Film Review: 'The Town'

Ben Affleck goes to 'Town' for slick, entertaining Boston crime movie

By Ty Burr, Boston Globe Staff
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/
September 16, 2010

I don’t care what anyone outside the greater metropolitan area says: “The Town’’ takes place in Movie Boston rather than the real thing. Movie Boston is a sub-Scorsese landscape of stubbled men walking down mean Suffolk County streets that exist primarily in the minds of good pulp novelists and bad screenwriters, and its authenticity depends far too much on Hollywood actors trying hahd to bend their dialogue around non-rhotic speech patterns.

That said, Ben Affleck’s latest is a pretty decent crime drama — not a patch on the best parts of his directorial debut, 2007’s “Gone Baby Gone,’’ but it’s moody and grim and engrossing if you approach it with the right expectations. The local horselaughs that have greeted the trailer for “The Town’’ — with its stentorian voice-over implying that the “one-square-mile neighborhood called Charlestown’’ is responsible for every urban plague from bank heists to bedbugs — won’t extend to the movie, which traffics in clichés but keeps the traffic moving.

Instead of directing his brother, Casey (who’s off chasing the ghost of Joaquin Phoenix), Affleck directs himself this time. He plays Doug MacRay, the leader of a four-man Charlestown bank-robbery crew that prides itself on planning, efficiency, and the threat of maximum violence. We see them in action early on and we also see the team’s weak link: Jeremy Renner (“The Hurt Locker’’) as hair-trigger Jimmy Coughlin, Doug’s oldest friend and biggest liability.

If Affleck’s doing a riff on the sexy, doom-laden antiheroes of ’40s film noir, Renner’s doing straight-up Cagney, and he’s the most watchable thing in the movie. His character is itchy with aggression, complete in his loathing of yuppies and other “tunies’’ crowding into the old nabe. If Jimmy knew that Doug was falling for the lissome bank manager they briefly took hostage on their last job, he’d pitch a fit.

Yes, it’s that kind of movie, where you have to swallow some sizable coincidences and implausibilities if you want to play along. Claire (Rebecca Hall) may not have laid eyes on Doug during the robbery (he was wearing a Halloween mask) but she certainly heard his voice, and Affleck gives that voice a velvety growl a woman would remember, even if she didn’t turn out to live just on the other side of the Monument.

The romance is the silliest part of “The Town,’’ but it’s also the part that works best, maybe because it’s so frankly a movie device and this director so frankly loves movies. As an actor, Affleck is a nice visual match for Hall — they’re both big, rangy people who seem comfortable in their own skin — and we root for Doug and Claire to make it even as we know that the big revelation (I’ve been dating the guy who held me at gunpoint and ditched me in East Boston!) might possibly be a deal killer. That knowledge weighs Doug down and gives him substance: He’s betting it all on something that can’t last.

Otherwise, “The Town’’ feels a little too familiar and a little too canned, from the regulation three-day beard on everyone up to and including Jon Hamm’s implacable FBI agent (really? Feds don’t shave?) to Blake Lively (“Gossip Girl’’) slumming it as Jimmy’s slatternly sister Krista, a single mom who pines for Doug but is willing to go home with whoever’s paying at closing time. This is more or less the same role that got Amy Ryan an Oscar nomination in “Gone Baby Gone,’’ but Lively is, to put it kindly, not Amy Ryan.

Is “The Town’’ authentic? Hell if I know — I’m from Brookline. For that matter, the director’s from Cambridge, and the curse of this city’s clannishness (one of them, anyway) is that you can never speak to the reality of the next town over without somebody getting their panties in a twist. That’s partly the point of both Chuck Hogan’s original novel (“Prince of Thieves’’) and this adaptation: A community that takes so much pride in insularity will eventually choke on it. But Affleck’s more interested in townie mythologizing and borrowed Lehane-ian street cred; did I mention he’s from Cambridge?

On the local-color level, at least, he gets things reasonably right. You buy that a vicious neighborhood top dog might look like Pete Postlethwaite and work as a florist; that his muscle might look like Dennis McLaughlin, a non-actor with excellent B-movie presence. As the other members of the crew, Slaine and Owen Burke have the proper pasty anonymity, and the faces in the corners of the screen are pink and hard. The knowingly chosen locations lead up to an amusing performance by Fenway Park as itself, and the grand absurdity of a high-speed police chase through the narrow streets of the North End has been thought out with devilish care. For once the geography in a Boston movie makes sense; even the standard shot of the Zakim Bridge has relevance.

The accents? Oddly, Affleck’s feels the most forced — maybe Hollywood diction lessons beat the regionalism out of him. Hall conquers her British cadences and sounds appropriately mid-Atlantic, and Renner, bless him, wins the Jill Quigg award for most lived-in local speech patterns. He doesn’t push it and he doesn’t underdo it; this is just how Jimmy talks, which is an extension of the shark-like rapacity with which he moves through the world. Accent is destiny in the Movie Boston rule book, and the pleasure and the limitation of “The Town’’ is that it plays squarely by the rules.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.

A Badge of Muslim Courage: Raheel Raza

Posted By Jamie Glazov On September 20, 2010 @ 12:41 am
http://frontpagemag.com/


Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Raheel Raza, a leading Muslim reformer, award winning writer, professional speaker, diversity consultant, documentary film maker and interfaith advocate. A founding member of the Muslim Canadian Congress, she is the author of Their Jihad . . . Not My Jihad. [1] Visit her site at RaheelRaza.com [2].

FP: Raheel Raza, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today about the courageous battle you have been fighting, as a Muslim, on the frontlines of our battle against radical Islam. Your pronouncements against the Ground Zero Mosque and your collision with Tariq Ramadan are the recent examples of your noble stand for justice and freedom.

Let’s start with your battle against the Ground Zero mosque and also the threat you received from Ground Zero mosque developer Sharif El Gamal after your meeting with the organizers of the mosque in New York.

Raza: Thanks Jamie.

It’s been almost a month since my article [3] was published in the Ottawa Citizen regarding the proposed mosque at Ground Zero, which was followed by my trip to New York to attend a meeting of the organizers of the mosque and then the follow up — which has been good, bad and ugly.

I feel no need to give a defense of my actions as everyone has the right to pursue the truth. It’s been a turbulent two months with many ups and downs. However, I have written a report about my visit to New York, since I met the organizers, asked questions and was able to make an informed opinion. Events that followed have only confirmed my stance. Hence, I owe it to myself and to those following these events to give an accurate account of my visit. Let me share it with you Jamie and with Frontpage’s readers:

At 5:57 p.m. on Monday August 16, 2010, my cell phone rang. The man asked me: “Is this Raheel Raza?” I automatically said yes. He said “I am Sharif El Gamal – do you remember you dared jump into a meeting called by Daisy Khan for 9/11 victims in New York?” I was a bit shocked at the tone but I retorted “I was invited to that meeting.” He said curtly, “No, you were not.” I tried to explain that I went as a guest of a 9/11 widow. “You were not invited,” he said again, and then added: “I am an American and a Muslim and may Allah protect you.” These words sent chills down my back. It took only one minute for the veneer of ‘tolerance’ to be peeled away, and the reality of the agenda became crystal clear.

I had decided to go to New York on Tuesday, August 10, to attend a meeting hosted by the ASMA Society as a guest of Maureen Basnicki, who is the widow of a 9/11 victim. I wanted to see and hear firsthand what the Ground Zero mosque was all about, to ask some important questions and to deliver a message that this is not a good idea.

When I arrived at the meeting, there were about 30 people in the room, most of them 9/11 survivors and their families. Some were carrying placards saying LOCATION which they respectfully kept under their chairs. The meeting was chaired by Gerry Bogacz, who is part of the 9/11 Community for Common Ground. There were no formal introductions of people around the table.

However, as soon as the organizers started speaking, I knew that this was not about sincere intentions but a con-job, a cover-up for a subversive agenda and all about the money. Ms. Daisy Khan spent 20 minutes telling us about her life and work. Eventually, she came to the mosque project and said that this monument (Ground Zero Mosque/Cordoba Institute/ Park 51) is to help shape Islam in America. She also said that the idea has garnered support not only in the U.S. but “would be replicated all over the world.”

She was joined by Mr. Sharif El Gamal, CEO of Soho Properties. The slick Mr. Gamal took another 15 minutes to tell his life story, explaining that he was a born American of mixed heritage and that he had feelings for the people in the room. He mentioned that he had been looking for a property in Manhattan since 2002 and that he had bought this building in 2005. Finally, they opened the meeting up for questions. (Interesting note in retrospect that neither Mr. Gamal nor Ms. Khan addressed me the entire evening, although they know who I am).

This was the flavor of the Q & A:

Q: How do you not expect a backlash when Muslims killed nearly 3,000 people? Where is Imam Faisal and where is the funding going to come from?

Gamal: Those were not Muslims – they are not my brothers and sisters and this is not our belief system. We never have anticipated such a backlash to our project so this is a surprise.

Ms. Khan: It’s the start of the month of Ramadan in which Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset and in this time Imam Faisal is travelling to build bridges.

Q: Where will the funding come from?

Gamal: We have not raised funds yet but we will not accept any funds that compromise American values.

