Robert Spencer on the Plight of Molly Norris

From Human Events:

Molly Norris’s cause should be taken up by all free people – not least the President of the United States. Obama could have explained that human beings control their own reactions to things. If Muslims chose yet again to riot and murder because of Terry Jones or Molly Norris, that would be a choice they would be making out of an unlimited array of other choices. Instead, Western authorities have fallen into the Islamic supremacists' trap and are starting to behave in just the way they want them to: thinking that they must not do certain things, because if they do, there will be violence from Muslims. Yet that violence is in every case solely the responsibility of the perpetrator, not of anyone else.

Obama could have said that the idea that Molly Norris would have to give up her career and live in hiding because of cartoons is unconscionable. He could have told the Islamic world that cartoons depicting Muhammad did not harm Muslims, and that the willingness of some Muslims to commit murder over such depictions was the only thing that made people care to draw Muhammad in the first place.

Obama could also have said that to threaten people with death because of cartoons was destructive to free speech and hence to free societies — and as such, it was something that the U.S. would do everything it could to resist. He could have announced that Molly Norris and others who were threatened for exercising their freedom of speech would be given full round-the-clock protection — and that if violent protests and riots over cartoons broke out in areas where American troops were deployed, those troops would put down those riots and protect the innocent to the fullest possible extent.

Apparently when Muslims behave with violent irrationality, Obama thinks that it is entirely the responsibility of non-Muslims to clean up the mess they make. In these dark days we don’t have any leaders who will stand up for the freedom of expression, explaining its importance as a bulwark against tyranny. Molly Norris, wherever she is, and the embattled free people of the United States, deserve better.

Who is Franklin Graham?

After seeing his impressive performance with Christiane Amanpour on ABC This Week, I took a look at his website for Samaritan's Purse, where I found this biography:

William Franklin Graham, III, born July 14, 1952, is the fourth of five children born to evangelist Billy Graham and his wife, Ruth Bell Graham. Raised in a log home in the Appalachian Mountains outside Asheville, North Carolina, Franklin now lives in the mountains of Boone, North Carolina.

He was born into a heritage rich in Christian ministry. By the time of Franklin's birth, Billy Graham was already known around the world as a spiritual leader, but he wasn't the only spiritual giant in the family. Franklin's maternal grandfather, Lemuel Nelson Bell, was a medical missionary to China for more than 20 years, a respected moderator of his denomination, the Presbyterian Church in the United States, and a co-founder and executive editor of Christianity Today.

At age 22, after a period of rebellion and traveling the world, Franklin committed his life to Jesus Christ while alone in a hotel room in Jerusalem. Soon after that, Dr. Bob Pierce, founder of Samaritan's Purse (and World Vision), invited Franklin to join him on a six-week mission to Asia. It was during that time that Franklin felt a calling to work with hurting people in areas of the world affected by war, famine, disease, and natural disasters..

(Note the log cabin reference...I wonder if he has considered running for President?)

FOIA Failures Continue in Obama Administration

From The Daily Caller: (ht FOIABlog):

To find out if other groups — including news outlets, commercial interests, individuals, and other nonprofits — were experiencing the same problems with their FOIA requests, CREW created a survey, which was distributed by the American Society of Access Professionals on the group’s private list-serve. Because CREW did not have access to the list-serve, and thus cannot quantify the list’s demographics, the organization wrote in its report that the results are “not scientific or statistically valid, [but] are definitive on at least some topics.”

Here are some of CREW’s more notable findings:

- “Two of the touted reforms – creation of agency chief FOIA officers (CFOs) and agency FOIA public liaisons – have had virtually no influence on the work of agency FOIA professionals,” the report says. According to the survey results, more than 60% of respondents said that the CFO position had no effect on their job, did not make processing requests clearer, and did not make their overall jobs easier. Comments on the position included, “Chief FOIA Officer? Seriously, there is no position description for FOIA, it’s everybody do everything,” and “Did not know this position existed.”

- Roughly 63% of respondents said the fact that FOIA is “not an administration priority,” was a problem.

