Daniel Pipes on CIA Support for Islamists

In his National Review Online review of Ian Johnson's new book: A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West, Daniel Pipes declares that the CIA bears responsibility for today's pandemic Islamist terror...

Johnson opens with a review of the systematic Nazi efforts to recruit Soviet Muslims from among their prisoners of war. Many Muslims loathed Stalin, and between 150,000 and 300,000 of them fought for the Axis in World War II. In other words, over and above their unfulfilled propaganda effort directed at Arabs, the Nazis actually fielded a substantial force of mainly Turkic Muslims under the leadership of a scholarly Nazi enthusiast named Gerhard von Mende.

After the German defeat in 1945, Johnson follows von Mende as he continued his anti-Communist work with ex-Soviet Muslims, now in a Cold War context. But his network of former soldiers proved not very competent at the task of arousing Muslim hostility against the Soviet Union. Their leading intellectual, for example, had served as the imam of an SS division that helped suppress the Warsaw uprising of 1944. Islamists quickly proved themselves far more competent at this political and religious challenge. Johnson explains that they “wear suits, have university degrees, and can formulate their demands in ways that a politician can understand.”

The heart of his fascinating study lies in tracing the evolution, much of it in Munich, from old soldiers to new Islamists. It’s a classic tale of 1950s intrigue, complete with rehabilitated Nazis, CIA front organizations, and dueling Soviet and American ambitions.

Johnson shows how, without anyone quite planning it, the Americans usurped von Mende’s network and handed it over to Said Ramadan. This early U.S. boost to the Muslim Brotherhood, Johnson argues, gave it the means to establish an Islamist framework to welcome the surge of Muslim immigration to Europe in the 1970s.

Thus did the Islamist domination of European Muslims have two hidden facilitators, Nazi and American. Its origins in Barbarossa reveal the ugly pedigree of today’s Islamist strength. Hitler and his thugs could not have foreseen it, but they helped set the stage for Eurabia.

American backing for Islamists prompts Johnson to warn against the futility of allying with the Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk — as Tony Blair once again recently attempted. However tempting, it invariably harms the West. The lesson is simple: Be cognizant of history and do not assist the Islamists.

On his blog, Pipes admits that he knew about this before Johnson's book, because of his own father's involvement in Cold War research

Coincidentally, I spent the summer of 1953 at the age of three in Munich, just as that city was emerging as a center of Islamic activism, precisely because of the major presence of ex-Soviet Muslims living there. An excerpt from my father's autobiography, Richard Pipes Vixi: Memoirs of a Non-Belonger (Yale University Press, 2003), p. 74 explains why he took the family to Munich:

At the end of May 1951, with financial assistance from the Center of International Affairs at MIT, Irene and I left Daniel with our parents and went on a four-month trip to Europe and the Middle East. My purpose was to interview the surviving members of national governments of what had been the Russian Empire during the period 1917-21. I located quite a few of them in London, Paris, Munich and Istanbul, and they helped me appreciably to understand the complex situations of that era. In Paris I established contact with the Georgian émigré community. Two years later, I spent another summer in Europe, this time in Munich, interviewing refugees from Soviet Central Asia, nearly all of them ex-German prisoners of war. The information they furnished on life in their regions in the 1930s reinforced my conviction that nationalism was well and alive in the borderlands of the USSR and that no mass assimilation was taking place.

His research that summer provided the basis of his article, "Muslims of Soviet Central Asia: Trends and Prospects,” The Middle East Journal, Spring, 1955, pp. 147-162 and Summer, 1955, pp. 295-308.

Interestingly, as Pipes notes, the author's website features photos of former Nazi Uzbeks recruited as Islamist CIA agents during the Cold War--not included in the book. Among other Muslim Brotherhood agents on the CIA payroll, according to Johnson’s research: Tariq Ramadan's father...

You can buy a copy from Amazon.com: You can also listen to Ian Johnson's interview on the Diane Rehme show... Nieman Foundation interview here. Carnegie Council interview here. Wall Street Journal review here. Bookforum review here.

England Shifts Right

Just came back from a 100-mile walk across Dartmoor and Exmoor on the Two Moors Way. Highly recommended for splendid isolation, desolation, and reflection...Big news was the Conservative-Lib Dem Coalition Government headed by David Cameron and Nick Clegg. A shift to the right from Labour (which didn't lose as badly as it might have done), yet nevertheless significant since now England, France, Italy and Germany are all headed by conservative leaders. Left for home on the eve of the Queen's Speech.

People we talked to in London were generally optimistic, seemed to like the idea of the "outs" coming in to take over, after the "ins" had been thrown out.  Young faces (Cameron and Clegg are 40-ish), fresh starts, budget cuts, lengthy public manifestos published on the web and so forth dominated the news on TV and radio. A different approach to government, with a fixed term guaranteed by written agreement, and Clegg serving as a sort of vice-presidential Deputy Prime Minister to Cameron's presidential Prime Minister.

Will it work?

Too soon to tell, IMHO.

Elena Kagan's Hunter High School Yearbook Photo

(Source: Yahoo News)

Video of US Troops in Russian Victory Day Parade

PART I:

PART II:

iPad Cat Toy App

(ht Huffington Post)

Did Chris Cox Cause Thursday's Wall Street Plunge?

It sure looks like it, after reading yesterday's Washington Post article by David Cho and Jia Lynn Yang:

In 2007, the SEC put in place new rules for how stocks are traded, led by then-Chairman Christopher Cox. The goal was to give investors more control over how their trades were executed and to guarantee the best price when they buy stocks.

When the NYSE received an order for a stock, for instance, the rules required the exchange to route the order to the platform offering the best price.

The new SEC rules toppled the dominance of NYSE. The trading of its own listed stocks dropped from 85 percent to 21 percent, said James Angel, a professor at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business.

As a result, a single entity can no longer put a stop to panicked selling. The markets Thursday were a preview of what happens when other trading venues take over, he said.

"We are dangerously unprotected from a real-time meltdown," Angel said.

Market officials and regulators are now unwinding millions of the trades that occurred on the electronic exchanges Thursday...

More on this at this video documentary website: Stock Shock:

Happy V-E Day!

Since US, British and French troops are marching in the Russian V-E Day parade this year, I thought this old Soviet poster (ht Ferghana.ru) featuring US, French and British (and Nationalist Chinese!) flags might be apropos...

Charles Crawford on the British Election

He calls the result "a well hung Parliament..."

In this context, the widest range of options and (vitally) sense of momentum is with the party which has much the biggest haul of seats and the highest number of votes, ie the Conservatives. Plus neither Labour nor the Lib Dems can afford a new election soon.

Which is why on balance after a flurry of uncertainty and desperate babbling brought about by sheer exhaustion, I expect David Cameron to lead the next UK government for a while under some sort of formal or informal arrangement as outlined above.

If this happens, an uneasy game of chicken will ensue: the Conservatives in effect will be saying to Parliament every day: "Vote us out if you dare - and face the consequences"...

President Obama's Pakistan Connections

From reading this account, on Pakistaniat.com, which points out that the President's mother worked in Pakistan for 5 years for the Asian Development Bank, overseeing a project in Gujranwallait from 1987-1992, it sounds like Barack Obama should be able to figure out Pakistan's role in NY's Times Square bomb plot for himself:

Barack Obama may have visited Pakistan for longer than any U.S. President or presidential candidate ever has. As so many college students do, he seemed eager to see the world. He was in Karachi in 1981 as a young student, returning from a visit to his mother in Indonesia. According to a New York Times report:

…Mr. Obama also spoke about having traveled to Pakistan in the early 1980s. Because of that trip, which he did not mention in either of his autobiographical books, “I knew what Sunni and Shia was before I joined the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” he said… According to his campaign staff, Mr. Obama visited Pakistan in 1981, on the way back from Indonesia, where his mother and half-sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, were living. He spent “about three weeks” there, Mr. Obama’s press secretary, Bill Burton, said, staying in Karachi with the family of a college friend, Mohammed Hasan Chandoo, but also traveling to Hyderabad, in India.

Finally, as mentioned in the excerpt above, Senator Obama had a number of Pakistani friends during his college days, and it was that friendship that brought him to Pakistan. Some details, again, from the same New York Times report:

…In Dreams from My Father, he talks of having a Pakistani roommate when he moved to New York, a man he calls Sadik who “had overstayed his tourist visa and now made a living in New York’s high-turnover, illegal immigrant work force, waiting on tables”… During his years at Occidental College, Mr. Obama also befriended Wahid Hamid, a fellow student who was an immigrant from Pakistan and traveled with Mr. Obama there, the Obama campaign said. Mr. Hamid is now a vice president at Pepsico in New York, and according to public records, has donated the maximum $2,300 to the Obama campaign and is listed as a fund-raiser for it. Mr. Chandoo is now a self-employed financial consultant, living in Armonk, N.Y. He has also donated the maximum, $2,300, to Mr. Obama’s primary campaign and an additional $309 for the general election, campaign finance records show.

