Bush No Longer Alone, Blair Now Like Hitler, Too...

According to a British Muslim leader. Of course, it was the Nazis who specialized in terror attacks to come to power--the night of the long knives, kristallnacht, the burning of the Reichstag, etc.--and then terror to achieve their ends in war, from blitzkrieg to the extermination of European Jewry, to an alliance with Islamic fundmentalists and support of the Muslim Brotherhood that is behind today's wave of fundamentalists.

There is indeed a Nazi connection, but not to Tony Blair. . .

Guts & Glory

A the 60th Anniversary of V-J Day approaches, I thought this link to Lawrence H. Suid's website might be interesting. I met him for lunch before our vacation, at the suggestion of Alice Goldfarb Marquis, author of numerous books about culture. She did me a real favor to put us in touch. I learned a lot, just at one lunch at the Woodside Deli. He's written ten books, and is the foremost historian of the US Military in Film and Television. Most interestingly, Suid explained why there weren't more films about terrorists after 9/11. Suid pointed out these type of films were already made before 9/11--movies like the 1997 Air Force One, starring Harrison Ford. Apparently, as Oscar Wilde said, life does imitate art.

These days, Suid is busily working on a biography of Fred Zinneman, who made Day of the Jackal, about an earlier incarnation of terrorism.

Victor Davis Hanson on Hiroshima

He calls his article 60 Years Later. (Hat tip to Little Green Footballs for the link).

Russia Sees America Losing Allies

Because, RIA Novosti argues, Bush is not serious about the war on terrorism...

From the "You Read It Here First" Department...

On June 21st, this was our blog entry about John Bolton:

Bolton Will Go to the UN
Although he is having a hard time getting through the Senate, Bolton will go to the UN, possibly as a recess appointment this July.

The date was just a little off--Bush appointed Bolton on August 1st.

Why is the US Government Aiding Terrorists?

That's the questions Russians are asking in thisRIA Novosti article about ABC TV's broadcast of an interview with Shamil Basayev, the Chechen Islamist terrorist responsible for the Beslan school tragedy and other attacks. His interview with a Radio Liberty reporter was broadcast by Ted Koppel. The Russians noticed, as Koppel did not, that Radio Liberty is a US government-funded propaganda operation. But the Russians are mistaken to complain about ABC, which has been soft on terrorism in the past (ABC's sympathy for the late Yassir Arafat was documented by media watchdog groups such as CAMERA). They don't pretend to be allies in the Global War on Terrorism.

The Bush administration does claim that it is against terrorism. However, by providing a platform for Basayev through Radio Liberty (ironic, considering Basayev would eliminate most liberties that Americans take for granted, should he come to power and establish an Islamic state governed by Sha'aria), the US is giving aid and comfort to the terrorist cause in Chechnya.

The Russians have a point, and are also making a threat--if the US doesn't stop supporting the likes of Basayev, they may very decide to pull out of the American campaign against Bin Laden and Al Qaeda (who are Basayev's ideological, political, and military allies). Something to think about...

Uzbekistan evicts United States Air Base

According to Yahoo! News, Uzbekistan is kicking the US military out of the country in the next 180 days.

This news has provided inspiration--it's been six years since I published my last book--and a title for something I'm working on now, based on my Fulbright experience teaching in Uzbekistan.

Working title: WHO LOST CENTRAL ASIA?

IMHO, There's plenty of blame to go around . . .

The Daily Ablution

Scott Burgess's The Daily Ablution exposed a member of Hizb-ut-Tahrir, Dilpazier Aslam, who reported on the London bombings for The Guardian. Since that fact was published by Burgess, the reporter was fired. In the aftermath, Alsam threatened to take the Guardian to court. (Hat tip to Tom Gross)

Real Life Space Drama

I can't stop thinking about those astronauts in the Space Shuttle. If it were me, I wouldn't get back in that thing, I'd demand they send up a nice, safe Russian Soyuz capsule to take me home. It's what they were using for the International Space Station while the shuttle problems were being fixed the first time. Old, clunky, but so far, reliable...

War Between Democracies

Matthew White has posted this great list of War Between Democracies, beginning in the 5th century BC and running up to the present day, as a rebuttal to the claim that no two democracies have gone to war against each other. They have, they do, and they will...

August Recess

It's the time of year when Congress goes on holiday, and so do we. Blogging may be sporadic for a little while...

British Soldiers Face War Crimes Charges in Iraq

Reuters reports three British soldiers will be tried as war criminals for the abuse of prisoners in Iraq.