- While “the vast majority of respondents are aware of Attorney General Holder’s FOIA guidelines,” which President Obama and the DOJ announced in 2009, “the majority reported no change at their agencies as a result of those guidelines.”

Document of the Week: Judge Ricardo M. Urbina's Decision in Jarvik v CIA

I've posted the decision in this FOIA case on Scribd. After some four years, and two lawsuits, I have received precisely zero documents from a Freedom of Information Act request for information about American involvement, alleged by the Uzbek government during show trials following violence in Andijan, blamed on Islamist extremist terrorists, in May, 2005--an event that led to the closure of a US air base supporting the war effort in Afghanistan and expulsion of US military and NGO personnel. IMHO, it is continuing secrecy around this fiasco that has harmed US national security and prolonged the Afghan war. However, under current FOIA law, an Exemption 1 claim on the basis of national security permits a court to make a decision in secret, on the basis of secret evidence, after hearing from only one side. The plaintiff is neither permitted to see the evidence, nor to respond to claims made to the judge.

Well, IMHO the outcome of such an Alice-in-Wonderland process can't be termed a surprise. I'll be dealing with the issue of the unfairness of the concept of ex parte secret evidence in my book: Jarvik v CIA: The Story of A FOIA Case for Edward Mellen Press.  I think that public trials are the best way to fight against extremism and terrorism--not through secret military action or secret court procedures. The reason that the United States has failed to prevail since 9/11 is that our government has pursued a strategy of secrecy, that has--as in the case of Wall Street's "black box" hedge funds--incentivized corruption, incompetence, bankruptcy and failure.

It has also given rise to conspiracy theories, since even the facts of 9/11 have never been laid out in a court of law, as part of an open and public adversarial process. Secrecy breeds distrust.

The time has come for the American government to abandon secrecy, militarism and police-state tactics, and instead to try to the prescription of Justice Brandeis for dealing with international terrorism: "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." Urbina Decision 20100928[1]; Jarvik v. CIA; 9-28-2010; FOIA Case

Charlie Cook's Election Forecast

From the Cook Political Report, based on latest polling data:

HOUSE: The Cook Political Report's current outlook is for a Republican net gain of at least 40 seats. A turnover of 39 seats would tip majority status into Republican hands....

SENATE: ...In the Senate, there is equal uncertainty. We could see Republican gains of seven or eight seats, but they could be as high as nine or 10. A GOP gain of 10 seats would flip control of that chamber.

Dutch Put Geert Wilders on Trial...

From the Financial Times:

The 47-year-old bleached-blond Mr Wilders is answering charges relating to his claims in a 2007 newspaper column that the Koran is “fascist”, and for encouraging Muslims to tear out pages of their holy book in a 2008 film. “Geert Wilders is convinced he has said nothing that is reprehensible,” Bram Moszkowicz, his lawyer, said.

The trial is expected to last a month and could result in a fine and a prison term of up to two years.

Analysts say Mr Wilders will use the trial, which has faced repeated delays, as a platform to reinforce his credentials as a political outsider, despite his new role in support of the government.

“He has established himself as the anti-status quo figure, so he will try to turn the trial into a political event, to try to prove that indeed he is correct that there is no freedom of speech in the Netherlands,” says Dick Houtman, professor of cultural sociology at Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

Here's the schedule, from the website Wilders On Trial:

The provisional planning of the proceedings will be as follows:

October 4th, 6th and 8th: trial proceedings
October 12th: indictment
October 15th: defence
October 19th: replication and rejoinder
November 2nd: verdict

Christiane Amanpour on ABC This Week: Holy War: Should Americans Fear Islam?

Full transcript on the ABC News website...

Secrecy News on Pentagon's Operation Dark Heart Censorship

Steven Aftergood's conclusion:

By censoring Anthony Shaffer’s new book “Operation Dark Heart” even though uncensored review copies are already available in the public domain, the Department of Defense has produced a genuinely unique product: a revealing snapshot of the way that the Obama Administration classifies national security information in 2010.