An Associated Press story on Obama’s college friends has more interesting snippets. Especially his relationship with Sohale Siddiqi, from Karachi, is fascinating - all the more to the Pakistani reader:

The way Sohale Siddiqi remembers it, he and his old roommate were walking his pug Charlie on Broadway when a large, scary bum approached them, stomping on the ground near the dog’s head. This was in the 1980s, a time when New York was a fearful place beset by drugs and crime, when the street smart knew that the best way to handle the city’s derelicts was to avoid them entirely. But Siddiqi was angry and he confronted the man, who approached him menacingly. Until his skinny, elite univerity-educated friend - Barack Obama - intervened. He “stepped right in between. … He planted his face firmly in the face of the guy. ‘Hey, hey, hey.’ And the guy backpedaled and we kept walking,” Siddiqi recalls.

…Obama spent the six years between 1979 and 1985 at Occidental College in Los Angeles and then in New York at Columbia University and in the workplace. His memoir, Dreams from My Father, talks about this time, but not in great detail; Siddiqi, for example, is identified only as “Sadik” _ “a short, well-built Pakistani” who smoked marijuana, snorted cocaine and liked to party. Obama’s campaign wouldn’t identify “Sadik,” but The Associated Press located him in Seattle, where he raises money for a community theater. Together, the recollections of Siddiqi and other friends and acquaintances from Obama’s college years paint a portrait of the candidate as a young man. They remember a good student with a sharp mind and unshakable integrity, a young man who already had a passion for the underprivileged. Some described the young Obama’s personality as confident to the point of arrogance, a criticism that would emerge decades later, during the campaign.

Not everyone who knew Obama in those years is eager to talk. Some explained that they feared inadvertently hurting Obama’s campaign. Among his friends were Siddiqi and two other Pakistanis, all of them from Karachi; several of those interviewed said the Pakistanis were reluctant to talk for fear of stoking rumors that Obama is a Muslim. “Obama in the eyes of some right wingers is basically Muslim until proved innocent,” says Margot Mifflin, a friend from Occidental who is now a journalism professor at New York’s Lehman College. “It’s partly the Muslim factor by association and partly the fear of something being twisted.”

…Of course, he was only 18 when he arrived at the small liberal arts college nicknamed “Oxy.” His freshman roommates were Imad Husain, a Pakistani, who’s now a Boston banker, and Paul Carpenter, now a Los Angeles lawyer… Obama had an international circle of friends _ “a real eclectic sort of group,” says Vinai Thummalapally, who himself came from Hyderabad, India. As a freshman, he quickly became friends with Mohammed Hasan Chandoo and Wahid Hamid, two wealthy Pakistanis.

In 1981, Obama transferred from Occidental to Columbia. In between, he traveled to Pakistan - a trip that enhanced his foreign policy qualifications, he maintained in a private speech at a San Francisco fundraiser last month. Obama spent “about three weeks” in Pakistan, traveling with Hamid and staying in Karachi with Chandoo’s family, said Bill Burton, Obama’s press secretary. “He was clearly shocked by the economic disparity he saw in Pakistan. He couldn’t get over the sight of rural peasants bowing to the wealthy landowners they worked for as they passed,” says Margot Mifflin, who makes a brief appearance in Obama’s memoir.

When Obama arrived in New York, he already knew Siddiqi - a friend of Chandoo’s and Hamid’s from Karachi who had visited Los Angeles. Looking back, Siddiqi acknowledges that he and Obama were an odd couple. Siddiqi would mock Obama’s idealism - he just wanted to make a lot of money and buy things, while Obama wanted to help the poor. “At that age, I thought he was a saint and a square, and he took himself too seriously,” Siddiqi said. “I would ask him why he was so serious. He was genuinely concerned with the plight of the poor. He’d give me lectures, which I found very boring. He must have found me very irritating.”

Siddiqi offered the most expansive account of Obama as a young man. “We were both very lost. We were both alienated, although he might not put it that way. He arrived disheveled and without a place to stay,” said Siddiqi, who at the time worked as a waiter and as a salesman at a boutique… In about 1982, Siddiqi and Obama got an apartment at a sixth-floor walkup on East 94th Street. Siddiqi managed to get the apartment thanks to subterfuge. “We didn’t have a chance in hell of getting this apartment unless we fabricated the lease application,” Siddiqi said. Siddiqi fudged his credentials, saying he had a high-paying job at a catering company, but Obama “wanted no part of it. He put down the truth.”

The apartment was “a slum of a place” in a drug-ridden neighborhood filled with gunshots, he said. “It wasn’t a comfortable existence. We were slumming it.” What little furniture they had was found on the street, and guests would have to hold their dinner plates in their laps. While Obama has acknowledged using marijuana and cocaine during high school in Hawaii, he writes in the memoir that he stopped using soon after his arrival in New York. His roommate had no such scruples. But Siddiqi says that during their time together here, Obama always refused his offers of drugs.

…Siddiqi said his female friends thought Obama was “a hunk.” “We were always competing,” he said. “You know how it is. You go to a bar and you try hitting on the girls. He had a lot more success. I wouldn’t out-compete him in picking up girls, that’s for sure.” Obama was a tolerant roommate. Siddiqi’s mother, who had never been around a black man, came to visit and she was rude; Obama was nothing but polite. Siddiqi himself could be intemperate - he called Obama an Uncle Tom, but “he was really patient. I’m surprised he suffered me.” Finally, their relationship started to fray. “I was partying all the time. I was disrupting his studies,” Siddiqi said. Obama moved out.

… Neither Hamid nor Chandoo would be interviewed for this story; Hamid is now a top executive at Pepsico in New York, and Chandoo is a self-employed financial consultant in the New York area. Both have each contributed the maximum $2,300 to Obama’s campaign, and records indicate each has joined an Asian-American council that supports his run for president. Both also are listed on Obama’s campaign Web site as being among his top fundraisers, each bringing in between $100,000 and $200,000 in contributions from their networks of friends. Both also attended Obama’s wedding in 1992, according to published reports and other friends.

Thummalapally has stayed in contact with Obama, too, visiting him in New York, attending his wedding in 1992 and joining him in Springfield, Illinois., for the Feb. 10, 2007, announcement of Obama’s run for the White House. President of a CD and DVD manufacturing company in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Thummalapally also is listed as a top fundraiser on the campaign Web site.

Siddiqi has not kept in touch. His has been a difficult road; years after his time with Obama, Siddiqi says, he became addicted to cocaine and lost his business. But when he needed help during his recovery, Obama - the roommate he drove away with his partying, the man he always suspected of looking down at him - gave him a job reference. So yes, he’s an Obama man, too. Witness the message on his answering machine: “My name is Hal Siddiqi, and I approve of this message. Vote for peace, vote for hope, vote for change, and vote for Obama.”

But the most interesting account, even more interesting than the yarn about Hal Siddiqi comes from Barack Obama himself, in his book Dreams from My Father...

Persepolis

Just saw Marjane Satrapi's feature-length cartoon coming of age story about growing up as a Persian emigre on Netflix...very relevant to today. I'm sorry I didn't see it when it came out in 2007. I don't know why it didn't win the Academy award for best foreign film. Catherine Deneuve plays the mother's voice. Five stars!

Plus, it explains what's going on with Iran right now: What's Past is indeed Prologue...

Ann Coulter on the Times Square Bomb Plot

From AnnCoulter.com:

Even after the NYPD de-wired the smoking car bomb, produced enough information to identify the bomb-maker, and handed it all to federal law enforcement authorities tied up in a bow, the federal government's crack "no-fly" list failed to stop Shahzad from boarding a plane to Dubai.

To be fair, at Emirates Airlines, being on a "no-fly" list makes you eligible for pre-boarding.

Perhaps the Department of Homeland Security should consider creating a "Really, REALLY No-Fly" list.

Contrary to the wild excuses being made for the federal government on all the TV networks Monday night, it's now clear that this was not a wily plan of federal investigators to allow Shahzad to board the plane in order to nab his co-conspirators. It was a flub that nearly allowed Shahzad to escape.

Meanwhile, on that same Monday at JFK airport, approximately 100,000 passengers took off their shoes, coats, belts and sunglasses for airport security.

