Victor Davis Hanson: Is the War on Terror Over?

April 26, 2007


Do we still need to fight a war on terror?

The answer seems to be no for an increasing number in the West who are weary over Afghanistan and Iraq or complacent from the absence of a major attack on the scale of 9/11.

The British Foreign Office has scrapped the phrase "war on terror" as inexact, inflammatory and counterproductive. U.S. Central Command has just dropped the term "long war" to describe the fight against radical Islam.

An influential book making the rounds - "Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them" - argues that the threat from al-Qaida is vastly exaggerated.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, goes further, assuring us that we are terrorized mostly by the false idea of a war on terror - not the jihadists themselves.

Even onetime neo-conservative Francis Fukuyama, who in 1998 called for the preemptive removal of Saddam Hussein, believes "war" is the "wrong metaphor" for our struggle against the terrorists.

Others point out that motley Islamic terrorists lack the resources of the Nazi Wehrmacht or the Soviet Union.

This thinking may seem understandable given the ineffectiveness of al-Qaida to kill many Americans after 9/11. Or it may also reflect hopes that if we only leave Iraq, radical Islam will wither away. But it is dead wrong for a number of reasons.

First, Islamic terrorists plotting attacks are arrested periodically in both Europe and the United States. Just last week a leaked British report detailed al-Qaida's plans for future "large-scale" operations. We shouldn't be blamed for being alarmist when our alarmism has resulted in our safety at home for the past five years.

Second, have we forgotten that Nazi Germany was never able to kill 3,000 Americans on our homeland? Did Japan ever destroy 16 acres in Manhattan or hit the nerve center of the U.S. military? Even the Soviet Union couldn't inflict billions of dollars in damage to the U.S. economy in a single day.

Third, in some ways stateless terrorists can be more dangerous than past conventional threats. Autocrats in some Middle East countries allow indirect financial and psychological support for al-Qaida terrorists without leaving footprints of their intent. They must assume that a single terrorist strike could kill thousands of Americans without our ability to strike back at their capitals. This inability to tie a state to its support for terrorism is our greatest obstacle in this war - and our enemies' greatest advantage.

Fourth, jihadists have already scored successes in all sorts of ways beyond altering the very nature of air travel. Cartoonists now lampoon everyone and everything - except Muslims. The pope must weigh his words carefully. Otherwise, priests and nuns are attacked abroad. A single false Newsweek story about one flushed Koran led to riot and death.

The net result is that terrified millions in Western societies silently accept that for the first time in centuries they cannot talk or write honestly about what they think of Islam and the Koran.

Fifth, everything from our 401(k) plans to municipal water plants depend on sophisticated computers and communications. And you don't need a missile to take them down. Two oceans no longer protect the United States - not when the Internet knows no boundaries, our borders are relatively wide open, and dozens of ships dock and hundreds of flights arrive daily.

A germ, some spent nuclear fuel or a vial of nerve gas could cause as much mayhem and calamity as an armored division in Hitler's army. The Soviets were considered rational enemies who accepted the bleak laws of nuclear deterrence. But the jihadists claim that they welcome death if their martyrdom results in thousands of dead Americans.

Finally, radical Islamists largely arise from the oil-rich Middle East. Since 9/11, the price of oil has skyrocketed, transferring trillions of dollars from successful Western, Indian and Chinese economies to unsuccessful Arab and Iranian autocracies.

Terrorists know that blowing up a Saudi oil field or getting control of Iraqi petroleum reserves - and they attempt both all the time - will alter the world economy. Even their mere threats give us psychological fits and their sponsors more cash.

This is a strange war. Our successes in avoiding attack convince some that the real danger has passed. And when we kill jihadists abroad, we are told it is peripheral to the war or only incites more terrorism.

But despite the current efforts at denial, the war against Islamic terrorism remains real and deadly. We can't wish it away until Middle Eastern dictatorships reform - or we end their oil stranglehold over the world economy.

Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and author, most recently, of "A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War." You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com.

Book Review: "Jesus For the Non-Religious" by John Shelby Spong

April 25, 2007, 6:35 a.m.

Personal Jesus

John Shelby Spong’s “nontheistic” Christianity.

By Jason Lee Steorts

http://www.nationalreview.com


What’s a religion good for, anyway?

That is the question retired Episcopal bishop John Shelby Spong never gets around to asking, let alone answering, in his new book, Jesus for the Non-Religious. His title suggests an answer, and he has tried to lob his book like a hand grenade into the institutions of Christendom. The idea is to explode two millennia of traditional belief on which these institutions rest, thereby making room for a new Christianity based on a conception of Jesus that is palatable to “a twenty-first century person.” What actually crawls out of the rubble is a Jesus for John Shelby Spong.

This Jesus would be unrecognizable to most Christians. The largest section of the book is an attack on “the supernatural forms of yesterday’s Christianity.” Spong executes this attack by means of a lengthy textual criticism of the Gospels, sprinkled with occasional undeveloped thoughts on the incompatibility of traditional belief with a modern worldview. (“The ability of anyone to walk on water exists in our world not in reality, but only in very bad golf jokes.”) Along the way, he jettisons the following claims, among others: that Mary was a virgin at the time of Jesus’s birth; that Jesus performed miracles; that Jesus atoned for the sins of mankind; that Jesus was resurrected; and that the resurrected Jesus ascended to Heaven.

Spong’s analysis is interesting as far as it goes, though his tendency to dismiss all disagreement as “hysterical” — his adjective of choice for traditional believers — is unbecoming, morally and intellectually. I offer here no evaluation of his textual criticism, as literary sleuthing is rarely dispositive. Instead, let’s assume for the sake of argument that his thesis is correct: Jesus performed no miracles, wrought no atonement, and rose from no tomb. When one is left with such a Christ, what does it mean to say — as Spong says of himself — that one is “a believing Christian”? What does one believe in? How could one persuade anyone else to share this belief?

Spong’s attraction to Jesus seems to be rooted largely in the ethics Jesus taught and lived. Jesus was nice to Samaritans. Jesus didn’t shun lepers. Jesus protected adulteresses from the stoning mobs. All to the good, as hysterical Christians would agree.

Disagreement is likely to begin where Spong’s Jesus starts preaching the Gospel according to Howard Dean. For instance, this Jesus would support the ordination of homosexual bishops and oppose the “authoritarian” institutions of the Christian churches. Why? Because “moral judgment is not life-giving; love that transcends the boundaries of judgment, as Jesus’ love did, is.” One can charitably assume that, had Spong written more carefully, he would not have implied that all moral judgments are to be forsworn. (His admonition not to judge rests on a judgment against those who are judgmental in ways he disapproves of.) But the principal message of Spong’s Jesus is clear enough: We must set aside unacceptably exclusionary traditions and moralities.

Whether this appeals to you as an ethics will depend on whether you share Spong’s opinions about which exclusions are unacceptable. But even if you do, Spong does not want you to think of Jesus as a moral exemplar merely. Probably he wishes to preserve some necessary connection between Christ and Christianity, and recognizes that the soundness of an ethical system does not depend on who taught it, or whether anyone taught it at all. (We could pattern a very fine Christian ethics on the “life” of Alyosha Karamazov.) How, then, does Jesus transcend the ethical? “As a Christian,” Spong explains, “I live inside a faith system which, at its core, asserts that in the life of this Jesus, that which we call God has been met, encountered and engaged.”

A FAREWELL TO THEISM

“That which we call God,” eh? And what might that be? Spong starts by telling us what it isn’t. The “theistic definition of God” is dead, he says. What he means is that he does not believe — and does not think anyone else should believe — in “a being, supernatural in power, dwelling outside this world and able to invade the world in miraculous ways to bless, to punish, to accomplish the divine will, to answer prayers and to come to the aid of frail, powerless human beings.” Our goal should be to “separate God understood theistically from the experience of God that we claim for Jesus.”

Unfortunately, Spong never explains what his nontheistic God is. His book abounds in passages such as this: “There is something about this Jesus that erases tribal boundaries, that calls people to step beyond security systems and that flows into a new humanity unbounded by the walls of protectionism. That is one huge dimension of what it means to say that God was experienced as present in this man Jesus.” One reads on in the hope that Spong will come around to the other dimension — to whatever it is about God that cannot be reduced to ethics. (For if the word “God” denotes nothing but the totality of sound ethical propositions, it is simply a metaphor for what could be discussed more clearly without it.) One’s hope is finally disappointed in the last chapter, when Spong admits to having no idea what God is: “I cannot tell anyone who or what God is. . . . The reality of God can never be defined. It can only be experienced, and we need always to recognize that even that experience may be nothing more than an illusion.”

Spong’s position, then, is this: There is a higher reality, and we have named it “God.” Somehow we encounter this higher reality in the life of Jesus. But we have no idea what the higher reality is, and can say nothing intelligible about it.