With both versions before them (excerpts), readers can see for themselves exactly what the Pentagon classifiers wanted to withhold, and can judge for themselves whether the secrecy they tried to impose can be justified on valid national security grounds. In the majority of instances, the results of such an inspection seem disappointing, if not very surprising, and they tend to confirm the most skeptical view of the operation of the classification system.

The most commonly repeated “redaction” in Operation Dark Heart is the author’s cover name, “Christopher Stryker,” that he used while serving in Afghanistan. Probably the second most common redactions are references to the National Security Agency, its heaquarters location at Fort Meade, Maryland, the familiar abbreviation SIGINT (referring to “signals intelligence”), and offhand remarks like “Guys on phones were always great sources of intel,” which is blacked out on the bottom of page 56.

Also frequently redacted are mentions of the term TAREX or “Target Exploitation,” referring to intelligence collection gathered at a sensitive site, and all references to low-profile organizations such as the Air Force Special Activities Center and the Joint Special Operations Command, as well as to foreign intelligence partners such as New Zealand. Task Force 121 gets renamed Task Force 1099. The code name Copper Green, referring to an “enhanced” interrogation program, is deleted.

Perhaps 10% of the redacted passages do have some conceivable security sensitivity, including the identity of the CIA chief of station in Kabul, who has been renamed “Jacob Walker” in the new version, and a physical description of the location and appearance of the CIA station itself, which has been censored.

Many other redactions are extremely tenuous. The name of character actor Ned Beatty is not properly classified in any known universe, yet it has been blacked out on page 15 of the book. (It still appears intact in the Index.)

In short, the book embodies the practice of national security classification as it exists in the United States today. It does not exactly command respect.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, David Swanson writes on Op-Ed News:

Shaffer and others in the military-spying complex knew about U.S. al Qaeda cells and leaders before 9-11 and were prevented from pursuing the matter. Shaffer believes they could have prevented 9-11. He so informed the 9-11 Commission, which ignored him. The Defense Intelligence Agency retaliated against Shaffer for having spoken up. We knew this, but the book adds context and details, and names names.

Russian TV Highlights Pentagon Book-Burning...(Heck of a PR Job, Sec. Gates!)

Meanwhile, Federal News Radio reports author Army Reserve Lieutenant Colonel Tony Shaffer believes that the Pentagon's book burning had more to do with revenge, Wikileaks, and General McChrystal than protection of US National Security...

Joshua Foust: In Defense of Hamid Karzai

From Foreign Policy's AfPak Channel blog:

It’s not hard to imagine ousting Karzai; it’s much harder to conceive of anyone better at the moment. Gul Agha Sherzai, the current governor of Nangarhar and former governor of Kandahar; Abdul Rashid Dostum, an Uzbek militia commander from the North; and Ismail Khan, the former potentate of Herat, all command constituencies, though none with the same degree of multi-ethnic support as Karzai. Abdullah Abdullah, who contested the election last year, also has many supporters, though again, not as many as Karzai.

But even if one of these men were to unseat the Afghan president, there’s no guarantee that they would be any better. In fact, they could be worse. Imagine if Ismail Khan were president – could he exercise any real control outside of Herat? Similarly, Gul Agha Sherzai, the prominent government of Nangarhar, was hyped last year as a presidential contender… but if Karzai’s relationship to the narcotics industry is a problem, Sherzai is worse (he’s also much more violent, and allegedly has a large harem of “dancing boys” at his mansion -- surely not the man the U.S. would want in Kabul). Additionally, Sherzai’s tenure of Kandahar was so bad the Taliban were welcomed in 1994 as liberators from his violent, capricious style of rule. Western pundits also fawned over Dostum and Ashraf Ghani -- but neither has been able to secure more than scattered, occasional support from Afghan voters. Each one of these men face a critical shortcoming: they represent their communities, but not Afghanistan. Only Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah enjoyed broad support in the last election.

Complaints about Karzai are focused too much on the man and not enough on the presidency. Good man or no, having an office as poorly situated as the Afghan presidency makes any officeholder destined for failure. Were another president to step into the post, he would be faced by the same pressures -- forced to manage the same perilous balancing acts. So maybe it’s less a question about Karzai than about U.S. expectations. If those can’t be met, Washington has a much bigger problem on its hands.

