Washington's New Mayor

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

Bloggerheads.tv

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

The First Published Profile of John O'Neill

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

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

David Horowitz Denies Path to 9/11 Conspiracy Charge

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

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

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

A Swing and a Miss, for President Bush

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

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

Was David Horowitz Behind The Path to9/11?

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

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

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

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

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

Subtext: We're still in deep trouble.

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

Now, can we survive as a nation until 2008?

Ann Althouse on The Path to 9/11

She got bored...

The Path to 9/11: Not Bad

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

Bumper Sticker, Semptember 10, 2006

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

Christopher Hitchens on the 5th Anniversary of 9/11

From today's Wall Street Journal:

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

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

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

Farmgirl Fare

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

Background Reading for The Path to 9/11

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

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

Is Democracy the Answer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zero Tolerance for Intolerance

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

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

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

Omran Salman on CAIR

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

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

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

Come and See (1985)

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

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

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

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

Islamists and the Naive

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Robert Spencer on CAIR

From JihadWatch (ht LGF):

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

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

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

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

From Agustin Blazquez

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

VERY INTERESTING

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

When is TV Censorship Not Censorship?

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

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

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