been swift, severe and unforgiving. Despite a profuse public apology and a vow to go hunting soon with an assault weapon, Zumbo’s career appears to be over.

His top-rated weekly TV program on the Outdoor Channel, his longtime career with Outdoor Life magazine and his corporate ties to the biggest names in gunmaking, including Remington Arms Co., have been terminated or are on the ropes.

Now, someone tell me how powerful and influential the nefarious Israel Lobby is. I dare ya.

That’s me. (Shhhh—don’t tell anyone. You’ll ruin my image.)

Why am I a cheap date? Because I am happy to receive this single measly gift—from Reuters of all places—for my one-year blogging anniversary: news that some prominent Europeans have not lost their minds, and that they are willing to say so in public.

The French magazine that published two of the Mohammed cartoons a year ago is having its day in court, having been sued by several Muslim groups for slander against all Muslims. 

Charlie Hebdo publisher Philippe Val said … the lack of prompt European support for Denmark as its embassies were attacked in the Middle East also upset him.

 

Val said the cartoons targeted Islamist militants: “In no way do they express any contempt for believers of any faith.”

He rejected suggestions from lawyers for the Muslim groups that Prophet Mohammad should be beyond criticism, saying religion had no place in the political sphere and that debate and criticism were essential elements of a democracy.

“What is sacred for a religion is sacred only for believers of that religion,” he told the court. “If we respected all the taboos of all religions, where would we be?” 

Indeed. A Paris professor weighed in too:

Paris University philosopher Abdel Wahhab Meddeb said he laughed when he saw Charlie Hebdo’s cartoon. “I urge Muslims to adapt to Europe and not the other way around. That would be catastrophic,” he told the court.

So did Le Monde:

“The trial against Charlie Hebdo is one of a different age,” the daily Le Monde wrote in an editorial. “In a secular state, no religion and no ideology is above the law. Where religion makes the law, one is close to totalitarianism.”

Finally, Reuters reminds us:

Courts in France, which observes a strict separation of church and state in the public sphere, have repeatedly defended free speech rights against religious objections.

Vive la révolution!

Andrew Sullivan links to a devastating column by Nick Cohen. It’s devastating for those like me and Cohen, who are infuriated by the deranged detachment of our fellows on the liberal left, and devastatingly on-target about my liberal-left cohort, which has abdicated moral responsibility and taken on the ill-fitting cloak of moral purity in the wake of 9/11 rather than face the realities that challenge its 30+-year-old worldview:

Why is it that apologies for a militant Islam which stands for everything the liberal left is against come from the liberal left? Why will students hear a leftish postmodern theorist defend the exploitation of women in traditional cultures but not a crusty conservative don? After the American and British wars in Bosnia and Kosovo against Slobodan Milosevic’s ethnic cleansers, why were men and women of the left denying the existence of Serb concentration camps? As important, why did a European Union that daily announces its commitment to the liberal principles of human rights and international law do nothing as crimes against humanity took place just over its borders? …

Why is the world upside down?

Of course Cohen has some answers:

My parents joined the Communist Party, but left it in their twenties. My father encouraged me to read Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s exposés of the Soviet Union and argue about them at the dinner table. He knew how bad the left could get, but this knowledge did not stop him from remaining very left-wing. He would never have entertained the notion that communism was as bad as fascism. In this, he was typical. Anti-communism was never accepted as the moral equivalent of anti-fascism, not only by my parents but also by the overwhelming majority of liberal-minded people. The left was still morally superior. Even when millions were murdered and tens of millions were enslaved and humiliated, the ‘root cause’ of crimes beyond the human imagination was the perversion of noble socialist ideals.

Every now and again, someone asks why the double standard persists to this day. The philosophical answer is that communism did not feel as bad as fascism because in theory, if not in practice, communism was an ideology that offered universal emancipation, while only a German could benefit from Hitler’s Nazism and only an Italian could prosper under Mussolini’s fascism. I’m more impressed by the matter-of-fact consideration that fascist forces took over or menaced Western countries in the Thirties and Forties, and although there was a communist menace in the Cold War, the Cold War never turned hot and Western Europe and North America never experienced the totalitarianism of the left.