But the "highly trained federal force" The New York Times promised us on Oct. 28, 2001, when the paper demanded that airport security be federalized, failed to stop the only guy they needed to stop at JFK last Monday -- the one who planted a bomb in the middle of Times Square days earlier.

So why were 100,000 other passengers harassed and annoyed by the TSA?

The federal government didn't stop the diaper bomber from nearly detonating a bomb over Detroit. It didn't stop a guy on the "No Fly" list from boarding a plane and coming minutes away from getting out of the country.

If our only defense to terrorism is counting on alert civilians, how about not bothering them before they board airplanes, instead of harassing them with useless airport "security" procedures?

Both of the attempted bombers who sailed through airport security, I note, were young males of the Islamic faith. I wonder if we could develop a security plan based on that information?

And speaking of a "highly trained federal force," who's working at the INS these days? Who on earth made the decision to allow Shahzad the unparalleled privilege of becoming a U.S. citizen last year?

WSJ: Pakistan's Historical Jihad

Sadanand Dhume explains:

In attempting to explain why so many attacks—abortive and successful—can be traced back to a single country, analysts tend to dwell on the 1980s, when Pakistan acted as a staging ground for the successful American and Saudi-funded jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. But while the anti-Soviet campaign undoubtedly accelerated Pakistan's emergence as a jihadist haven, to truly understand the country it's important to go back further, to its creation.

Pakistan was carved out of the Muslim-majority areas of British India in 1947, the world's first modern nation based solely on Islam. The country's name means "Land of the Pure." The capital city is Islamabad. The national flag carries the Islamic crescent and star. The cricket team wears green.

From the start, the new country was touched by the messianic zeal of pan-Islamism. The Quranic scholar Muhammad Asad—an Austrian Jew born Leopold Weiss—became an early Pakistani ambassador to the United Nations. The Egyptian Said Ramadan, son-in-law of Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna, made Pakistan a second home of sorts and collaborated with Pakistan's leading Islamist ideologue, the Jamaat-e-Islami's Abul Ala Maududi. In 1949, Pakistan established the world's first transnational Islamic organization, the World Muslim Congress. Mohammad Amin al-Husayni, the virulently anti-Semitic grand mufti of Jerusalem, was appointed president.

Through alternating periods of civilian and military rule, one thing about Pakistan has remained constant—the central place of Islam in national life. In the 1960s, Pakistan launched a war against India in an attempt to seize control of Kashmir, the country's only Muslim-majority province, one that most Pakistanis believe ought to be theirs by right.

In the 1970s the Pakistani army carried out what Bangladeshis call a genocide in Bangladesh; non-Muslims suffered disproportionately. Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto boasted about creating an "Islamic bomb." (The father of Pakistan's nuclear program, A.Q. Khan, would later export nuclear technology to the revolutionary regime in Iran.) In the 1980s Pakistan welcomed Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and the Palestinian theorist of global jihad Abdullah Azzam.

In the 1990s, armed with expertise and confidence gained fighting the Soviets, the army's notorious Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spawned the Taliban to take over Afghanistan, and a plethora of terrorist groups to challenge India in Kashmir. Even after 9/11, and despite about $18 billion of American aid, Pakistan has found it hard to reform its instincts.

Pakistan's history of pan-Islamism does not mean that all Pakistanis, much less everyone of Pakistani origin, hold extremist views. But it does explain why a larger percentage of Pakistanis than, say, Indonesians or Tunisians, are likely to see the world through the narrow prism of their faith. The ISI's reluctance to dismantle the infrastructure of terrorism—training camps, a web of ultra-orthodox madrassas that preach violence, and terrorist groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba—ensure that Pakistan remains a magnet for any Muslim with a grudge against the world and the urge to do something violent about it.

William McGurn: First Amendment a Right, Not a Privilege

In today's Wall Street Journal, William McGurn reflects on the implications for bloggers of the Apple v Gizmodo iPhone Case:

Steve Simpson, a lawyer for the Institute for Justice, a libertarian public interest law firm, puts it this way: "Once the government gets in the business of deciding who can speak based on identity, it will then necessarily be involved in deciding what viewpoints get heard."

The classic view of the First Amendment holds all Americans are entitled to its rights by virtue of citizenship. These days, alas, too many journalists and politicians assume that a free press should mean special privileges for a designated class. The further we travel in this direction, the more the government will end up deciding which Americans qualify and which do not.

It's not just Mr. Chen. Two weeks ago in New Jersey, a state appeals court ruled that a hockey mom who blogs is not a journalist for the purposes of protecting her sources. The woman was being sued for derogatory comments she posted on a message board about a company that supplies software for the porn industry. At the federal level, meanwhile, a "shield law" protecting journalists from revealing their sources remains bogged down in Congress as legislators are forced to define who is legitimately a journalist and who is not.

IMHO, "shield laws" are a bad idea--undemocratic, unconstitutional, and unfair...unlike the First Amendment.

Huffington Post: Lesson of Times Square Bomb Attempt--Try Terror Suspects in Manhattan!

IMHO, this analysis by Dan Collins, NY editor of the Huffington Post, is correct:

If I could offer a lesson, I'd be counter-intuitive. We should have let the federal government try the 9/11 terror sheik in Manhattan. It would have been inconvenient, although not necessarily as inconvenient as the police department led us to believe. But it would have been taking a stand. New Yorkers against the crazy people, most of whom fail. And the one who succeeds is never the one you suspect.

So we should work as hard as we can to protect against the unforeseeable. But in the meantime, we should be brave, and united, and supremely ticked off.

Connecticut Post: State Home for Terrorists

According to the Stratford, Connecticut Post, terrorists have been in the state for years. A couple of recent past links to terror in the land of steady habits:

Spring 2001 -- Four of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers meet with a Jordanian national living in Bridgeport who later was arrested for providing false identification cards to illegal aliens. The four are identified as Hani S.H. Hanjour, Nawaf Alzhami, Ahmed Alghamdi and Majed M. GH. Moqed was living at the Fairfield Motor Inn. Hanjour piloted the American Air Lines Flight 77 that crashed into the Pentagon. The Bridgeport contact, identified as Eyad M. Alrababah , is arrested by authorities in New Jersey for providing false identification cards and driver's licenses.

April 3, 2009 -- Hassan Abujihaad, a former U.S. Navy signalman aboard the U.S.S. Benson, is sentenced to 10 years in prison by a federal judge in New Haven for disclosing ship movements via e-mails to Azzam Publications in London. Azzam operated an Internet site through OLM, LLC., a Trumbull-based web hosting firm. Two members of Azzam, Syehed Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad, who sought people to fight and fund the Jihad over the website, are challenging their extradition from London to Connecticut to stand trial on federal terrorism charges.

The Connecticut paper also published information on the alleged source of the car used in Times Square:

The Connecticut license plate on the explosives-packed Nissan Pathfinder was found to have been taken from a Ford pickup truck recently sent for repair to Kramer's Used Auto Parts on Old South Avenue in Stratford. Several sources said a vehicle identification number found on a replacement part on the Pathfinder was also from a vehicle last tracked to Kramer's.

Federal, New York state and New York City investigators went to the Norwalk home of Norman LeBlanc shortly after 3 a.m. Sunday, a police source said, adding that LeBlanc, whose family has owned Kramer's and other area auto parts businesses, then took the investigators to the Stratford junkyard.

It could not immediately be learned what, if any, material was taken from the business.

A few hours later Sunday morning, about a dozen police vehicles -- local police and FBI and NYPD -- were still outside Kramer's, which is off Access Road. The business is surrounded by an old chain-link fence with signs saying, "used cars bought and sold" and "auto and truck parts." There are dozens of used and junked cars on the lot.

Wayne LeBlanc is listed as president and CEO of the Stratford business. A reporter was turned away from his Flax Hill Road home in Norwalk without comment Sunday night.

Richarrd Fredette, chairman of Stratford's Board of Zoning Appeals and former owner of Elite Auto Body, said LeBlanc bought Kramer's from Nick Kramer, now deceased, about 15 years ago.

Hail to the Street Vendors Who Saved New York, Lance Horton & Duane Jackson!

The NY Daily News has the story:

They saw something and they said something.

Two Times Square street vendors - and Vietnam veterans - alerted cops that there was something fishy about the dark-colored SUV, officials said.

T-shirt hawker Lance Orton flagged down hero officer Wayne Rhatigan, 46, who was patrolling Times Square on horseback Saturday night.

"I'm not a celebrity, I'm just an average Joe," Orton said Sunday night, a towel wrapped around his waist in his Bronx apartment. "It's nice, but I'm not a glory hound."

Handbag vendor Duane Jackson also noticed the Nissan Pathfinder, and was immediately suspicious.