This view has one troublesome little catch: It destroys the possibility of justifying the claim that the higher reality exists. It would be one thing if we had a way of cognizing some aspect of the higher reality, an ability to articulate propositions about it and adduce reasons for thinking these propositions true. It is quite another to posit the higher reality’s existence simply because you feel you have “encountered” it. If you can say nothing about what you have encountered — and if the supposed encounter might in fact be “an illusion” — how can you know that you have encountered anything at all?

The blindness of this epistemological alley is all too apparent when Spong uses “the language of human analogy” to describe his experience of God. What he actually describes is his feelings. “I experience life to be more than I can embrace.” “I experience love as something beyond me.” “I experience being as something in which I participate, but my being does not come close to exhausting the content of Being itself.” This is all fascinating as one man’s account of his personal psychology. But there is no reason to suppose that what John Shelby Spong feels tells us anything other than what it feels like to be John Shelby Spong.

Even if we could somehow know that the nontheistic God existed, its obscurity would vitiate Spong’s conception of Christian ethics. Consider again my original question: What is a religion good for? One answer is that it goes on where Spong stops. It offers an account of the higher reality. It is not just an aggregation of imperatives, but a group of answers to such questions as: Why does something exist instead of nothing? Is there a supreme being? If so, what is his nature, and what does he expect of me? Will I survive my death? What must I do to ensure that my life after death is agreeable?

A religion’s answers to these questions are perfectly intelligible, even if its success in justifying them is open to debate. This intelligibility in turn provides a secure foundation for the religion’s ethics. If you believe (1) that you owe obedience to God and (2) that God has commanded you not to murder, it is a simple deductive step to the conclusion (3) that you ought not murder. I am not saying that an ethics must make reference to claims about God. But Spong thinks Jesus’s ethics is grounded in the divinity that was present in Jesus. By insisting that this divinity is unknown and unknowable, he destroys the possibility of such grounding.

SOMETHING ERE THE END . . .

So the nontheistic God is mute. It can say nothing about how we should live. Worse, it can say nothing about how we should die. That too is something a religion — or a theistic one, at least — is good for. Spong seems to recognize this. Theism arose, he says, as an adaptive response to the irreducible anxiety of self-consciousness, and in particular the fear of death. Whether or not he has his evolutionary biology right, it is surely true that theism, coupled with a belief in personal immortality, helps ease the way into that good night.

John Shelby Spong is an old man. In a passage both moving and sincere, he writes of his own approaching end and his hope to write another book:

I have one further literary task that I hope to complete in my already more than ‘three score and ten years.’ . . . I want to take the idea of a nontheistic but eminently real God met in the human Jesus and from that vantage point address the subject of death and dying, as well as what the church has tried to say throughout the ages on the subject of eternal life. . . . If my idea of God and my vision of a redefined Jesus cannot speak to the human anxiety of death, then I do not believe that I have found either the new beginning for the Jesus story that I seek or one that will survive.

It is hard to see how the new story can survive when the God at its center is nothing but an overwrought sentimentality plummeting down an abyss. If that is all we have left, Spong can keep his Christianity. There would be more dignity and courage — to say nothing of honesty — in facing life’s terrible question marks with a mind that does not flinch.

Kahn Haunted by Rose's Lie

Page Two: Acclaimed author haunted by Rose's lie

Wednesday, April 25, 2007

By Bill Dwyre, Los Angeles Times

The boy who wrote "The Boys of Summer" will be 80 on Halloween. At this stage of his life, the trick for Roger Kahn is to treat himself to writing projects that are comfortable and not consuming.

"I'm a consultant now," he says, from his home in Stone Ridge, N.Y. "Best job in the world, a consultant."

He is a frequent public speaker, is working on several screenplays and continues to write and make appearances in connection with the 21 books he has written. He retains the personal and financial fruits of his 1972 masterpiece about Kahn, his dying father and the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball players from the early 1950s they both loved.

Sports Illustrated once called "The Boys of Summer" the "best baseball book ever written."

No less an author than James A. Michener called it "a work of high moral purpose."

So, Kahn should be able to assume hyperbole and superlatives on his gravestone. He should be confident that his legacy is the language of a generation of baseball fans, that his literary image should be devoid of question marks.

Because of Pete Rose, he is not sure.

The occasional sleepless night for Kahn over the Rose book had ended years ago. Then came the recent ESPN interview when Rose told Dan Patrick that he had, indeed, gambled on baseball. The quote was, "I bet on my team to win every night because I love my team."

Kahn first heard it on CNN.

"My first reaction was to reach for the barf bag," Kahn says.

The news in Rose's statement was not lost on the media. It brought headlines. Rose, who played the most major-league games and had the most hits, was banned from baseball in 1989 by then-commissioner Bart Giamatti because Giamatti was convinced Rose had bet on baseball games. Rose, then manager of the Cincinnati Reds, admitted only to gambling on lots of other sports and to being a "terrible selector of friends."

Most people who cared believed he had bet on baseball, and most did so based on the same logic used by Jim Murray, longtime Los Angeles Times sports columnist and advocate of Rose's eventual admission into baseball's Hall of Fame.

"Did Rose bet on the game?" Murray once asked in a column. "Probably. Rose bet on the color of the next car coming down the street."

Into this mess, unknowingly, had stepped Kahn. He had begun research on a book on Rose before the gambling allegations surfaced. He had reservations from the start, but when the publishers promised that it was a million-dollar project, half for him, half for Rose, he did what any writer would have done. He said yes.

Kahn had additional pressures. His son, Roger Laurence Kahn, was battling depression and drug addiction, and the bills for his medical care were exorbitant. Kahn's son committed suicide in 1987.

Kahn says he never felt 100 percent comfortable with Rose or the Rose project, especially when, in the middle of work on "Pete Rose: My Story," the gambling accusations started tumbling out.

"He was always surrounded with a bodyguard of liars," Kahn says, "and so the question had to be put to him, before we went forward with the book. I must have sat him down and asked him five times, 'Did you bet on baseball?'

"And the answer was always the same. He'd look me in the eye and say, 'I've got too much respect for the game.' "

Until the recent interview on ESPN radio, that remained Rose's stance. He admitted to betting on all sorts of sports and to probably having a gambling problem.

But he never admitted to betting on his own game because he "respected it too much."

Now, Kahn feels the sting of having his name on a book based on a lie.

"I regret I ever got involved in the book," Kahn says.

Kahn, who made about one-fifth of his promised $500,000, is not the first author, nor will he be the last, to get it slightly wrong. And his body of work, minus "Pete Rose: My Story," speaks volumes. He will always be much more a boy of summer than a biographer of Pete Rose. And the joy and insight he gets from his "boys" remains a source of never-ending stories and inspiration.

"A couple of years ago, I was sitting at a table at an event at Cooperstown, with Clem Labine, Frank Robinson and Enos 'Country' Slaughter," Kahn says. "Slaughter was one of the great rednecks of our time, but here it was, years later, and he was an old man, sitting with old baseball players, and any racial things are history. Slaughter asks Robinson if he'd go over to the buffet table and get him some oysters, but please make sure to get soft ones because his teeth hurt.

"Sure enough, Robinson goes off and gets a plate of soft oysters for Enos Slaughter, and Labine, watching closely, tells me later that nothing will ever surprise him again."

Slaughter and Labine are both dead now, and Robinson isn't as good a storyteller as Roger Kahn.

So, for the sake of baseball fans everywhere, Kahn needs to stop plotting ways to find and burn all copies of his book on Rose and return to "consulting" on our behalf.

Daniel Pipes: A Madrassa Grows in Brooklyn

Principal-designate Dhabah "Debbie" Almontaser of the Khalil Gibran International Academy

Daniel Pipes

http://www.FrontPageMag.com

April 25, 2007

Come September, an Arabic-language public secondary school is slated to open its doors in Brooklyn. The New York City Department of Education says the Khalil Gibran International Academy, serving grades six through 12, will boast a "multicultural curriculum and intensive Arabic language instruction."

This appears to be a marvelous idea, for New York and the country need native-born Arabic speakers. They have a role in the military, diplomacy, intelligence, the courts, the press, the academy, and many other institutions — and teaching languages to the young is the ideal route to polyglotism. As someone who spent years learning Arabic, I am enthusiastic in principle about the idea of this school, one of the first of its kind in the United States.

In practice, however, I strongly oppose the KGIA and predict that its establishment will generate serious problems. I say this because Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage. Some examples:

Franck Salameh taught Arabic at the most prestigious American language school, Middlebury College in Vermont. In an article for the Middle East Quarterly, he wrote: "even as students leave Middlebury with better Arabic, they also leave indoctrinated with a tendentious Arab nationalist reading of Middle Eastern history. Permeating lectures and carefully-designed grammatical drills, Middlebury instructors push the idea that Arab identity trumps local identities and that respect for minority ethnic and sectarian communities betrays Arabism."