Q: What is the mission statement of the Cordoba Center?

Gamal: The project’s name is Park 51. It will be like a YMCA and promote tolerance and understanding between people.

Woman in the audience: The YMCA is a secular place.

Me: If you are a feeling, caring American how come you were not aware that this location might be problematic? And since you purchased the property in 2005, how have you spent the last 5 years in outreach, bridge-building, garnering community support and fund raising?

Gamal: I never thought the location would be such a sore point and no, we did not do any outreach until now. I honestly never thought I would be sitting here giving a defense. I can’t imagine what all the fuss is about.

Me: How naïve can you be not to be aware that this location is sensitive to Americans? Are you not concerned that a majority of Americans are against this project going ahead at this location?

Gamal: I honestly did not think the location would be a problem. We need the space.

Me: Are you going to get funds from outside the U.S.? (I asked this 3 times)

Gamal: I can’t answer that question.

Q: Why not move to another location?

(No response)

Mike (a retired New York City Police officer): You are very good at filibusters and you have not said anything right tonight.

Q: Historically mosques have been built in places of conquest and why have the larger Muslim communities not come out to support you? Why do the Imams not condemn the terrorists?

Ms. Khan: There have been no new terrorist attacks because of our diligence as Muslims.

Man in the audience: It’s offensive of you to say this. There have been no new attacks because of our police system and the FBI.

Firemen # 1: I was at 9/11. This project is insensitive and insulting because we saw TV images of Muslims celebrating the 9/11 tragedy around the world. Now I’m supposed to embrace the idea of a mosque at that very spot? Can you build it somewhere else?

Fireman # 2: Building it where you are is pouring salt on my wounds and I resent that. You say you need a mosque. We need our twin towers back. Can you help rebuild those?

Fireman # 3: No construction worker, no fireman or police officer who wears a cap saying Never Again, will work on this project and I hope it fails. I hope you don’t get the funds to make this happen. I hope you discard this project.

After attending this meeting, I discovered was that there was no transparency, no honest answers and therefore no sincerity of intention. Mr. Gamal was like a used car salesman: contradicting himself, prevaricating and being evasive. He spoke about everything except the make and model of the car. Ms. Khan was described by one of the women as a “cult-type leader” because she answered every question with a lecture about Islam.

I suspect that the organizers already have a green light from the US State Department or the White House. Otherwise they would not have been so arrogant as to ignore the cries of the victims and their friends and families. They did not care for the opinions of the community, when clearly the majority of those present were against the project.

Ms. Basnicki who was with me, has this to say:

“I went to this meeting with mixed feelings. I was eager to assert that as a Canadian I found it easy to accept religious tolerance. However I left the meeting with even more confusion. Simple questions such as where is the funding coming from for this $100 million center, renamed Park51 were not answered. This was not a bridge building meeting……..it caused greater unease and a much larger gulf.”

FP: Did Gamal or anyone of his people get in touch with you again?

Raza: There were no subsequent phone calls. The threat does not worry me because it’s an act of cowardice by people who have subversive agendas. What concerns me is the complete denial by El Gamal that the call was ever made from his office. But I saved the number on my cell and it matches that of Mr. Gamal’s Soho Properties offices in New York.

A lie is the first and last indicator of a person trying to hide something. For me, that says it all

FP: What do you think Imam Rauf, Daisy Khan and Sharif El Gamal are really up to on building this mosque? What do you think about that as a Muslim?

Raza: I think it’s all about real estate, greed and money. They really don’t care about the sentiments of Americans and this has shown through by my meeting with Daisy Khan and Mr. El Gamal with the 9/11 survivors and their families.

I am more than 99% sure that part of the funding is going to come from sources that danced on the streets when the murder of humanity and destruction of the twin towers took place.

As a Muslim I want to make it clear to fellow Muslims and your readers that we have to draw a clear line between the heinous agenda of political Islamists and people who wish to practice our faith in its spiritual sincerity and follow its non-violent message.

Unfortunately those supporting the ongoing building of the Mosque are more enamored with Michael Moore’s anti-American stance than they are with pure Qur’anic teachings which tell us to be sensitive and compassionate when interacting with those who are not part of our faith, and the example of the Prophet who did not allow building of a mosque at a place which would be contentious.

FP: Raheel Raza, we’ve run out of time, thank you for joining us. I would like to follow up with you on your recent collision with Tariq Ramadan. Frontpage readers stay tuned.


URLs in this post:

[1] Their Jihad . . . Not My Jihad.: http://www.amazon.com/Their-Jihad-Not-My-Jihad/dp/0973508728/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226390453&sr=1-1

[2] RaheelRaza.com: http://raheelraza.com/

[3] my article: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Mischief+Manhattan/3370303/story.html

How NYC schools fail students

By KYLE SMITH
New York Post
http://www.nypost.com
September 19, 2010

Whenever you hear the words “for the children,” your scoundrel detector should light up. These three words can be used to justify pretty much any public policy or its opposite, but at their most notorious they’re the mantra of the teachers’ unions. What do the children say, though? In the new film “Waiting for ‘Superman,’ ” their stunned and tear-stained faces eloquently state that they want a different educational system.

Kids are the stars, and union leaders, like American Federation of Teachers chief Randi Weingarten, the villains, of this documentary. Opening Friday, “Superman” is a look at the simple problem of, and the equally simple answer to, our disastrous schools.

“Superman” concludes as five children, two of them New Yorkers, eagerly attend lotteries in which they hope to draw a number that will be a ticket out of unionized schools and into non-union charter schools. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that winning such a lottery means a path to a better life. The parents know this, and the importance of the moment isn’t lost on the kids either. Take Bianca, a kindergarten student from Harlem whose mom declares at the outset of the film, “She will go to college.” In a companion book to the film, producer Lesley Chilcott says of Bianca, “Here she was, reading a million miles a minute and narrating her life for us, on camera and unprompted, overly wise for her 6 years.”

But Bianca and her mother, Nakia, can’t afford to move to a neighborhood that has good schools. The series of schools Bianca is zoned for are disasters. If they were told that their mission was to prepare kids for prison instead of college, they wouldn’t have to change anything.

So Bianca attends a private, Catholic kindergarten that Nakia, a receptionist whose hours were recently cut back, can’t easily afford. Bianca hopes to win a place in the Harlem Success Academy, a free charter school (with a mix of public and private funding) in which 100% of third-graders passed the math exam and 95% passed in English. Bianca’s chances for a spot? Thirty-five out of 767. Meanwhile, her mother has fallen behind in tuition payments. The Catholic school informs Nakia that Bianca won’t be able to attend her graduation ceremony. Nakia cries, and you will too.

The story of Francisco, a Bronx lad about to enter second grade, is, if anything, even more dismal. His mother, Maria, is focused and determined. Maria was the first in her family to go to college, then the first to get a graduate degree. Now she is a social worker who has enrolled her son in two after-school reading programs. She studies with Francisco every night and has already entered him in lotteries for seven charter schools. This year he is applying to Harlem Success Academy, even though it’s a 45-minute train ride from home. If he doesn’t get in this time — and he won’t, with 792 kids applying for 40 spots — it looks like his last chance for a decent education.

Some of us are fortunate enough to be able to afford homes in areas that have good schooling, but Francisco is everyone’s problem. If he has to attend a typical Bronx school, in his teens he might be yet another unsupervised youth on the street, unprepared for adult life and justifiably angry.

We should be angry too, and the tone of director Davis Guggenheim’s film is unsparing as he depicts the central problem: intransigent teachers’ unions protect the worst teachers at all costs. That means few spots for strong teachers — like the ones who choose to work at charter schools. A simple chart illustrates that the difference between the best teachers and the worst is an entire year of education per year — good ones cram in 1.5 years of the curriculum in a year, while bad ones cover only half of a year of coursework per year. It’s no mystery why so many ninth-graders are reading at a fourth-grade level.

As for the unions’ perpetual cries for more funding, Guggenheim points out that we’ve already doubled real, inflation-adjusted spending on education over the last 40 years. Money is abundant. The problem is that it’s being wasted.

Sometimes the messenger is as important as the message, and we’re talking about the guy who helmed “An Inconvenient Truth” — a diehard liberal activist and union supporter who also directed Barack Obama’s 30-minute campaign infomercial.

Yet Guggenheim points out in the film that the teachers’ unions essentially own the Democrats. These unions are the single largest political interest group by spending, and more than 90% of their donations go to their pet party. The purpose of all this money is to ensure that no distinctions are made among teachers — even the worst ones almost invariably get tenure and then can’t be fired (in 2007, only 10 of 55,000 tenured New York City teachers were canned). Good teachers, if they happen to be last in seniority, are the first to be let go in a round of layoffs. All that matters is preserving and expanding the compensation of union members.

Every child gets left behind the interests of the unions.

Guggenheim’s doc is the least hard-hitting of three terrific education movies that have been in theaters this year. Both “The Cartel,” which is about New Jersey schools, and “The Lottery,” which is about New York City schools, are available on DVD. “The Cartel” is particularly canny about the immense and ever-growing costs of education bureaucrats who never go near a classroom, while “The Lottery” goes into more detail about such New York success stories as the Harlem Children’s Zone and the Harlem Success Academy.