Huffington Post Compares Censored Operation Dark Heart to Original

Marcus Baram based his story of Pentagon censorship on a Federation of American Scientists report by Steven Aftergood:

The most common redaction in the entire book is Shaffer's cover name, "Christopher Stryker," and other popular redactions are references to the National Security Agency, the abbreviation SIGINT (signals intelligence) and comments like "Guys on phones were always great sources of intel," notes Aftergood.

He also reports that only about 10% of the redacted passages, such as the identity of the CIA station chief in Kabul and a physical description of that station, have "some conceivable security sensitivity."

Among the more unnecessary redactions: the name of "Deliverance" star Ned Beatty -- "which is not properly classified in any known universe" -- but is blacked out on page 15 of the book. Overall, the national security classification exemplified in the new book "does not exactly command respect," writes Aftergood.

Here's a link to the FAS website's article:http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2010/09/dark-contrast.pdf.

Pentagon Burns Books in Name of National Security...

The book is called Operation Dark Heart: Spycraft and Special Ops on the Frontlines of Afghanistan -- and the Path to Victory
by Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, and the Pentagon has bought the initial press run to burn before reading, according to this article in Digital Journal.

I just have one question: Has anyone considered the public diplomacy implications of this story for US credibility in relation to freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and so forth in the struggle against Islamist extremism?

IMHO, I'd say that after the handling of Abu Gharib torture pictures, this is the second worst P/R move I've seen since 9/11 from the United States government.

The author has been quoted as saying: "The whole premise smacks of retaliation. Someone buying 10,000 books to suppress a story in this digital age is ludicrous."

So is a publisher like St. Martin's for agreeing to such a repugnant deal. Of course, the story has already been picked up by Iran's Tehran Times...

PBS NewsHour Debates Obama Administration Internet Surveillance

Pamela Geller on 60 Minutes' Coverage of Bloomberg Ground Zero Mosque

From Atlas Shrugs:

Considering it's CBS, yes it could have been worse, but it was pretty bad. I am called a "conspiracy theorist" for speaking the truth and investigating the stealth jihadists behind the mosque. You can write to CBS here.

Thug devleoper Sharif El- Gamal is treated with kid gloves. No mention of his rap sheet, his bullying of moderate Muslims against the mosque, or of the fact that he was just evicted from his office. He was a waiter a couple of years ago, and suddenly became a BSD developer on the medicare fraudster's dime: his financier, Hisham Elzanaty, was a large funder of Hamas (exposed in the Holy Land terror funding trial) while defrauding medicaid out of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Worse still, Imam Feisal Rauf was packaged like a big fuzzy teddy bear. Nothing about his previous first performance on 60 minutes. It was right after 911, and Rauf blamed America for the 911 attacks. "Osama Bin Laden is made in the USA." Watch that video here.

He, too, was given a free pass. Nothing on his sanction of Hamas or his role in the jihad warship flotilla. Imam Rauf, the self-described "head coach" of the global strategic initiative -- audio here (his "players" include "the President of the United States, or the President of Malaysia, or the President of England" [sic]), said the following in tonight's 60 minutes episode:

"It's my duty as an American Muslim to stand between you, the American non-Muslim and the radicals trying to attack you."

More threats from this snake. He is going to save us ..... from jihadists? Who is going to save us from him? Please, Rauf, get out of the way, we'll save ourselves, thankyouverymuch.

His motive to build a mega mosque on Ground Zero was made painfully clear in this quote in the NY Times back in December 2009, announcing the Ground Zero mosque, and subsequently scrubbed from the article.

“New York is the capital of the world, and this location close to 9/11 is iconic,” Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf

A presence so close to the World Trade Center, “where a piece of the wreckage fell,” Imam Feisal added, “sends the opposite statement to what happened on 9/11.”

How's that?

“Building so close is owning the tragedy."

Rauf is the self-described "head coach" of the global strategic initiative and I'm the "conspiracy theorist?"

Then again, CBS minutes thinks Oliver Stone is a ......... genius. So much for investigative journalism.