"Why is this knucklehead parked in the bus lane?" Jackson, 58, of Buchanan, Westchester County, said he asked himself after spotting the Nissan Pathfinder in a No Standing zone just as cops alerted by Orton were responding.

A cop shined a flashlight through the tinted windows.

What Jackson saw next really scared him.

"Smoke started coming out of it, then the pops began - five or six of them," Jackson said. "They sounded like firecrackers," he said. "That's when everyone started running."

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2010/05/02/2010-05-02_times_square_vendors_duane_jackson_lance_horton_alerted_cops_to_smoking_car_bomb.html#ixzz0msLMCB00

Here's a link to a facebook page asking Mayor Bloomberg to take the street vendors out to dinner.

Nick Clegg v David Cameron v Gordon Brown

For those following the British election debates, the BBC has a good aggregator of election news, here.

UPDATE: There's also a Facebook Democracy UK page...

Florida Congressman Wants Chechens Added to Terror List

So far, the State Department has said: "No." Despite the fact that the group has officially declared war on the United States, as well as masterminding terror attacks in Russia. On this issue, IMHO, Congressman Alcee Hastings (D-FL) is right, and Hillary Clinton is wrong:

HASTINGS CALLS FOR CAUCASUS EMIRATE TO BE ON TERRORIST LIST
Group Claimed Responsibility for Moscow Subway Bombing

WASHINGTON--U.S. Congressman Alcee L. Hastings (D-FL), Co-Chairman of the Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe (U.S. Helsinki Commission), introduced legislation today urging the State Department to formally designate the Caucasus Emirate as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

The State Department’s 2009 Country Reports on Terrorism is not expected to include the Caucasus Emirate in its list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations despite the group's recent attacks on the Moscow subway that killed at least 38 people and the fact the group is behind more than 60 acts of terrorism in Russia’s North Caucasus in the past three months and trained 20 suicide bombers in 2009.

“We have a policy of zero-tolerance towards terrorism of any kind directed against anyone anywhere in the world,” Hastings said. “The Caucasus Emirate cooperates with al-Qaeda and has declared jihad on the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, and Israel. This organization is a threat to our national security and that of our allies. This resolution urges the Administration to officially acknowledge that reality.”

Shamil Basaev, who was the leader of the predecessor organization to the Caucasus Emirate until his assassination by Russian commandos in 2006, trained at an al-Qaeda camp in Khost, Afghanistan in 1994. The group’s Web site has included articles from an author connected to perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks and the 2009 Fort Hood, Texas shootings with rhetorical attacks on the United States calling for American Muslims to wage holy war against the United States.

“President Obama has made historic improvements in U.S.-Russian relations,” Hastings continued. “The United States and Russia must stand together in this ongoing struggle against violent fanatics. In this fight there is no room for double standards, we must be consistent."

Charles Crawford on Pope-gate, Cont'd...

Charles Crawford, Britain's former man in Warsaw, wants answers to some questions about the latest Foreign and Commonwealth Office anti-Papist memorandum:

The Heresiarch links to my thoughts on the FCO and its Popegate scandal, but wonders if I have it right - maybe the causes are ... even deeper:

It's easy enough to blame New Labour, with its love of targets and hatred of anything traditional or elitist, for this sort of tosh, but I suspect the Blair administration has been as much the symptom as the cause of it.

Other, profounder, causes have been at play: a loss of nerve on the part of the old elites, the complete ascendency of the media and the news cycle, a generalised and growing distrust of institutions - most powerful when internalised by those who themselves run those institutions - a truncation of attention-spans and an hysterical neophilia.

The best word for it is infantilisation. Britain, and probably most other western countries as well, is regressing to a state of toddlerism, or at best arrested adolescence.

I could not agree more.

See how the FCO is responding to this self-made disaster. By sending the offenders back to school:

The civil servant in charge of the Pope’s visit to Britain has been suspended and is to be investigated for misconduct after a memo lampooning the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church was leaked to the press.

All the staff involved in producing the memo are to be sent on “urgent diversity training” and will have nothing further to do with organising the visit of Pope Benedict XVI to Britain in September.

Please excuse me while I leave the desk to emit a high-pitched scream.

Goes offstage

eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Returns

This is not a problem requiring 'diversity training', where the wretched victims sit listlessly staring out of the window, trying their best not to listen to some or other humourless harpy intoning on their need to 'respect' minorities and examine their 'unconscious prejudices'.

This is not a technical problem at all, capable of being sorted by some extra 'training'.

Indeed, the key problem is the very fact that the FCO apppears to think that lack of 'training' is the problem, and that more training is the answer.

Wrong!

It's all about structure and professional attitude.

What was happening across the organisation to create a culture and command structure in which a significant non-junior diplomat could produce and circulate around Whitehall such drivel? (Note: when the story broke I contacted the FCO myself and was assured that the offending officer was 'junior'. This was at the least highly misleading.)

Come on Fleet Street, ask the the FCO the right questions:

-who was Mr Noorani's line manager?
-what instructions were given to him and by whom?
-what internal expertise was being drawn upon to advise on the Pope's visit?
-why were these ideas circulated without HM Ambassador to the Vatican clearing them first?
-who is running this part of the FCO whelk stall?

Answers please, from people in the know.

The New Republic on Human Rights Watch's Jihad

Benjamin Birnbaum writes:

As [Robert] Bernstein and his allies saw it, Whitson and others in MENA consistently ignored the context of Israeli actions—context that might have created a more accurate picture. That was the overriding complaint in a letter Edith Everett wrote to HRW in June 2008, outlining her dissatisfaction with the way the organization was treating Israel. HRW had repeatedly called for Israel to lift its blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. Everett pointed out that “the original contravention of human rights lies with Hamas and these terrorist organizations and if they were to stop their unprovoked attacks on Israeli civilians there would be no restrictions on the flow of goods into Gaza.”

That month, Bernstein made a presentation at a meeting of the executive committee of HRW’s board. After asking HRW staffers to leave the room, he told the assembled something they already knew—that he had concerns about MENA’s Israel work—and something they did not: “I told them, from then on, they couldn’t assume that I would remain silent to the public.”

Ken Roth was absent from the meeting—his daughter was graduating from high school that day—but he was furious when he found out. He immediately e-mailed Bernstein’s son Bill, a classmate from Brown, lamenting how unfortunate he found it that a man who had spent his life championing human rights had become an apologist for Israel. He appealed to the younger Bernstein to intervene, warning that his father would do great harm to the organization and to his own reputation.

Not everyone at HRW, however, was eager to keep Bernstein in the fold. His persistent questions had become a never-ending source of annoyance to Whitson. “It just came to this point where we would have countless meetings with him explaining things over and over,” Whitson says. “And then, he would just ask the same question as if you’d never had the conversation before. And you’re like, ‘But did you actually read the report? Did you actually see what it said? Because it answers your question, and we’ve discussed this, like, eighteen times.’” Her attitude toward Bernstein’s threat was one of indifference. “You’re like, ‘OK, just go public and get it over with.’”

At the time, however, Bernstein was still unsure of himself. He had begun consulting prominent outsiders, among them just war philosopher Michael Walzer and Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, a friend of his son Tom. Zakaria spoke to Bernstein at length—first in a face-to-face meeting, then in a series of phone calls. Bernstein had already started putting his thoughts to paper—thousands of words’ worth—but felt he was getting nowhere and urged Zakaria to take up the cause instead. Zakaria demurred. “My advice to him,” Zakaria says, “was that, if he felt as strongly as he did, then he needed to speak out because the impact of the founder of Human Rights Watch talking about his disillusionment with the organization was going to be far greater than an outsider who had no historical association with the organization.”

Bernstein also raised some of his concerns with then-HRW board member Richard Goldstone, who would go on to write the U.N.’s much-maligned report on the Gaza war. There are few more reviled figures in Israel right now than Goldstone, but even he sympathized with Bernstein on certain points, such as the politicized nature of the U.N. Human Rights Council, which, after being created in 2006, had directed its first nine condemnations at Israel. In March 2008, barely a year before he accepted UNHRC’s mandate to investigate the Gaza war, he told Bernstein that he thought the body’s performance had been hopeless and expressed ambivalence as to whether HRW should continue appearing before it. He also agreed with Bernstein that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s increasingly aggressive anti-Israel rhetoric, in combination with his threatening policies, was an issue worthy of HRW’s attention. Goldstone pushed Roth to address it, but to no avail. (When I asked Roth in a February interview at his office about HRW’s refusal to take a position on Ahmadinejad’s threats against Israel, including his famous call for Israel to be “wiped off the map,” Roth quibbled about the way the statement had been translated in the West—“there was a real question as to whether he actually said that”—then told me that it was not HRW’s place to render judgments on such rhetoric: “Let’s assume it is a military threat. We don’t take on governments’ military threats just as we don’t take on aggression, per se. We look at how they behave. So, we wouldn’t condemn a military threat just as we wouldn’t condemn an invasion—we would look at how the government wages the war.” Whitson, who sat in on the interview, offered her two cents: “You know, that statement was also matched by Hillary Clinton saying that the Iranian regime should be destroyed or wiped off the map. Again, so, very similar statements, side by side, close in time.” For his part, Goldstone told TNR that he eventually came around to the view this was not an issue HRW should take up.)

