Christopher Hitchens on the CIA's Responsibility for 9/11

Speaking on Australian television's Lateline, Hitchens called for the CIA to be abolished and its officials put on trial for their criminal negligence on 9/11:

CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS: The CIA has never got anything right. Actually, I think I know it's a trillion-dollar intelligence budget. Unconstitutionally, the CIA, which I agree with Senator Moynihan, should have been closed and abolished some years before now, doesn't have to reveal how much money it spends. But let's say it's a trillion dollars. The only American who was able to infiltrate the Taliban in that entire period was John Walker Lyndh, an al-Qaeda fancier from Marin County, California, and a drifter. The CIA has recently fired two or three dozen of its very few translators into a Arabic and Persian because they're homosexual. It is famously incompetent, corrupt and viral and it has never got anything right by either Iraq, Afghanistan or al-Qaeda. George Tenet on - this time, exactly this time five years ago, was watching the smoke with Senator David Boren, formerly of Oklahoma, and is quoted directly by Robert Woodward as having said, "Gee, I hope it's nothing to do with those guys in the flight schools in the mid-west," who the CIA knew about that and did nothing about. It's remarkable that the leaders of the CIA have not been impeached and put on trial for criminal and culpable negligence and this contribution to this fantastically mediocre Senate report is only the latest of their many failures. That's what I think about the CIA.

Individualism--Hollywood's True Religion

That's the argument made by Howard Suber, my former UCLA professor and author of the Power of Film, in a Huffington Post article entitled "Why They Hate Our Movies":

Societies that deny the power of the individual ironically tend to gravitate towards a single all-powerful individual who is allowed to hold the power of the nation in his hands. When this happens, there is no need to create heroic individuals in fiction because public squares, news broadcasts, postage stamps and flags all emblazon the image of the same hero on them.

Paradoxically, societies such as our own that trumpet a belief in the power of the individual seldom allow any single individual to acquire much power in real life. As popular culture in America demonstrates, there is an inverse rule that dictates that, the more power someone in real life has, the more there seems an urgent necessity to cut him or her down to size.

Individualist societies are uncomfortable with heroes in real life, and often don't know what to do with them. Perhaps, as a compensation, they produce a multitude of heroes in their movies and other popular media.

Everyone knows that American Individualism means that each person is expected to "look out for #1" -- himself. And yet, no memorable popular American film gives us a protagonist who is only concerned with himself throughout the film.

At the beginning of Casablanca, Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) utters that famous line, "I stick my neck out for nobody" but by the end, he's given up the only person he's ever truly loved for "The Cause." In Gone With the Wind, Rhett Butler (Clark Gable), makes it clear early in the film that, "I'm the only cause I believe in," but he becomes a hero by running the Northern blockade to aid his countrymen, and joins the army even though he knows the Confederacy is doomed.

Early in It's a Wonderful Life, George Bailey (James Stewart) tells his father that he wants to get out of the small town he lives in and scorns, but then he devotes his whole life to it. Early in On the Waterfront, Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) says, "Me? I'm with Me" and he advises Edie (Eva Marie Saint) that his philosophy is "Do it to them before they do it to you." By the end of the film, however, he is beaten nearly to death fighting on behalf of his fellow workers. Finally, early in The Godfather, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) says of the story he has just told his girlfriend, Kay (Diane Keaton), "That's my family, Kay -- it's not me." But Michael then joins his family's violent business in order to save his father's life.

The pattern here is clear: characters often begin their story being concerned only with themselves; but by the end, they sacrifice themselves for their family, community, or cause. This is not that different from those with orthodox religious or political faiths, who also believe in the importance of sacrifice.

The difference lies in where each thinks the most important power lies. When Orthodox Muslims talk about their plans, they usually say, Inshallah, just as Orthodox Jews say, "God Willing." For the religious, the power to make something happen lies outside individual will or control. But where in America's memorable movies, aside from Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ - about as orthodox a film as has ever been made - does a central character rely on God, Jesus, Mohammad, or some other force outside himself?

The sad fact is that, throughout history, and in much of the world today - even in so-called advanced societies - people do not feel they have power as individuals. It is no wonder, then, that they hunger for films that tell them that a single individual can matter, can be in control of his or her own destiny.

It is not surprising that those who believe the most important power lies in a deity, the state, or some idea should hate American movies. They are correct to see in them a competing belief system. What is surprising is that so many people who share the belief in the power of the individual fail to realize how powerful it is.

You can buy Howard Suber's book from Amazon.com here:

Darfur--Not Genocide?

That's the argument of Gerald Prunier's book, Darfur: The Ambiguous Genocide, reviewed by Yehudit Ronen in Middle East Quarterly. Instead, it is more accurate to call the situation mass murder in the midst of civil war:

Prunier claims that the killing in Darfur should not be seen as genocide, since the aims of the Sudanese government were not to eradicate a people but rather to carry out the brutal suppression of what was seen as an existential threat. Whatever term one uses, however, the carnage and misery unleashed by Khartoum and its Janjaweed cohorts remains just as horrific.

Washington's New Mayor

Councilman Adrian Fenty won the Democratic primary for Mayor yesterday. Since Washington, DC has essentially a one-party system (Democratic), that means he'll be elected Mayor come November. Since I'm a registered independent, I couldn't vote for him in the primary. But I'll do so in the election. I met him about a year ago at a crosswalk on Connecticut Avenue near the Chevy Chase Circle Safeway, where the city put in a flag system to protect pedestrians. It doesn't really work and he told me he'd try to get money for a stoplight (I think he said it costs $100,000). Now that Fenty's the new mayor, I hope it happens. His primary campaign was very well-organized. The student precinct walkers (one from DC and one from Connecticut, via Oberlin College) had Blackberrys, clipboards, and all sorts of organizational tools. They asked us if there was anything that needed doing. Then, Councilman Fenty took care of a dead tree on our street very quickly. He's promised to be the kind of mayor who gets things done. Hope he lives up to his promises...

Bloggerheads.tv

My friend from New York Magazine recommended this link to Bloggerheads.tv, starring Robert Wright and Mickey Kaus talking about current events.

The First Published Profile of John O'Neill

My friend told me over the phone today today, after seeing The Path to 9/11, that he assigned the first story ever published about former FBI agent John O'Neill while working as an editor at New York Magazine. He pointed out the irony that Osama killed both Massoud in Afghanistan, and O'Neill, who was working in the World Trade Center on 9/11. Meanwhile, Osama is still at large. Robert Kolker's article, titled "O'Neill v. Osama," is available online, here:

Most of the victims of the September 11 attack seemed tragically random -- they were just going to work. Not John O'Neill. Until last August, he'd been the FBI's top expert on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, a lead investigator of the USS Cole and African embassy bombings. Leaving the Bureau in frustration, he'd taken a job he thought of as retirement: World Trade Center security chief. But when he died it became clear: His own life contained as many mysteries as his enemy's.

David Horowitz Denies Path to 9/11 Conspiracy Charge

He responds to Max Blumenthal's accusations at Frontpagemag.com

I've been amused over the past few days to see how powerful I am and to see how rapidly a fiction can be concocted and travel around the leftwing web, but not actually surprised. The author of this fiction, along with many others is little Max, whose posts begin on his blog but don't end there. Huffington Post, Yahoo News, Indymedia and a rash of others spread each and every fantasy he comes up with . . . In fact, I never heard of David Cunningham or his group before reading about them in Max's hilarious column. I didn't know about "Path to 9/11" until after it was made. In the 18 or so years I have been active in the Hollywood community I have never attempted to "discredit mainstream film and TV production" and in fact formed coalitions with liberals in the industry to defend films against censoship attempts like the V-Chip and critics like Joe Lieberman, Tipper Gore and many conservatives along with them.

This is just one of many of attempts by the left to create a right-wing caricature they can attack. Apparently the real David Horowitz -- a free speech liberal, a supporter of artistic freedom in Hollywood and academic freedom in the university -- is too much of a challenge for their feeble minds to handle.

A Swing and a Miss, for President Bush

President Bush interrupted ABC's broadcast of The Path to 9/11 last night. Despite what sounded like some phrases by Peggy Noonan (words like "cherish"), and what a friend of mine pointed out were self-conscious imitations of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address ("rededicate"), Bush had nothing new to say. He couldn't name the enemy America is fighting. He couldn't explain the link between Iraq and Bin Laden (Hint: if UBL could get away with 9/11, why wouldn't Saddam try something, too?). He was wrong on the "clash of civilizations" argument--what's the point of dissing Samuel Huntington when you clearly don't have anything better to offer. His "war for civilization" didn't tell us who was fighting on which side. How can Americans recognize those fighting "against civilization"?

Lest this seem nitpicking, I'll note that the overall context served to make Bush's speech look like a scene in The Path to 9/11, so that when the final grades from the 9/11 commission appeared in the end titles--giving the Bush administration several D's and an F--they also read like Bush's grade card for the President's Address to the Nation....

Was David Horowitz Behind The Path to9/11?

The Nation's Max Blumenthal claims there was a Christian conspiracy headed by ex-communist David Horowitz to get The Path to 9/11 broadcast on ABC:

Iger now bears ultimate responsibility for authorizing the product of a well-honed propaganda operation--a network of little-known right-wingers working from within Hollywood to counter its supposedly liberal bias. This is the network within the ABC network. Its godfather is far-right activist David Horowitz, who has worked for more than a decade to establish a right-wing presence in Hollywood and to discredit mainstream film and TV production. On this project, a secretive evangelical religious right group long associated with Horowitz, founded by The Path to 9/11's director, David Cunningham, that aims to "transform Hollywood" in line with its messianic vision, has taken the lead.