Still, it is “Superman” that has the polish, the budget, the publicity machine and the liberal credentials to make Americans realize the catastrophic influence of teachers’ unions on an educational system that was once the envy of the world.

Conservatives have been saying everything that “Superman” says for 20 years or more. But now that liberals are on board, you might say that the science is settled. The argument is over. We need competition in public schools. Teachers should compete with each other for the right to instruct our children. Schools should compete for the children. And their funding should depend on how many show up. How could they argue that “resources are being drained from public schools” if all schools — charter schools, private schools, zoned schools — were to receive the same amount of public money per pupil? (Charter schools, in fact, often get paid much less than zoned schools per pupil, relying heavily on private donations to make up the shortfall.)

The differences between “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Superman” are intriguing. The new one came about not because of worries about the polar ice cap or the future but because of what’s happening right now, in Davis Guggenheim’s own neighborhood. Every morning he guiltily drives past three awful public schools to take his kids to their comfy private one.

The schools the film dubs “dropout factories” are dragging down the nation’s overall competitiveness and cheating millions of impoverished people, most especially black and brown children, out of joining the middle class. It’s an issue individuals can do something about — by backing more charter schools and rejecting, as they did recently in New Jersey, the demands of teachers’ unions. And your efforts quickly become evident right there in your neighborhood, instead of dispersing and disappearing into the vastness of the planet.

“Think global, act local” is a clever liberal rubric, a distraction from the fact that everyone is a conservative in his own back yard. I live in a part of Manhattan where my neighbor, Commentary editor John Podhoretz, discovered that after his polling place had been open for more than two hours, he was the first person to ask for a Republican ballot on primary day. But if three rapes occurred on my block next week, civil liberties and limits on self-defense would be instantly forgotten. Every liberal in the area would be demanding more police officers, more random questioning of anyone who looks like he doesn’t belong, more access to weapons.

When it comes to the abstraction occurring in other neighborhoods known as “crime,” though, my fellow Upper West Siders are suspicious of police methods and wonder whether young criminals need more counseling and less punishment.

Well-off white liberals may vote Democratic, oppose meaningful educational reform and back teacher raises and smaller class sizes, all to show they “support education.” They feel fine — as long as the results are concealed in someone else’s neighborhood. If they had to drop their kids off at the same schools that waste the lives of millions of other children, they would have demanded accountability from the teachers’ unions a long time ago.

Those unions have an opportunity now too — to aid the majority of their members who are good teachers by making it easy to fire (not just move to rubber rooms while continuing to pay) the bad ones. Fired teachers should hand their chalk to good new ones, and job security and pay should be based on performance instead of seniority.

An analyst in Guggenheim’s film figures that if just the bottom 10% of the most incompetent teachers were to be replaced by average ones, educational quality would skyrocket overnight. Come on, Ms. Weingarten. Do it for the Biancas and Franciscos.

Do it for the children.

The Problem of Honor Killings

By Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi
http://www.americanthinker.com/
September 18, 2010

A recent report by Robert Fisk in the Independent on the subject of honor killings throughout the world should highlight the need to address the prevalence of this barbaric custom.[1]

Fisk notes that many women's rights groups suspect that the number of victims of honor killings may be four times higher than the UN's "latest world figure of around 5000 deaths a year." Meanwhile, "Amnesty International and news archives suggest that the slaughter of the innocent for "dishonouring" their families is increasing by the year." Moreover, whilst the practice is known to occur amongst Hindus and Sikhs in South Asia and the West, as well as amongst Christians and other minorities in the Middle East, it is still largely confined to Muslim communities in countries such as Iraq, Jordan, Pakistan and Turkey. However, the custom may be equally widespread in Egypt and the Gulf states, where media freedom on the issue is much more restricted.

Of course, the concept of honor killings predates most religions and ultimately has cultural and tribal roots. For example, ancient Assyrian law allowed a father to punish his daughter, if she had been raped, in any manner he wanted. Nevertheless, the question arises of why honor killings are today more prevalent in the Muslim world and amongst Muslim communities in the West. From Muslim advocacy groups and spokespersons, one has the impression that they have nothing to do with Islam. For instance, after the murder of Canadian teenager Aqsa Parvez by her father and brother for refusing to wear the hijab, Sheila Musaji wrote in the American Muslim that "although this certainly is a case of domestic violence ... 'honor' killings are not only a Muslim problem, and there is no 'honor' involved." Similarly, Mohamed Elmasry of the Canadian Islamic Congress declared: "I don't want the public to think that this is an Islamic issue or an immigrant issue. It is a teenager issue."

Contrary to such denialism, though, the evidence illustrates that Islamic orthodoxy generally condones the practice, whilst not explicitly recommending it per se. The most egregious case in point is the Umdat Al-Salik ("Reliance of the Sojourner" in Arabic), a manual on Shari'a (Islamic law) certified by Al-Azhar University, the most prominent and authoritative institute of Islamic jurisprudence in the world, as a reliable guide to orthodox Sunni Islam.

The manual states (01.1-2) that "retaliation is obligatory against anyone who kills a human being purely intentionally and without right," except when "a father or mother (or their fathers or mothers)" kills his or her "offspring, or offspring's offspring." Hence, according to this view a parent, who murders his or her son/daughter for the sake of "honor," whether owing to issues of chastity, apostasy and the like, incurs no penalty under Shari'a. This ruling is derived from a hadith (Sahih Muslim, Book 19, Number 4457) where it is affirmed that one should not kill a child unless one could know "what Khadir had known about the child he killed." Khadir is a figure featured in the Qur'an who accompanies Moses on a journey and kills a son of believing parents for fear that he would rebel against the will of God (18:74 and 18:80-81).

It is for these reasons that Islamic religious authorities have often been reluctant at best to condemn the custom of honor killings. In fact, in 2003 the Jordanian Parliament voted against a bill to introduce harsher legal penalties for honor killings on the grounds that it would violate "religious traditions." Likewise, with regards to the killing of Rand Abdel-Qader, a 17 year-old Iraqi who allegedly loved a British soldier stationed in Basra, by her father, an Iraqi sergeant pointed out that "not much can be done when we have an 'honor killing' case. You are in a Muslim society and women should live under religious laws."[2]

An appropriate but not exact analogy is the problem of female circumcision in Egypt, which dates back to Pharaonic times. Though banned in 1997 by the Supreme Constitutional Court, a 2005 study found that 95% of Egyptian women had been subjected to some form of female circumcision, for the Shafi'i school of Islamic jurisprudence, dominant in Egypt, rules that trimming the clitoral hood is mandatory, and accordingly the ritual is still condoned and recommended by many Muslim clerics.

Therefore, it is incumbent on human rights organizations working in the Muslim world to put pressure on Islamic religious authorities to denounce unequivocally the practice of honor killings, discuss openly and honestly the religious basis that condones the custom, and work to formulate a reformed interpretation of core Islamic texts that teaches why honor killings are wrong from a religious viewpoint, all of which will end impediments to introducing stricter legal punishments for honor killings in Muslim countries. Similarly, women's rights groups based in the West should encourage Muslim advocacy groups and religious leaders who serve Muslim communities in the West to do the same. Furthermore, as Phyllis Chesler points out, in the U.S. "a regular shelter for battered women does not specialize in honor killings, nor are there any provisions for foster families-Muslim or otherwise-who can protect girls targeted for murder by their biological families." [3] These are gaps that must be filled.

By adopting such measures, it does not follow that honor killings will vanish overnight, but at least the number of cases will be reduced substantially.


Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is an intern at the Middle East Forum.

Links:

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/the-crimewave-that-shames-the-world-2072201.html

[2] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/girl-17-killed-in-iraq-for-loving-a-british-soldier-816301.html

[3] http://www.meforum.org/2067/are-honor-killings-simply-domestic-violence#_ftn10

There Oughtn’t Be a Law

The burqa ban won’t save France, and preemptive capitulation won’t save us.

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com
September 18, 2010 4:00 A.M.

République française has banned the burqa. Along with the face-covering veil (the niqab), the burqa is the garment with which Muslim women conceal their bodies from head to toe. More accurately, it is the instrument by which their bodies are concealed. In fundamentalist Muslim communities, the burqa is not worn by a woman’s free choice. It is imposed, a product of cultural submission that reflects the subordinate status — in a real sense, the chattel status — to which women are consigned in Islamist ideology.

The new French burqa law was announced this week. Not a social debate: a law. Western societies are running out of gas for the same reason Western economies are sputtering: They are over-lawyered and, hence, hyper-regulated. We’re incapable of comprehending public controversy through anything but the most legalistic prism, particularly when individual liberty is implicated.

Thus we have the tyranny of the lowest common denominator. The tune is called by that rarest of creatures: the woman living in the West who wears the burqa because she wants to wear the burqa. Of course there are such women. Some are merely eccentric, but most burqa volunteers are affirming a civilizational chasm. In Islam, the concept of “freedom” is nearly the opposite of what the non-Muslim West takes it to mean; it is perfect submission to Allah. That is the only life choice the voluntarily shrouded woman makes, and the burqa is emblematic of all the doctrinal subjugation that necessarily follows.