Bernstein was becoming steadily more frustrated—and two of his closest allies at the organization were soon on their way out. In early 2009, Whitson informed Steve Apkon that, if he wished to serve another term on the MENA advisory committee, he would be expected to make a contribution in the $10,000 range. Apkon was livid. He dashed off a sharply worded letter to advisory committee chair Shibley Telhami. “An organization that was founded to protect the most basic of human rights—freedom of speech—seeing it as the canary in the coal mine in regards to everything else, seems to have created within its own organization a disregard and intolerance for open dialogue,” he wrote. His membership was not renewed. (HRW denies that Apkon’s removal had anything to do with his criticisms, attributing it primarily to his failure to make an acceptable contribution.)

Shortly thereafter, Edith Everett was gone. At a MENA advisory committee meeting in March 2009, two months after the war in Gaza, she raised the subject of human shields with HRW senior military analyst Marc Garlasco, who was on hand to discuss the issues he and his fellow researchers were planning to write about: “I said, ‘I hope when you talk about the Palestinians in Gaza that you speak about their use of the population as human shields,’ and he was beginning to respond to that when Sarah Leah Whitson wouldn’t let him speak. She just put an end to that conversation. She said, ‘Well, in summation, I think we have to move on,’ or something, and I said, ‘This is ridiculous,’ you know?” Everett immediately tendered her resignation from both the HRW board and the MENA advisory committee.

At the end of that month, Bernstein sent a long e-mail to the board of HRW. “While I realize that HRW is doing a lot of valuable work, to me the mishandling of the Israel-Palestine situation is like a cancer,” he wrote. “After my twenty-one years as chair, I still care deeply about the direction of HRW, and my inability to bring change bothers me.”

NJ Court Rules Blogger Not "Journalist"

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

PA Consulting Produced Joke Afghanistan Strategy Powerpoint

Clearly stated on page 31 of the Pentagon Powerpoint slide from "Dynamic Planning for COIN in Afghanistan" titled "Afghanistan Stability / COIN Dynamics" (p.22 of 31) mocked on page one of the New York Times is the author:

"© PA Knowledge Limited 2009."

Some questions:

1. Why is a contractor allowed to copyright a US government document paid for by taxpayers?

2. Who awarded this contract to PA Knowledge Limited?

3. How much was PA Knowledge Limited paid for this PowerPoint presentation?

4. Why wasn't PA Knowledge Limited mentioned in Elisabeth Bumiller's April 26, 2010 front-page NY Times story about the PowerPoint scandal?

Some interesting information from the PA Consulting website raise one more question about how this scandal originated:

1. PA Knowledge Limited is a subsidiary of PA Consulting--a British company:

Corporate headquaters
123 Buckingham Palace Road
London SW1W 9SR
United Kingdom
Tel: +44 20 7333 5865
Fax: +44 20 7333 5050

QUESTION: Why is US strategy in Afghanistan being interpreted for PowerPoint presentations for the Pentagon by a foreign (although allied) company? Isn't there anyone in the Pentagon who can do this without a contract? Contracting out your strategy is a sure loser--that's a no brainer...

Isn't there anyone in Congress who could hold a hearing? Obviously someone leaked this to the press for a reason. Perhaps PA Consulting should be held liable for the problems with America's Counterinsurgency Strategy in Afghanistan?

The PA Consulting website describes the contract but unfortunately doesn't disclose the amount of money US taxpayers have wasted to date on this contract:

Counterinsurgency and strategies for effective ‘whole of government’ approaches to influence unstable regions

Developing tailored causal maps of key drivers of stability in regions and countries of interest, drawing on a library of analyses of regions across the world, we help give senior decision makers and their teams a shared ‘big picture view’ and a more structured way to help inform options for intervention.

Time to call PA executives to testify before Congress about their responsibility for America's problems in Afghanistan--as Goldman, Sachs brass just did.

President Obama Visits Ottumwa, Iowa

According to the Ottumwa Courier, the President has just been in Ottumwa, Iowa.I was there at Thanksgiving with someone I know and a friend. It's an interesting town. Hometown to Edna Ferber, author of "Showboat". Site of "Meat Solutions" (a slaughterhouse). Industrial. Union. We had a "loose meat" sandwich at "Canteen Lunch in the Alley" and saw the beautiful mural of Chief Ottumwa over the bar in the Tom-Tom-Tap at the Hotel Ottumwa. Then watched a magnificent prairie sunset. Next time you find yourself in Iowa, follow the lead of President Obama...and drop by Ottumwa. Here's an excerpt from the Ottumwa Courier report:

President Barack Obama on Tuesday sought to bolster both health care and regulatory reform during a historic visit to Ottumwa, saying his administration wants to “restore a sense of security to the middle class.”

“Visits like this remind you that when you get out into the heartland and you talk to folks, there is a lot to learn from rural America,” Obama said to a packed house at the Hellyer Student Life Center on the Indian Hills Community College campus. “It’s towns like this that give America its heartbeat.”

After a warm welcome, Obama received a standing ovation for the passage of health care reform, emphasizing popular angles on the legislation, like putting an end to bans for pre-existing conditions and help for senior citizens. He touted the reform package as the single biggest deficit reduction action since the 1970s, though he admitted it will mean larger deficits in the short term.

A similar ovation followed comments on regulatory reform for business. Obama focused on responsibilities, trying to create a connection between obligations met by families and those failed by corporate and political America. He drew distinctions between the behavior of Americans who struggle to pay their debts and behave according to social norms and corporations who don’t bother to try.

“Even before this last crisis it felt like it was slipping away. Folks like you are living up to your responsibilities. People in Washington and Wall Street are not living up to theirs,” he said.

And here's the video of the President' Town Hall from the White House website:

What Did Billy Graham Say to President Obama?

According to Christian Web News, among other things, topics included Franklin Graham's blacklisting by the Pentagon...

President Obama made the short drive from Asheville, where he spent the weekend, to Montreat, to see the 91-year-old Graham and son Franklin, also an evangelist.

The visit only lasted about 30 minutes, and included aides and advisers to both men. Obama had a private prayer and conversation with Billy Graham. Graham gave two bibles to Obama, one for him, and the other for the first lady, Graham spokesman Larry Ross said, according to the Associated Press.

Obama was “extraordinarily gratified that he took the time to meet with him” White House spokesman Bill Burton said.

According to Franklin Graham, his dad and Obama's conversation was “very cordial, very nice.” He said, “When the president got ready to leave, the president prayed for my father, my father prayed for him.”

According to Graham, his father prayed for the nation and that God would give Obama wisdom in his decisions. Franklin Graham said in his prayer, the president thanked God for Billy Graham's life.

Franklin Graham said he and Obama talked for a short time about the Pentagon Prayer Service ordeal. Graham said that the activists with an agenda were trying to pull all religion out of the military.

Franklin Graham said, “I wanted to make him aware of that. He said he would look into to it.”

BTW, I couldn't find an account--or a photo--on the White House website (but maybe I missed something).

General Jones' "Macaca" Moment of Truth...

I saw this video on YouTube yesterday, and was willing to give General Jones the benefit of the doubt. It is an old joke, one I had read years ago in a joke book. Not the worst joke ever, and possibly not even intended in a bad way...But, now that General Jones has apologized, it unfortunately needs to be taken a little more seriously--by the Israeli government, if not by the American Jewish community. If he has apologized, then General Jones has admitted that his intent was not, in fact, innocent. It was a reflection of a deeper bias against, prejudice towards, and even contempt for Jews and Israel (he mentioned Israel explicitly in the joke). If he had said, "No apology necessary, no offense was intended," it would have been different.

IMHO, Israel should issue a diplomatic protest against General Jones, asap. The Israelis need to ask for another National Security Adviser, who has not demonstrated such insensitivity, if nothing else. The American Jewish community, likewise, needs to formally protest and ask for a new National Security Adviser in the interest of the United States--where no group of citizens of any religion should be singled out for humiliation at the hands of a government official (especially a top Presidential adviser). Imagine what would have happened if General Jones had joked about Muslims, and use that as a single standard for judging behavior.