BTW, the worst part of the broadcast here in DC were CYA notices from WJLA crawling across the top of the screen saying that the station was not responsible for the views aired in the program. The second worst were the title cards explaining that the dramatization was a dramatization. It looked legalistic, bureaucratic, and cowardly--just like something those bureaucrats responsbible for 9/11 depicted in the film would come up with. America can't win until the nation stops apologizing for trying to do so.

IMHO, Although not bad--and admittedly, David Cunningham is no Frank Capra--the show really pulled its punches on both Bush and Clinton. The second episode didn't depict Bush flying all over the country, obviously not knowing what the heck had happened. This didn't exactly please those of us who lived in Washington, DC at the time. On the other hand, the show did a pretty good job of making the point that overpaid nitwits in suits with lots of fancy toys simply cannot defeat highly motivated fanatics, that the US betrayed Massoud, that the immigrant customs officer in Florida who turned back one hijacker--despite being told to lay off the Saudis (and which office in Washington did that come from?)--as well as the wife of the Flight 93 passenger who told him what was going on, did more for the US than all of the CIA, FBI, and National Security staffs put together. The media came out OK, not surprisingly, given that it was based in part on ABC News correspondent John Miller's book, The Cell. One good point in the film: that when the going gets tough in Washington, all they can think of is to call a meeting, or a videoconference. Cheney looked helpless, Rice looked hapless, Richard Clarke seemed to be a phony blowhard, etc.

Tellingly, CIA chief George Tenet, the villian of Act I, was still around working for Bush in Act II--how come?

Subtext: We're still in deep trouble.

The only politician who came off well in this story was my favorite: New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who wouldn't let the FBI shut down New Year's 2000 celebrations. Good call.

Now, can we survive as a nation until 2008?

Ann Althouse on The Path to 9/11

She got bored...

The Path to 9/11: Not Bad

It's half-time for the ABC mini-series that began last night and ends tonight. So far, it's not bad. It's about the bureaucrats and terrorists--and it's hard to tell which is the greater threat to America, which is a strong message. Best scene was of the Washington State US Customs Service inspector catching the millenium bomber. Second best was of the Filipina policewoman catching the Bojinka bomber. As John O'Neil's character says, the women in law enforcement seem to be doing better than the men... Best line so far from Massoud, Lion of the Panjshir and head of the Northern Alliance: "Are there no men left in America?"

Bumper Sticker, Semptember 10, 2006

   It reads: "I'm the proud parent of a blue-blooded legacy child with mediocre grades."

Christopher Hitchens on the 5th Anniversary of 9/11

From today's Wall Street Journal:

The time for commemoration lies very far in the future. War memorials are erected when the war is won. At the moment, anyone who insists on the primacy of September 11, 2001, is very likely to be accused--not just overseas but in this country also--of making or at least of implying a "partisan" point. I debate with the "antiwar" types almost every day, either in print or on the air or on the podium, and I can tell you that they have been "war-weary" ever since the sun first set on the wreckage of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and on the noble debris of United Airlines 93. These clever critics are waiting, some of them gleefully, for the moment that is not far off: the moment when the number of American casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq will match or exceed the number of civilians of all nationalities who were slaughtered five years ago today. But to the bored, cynical neutrals, it also comes naturally to say that it is "the war" that has taken, and is taking, the lives of tens of thousands of other civilians. In other words, homicidal nihilism is produced only by the resistance to it! If these hacks were honest, and conceded the simple truth that it is the forces of the Taliban and of al Qaeda in Mesopotamia that are conducting a Saturnalia of murder and destruction, they would have to hide their faces and admit that they were not "antiwar" at all.

One must have a blunt answer to the banal chat-show and op-ed question: What have we learned? (The answer ought not to be that we have learned how to bully and harass citizens who try to take shampoo on flights on which they have lawfully booked passage. Yet incompetent collective punishment of the innocent, and absurd color-coding of the "threat level," is the way in which most Americans actually experience the "war on terror.") Anyone who lost their "innocence" on September 11 was too naïve by far, or too stupid to begin with. On that day, we learned what we ought to have known already, which is that clerical fanaticism means to fight a war which can only have one victor. Afghans, Kurds, Kashmiris, Timorese and many others could have told us this from experience, and for nothing (and did warn us, especially in the person of Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of Afghanistan's Northern Alliance). Does anyone suppose that an ideology that slaughters and enslaves them will ever be amenable to "us"? The first duty, therefore, is one of solidarity with bin-Ladenism's other victims and targets, from India to Kurdistan.

The second point makes me queasy, but cannot be ducked. "We"--and our allies--simply have to become more ruthless and more experienced. An unspoken advantage of the current awful strife in Iraq and Afghanistan is that it is training tens of thousands of our young officers and soldiers to fight on the worst imaginable terrain, and gradually to learn how to confront, infiltrate, "turn," isolate and kill the worst imaginable enemy. These are faculties that we shall be needing in the future. It is a shame that we have to expend our talent in this way, but it was far worse five years and one day ago, when the enemy knew that there was a war in progress, and was giggling at how easy the attacks would be, and "we" did not even know that hostilities had commenced. Come to think of it, perhaps we were a bit "innocent" after all.

Farmgirl Fare

Someone I know recommended this blog dedicated to the simple life in the country, artesanal baking, and photography--there's a daily farm photo--saying the pictures were excellent. I took a look and agree, so here's a link to Farmgirl Fare. It's a nice change of pace...

Background Reading for The Path to 9/11

The controversy over ABC's 9/11 mini-series fits into a theory about the role of television movies in American culture discussed in an article I published 18 years ago in the scholarly journal Studies in Popular Culture.( For those of our readers with access to a university library here's the reference:"It's Only a Movie: The Television Docu-Drama and Social Issue Movie as The American Marketplace of Ideas," Studies in Popular Culture (Spring, 1988). Unfortunately, it was before online publishing, and so I can't find an online copy at the website of the Popular Culture Association of the South.) Bottom line: protests from Clinton administration figures to ABC are nothing out of the ordinary in the history of TV movie controveries--the Reagan administration objected to The Day After, which led to ABC's follow-up broadcast of Amerika, in response to criticism.

UPDATE: Here is a link to video clips of the scenes to which objections have been raised (ht LGF): http://www.redstate.com/blogs/krempasky/2006/sep/09/abcs_path_to_9_11_clip_synopsis.

Is Democracy the Answer?

David Yerushalmi doubts the Bush democratization agenda presents a strategy for victory: (ht The American Thinker)

President Bush has built an entire war strategy on two legs, neither of which alone is sufficient to support victory. One leg stands for war, but only a limited war. A war to defeat “terrorism” and “Islamofascism” while preserving traditional and historical Islam with its full ideological panoply intact. It is a war that stops short of devastatingly destroying the enemy because the war planners are convinced that they can hurriedly rebuild a viable democracy on the back of a vibrant and fully respected Islam. But if traditional, historical Islam is anti-Western at its core, is this strategy viable? Does the evidence in Afghanistan or Iraq or the Palestine Territories suggest otherwise? Is there today such a thing as a western-friendly Islamic state?

Moreover, because the President embraces the democracy ideology, he is logically and strategically constrained from warring until the enemy is defeated because he refuses to identify the enemy. The Bush Administration’s war strategy to build democracy on a base of some mythical if not simply fictional peaceful Islam becomes the very factor that prevents victory. Unlike the war effort during World War II, when we warred against Germany and Germans and against Japan and the Japanese, President Bush wants to war against the tactic of terror or against only Islamic terrorists once they have already attacked or planned to attack.

In World War II, and properly so, there was no effort to artificially confine the war to Nazism and fascism or to Bushidoism and tokko (or suicide missions). Nor did the Allied Powers only seek to kill the Germans and the Japanese who took up arms. To end that war and to destroy the ideologies that drove those nations to conquer the West, the US and its allies made its goal victory and conquest through the complete and utter defeat and destruction of the enemy societies and their ideologies of world domination. Period.

The President’s second term is in its waning stages. The contenders lining up for that most important office look weak and pallid by comparison. If the President’s strategy is wrong and dangerous, the strategy that will come to replace his will most certainly be more so. By fighting the war with an ideology instead of a strategy for complete victory, the President is setting the stage for a colossal defeat and retreat.

At best, the US will find itself with warring Islamic democracies hell bent on our destruction. At worst, a nuclear Iran with its sphere of influence stretching through a Shia-dominated Iraq and a Lebanon held hostage to a Shia-centered Hezbollah, will combine with a Sunni-dominated al Qaeda to begin a domino effect. In the Middle- and Near-East, there are two major powers standing precariously on the shoulders of two military tyrants.

One is Egypt with Mubarak only two years away from his 80th birthday with no real successor in place. Mubarak of course has been ridiculously criticized by the West for failing to democratize. But every time he allows even the slightest “liberal democratic” reform, the Islamic factions of the Brotherhood, another of the many jihadist organizations in the region, gain enormous power and popular support. Mubarak knows full well that he is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. He is grooming his son, Gamal, to stand in his shoes but most observers doubt if a newly anointed progeny will be able to hold back the Islamic forces rushing the gates. The question will be how well the Egyptian military responds to the Islamic threat when Mubarak dies.