Agustin Blazquez's CHE: THE OTHER SIDE OF AN ICON to Premiere in Miami & Paris

My favorite Cuban-American filmmaker sent me this press release today:

"BE INFORMED TO BE FREE."
---Agustin Blazquez

PRESS RELEASE, September 20, 2010
Contact: AB INDEPENDENT PRODUCTIONS
1-3O1-949-8791 ABIP.USA@verizon.net

World premiere of the documentary CHE: THE OTHER SIDE OF AN ICON, produced & directed by Agustin Blazquez at the Miami-Dade College’s Tower Theater, on October 8 & 9 (6:45 pm) & 10 (4:30 pm), 2010. Sponsored in part by the Miami-Dade College. Also an screening at the University of Miami's Casa Bacardi on October 13, 2010 (6:30 pm) and a premiere at Maison de l'Amerique Latine in Paris, France, sponsored by Zoe Valdes, Ricardo Vega & Lunaticas Production,s on October 18, 2010 (9:00 pm).

This film profiles the life of the man killed in Bolivia, as well as "Che", the icon, who lives on today. It presents the real man behind the myth, his legacy and why he has become so popular among the youth, revolutionaries and terrorists of the world. It explores the dangers of believing in Che's carefully constructed fake public image--herein lies the real Che. This documentary is based on sources who worked directly with him, knew his family in Argentina and Havana --who were intimately acquainted with Che's personal and political trajectory as well as his academic scholars.

With the testimonies of:
Abel N. Morales, Agustin Alles Soberon, Antonio de la Cova, Armando M. Lago, Barbara Rangel Rojas, Barbara Rojas, Emilio Izquierdo, Ernesto Betancourt, Enrique Encinosa, Enrique Ros, Felix Ismael Rodriguez, Gustavo Mata, Humberto Fontova, Jaime Suchliki, Javier D. Souto, Jorge Beruff, Margot Menendez, Pedro Corzo, Roberto Bismarck, Rolando Castaño, Roberto Martin Perez & Sergio G. Muñiz

Narrator GUSTAVO REX, asistant & interviewer in English Jaums Sutton
interviewers in Spanish Ana Maria Lamar & Vivian Gude
final song You Don’t Know Che by STEVE PICHAN video on www.YouTube.com/Jaums,
additional music Rodolfo Guzman, Virginia Alonso, Springfield United Methodist Church Choir, Caryl Traten Fisher, Rafael Monteagudo, Carlos Molina & Marisa Molina
Spanish & English subtitles / taped on HD & 16.9 widescreen / time 114 min.

distributed by www.CubaCollectibles.com

Tickets will be for sale two days before each show at the theater box office
1508 SW 8th Street, Miami, FL 33135, ph. 305 643-8706
$6 (General Admission), $5 (Students, Seniors, & members of the Miami Film Society),
$4 (individuales packages of 5 tickets for $20)

DVDs of CHE: THE OTHER SIDE OF AN IDOL will be for sale the days of the shows.
The proceedings will benefits the
UNCOVERING CUBA EDUCATIONAL FOUNDATION (UCEF)
A non-profit organization [501 (c)(3)]
All donations are tax deductible and your cancelled check is your receipt

NOTE: The Uncovering Cuba Educational Foundation Corporation (UCEF) is a Maryland tax-exempt non-stock corporation that held its first organizational meeting on August 18, 2003. Founded by Agustin Blazquez and James W. Sutton, it is an official non-profit corporation. The purpose is to educate the general public and the news media regarding the history of Cuba and current events within the island, particularly from the firsthand point of view of its citizens and Cuban Americans.

You can view clips from the film on YouTube, at this URL:http://www.youtube.com/user/jaums.

Fouad Ajami on the Bloomberg Ground Zero WTC Mosque

From today's Wall Street Journal:

It was in 1965, Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf tells us, that he made his way to America as a young man. He and a vast migration would be here as American identity would undergo a drastic metamorphosis.
The prudence of days past was now a distant memory. These activists who came in the 1990s—the time of multiculturalism and of what the late Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the "disuniting of America"—would insist on a full-scale revision of the American creed. American liberalism had broken with American patriotism, and the self-styled activists would give themselves over to a militancy that would have shocked their forerunners. It is out of that larger history that this project at Ground Zero is born.