General Jones may have started with a banal joke, but if his apology isn't evidence of intentional defamation against Jews, I don't know what is... And if not stopped now, who knows where this might end, especially given recent demonization of Israel by General Petraeus and the Obama administration?

It's a "Macaca" moment of truth for General Jones, as former Virginia Governor George Allen might tell him...

UPDATE: I've received this response from the Anti-Defamation League Media Relations Department to my inquiry about their reaction:

(ADL Media )
Mr. Foxman’s reaction to Gen Jones’ joke as cited below in the ABC blog was widely reported in the media.

ADL has accepted Jones’ apology

http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2010/04/antidefamation-league-national-security-adviser-jones-told-inappropriate-stereotypic-joke-about-jewi.html

Home > Politics > Political Punch
Political Punch
Power, pop, and probings from ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper

Anti-Defamation League: National Security Adviser Jones Told “Inappropriate, Stereotypic” Joke About Jewish Merchant
April 26, 2010 11:19 AM

While many in the largely Jewish audience laughed, others didn’t find it so funny, including Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

“It's inappropriate,” Foxman told ABC News. “it's stereotypic. Some people believe they need to start a speech with a joke; this was about the worst kind of joke the head of the National Security Council could have told.”

“To make fun of Jews in terms of ‘Jews won’t help you in need, Jews want to sell to you?’ Whoa!” Foxman says. “Where's the sensitivity? The irony of it is General Jones went to this forum to reach out to the Jewish community. Of all the jokes this is probably the worst one he could have picked.”

National Security Adviser Gen. James Jones has apologized for his offensive joke. Abe Foxman and the Anti-Defamation League have accepted his apology.

Statement from General Jones about the joke he told during his remarks at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy
“I wish that I had not made this off the cuff joke at the top of my remarks, and I apologize to anyone who was offended by it. It also distracted from the larger message I carried that day: that the United States commitment to Israel’s security is sacrosanct.” – General Jim Jones, National Security Advisor

P.S. I prefer Barry Rubin's analysis, here:

I could talk about more but let me focus on two that I think are inescapable and have policy consequences. It is interesting to note that both aspects relate to changes Jones made in the way the joke has been told by Jews.

First, the story is set in Afghanistan. Why there of all places where there have never been any Jews and there is only one in the whole country today? When it has appeared onJewish sites, the joke was set in the Sahara Desert. Note also Jones insisted--part of the joke but also revealing--that it was based on a "true" story.

Well, Afghanistan is the main theatre of operations for the U.S. military, especially if one takes into account future plans. So it shows that even in Afghanistan, there are people obsessed with theIsrael -Palestinian conflict. (That's not true by the way.) The idea that the conflict is the central issue in the world determining everything has become a theme of ObamaAdministration foreign policy. True, it is a Hamas guy and not a Taliban guy. Yet one cannot help but make the connection.

Second, instead of an individual Jew, the focus of the story is switched to Israel by making it a Hamas guy, putting in references to Israel, and making an Afghan Jew describe Israel as "my country."

The Jew, now made into a representative of Israel--in effect--rather than a generic Jew, seeks to charge (presumably overcharge) for letting the Hamas guy in to get what he needs. Indeed,Israel does demand an admissions' fee into peace for Hamas and also the Palestinian Authority: that they must show they are serious about peace as well as make compromises.

The tendency of the current U.S. government and of Europe is-and I don't want to overstate this-to say that such a barrier is unnecessary. End the sanctions on the Gaza Strip, they say, let Hamas into the talks (I'm not saying the Obamaadministration endorses this idea), give the PA a state. Then everything will be okay and peace will prevail.

The adaptation of this into the joke is to let the Hamas guy in without a tie and trust him to pay at the end of the meal. Indeed, that if you do so he will stop cursingIsrael and want to be friends. After all, most restaurants today have given up their tie and jacket requirement.

Now here's the joke I'll tell when they ask me to speak at the National Security Council:

An Israeli is walking through a dangerous desert, beset by enemies on every side. He comes upon an American general who is national security advisor. "Please help me," says the Israeli, "I'm out of ammunition."

"I'd love to help you," says the general, "but I can only sell you a tie. It's because I'm helping you that they are all out to get me!"

"No thanks on the tie," says the Israeli, "I'd rather have your support as an ally against those antisemitic, anti-American totalitarian forces which are out to destroy you any way."

Apple iPhone Search Raises Question: Are Bloggers Journalists?

If so, Gizmodo argues, bloggers such as Jason Chen are protected by California's journalism shield law:

Police Seize Jason Chen's Computers
Last Friday night, California's Rapid Enforcement Allied Computer Team entered editor Jason Chen's home without him present, seizing four computers and two servers. They did so using a warrant by Judge of Superior Court of San Mateo. According to Gaby Darbyshire, COO of Gawker Media LLC, the search warrant to remove these computers was invalid under section 1524(g) of the California Penal Code.

IMHO, the language in the code, "or other periodical publication," ought to cover blogs and bloggers. The clear definition of the word publication is to make something public--not to print on paper. See Wikipedia's definition:

"To publish is to make content publicly known. The term is most frequently applied to the distribution of text or images on paper, or to the placing of content on a website."

Yet, copyright law does not reflect this fact, according to Ray Ming:

RayMing Chang, Publication Does Not Really Mean Publication: The Need to Amend the Definition of Publication in the Copyright Act, 33 AM. INTELL. PROP. L. ASS'N Q.J. 225: This article analyzes the definition of publication in the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 and finds strong support for the proposition that electronic dissemination (e.g., "Internet publishing") of works does not result in publication under American copyright law. This article argues that the definition of publication needs to be amended to explicitly include electronic dissemination.

The Apple case presents a chance for the courts to weigh in on the status of blogs and bloggers...

Charles Crawford on the British Foreign Office's "Pope Memo"

Read it here:

So the point is that this sort of crass behaviour did not arise incidentally or through a fleeting engorging of poor Steven Mulvain's post-adolescent imagination lobes.

It took place in a professional context deliberately engineered by New Labour in which professional standards - and the very idea of standards - are 'relativised'. Where FCO new entrants are harangued about Climate Change and Outreach to Islam but not taught the basic professional values.

One in which Judgement is cast aside in favour of Delivering Results and Personal Impact.

The problem, see, is that if you emulate Mr Mulvain and Deliver Results and achieve Personal Impact without Judgement, you can screw up on a vast scale.

Memo to Next Government:

Haul me quickly back to the FCO to sort all this out.

A dirty job, but someone has to do it.

Ross Douthat on the Significance of South Park

From the New York Times:

Across 14 on-air years, there’s no icon “South Park” hasn’t trampled, no vein of shock-comedy (sexual, scatalogical, blasphemous) it hasn’t mined. In a less jaded era, its creators would have been the rightful heirs of Oscar Wilde or Lenny Bruce — taking frequent risks to fillet the culture’s sacred cows.

In ours, though, even Parker’s and Stone’s wildest outrages often just blur into the scenery. In a country where the latest hit movie, “Kick-Ass,” features an 11-year-old girl spitting obscenities and gutting bad guys while dressed in pedophile-bait outfits, there isn’t much room for real transgression. Our culture has few taboos that can’t be violated, and our establishment has largely given up on setting standards in the first place.

Except where Islam is concerned. There, the standards are established under threat of violence, and accepted out of a mix of self-preservation and self-loathing.

This is what decadence looks like: a frantic coarseness that “bravely” trashes its own values and traditions, and then knuckles under swiftly to totalitarianism and brute force.

Happily, today’s would-be totalitarians are probably too marginal to take full advantage. This isn’t Weimar Germany, and Islam’s radical fringe is still a fringe, rather than an existential enemy.

For that, we should be grateful. Because if a violent fringe is capable of inspiring so much cowardice and self-censorship, it suggests that there’s enough rot in our institutions that a stronger foe might be able to bring them crashing down.

Lang Lang's iPad Recital

(ht HuffingtonPost)

Click Here for Live Volcano Footage From Iceland

Simon Johnson: Break Up the Banks!

(ht Huffington Post)

How Volcanic Ash Shuts Down Jet Engines

Arianna Huffington on SEC v Goldman, Sachs

Arianna, who has a pretty good head for business herself, says Wall Street has "shorted" America's Middle Class:

After reading the details of the SEC's filing against Goldman Sachs, it's hard not to come away thinking: "Why would anyone ever do business with that firm again?" Likewise, after even a cursory examination of the treatment of the American middle class by the Wall Street/Washington class over the past few decades, one should also wonder why anyone would ever do business with that crowd again. And yet, there they are, still running things at the Treasury, the Fed, and the National Economic Council.