The other of course is Pakistan with its nuclear arsenal protected only by strongman President-General Pervez Musharraf. But Musharraf knows that he rules over a population very supportive of bin Laden and al Qaeda. His most recent treaty with the tribal leaders in North Waziristan has been widely viewed as a wholesale capitulation to the fact that the Taliban and al Qaeda have been granted safe haven in the northwest mountainous regions of his country.

Once Egypt and Pakistan are in play, the whole of the Middle East, and indeed the Near East, including India, are at risk. Are we really prepared to rely on an ideological panacea? Put simply, is democracy the answer to Islam?

Zero Tolerance for Intolerance

In a penetrating review of Ian Buruma's Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance, Dutch novelist Leon de Winter--no fan of van Gogh personally--says that Buruma has missed the real message of Van Gogh's death in a misunderstanding of the nature of tolerance. De Winter believes that Islamist supremacism is the problem, that conflicts with European Muslims result from a fundamental refusal "to accept Islam's status as a minority religion in a superior but 'infidel' environment: secular Europe." In other words, until fundamentalists become tolerant of secularism, they ought not be tolerated themselves, because the belief system represents a genuine threat to the future of free society. It is a thesis devastating in its simplicity. De Winter quotes from Karl Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies to support his conclusion:

Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them."

Unfortunately, the full text of de Winter's review is only available online to paid subscribers of the Wall Street Journal. However, you can read an earlier De Winter article about Van Gogh on this link to his Hudson Institute website, or order the Buruma book from Amazon here:

Omran Salman on CAIR

Omran Salman, an Arab journalist from Bahrain, took on CAIR in the Philadelphia Inquirer on August 31st (ht Daniel Pipes):

Rather than just condemn the plot and address the scourge of Islamic extremism, Muslim groups such as the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and the Muslim American Society (MAS) sought to both legitimize terror and portray Muslims as victims.

Do these organizations really represent Muslims in the West? Hardly. It is their apologia of Islamic extremism, rather than discrimination or religious hatred in Western society, which most victimizes American Muslims.

Come and See (1985)

Elem Klimov's film, written by by Alex Adamovich, is sort of a Russian response to Gunter Grass's "The Tin Drum." A teenage boy living in Belarus is caught up in WWII battles, after joining the partisans. What he comes to see, from the opening scene of children digging amongst corpses on a battlefield to the final massacre of an entire village by German troops and SS men, is unrelenting horror and suffering.

It is a hard film to watch, and very long, but I recommend it as a way to understand Russia and its experience during the Second World War--and why it is etched in the soul of Russians still today. That Belarus was historically home to some of the largest Jewish population in Europe, completely wiped out by the Nazis, is alluded to in the film, as well. Perhaps, in this light Klimov's film carries another significance, as a way of understanding what it means when the leaders of one nation say they want to "wipe off the map" the people of another nation. It is something that Russians and Jews understand. Hitler's goal of lebensraum targeted first Jews, then Slavs. The film depicts how German farmers lived in homes belonging to massacred families of Belarus.

Klimov's style is jarring, expressionistic, and nightmarish. His concluding images of Hitler as a small boy, held in his mother's arms, clearly from family photos, are haunting.

A viewer realizes: Osama Bin Laden was once a small boy, too...

Islamists and the Naive

A reference in a New York Times article today about anti-terror raids in Denmark to a book by two Social Democrats titled "Islamists and the Naive" caught my eye--and raised a question: why haven't we seen an English translation yet?

In the message, the suspect, a recent convert to Islam, cited the authors of a new book, “Islamists and the Naïve,” which compares Islam to Nazism and communism.

It was written by Karen Jespersen, a former interior minister from the Social Democrat Party, and her husband, Ralf Pittelkow, a columnist for Jyllands-Posten. It was that newspaper that provoked Muslim fury last year when it was the first to publish cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad.

“Yes, there is fanaticism in Denmark and you have to ask yourself why the Danes are so hostile to foreigners,” the letter says. “The answer is very simple for us Muslims living here,” it continued, before mentioning Ms. Jespersen and Mr. Pittelkow, who was an adviser to Poul Nyrup Rasmussen when he was prime minister.

“He supports ridiculing people,” the e-mail message said of Mr. Pittelkow.

The book has created a sensation in Denmark, in part because its authors are former leftist intellectuals who once advocated tolerance but now argue that anyone underestimating the threat posed by Islam to Denmark and the West is naïve.

Some have criticized the book for incendiary language that mimics the style of the far-right Danish People’s Party, which advocates a zero-tolerance approach to immigration, and contends that Islam is incompatible with Denmark’s liberal values. Ms. Jespersen and Mr. Pittelkow did not return phone calls on Thursday.

Asked in an interview in Politiken on Saturday how she could equate Islam with Nazism and communism, Ms. Jespersen responded: “We compare it to underline what kind of forces we are up against. It doesn’t matter how many or how few there are. The link between politics and religion makes Islam a totalitarian movement, and it is gaining ground in the Middle East and Europe.”

Robert Spencer on CAIR

From JihadWatch (ht LGF):

But consider it from the infidel point of view for just a moment. Here you are in the Chicago Sun Times wringing your hands about "Islamophobia" and posing as a victim, when in fact several members of your organization have been arrested and convicted of various terrorism-related activities, and you no longer contest Anti-CAIR's characterization of CAIR as a "terrorist supporting front organization" that "wishes nothing more than the implementation of Sharia law in America" and is a group that was "founded by Hamas supporters which seeks to overthrow Constitutional government in the United States and replace it with an Islamist theocracy using our own Constitution as protection."

Can you see the cognitive dissonance there? I suspect you can. And don't think infidels haven't noticed it also. I believe that you, Mr. Hooper, are one of those who are responsible for the anger some non-Muslims feel toward Muslims today: these non-Muslims are not fools. They can see through posturing and disingenuousness. They see all the things that don't tally with your professed anti-terrorism, and see that you have never answered lingering questions about where your organization really stands. They can see how you trump up anti-Muslim hate crimes. But of course, I doubt any of this will cause you concern: after all, you are entirely willing to use that anger for your own purposes in the Chicago Sun Times, with Jim Ritter as your willing dupe.

As for the other posts you quoted, do you deny that Islam is a political movement? After all, did you yourself not say: "I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future. But I'm not going to do anything violent to promote that. I'm going to do it through education." If you attain this goal, would this not entail altering the Constitution to bring it in line with Sharia on questions such as women's rights, the rights of non-Muslims, and other matters? As such, was the poster wrong to say that such an aspiration "contravenes the constitution and espouses treason"? If you deny this, are you prepared to renounce publicly the aspects of Sharia that do indeed contravene the Constitution?

As for the third comment, you could do a great deal to mitigate this hate by coming clean about CAIR, as explained above, and actively working to resist jihad terror, instead of working to obstruct anti-terror efforts.

From Agustin Blazquez

Speaking of movies, our favorite Cuban-American filmmaker, Agustin Blazquez, just sent us this:

VERY INTERESTING

In a recent interview, General Norman Schwartzkopf, was asked if he
thought there was room for forgiveness toward Hizbollah.
The General said: "I believe that forgiving Hizbollah is God's
function. The Israelis' job is to arrange the meeting"

When is TV Censorship Not Censorship?

Apparently when TV shows like The Path to 9/11 are cut to suit Democrats, if the current controversy over ABC's two-part docudrama is any indication. Persian-American screenwriter Cyrus Nowrasteh apparently teed off some powerful people from the Clinton administration, who demanded changes in the story. The Washington Post says that ABC has agreed to censor the film to make them happy. Here's a link to an interview with Nowrasteh from Frontpagemag.com. According to Wikipedia, producer Marc Platt's earlier credits include Pretty Woman, Jerry Maguire, Philadelphia, and Legally Blonde. So, I'd say he's not exactly a Republican Michael Moore.

Censored or not, it sounds extremely interesting. I'm glad someone is taking on the political and historical background to 9/11 rather than just milking the tragedy.

Since controversy sells newspapers, even a censorship controversy, like many Americans on Sunday night at 8, and again on Monday, someone I know and yours truly plan to be watching ABC's version of the road to 9/11...

Anti-Chechen Pogrom Rages in Russian Town

RIAN.ru reports that days of violence have driven Chechens from the Karelian town of Kondopoga following a double killing:

Violence shook the town of Kondopoga over the weekend after two people were killed earlier in the week in an apparent brawl at a restaurant allegedly owned by Chechens. Hundreds of locals gathered on Saturday to demand the expulsion of North Caucasus natives before a mob torched the restaurant and ransacked a marketplace.

Viktoria Veber, the head of Karelia's Islamic Enlightenment organization, said about 50 Chechens, mainly women and children, who were being housed at a tourist resort near the republic's capital, Petrozavodsk, had no money to pay for food and housing, with private entrepreneurs paying for them.

Veber said the refugees would not return to Kondopoga until they received guarantees of their safety. Most of them are relatives of Chechens detained on suspicion of killing two local residents, which triggered riots in the 35,000-city.

Christopher Hitchens on Niger, Uranium, and Saddam Hussein

On Slate, Hitchens has more to say about Niger's uranium business:

This is not the only such contact or approach that has been uncovered from the Niger end. Iraq had lots of off-the-record cash and lots of off-the-record cheap oil. What did Niger have to offer in return? (Remember that Joseph Wilson was recommended by his wife to investigate these people mainly on the grounds that he was so friendly with them!)