Indeed. Never having experienced totalitarianism of the left, my cohort is unable—or unwilling—to take the leap of imagination necessary to confront the fact that totalitarianism, whether from the right, the left, or the fanatically “religious,” is a scourge on humanity.

The good fight today is against the forces of darkness that seek to deprive individuals across the globe of their excruciatingly hard-won political and personal freedoms—supposedly in the name of Allah but actually for bloody revenge and in quest of raw power.

I am a child of the dark forces of the 20th century. Rocked in the kindly bosom of America, I was able to rise above and to soar through my American dreams along with my cohort. But I can never forget where I came from.

You might call me your guilty conscience.

On the other hand, you might call me the unexploded ordnance of the 20th century.

We’re here. We won’t shut up. Get used to it.

In Commentary, Christian Delacampagne writes about France in the era of Islamism: a country seized by fear, which manifests itself as extreme political correctness and—more dangerously—as official denial.

Ostensibly, Delacampagne’s subject is his friend, high school teacher Robert Redeker, who was forced to go into hiding with his family after receiving death threats for a very strongly worded op-ed in Le Figaro titled “What Should the Free World Do in the Face of Islamist Intimidation?”. But Delacampagne is deeply concerned about the political climate that characterizes French academia and, consequently, French public opinion:

Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin was virtually the only public official who took an honorable position, declaring that this “fatwa” against a French intellectual was “unacceptable.” A group of centrist intellectuals, including Pascal Bruckner, Alain Finkielkraut, André Glucksmann, and Bernard-Henri Lévy, also issued an appeal on Redeker’s behalf and in defense of France’s “most fundamental liberties.”

But the vast majority of responses, even when couched as defenses of the right to free speech, were in fact hostile to the philosophy teacher. …France’s two largest teachers’ unions, both of them socialist, stressed that “they did not share Redeker’s convictions.” The leading leftist human-rights organizations went much farther, denouncing his “irresponsible declarations” and “putrid ideas.”

Among members of the media, Redeker was scolded for articulating his ideas so incautiously. On the radio channel Europe 1, Jean-Pierre Elkabach invited the beleaguered teacher to express his “regret.” The editorial board of Le Monde, France’s newspaper of record, characterized Redeker’s piece as “excessive, misleading, and insulting.” It went so far as to call his remarks about Muhammad “a blasphemy,”

Bottom line: in France, the birthplace of Voltaire, the homeland of engaged, brassy intellectuals, intellectuals are not allowed to criticize Islam, or even Islamism. Delacampagne believes one reason for this is the French academy’s long love affair with the Arab world and “Orientalism” (which in France, unlike in America after Edward Said, is apparently a good thing; I know—it’s awfully hard to keep track):

Today in France, research on the most contested issues of race and religion is taboo unless one exhibits the “right” politics. To speak at conferences or to be considered for important posts, a scholar must be prepared to describe the colonial era in French history as nothing less than an exercise in genocide and to denounce American policy in the Middle East as barbaric cruelty. Those who refuse to comply find themselves shut out.

Worse:

 The present generation of Orientalists is omnipresent in the French media, unavoidable on radio and television. They assure the country that the progressive Islamization of European suburbs, plain for all to see, poses no danger. They suggest that the problem with Israel is its very existence. They inspire the open sympathy with Hamas, Hizballah, and Iran that can be found in newspapers like Le Monde and Libération. And they encourage the use of the term “Islamophobia” (a coinage of Iranian clerics) in order to delegitimize all those who might be tempted to disagree with them—individuals like Redeker.

Sound familiar? It should, because it’s been going on in the blogosphere and commentariat right here in the good old “U.S. and A.” (thank you, Sacha Baron Cohen) for quite some time now.