The urgent need for the reorganization of our financial system goes far beyond the upcoming debate on new financial regulations. And it goes far beyond the media's right versus left framing. It's a question about the future of our country, and whether we are going to stop the slide toward a Third World system in which there are just two classes: those at the bottom and those at the top.

A lot of people at the top of the economic food chain have done very well shorting the middle class. But the losers in those bets weren't Goldman Sachs investors -- they were millions of hard working Americans who had heard the pitch and bought into the American Dream, only to find it had been replaced by a sophisticated scam.

Bring Back Transatlantic Steamers...

That's what a friend of mine suggested to me today, to solve the air traffic shutdown caused by the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajokull.

The old Queen Mary used to take one from NYC to England in 5 days. And the new Queen Mary 2 is still in business for Cunard Lines.

My own recommendation--zeppelins!

Huffington Post-1, Goldman Sachs-0

Today's Huffington Post appears to be chock full of the Goldman Sachs Fraud Charges Story....

Iceland's Uzbek Connection...

The volcanic eruption dominating the news today reminded me that Iceland's First Lady, Dorrit Moussaieff, comes from a prominent Bukharian Jewish family that traces its roots to the dyer of Ghengis Khan's robes. Here's an excerpt from a February, 2009 profile in the Times of London:

...That is because the Icelandic first lady comes in the zippy form of Dorrit Moussaieff. She is sitting in the splendid drawing room of her Belgravia apartment, which is panelled with wood and decorated with porcelain and paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec and the preRaphaelites. At 59, dripping in jewels and with her nut-brown hair freshly blow-dried by Nicky Clarke himself, she looks closer to 35.

Her husband’s entire government may have just resigned but she seems unruffled by the political turmoil. “He is currently attending to an entirely new administration,” she acknowledges. So why did he not resign, then? “Nobody asked him to. More champagne?”

I accept a glass of bubbly, mixed with pomegranate juice. Five minutes later she is suggesting we go to an art opening at “Charlie Saatchi’s”, inviting me to dinner and urging me to bring my four children to Iceland in half-term. Although she doesn’t take a glass herself, she clearly cares not one jot that the comparisons to Marie Antoinette are starting to loom dangerously large.

She is wearing a selection of goodies that are almost as opulent as the room. Apart from the diamond cubes in her ears, one of her (three) diamond necklaces is set with a dark-green antique mogul emerald as big as a matchbox. Of the necklace itself, she is briskly dismissive. “The diamonds are insignificant,” she comments. “What’s significant is the emerald.”

A scion of the Israeli Moussaieff jewellery dynasty, born in Israel, she came to London at the age of 13 with her parents.

She followed her father into the family business and was, in her jewellery-selling heyday, rumoured to be earning a seven-figure salary. She had been a fixture on London’s party circuit for years before she met Iceland’s president, Olafur Ragnur Grimsson, in 1999 at a lunch party in South Kensington; four years later they were married. Moussaieff has now taken the Icelandic cause to her bosom, splitting her time between Reykjavik and the splendour of her London apartment. She’ll bang Iceland’s drum all right, but not in sackcloth and ashes.

Dmitry Babich on Kyrgyzstan's Crisis

From Russia Profile (ht Johnson's Russia List):

Aitmatov did not believe in flawless state machines – not in totalitarian ones, not in democratic ones. He was more interested in his protagonists – homegrown philosophers who in their space stations turn out to be freer and more astute than some university professors. And this is the greater truth, once again demonstrated by the events of 2005 to 2010 in the writer’s native Kyrgyzstan. So, Askar Akaev was replaced with Kurmanbek Bakiev. So Bakiev will now be replaced by someone else. And this someone will also place their friends and relatives in lucrative jobs in “investment and innovation,” simultaneously putting their opponents in prison. And similarly they will take the percentage of their supporters in Parliament up to 100. This percentage, by the way, only gets bigger with every new revolution. In Bakiev’s time, the party of power took 79 percent – more than in Akaev’s. Looks ideal. But all of the sudden, there is a new revolution.

Meanwhile the United States, Russia and other countries keep trying to figure out which one of them financed the rebels. In reality, the rebels did not need any financing. Hunger and illiteracy worked much better than any foundations or spies. The illiteracy was caused by the collapse of the Soviet education system, and the hunger is a consequence of illiteracy. And right now the task at hand is to teach the Kyrgyz youth Russian and/or English, to give it a future. But this is not mentioned in newspapers or at summits. The topics of gas pipelines and external political “spheres of influence” are much more interesting.

Democracy is not a race car that can be imported from the United States or from Western Europe with a “quality assured” certificate from Freedom House. It is not a blissful nirvana and not even a procedure, as was thought in the 19th century. It is a search. It is the daily improvement of the quality of a person – their education, their sense of responsibility for the country and the family, their freedom from prejudices and sin. This is what should be done in Kyrgyzstan, in Russia and in Poland, not boasting of EU membership or of the “power vertical” at the same time as people are forgetting books and the habit of reading in general.

Having lived in the shadow of a very cruel political regime for 60 years, Aitmatov showed us that it is possible to be an utterly free person even in an authoritarian society. It was futile to build “Berlin Walls” to limit his freedom – it was the same as building ramparts against aviation. Thanks to his imagination, he easily flew over the bounds of censorship. This is how he became a free person, without Parliaments and national revolutions. Let’s learn from him today – in Russia, in Kyrgyzstan, and in Poland.

"The Guy in the Windbreaker"

President Obama slipped away from the White House Press Corps the other day, but he couldn't hide from my Swarthmore College buddy Tom Satterwhite, who published his account on the Washington Post Local Opinions website today:

The guy in the windbreaker
By Tom Satterwhite
Washington

The other day, while I was waiting for the light to change at Chesapeake Street and Nebraska Avenue NW, I saw about eight big black sport-utility vehicles approaching.

My first thought was, “This looks like fairly heavy artillery, but it can’t be Him ... where are all the motorcycles, the press and the 10,000 police that always seem to trail behind?” The lead car turned onto the street ahead of me and started up the hill toward the Fort Reno Park athletic fields.

Nobody got out to redirect traffic, and I followed the procession up the hill. Then the caravan stopped, and while I watched, a guy in a black windbreaker and a few agents got out and started walking up a hill on the right toward a small crowd of people milling around for no apparent reason. I thought, “This is too much. What is going on?” So I parked in an illegal spot, got out and walked over to the field where an agent inquired, “Can I help you?”

“Are we allowed to go on the field?” I asked. She smiled and said, “Of course. It’s public property. See the agent over there.” Another agent, who seemed to be about 10 feet tall, came over, scanned me with a wand, and said, “Thank you. Go ahead.” When I got to the top of the hill, I realized some girls were playing soccer, and the guy with the black windbreaker, who was now pretty close, looked me in the eye for a second. Still mystified, I turned and asked one of the coaches, “The president is here because ... ?”

“His daughter is on my team.”

Mary Moran v National Football League Players Association

Now, this is an interesting lawsuit. The plaintiff is the daughter of Congressman Jim Moran (D-VA). The defendant is the union of professional football players.

If this goes to trial, it will be hard to get a seat in the courtroom.

National Guard Truck Kills Science Reporter at DC Nuclear Summit

Constance Holden, 68, a reporter for Science magazine, was killed by a National Guard truck as she rode her bicycle near the Washington Convention Center yesterday, according to the Washington Post.

More on the story from GreaterGreaterWashington.org:

The incident puts a tragic veneer on an already-frustrating event, where citizens have to show ID and submit to searches just to enter their own homes. Security agencies are doing all of this in the name of protecting the world leaders, but it's less clear whether it's all necessary. What is clear is that one Washingtonian is dead as a result.

Geoff Hatchard Tweeted, "All this security to ensure that no one gets hurt or dies at the summit, and the security manages to kill someone? Mission NOT accomplished."

More on the Polish Airliner Tragedy by Charles Crawford

The Legacy Of Lech and Maria Kaczynski: Si Monumentum Requiris, Circumspice

Here is the text of my appreciation of the life and times of Lech and Maria Kaczynski, now up at Radio Free Europe.
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I attended a smart Warsaw dinner party in 2006, not long after the Kaczynski twins and their Law and Justice party (PiS) had triumphed in the 2005 Polish parliamentary and Presidential elections. The assembled Poles, distinguished Warsaw intellectuals, united in noisy disgust. The Kaczynskis were portrayed as belonging to that part of the political spectrum which ranges from pathological extremists to the far side of the Antichrist. Poland was hurtling down the road to ruin, even dictatorship.