At a minimum, this would suggest that the Blair and Bush administrations were quite right to view the Iraq-Niger relationship with concern. At a maximum, it would suggest that the Niger connection was a great deal more significant—and more dangerous—than anyone has even suspected. (The A.Q. Khan network was not exposed until after Muammar Qaddafi's capitulation and the opening of the Libyan stockpiles, which in turn did not occur until after Saddam Hussein had been overthrown.)

In any conflict of evidence or interpretation between Rolf Ekeus and Wissam Zahawie, there cannot be a person living who would prefer Zahawie's word. In any evaluation of the Wilson visit to Niger, it must indeed be acknowledged that he found nothing—but only because he had neither the ability nor the intention to do so. This was yet another CIA "intelligence failure" in the making, and it follows that those who asked searching questions about the agency's role were doing exactly the right thing.

Bye, Bye, Blair...

Tony Blair has announced that he will step down as British prime minister, according to Reuters. What will he do next?

Here's a suggestion--Secretary-General of the United Nations...

Newt Gingrich: How Bush Resembles Lincoln

From today's Wall Street Journal, a reminder that Newt Gingrich is a trained historian. Unstated subtext: Rumsfeld resembles McClellan....

In April of 1861, in response to the firing on Fort Sumter, President Lincoln called for 75,000 volunteers to serve for 90 days. Lincoln had greatly underestimated the challenge of preserving the Union. No one imagined that what would become the Civil War would last four years and take the lives of 620,000 Americans.

By the summer of 1862, with thousands of Americans already dead or wounded and the hopes of a quick resolution to the war all but abandoned, three political factions had emerged. There were those who thought the war was too hard and would have accepted defeat by negotiating the end of the United States by allowing the South to secede. Second were those who urged staying the course by muddling through with a cautious military policy and a desire to be "moderate and reasonable" about Southern property rights, including slavery.

We see these first two factions today. The Kerry-Gore-Pelosi-Lamont bloc declares the war too hard, the world too dangerous. They try to find some explainable way to avoid reality while advocating return to "normalcy," and promoting a policy of weakness and withdrawal abroad.

Most government officials constitute the second wing, which argues the system is doing the best it can and that we have to "stay the course"--no matter how unproductive. But, after being exposed in the failed response to Hurricane Katrina, it will become increasingly difficult for this wing to keep explaining the continuing failures of the system.

Just consider the following: Osama bin Laden is still at large. Afghanistan is still insecure. Iraq is still violent. North Korea and Iran are still building nuclear weapons and missiles. Terrorist recruiting is still occurring in the U.S., Canada, Great Britain and across the planet.

By late summer, 1862, Lincoln agonizingly concluded that a third faction had the right strategy for victory. This group's strategy demanded reorganizing everything as needed, intensifying the war, and bringing the full might of the industrial North to bear until the war was won.

The first and greatest lesson of the last five years parallels what Lincoln came to understand. The dangers are greater, the enemy is more determined, and victory will be substantially harder than we had expected in the early days after the initial attack. Despite how painful it would prove to be, Lincoln chose the road to victory. President Bush today finds himself in precisely the same dilemma Lincoln faced 144 years ago. With American survival at stake, he also must choose. His strategies are not wrong, but they are failing. And they are failing for three reasons.

Ann Coulter on Joe Wilson

Ann Coulter argues that Scooter Libby fell into Patrick Fitzgerald's "perjury trap." But why did Judy Miller go to jail? Something about this story remains unexplained...

Melanie Phillips on Britain's Fifth Column

From her column in the Daily Mail:

Warning bells are sounding across the Atlantic, with an article in America’s New Republic magazine claiming that Britain now poses a greater terror threat to America than Iraq, Iran or Afghanistan.

That absurd bit of hyperbole aside, the real surprise to me is that anyone is still surprised by the existence and scale of the home-grown British Islamic terrorist threat.

Three months ago, I published my book, Londonistan — which virtually the entire British publishing world had refused to touch — which warned about precisely this phenomenon.

Not only had Britain been allowed to become the hub of Al Qaeda in Europe, but the political and security establishment was still refusing to acknowledge the full dimensions of the threat. Of course, not all Muslims fit this pattern. Hundreds of thousands of British Muslims have no truck with Islamic extremism or terrorism, and across the world Muslims are numbered among its principal victims.

Nevertheless, the dismaying fact is that a horrifying number in Britain do harbour extremist views. According to a recent poll of British Muslims, no fewer than one quarter supported the London bombings in July last year. Yet even now, many in Britain still remain in a state of denial about the nature and implications of this threat. Politicians, police and security officials refuse to acknowledge that we are facing a holy war, an Islamic jihad, being waged against the West.

That doesn’t mean that all Muslims sign up to such a war; many regard it as a perversion of their faith. But the fact is that this terrorism is being perpetrated in the name of Islam and is condoned and even mandated by Islamic religious authorities.

And unless we understand that what drives people to these terrible acts is religious fanaticism — and is therefore not susceptible to reason, let alone negotiation — we cannot hope to defeat it.

A reader survey...

Who reads this blog? To find out, I've built a reader survey. If you'd like to participate, please click here. NOTE: The free survey software I'm using will only process up to 100 responses, so please take just one...

Victor Davis Hanson on Fouad Ajami

Hanson reviews The Foreigner's Gift for Commentary Magazine:

The Foreigner’s Gift is not an organized work of analysis, its arguments leading in logical progression to a solidly reasoned conclusion. Instead, it is a series of highly readable vignettes drawn from Ajami’s serial travels and reflections. Which is hardly to say that it lacks a point, or that its point is uncontroversial — far from it. Critics will surely cite Ajami’s own Shiite background as the catalyst for his professed confidence in the emergence of Iraq’s Shiites as the stewards of Iraqi democracy. But any such suggestion of a hidden agenda, or alternatively of naiveté, would be very wide of the mark.

What most characterizes Ajami is not his religious faith (if he has any in the traditional sense) but his unequalled appreciation of historical irony — the irony entailed, for example, in the fact that by taking out the single figure of Saddam Hussein we unleashed an unforeseen moral reckoning among the Arabs at large; the irony that the very vehemence of Iraq’s insurgency may in the end undo and humiliate it on its own turf, and might already have begun to do so; the irony that Shiite Iran may rue the day when its Shiite cousins in Iraq were freed by the Americans.

When it comes to ironies, Ajami is clearly bemused that an American oilman, himself the son of a President who in 1991 called for the Iraqi Shiites to rise up and overthrow a wounded Saddam Hussein, only to stand by as they were slaughtered, should have been brought to exclaim in September 2003: “Iraq as a dictatorship had great power to destabilize the Middle East. Iraq as a democracy will have great power to inspire the Middle East.” Ajami himself is not yet prepared to say that Iraq will do so — only that, with our help, it just might. He needs to be listened to very closely.

Youssef Ibrahim's Plan to Defeat Islamist Terror

From the NY Sun (ht Melanie Phillips):

1.The West needs strategies conveying to the vast majority of the world's 1.2 billion Muslims that acquiescence to jihadists and their ideologies means a rupture with Western civilization. The consequences for this should be spelled out by withholding Western commerce, the Internet, arms, machinery, and know-how — all of which still represent the bulk of progress as we define it in today's world. Imagine a ban on weapons and technology, on Microsoft and IBM, on Boeing, Ilyushin transport planes, and Airbus spares.

2. Draconian sanctions such as these should be applied in unison with Russia and China and clearly framed within the U.N. code. Islamic so-called moderate or client states including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Indonesia, among others, as well as enemies such as Iran, should be provided with a yardstick to define the dismantling of the infrastructure and software of terror at home — in mosques, in schools, in theocratic institutions, and inside government itself.

That will demand total elimination of the madrassa rote systems, the restructuring of religious teachings, and the outlawing of political groups such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Muslim Brotherhood, which adopt religion as political vehicles.

3. In the West itself, the last vestiges of tolerance toward Islamic fundamentalism must be removed. Laws targeting extremist speech, Islamic dress, storefront unregulated mosques, and the traffic of immigrant Muslims who do not speak the language nor share the values of freedom must surface in the legal codes of America, Europe, and Australia. The West must clearly process the fact that it is facing an existential threat to its core values, and it cannot be shy about installing tools of war in its democratic practices.

Lest anyone think this is much ado about little, five years ago on one of America's darkest days when airplanes were crashed into the World Trade Center, it seemed that only a few hundred jihadists were aiming to make a point.

How to Bomb Tehran

Writing in the American Thinker J.R. Dunn says it may be time to bomb Tehran--without killing anyone:

* The Biggest Bang—Which brings us to our final possibility, which can be carried out as the last action short of open war. This would involve setting off a low-yield nuclear warhead 50,000 feet over Tehran. At that altitude, a bomb of precise power would break every window in the city, blind a few unfortunates, but kill no one. This may seem a drastic proposal, but in a climate where even gentle souls like Michael Coren are suggesting far worse, ‘drastic’ is a matter of debate.

A nuclear explosion is the most foreboding sight in nature it is possible to witness and survive. Many eyewitnesses of atmospheric bomb tests speak of the almost unreasoning terror that the sight creates. During the 1960s, an Air Force officer suggested that a single exception be made to the atmospheric test ban treaty: that a single bomb be set off annually with the leaders of all major powers present. “Once they see it, they will never forget it.”

