Russian Central Banker Murdered in Moscow

Andrei Kozlov, 41, who investigated money-laundering for Russia's Central Bank, was gunned down in the street yesterday, in what looked like a mob rubout. RIAN.ru has the latest news updates:

Kozlov first joined the Soviet Union's central bank and rose to become the first deputy chairman of the Bank of Russia in 1997 before quitting for the private sector in 1999. He held several senior positions, including as chairman of Russian Standard Bank in 1999-2000, before returning to the Bank of Russia in April 2002.

The Central Bank said in a statement posted on its Web site, "He made a huge contribution to the reform of the country's banking system, making it more effective, transparent and stable."

And members of the banking community also praised Kozlov's efforts to ensure stability and clean up a system that was rocked by a default in 1998 that saw confidence plunge.

"He did a great deal to improve Russia's banking system, make it more transparent and conformant with international banking standards," said Mikhail Zadornov, a former finance minister and head of Vneshtorgbank 24, a subsidiary of the state-owned foreign trade bank Vneshtorgbank.

Daily Kommersant cited banking sources as saying Kozlov's activities had also targeted "gray schemes" used by importers to minimize customs duties and value-added tax payments, as well as by criminal and shadow groups to launder money.

Contract killings in Russia were frequent in the 1990s as gangsters sought to take control of lucrative assets in various fields, but a banking figure as senior as Kozlov has never been murdered before.

Ann Coulter on The Path to 9/11

From AnnCoulter.com:

Islamic jihadists attacked America year after year throughout the Clinton administration. They did everything but blow up his proverbial "bridge to the 21st century." Every year but one, Clinton found an excuse not to fight back.

The first month Clinton was in office, Islamic terrorists with suspected links to al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein bombed the World Trade Center.

For the first time ever, a terrorist act against America was treated not as a matter of national security, but exclusively as a simple criminal offense. The individual bombers were tried in a criminal court. (The one plotter who got away fled to Iraq, that peaceful haven of kite-flying children until Bush invaded and turned it into a nation of dangerous lunatics.)

In 1995 and 1996, various branches of the Religion of Peace — al-Qaida, Hezbollah and the Iranian "Party of God" — staged car bomb attacks on American servicemen in Saudi Arabia, killing 24 members of our military in all. Each time, the Clinton administration came up with an excuse to do nothing.

Despite the Democrats' current claim that only the capture of Osama bin Laden will magically end terrorism forever, Clinton turned down Sudan's offer to hand us bin Laden in 1996. That year, Mohammed Atta proposed the 9/11 attack to bin Laden.

Clinton refused the handover of bin Laden because — he said in taped remarks on Feb. 15, 2002 — "(bin Laden) had committed no crime against America, so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him." Luckily, after 9/11, we can get him on that trespassing charge.

Although Clinton made the criminal justice system the entire U.S. counterterrorism strategy, there was not even an indictment filed after the bombing of either Khobar Towers (1996) or the USS Cole (2000). Indictments were not filed until after Bush/Ashcroft came into office.

Only in 1998 did the Clinton-haters ("normal people") force Clinton into a military response. Solely because of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton finally lobbed a few bombs in the general direction of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

In August 1998, three days after Clinton admitted to the nation that he did in fact have "sex with that woman," he bombed Afghanistan and Sudan, doing about as much damage as another Clinton fusillade did to a blue Gap dress.

The day of Clinton's scheduled impeachment, Dec. 18, 1998, he bombed Iraq. This accomplished two things: (1) It delayed his impeachment for one day, and (2) it got a lot of Democrats on record about the monumental danger of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction.

Tony Blair on A Global Alliance for Global Values

The British Prime Minister's recent condemnation of "anti-American...madness" has made headlines around the world. We searched for the source, and found it in this pamphlet published by the UK Foreign Policy Centre, that you can download as PDF file,for free, by clicking this link. This excerpt indicates that Prime Minister Blair (or his speechwriters) may be on the same wavelength as Bernard Lewis, Daniel Pipes, or even Vladimir Putin:

But by the early 20th century, after renaissance, reformation and enlightenment had swept over the Western world, the Muslim and Arab world was uncertain, insecure and on the defensive. Some countries like Turkey went for a muscular move to secularism. Others found themselves caught between colonisation, nascent nationalism, political oppression and religious radicalism. Muslims began to see the sorry state of Muslim countries as symptomatic of the sorry state of Islam. Political radicals became religious radicals and vice versa.

Those in power tried to accommodate the resurgent Islamic radicalism by incorporating some of its leaders and some of its ideology. The result was nearly always disastrous. The religious radicalism was made respectable; the political radicalism suppressed and so in the minds of many, the cause of the two came together to symbolise the need for change. So many came to believe that the way of restoring the confidence and stability of Islam was the combination of religious extremism and populist politics. The true enemies became "the West" and those Islamic leaders who co-operated with them.

The extremism may have started through religious doctrine and thought. But soon, in offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood, supported by Wahhabi extremists and taught in some of the Madrassas of the Middle East and Asia, an ideology was born and exported around the world.

On 9/11 2001, 3,000 people were murdered. But this terrorism did not begin on the streets of New York. Many more had already died, not just in acts of terrorism against western interests, but in political insurrection and turmoil round the world.

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

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

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

Individualism--Hollywood's True Religion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Darfur--Not Genocide?

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

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

Washington's New Mayor

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

Bloggerheads.tv

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

The First Published Profile of John O'Neill

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

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

David Horowitz Denies Path to 9/11 Conspiracy Charge

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

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

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

A Swing and a Miss, for President Bush

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

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

Was David Horowitz Behind The Path to9/11?

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

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

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

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

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

Subtext: We're still in deep trouble.

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

Now, can we survive as a nation until 2008?

Ann Althouse on The Path to 9/11

She got bored...

The Path to 9/11: Not Bad

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

Bumper Sticker, Semptember 10, 2006

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

Christopher Hitchens on the 5th Anniversary of 9/11

From today's Wall Street Journal:

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

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

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

Farmgirl Fare

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

Background Reading for The Path to 9/11

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

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

Is Democracy the Answer?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zero Tolerance for Intolerance

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

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

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