For an example of such grammatical drills, see the just-published book by Shukri Abed, Focus on Contemporary Arabic: Conversations with Native Speakers (Yale University Press), one chapter of which is titled "The Question of Palestine." Its intensely politicized readings would be unimaginable in a book of French or Spanish conversations.

The Islamist dimension worries me as well. An organization that lobbies for Arabic instruction, the Arabic Language Institute Foundation, claims that knowledge of Islam's holy language can help the West recover from what its leader, Akhtar H. Emon, calls its "moral decay." In other words, Muslims tend to see non-Muslims learning Arabic as a step toward an eventual conversion to Islam, an expectation I encountered while studying Arabic in Cairo in the 1970s.

Also, learning Arabic in of itself promotes an Islamic outlook, as James Coffman showed in 1995, looking at evidence from Algeria. Comparing students taught in French and in Arabic, he found that "Arabized students show decidedly greater support for the Islamist movement and greater mistrust of the West." Those Arabized students, he notes, more readily believed in "the infiltration into Algeria of Israeli women spies infected with AIDS…the mass conversion to Islam by millions of Americans," and other Islamist nonsense.

Specifics about the KGIA confirm these apprehensions, including its roster of sponsors and enthusiasts. The school's key figure, principal-designate Dhabah ("Debbie") Almontaser, has a record of extremist views, as William A. Mayer and Beila Rabinowitz have shown at PipeLineNews.org.

* Arabs or Muslims, Ms. Almontaser says, are innocent of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001: "I don't recognize the people who committed the attacks as either Arabs or Muslims." Instead, she blames September 11 on Washington's foreign policies, saying they "can have been triggered by the way the USA breaks its promises with countries across the world, especially in the Middle East, and the fact that it has not been a fair mediator."

* At a community meeting with the New York Police Department commissioner, she berated the NYPD for using "FBI tactics" when informants were used to prevent a subway bombing, thereby polarizing the Muslim community. For Ms. Almontaser, it appears, preventing terrorism counts less than soothing Muslim sensibilities.

* She calls George W. Bush a "nightmare" who is "trying to destroy the United States."

Rewarding these views, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a foreign-funded front organization, in 2005 bestowed an honor on Ms. Almontaser for her "numerous contributions" to the protection of civil liberties.

Her intentions for the KGIA should raise alarms. An Associated Press report paraphrases her saying that "the school won't shy away from sensitive topics such as colonialism and the Israeli-Palestinian crisis," and she notes that the school will "incorporate the Arabic language and Islamic culture." Islamic culture? Not what was advertised — but imbuing pan-Arabism and anti-Zionism, proselytizing for Islam, and promoting Islamist sympathies will predictably make up the school's true curriculum.

To express your concerns about this planned Arabic school, please write the New York City chancellor, Joel Klein, at JKlein@schools.nyc.gov.

Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.

Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers). This column will be on hiatus for the next 15 weeks, until mid-April, while Mr. Pipes teaches at Pepperdine University in Malibu, California.

Robert Spencer: Beating Freedom of Speech

Scene from Theo van Gogh's film "Submission"

http://www.FrontPageMag.com
April 25, 2007

On Thursday, April 12, a gang of Somali thugs on a downtown Oslo street attacked Kadra, a Somali woman who now lives in Norway, and beat her senseless, breaking several of her ribs. They were enraged at her for her recent statement that the Qur’an’s views of women needed reevaluation. They also might have been angry because of her role in revealing the widespread support among imams in Norway for female genital mutilation; Kadra exposed their support for this horrific procedure using a hidden camera in a 2000 documentary for Norwegian television.

As they beat her, Kadra’s attackers shouted Allahu akbar – Allah is great – and recited verses from the Qur’an. “I was terrified,” she said. “While I lay on the pavement they kicked me and screamed that I had trampled on the Koran.”

The following Tuesday, two men in Mississauga, Ontario, attacked journalist Jawaad Faizi, who writes for the Pakistan Post, a newspaper based in Mississauga. The attackers told Faizi to stop “writing against Islam,” and particularly to stop criticizing an Islamic organization, Idara Minhaj-ul-Quran, and its leader, a Muslim cleric named Allama Tahir-Ul-Qadri.

Faizi, a native of Lahore, Pakistan, said, “I had so many problems back home as a journalist, but I’m shocked that this is happening here.”

Of course, “writing against Islam,” or being perceived as having done so, has always been dangerous, as Salman Rushdie and many others can attest. The New York Times reported in 2002 that a professor at the University of Nablus in the West Bank, Suliman Bashear, who “argued that Islam developed as a religion gradually rather than emerging fully formed from the mouth of the Prophet,” was for this novel and, from the point of view of traditional Islam, heretical teaching, thrown out of a second-story window by his students. In 1947, the Iranian lawyer Ahmad Kasravi was murdered in court by Islamic radicals; Kasravi was there to defend himself against charges that he had attacked Islam. Four years later, members of the same radical Muslim group, Fadayan-e Islam, assassinated Iranian Prime Minister Haji-Ali Razmara after a group of Muslim clerics issued a fatwa calling for his death. In 1992, the Egyptian writer Faraj Foda was murdered by Muslims enraged at his “apostasy” from Islam — another offense for which traditional Islamic law prescribes the death penalty. Foda’s countryman, the Nobel Prizewinning novelist Naguib Mahfouz, was stabbed in 1994 after accusations of blasphemy. Under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, many non-Muslims have been arrested, tortured, and sentenced to die on the slimmest of evidence.

But for such things to happen in Iran and Egypt, two countries where Islamic radicalism is widespread, is one thing; to have them happen in Oslo and Mississauga, Ontario is quite another. But this kind of thing has happened before in the West. On November 2, 2004, Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was bicycling through the streets of Amsterdam when Mohammed Bouyeri, a Muslim wearing traditional Islamic clothing, began shooting at him. After Van Gogh fell off his bike, Bouyeri ran up to him and began slitting his throat, attempting to behead him. In his agony, van Gogh pleaded with his killer, “Can’t we talk about this?” Bouyeri replied by stabbing van Gogh repeatedly and leaving a note on a knife stabbed into the body. The note contained verses from the Qur’an and threats to other Dutch public figures who opposed the flood of Muslim immigrants into the Netherlands.

Bouyeri killed van Gogh because of the filmmaker’s twelve-minute video Submission, which had aired on Dutch TV a few weeks before the murder. A collaboration between van Gogh and the Somali ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who was then a member of the Dutch Parliament, Submission decried the mistreatment of Muslim women — and even featured images of battered women wearing see-through robes that exposed their breasts, with verses from the Qur’an written on their bodies.

At his trial, Bouyeri was unrepentant -- and absolutely clear about why he murdered van Gogh. “I did what I did purely out my beliefs,” he explained, Qur’an in hand. “I want you to know that I acted out of conviction and not that I took his life because he was Dutch or because I was Moroccan and felt insulted….If I ever get free, I would do it again.” He was, he said, acting in accord with Islamic law: “What moved me to do what I did was purely my faith. I was motivated by the law that commands me to cut off the head of anyone who insults Allah and his prophet.”

The attacks on Kadra and Faizi show that there are many others in the West today who believe that they must likewise act upon Allah’s commands and victimize those whom they deem to have offended Islam.

This is a challenge to all Western governments, for it is a challenge to the freedom of speech that is rooted in the constitutions and laws of Western states, and ultimately is intimately connected with the freedom of conscience and the Judeo-Christian view of the dignity of the human being before God. Western leaders should move now to make it abundantly clear that attacks on “blasphemers” and “heretics” will not be tolerated; that those who believe that Sharia should be the highest law of the land are not welcome here; and that the West will defend our Judeo-Christian culture and heritage.

Otherwise, only one thing is certain: there will be many, many more such attacks.


Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of six books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith and the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad.

A-Rod’s HRs wasted

Alex Rodriguez hits a two-run homer in the ninth inning of last night's loss to push his season total to 14 home runs in 18 games.

DEVIL RAYS 10, YANKEES 8

BY KAT O'BRIEN
kat.obrien@newsday.com


April 24, 2007

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. -- As Alex Rodriguez continues to put up numbers that look as if they belong in a video game, the Yankees' pitchers continue to falter.

The Yankees dropped their fourth straight game last night, losing to the Devil Rays, 10-8, despite Rodriguez's two home runs. At this rate, the only way A-Rod's performance will be as memorable as it should be is if he copies Babe Ruth's early years and begins pitching as well.