Canadian Islamists Apologize to Daniel Pipes

For personal attacks that compared Pipes to Hitler:

On June 10, the CIC published an apology and retraction: 'The Canadian Islamic Congress and Ms. Valiante apologize without reservation and retract remarks in the column that suggest that Dr. Daniel Pipes is a follower of Hitler or that he uses the tactics of Hitler or that he wants to ethnically cleanse America of its Muslim presence.' The CIC also sent funds to cover my legal expenses and made a donation in my honor to a Canadian charity.

The CIC's action is, to the best of my knowledge, without precedent.

Of course, Canadian libel laws are stricter than American ones . . .

How the US Nurtured Islamist Terror

Rachel Bronson's article in The National Interest explains that America is being bitten by our own dog, that Islamist terrorists--as well as political Islam--are the beneficiaries of decades of American patronage:

The confluence of U.S.-Saudi anti-communist interests manifested itself most obviously in Afghanistan, where the United States and Saudi Arabia spent no less then $3 billion each, channeling assistance to armed anti-American Islamic fundamentalists. But the shared anti-communism embedded in the U.S.-Saudi partnership, and the proselytizing it spawned, was not limited to Afghanistan; it stretched from Somalia, Sudan and Chad to Pakistan and beyond. Countries where the U.S.-Saudi partnership was strongest are areas where today the Islamist threat is particularly vexing. After September 11, both Somalia and Sudan were considered likely targets in any American operation to eliminate terrorism.

Other American allies, such as Egypt, Tunisia and Israel, supported indigenous Islamic movements in order to counter local nationalist opponents, many of whom were Soviet backed. In turn, the same leaders who underwrote local Islamist groups in the 1970s and 1980s later used their very presence to justify a resistance toward democratization.

In contrast to the support Islamist groups received in America-friendly countries in the Middle East, religious organizations suffered a crueler fate in Soviet-supported countries. The Syrian regime exterminated 20,000 citizens in 1982 for being associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Saddam Hussein's Iraq massacred religious leaders, especially among the Shi'a population. Egypt provides the best example of how Cold War ideological struggles shaped today's politico-religious landscape. While receiving Soviet aid, Gamal Abdel Nasser persecuted the Muslim Brotherhood. American-supported Anwar Sadat, on the other hand, heavily backed the Brotherhood in order to counter local Nasserite opposition.

The politicization of Islam is thus a direct outgrowth of the Middle East's Cold War experience. Given this history, it should come as no surprise that in today's post-Cold War Middle East, the major constituency-based organizations in the Arab world that are best placed to organize politically are Islamist ones.

Brave New World

On the way up to Glimmerglass, we listened to Peter Firth's books-on-tape version of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I had read it in High School, or maybe college, as a science fiction book about the Utopian--or rather, Dystopian--Future. But hearing it read aloud, for some eight hours, as a middle-aged person, it seemed to have another meaning as a social satire of England's chattering classes. It wasn't about the future. It was about now. And laughing out loud funny in parts, smiling most of the rest of the time--until the sudden end of his savage. I had thought of Huxley mostly as a 60s hippie, Timothy Leary, Indian mysticism type (we went on a family pilgrimmage to his home in Ojai when I was young), so this was a fresh perspective. Plus, it seems almost everything in the book has come to pass in this age of Prozac and cloning--even the "hatcheries"...

Celebrating Bastille Day at Glimmerglass

Can't say enough good things about the Glimmerglass Opera. We just got back from a Bastille Day weekend getaway, thoroughly enjoyed three French operas: Lucie de Lammermoor, Donizetti's classic sung in French; Le Portrait de Manon, by Massenet; and Poulenc's La Voix Humaine. All three were superb. All the singers were excellent. And the music and staging were good, too. The setting is lovely late Otsego, Glimmerglass State Park, a stone's throw from James Fenimore Cooper's final resting place in Cooperstown, NY. This time we stayed in Sharon Springs, a Jewish Ghost Town, filled with crumbling wooden hotels and lodging houses, set in a hollow smelling of sulfur from the spa waters that bubble up. On the hill is the hulk of Adler's Hotel, where former NYC Mayor Ed Koch once worked as a busboy. The few guests still remaining appear to be elderly Russian immigrants, walking and talking, sitting outside their rented cottages, little dachas that reminded us, too, of our time spent in Russia...

A Touching Tribute to London Attack's American Victim

Tamara Jones has a very nice obituary for Minh Matsushita, the first identified American victim of July 7th's London bomb attacks. He was a Vietnamese refugee, raised in the Bronx, who had worked as an adventure tour guide before settling down to a desk job in the City with an internet company.