There is a great Arab and Islamic tale. It happened in the early years of Islam, but it speaks to this controversy. It took place in A.D. 638, the time of Islam's triumphs.The second successor to the Prophet, the Caliph Omar—to orthodox Muslims the most revered of the four Guided Caliphs for the great conquests that took place during his reign—had come to Jerusalem to accept the city's surrender. Patriarch Sophronius, the city's chief magistrate, is by his side for the ceremony of surrender. Prayer time comes for Omar while the patriarch is showing him the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

The conqueror asks where he could spread out his prayer rug. Sophronius tells him that he could stay where he was. Omar refuses, because his followers, he said, might then claim for Islam the holy shrine of the Christians. Omar stepped outside for his prayer.

We don't always assert all the "rights" that we can get away with. The faith is honored when the faith bends to necessity and discretion.

Erin O'Connor on Jonathan Franzen

From her blog, Critical Mass:

Granted I have not finished the novel. And perhaps the tenderness and compassion will appear magically in the last few pages and will wash over me with such power that it will mitigate the pinched and cramped effects of the first 450 pages. But I’m having my doubts. Freedom is not a compassionate or tender novel. It’s angry, bitter, and deeply troubled. It’s written from a narrative perspective that struggles to see its central characters through anything other than a sour, sardonic lens. And, in titling the novel Freedom, it elevates this struggle–or tries to elevate it–to the level of philosophical meditation. The result is a jaundiced and dysphoric work that–while compulsively readable in the manner of The Corrections–is hardly a tender or compassionate account of “the many ironies of life under late capitalism.” Rather, it reads like a claustrophobic tautology: a blanket indictment of middle-class Americanness that sees Americanness as an ugly inevitable distortion of humanity caused by the irredeemably flawed premises of America itself.

Jay Wertz on Oren Jacoby's Lafayette: The Lost Hero

I saw a preview of Lafayette: The Lost Hero at the Society of Cincinnati last weekend, and enjoyed it before it aired on PBS Monday night...yet only now found an excerpt from this thoughtful review to share, by Jay Wertz from HistoryNet:

Leading a small command at the Battle of Brandywine, September 11, 1777, he was wounded in the leg but recovered quickly. Given command of a division shortly after his 20th birthday, he went on to earn the trust and admiration of George Washington, particularly through the long, hard winter of 1777–78 at Valley Forge.

These experiences and those that lay ahead in Lafayette's long life are told in a story that unravels through unique scenarios in the program. It's as if Jacoby went shopping in the mall of documentary techniques and put one of each in his basket. In Lafayette: The Lost Hero Jacoby bends and twists through different techniques to glide easily through the biography and make it entertaining. He shows a map with all the places named Lafayette in the U. S. A. and takes us to some of them; he uses clips from several Lafayette movies, etc.

Reenactors recreate battles in the film. Courtesy of Thomas Beckner - Storyville Films.The all-important first five minutes had me hooked as Revolutionary War reenactors arrive on a benign landscape to stage a scene for the documentary. The often folksy-sounding narrator reminds us that living history interpreters do so to try to understand how life was in times past. I concur and have been broadcasting that message for more than two decades, since I began filming authentic historical reenactments with the 200th anniversary Yorktown Victory Celebration. Jacoby's opening scene hooked me, and I was delighted that the style and content held my attention to the end.
Besides negotiating French arms, men and warships for the American war effort and leading a significant command at the Battle of Yorktown, Lafayette impressed the new nation in other ways. His love of liberty that brought him to the American cause extended in his mind to all citizens, and he encouraged the young nation to rid itself of the hypocritical scourge of slavery. He even bought the freedom of an African-American who acted as a military spy in his Yorktown command. Many of Lafayette's feelings and thoughts are revealed in excerpts from his memoirs, convincingly delivered in the show in a gently accented voice.