Rodriguez has 14 home runs in 18 games, reaching that figure faster than any other player in major-league history. With six games remaining in the month, he tied the Cardinals' Albert Pujols for the major-league record for home runs in April and broke the American League record of 13 held by Ken Griffey Jr. A-Rod's 34 RBIs match the total of the two AL players tied for second, as Jason Giambi and David Ortiz each has 17. But not even those superlatives have been able to prevent the Yankees from falling to 8-10.

"He's keeping us in the games," manager Joe Torre said. "He gives you a chance to catch up all the time ... unfortunately."

The "unfortunately" aspect is that the Yankees are constantly in catch-up mode. That's because the Yankees' starting pitchers are averaging a major league-low 4.87 innings per game, according to Stats, Inc. Kei Igawa did not even manage that last night. He gave up seven runs and was yanked after 4 1/3 innings.

Rodriguez's historic month is the only reason the Yankees are even in a position to compete. He went 4-for-5 with three RBIs and four runs scored last night. His batting average is up to .400, he has hit safely in all 18 games and his slugging percentage is 1.053. The list of records he is setting or matching is lengthy.

But can Rodriguez enjoy what he is doing? "Probably not as much as I should," he said, "but I will someday."

The sheer joy Rodriguez exhibited immediately after his pair of walk-off home runs earlier this month at Yankee Stadium is gone. Knocking in nearly two runs a game, a pace that he cannot realistically expect to maintain, must feel exhausting when it can't prevent four consecutive close losses.

"You've just got to grind through," he said. "We need a win in the worst way ... The key is not to get discouraged."

Even Torre admitted that can be tricky when the team is racking up runs but not seeing any rewards. The Yankees scored in each inning from the second through the sixth last night yet never took the lead beyond 1-0. They knocked around Devil Rays starter Casey Fossum (2-1) for six earned runs in 5 2/3 innings and he still got the win.

Igawa (1-1) did even worse than Fossum as his ERA rose to 7.84. If the Yankees were not desperate for starters, they might send him to the minor leagues. They can hardly afford to do that, given that Chien-Ming Wang is making his season debut tonight and Mike Mussina and Carl Pavano still are on the disabled list.

"He had no command," Torre said. "He was missing his spots by a long way. You're certainly not going to have success when you don't throw enough strikes and you don't spot the ball."

Rocco Baldelli's three-run homer in the second inning gave the Devil Rays the lead for good at 4-1, but the Yankees closed to within 7-6 in the sixth inning. Colter Bean pitched a scoreless inning in relief of Igawa, and Mike Myers and Brian Bruney got the final two outs in the sixth. But Bruney lost his command in the seventh, walking Akinori Iwamura and giving up a double to Elijah Dukes. After he fell behind Josh Paul 2-and-0, Torre replaced him with Luis Vizcaino, who walked Paul and allowed a three-run double to B.J. Upton, who had lined a home run off the leftfield foul pole in the fourth inning.

"It just can't happen every night like it is," Johnny Damon said of the short starts. "The bullpen's being used to death because of it."

Tonight

Yankees at Tampa Bay

7:05 p.m.

TV: YES

Radio: WCBS (880)

David Halberstam, 73, Reporter and Author, Dies

By CLYDE HABERMAN
The New York Times
Published: April 24, 2007

David Halberstam, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and tireless author of books on topics as varied as America’s military failings in Vietnam, the deaths of firefighters at the World Trade Center and the high-pressure world of professional basketball, was killed yesterday in a car crash south of San Francisco. He was 73, and lived in Manhattan.

Mr. Halberstam was a passenger in a car making a turn in Menlo Park, Calif., when it was hit broadside by another car and knocked into a third vehicle, said the San Mateo County coroner. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

The man who was driving Mr. Halberstam, a journalism student at the University of California at Berkeley, was injured, as were the drivers of the other two vehicles. None of those injuries were called serious.

Mr. Halberstam was killed doing what he had done his entire adult life: reporting. He was on his way to interview Y. A. Tittle, the former New York Giants quarterback, for a book about the 1958 championship game between the Giants and the Baltimore Colts, considered by many to be the greatest football game ever played.

Tall, square-jawed and graced with an imposing voice so deep that it seemed to begin at his ankles, Mr. Halberstam came into his own as a journalist in the early 1960s covering the nascent American war in South Vietnam for The New York Times.

His reporting, along with that of several colleagues, left little doubt that a corrupt South Vietnamese government supported by the United States was no match for Communist guerrillas and their North Vietnamese allies. His dispatches infuriated American military commanders and policy makers in Washington, but they accurately reflected the realities on the ground.

For that work, Mr. Halberstam shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1964. Eight years later, after leaving The Times, he chronicled what went wrong in Vietnam — how able and dedicated men propelled the United States into a war later deemed unwinnable — in a book whose title entered the language: “The Best and the Brightest.”

Mr. Halberstam went on to write more than 20 books, including one on the Korean War scheduled to be published in the fall.

“I think the work he was proudest of was his trilogy on war,” his wife, Jean Halberstam, said last night. Besides “The Best and the Brightest,” she was referring to a study of United States policies in the 1990s called “War in a Time of Peace: Bush, Clinton and the Generals,” and the Korean War book, “The Coldest Winter.”

Mr. Halberstam’s range, however, extended well beyond war. His interests roamed from basketball to the auto industry, from the 1949 American League pennant race to the rise of modern media conglomerates in the 20th century.

“A writer should be like a playwright — putting people on stage, putting ideas on stage, making the reader become the audience,” he recently told an interviewer for NY1 News.

Over the years, he developed a pattern of alternating a book with a weighty theme with one that might seem of slighter import but to which he nonetheless applied his considerable reportorial muscles. “He was a man who didn’t have a lazy bone in his body,” said the writer Gay Talese, a close family friend.

Almost invariably, Mr. Halberstam wrote about sports in those alternate books. “They were his entertainments,” his wife said. “They were his way to take a break.”

As a result, his book on the media, “The Powers That Be,” was followed by a basketball book, “The Breaks of the Game.” A study of the decline of the American automobile industry and the Japanese ascension, “The Reckoning,” was followed before long by “The Summer of ’49,” on an epic pennant battle between the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox.

Other works included “The Fifties,” a look at a decade that he argued was more monumental than many believed; “The Children,” about the civil-rights movement of the 1960s; and “Firehouse,” a study of the tight-knit world of New York firefighters, focused on 13 men from a firehouse near his Upper West Side home who went to the World Trade Center on 9/11. Only one survived.

David Halberstam was born on April 10, 1934, in New York City, to an Army surgeon, Dr. Charles A. Halberstam, and a schoolteacher, Blanche Levy Halberstam. His older brother, Michael, became a well-known cardiologist in Washington. In 1980, Michael Halberstam was shot in his home and killed by an intruder.

After World War II, the Halberstam family moved to Westchester County. David attended school in Yonkers, and then went to Harvard, where he graduated in 1955. By then, his commitment to journalism had been sealed. He was managing editor of the student newspaper, The Crimson.

After graduation, he went south and wrote about the nascent civil-rights movement, first for The West Point Daily Times Leader in Mississippi, then for The Nashville Tennessean. In 1960 he joined The New York Times, first in the Washington bureau, then as a foreign correspondent based in Congo.

It was when he went to South Vietnam in 1962 that he began to leave an indelible journalistic mark.



David Halberstam in Vietnam

He soon saw that the American-backed government in Saigon was corrupt and failing — and he said so. William Prochnau, who wrote a book on the reporting of that period, “Once Upon a Distant War,” said last night that Mr. Halberstam and other American journalists then in Vietnam were incorrectly regarded by many as antiwar.

“He was not antiwar,” Mr. Prochnau said. “They were cold war children, just like me, brought up on hiding under the desk.” It was simply a case, he said, of American commanders lying to the press about what was happening in Vietnam. “They were shut out and they were lied to,” Mr. Prochnau said. And Mr. Halberstam “didn’t say, ‘You’re not telling me the truth.’ He said, ‘You’re lying.’ He didn’t mince words.”

President John F. Kennedy was so incensed by Mr. Halberstam’s war coverage that he strongly suggested to The Times’s publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, that the reporter be replaced. Mr. Sulzberger replied that Mr. Halberstam would stay where he was. He even had the reporter cancel a scheduled vacation so that no one would get the wrong idea.

After Vietnam and after winning his Pulitzer Prize, Mr. Halberstam was assigned to the Times bureau in Warsaw. There, he met an actress, Elzbieta Czyzewska, whom he married in 1965. That marriage was short-lived. In 1979, he married Jean Sandness, then a writer.

In addition to his wife, he is survived by their daughter, Julia, also of Manhattan.