Bully for her. But what about the other women who don the burqa? What about the women who are extorted into cloaking themselves under pressure from a culture characterized by arranged marriages and honor killings? These women are pressured to submit because others have submitted. They are “captive women behind bars,” as French president Nicolas Sarkozy describes them, making a metaphor of the grilled visor the burqa places across women’s eyes. These women and girls are in France, but they are not free. They are “shut out from social life and robbed of any identity,” as Sarkozy puts it, and the burqa is their moving prison, enveloping every step. It extends the republic’s 750 zones urbaines sensibles, “sensitive urban areas” — Islamic enclaves over which the French state has effectively ceded sovereignty to sharia authorities.

This is a social problem, not a legal one. Law is the steel by which a body politic reinforces its vibrant, pre-existing mores. It is not a device for creating mores or for bringing to heel those who are at war with the body politic. Indeed, for Islamists seeking to destroy the West, the law is a weapon in their arsenal — the device by which they hamstring a self-consciously law-worshipping society. For a dying society, though, a law, like the burqa law, is about as useful as a band-aid.

Islamist ideologues are ascendant because they are moving what they are proud to call their “civilizational jihad” against the West from the battlefield, where they know they cannot win, to our institutions, where the scales tip in the Islamists’ favor. They are culturally confident. We, on the other hand, are ambivalent about whether our culture deserves to survive. No law can solve that problem.

France is trying its burqa ban nonetheless. The United States, by contrast, seeks to impose social cohesion by capitulating to sharia at the expense of the First Amendment. That is the latest twist in the brouhaha over the Ground Zero mosque.

Last weekend, at the crater formerly known as the World Trade Center, protester Derek Fenton was photographed burning pages from a Koran, following through on an obscure Florida pastor’s threat to torch Islam’s holy book. Fenton, it turned out, was an 11-year employee of the New Jersey Transit Authority, which promptly fired him when the photos went public.

But hold on a moment: Fenton, who was charged with no crime, was engaged in constitutionally protected expression. It is irrelevant that his conduct may be judged foolish or offensive. It makes no difference that there were less provocative ways to make the same point. Or does it?

The incident occurred in his off-hours and was unrelated to his job. Should it matter that riotous Muslims might seek their vengeance against his state employer, thus endangering train passengers? Not according to the Supreme Court. The American flag and all it symbolizes cannot be shielded from desecration, we are told, because free speech is the defining value of a free society. We don’t give a veto to those it offends, for its very purpose, often its most salutary purpose, is to offend. The justices reaffirmed the principle in Texas v. Johnson (1989): Free expression “may indeed best serve its high purpose when it induces a condition of unrest, creates dissatisfaction with conditions as they are, or even stirs people to anger.”

Did the Court mean any people, or just non-Muslims? Is the principle really as transcendent as it sounds, or is it just high-minded rhetoric? Is it just the way our dissipated rulers couch the lesson that, when it comes to attacks on Western values, we must accept them because we probably deserve them?

All the recent talk of Koran burning spurred Justice Stephen Breyer to suggest that free expression may need an Islam exemption. That prompted justifiable outrage, but it should have surprised no one. The Obama administration has already joined the Organization of the Islamic Conference in a UN resolution designed to make blasphemy against Islam illegal. And the president’s latest appointee, Justice Elena Kagan, is a sharia enthusiast who argues that government may curb free expression whenever it decides the “value” of speech is outweighed by other “societal costs” — which is to say, when doing so elevates progressive pieties.

This is of a piece with other recent episodes of what Roger Kimball calls “preemptive capitulation.” We also learned this week that Molly Norris, the Seattle cartoonist who proposed “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day,” has changed her name and gone into hiding. Couldn’t the FBI have protected her from Islamist rage? Evidently not: It was the Feebs who advised her to go dark.

The ethos of preemptive capitulation is all around us. It ran through last year’s refusal by Yale University Press to publish Jytte Klausen’s book on Muslim rioting over cartoon depictions of Mohammed until the book was purged of the cartoons. Even such classical representations of the prophet as Gustave Doré’s illustration of Dante’s Inferno, which portrays Mohammed as a “sower of religious discord,” had to be censored out of fear that the religion of peace would go medieval. The ethos informed a New Jersey judge who refused a protective order to a woman being serially raped by a Muslim man she was trying to divorce — after all, the jurist reasoned, the man was simply following his religious principles, under which his wife was no more than a vessel, bereft of any right to say no. The ethos led uniformed police to arrest Christian evangelists for handing out copies of St. John’s gospel on a public street in heavily Muslim Dearborn, Mich. Camouflaged as a crackdown on “disturbing the peace,” it was transparently the enforcement of sharia’s prohibition against preaching religions other than Islam. And the ethos is exploited by Imam Feisal Rauf, who now concedes the Ground Zero mosque was a bad idea but insists we must accept it lest “the radicals” explode in murderous rage.

It is the ethos of self-loathing. That is our burqa: our feebleness, our lack of cultural confidence. To shed it, we will have to rediscover why the principles it cloaks are superior and worth fighting for. If we don’t, the law won’t save us any more than it will save France.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Photo: (Claude Paris/Associated Press)

It's the Spending, Stupid

WONDER LAND

A chronic voter 'concern' has now exploded into a broad public movement.

By DANIEL HENNINGER
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
SEPTEMBER 16, 2010.

At a backyard town-hall meeting in Fairfax, Va., Monday, President Obama explained why Christine O'Donnell was going to beat Mike Castle in the GOP's Delaware Senate primary:

"They saw the Recovery Act," he said. "They saw TARP. They saw the auto bailout. And they look at these and think, 'God, all these huge numbers adding up.' So they're right to be concerned about that."

Of course Mr. Obama was speaking generally about the public mood. Let's call it his "generic" explanation for the current voter impulse to wipe out GOP incumbents now and Democrats in November.

Martin Kozlowski

Here's your bumper sticker for the 2010 elections: It's the Spending, Stupid.

And the president didn't mention the two $3 trillion-plus budgets passed on his watch or the trillion-dollar health-care entitlement. They, the voters, are not "concerned" about Uncle Sam's spending floating toward the moon. They are enraged, furious, crazed and desperate.

Pennsylvania's shrewd Democratic Gov. Ed Rendell, scripting the new conventional wisdom, says the tea party movement supporting Christine O'Donnell, Sharron Angle in Nevada and Joe Miller in Alaska proves the GOP is in the grip of crazies. With luck, none of his audience will wake up from this delusion before November.

Back in April, the New York Times/CBS did a poll of tea party supporters. When asked, "What should be the goal of the Tea Party movement," 45% said, "Reduce federal government." That is, cut spending. Everything else was in single digits.

I'm convinced that beneath all the economic turbulence in the land is anxiety that's been building for years as public spending has continued to grow. What was a chronic "concern" has exploded this year into a broad public movement—in Washington, California, New York, New Jersey and indeed across Europe. This isn't "concern," Mr. President. It's a crisis.

Look at the astonishing numbers in the Rasmussen poll released last week. Nearly seven in 10 respondents (68%) want a smaller government, lower taxes and fewer services. The party breakdown: GOP, 88%; Democrats, 44%; and Other, 74%. In short, the independent voters who decide national elections have moved into the anti-spending column. I don't think they'll leave any time soon.

In a note on last week's poll, Rasmussen points out that the only time it recorded a higher shrink-the-government number, at 70%, was in August 2006. That was just ahead of the famous off-year election in which Republican voters withheld support for their party's free-spending members in Congress.

The Obama White House holds that the spending concerns Mr. Obama cited Monday—the stimulus, TARP, the auto bailout—were necessary. Whatever any individual merit in this stuff, it hit most voters at a moment when nearly any big government outlays were going to be written off as "more spending." When Mr. Obama said the health bill was "paid for," naturally polls showed that no one believed him. Why should they?

This loss of faith predates the Obama presidency.

I called Scott Rasmussen this week to discuss the roots of the anti-spending mood, and he suggested that the American electorate's desire for pushback against the growth in federal spending dates at least to 1992 and Ross Perot's third-party presidential bid, which drew 18.9% of the popular vote. Indeed, Mr. Rasmussen argues, you can find evidence of the turn in Jimmy Carter's "efficiency in government" efforts.

Until Barack Obama, the only Democrats who had a chance of winning the presidency were Southern governors with a reputation for fiscal moderation. But after Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992, he immediately tried to pass the mammoth health-care entitlement known as HillaryCare. After 17 acrimonious months, it died in August 1994. That November, voters gave control of the House to the GOP for the first time in 40 years. It was about more than Newt Gingrich's charm.

So this year the Democrats, who control Congress because of voter disgust with the Republicans in 2006, passed a health-care entitlement. And this year voters will transfer power back to the Republicans.

The most important and startling number in American politics today is Congress's approval rating: 23%. This is a no-confidence vote. The second branch of government is losing the country. Surely it's about the spending. What else? That Congress hasn't spent enough?

If voters give control of the House to the GOP, the party desperately needs to establish credibility on spending. Absent that, little else is possible. Independent voters now know that the national Democratic Party, hopelessly joined to the public-sector unions, will never stabilize public outlays.