Not coincidentally, I note that Andrew Sullivan posts his latest fence-sitting view on the war, and later refers to himself as having offered (to Bob Wright, on Bloggingheadstv) ”an abject apology for passionately supporting the Bush-run Iraq war.”

Thank you, Comrade Sullivan. We will take your nuanced self-criticism under advisement. 

(updated with a p.p.s.)

Over at Slate, Shmuel Rosner raises the complicated issues involved in the West’s strong support for the “moderate” Mahmoud Abbas (support that now comes also from Israel’s Olmert, as I mentioned earlier today) and the concomitant attempt to squash the radical theocratic Iran-backed terrorist group Hamas (which, inconveniently, was democratically elected in January—oops!).

As the dangerous situation in the Palestinian territories unravels, one question stands out: Who are the good guys? The politicians who are now trying to topple a democratically elected government or the people in power who are trying to pursue their ideology—one that they didn’t hide from the voters who freely chose to elect them? And how come all these world leaders are publicly siding with the revolutionaries?

One word. Ready for it? Realism—as in cynicism and in international relations “realism.”

Whatever you think of the Baker-Hamilton report and its shortcomings, it is realism that is making headway this week in the Palestinian territories. Realism—and a healthy dose of cynicism.

So, the Palestinians who oppose Abbas’ moves will be right when they point to this chain of events as the culmination of Western hypocrisy. But those who support him—in Palestine and around the world—will also be right. Sometimes, hypocrisy is the most basic way to recognize reality.

Hypocrisy: get used to it (although, truth be told, if you’re not used to it by now, you’re living on another plane, not in the plugged-in Globally PC world of the early 21st century).

p.s. I would love to believe that this—plan B, wherein we (Western-style progressive/moderates) lay aside talk of democracy and unite against a common foe (Islamofascist reactionaries)—will work. (I have grave doubts; but there’s always hope.)

As pertains to foreign policy: I think we (liberal hawkish neocon fellow-travelers) should not be wedded to ideology; that we should face the fact that conditions on the ground in Iraq were resistant to the fondest and sincerest hopes of the war planners; that democracy is still a goal but further off from realization in Iraq—and the Middle East, where representative government is stymied by tribalism—than we had hoped; that the chaos in the Middle East can only be (if that) managed (we hope), not solved; that regardless of how we handle Iraq, managing the Middle East would be well served by a concerted effort to make big public gestures to relieve the suffering of the Palestinian people (in a way that does not threaten Israeli security any more than it is already threatened); that an improvement in the lot of the Palestinian people is long, long overdue and a good in and of itself; and finally: that a visible improvement in the lot of the Palestinian people would be the biggest PR coup in living memory—and that it would force a change on the region.

But I may be daydreaming. Because that is precisely what our enemies are doing their level best to prevent.

p.p.s. For Rosner, Fatah are the “good guys” and Hamas are the “bad guys.”

For Jimmy Carter, the good guys are the Palestinians and the bad guys are the Israelis: that’s so 20th century.

Everybody’s blaming the Jews anyway—why not Sudan’s “leader”?

Sudan’s President Field Marshal Omar Hassan Ahmed al-Bashir claimed Tuesday that reports in western newspapers of hundreds of thousands dead in his country’s brutal civil war are all part of an Israeli-led worldwide conspiracy. …

In statements that appeared to be more in keeping with 1920s anti-Semitism than statesmanship, Field Marshal al-Bashir added that Israeli influence was at the center of the conflict, and all the world’s disputes.

Not very effective, those Jews. Despite their best efforts, they only managed to get 9,000—not 400,000, as reported by the world press—killed in Darfur.

Read the rest of his appalling lies here.

For some reason, reading a throwaway sentence in Janet Maslin’s NYT review of Gore Vidal’s new memoir [emphasis mine],

Among the many photographs included in “Point to Point Navigation” is a flattering (but of course) picture of Mr. Vidal, in his dashing mid-30s, hovering over “Claire Luce,” as the caption misspells her first name. (It was Clare.)

I was reminded of a passage in Azar Nafisi’s haunting memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran.