By the late 1960s, Mr. Halberstam tired of daily journalism and he left The Times, not exactly on mutually amicable terms. After that, he devoted himself to books, magazine articles and even a Vietnam-based novel, “One Very Hot Day.”

In the recent NY1 interview, Mr. Halberstam summed up his approach to work by quoting a basketball player. “There’s a great quote by Julius Erving,” he said, “that went, ‘Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don’t feel like doing them.’ ”

Sewell Chan, Jesse McKinley and Sam Roberts contributed reporting.

In Memoriam: Boris Yeltsin

His rule was marked by lost opportunities and fearsome political corruption.

BY DAVID SATTER
The Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, April 24, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

The era of Boris Yeltsin, who died yesterday, was a time of lost opportunity. Yeltsin led the revolution that overthrew the Soviet Union. But his attempt to build democracy in Russia was a failure, in no small measure because, mesmerized by the success of the West, he was determined to create democracy by force.

In some respects, Yeltsin was one of history's great benefactors. Expelled from the Party leadership after he made a speech in 1987 denouncing the slow pace of Soviet reform, he became a martyr in the eyes of the public. And with the help of the first free elections, he emerged as the leader of the opposition to the regime. The movement he led brought a peaceful end to 73 years of communist rule.

The fall of communism, however, was only one of the goals that faced Russia in the 1990s. The second and equally important goal was the creation of a reliable democracy. If in the case of the fall of communism, Yeltsin put himself in charge of a movement that already existed and had swept the whole country, it was in the building of what came next that the decisions he made were his alone. And those decisions ultimately spelled disaster.

It is this failure that explains why Yeltsin will be little mourned in Russia; his popularity at the end of his second term was 2%. When Russians are asked to explain the popularity of Vladimir Putin today, they inevitably refer to the chaos and criminality of the Yeltsin years. This is also the reason for their loss of faith in "democracy," a loss of faith that places a huge burden on Russia's dwindling band of human rights activists.

The country that Yeltsin inherited after the fall of the Soviet Union was spiritually disoriented. After 4,000 years of civilization, the communists decided to reject not only God but any intuitive sense of right and wrong. "Right" was what served the working class. Under these circumstances, the most pressing need for Russia was to re-establish the authority of universal moral values, which could only be achieved by establishing the rule of law.

Yeltsin, however, and the small group of economists who advised him, decided that the most urgent priority for Russia was putting state-owned property immediately into private hands, even if those hands were criminal. In this, they were fully supported by the U.S. The result was that the path was laid for the pillaging of the country and the rise in Russia of the present KGB dictatorship.

Foreigners, viewing Russia from the outside, and impressed by the country's new freedoms, were often unaware of the crime and wrenching poverty that overwhelmed ordinary citizens. All property was in the hands of the government; money was in the hands of black market operators and gangsters. Without legal safeguards, criminals acquired property by bribing state officials. The biggest criminals became oligarchs and, with their newfound wealth, pillars of the government.

Russians watched with astonishment as the wealth created by the combined efforts of the entire population was parceled out to well-placed insiders on the strength of corrupt connections. The new owners proceeded to strip the assets of the factories and mines they acquired and the economy collapsed. In the period from 1992 to 1998, the Russian gross domestic product fell by half. This had not happened even under Nazi occupation.

One consequence was that Russians stopped receiving their wages. By Jan. 1, 1998, wage arrears reached 13% of the total money mass (M2)--$8 billion at the official rate of exchange. Official statistics even introduced a heading "wage arrears" and, to ward off starvation, factory workers who had gone months without their salaries began raising their own food.


**********


Perhaps most important, the spiritual crisis in Russia deepened. Communist ideology was based on a set of anti-values designed to facilitate state-sanctioned murder and justify totalitarian rule. At the same time, however, these values defined a worldview that gave each individual a sense that he was working for the good of mankind and that his life had meaning. The revelations of glasnost showed that the communist worldview was based on lies, but offered nothing to take its place. After the fall of the Soviet Union people hoped for democracy; instead they found themselves ruled by bribe-takers and gangsters. The result was widespread despair.

Between 1992 and 1994, the rise in the death rate in Russia was so dramatic that Western demographers did not believe the figures. The toll from murder, suicide, heart attacks and accidents gave Russia the death rate of a country at war; Western and Russian demographers now agree that between 1992 and 2000, the number of "surplus deaths" in Russia--deaths that cannot be explained on the basis of previous trends--was between five and six million persons.

Under these circumstances, Yeltsin became an unpopular and even hated figure in Russia. But even in light of the disastrous toll of reform, one could argue that, in his policy decisions, Yeltsin had good intentions. No such argument is possible about the means through which Yeltsin and his entourage ensured the choice of a successor.

By 1999, it was clear that, barring extraordinary events, no candidate associated with Yeltsin had a chance of being elected president. This meant the results of the dishonest division of property in the country would almost certainly be re-examined. And, for those close to Yeltsin, this promised not only the loss of their ill-gotten gains, but prison or worse.


**********


As it happened, events intervened. In September 1999, four apartment buildings were blown up in Moscow, Buinaksk and Volgodonsk, killing 300 persons as they slept. The explosions were attributed to Chechens and, with the public galvanized in support, the authorities launched a new invasion of Chechnya. Vladimir Putin, the virtually unknown former head of the Federal Security Service (FSB) who had been named prime minister, was put in charge of the campaign.

The war achieved some early gains, successfully diverting attention from the pillaging of the country. Overnight, Mr. Putin became a national hero and was elected president. His first official act was to pardon Yeltsin and the members of his family for all crimes committed in office, and to announce that the results of privatization would not be reconsidered.

A fifth bomb, however, was planted in a basement in Ryazan, southeast of Moscow. In that case, the bomb did not go off. Quick thinking residents called the local police. The bombers were arrested. They were found to be agents of the FSB.


**********


Yeltsin was a contradictory figure: A man of boundless energy and determination, his fight against the Soviet system was motivated by a personal desire for revenge but also by a vision of a better life. At the same time, however, he shared the core assumption of the communist worldview--that the individual has no value compared to the goals of the state. It was this that undercut the democracy he hoped to build and prepared the way for the KGB-FSB government that exists in Russia today.
In the aftermath of Yeltsin's death, there will be many, particularly in the U.S., who try to draw a distinction between democracy under Yeltsin and authoritarianism under Mr. Putin. This distinction is false. Democracy implies a rule of law that did not exist under Yeltsin. At the same time, Mr. Putin was Yeltsin's handpicked successor. He never would have become president were it not for the criminality of the Yeltsin years, and the apartment bombings that led to the Second Chechen War.

The emancipation of Russia and its descent back into authoritarianism are both part of Yeltsin's legacy. Fate put him at the head of a movement that did great good--but he proved incapable of guaranteeing his country a better future. In the end, his life is a sober illustration of the necessity of uprooting the communist inheritance in Russia, and of how deep that legacy runs.

Mr. Satter is affiliated with the Hoover Institution and the Johns Hopkins University. His latest book is "Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State" (Yale, 2003).

Bill Steigerwald: "The Clinton Crack-Up"

http://www.FrontPageMag.com

April 24, 2007

Conservative columnist and author R. Emmett Tyrrell has not really spent half his career reporting scandals about Bill and Hillary Clinton. It just seems that way. The American Spectator, the conservative monthly magazine he founded in 1967, broke some of the earliest stories about "Troopergate," "Travelgate," and "Filegate" in the early 1990s. And two of his books, 1997's Boy Clinton and 2003's Madam Hillary, were unflattering but best-selling biographies of his favorite Democrat power couple. Now the irrepressibly troublemaking Tyrrell has updated the Bill Clinton saga with The Clinton Crack-Up: The Boy President's Life After the White House. I talked to him Thursday, April 18, by telephone from his offices in Washington.

Q: Why can't you just leave the poor Clintons alone?

A: Because I read the newspapers! (laughs) And they're in the newspapers -- often the headlines -- every day!

Q: What's a quick synopsis of your book?

A: The book takes up from Clinton's last hours in the White House and is the only book to chronicle his years of retirement, as he raises vast amounts of money for himself, recaptures the Democrat Party, and paves the way for his wife's coronation.

Q: Would you characterize what he's doing as work or play?

A: I characterize it as "obsession," (laughs), which is to say his life. His life, as I say in the book, has been one long itinerary.

Q: Is he still the same old Bill?

A: If that's the way you're going to phrase the question, let me answer it by saying, emphasis on "old." He's really aged. I crashed his birthday party in Toronto and saw for myself what my sources had told me during the two-and-a-half years I spent writing the book -- that Clinton had aged astoundingly. He's not in particularly good health. Why that hasn't made it into the new stories about him, I don't know.

Q: Why did you write this book?