In a sense, the GOP's impending victory is meaningless, a win by default. If the Republican rookies entering Congress next year don't do something identifiably real to stop the federal-spending balloon, voters two years from now will start throwing the GOP under the bus. Absent action, the political rage and cynicism on offer in 2012 could make this year's tea parties look like, well, a tea party.

Write to henninger@wsj.com

Harry Reid’s Illegal-Alien Student Bailout

A law that supposedly benefits students really benefits Democrats.

By Michelle Malkin
http://www.nationalreview.com
September 17, 2010 12:00 A.M.

The so-called DREAM Act would create an official path to Democratic voter registration for an estimated two million college-age illegal aliens. Look past the public-relations-savvy stories of “undocumented” valedictorians left out in the cold. This is not about protecting “children.” It’s about preserving electoral power through cap-and-gown amnesty.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid (pictured at right) announced this week that he’s attaching the DREAM Act to the defense authorization bill. With ethnic activists breathing down his neck and President Obama pushing to fulfill his campaign promise to Hispanics, Reid wants his queasy colleagues to vote on the legislation next week.

Open-borders lawmakers have tried and failed to pass the DREAM Act through regular channels for the past decade. That’s because informed voters know giving green cards to illegal-alien students undermines the rule of law, creates more illegal-immigration incentives, and grants preferential treatment to illegal-alien students over law-abiding native and naturalized American students struggling to get an education in tough economic times. This bad idea is compounded by a companion proposal to recruit more illegal aliens into the military with the lure of citizenship (a fraud-ridden and reckless practice countenanced under the Bush administration).

DREAM Act lobbyists are spotlighting heart-wrenching stories of high-achieving teens brought to this country when they were toddlers. But instead of arguing for case-by-case dispensations, the protesters want blanket pardons. The broadly drafted Senate bill would confer benefits on applicants up to age 35, and the House bill contains no age ceiling at all. The academic-achievement requirements are minimal. Moreover, illegal aliens who didn’t arrive in the country until they turned 15 — after they had laid down significant roots in their home country — would be eligible for DREAM Act benefits and eventual U.S. citizenship. And, like past amnesty packages, the Democratic plan is devoid of any concrete eligibility and enforcement mechanisms to deter already rampant immigration-benefit fraud.

The DREAM Act’s sponsors have long fought to sabotage a clearly worded provision in the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) that states: “Notwithstanding any other provision of law, an alien who is not lawfully present in the United States shall not be eligible on the basis of residence within a State (or a political subdivision) for any postsecondary education benefit unless a citizen or national of the United States is eligible for such a benefit (in no less an amount, duration, and scope) without regard to whether the citizen or national is such a resident.”

Ten states defied that federal law and offered DREAM Act–style tuition preference to illegal aliens: California, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, Oklahoma, Texas, Utah, and Washington. The last time DREAM Act champions tried to tack their scheme onto a larger immigration proposal, they snuck in language that would absolve those ten states of their law-breaking by repealing the 1996 law retroactively — and also offering a special path to green cards and citizenship for illegal-alien students.

Despite the obvious electoral advantage this plan would give Democrats, more than a few Republicans who favor illegal-alien amnesty crossed the aisle to support the DREAM Act, including double-talking senators John McCain, Richard Lugar, Bob Bennett, Sam Brownback, Norm Coleman, Susan Collins, Larry Craig, Chuck Hagel, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Mel Martinez, and Olympia Snowe, as did presidential candidate Mike Huckabee (who champions even greater illegal-alien student benefits than those proposed by Democrats). After paying lip service to securing the borders, McCain promised DREAM Act demonstrators this week that he supports the bill and will work to “resolve their issues.”

Out-of-touch pols might want to pay attention to the world outside their bubble. A recent Quinnipiac University poll shows that Americans across the political spectrum favor tougher enforcement of existing immigration laws over rolling out the amnesty welcome wagon. When asked, “Do you think immigration reform should primarily move in the direction of integrating illegal immigrants into American society or in the direction of stricter enforcement of laws against illegal immigration?” solid majorities of registered Republicans, Democrats, and independents chose stricter enforcement over greater integration of the illegal-alien population.

Democrats outside the Beltway have grown increasingly averse to signing on to illegal-alien incentives — especially as the Obama jobs death toll mounts and economic confidence plummets. Here in Colorado, a handful of Democrats joined Republican lawyers to kill a state-level DREAM Act amid massive higher-education budget cuts and a bipartisan voter backlash.

Asked why she opposed the illegal-alien student bailout, one Democratic lawmaker said quite simply: “I listened to my constituents.” An alien concept in Washington, to be sure.

— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery, 2010). © 2010 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

Why It's Time for the Tea Party

The populist movement is more a critique of the GOP than a wing of it.

By PEGGY NOONAN
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/home-page
SEPTEMBER 17, 2010

This fact marks our political age: The pendulum is swinging faster and in shorter arcs than it ever has in our lifetimes. Few foresaw the earthquake of 2008 in 2006. No board-certified political professional predicted, on Election Day 2008, what happened in 2009-10 (New Jersey, Virginia and Massachusetts) and has been happening, and will happen, since then. It all moves so quickly now, it all turns on a dime.

But at this moment we are witnessing a shift that will likely have some enduring political impact. Another way of saying that: The past few years, a lot of people in politics have wondered about the possibility of a third party. Would it be possible to organize one? While they were wondering, a virtual third party was being born. And nobody organized it.

Here is Jonathan Rauch in National Journal on the Tea Party's innovative, broad-based network: "In the expansive dominion of the Tea Party Patriots, which extends to thousands of local groups and literally countless activists," there is no chain of command, no hierarchy. Individuals "move the movement." Popular issues gain traction and are emphasized, unpopular ones die. "In American politics, radical decentralization has never been tried on such a large scale." Here are pollsters Scott Rasmussen and Doug Schoen in the Washington Examiner: "The Tea Party has become one of the most powerful and extraordinary movements in American political history." "It is as popular as both the Democratic and Republican parties." "Over half of the electorate now say they favor the Tea Party movement, around 35 percent say they support the movement, 20 to 25 percent self-identify as members of the movement."

So far, the Tea Party is not a wing of the GOP but a critique of it. This was demonstrated in spectacular fashion when GOP operatives dismissed Tea Party-backed Christine O'Donnell in Delaware. The Republican establishment is "the reason we even have the Tea Party movement," shot back columnist and Tea Party enthusiast Andrea Tantaros in the New York Daily News. It was the Bush administration that "ran up deficits" and gave us "open borders" and "Medicare Part D and busted budgets."

Everyone has an explanation for the Tea Party that is actually not an explanation but a description. They're "angry." They're "antiestablishment," "populist," "anti-elite." All to varying degrees true. But as a network television executive said this week, "They should be fed up. Our institutions have failed."

Barbara Kelley

I see two central reasons for the Tea Party's rise. The first is the yardstick, and the second is the clock. First, the yardstick. Imagine that over at the 36-inch end you've got pure liberal thinking—more and larger government programs, a bigger government that costs more in the many ways that cost can be calculated. Over at the other end you've got conservative thinking—a government that is growing smaller and less demanding and is less expensive. You assume that when the two major parties are negotiating bills in Washington, they sort of lay down the yardstick and begin negotiations at the 18-inch line. Each party pulls in the direction it wants, and the dominant party moves the government a few inches in their direction.

But if you look at the past half century or so you have to think: How come even when Republicans are in charge, even when they're dominant, government has always gotten larger and more expensive? It's always grown! It's as if something inexorable in our political reality—with those who think in liberal terms dominating the establishment, the media, the academy—has always tilted the starting point in negotiations away from 18 inches, and always toward liberalism, toward the 36-inch point.

Democrats on the Hill or in the White House try to pull it up to 30, Republicans try to pull it back to 25. A deal is struck at 28. Washington Republicans call it victory: "Hey, it coulda been 29!" But regular conservative-minded or Republican voters see yet another loss. They could live with 18. They'd like 8. Instead it's 28.

For conservatives on the ground, it has often felt as if Democrats (and moderate Republicans) were always saying, "We should spend a trillion dollars," and the Republican Party would respond, "No, too costly. How about $700 billion?" Conservatives on the ground are thinking, "How about nothing? How about we don't spend more money but finally start cutting."

What they want is representatives who'll begin the negotiations at 18 inches and tug the final bill toward 5 inches. And they believe Tea Party candidates will do that.

The second thing is the clock. Here is a great virtue of the Tea Party: They know what time it is. It's getting late. If we don't get the size and cost of government in line now, we won't be able to. We're teetering on the brink of some vast, dark new world—states and cities on the brink of bankruptcy, the federal government too. The issue isn't "big spending" anymore. It's ruinous spending that they fear will end America as we know it, as they promised it to their children.

So there's a sense that dramatic action is needed, and a sense of profound urgency. Add drama to urgency and you get the victory of a Tea Party-backed candidate.