LONDON -- Minh Matsushita was a man forever in motion, an adventure always in progress. His passport was a pocket-size accordion of pages bearing faded stamps and mysterious visas.

Even as his boyhood friends from the Bronx settled down, got married, pursued careers and started families, the 37-year-old Matsushita just kept reinventing himself. He might be a beach bum in San Diego one year and a tech geek in Manhattan the next. You could find him snorkeling in Australia, or hiking across minefields in Cambodia.

Dude, what are you doing?, friends would remember asking time and again, when he would alight between trips on someone's back porch to drink through the night and tell his tales. Minh always smiled, shrugged and gave the cavalier answer his buddies came to think of as his personal motto:

"No worries, man."

For the past 18 months, Matsushita had been living out the dream of the perpetual wanderer, exploring remote corners of the world as a tour guide for an Australia-based agency called Intrepid Travel. Leading tourists on treks through the jungles and paddies of Southeast Asia, he also found for the first time in his life something more than adventure.

He fell in love.

As Instapundit says, read the whole thing.

Happy Bastille Day!

Another good day to celebrate Freedom.


...And the link between the French and American Revolutions, personified by the Marquis de Lafayette.

After persuading the French to give George Washington the gift of freedom for the United States, where he was present at Yorktown with General Rochambeau for the British surrender (In this picture, Rochambeau is pointing, giving orders to the troops, while Washington looks on, Lafayette over his shoulder),

Lafayette returned to France. There, on July 14, 1789 he led his troops--many of whom had served with him in the American Revolution, and were known to the French as "the Americans"--in storming the infamous French prison. (This might be seen as America's first attempt at "regime change.") He also worked with Thomas Jefferson on the Declaration of the Rights of Man. After trying to save Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette from the guillotine, he fled the Revolution, only to be thrown into an Austrian dungeon, where he was kept prisoner.

After the Revolution, Lafayette presented two keys from the Bastille as gifts to the first American President, with these words: "Give me leave, my dear General to present you with a picture of the Bastille, just as it looked a few days after I had ordered its demolition,- with the main key of the fortress of despotism. It is a tribute, which I owe, as a son to my adoptive father, as an Aide - de - Camp to my General, as a Missionary of liberty to its Patriarch." To cement the Franco-American relationship, Lafayette and Washington established the Sons of the Cincinnati, an organization that still has branches in France and the United States.

One key to the Bastille hangs in the hallway at Mount Vernon.

The other is in the collection of the George Washington Masonic Memorial in Alexandria, Virginia.
You can read the story of the two Bastille keys in this article.

About Last Night: Another Great Newshour Interview...

Last night Ray Suarez took on General John Vines, who actually admitted that he plans to lose the Iraq war.

Here is his surrender declaration:

So the idea that we are going to win an insurgency, we are going to defeat the insurgency, the coalition, and then give freedom to the Iraqi people does not track. Freedom can't be given to someone; it must be taken, and so they have to take that.

"This man is a complete idiot," the person sitting next to me turned and said. I agree. And kudos to Jim Lehrer and Ray Suarez for smoking him out of his cave, so the American people can see what is going on with our military leadership.

For those who don't know American history, we can start at the beginning: The French military, under General Rochambeau, presented freedom as a gift to George Washington in the American Revolution--General Cornwallis originally wanted to present his sword to the French, whose fleet and armies defeated him at Yorktown. We Americans couldn't "take" freedom without the French.

Abraham Lincoln presented freedom to the slaves in the Civil War. Slaves couldn't "take it" without the Union Army.

In more recent times, America (with a great deal of help from the USSR and Great Britain) presented freedom as a gift to Germany, Japan, Italy and the nations of Western Europe. They didn't "take it," either.

So why expect from the Iraqis what we didn't expect from ourselves or others?

Unless and until the enemy is decisively defeated, the Iraqi people will not enjoy freedom. As FDR noted, one of the most important freedoms is "Freedom from Fear."

For without civil order--while chaos, anarchy, and violence reign--democracy is impossible.

Why Do They Hate Us? (Continued)

James Taranto, in OpinionJournal's Best of the Web Today explains the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh: "This had nothing to do with Israeli 'occupation' of 'Palestinian lands,' America's 'unilateral invasion' of Iraq, 'torture' of prisoners at Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib, the widening 'income gap,' or any of the other litany of complaints that the terror apologists trot out. Islamist terrorism arises from religious fanaticism and hatred, plain and simple."