A: I’ve been fascinated with the 1960s generation, and the 1960s generation is now facing its probably great political struggle in ’08. There’s the conservative side, which I have been on all these years, and there’s the left-wing side, which the Clintons and Jean-Francois Kerry and Howard Dean and Al Gore have been on. I’ve followed them from the beginning and I’m convinced that whoever gets the Democrat nomination in ’08 will be giving the left-wing of that generation its last opportunity to lay claim to the identity of the entire generation.

Q: What has Bill Clinton been doing since he left the White House and why is it different or worse than what previous ex-presidents did?

A: Well, just in dollars and cents. I start the book by comparing the retirement of Harry Truman with the retirement of Bill Clinton. The reason you compare the two is that, a) they're both Democrats, but b), they both left office with a very low approval rating. Clinton's went through the floorboards within hours of his leaving the White House because of Pardongate, the trashing of the White House and the pilfering of the White House. But Harry Truman absolutely refused, as he put it, to "commercialize the presidency." So he lived quietly -- and I might add in dignity -- reading history and writing at his retirement home in Missouri. Clinton went out and commercialized the presidency. He raised over $43 million in the first four years with, let's face it, pretty vacuous speeches.

Q: You always hear that "Clinton is a great speaker." But I've never heard him say anything great.

A: Take a look at the quote that I lift in my prologue from Toronto -- a completely meaningless if not chaotic statement. That night in Toronto the Canadian audience contributed $24 million to the Clinton charity. I quoted from the speech. It was inane. His speeches are inane. He is in retirement a reckless, mercenary and unhappy man.

Q: Have the media done a proper job of covering ex-president Clinton?

A: In the book, I coin a phrase “the episodic apologists.” They dominate the media. They have gone through repeated episodes in the Clinton life of holding great hope for his arrival; being thrown into great indignation -– personal indignation -– at the scandal; and then hope renewed in a matter of months. You never saw it any more dramatically than after Pardongate. They had such hopes for him in retirement. And within hours he had committed the greatest pardon scandal in American political history.

Read Pardongate in the book, where I quote Democratic leaders and the New York Times and the New York Observer abominating the Clintons and, in the case of the Observer, calling on Hillary to resign from the Senate. And within a matter of months, The Washington Post, which was just as critical, is booming her as the next president of the United States.

These are the episodic apologists. I’ll tell you there is something deep-rooted in all of this. There is a deep-rooted reason that the Clintons have been accompanied through their scandalous lives by the episodic apologists. And the reason is? The 1960s generation. There has never been a generation like it -– the left’s narcissism, amorality and endless political hustle. These journalists who are episodic apologists and the politicians who are episodic apologists are from that generation.

Q: What new and interesting will aficionados of Bill Clinton’s personal life learn from your book?

A: They’ll learn that his retirement has been a period of emotional turmoil and rejection, first by the American people and his wife, who sent him off traveling the world to raise money on his speaking tours. You learn interesting things like the Secret Service has no respect for him, and in fact served as my sources in numerous occasions. You’ll learn that after telling journalists it was a great mistake for him to give international fugitive Marc Rich a pardon, he actually months later in Switzerland visited with Marc Rich. You’ll learn that in the spring of ’05 he had his political people approach the political advisers of Gov. Schwarzenegger with the proposal that if Schwarzenegger will support Clinton in eliminating the ban against a president running for a third term, his people would support Schwarzenegger in overthrowing the constitutional ban against foreign-born presidential candidates.

There’s a lot more you will learn. The beauty of being an independent critic of the Clintons, as I have been, is that I can actually report that much of the press knows but has never deigned to report to the American people.

Q: You are said to know more about the Clintons, and also more about the dark side of the Clintons, than any other writer. What's the scariest thing you know?

A: I don't know that I know much more than a lot of journalists, I just will report it. They just won't report it.

Q: Is the stuff in your book or is it waiting for future books?

A: Bill Clinton is an adolescent -- a perpetual adolescent. Taking all the pathologies of a bad boy and then bringing those pathologies of a bad boy into the presidency leads to some very dangerous consequences. One was his neglect of terrorism for eight years. Two was the technology transfers he allowed to the Red Chinese. And I guess three was defining deviancy down. I don't know what his greatest danger is to the country, but those are three.

Q: You obviously have fundamental political differences with the Clintons …

A: I don’t know! Clinton claims to be a moderate!

Q: How can we trust what you tell us about him?

A: Well, look at what I’ve actually said about him and see if it measures up. There’s never been any revelation I’ve made about Bill Clinton that has ever been found to be wrong. And make sure, that when someone tells you there is, you make sure it was a revelation of mine. The Clintons are inveterate liars and inveterate campaigners, and they’ll go out there and campaign and say that I’ve said shocking things about Bill Clinton. In his book (former Democratic National Committee Chairman) Terry McAuliffe claims that The American Spectator cooked up the nonsense that Clinton had “ordered the murder of political opponents.” He actually said in the book that that was one of our revelations. There is no truth to that whatsoever. So when somebody tells you that one of my revelations wasn’t true, make sure it was one of my revelations and not one of their pipe dreams.

Q: What good or nice things will historians say about Mr. Clinton’s eight years in office?

A: ... Historians are now saying that he achieved very little. I cite James Patterson, an eminent historian writing in the Oxford series of American history. He said that Clinton achieved very little. I suppose that’s what they’ll end up saying -– that’s the good thing: he achieved so little.

Q: The number of pardons and commutations -- was the number normal and was the nature of the crimes that were absolved typical?

A: The number was rather high but not catastrophically high. The crimes were very serious crimes -- a lot of drug dealing, money-laundering, violent crime. But what made them reprehensible was that they rarely lived up to the minimum of standards of a criminal who had spent some time in prison, had sought to make restitution, and had apologized. The Marc Rich case is a perfect example of it. In some cases, some of them never even sought pardons. In the case of Marc Rich, he had never done any time, he had never cooperated with authorities, and he had never apologized or attempted restitution.

Q: Is Bill Clinton a net plus or a net minus to Hillary Clinton's hopes in 2008?

A: I can't say if he is a net plus or a net minus. I can just tell you what his pluses are. His pluses are that he can raise a great deal of money. His minuses are three:

When he appears on stage with her, the attention shifts to him. The Clintons are constantly living in fear that there will be a bimbo eruption at any moment, because of the reckless way he's lived his years of retirement. Finally, the record is clear: When he campaigns for people, they almost always lose. In '04 he campaigned for something like 14 candidates -- 12 of them lost. It's in the book. So there's an awful lot of myth about what a great campaigner he is. He's great for Bill Clinton but he's rarely been great for anyone he's campaigned for.

Q: What does it say about this country that so many people -- including so many rich and famous people -- think Bill Clinton was a great and wonderful president?

A: Well, it says, as Will Rogers would have said -- of himself -- "A great many Americans only know what they read in the newspapers."

Bill Steigerwald is the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's associate editor. Call him at (412) 320-7983. E-mail him at: bsteigerwald@tribweb.com.

Furor over author Ayaan Hirsi Ali's visit stirs debate on religious freedom

Ayaan Hirsi Ali

By Robin Acton
PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, April 22, 2007


Say what you want about your religion.

Go ahead, say anything that comes into your mind -- even if you don't agree with your minister, your priest, your rabbi. Even if you think you're right and they've got it all wrong, as long as you're not making a direct threat to someone, you can disagree or turn your back and walk away to another faith or to no faith at all.

Here, in America, it's OK. In a land of more than 3,000 diverse religions, your right to religious liberty is a guaranteed protection under the First Amendment.

"The key in the U.S. from the beginning has been to make sure all religious groups not only understand freedoms, but connect them to their own commitment," said Charles C. Haynes, senior scholar and director of educational programs at the First Amendment Center in Arlington, Va., and Nashville.

A community debate over religious freedom surfaced in Western Pennsylvania last week when Dutch feminist author Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali refugee who has lived under the threat of death for denouncing her Muslim upbringing, made an appearance at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown.

Islamic leaders tried to block the lecture, which was sponsored through an endowment from the Frank J. and Sylvia T. Pasquerilla Lecture Series. They argued that Hirsi Ali's attacks against the Muslim faith in her book, "Infidel," and movie, "Submission," are "poisonous and unjustified" and create dissension in their community.

Although university officials listened to Islamic leaders' concerns, the lecture planned last year took place Tuesday evening under tight security, with no incidents.

Imam Fouad ElBayly, president of the Johnstown Islamic Center, was among those who objected to Hirsi Ali's appearance.

"She has been identified as one who has defamed the faith. If you come into the faith, you must abide by the laws, and when you decide to defame it deliberately, the sentence is death," said ElBayly, who came to the U.S. from Egypt in 1976.