That is the context. Local Tea Parties seem—so far—not to be falling in love with the particular talents or background of their candidates. It's more detached than that. They don't say their candidates will be reflective, skilled in negotiations, a great senator, a Paul Douglas or Pat Moynihan or a sturdy Scoop Jackson. These qualities are not what they think are urgently needed. What they want is someone who will walk in, put her foot on the conservative end of the yardstick, and make everything slip down in that direction.

Nobody knows how all this will play out, but we are seeing something big—something homegrown, broad-based and independent. In part it is a rising up of those who truly believe America is imperiled and truly mean to save her. The dangers, both present and potential, are obvious. A movement like this can help a nation by acting as a corrective, or it can descend into a corrosive populism that celebrates unknowingness as authenticity, that confuses showiness with seriousness and vulgarity with true conviction. Parts could become swept by a desire just to tear down, to destroy. But establishments exist for a reason. It is true that the party establishment is compromised, and by many things, but one of them is experience. They've lived through a lot, seen a lot, know the national terrain. They know how things work. They know the history. I wonder if Tea Party members know how fragile are the institutions that help keep the country together.

One difference so far between the Tea Party and the great wave of conservatives that elected Ronald Reagan in 1980 is that latter was a true coalition—not only North and South, East and West but right-wingers, intellectuals who were former leftists, and former Democrats. When they won presidential landslides in 1980, '84 and '88, they brought the center with them. That in the end is how you win. Will the center join arms and work with the Tea Party? That's a great question of 2012.

Television Review: Boardwalk Empire

Jersey Shore, The Early Years

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
The New York Times
Published: September 16, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/


Craig Blankenhorn/HBO

A scene from “Boardwalk Empire” set on the recreated Atlantic City Boardwalk. The series begins on Sunday on HBO.

On the eve of St. Patrick’s Day 1920 the city treasurer in Atlantic City is busy finessing Prohibition, but his brother, the sheriff, is focused on delivering a speech to the Ancient Order of the Celts. He brandishes a pamphlet he picked up in a course at the Y.M.C.A.: “Public Speaking and Influencing Men in Business” by Dale Carnagey.

Long before he wrote “How to Win Friends and Influence People,” Dale Carnegie published advice under his real name, Carnagey. That kind of historical fastidiousness runs throughout “Boardwalk Empire,” a new series beginning Sunday on HBO about bootleggers at the dawn of the Jazz Age. It’s a period drama with an irresistible pedigree: Terence Winter, a lead writer of “The Sopranos,” created it, and Martin Scorsese, one of its executive producers, directed the first episode.

As is Mr. Scorsese’s wont, the attention to detail, like the cinematography, is lavish, exquisite and unswerving. It is also a little constricting. In the first few episodes, characters adhere so carefully to type they trip into caricature. Accuracy isn’t always the same as plausibility; imagined history can sometimes be more persuasive than fact.

“Boardwalk Empire” is a well conceived, beautifully made series that has every reason to be great. Who doesn’t want to watch rum runners and gangsters on HBO? Yet, surprisingly, given the extraordinary talent and money behind it, “Boardwalk Empire” falls short. The series gets better and more engrossing with time, but it takes more than a few episodes for it to clear its throat, establish its bona fides and fall into storytelling stride. One possible reason is that the star, Steve Buscemi, is hard to accept in the lead role of Enoch Thompson, known as Nucky, Atlantic City’s dashingly corrupt treasurer. Nucky, half political boss, half gangster, is a dandified fixer who can charm suffragettes and terrify bootleggers and ward heelers.

Mr. Buscemi, who played Tony Soprano’s cousin in “The Sopranos,” is a distinguished character actor and certainly a distinctive one: bug-eyed and cadaverous, he speaks in a tinny voice that sounds like a 33 1/3 r.p.m. record played at 45. Mr. Buscemi manages to tamp down the comedy of his mien, but it takes a lot of squinting to see him as a powerbroker straddling two worlds.

Nucky is supposed to be a persuasive liar who can preach teetotalism to the Women’s Temperance League with a straight face. Mr. Buscemi, however, looks shifty and disingenuous — that is only supposed to be apparent after Nucky leaves the stage and reaches for his flask.

Nucky is based on a real-life Atlantic City political boss, Nucky Johnson, but the fictional version inevitably evokes Tony Soprano. Like that other New Jersey mobster, Nucky is the sum of many contradictions. He is an extrovert with an inner life, an egotist with wry self-awareness, a vicious killer and bully with a soft spot for smart women and newborns, a snob with no bias against blacks, Jews or Germans. Nucky is a bad man surrounded by people who are even worse, and he is the viewer’s pivot in all the upheaval, excitement and lawlessness that was the age of Prohibition.

Mr. Winter is aware of the pitfalls of the role. “If we wanted the real Nucky, we would have cast Jimmy Gandolfini,” Mr. Winter recently told The New York Times. “But by Episode 12 you’re going to think nobody else could have done it but Steve.” Twelve episodes is quite a long time, and it isn’t until the fifth episode that it seems like Mr. Buscemi (pictured at right) will pull it off at all.

There is plenty to watch along the way. “Boardwalk Empire” is a “Ragtime” of an adventure story that mixes fictional characters with real ones, though the historical ones are mostly gangsters: Arnold Rothstein (Michael Stuhlbarg), Big Jim Colosimo (Frank Crudele), Lucky Luciano (Vincent Piazza) and, in one of the best performances of all, Al Capone (Stephen Graham).

Nucky has a protégé, Jimmy (Michael Pitt), who left Princeton to fight in World War I and returns changed by combat and in a rush to make up for lost time.

Living like a pasha in the Ritz-Carlton, Nucky has an entourage that includes a proper German valet and a highly improper mistress (Paz de la Huerta), a former showgirl who swears like a sailor but talks in a gooey baby voice. Nucky, who winces at uncouth behavior, also befriends an attractive, intelligent and pregnant Irish immigrant, Margaret (Kelly Macdonald). Margaret has two small children and an abusive louse of a husband who gives her black eyes but can’t destroy her love of reading; Henry James and George Sand are among her favorites.

Nucky has business dealings with mobsters in Chicago and New York, as well as with elected officials in Washington and Trenton, but he also has a few enemies, including most ominously an Internal Revenue agent, Nelson Van Alden (Michael Shannon), an Eliot Ness-like zealot and strict Roman Catholic who suspects that Nucky is a kingpin of the illegal alcohol trade. As with many other characters, Nelson’s costumes, posture and enunciation are period perfect, but he is so tightly bound into the archetype of the 1920s federal agent that he seems one-dimensional.

Characters intersect and, with time, divert from type, but they don’t interact with the same layered intensity that drove “The Sopranos” and “The Wire.” At heart “Boardwalk Empire” is a cops and robbers tale and its thrills rest on the skill of the filmmaking.

Mr. Scorsese’s cinematic style in the first episode is as distinctive and effective as it was in “Goodfellas” or “The Departed”: long tracking shots and slow, exalted pans from ceiling to floor. The violence is shockingly brutal and, of course, lyrical; in one scene, a man lies dead in a pool of blood as a Caruso record plays on a blood-splattered gramophone.

The sets and period clothes are richly and ingeniously recreated, down to the litter on the boardwalk and the wisps of silk and velvet chiffon on a rack in a lingerie store. Sometimes exactitude verges on pedanticism. When Margaret, worried about pregnancy, reads a Margaret Sanger pamphlet on family planning, the camera lingers on the title, “Family Limitations.” It’s a level of precision that signals insecurity. The series is based on a history book, Nelson Johnson’s “Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City.” Perhaps because the people who adapted the book didn’t live in those times or grow up around people who did, they lack the confidence to improvise.

Its not absolutely necessary for a show’s creators to have a personal connection to their work. David Milch didn’t grow up in a Gold Rush town, but “Deadwood” brilliantly alchemized fact into fiction. More often, though, they do: Matt Weiner siphoned childhood memories for “Mad Men,” David Chase drew on his Italian-American heritage in “The Sopranos,” and David Simon used his reporting experience in Baltimore for “The Wire.” Mr. Simon’s new HBO series, “Treme,” isn’t nearly as extraordinary, and that could be because he and his colleagues are respectful fans of New Orleans, not natives with a license to riff.

“Boardwalk Empire” is an artful reworking of the gangster myth, but it isn’t a great work of art. After telling the Women’s Temperance League a poignant hard-luck tale, Nucky turns to Jimmy and says, “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” “Boardwalk Empire” doesn’t always follow this advice.

Boardwalk Empire

HBO, Sunday nights at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time.

Created by Terence Winter; pilot directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Mr. Winter; Mr. Winter, Mr. Scorsese, Tim Van Patten, Stephen Levinson and Mark Wahlberg, executive producers; Gene Kelly and Lawrence Konner, co-executive producers; Rudd Simmons and Rick Yorn, producers (series); David Coats- worth, producer (pilot); Howard Korder and Margaret Nagle, supervising pro- ducers.