That’s the problem with the ayatollahs and their servants – they haven’t seen it. A single example of what their longed-for toy actually is might concentrate their minds wonderfully. It might also result in every bearded man in Tehran being strung up by a terrified citizenry. And if it doesn’t work? If the ayatollahs remain defiant? We set off another one 45,000 feet above Qum. Repeat as many times as necessary. Anything is better than genocide.

Taliban-Al Qaeda Win in Waziristan

Michelle Malkin is not pleased with the latest news on Bill Roggio's blog from Pakistan's Afghan border. Apparently, it's just become the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan after an agreement with the Pakistani government. That's where Bin Laden supposedly lives.

Roggio say that makes Waziristan the new home base of Al Qaeda:

While this is not reported in the media, the “Taliban commanders” in attendance include none other than Jalaluddin Haqqani, military commander of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Tahir Yuldashev, the commander of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. The New York Times does place Haqqani and Yuldashev in the Waziristan region. Both men are deeply in bed with al-Qaeda, and it is useless at this point in time to make distinctions between al-Qaeda, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan , the Taliban and Pakistan jihadi groups like Lashkar-Toiba. Syed Saleem Shahzad indicates other known Taliban commanders were present at the meeting; "At the gathering, mujahideen leader Maulana Sadiq Noor and a representative of Gul Badar (chief of the Pakistani Taliban in North Waziristan), as well as other members of the mujahideen shura (council), were seated on a stage while the leaders of the JUI-F [the political party of Pakistani opposition leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman and only party in North and South Waziristan] delivered the speeches." Note that while unstated, Haqqani and Yuldashev also sit on the Mujahideen Shura.

Quinnipiac Poll: Americans Want Giuliani

Thanks to a short item in The American Thinker today that led me to Qunnipiac University's polling site, I've learned that the Israelis are not the only ones who like Hizzoner. So far, he leads every other candidate listed in the Quinnipiac Poll, too:

Among Republican voters, 46 percent would like to see former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani nominated to run for President in 2008, followed by 25 percent who back Arizona Sen. John McCain, with no other GOP contender breaking 7 percent.

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton is the choice of 44 percent of Florida Democrats, followed by former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards with 17 percent, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry at 10 percent and Delaware Sen. Joseph Biden at 8 percent.

On head-to-head matchups, Giuliani leads Clinton 49 - 42 percent, while McCain tops the Democrat 48 - 42 percent.

Israeli Experts Back Giuliani for US President

According to Haaretz. They gave him a score of 8.75 out of a possible 10. Of course, as readers of this blog surely realize, I would like to call Hizzoner "Mr. President" someday, too--but can he win American as well as Israeli support in 2008? Interestingly, Hillary Clinton is the highest-ranked Democrat, with a score of 7.63 (tied with Senator John McCain).

King Rat (1965)

What a movie: slow-moving, stark, depressing, haunting, thought-provoking. It's about what it takes to survive, about the struggle in each person between good and evil, about war and peace, POW camps, the Japanese occupation of Asia, the A-bomb--and Anglo-American relations, as well.

The cast of this adaptation of James Clavell's autobiographical 1962 novel makes the film worth watching just for the acting: George Segal is King Rat, the American black-marketeer, a US Army corporal who runs the rackets in a Singapore POW camp; James Fox is Marlowe, a sarong-wearing British officer who falls under his spell. Supporting cast reads like the Masterpiece Theatre stock company--John Mills, Leonard Rossiter, Denholm Elliott.

It makes you think, it makes you feel, and it sticks with you for a long time afterwards. (Not suitable for children or the squeamish, since the film's POWs eat rats and a dog).

Conservation Finance

I came across this blog while researching NGOs. Conservation Finance has interesting posts about ecology, development, and the economics of international aid programs. It's worth a look...

Daniel Pipes to Bin Laden: "Nuts!"

Well, he said it a little more long-windedly than America's soldiers fighting the Battle of the Bulge during WWII--but Daniel Pipes has just rejected Bin Laden's invitation to surrender, switch sides, and join his jihad against America:

So, Al-Qaeda wants me and my "sword" (a reference, presumably, to my computer keyboard) to join its efforts. My response to Gadahn:

I note your offer for me to change sides in the current war. But I am faithful to my own religion, to my own country, and to my civilization. I will do my part to defeat radical, totalitarian Islam and to usher in the emergence of a modern, moderate, and good-neighborly Islam in its place.

Uzbek Independence Day

It was celebrated on September 1st. Here's a link to an interesting holiday-themed article from the Escape Artist.

Christopher Hitchens on Richard Armitage, Joseph Wilson & Valerie Plame

I don't know how he does it. He churns out long such articles overnight. He must never sleep. Here's Christopher Hitchens take in Slate on the end of a Washington scandal:

I had a feeling that I might slightly regret the title ("Case Closed") of my July 25 column on the Niger uranium story. I have now presented thousands of words of evidence and argument to the effect that, yes, the Saddam Hussein regime did send an important Iraqi nuclear diplomat to Niger in early 1999. And I have not so far received any rebuttal from any source on this crucial point of contention. But there was always another layer to the Joseph Wilson fantasy. Easy enough as it was to prove that he had completely missed the West African evidence that was staring him in the face, there remained the charge that his nonreport on a real threat had led to a government-sponsored vendetta against him and his wife, Valerie Plame.

In his July 12 column in the Washington Post, Robert Novak had already partly exposed this paranoid myth by stating plainly that nobody had leaked anything, or outed anyone, to him. On the contrary, it was he who approached sources within the administration and the CIA and not the other way around. But now we have the final word on who did disclose the name and occupation of Valerie Plame, and it turns out to be someone whose opposition to the Bush policy in Iraq has—like Robert Novak's—long been a byword in Washington. It is particularly satisfying that this admission comes from two of the journalists—Michael Isikoff and David Corn—who did the most to get the story wrong in the first place and the most to keep it going long beyond the span of its natural life.

As most of us have long suspected, the man who told Novak about Valerie Plame was Richard Armitage, Colin Powell's deputy at the State Department and, with his boss, an assiduous underminer of the president's war policy. (His and Powell's—and George Tenet's—fingerprints are all over Bob Woodward's "insider" accounts of post-9/11 policy planning, which helps clear up another nonmystery: Woodward's revelation several months ago that he had known all along about the Wilson-Plame connection and considered it to be no big deal.)

Swedish Recipes

While we're doing more cheerful links, here's Anne's Food, featuring recipes from Stockholm...

Russian Blog Saves Lives

Here's a nice story, for a change, about how weblogs are helping to save lives in Russia:

She is one of the most popular users of the LiveJournal, or JJ in Russian abbreviation. Almost 3,500 people are permanent readers of her Internet Diary. Olga went into charity about two years ago. The same LiveJournal encouraged her to go for it.

"The first case started with a request, which I came across in the LiveJournal. A single mother with four children needed money urgently. A fund-raising campaign was a huge success. Later on, another user of LiveJournal needed money, and we collected it for him, too. This is how it all started. After some time, we gained a reputation, and more users," Olga recalls.

A year ago, Vladik Kuzmin, a small boy with a cancerous tumor from Khabarovsk appeared in her life. Olga does not remember exactly how his parents contacted her. But this is not so important after all. Raising solid funds started with his case. During his short life the boy went through several operations in Russia, but to no avail. Russian doctors acknowledged that his tumor was inoperable, but their Japanese colleagues volunteered to try and save the boy. But they asked for about $300,000. Olga started her search for money. But she soon found out that the whole sum was not necessary. German doctors learnt about Vladik from the Internet, through the same LiveJournal, and said that the treatment would be by an order less. Volunteers contacted the hospital, prepared the required papers, and in late August Vladik went through a successful operation, and will soon return home. The Internet community has saved his life.

"The expenses for Vladik's treatment were brought down from $300,000 to $35,000. We collected even more than needed. All in all, we raised about $75,000 to help Vladik and other children. And this is just through my modest blog.

Glenn Ford (1916-2006)

It was surprising to hear that actor Glenn Ford passed away. Some obituaries noted that Santa Monica High School was Ford's alma mater. Mine too. I acted in student plays put on by the Drama Club--they presented an annual "Glenn Ford Award" for the best actor in a school play (not me). Ford's photo hung in our high school "Hall of Fame." At UCLA we watched "Gilda" in our Film Noir seminar. The Washington Post called him an overlooked Hollywood star, maybe true in Washington, DC--but not in Santa Monica... Here are some facts about his life, from the LA Times obituary:

He was born Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford on May 1, 1916, the son of a railroad executive and mill owner and nephew of Sir John MacDonald, a former prime minister of Canada and a descendant of Martin Van Buren, eighth president of the United States.

Ford spent his earliest years in Glenford, site of the family's paper mill, from which Ford took his professional name.

By the time his family moved to California when he was 7, he had already developed a taste for performing. At Santa Monica High School, he ran track, played lacrosse and excelled in English and drama.

Ford worked with numerous little theater groups and California touring companies as an actor and stage manager before joining the Broadway-bound play "Soliloquy," starring film actor John Beal, in 1938.

But when the play reached Broadway, it closed after only two performances. Ford returned to Los Angeles, and 20th Century Fox hired him for a fourth-billed role in the low-budget "Heaven With a Barbed Wire Fence."

It was not the most auspicious of debuts.

In a 1985 interview with The Times, Ford recalled that the film's director, Ricardo Cortez, told him he would never make it as a movie actor. But soon after, Ford was signed by Columbia. Roles in a string of B pictures followed, until World War II service intervened.