Nafisi is describing the period right before the final totalitarian clampdown on Iran by Khomeini’s theocratic revolution [emphasis mine]:

…I walked for about forty-five minutes and stopped by my favorite English bookstore. I went in there on a sudden inspiration, fearful that I might not have the opportunity to do so in the near future. And I was right: only a few months later, the Revolutionary Guards raided the bookstore and closed it down. …
I started picking books up with a greedy urgency. I went after the paperbacks, collecting almost all the Jameses and all six novels by Austen. I picked up Howards End and A Room with a View. Then I went after ones I had not read, four novels by Heinrich Boll, and some I had read a long time ago—Vanity Fair and The Adventures of Roderick Random, Humboldt’s Gift and Henderson the Rain King. I picked up a bilingual selection of Rilke’s poems and Nabokov’s Speak, Memory. I even lingered for a while debating over an unexpurgated copy of Fanny Hill. Then I went after the mysteries. I picked up some Dorothy Sayers and, to my utter delight, found Trent’s Last Case, two or three new Agatha Christies, a selection of Ross Macdonalds, all of Raymond Chandler and two Dashiell Hammetts.

I didn’t have enough money to pay for them all. [The bookstore owner said:] Don’t worry; no one is going to take these away from you. No one knows who they are anymore.
Besides, who wants to read them now, at this time?

Why does Janet Malcolm’s scolding about a typo remind me of Azar Nafisi’s realization that her world will come crashing down?

Because a typo ["Claire" instead of "Clare"] isn’t always a typo (as in careless mistake). Sometimes it is the result of the cultural illiteracy, as the Bookseller of Tehran told Nafisi: no one knows who they are anymore.

(Those who forget the past, Santayana famously said, are doomed to repeat it.)

Nafisi continues:

Who indeed [wants to read these authors now]? People like me seemed as irrelevant as Fitzgerald was to Mike Gold, or Nabokov to Stalin’s Soviet Union, or James to the Fabian Society, or Austen to the revolutionaries of her time. In the taxi, I took out the few books I had paid for and surveyed their covers, caressing their glossy surfaces, so giving to the touch.

The curators of the Met show Glitter and Doom know that people like Azar Nafisi and, say, George Grosz, who bravely fought the good fight, are definitely not irrelevant—perhaps especially in times when they are made to feel the most irrelevant.

The other day, as a way of pre-empting the painful, embarrassing, and shameful accusations by bigoted and/or overheated critics that American Jews who have an interest in seeing Israel remain Jewish (not to mention secure and safe from existential threats) have dual loyalties—i.e., that they are traitors to America—I called for an open discussion of the role of the Israel lobby in U.S. foreign policy (and the role of all lobbies in American government policies).

Today the subject gets exposure in a wide-ranging and thorough going-over of the current relations between Israel and the U.S. in the New York Times, in a must-read piece by Steven Erlanger. (It’s too long to summarize, but it is rich and deep with information and subtext. Read it while the link is still active; I think you can get free access to the article for 7 days after publication.)

For those of you bird-dogging subtle shifts in the wind and the impact of the Walt and Mearsheimer paper, here are the relevant passages:

In September, Israel was abuzz over a speech by an American official that got little coverage in the American news media. Philip D. Zelikow, counselor to Ms. Rice, had addressed the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, considered sympathetic to Israel’s interests, on “Building Security in the Broader Middle East.”

Mr. Zelikow, in the last of 10 points, suggested that to build a coalition to deal with Iran, the United States needed to make progress on solving the Arab-Israeli dispute.

“For the Arab moderates and for the Europeans, some sense of progress and momentum on the Arab-Israeli dispute is just a sine qua non for their ability to cooperate actively with the United States on a lot of other things that we care about,” he said.

The message seemed perfectly clear to Israelis: the Bush administration would demand Israeli concessions on the Palestinian issue to hold together an American-led coalition on Iran. American officials were quick to insist that there was no change in American policy, and that Mr. Zelikow was speaking on his own.