WITH: Steve Buscemi (Nucky Thomp- son), Michael Pitt (Jimmy Darmody), Kelly Macdonald (Margaret Schroeder), Michael Shannon (Agent Nelson Van Al- den), Dabney Coleman (Commodore Louis Kaestner), Shea Whigham (Sheriff Elias Thompson), Anthony Laciura (Ed- die Kessler), Stephen Graham (Al Ca- pone), Aleksa Palladino (Angela Darmo- dy), Michael Stuhlbarg (Arnold Roth- stein), Vincent Piazza (Lucky Luciano), Paz de la Huerta (Lucy Danziger), Paul Sparks (Mickey Doyle), Michael Kenneth Williams (Chalky White), Gretchen Mol (Gillian), Greg Antonacci (Johnny Tor- rio) and Frank Crudele (Big Jim Colosi- mo).

A version of this review appeared in print on September 17, 2010, on page C1 of the New York edition.

Trifle with the government? Just ask Jacob Maged

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
Thursday, September 16, 2010; A25
http://www.washingtonpost.com


JERSEY CITY - The crime scene at 138 Griffith St. has changed in 76 years. Today it is a barber shop. In 1934, it was a tailoring and cleaning establishment owned and run by Jacob Maged, 49.

With his responsibilities as a father of four, Maged should have shunned a life of crime. Instead, he advertised his criminal activity with a placard in his shop window, promising to press men's suits for 35 cents. This he did, even though President Franklin Roosevelt's New Dealers, who knew an amazing number of things -- his economic aides were not called a "Brains Trust" for nothing -- knew that the proper price for pressing a man's suit was 40 cents.

The National Recovery Administration was an administrative mechanism for the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, which envisioned regulating the economy back to health by using, among other things, codes of fair competition. The theory was that by promoting the cartelization of labor by encouraging unions, and the cartelization of industries by codes that would inhibit competition, prices would be propped up and prosperity would return.


The NRA is O.K. with Jacob Maged, tailor, now. He's pictured putting up the Blue Eagle after Judge Robert V. Kinkead of Jersey City, N.J., remitted the balance of his thirty-day sentence for code chiseling. (Image: Bettmann/CORBIS, April 23, 1934)

Soon there were more than 500 NRA codes covering the manufacture of products from lightning rods to dog leashes to women's corsets. Amity Shlaes, in "The Forgotten Man," her history of the New Deal, reports that the NRA "generated more paper than the entire legislative output of the federal government since 1789." Businesses were asked to display the Blue Eagle, an emblem signifying participation in the NRA. Gen. Hugh "Iron Pants" Johnson, an admirer of Mussolini who headed the NRA, declared, "May God have mercy on the man or group of men who attempt to trifle with this bird."

Maged trifled by his 5-cent violation of New Jersey's "tailors' code," written in conjunction with the NRA. On April 20, 1934, he was fined $100 -- serious money when the average family income was about $1,500 -- and sentenced to 30 days in jail. The New York Times reported that Maged "was only vaguely aware of the existence of a code." Not that such ignorance was forgivable. It is every citizen's duty to stay up late at night, if necessary, reading the fine print about the government's multiplying mandates.

"In court yesterday," the Times reported, "he stood as if in a trance when sentence was pronounced. He hoped that it was a joke." Maged was an immigrant from Poland, which in the Cold War would become familiar with the concept of "economic crimes" and the use of criminal law for the "re-education" of deviationists.

Actually, his sentence was a judicial jest. After Maged spent three days in jail, the judge canceled the rest of his sentence, remitted the fine and, according to the Times, "gave him a little lecture on the importance of cooperation as opposed to individualism." The judge emphasized that people "should uphold the president . . . and General Johnson" in their struggle against -- among other miscreants -- "price cutters." Then, like a feudal lord granting a dispensation to a serf, the judge promised to have Maged "measure me for a new suit."

Maged, suitably broken to the saddle of government, removed from his shop window the placard advertising 35-cent pressings and replaced it with a Blue Eagle. "Maged," reported the Times, "if not quite so ruggedly individualistic as formerly, was a free man once more." So that is freedom -- embracing, under coercion, a government propaganda symbol.

Today, as 76 years ago, economic recovery is much on the mind of the government, which is busy as a beaver -- sending another $26 billion to public employees, proposing an additional $50 billion for "infrastructure" -- as it orchestrates Recovery Summer to an appropriate climax. But at least today's government is agnostic about the proper price for cleaning a suit.

In 1937, FDR asked in his second inaugural address for "unimagined power" to enforce "proper subordination" of private interests to public authority. The biggest industrial collapse in American history occurred eight years after the stock market crash of 1929, and nearly five years into the New Deal, in . . . 1937.

Maged died here of cancer on March 31, 1939. He was 54. He remains a cautionary example of the wages of sin, understood by the progressives of his day as insubordination toward government that knows everything. The NRA lives on, sort of, in this Milton Friedman observation: Pick at random any three letters from the alphabet, put them in any order, and you will have an acronym designating a federal agency we can do without.

georgewill@washpost.com

Springsteen talks Dylan, darkness and the “survivor guilt” of fame

“The artists we love, they put their fingerprint on your imagination, and on your heart and your soul”

by Brian D. Johnson on Wednesday, September 15, 2010 12:57am
http://www2.macleans.ca/

A few minutes before Bruce Springsteen stepped onstage in the 550-seat flagship cinema of the new TIFF Bell Lightbox, a stage hand removed the guitar stand. Which seemed to confirm it wasn’t going to be that kind of show. It was, however, the hottest ticket at the festival: a chance to spend an hour or so in a relatively intimate theatre listening to actor Edward Norton interview the Boss about music, cinema, celebrity and politics. And it seemed as strange for them as it was for us. Springsteen is perfectly at home singing for 20,000 people, and Norton (Primal Fear) can comfortably shape-shift into a psychopath in front of a movie camera. But they were both novices at performing in an onstage interview, which had a certain homespun charm.

As part of TIFF’s Mavericks program, Springsteen’s dialogue with Norton was presented in advance of the world premiere of Thom Zimny’s documentary Promise: The Making of Darkness the Edge of Town. There was a palpable excitement in the air. As TIFF programmer Thom Powers nervously confessed, “I will be able to breathe for the first time in six weeks.” When the Boss hit the stage, there was the expected standing ovation and chants of “Bruuuuuuuce.” But the audience quickly settled down and sat in rapt attention without a single fan outburst. Obeying strict orders, there was no texting, tweeting or cellphone photography. I’ve been driven crazy all week by flickering Blackberries among industry types in screenings. But this was the best-behaved crowd I’d encountered since this film festival began—ironic considering they’d come to see a rock star.

Springsteen and Norton came out dressed almost identically in black shirts, black boots and jeans. They both seemed a bit awkward at first, joking about their wardrobe. Norton, who explained he and the Boss have been friends for 11 years, went out of his way to act casual. It’s always interesting to see a star play the role of interviewer. I’ve conducted an interview or two in my time, off and on stage, and though it’s not high art, it is an acquired skill, like acting or playing guitar. Norton’s questions were long, rambling and tangential; he tended to answer them by the time he got to the question mark. But at least they were intelligent, and informed by his friendship with Springsteen. He also covered the vital issues: the creative process, the balance between intuition and craft, the influences, the ambition, the politics—and that pesky vision thing. Springsteen even got to talking about his children. When Norton suggested that every generation thinks its going to be the first generation of cool parents, Springsteen laughed. “That doesn’t work,” he said. “Why would my kids want to come out and see thousands of people cheer their parents?”

The one thing they didn’t dwell on was the music, which gets plenty of attention in the documentary. Instead, Bruce ruminated on its thematic course, something he struggled with in the insanely laborious recording of Darkness on the Edge of Town, the 1978 album that followed the monstrous success of Born to Run.

“I was afraid of losing myself,” said Springsteen, explaining that one minute he and the the E-Street band were “a provincial group of guys with no money ” who had never been on an airplane and thought New York was “million miles away.” Then he was a superstar who was, nonetheless, broke, in a legal battle with his manager, and worried about being “gobbled up” by fame. “It’s easy for you to be co-opted,” he said. “The irony of any kind of success is the conversation you’ve struck up is also the one that makes you a bit of a mutant—a mutant in your own neighbourhood. And it leaves you with a good deal of survivor guilt. Nobody knows anybody who has any money—except you.”

Springsteen talked about Darkness on the Edge of Town as his pivotal album, where he set the direction that would set his career. In the early years, “we were all creatures of the radio,” he said, stressing that “records” were his prime influence. But the Boss has a more than passing affinity with film. The sense of landscape in his songs is archly cinematic, and as he explained, heavily influenced by American film noir. Early in the interview, he referenced Bob Dylan and David Lynch into the same line as he recalled listening getting “the first true picture of my country” when he heard Dylan’s Highway 61 as a teenager—”1960s small-town America was very Lynchian,” he said. “Everything was rumbling. Dylan took all the dark stuff that was rumbling underneath and brought it too the surface.

As Norton noted, Springsteen referenced movies from his first album, with lines like “I could walk like Brando into the sun.” But with success, he was flung into an epic landscape, with the Vietnam war still fresh and American cinema erupting around him: “Popular pictures were dark, bloody pictures that dealt with the flipside of the American Dream.” During the Born To Run tour, he recalled, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro treated him to a private screening of Taxi Driver. Then he added, as if it had just occured to him, that Jon Landau—the producer taking over his career at the time, was a film critic.