Ford enlisted in the Marine Corps in December 1942, after having been a member of the Coast Guard Auxiliary for a year. After his discharge in 1945, he returned to the screen the next year in three notable pictures: "Gilda"; "A Stolen Life," in which he played opposite Bette Davis; and "Gallant Journey," a film biography of 19th century flight pioneer John Montgomery.

In "Gilda," where Rita Hayworth performs one of the steamiest dances in movie history, Ford was praised by Variety as "a far better actor than the tale permits."

Where's the Secret Service?

Michelle Malkin has a roundup of open incitement to kill President Bush, including a new British docudrama.

I think inciting people to kill the President is still against the law...

Daniel Pipes on Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006)

Daniel Pipes has published a webpage on Naguib Mahfouz, with links to writings about the Egyptian Nobel-laureate. Here are some excerpts:

On Pour Rushdie: Cent intellectuels arabes et musulmans pour la liberté d'expression:

In an impressive show of strength, one hundred Arab and Muslim intellectuals have written op-ed length articles in support of Rushdie. The writers include such heavyweights as the Syrian poet Adonis, the Kirgiz novelist Chingiz Aïtmatov, the Syrian writer Sadiq Al-Azm, the Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun, the Tunisian historian Hichem Djaït, the Lebanese novelist Hanan el-Cheikh, the Israeli Arab novelists Emile Habibi and Anton Shammas, and the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz.

Their formats vary, from poetry to analysis to open letter to music, but the message stays the same: We're with you Salman. In addition to these, the volume includes a document of great daring: under the title, "Call of Iranian artists and intellectuals in favor of Salman Rushdie," some 127 Iranian figures have signed a petition blasting the Khomeini edict against Rushdie, as well as the "terrorist and liberty-cide methods" of the Islamic Republic.

This outpouring of solidarity with the beleagured victim of fundamentalist Islam has a message not just for Muslims but also for Westerners. First, don't assume that all Muslims think as do the ayatollahs, but recognize that they are the first victims of the fanatics. Second, ignore the Western apologists who claim that fundamentalism is the tide of the future, and fight it along with the brave Muslims represented in this volume.

On Palace Walk:

According to Mahfouz, the First World War signaled major changes in the traditional Muslim family structure. When Fahmi, the second son, refuses to comply with Ahmad's order to stop his nationalistic activities, he acts as a modern son. Fahmi is not merely disobedient; he is inspired by moral principles that Ahmad can neither share nor overrule through the force of personal authority. Such a conflict between generations was almost inconceivable in the more static society of earlier periods, when both father and son would have been similarly attuned to the traditional loyalties. Once the precedent has been set, one expects repetitions to recur with increasing frequency and diminishing justification. As Ahmad's power diminishes, family relations are on their way towards modernity.

Zaynab, briefly the wife of Ahmad's eldest son, wants changes in her position as woman. She insists on going out in the evening with her husband; Amina, the traditional woman, predictably leads the opposition to this notion (for otherwise her own decades of acceptance look wasted and foolish). More disruptive yet, Zaynab demands a divorce when she finds her husband with another woman. This may not sound like a surprising response, but it was to Ahmad, raised in an entirely different ethic. "There was nothing strange about a man casting out a pair of shoes, but shoes were not supposed to throw away their owner." The world is changing and each character, regretting this, changes with it.

Mahfouz can be compared to Honoré Balzac in his love for the life of a particular great city, high and low, and his tolerance for the ambiguity in the heart of each human. At its best, Palace Walk is full of insight about the human condition. Its triumph lies in the portrayal of character, particularly the complex figure of Ahmad, whom we might easily judge to be a moral monster. But Mahfouz makes plausible, through multiple points of view and the merchant's own interior monologues, the good opinion held of him by friends, family, and self.

Mahfouz's people are made plain by his great clarity of language, though his verbal strength is slightly hampered in this translation by a choice of words that often seems merely accurate.

The novel's most contemporary aspect, and its weakest, is its ending. Unlike Balzac, Mahfouz lets the story spin on inconclusively, stopping the action at a sobering climax but without giving closure to an event which might have been a satisfying measuring stick for the change in its characters.

On The Thousand and One Nights:

Mahfouz, the Egyptian novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988 and was stabbed in the neck by a fundamentalist Muslim in 1994, has added to the pseudo-Nights literature with a wonderful set of fantastical stories about the town where the original Nights are supposed to have occurred. Normally known as a Balzac-type chronicler of the human comedy all around him, Mahfouz lets loose here with enchanting tales from a bewitched world-but one that illustrates a full range of human emotions and predicaments. Arabian Nights and Days may be the outstanding work of modern Arabic literature. Also, Doubleday has graced the book with one of the most stunning jackets of any book published in the United States in recent years.

On the significance of his work:

Mahfouz exerts a benign and moderating influence on the turbulent politics of the Arabic-speaking countries, and for this one must be grateful. But actually, as an artist, how good is he? He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988, a pretty impressive credential, to be sure. But the sages of Stockholm have been known to respond to political pressures, and the absence of any Arabic writer among the ranks of the world's most prestigious literary laureates weighed heavily on them. They selected Mahfouz because he was the confirmed giant among Arab writers - not because they found him to be the leading belle-lettrist in a worldwide competition.

This reviewer once spent an academic year in Cairo enrolled in a program to learn the Arabic language that amounted to a crash course in modern Egyptian literature. The many novels I read left me deeply unimpressed by the general quality of the artistry. I found stories contrived, characters thin, and language stilted. Had they been written in English, I concluded, most of these Arabic novels would likely not have been published. This is not entirely surprising, for the novel is a Western form very new to Arabs. Poetry is the glory of Arabic literature; novels remain derivative and experimental. Mahfouz is no doubt right that "The novel is the poetry of the modern world," but his is a format that Arab authors have yet fully to master.

By this unexacting standard, Mahfouz does shine; by international standards, however, he is a middling novelist. Two of his works are truly compelling: Palace Walk (1956), the first volume of the trilogy, with its very comprehensive account of three generations of a rather typical, if prosperous, Cairene family, depicts a dictatorial husband in the 1910s who insists that his family live a thoroughly Islamic life but then goes off nearly every evening to pursue his sybaritic pleasure. The contrast between his domineering personality at home and the good-time Ahmad out on the town is unforgettable. Arabian Nights and Days (1982) tells a wonderful set of fantastical stories about the town where the original Thousand and One Nights are supposed to have occurred. It's a modernized version of an ancient fable and it works surprisingly well.

But the other volumes fall off and most of his other major works (The Beginning and the End, The Thief and the Dogs, Miramar) somewhat repeatedly and tediously pursue the same themes. Though compared to Balzac, Mahfouz's vision is far more constricted, so his stories fall way short of that master's. A Balzac or an Austin could display the human comedy within narrow confines, but not Mahfouz, who only glancingly touches on it. Worse, Mahfouz is a committed artist, much of whose fiction, Milson explains, "is the outcome of his desire to reform society, and his primary purpose throughout is to convey ideas." However laudable those ideas may be, this political purpose gives his work a didactic and sometimes stifling quality.

Japanese Women ISO Korean Men

Today's Washington Post reports the latest fad to sweep across Japan is the "Korean Wave":

TOKYO -- Thin and gorgeous in a slinky black dress, Mikimoto pearls and a low-slung diamond Tiffany pendant, 26-year-old Kazumi Yoshimura already has looks, cash and accessories. There's only one more thing this single Japanese woman says she needs to find eternal bliss -- a Korean man.

Melanie Phillips: Western Media Are Jihadist Dupes

(ht LGF)

Certain conclusions are now inescapable. First, hatred of Israel and the irrationality associated with that hatred have now reached unprecedented proportions within Britain and the west. Second, with a few honourable exceptions the mainstream media are no longer to be believed in anything they transmit, either in words or pictures, about the Middle East. It is only the blogosphere which is now performing the most elementary disciplines of journalism: to aspire to objectivity, to separate facts from prejudices, to apply basic checks to claims being made by partisans to a conflict, and to be particularly wary of those with a proven track record of lying. Third, the mainstream media must now be regarded as active accessories to the war being waged against the free world and therefore as a fifth column in that world – an enemy within. Fourth, the impact of the lies and distortions transmitted by the mainstream media in inflaming the already pathological hatred of the west within the Arab and Muslim world is incalculable. Fifth, the mainstream media’s vilification, demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel, based on outright fabrications and malevolent distortions, is imperilling the very existence of the country that is the front line of defence of the free world. Sixth, that vilification is also imperilling the safety and well-being of Jewish communities around the world, subject now to the double victimisation of attack by Islamists and attack by non-Muslims for belonging to a Jewish people that refuses to submit passively to a second attempt at genocidal slaughter and instead fights to defend itself.

To date, as far as I can determine, not one mainstream editor or proprietor has acknowledged this corruption of the western media. The scale of this corruption now threatens to have a lethal impact on the course of human history. Hatred now drives not just the jihadists but their western dupes, too. Truth and freedom are indivisible. The deconstruction of the former inevitably presages the destruction of the latter. This is the way a civilisation dies.

Alan Dershowitz: Amnesty International's Phony War Crimes Charge

...against Israel. From The Jerusalem Post:

For Amnesty, "Israeli war crimes" are synonymous with "any military action whatsoever."

The real problem with Amnesty's paper is that its blanket condemnations do not consider the consequences of its arguments. (It doesn't have to; it would never advance these arguments against any country but Israel.)

