Zero Tolerance for Intolerance

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

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

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

Omran Salman on CAIR

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

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

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

Come and See (1985)

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

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

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

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

Islamists and the Naive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Spencer on CAIR

From JihadWatch (ht LGF):

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

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

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

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

From Agustin Blazquez

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

VERY INTERESTING

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

When is TV Censorship Not Censorship?

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

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

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

Anti-Chechen Pogrom Rages in Russian Town

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

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

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

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

Christopher Hitchens on Niger, Uranium, and Saddam Hussein

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

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

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

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

Bye, Bye, Blair...

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

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

Newt Gingrich: How Bush Resembles Lincoln

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ann Coulter on Joe Wilson

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

Melanie Phillips on Britain's Fifth Column

From her column in the Daily Mail:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Victor Davis Hanson on Fouad Ajami

Hanson reviews The Foreigner's Gift for Commentary Magazine:

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

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

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

Youssef Ibrahim's Plan to Defeat Islamist Terror

From the NY Sun (ht Melanie Phillips):

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

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

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

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

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

How to Bomb Tehran

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

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

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

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

Taliban-Al Qaeda Win in Waziristan

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

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

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

Quinnipiac Poll: Americans Want Giuliani

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

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

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

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

Israeli Experts Back Giuliani for US President

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