Feverish attacks on the Kaczynski phenomenon from many Poles (including Solidarity period colleagues) quickly turned into an international liberal media ‘narrative’ drawn from a pick ‘n mix list of disobliging adjectives which is surfacing in some obituary analysis: extreme, nationalist, homophobic, anti-German, anti-European, ultra-Catholic, xenophobic, reactionary, divisive, populist, right-wing.

The worst adjective the patronising Warsaw elite threw at the Kaczynskis was something much more subtly Polish: they were so provincial. They were not ‘one of us’ – too petty and pedantic, too truculent, too self-righteous, too wrapped up in Poland’s own myths, too worried about all those uneducated primitive Poles out there. In short, much too Polish – but in the wrong way.

In my four years in Warsaw from numerous meetings with the Kaczynski family including their mother Jadwiga Kaczynska I drew my own, very different conclusions. They came across as smart, amusing, private but determined and far-sighted Polish patriots who had ‘attitudes’ rather than specific policies.

The Kaczynskis' overriding ambition was for Poland to be strong. (This might sound a curious goal for non-Poles, but remember that since 1795 Poland has been substantively free and independent for only 40 years.) The Kaczynskis looked uncompromisingly at what they saw as key weaknesses in Poland as it had had emerged from its bleak modern history. They identified three themes.

Communism’s Corrupt Legacy

One was the dire moral and institutional legacy of communism. Poles’ heroic heave to end Soviet rule had come with a huge cost. Poles had spied on and betrayed other Poles. Key state institutions had been penetrated by people on the Moscow payroll. Far too many people had prospered dishonestly since communism ended. New foreign investment flooding into Poland was welcome, but it brought too many temptations to cut corners.

Above all, key Solidarity leaders including Lech Walesa himself had pulled punches when communism ended, allowing numerous communist villains to sneak away from their crimes only to return in expensive new suits, whistling nonchalantly as new European ‘social democrats’. It was this argument which so infuriated former Solidarity personalities – how dare the Kaczynskis call into question Poland’s (and Solidarity’s) supreme moral triumph in ending communism peacefully? Heresy.

In my view Lech Kaczynski wanted to win the 2005 Presidential election primarily to see his view of this recent history vindicated, rather than with any clear plans to do much about it. In particular there was no generalised throwing open of the communist archives – some commentators close to the Kaczynskis told me that key Solidarity people and many senior Catholic Church leaders had to be protected from devastating revelations of betrayal or private indiscretions.

As the post-communist Left reeled under one scandal after another, Lech Kaczynski campaigned against corruption at all levels of the state (with sly swipes at unwholesome ‘foreign’ influences), first as Justice Minister in 2000-2001 and then as Mayor of Warsaw.

As Mayor he set a new style. Official processes were meticulously if not painfully respected. Unspectacular but steady improvements were made. Corruption scandals faded away. This unassuming if not boring style went down well with the public.

And, yes, Mayor Kaczynski banned two gay parades. Not so much because he was against homosexuality (decriminalised in Poland decades before the United Kingdom got round to it), but rather because he thought that that sort of thing was just unseemly. The fact that many German and other foreign gay rights activists wanted to use the parades to challenge his authority made him more defiant.

Political Instability

The Kaczynskis also fretted over political instability itself; they did not want Poland slipping back into the ruinous feuding of the 1930s. By 2000 the dozens of political parties which had contested early post-communist elections had been reduced to some ten groupings. However, a quarter or more of Polish voters flirted with overtly populist leaders of a ‘Red-Brown’ inclination. Many were marginalised Poles from families displaced from Ukraine in World War Two and now somehow ‘rootless’ in poor rural areas.

After the Kaczynski PiS party (to their own surprise) became the largest party in the 2005 Parliamentary elections, the twins hit upon a strategy which scandalised many middle-class Poles: they formed a government with these populists, the Self-Defence and Polish Families parties led by Andrzej Lepper and Roman Giertych respectively.

This ridiculous government wobbled along for a year or so then collapsed, prompting the 2007 elections. The main centre right party Citizens Platform swept to power. Far from banging a ‘right wing’ free market drum, PiS talked about ‘social justice’ and strong state support for the less fortunate. PiS sucked in votes from different parts of the left spectrum. Self-Defence and Polish Families were crushed. The former communists struggled to get into double figures.

The result of the Kaczynskis’ crafty machinations has been a spectacular success for Poland and for Europe. Only four political groupings are now in Parliament, all committed to EU membership and modernising pro-Western policies. Polish politics, decision-making and institutions are notably more stable – Poland’s current fine run of economic success while the rest of Europe is faltering is no coincidence.

Poland and Europe

Finally, Lech Kaczynski wanted Poland to be strong in Europe. But he also wanted Western Europe to grasp that while it had prospered after World War Two, Poland had been left at Yalta to rot under Russian/Soviet rule. He insisted that the values of ‘modern Europe’ had been formed without Poland’s rightful participation, so Poland did not see itself as automatically bound by them. Yes, Poland would join the European Union. But it had not thrown off communist Moscow to submit to petty-bureaucratic Brussels.

Thus Poland’s tenacious negotiating positions over the 2005 EU Budget deal and the Lisbon Treaty. Other EU capitals saw the Kaczynskis as blustering amateurs who would quickly fold. I warned London that the Kaczynskis would be stubborn and skilful negotiators, and privately advised Tony Blair how to work with them.

Lech Kaczynski duly played on Angela Merkel’s desperation to get EU voting reweighted in Germany’s favour and extracted a remarkable concession, namely that Poland’s excellent voting weight under the Nice Treaty extend until late 2014. This gives Poland a stronger hand in the 2012/13 EU Budget negotiations. Kaczynski also steered Poland’s Eurozone membership issue into the long grass – again, a perspicacious outcome which has done Poland no harm.

Lech Kaczynski’s Legacy

Lech Kaczynski reminds me of Bill Buckley’s famous ambition for US conservatives, to "stand athwart history, yelling Stop!" His weakness was turning his fiercely held attitudes into policies. Far too often, especially in foreign policy pronouncements, he came across as heaving large lumps of Attitude into the river of current affairs, making an impressive splash but doing nothing to stop the water simply running past again.

Attitudes and policies come and go. For now let’s remember and respect what Lech and Maria Kaczynski did over more than 30 years to build a strong, honest Poland.

Yesterday on BBC and CNN I was asked whether Poland would slump into political instability, so many top people being lost in this disaster. I replied, “of course not”.

Poland is in deep sorrow, yet coping firmly and democratically with this calamity. Lech Kaczynski helped make that happen – a towering moral and political achievement, for Poland and for Europe.

* * * * *

The plaque for Sir Christopher Wren in St Paul's Cathedral says this:

si monumentum requiris, circumspice (if you seek his monument, look around you)

The same goes for Lech Kaczynski in his fine and honourable journey from child film star to law studies through internment and Solidarnosc, and then to his final years as Poland's third democratically elected leader.

Charles Crawford on the Polish Airliner Tragedy

From CharlesCrawford.biz:

I have just heard the appalling news about the crash near Smolensk of the plane carrying President Kaczynski and a senior delegation en route to Katyn.

As well as the President and his wife Maria it looks as if former President-in-exile Ryszard Kaczorowski, head of the Institute of National Memory Janusz Kurtyk, head of the Polish National Bank Sławomir Skrzypek and dozens of other significant Polish personalities have perished as the plane tried to land in thick fog.

The Russians have moved fast to open an official investigation. The plane itself was the official President's jet, a Soviet-era designed Tu-154.

I knew many people on board. Beyond awful.

Lech Kaczynski was a man who fought long and hard to bring his country modern constitutional democracy. Interned by the Communists for his work for the Solidarity trade union, he worked closely with - then fell out with - Lech Walesa.

In the 1990s he held various prominent decisions before making his name denouncing corruption as Justice Minister in the Buzek government from 2000-2001. He then did well as Mayor of Warsaw and was elected President of Poland in 2005.

I met him on many occasions before and after he became President. My wife and I also much enjoyed the company of his wife Maria.

This is not the moment to write some wider thoughts about what the Kaczynski family represented. No doubt it will not take long before sneers about his supposed narrow-minded anti-gay Catholic reactionary anti-EU attitudes creep forth.

Suffice to say that Lech Kaczynski was not that. He was a highly intelligent, principled Polish statesman, who above all emphasised the central importance in public life of honesty, the law and democratic constitutionality .

My own deepest condolences to his daughter Marta, his brother Jaroslaw and to his mother whom I had the honour to host in 2006 at the Residence in Warsaw on our Remembrance Day. She played her part in Poland's struggle for freedom in WW2. How tragic for her that one of her beloved twin sons has been lost today.