But Mr. Zelikow’s close ties to Ms. Rice are well known, and the furor over his comments was amplified because they appeared to some to echo criticisms published in March in The London Review of Books by two American scholars, John J. Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago and Stephen M. Walt of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

They suggested that from the White House to Capitol Hill, Israel’s interests have been confused with America’s, that Israel is more of a security burden than an asset and that the “Israel lobby” in America, including Jewish policy makers, have an undue influence over American foreign policy. In late August, appearing in front of an Islamic group in Washington, Mr. Mearsheimer extended the argument to say that American support of the war in Lebanon had been another example of Israeli interests trumping American ones.

The essay argued that without the Israel lobby the United States would not have gone to war in Iraq and implied that the same forces could drag the United States into another military confrontation on Israel’s behalf, with Iran. It urged more American pressure to solve the Palestinian question as the best cure for regional instability.

Some Israelis worried that the implicit charge of dual loyalty would be underlined by the trial of two former officials of the prominent pro-Israel lobbying group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, on charges of receiving classified information about Iran and other issues from a Defense Department official and passing it on to a journalist and an Israeli diplomat. The trial is scheduled to begin early next year.

Mr. Walt, in an interview, argued that the first President Bush had worked to restrain Israel, and that Mr. Clinton worked to attain diplomatic concessions to achieve a peace. But when this Bush administration took office, “they first had no use for the Mideast, then took a more balanced position, calling for a two-state solution, and then were completely won over by Israel’s argument that it is simply fighting terrorism.”

Former Israeli ambassadors to Washington like Mr. Rabinovich, Mr. Arens and Mr. Shoval all scoff at the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis, which echoes criticisms of Jewish influence as far back as the presidency of Harry S. Truman.

But given the intensifying debate in Washington about Iran, Mr. Rabinovich said, the essay is “disturbing,” as are the echoes of part of the argument in Mr. Zelikow’s speech. Mr. Arens said that 9/11 created “an objective reality” of an antiterrorism coalition, led by President Bush, in which Israel is a crucial member. Mr. Bush is seen here as less interested in being an honest broker than in supporting Israel as a crucial strategic partner in the region.

The Iran confrontation, Mr. Arens said, will bolster that partnership. “The president said that he sees a clear and present danger with Iran arming itself with nuclear weapons and it’s obvious that this is a clear and present danger for the state of Israel,” he said. “Although a small country, we are not a minor party. When people talk about the possibility of a military option, what are they talking about? The U.S. or maybe Israel to take that move, not the U.S. or Germany or France.”

He acknowledged, however, “That inevitably will lead people who are critical of the position of the president to be critical of Israel, because we are seen as a partner in this campaign, and it is not a very big step to say that Israel is leading the U.S., or misleading the U.S., by the nose in this thing.”

The piece is a two-parter. Tomorrow’s article promises to include the role of evangelical Christians in the “special relationship” (JFK’s term).

I’ll have more to say after I’ve read both.

It’s known as the hudna, and Ahmed Yousef, an adviser to Palestinian “prime minster” (of resistance until the destruction of Israel) Haniyeh, is the author of the op-ed in today’s New York Times, in which he lays down what sounds like such a reasonable course of action—a temporary “truce” with Israel, which Hamas seeks to destroy:

A truce is referred to in Arabic as a “hudna.” Typically covering 10 years, a hudna is recognized in Islamic jurisprudence as a legitimate and binding contract. A hudna extends beyond the Western concept of a cease-fire and obliges the parties to use the period to seek a permanent, nonviolent resolution to their differences. The Koran finds great merit in such efforts at promoting understanding among different people. Whereas war dehumanizes the enemy and makes it easier to kill, a hudna affords the opportunity to humanize one’s opponents and understand their position with the goal of resolving the intertribal or international dispute.

Here’s the proposal:

We Palestinians are prepared to enter into a hudna to bring about an immediate end to the occupation and to initiate a period of peaceful coexistence during which both sides would refrain from any form of military aggression or provocation.