Amnesty International's conclusions are not based on sound legal arguments. They're certainly not based on compelling moral arguments. They're simply anti-Israel arguments. Amnesty reached a predetermined conclusion - that Israel committed war crimes - and it is marshalling whatever sound-bites it could to support that conclusion.

Amnesty International is not only sacrificing its own credibility when it misstates the law and omits relevant facts in its obsession over Israel. It also harms progressive causes that AI should be championing.

Just last year, for example, Amnesty blamed Palestinian rapes and "honor killings" on - you guessed it - the Israeli occupation. When I pointed out that there was absolutely no statistical evidence to show that domestic violence increased during the occupation, and that Amnesty's report relied exclusively on the conclusory and anecdotal reports of Palestinian NGOs, Amnesty stubbornly repeated that "Israel is implicated in this violence by Palestinian men against Palestinian women."

This episode only underscored AI's predisposition to blame everything on Israel. Even when presented with an ideal opportunity to promote gender equality and feminism in the Arab world, it preferred to take wholly unrelated and absurd shots at Israel.

Amnesty International just can't seem to help itself when it comes to blaming Israel for the evils of the world, but rational observers must not credit the pre-determined conclusions of a once-reputable organization that has destroyed its own credibility by repeatedly applying a double standard to Israel.

Print Your Own Classic Books--Free

With Google's new service, according to the BBC:

The firm's book search tool will let people print classics such as Dante's Inferno or Aesop's Fables, as well as other books no longer under copyright. Until now, the service has only let people read such books on-screen.

Google's book search service stems from a wider project to put books online in a searchable format, which it is undertaking with major universities. Working with Google on the Books Library project are Oxford University, Harvard, Stanford, the University of Michigan and the University of California, as well as the New York Public Library.

"How many users will find, and then buy, books they never could have discovered any other way? Eric Schmidt, Google

Volunteers working for a project known as Gutenberg have for some years copied out-of-copyright books as text files, which can then be used for printing, reading or piping into a programme for editing.

In contrast, Google is offering the books in a "print-ready" format, as have several other - albeit much smaller and less well-known - firms.

NPR Attacks My Cousin!

I guess it shows that I really don't listen to NPR anymore... Thanks to tesing Digg It versus Topix, I found out that this past June, "bioethicist" Katie Watson recorded an NPR commentary calling my cousin, Dr. Robert Jarvik, "a sellout" for endorsing Lipitor. Well, I may be biased, but after hearing her complaint, I don't think I'd ever ask Katie Watson for ethical advice, much less medical advice from the anonymous cardiologist friend (are anonymous denunciations ethical?) she quotes against my cousin.

I'm pretty sure Robbie is getting paid for the ads, of course. He may be "cashing in" on his fame, but that certainly doesn't make him a "sellout." I don't think he's betrayed any principle. He's a bioengineer, not a cardiologist. If my cousin says he takes Lipitor himself, I believe him. We have a family tendency towards elevated cholesterol. I take Lipitor myself, my internist prescribed it when another statin wasn't working (how come I can't get it for free?).

The first time I saw the Pfizer ad on TV, I was surprised. I wondered why a drug company would pick an inventor to promote a pill. Then I guessed the subtext of the ad might be: "Take this cholesterol reducing drug so you won't need to have artificial heart implanted." I guess that's kind of clever, because it seems sort of understated.

Now, I'm told there's a sequel--filmed at the Milwaukee Art Museum--but I still haven't seen it so I don't know what that's about. (For some reason, I doubt NPR will call the art museum a "sellout.")

Of course, I do like seeing my relative starring in a TV ad. Everyone knows that people watch commercials more than the shows. And it's not for Viagra or Ex-Lax or denture cream, or even Rogaine. I admit I'm biased, and that I got some calls from people that I had not heard from in a long time and having a cousin on TV raised my status, too.

But that doesn't give NPR the right to smear my relative as a sellout just for doing advertising. Especially since NPR runs ads all the time--for example: the digital download attacking my cousin included a plug for RealPlayer. Since NPR claims to be non-commercial, and Robbie doesn't (he has a commercial company called Jarvik Heart), I think that may make NPR the "sellout."

Dan Gordon on Israeli Tactics in Lebanon

Gordon points out that Arab Druze and Bedouin Muslims fight in the Israeli army. From The American Thinker:

They had received intelligence that arms were being stored in the mosque of that village, and that possibly it had been booby trapped in order to kill or maim any Israeli troops trying to enter the mosque in search of weapons. Lieutenant Colonel Ishai related that normal operating procedures and common sense would dictate that he first send in bomb sniffing dogs.

It should be noted that Lieutenant Colonel Ishai’s brigade is made up not only of Jews but Druze and Bedouin Muslims. All of these fighters came from villages in the Galilee which had been hit by Hezb’allah’s constant barrages of katyusha rockets aimed at Israel’s civilian population. For them this fight was not a political struggle, nor even a national one, it was quite literally in defense of their homes.

Lieutenant Colonel Ishai has served for many years shoulder to shoulder with Muslim troops in the army of the Jewish state. Indeed I was privileged to meet Druze commanders, who commanded almost exclusively Jewish troops. The first one of those commanders was my own company commander when I was in basic training in 1973.

The soldiers who fight for the state of Israel are not only Jews they are Christian, Druze and Moslem as well. Far from the image of a barbaric Nazi-like military, the IDF takes great pains even in war time to respect the sensitivities not only of its own troops but of the Palestinian and Lebanese civilians caught up in the cross fire brought about by the Islamist terrorists who hide behind them.

Lieutenant Colonel Ishai decided that sending bomb sniffing dogs into a Moslem mosque would be offensive to members of that religion. He thus decided that rather than do that he would send in soldiers, knowing that he was risking their lives to do so.

He gave that order and his soldiers obeyed it in full knowledge of all the implications of their actions. They would risk their lives to respect the sanctity of another’s religion and the sensitivities of another people. Those were the actions of the Israeli army.

What they found in the mosque were anti-tank missiles of the kind that had just been used to try and kill them and katyusha rockets of the kind that quite literally had been aimed at their own homes and families. This is the nature of the enemy we faced. It was a terrorist army organized, trained, financed and equipped as an army whose short, medium and long range rockets rained at Israel’s civilian population, while hiding behind Lebanon’s civilian population.

It is a terrorist army that sought to maximize both Israeli and Lebanese civilian loss of life. The use of indiscriminate weapons against civilian populations is recognized as a war crime in every court in every nation. Hezb’allah committed four thousand of those war crimes in launching its four thousand rockets against Israel’s cities and villages. That is a war crime which no one seems to be investigating, let alone prosecuting. However, one could add to that, that the firing of such weapons from within ones own civilian population is not only a war crime, not only a crime against one’s own people, but a crime against humanity. I would hope that the next time someone so casually refers to Israel’s barbaric attacks against the Lebanese people, they remember Lieutenant Colonel Ishai and his soldiers, Druze Moslem, and Jewish alike who risked their lives rather than offend the sensitivities of the Lebanese people, those very same people whom Hezb’allah’s terrorist army so readily sacrificed in their unprovoked attack against Israel.

VOA & Radio Free Europe Topper Ensnared in Corruption Probe

Today's NY Times and Washington Post both report that former CPB Chairman Ken Tomlinson--currently head of the International Broadcasting Board of Governors that oversees Radio Free Europe and the Voice of America--has been named in a State Department corruption investigation. He's accused of hiring cronies, running a horse-breeding business, and other violations. Interestingly, despite the swirl of scandal, President Bush had re-nominated Tomlinson for another term.

From the Post story by Paul Farhi:

The most sensational complaint against Tomlinson might be that he used government resources to support his stable of thoroughbred racehorses, potentially violating federal embezzlement laws. Tomlinson has had a lifelong interest in breeding and racing horses. Upon his retirement from Reader's Digest in 1996, he began to devote himself to raising horses at his ranch, Springbrook Farm, near Middleburg.

The investigation determined that Tomlinson used his office for his thoroughbred activities, but the summary offers no details.

The State Department said it turned its report over to the Department of Justice, which has declined to bring criminal charges against Tomlinson. The allegation involving the contractor, however, is pending in DOJ's civil division.

Tomlinson, who is attending a conference in Berlin, said via e-mail yesterday that he made "diligent efforts" to bill each board for the work he did. "It is well known and accepted by all," Tomlinson wrote, "that because of the importance of what I was doing in the war on terror that I would be working more than 130 days a year," which is the statutory maximum.

He also wrote that he devoted an average of one e-mail and 2 1/2 minutes a day at the office to his horse operations. "In retrospect," he wrote, "I should have been more careful in this regard."

The inspector general's report was made public by three Democratic members of Congress: Reps. Howard Berman and Tom Lantos, both of California, and Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut. The three legislators requested the investigation last year after being contacted by an anonymous BBG employee.

The lawmakers called for Tomlinson's removal yesterday and urged President Bush in a letter to "take all necessary steps to restore the integrity of the Broadcasting Board of Governors."

I'm an outsider, but I'd say Ken Tomlinson's chances of getting through the Senate for a second term are zero. You can read the original State Department investigation posted on Congressman Howard Berman's website.(ht TPM Muckracker.com)

President Bush may not realize it, but the Democrats have done him a favor by forcing Tomlinson out. It gives Bush a second chance--to nominate somebody qualified to improve America's battered image around the globe.