Hirsi Ali, an atheist, has been critical of many Muslim beliefs, particularly on subjects of sexual morality, the treatment of women and female genital mutilation. In her essay "The Caged Virgin," she also wrote of punishment, noting that "a Muslim's relationship with God is one of fear."

"Our God demands total submission. He rewards you if you follow His rules meticulously. He punishes you cruelly if you break His rules, both on earth, with illness and natural disasters, and in the hereafter, with hellfire," she wrote.

In some Muslim countries, such as Iran, apostasy -- abandoning one's religious belief -- and blasphemy are considered punishable by death under sharia, a system of laws and customs that treats both public and private life as governable by God's law.

Sharia is based largely on an interpretation of the Quran, the sayings of the Prophet Mohammed, a consensus of Islamic scholars and reasoning, according to the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations. In some countries, sharia has been associated with stoning to death those who are accused of adultery, flogging for drinking wine and amputation of a hand for theft.

One of the most noted cases of apostasy in recent years involved author Salman Rushdie, whose novel "The Satanic Verses" offered an unflattering portrayal of the Muslim Prophet Mohammed. The book prompted Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa -- a religious decree -- in 1989 calling for Rushdie's assassination.

Although ElBayly believes a death sentence is warranted for Hirsi Ali, he stressed that America is not the jurisdiction where such a crime should be punished. Instead, Hirsi Ali should be judged in a Muslim country after being given a trial, he added.

"If it is found that a person is mentally unstable, or a child or disabled, there should be no punishment," he said. "It's a very merciful religion if you try to understand it."

Zahida Chaudhary, a member of the education council and education secretary at the Muslim Community Center of Greater Pittsburgh in Monroeville, insisted that Islam is a peaceful religion.

"The Prophet Mohammed was a peacemaker and a role model for humanity," she said. "My understanding is that he was a peaceful person who believed that religion was a choice. He tried to teach people and bring them into it, not punish them."

Haynes, who has studied and written extensively about religious liberty and has worked with many Muslim groups, said he was "stunned" by ElBayly's comments.

"There are more radical, extreme views of Islam in European counties than in the U.S. It's rare to hear it and even more rare to learn that American Muslims believe it," he said.

While Hirsi Ali is viewed as an infidel among the Islamic community, those who speak out against other religions usually are met with discussion, prayer and counseling. In extreme cases, critics might be shown the door.

"One is free to choose whatever religion and body of truths one wants to believe," said the Rev. Ronald Lengwin, spokesman for the Roman Catholic Diocese. "The church fosters freedom of religion. That's a decision everyone has to make on their own."

Centuries ago, Lengwin said, the church imposed harsh punishment -- including execution -- upon people viewed as heretics. He cited as an example the Roman Inquisition trial of 15th century Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei, who was tried by the church, threatened with torture and sentenced to prison for his teachings on the motions of the earth.

With the evolution of the church, things have changed.

For example, Lengwin said, the church has faced criticism from many of its own priests who have disagreed with various beliefs and practices. When that happens, there is discussion and clarification of beliefs, he said.

It doesn't always work.

"We've had people walk away and start churches of their own or join Lutheran or Presbyterian or other churches," he said. "The role of the church is to teach the truth as effectively as you can. There's no jail if you don't agree with us."

The Rev. Douglas Holben, executive presbyter for the Redstone Presbytery, which covers Westmoreland, Fayette, Somerset and Cambria counties, said the Presbyterian Church "as a community of faith would try to find a common ground" when confronted with differing opinions.

"We seek to find things to unite us," Holben said.

If faced with criticism, it's best to "find ways in which they find the church to be faithful to the Lord," he said.

Holben said the church has formed a Theological Task Force on Peace, Unity and Purity that includes people from different backgrounds and perspectives. Discussions among the group were productive, he said, adding that the members did not condemn or judge each other for their differences.

"They were able to say that even though we don't agree with your opinion, we can agree upon a common faith," he said.

Rabbi Sara Perman, leader of the Congregation Emanu-El Israel in Greensburg, explained that before the French Revolution emancipated Jews in Europe, those who spoke out against Judaism faced "cherem" or excommunication. Cherem resulted in both a spiritual and economic "death" because people who were excommunicated were unable to make a living in their community.

"Now, the reality is that if you are unsatisfied and speak out against Judaism, there isn't much we can do about it in this country," Perman said. "Within the general Jewish community, there isn't much you can do except not give them a forum or ignore them."

Haynes said the key to America's success in religious diversity is for people of all religions to understand that you "can't just tolerate" the fact that Muslims or Catholics or Protestants or Mormons or Jews have a right to be here. He said this country is a "level playing field" where everyone is free to practice their religion, but not to carry out extreme ideas that violate basic principles.

"I don't think there's anyplace on the planet with more religious diversity," Haynes said.

"This is a big challenge in 21st century America to make sure we can live with the deepest differences, and religious differences are the most difficult to navigate."



Robin Acton can be reached at racton@tribweb.com or 724-830-6295.

Mark Steyn: Let's be realistic about reality

A yellow ribbon put up in memory of the Virginia Tech shooting victims is displayed in front of a post office in downtown Blacksburg, Va., Wednesday, April 18, 2007. Postal clerks in the office said that were questioned by the FBI about a package sent by Virginia Tech gunman Cho Seung-Hui to NBC news from a Blacksburg post office.

April 22, 2007
Chicago Sun-Times

Within hours of the Virginia Tech massacre, the New York Times had identified the problem: ''What is needed, urgently, is stronger controls over the lethal weapons that cause such wasteful carnage and such unbearable loss.''

According to the Canadian blogger Kate MacMillan, a caller to her local radio station went further and said she was teaching her children to ''fear guns.''

Overseas, meanwhile, the German network NTV was first to identify the perpetrator: To accompany their report on the shootings, they flashed up a picture of Charlton Heston touting his rifle at an NRA confab.

And at Yale, the dean of student affairs, Betty Trachtenberg, reacted to the Virginia Tech murders by taking decisive action: She banned all stage weapons from plays performed on campus. After protests from the drama department, she modified her decisive action to "permit the use of obviously fake weapons" such as plastic swords.

But it's not just the danger of overly realistic plastic swords in college plays that we face today. In yet another of his not-ready-for-prime-time speeches, Barack Obama started out deploring the violence of Virginia Tech as yet another example of the pervasive violence of our society: the violence of Iraq, the violence of Darfur, the violence of . . . er, hang on, give him a minute. Ah, yes, outsourcing: ''the violence of men and women who . . . suddenly have the rug pulled out from under them because their job has moved to another country." And let's not forget the violence of radio hosts: ''There's also another kind of violence, though, that we're going to have to think about. It's not necessarily physical violence, but violence that we perpetrate on each other in other ways. Last week the big news, obviously, had to do with Imus and the verbal violence that was directed at young women who were role models for all of us, role models for my daughters.''

I've had some mail in recent days from people who claimed I'd insulted the dead of Virginia Tech. Obviously, I regret I didn't show the exquisite taste and sensitivity of Sen. Obama and compare getting shot in the head to an Imus one-liner. Does he mean it? I doubt whether even he knows. When something savage and unexpected happens, it's easiest to retreat to our tropes and bugbears or, in the senator's case, a speech on the previous week's "big news." Perhaps I'm guilty of the same. But then Yale University, one of the most prestigious institutes of learning on the planet, announces that it's no longer safe to expose twentysomething men and women to ''Henry V'' unless you cry God for Harry, England and St. George while brandishing a bright pink and purple plastic sword from the local kindergarten. Except, of course, that the local kindergarten long since banned plastic swords under its own "zero tolerance" policy.

I think we have a problem in our culture not with "realistic weapons" but with being realistic about reality. After all, we already "fear guns," at least in the hands of NRA members. Otherwise, why would we ban them from so many areas of life? Virginia Tech, remember, was a "gun-free zone," formally and proudly designated as such by the college administration. Yet the killer kept his guns and ammo on the campus. It was a "gun-free zone" except for those belonging to the guy who wanted to kill everybody. Had the Second Amendment not been in effect repealed by VT, someone might have been able to do as two students did five years ago at the Appalachian Law School: When a would-be mass murderer showed up, they rushed for their vehicles, grabbed their guns and pinned him down until the cops arrived.

But you can't do that at Virginia Tech. Instead, the administration has created a "Gun-Free School Zone." Or, to be more accurate, they've created a sign that says "Gun-Free School Zone." And, like a loopy medieval sultan, they thought that simply declaring it to be so would make it so. The "gun-free zone" turned out to be a fraud -- not just because there were at least two guns on the campus last Monday, but in the more important sense that the college was promoting to its students a profoundly deluded view of the world.