The “occupation” Yousef refers to, of course, is the “occupation” of the land of Israel by Jews, because Hamas doesn’t recognize the State of Israel.

Such a concept — a period of nonwar but only partial resolution of a conflict — is foreign to the West and has been greeted with much suspicion.

Gee, I wonder why. It can’t be because of Hamas’s circular reasoning, can it?

Norm Geras has his own take:

But what about there being no support for recognition, and what about ending up like Michael Collins? It wouldna (with the hudna) happen? How come? I guess, because even though the hudna would be a kind of recognition, it also simultaneously wouldna be that - not, anyway, in the Michael Collins sense. What, even though this Palestinian delegation have said publicly that it would be? For difference within identity, for dialectical thinking, you couldna do better than a hudna?

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.

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 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.

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.

(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)

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.

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

To veil or not to veil? Jack Straw, Britain’s former foreign minister, says he would prefer it if Muslim women would remove their veils when talking to him as it is a barrier to face-to-face communication. A currect deputy prime minister of Britain disagrees.

Last week, in his editorial published in the Lancashire Evening, Straw asked Muslim women to “take off their veils”. He said that the increasing number of women wearing a veil was concerning, noting it was disturbing to talk to a woman whose face he could not see….

Prescott suggested that Straw’s fears about the women who wear a veil were exaggerated.

“If a woman wants to wear a veil, why shouldn’t she? It’s her choice,” Prescott told the BBC’s Sunday AM program.

Prescot said he would not ask a Muslim woman to remove her veil when she visits his office.

“If somebody comes into my constituency whether they are wearing a school cap, or wearing a turban or wearing dark glasses, I’m not going to ask them to remove it. I think you can communicate with them,” he explained.

The Big Pharaoh doesn’t like Prescott’s comparisons. This is the kind of veil Straw was talking about:

You can definitely see where it would stop communication cold. Moreover, it’s hard to read the wearing of this kind of veil in Merrye Olde England in 2006 as anything but a political statement—and an in-your-face one (no pun intended) at that. And Straw is calling bulllshit on it.

A commenter at the Big Pharaoh’s blog writes:

I wish Muslims around the world realize that the veil is NOT Islamic, but a byproduct of Arabian culture.

Sad that some people regard culture higher than the faith itself.

And this reminded me of another story I read today, about a brave Iranian cleric who is trying to recapture traditional Shi’ism from the grip of what he calls “political religion.”

News filtered out of Iran this Sunday of demonstrations protesting the arrest of supporters of Ayatollah Mohammad Kazemeini Boroujerdi, an Iranian cleric fighting against the “Political Religion” that has dominated his country since Khomeini. Rumors also spread that these demonstrations have become violent with fatalities reported.

Read Michael Ledeen’s take on these events here.

A couple of days ago, another site reported on the events leading up to the confrontation with Boroujerdi and his supporters:

October 6, 2006 (RFE/RL) — A dissident Iranian cleric who advocates the separation of religion and politics, Ayatollah Seyyed Hossein Kazemeyni Boroujerdi, is accusing officials of persecuting him and his followers. Boroujerdi claims dozens of his supporters have been arrested and taken to Tehran’s notorious Evin prison in recent weeks. The ayatollah tells RFE/RL that he has appealed for help from international figures that include the Roman Catholic pope and EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana….

The Shi’ite cleric says pressure has increased significantly since the summer, following a gathering he held for his supporters. He claims that thousands of people attended his June 30 religious meeting in Tehran’s Shahid Keshvari stadium.

“About two months and a half ago, there was something similar to a coup d’etat against me — because our last meeting was such that it shook the city and it made the establishment think that if they don’t stop me, then there will be millions of people [supporting me],” Boroujerdi says.

He’s not the only cleric who’s being intimidated and harassed, apparently:

The ayatollah says his belief in the separation of religion from politics and his refusal to support “political religion” have drawn the ire of Iran’s leaders. Iran’s Islamic establishment is based on the principle of “velayat-e faqih,” or the rule of the Islamic jurist.