Al Qaeda's Saudi Connection

It's not exactly a surprise, but Uriya Shavit carefully presents the evidence of Al Qaeda's Saudi Arabian roots:

Indeed, bin Laden's success in terrorizing the United States is largely the result of the materialization of the conception of the "counterattack": while the 9-11 attacks had little direct strategic importance for the U.S. economy and society, the emerging threat of a few Muslim Americans or Muslim Europeans becoming a fifth column and of sophisticated technologies becoming self-destructive weapons not only struck fear and suspicion in many Western societies but also forced them to rethink long-held convictions on such issues as freedom of speech, immigration, due process, and multiculturalism.

Gerald Steinberg: Investigate Human Rights Watch

Writing in the Jerusalem Post,Gerald Steinberg has accused HRW head Ken Roth of "blood libel" against Israel, and demanded an investigation of the organization:

With an annual budget of $50 million, Roth and his funders are obliged to insure that HRW's reports are accurate and free of ideological bias. In contrast, when these reports are instrumental in spreading anti-Israel sentiment in Malaysia, Turkey, Bangladesh, Europe and elsewhere, the result is the antithesis of the human rights objectives proclaimed by HRW.

Rather than the independent investigations of Israel that Roth always demands, it is his HRW's activities that need to be investigated.

I agree. I'd like to nominate Natan Sharansky to conduct an independent investigation of Human Rights Watch--and suggest HRW founder Robert Bernstein raise the money to pay for it...

Reese Schonfeld on Republican War Wimps

From MeandTed.com:

Liberals are accused of NIMBY – Not in My Backyard: School integration, emphatically, but NIMBY; low-income housing, absolutely, but NIMBY; a halfway house, absolutely, but not in my backyard – obvious hypocrisy, all of it.

Conservatives are just as two-faced about “staying the course.” As with Vietnam when this generation of conservative leaders rich boy-ed their way out of the draft (Bush, Cheney, Quayle, never spent a day in that country), conservatives now talk one way and act another.

Everyday conservatives are demanding that the U.S. “stay the course,” demanding that we support our troops and honor our brave men and women, even while they are unwilling to make the least sacrifice to ease the strains on the soldiers and Marines actually doing the fighting. The Pentagon keeps them there on longer and longer tours and rotates them back with less and less R&R. Real support would entail enlisting more men, more reserves to permit an adequate rotation schedule, prevent battle fatigue and leave these heroes victims of their own bravery.

The best way for conservatives to avoid the charge of hypocrisy would be to deliver a son, a daughter, a brother, a sister or some other loved one to the Army or Marines. (The second best way would be to show some political courage and vote for a draft.) Then maybe at last we would have enough troops to fight and win the war.

No one has the right to demand we “stay the course” unless he has one of his own traveling that course with the truly brave men and women who are there now. Otherwise, he is just another N.M.B. – stay the course but “Not with My Boy.”

By the way, the Pentagon is not necessarily honoring our troops when they cut their widows pensions in half. (More on that Monday.)

ZoomInfo.com

Just found this cv search website because it had a link to yours truly: ZoomInfo.com.

The Mosul - Haifa Oil Pipeline

An anti-Israel caller to C-Span this morning was critical of Ahmad Chalabi for advocating the rebuilding of the Mosul-Haifa oil pipeline--a pre-1948 oil export route. So, I googled the idea, and found this 2003 article from the Guardian describing the proposal. My reaction: why not? In fact, why not make it an explicit goal of the European UN force--to rebuild the Iraq-Israel oil pipeline and turn the politics of oil into the politics of pro-Western democracy as an overt goal of American diplomacy in the Middle East? Here's the bottom line:

The plan envisages the reconstruction of an old pipeline, inactive since the end of the British mandate in Palestine in 1948, when the flow from Iraq's northern oilfields to Palestine was re-directed to Syria.

Now, its resurrection would transform economic power in the region, bringing revenue to the new US-dominated Iraq, cutting out Syria and solving Israel's energy crisis at a stroke.

It would also create an end less and easily accessible source of cheap Iraqi oil for the US guaranteed by reliable allies other than Saudi Arabia - a keystone of US foreign policy for decades and especially since 11 September 2001.

Until 1948, the pipeline ran from the Kurdish-controlled city of Mosul to the Israeli port of Haifa, on its northern Mediterranean coast.

The revival of the pipeline was first discussed openly by the Israeli Minister for National Infrastructures, Joseph Paritzky, according to the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz .

The paper quotes Paritzky as saying that the pipeline would cut Israel's energy bill drastically - probably by more than 25 per cent - since the country is currently largely dependent on expensive imports from Russia.

US intelligence sources confirmed to The Observer that the project has been discussed. One former senior CIA official said: 'It has long been a dream of a powerful section of the people now driving this administration [of President George W. Bush] and the war in Iraq to safeguard Israel's energy supply as well as that of the United States.

'The Haifa pipeline was something that existed, was resurrected as a dream and is now a viable project - albeit with a lot of building to do.'

The editor-in-chief of the Middle East Economic Review , Walid Khadduri, says in the current issue of Jane's Foreign Report that 'there's not a metre of it left, at least in Arab territory'.

To resurrect the pipeline would need the backing of whatever government the US is to put in place in Iraq, and has been discussed - according to Western diplomatic sources - with the US-sponsored Iraqi National Congress and its leader Ahmed Chalabi, the former banker favoured by the Pentagon for a powerful role in the war's aftermath.

Sources at the State Department said that concluding a peace treaty with Israel is to be 'top of the agenda' for a new Iraqi government, and Chalabi is known to have discussed Iraq's recognition of the state of Israel.

The pipeline would also require permission from Jordan. Paritzky's Ministry is believed to have approached officials in Amman on 9 April this year. Sources told Ha'aretz that the talks left Israel 'optimistic'.

More on the pipeline from Wikipedia:

The Trans-Arabian Pipeline Company (Tapline), was founded as a joint venture between the Standard Oil company of New Jersey (now Esso), Standard Oil of California (Chevron), The Texas Company (Texaco), and Socony-Vacuum Oil Company (Mobil), however, it eventually became a fully owned subsidiary of Aramco. The company built and operated the Trans Arabian Pipeline, a 1214 km 30" oil pipeline from Qaisuimah, Saudi Arabia to Sidon, Lebanon. In its heyday, it was an important factor in the global trade of petroleum-- helping with the economic development of Lebanon-- as well as American and Middle Eastern political relations.

Construction began in 1947. Originally the Tapline was intended to terminate in Haifa which was then in Palestine but due to the establishment of the state of Israel, an alternative route through Syria (via the Golan Heights) and Lebanon was selected with an export terminal in Sidon. Oil transport through the pipeline started in 1950. The initial capacity of the pipeline was 300,000 barrels per day (bpd), eventually rising to a maximum capacity of about 500,000 bpd with the addition of several more pumping stations.

Since the 1967 Arab-Israeli War, the section of the pipepline which runs through the Golan Heights came under Israeli control, though the Israelis permitted the pipeline's operation to continue. After years of constant bickering between Saudi Arabia and Syria and Lebanon over transit fees, the emergence of oil supertankers, and pipeline breakdowns, the section of the line beyond Jordan ceased operation in 1976. The remainder of the line between Saudi Arabia and Jordan continued to transport modest amounts of petroleum until 1990 when the Saudis cut off the pipeline in response to Jordan's support of Iraq during the first Gulf War. Today, the entire section of the line is unfit for oil transport.

Despite these problems, the Tapline has remained a potential export route for Persian Gulf oil exports to Europe and the United States. At least one analysis has indicated that the transportation cost of exporting oil via the Tapline through Haifa to Europe would cost as much as 40 percent less than shipping by tanker through the Suez Canal. In early 2005, rehabilitation of the Tapline at an estimated cost of $100 to $300 million was one of the strategic options being considered by the Jordanian government to meet oil needs.

Caroline Glick: News Media & NGOs Collaborate with Terrorists

From Little Green Footballs:

AS IS the case with the Palestinian war against Israel, one of the most notable aspects of Hizbullah’s latest campaign against Israel has been the active collaboration of news organizations and international NGO’s in Hizbullah’s information war against Israel. Like their rogue state sponsors, subversive sub-national groups like Hizbullah, Fatah and Hamas, see information operations as an integral part of their war for the annihilation of Israel and defeat of the West. And their information operations are more advanced than any the world has seen. As becomes more evident with each passing day, they have successfully corrupted both the world media and the community of NGOs that purportedly operate in a neutral manner in war zones.

It is not a coincidence that I saw the pictures of the Reuters’ vehicle on Powerline and not in the media coverage of the purported attack. Both the global media and the international NGO community abjectly refuse to investigate themselves. As democratic governments and their militaries have proven incapable of dealing with the phenomenon (in part because they seek to curry favor with the media and the international NGO community), the blogosphere as taken upon itself the role of media watchdog.

BLOGGERS HAVE become a critical component of the free world’s defense in the current war. During the Hizbullah campaign in Lebanon, bloggers scrutinized coverage of the war in a way that has never been done before. Their work has exposed the dirty secret of the Middle East that the media has hidden for so many years: The global media and the international NGO community, which profess to be neutral observers, are in fact colluding with terrorist organizations.

The blogosphere, and particularly Little Green Footballs, Powerline, Zombietime, Michelle Malkin, and EU Referendum, have relentlessly exposed the systematic staging of news events, fabrication of attacks against relief workers, and doctoring of photographic images by Hizbullah with the active assistance of international organizations and the global media.