Things got interesting when Norton started asking about wild impulse versus painstaking craft. Springsteen talked about the virtue of craft. “Dylan,” he said, “was very, very conscious; he just wouldn’t talk about it. . . The construction of image, there’s no getting around it. That doesn’t mean it’s inauthentic. Writing and imagining a world, that’s a particular thing. The artists we love, they put their fingerprint on your imagination, and on your heart and your soul. . . I wanted to bring in the full landscape of the country.

Springsteen talked about the massive ambition he had in the 70s. “There was something in the hardness of it, that young naked desire. We wanted people to hear our voices and we set our sights very big. I wanted the pink Cadillac and I wanted the girls, but above all I wanted a purposeful work life.” Darkness on the Edge of Town, he said, was his attempt to find that. In marathon studio sessions—documented by intimate black-and-white footage in the documentary—he recorded some 70 songs. Slashing all the feel-good numbers, he reduced the album to “the 10 toughest songs I had.” They were “carved meticulously, consciously out of a huge hunk of stone, with a lot of ego and ambition. That, he said, “was the beginning of a long conversation I had with my fans.”

Norton asked if he ever worried about being overtaken by the next generation of rockers. “If you’re good,” said Springsteen, “you’re always looking over your shoulder. It’s the life, the gun-slinging life.”

So yes, I took notes as I sat in the 5th row, close enough to feel a connection, marvelling at how odd it was to quietly watch the Boss perform musicology on his own career—Uncle Bruce easing into his role as the elder. It was by turns fascinating, inspiring and slightly sad, all this rumination about the meaning of those glory days. Then suddenly it was over. The rock star and the movie star slipped off stage to a few polite shrieks of protest. Later outside the theatre, as I chatted with Blue Rodeo’s Jim Cuddy, we noticed a stagehand carrying away an unplayed acoustic guitar.

Papers of Bible Scholar Donated

BY YONAT SHIMRON - Staff Writer
The Raleigh News & Observer
http://www.newsobserver.com/
September 15, 2010


TAKAAKI IWABU - tiwabu@newsobserver.com

Daniel Akin, president of Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, holds a Schaeffer book he has studied.


WAKE FOREST -- Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary has landed the collected papers of one of the most important evangelicals of the 20th century, a man credited with giving intellectual heft to the Christian right - Francis Schaeffer.

At a ceremony during Tuesday morning's chapel service, Schaeffer's daughter, Deborah Middelmann, handed seminary professor Bruce Little a black, leather-bound copy of her father's copiously noted King James Version of the Bible.

"Evangelicalism would not have had the cultural influence it has today were it not for Francis Schaeffer," said Little, tearing up as he held Schaeffer's Bible.

With that handoff, the Baptist seminary became the custodian of 85 boxes of Schaeffer's unpublished papers, notes, letters and tape-recorded discussions, most of which were shipped from Switzerland, where Schaeffer and his family lived for many years. Schaeffer, who died in 1984, is second only to Billy Graham among influential American evangelicals of the last half of the 20th century.

Schaeffer is credited with influencing a generation of evangelicals who were transfixed by his message of engaging popular culture in the 1960s and 1970s. Though he lived most of his adult life abroad, he spoke frequently at Christian colleges and seminaries - often dressed in Alpine mountain climbing gear. He wore his hair long and sported a goatee.

During the final years of his life, Schaeffer became the godfather of the Christian right. He began using the term "secular humanism," to describe contemporary culture, and helped push evangelicals to oppose abortion.

"There was something about him," said Barry Hankins, a professor of history at Baylor University who studies Schaeffer. "He touched a nerve that others couldn't touch at that time."

Two films made by Schaeffer's son, Frank, made him even more popular. "How Shall We Then Live?" and "Whatever Happened to the Human Race?" shaped an argument for battling liberal theology in the Christian church and liberal values in society at large.

The seminary plans to restore and transcribe much of Schaeffer's material in digital form. The collection will also serve as a resource for students and scholars.

Southeastern President Daniel Akin said he was "blown away" by the offer, from the Francis Schaeffer Foundation to Little. Although no funds have been set aside to house and restore the material, Akin said he told Little, "We'll do whatever it takes to make it happen."

Middelmann acknowledged it may be surprising or upsetting that her father's collection was given to a Baptist seminary, since Schaeffer was a Presbyterian. An institute dedicated to his work already exists at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, a school affiliated with the Presbyterian Church in America.

As important, Middelmann said, she found a "kindred spirit" in Little, whom she met a few years ago when he hosted a conference at Southeastern on her father's work.

"My father was a very odd man," said Middelmann. "Had it been given to a more logical place it would have been very inappropriate."

The collection is not a bequest. The Francis Schaeffer Foundation still owns the material, but it is expected to remain permanently at Southeastern.

"We're hoping to revive interest in Francis Schaeffer," said Little. "We want to give new understanding to his life and ministry."

yonat.shimron@newsobserver.com, 919-829-4891



Who was Francis A. Schaeffer?

To a generation of evangelicals who came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, Francis Schaeffer was a popular Christian intellectual who defended faith in an age of growing secularism.

Schaeffer was born in 1912 in Germantown, Pa. He became a Christian at age 17, and after seminary served churches - two in Pennsylvania and one in St. Louis.

He and his wife, Edith, moved to Switzerland in 1948 and established the L'Abri community, French for "the shelter." Each Saturday, he would hold discussions about Christianity that drew wider and wider audiences to his chalet. Though not a scholar, he engaged with contemporary culture, especially avant garde music, Italian cinema and French existentialist writers. He became popular in American Christian colleges, traveling frequently to lecture.

Later in his life, he became sharply critical of what he called the "secular humanist" worldview. His book," A Christian Manifesto," influenced leaders in the Christian right such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. He is credited with making opposition to abortion, once mainly a Roman Catholic issue, one of the planks of the Protestant evangelical movement.

He died of lymphoma in 1984.

Springsteen Talks 'Darkness' With Festival Doc

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: September 14, 2010
http://www.nytimes.com/


TORONTO (AP) -- Bruce Springsteen says he and the E Street Band were on a mission when they made his ''Darkness on the Edge of Town'' album 32 years ago.

Springsteen opens up about the career-altering album in the documentary ''The Promise: The Making of Darkness on the Edge of Town,'' which premieres Tuesday at the Toronto International Film Festival.

The film, which played Monday for press, features contemporary interviews with Springsteen and his band along with rehearsal and studio footage as they made the 1978 record, which he calls a ''reckoning with the adult world'' after the phenomenal success of his ''Born to Run'' album three years earlier.

Before the premiere, Springsteen will discuss his music in a public chat with actor Edward Norton, who became friends with the rocker after they met at a concert about 10 years ago.

''That record, there's no way to overstate how much that record was a part of my life,'' Norton said in an interview. ''I've seen the film, and it's amazing to see him at that age going through the creative process on it. Any artist, I think, will appreciate the chance to see someone who is as great as he is at that age struggling and struggling and struggling to get things to where he hears them in his head.''

After its Toronto premiere, ''The Promise'' will air Oct. 7 on HBO, then will be included in a CD and DVD boxed set release of ''Darkness on the Edge of Town'' due in stores Nov. 16.

Directed by Thom Zimny, who made a similar making-of documentary about ''Born to Run,'' ''The Promise'' captures Springsteen in a burst of creativity after a three-year studio lapse, when he was unable to record amid a court fight with his former manager.

Springsteen says he wanted the album to reflect the ''deep despair and resilience'' he saw among the small towns where he grew up.

''One of the things that's amazing to me is he's considered this quintessential American working-class artist, yet so much of his work has challenged the idea that America lives up to its ideals in some ways,'' Norton said. ''He shows people and artists that you can live in a culture and place and love it and still question it, still challenge it.''

Unlike ''Born to Run'' -- for which Springsteen wrote nine songs, eight of them appearing on the album -- ''Darkness on the Edge of Town'' was honed into a 10-song cycle from about 70 tunes he wrote, according to his band mates. The songs included such castoffs as ''Because the Night'' and ''Fire,'' which became hits for Patti Smith and the Pointer Sisters.

Springsteen jokes that if a song did not work, he would pull out the fragments he liked and try them elsewhere, like taking car parts from one vehicle and sticking them into another to make it run. He shares failed lyrics for the album's opening anthem, ''Badlands,'' and describes a version of the slow, meditative tale ''Racing in the Streets'' in which the narrator's melancholy girl, who ''cries herself to sleep at night,'' was not even in the song.

Sound mixer Chuck Plotkin describes Springsteen's poetic instructions for how the dissonant assault of ''Adam Raised a Cain'' should sound next to the album's more melodic tunes. Springsteen told Plotkin to think of a movie showing two lovers having a picnic, when the scene abruptly cuts to a dead body. This song, Springsteen said, is that body.

The ''Darkness'' songs were leaner and angrier than those on ''Born to Run,'' advancing from the earlier album's sense of youthful anarchy and escape to growing resignation to a ''life of limitations and compromises,'' Springsteen says.

''`Born to Run' and `Darkness,' they're the beginning of the story,'' Springsteen says. ''I'm beginning to tell the story that I tell for most of the rest of my working life.''

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Online:

Toronto International Film Festival: http://tiff.net/