Reports have emerged in recent years of other clerics and dissidents who have criticized the velayat-e faqih principle being persecuted in Iran.

They include the late Grand Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari, an influential Iranian cleric who was placed under house arrest in the 1980s.

“The political establishment forces them to accept its demands and interpret the religion in accordance with the establishment’s needs,” [Shariatmadari's son, who lives in Germany,] says. “Most clerics have realized this, but because of the heavy price of opposition to the regime, most of them do not have the courage to express [that view] publicly. Ayatollah Boroujerdi has been able to express the demand for the separation of religion from politics very openly — to a wide audience and with boldness. This is something that this establishment doesn’t like.”

From stories like these, it is so obvious that well-meaning Western multiculturalists, in the name of tolerance, are backing the forces of reaction in the Islamic world—and, worse, allowing them free passage into our societies under the name of “tolerance.” It’s got to stop. Good for Jack Straw.

Scene from “Idomeneo” during a rehearsal in 2003: King Idomeneo (played by Charles Workmann) places the severed heads of the Prophet Muhammad on a chair next to the head of Buddha

Spiegel reports:

News of the cancellation drew strong criticism from the government and the main political parties. Culture Minister Bernd Neumann said: “If concern about possible protests already leads to self-censorship then the democratic culture of free speech is in danger.” …

The parliamentary leader of the conservative Christian Social Union, Peter Ramsauer, called the cancellation cowardly. “It’s an incredible occurrence that has never happened in Germany before in this form.” He said the cancellation had nothing to do with respect for religion. “It’s naked fear of violence. That’s nothing but pure cowardice.”

The head of Germany’s Islamic Council, Ali Kizilkaya, welcomed the opera’s decision, saying it was taking account of Muslim sensitivities.

Taking account of Muslim sensitivities, eh? When will “Muslims,” who Ali Kizilkaya says he represents, take account of the Enlightenment sensitivies of Western democracies, eh?

The New York Times predicts that the term “Islamic fascists,” having proved oh-so-unpopular, will no longer emanate from Bush’s mouth.

By Labor Day, Islamic fascists and Islamo-fascism were the hot new conservative buzzwords.

And then, just as suddenly, they were gone — at least from the president’s lips.

“The debate that we wanted to launch was about an ideological struggle against an enemy that has very specific plans, ambitions and aspirations, much like movements of the past, like fascism and Nazism,” said Dan Bartlett, counselor to the president. Addressing the term Islamic fascists, Mr. Bartlett said, “I’m sure he’ll use it again.”

But it seems unlikely Mr. Bush will use it again, given the outcry it provoked.

Muslims, both here and in other countries, were deeply offended.

We’ll see about where Mr. Bush goes with the term “Islamic fascism,” which gets across the message that there’s an ideology behind the terrorists who are threatening our way of life (a notion that progressives would rather not engage, because it leaves them with no peaceful options for dealing with terrorism).

Meanwhile, our pop culture reliably takes on politics—sooner or later. In this case sooner: an ad agency has caused an uproar by creating a radio spot for a car dealership that is said to be declaring a “jihad on the auto market.”

A car dealership’s tongue-in-cheek radio advertisement declaring “a jihad on the auto market,” will not be changed, the company said.

The ad has drawn criticism that its content is offensive to Muslims.

Several stations rejected the spot from Dennis Mitsubishi, which boasts sales representatives wearing “burqas” — the head-to-toe traditional dress for some Islamic women — will sell vehicles that can “comfortably seat 12 jihadists in the back.”

Jihad is a holy war waged by Muslims in defence of Islam.

“We firmly believe the ad does not in any way disrespect any religion or culture, but we feel, I guess, that maybe poking a little fun at radical extremists is fair game,” dealership president Keith Dennis said.

“It was our intention to craft something around some of the buzzwords of the day and give everyone a good chuckle and be a little bit of a tension reliever.”

Good luck with that!