James R. Gaines, a Lafayette biographer, picks up much of the weight of the narrative early in the program. With Sabine Renault-Sabloniere, another biographer and Lafayette descendent, the audience is led through the Marquis' early life, long association with America, his uncomfortable and ultimately tragic role in the French revolution and the love bond he shared with his wife. Hearing her words are also among the more poignant moments in the program.

Although I enjoyed most of the cornucopia of techniques used in the program, the animated maps were a little creepy—literally; instead of animated arrows, color blobs creep down the maps. And when Mme. Renault-Sabloniere comes to the U. S. to visit that iconic symbol of French-American friendship, the Statue of Liberty, she is interviewed by Public Radio's Sarah Vowell. Vowell's dull-headed conversation with Lafayette's 6-times great-granddaughter could definitely be used as evidence in a French snob's derision of Americans. Garrison Keillor would have been better. These are minor aberrations, however, in a really engaging program about a remarkable man whom modern Americans have known precious little about.

Bruce Bawer on Rev. Terry Jones' Cancelled Koran-Burning

From City Journal:

It’s clear, of course, that Jones—who at the last minute canceled the bonfire, declaring that “God is telling us to stop”—is a nut. He’s apparently made a career of spewing hate at Jews, gays, and just about everybody else who doesn’t belong to his tiny church, which seems to be some kind of wacky cult.

But that’s neither here nor there. The real story here isn’t about Jones but about the rest of us and what we’ve allowed to happen to our civilization since 9/11. Who would have imagined, on the day the Twin Towers fell, that nine years later we’d be so scared of Muslim reactions that the plan of some crank to burn a few copies of the Koran would become the lead story on the evening news and cause the president himself to plead with the guy to call it off? Imagine a modern-day Rip Van Winkle who’d fallen asleep before 9/11 and awakened to all this nonsense. For such a person, the degree of attention accorded to Jones would have been nothing less than incomprehensible. What in God’s name, Rip would ask, had happened to America? How could we have become so timid, so terrified, so quickly? How could an American president, in the middle of war and economic crisis, give so much as a moment’s notice to such a piddling non-story?

Needless to say, the truly important things went unsaid on those network news reports. Nobody pointed out that we wouldn’t be fretting like this if there weren’t something very special about Islam. You could announce plans to burn a stack of Bibles, or the Bhagavad-Gita, or the Dhammapada, or the Book of Mormon, or Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, or a truckload of copies of The Watchtower, or any other non-Muslim religious text without making the White House and Pentagon call emergency meetings and put embassies around the world on alert. How little time it’s taken for us to get used to paying Islam a unique degree of “respect”!

One of the network news reports—I don’t remember which—showed an anti-American demonstration by Muslims in Kabul reacting to Jones’s planned Koran-burning. The demonstrators were burning an American flag and stomping on it. Neither the reporter nor the anchorperson commented on this fact. Plainly, in their view, the burning of an American flag was not worth remarking upon. After all, in recent years Muslims around the world have burned countless American flags, not to mention the flags of pretty much every other Western democracy. Since 9/11, we’ve grown used to seeing the revered symbols of Western democratic values routinely desecrated in the Muslim world.

And we’ve also grown used to the fact this is most assuredly not a two-way street. American flags can be burned by the hundreds, by huge crowds, in the major squares of Muslim capitals, and that’s apparently hunky-dory with us. But when a guy in Gainesville whom nobody ever heard of decides to burn a few Korans, everybody from the president on down begs him to reconsider. Obama to the contrary, this isn’t about “our values as Americans”; it’s not about “freedom and religious tolerance.” It’s about fear. Nine years after jihadists murdered 2,977 people on American soil, the sight of American leaders quaking in their boots at the thought of some clown’s offending the Muslim world is nothing less than obscene.

Rafael Medoff's Yom Kippur Al Chet

"For the Sin of Silence During the Holocaust"
by Rafael Medoff

On Yom Kippur, in synagogues throughout the country, American Jews will lightly strike their chests while reciting the Al Chet, the litany of confessions for sins committed during the previous year. "For the sin of lying.... For the sin of gossiping.... For the sin of being disrespectful...." and so on.

Some years ago, one of the most prominent rabbis in America made a startling suggestion--that American Jews should add an Al Chet to acknowledge the community's failure to respond adequately to news of the mass killing of European Jews during the Holocaust. Although the proposal evidently was never implemented, statements made recently by several prominent Jewish leaders have gone a long way in that direction.

The Al Chet suggestion came from Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik (1903-1993), longtime head of Yeshiva University's rabbinical school and a key figure in the shaping of Modern Orthodox Judaism. In a taped lecture at YU's Wurzweiler School of Social Work on December 24, 1973, Rabbi Soloveitchik remarked that "during the Holocaust period," many American Jews were not sufficiently concerned "with our brethren, with our fellow Jews, and we let millions of Jews go down the drain."

Therefore, he said, "to the list of Al Chets of the chatayim [sins] we enumerate on Yom Kippur, we should add another Al Chet. Perhaps it would be the worst, the most horrible one - Al chet shechatanu lefanecha bera'inu tzoras nafshoseihem shel acheinu bais Yisroel shehischananu eileinu v'lo shamanu['For the sin that we have sinned before You by seeing the suffering of our Jewish brethren who called to us and we did not listen']."

Statements of this sort were unheard of in the first decades after the war, when there was little public discussion among American Jews about their response to the Holocaust. Perhaps the memories and the wounds were too fresh. Perhaps the fact that many of the Jewish leaders whose records merited scrutiny still held positions of leadership discouraged a serious reckoning.

That began to change in the 1960s and 1970s, as a younger generation of American Jews started asking questions about the actions of their elders. Articles about the subject began appearing more frequently in Jewish periodicals. Activists in the Soviet Jewry movement cited American Jewry's lethargic response to the Holocaust as an impetus for their own protests. "We didn't want to repeat the mistakes of that generation," Glenn Richter, director of the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, recalls.

By 1981, there was sufficient interest in the topic to bring about the creation of the American Jewish Commission on the Holocaust, a committee of Jewish communal figures intending to produce the first comprehensive examination of US Jewry's Holocaust record. The acrimony that engulfed the commission's work and led to its dissolution revealed still-lingering sensitivities. Critics of the Jewish leadership cried whitewash, while defenders of the establishment circled the wagons. But the controversy did galvanize a healthy public discussion.

New scholarly research in the 1980s permanently reshaped the debate. Monty Penkower (The Jews Were Expendable, 1982), David Wyman (The Abandonment of the Jews, 1984), Haskel Lookstein (Were We Our Brothers' Keepers?, 1984) and others revealed unflattering new information about American Jewry and the Holocaust. They chronicled the missed opportunities to press for Allied rescue of refugees, the petty in-fighting between Jewish groups that sapped communal time and energy, the unsavory attacks by Jewish leaders against the activist Bergson Group. What the historians found essentially confirmed what the critics had suspected.

During the past several years, remarks made by several prominent Jewish leaders have dramatically illustrated how much attitudes have changed over the years. At a conference of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, Michael Miller, executive director of the New York Jewish Community Relations Council, and Seymour Reich, past president of B'nai B'rith and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, sharply criticized their predecessors' wartime record. Reich declared: " I have come here today, as a veteran of the Jewish establishment, to say unequivocally: the Jewish leaders in the 1940s were wrong."

Rabbi Dr. David Ellenson, president of Reform Judaism's Hebrew Union College, has gone so far as to assert that Rabbi Stephen Wise "failed miserably" in his response to the Holocaust. The news from Europe was certainly unprecedented, he said, but Jewish leaders such as Wise "had an obligation to be sufficiently flexible and imaginative to deal with unprecedented situations." Rabbi Ellenson's bold statement was significant not only because Wise was the most prominent American Jewish leader of the 1940s, but also because he was the founder and longtime leader of the very institution over which Ellenson himself now presides.

These Jewish leaders who have criticized the wartime Jewish establishment may not have phrased their remarks in the form of an Al Chet, but they certainly spoke in the spirit of the forthright acknowledgment Rabbi Soloveitchik evidently had in mind.

Dr. Rafael Medoff is director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, www.WymanInstitute.org