I live in northern New England, which has a very low crime rate, in part because it has a high rate of gun ownership. We do have the occasional murder, however. A few years back, a couple of alienated loser teens from a small Vermont town decided they were going to kill somebody, steal his ATM cards, and go to Australia. So they went to a remote house in the woods a couple of towns away, knocked on the door, and said their car had broken down. The guy thought their story smelled funny so he picked up his Glock and told 'em to get lost. So they concocted a better story, and pretended to be students doing an environmental survey. Unfortunately, the next old coot in the woods was sick of environmentalists and chased 'em away. Eventually they figured they could spend months knocking on doors in rural Vermont and New Hampshire and seeing nothing for their pains but cranky guys in plaid leveling both barrels through the screen door. So even these idiots worked it out: Where's the nearest place around here where you're most likely to encounter gullible defenseless types who have foresworn all means of resistance? Answer: Dartmouth College. So they drove over the Connecticut River, rang the doorbell, and brutally murdered a couple of well-meaning liberal professors. Two depraved misfits of crushing stupidity (to judge from their diaries) had nevertheless identified precisely the easiest murder victims in the twin-state area. To promote vulnerability as a moral virtue is not merely foolish. Like the new Yale props department policy, it signals to everyone that you're not in the real world.

The "gun-free zone" fraud isn't just about banning firearms or even a symptom of academia's distaste for an entire sensibility of which the Second Amendment is part and parcel but part of a deeper reluctance of critical segments of our culture to engage with reality. Michelle Malkin wrote a column a few days ago connecting the prohibition against physical self-defense with "the erosion of intellectual self-defense," and the retreat of college campuses into a smothering security blanket of speech codes and "safe spaces" that's the very opposite of the principles of honest enquiry and vigorous debate on which university life was founded. And so we "fear guns," and "verbal violence," and excessively realistic swashbuckling in the varsity production of ''The Three Musketeers.'' What kind of functioning society can emerge from such a cocoon?

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: Gun ban made everyone 'feel safe'

A Virginia Tech faculty member lays a flower at a memorial to the victims of the Virginia Tech shooting, on the campus in Blacksburg, Virginia April 19, 2007.

Apr. 22, 2007
Las Vegas Review-Journal

A non-citizen with a green card -- stay tuned, the parallels to Jamaican Colin Ferguson killing six and wounding 19 on the Long Island Railroad in 1993 go way beyond that -- killed 32 people at Virginia Tech University last week, finally growing so weary after two hours of unobstructed mayhem that he gave up waiting for police to intervene and killed himself.

Surprisingly -- but only because we keep assuming they're more susceptible to the weight of facts and evidence than the average house plant -- the victim disarmament movement was once again in full bray last week, splashing around in the gore of Virginia Tech and shrieking with glee at the prospect that this massacre may once again breathe life into their thoroughly discredited agenda.

In fact, it would be harder to dream up a tragedy better designed than Virginia Tech -- where gun-grabbers are disappointed the killer used only a couple of pocket pistols, instead of a big ugly "assault rifle" -- to demonstrate the folly of "gun control."

Last year, the Roanoke Times quoted Virginia Tech spokesman Larry Hincker saying he was happy to hear of the defeat of Virginia House Bill 1572 -- sponsored by Todd Gilbert -- which would have prohibited public universities from making "rules or regulations limiting or abridging the ability of a student who possesses a valid concealed handgun permit ... from lawfully carrying a concealed handgun."

"I'm sure the university community is appreciative of the General Assembly's actions because this will help parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safe on our campus," the Virginia Tech spokesman said, little more than a year ago.

One wonders if this cheerful idiot still holds that parents, students, faculty and visitors feel safer on the Virginia Tech campus, knowing they're barred from defending themselves against armed lunatics like Seung-Hui Cho?

Since Gilbert's bill failed, most universities in Virginia continue to require students and employees other than police to check their guns. In June 2006, Virginia Tech's governing board specifically approved a "violence prevention policy" that reaffirmed that school's ban.

I know what: Let's next "prevent more violence" in the Middle East by disarming Jews in Israel and trusting the Arabs to leave them alone!

"Had I been on campus today, and otherwise been entitled to carry firearms for protection and been deprived of that, I don't think words can describe how I would have felt, knowing I could have stopped something like this," Gilbert, the sponsor of that modest 2006 Virginia bill, told World Net Daily on the day of the shootings.

If that sounds familiar, it's because numerous witnesses to the Colin Ferguson massacre on the Long Island Railroad later testified that -- had they not been barred by law from carrying their own self-defense weapons -- they could easily have saved many lives by taking down the killer on one of the many occasions when he stopped to reload.

Similarly, Suzanna Gratia Hupp won election to the Texas Legislature after testifying that she could have stopped another mass murderer in Killeen, Texas, from reloading and subsequently shooting Mrs. Hupp's mother and father in the head if the law had allowed her to bring into the Luby's Cafeteria that day the loaded handgun which she had -- as required by law -- left outside in her truck.

We don't even have to get "theoretical" about this. As Jacob Sullum of Reason magazine pointed out on these pages last week, "Four years ago at Appalachian Law School in Grundy, Va., a man who had killed the dean, a professor and a student was subdued by two students who ran to their cars and grabbed their guns. In 1997 an assistant principal at a public high school in Pearl, Miss., likewise retrieved a handgun from his car and used it to apprehend a student who had killed three people" -- armed citizens in each case almost certainly sparing further lives.

"Hopefully, there will soon be an opportunity to examine which policies, if any, could have prevented this incident," mewed Josh Horwitz, executive director of the so-called Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, last week.

Needless to say, Mr. Horwitz then tipped his hand, adding, "In a nation plagued by gun violence and more than 30,000 gun deaths per year, a re-evaluation of our overly permissive attitude toward firearms is long overdue."

This is the rhetorical equivalent of blaming drunken driving deaths on "the easy availability of cars."

Actually, it's much stupider than that. There are now some 20,000 overlapping gun control laws in this country, each enacted by lawmakers in violation of their sacred oaths to protect and defend the Constitution, virtually all imposed since the 1920s, before which time this was such a peaceful country that Americans didn't even lock their doors.

In contrast, we now live in a country where an innocent American can be sent to prison for owning a broken rifle, providing the ATF can haul the thing off to its Virginia test range and cause it to slam-fire three rounds before it jams. Given that the ATF has unconstitutionally banned both the re-importation and new manufacture of BARs, supply and demand now dictate that a single one of these bulky and outdated militia weapons would cost me $10,000 -- once I passed the background check, and assuming the sheriff approves.

Yet these bitter-enders keep chirping about "the too easy availability of guns."

If the hoplophobes really wanted to "examine which policies, if any, could have prevented this incident," why not simply look at the anti-depressant connection?

Kip Kinkel of Springfield, Ore., one of the first of our recent wave of school shooters, had recently been taken off the psychoactive drug Ritalin when he decided to kill his parents before shooting up a school breakfast. Can you recall that happening before they started prescribing Ritalin to schoolchildren?

One of the Columbine school shooters was turned down when he tried to enlist in the Marines because he'd been on Luvox, another psychoactive "anti-depressant." And The Associated Press reported last week that Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho "may have been taking medication for depression."

But we won't be looking at that pattern, will we? Instead, America's hoplophobe press will follow Mr. Horwitz's lead and concentrate on "where he got his guns" -- which makes about as much sense as investigating the latest Baghdad truck bombing by asking, "Where on earth did that suicidal militant get his Toyota?"

Why don't they explain to us, just this once, why these chemically warped fruitcakes never attack police stations or Army bases? Could it be because, even in their madness, they know the armed people there might shoot back?

We wouldn't want to similarly inoculate our schools, I suppose.


Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the novel "The Black Arrow."

George Vecsey: All Those Who Wanted A-Rod Gone, Raise Your Hand

The New York Times
Published: April 22, 2007
BOSTON

The moral to the story is, don’t make rash judgments. It was only six months ago that Joe Torre batted Alex Rodriguez in the embarrassing eighth spot in the lineup during the final game in Detroit.

Some fans and sportswriters (let us not name names) were screaming that maybe it was time for Torre to go, or Rodriguez, or even both, since obviously something wasn’t working out with this expensive talent.

Now Rodriguez is on a tear that could match any one season that Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Maris or Jackson ever had. Maybe he will even do Major League Baseball a huge favor by taking attention away from Barry Bonds.

A-Rod did not hit anything out yesterday as the Red Sox beat the Yankees, 7-5 , in sun-drenched Fenway Park, but he did drive in his 31st run and had a single and double, after his two home runs Friday gave him 12 for the season.

“I may have seen a player this hot,” Torre said earlier, “but never with this ability.”

Rodriguez is not some fluke, some Shane Spencer or Hurricane Hazle just arrived from the bushes, having a hot week. This is a great player, living up to his potential

At the same time, a suddenly relaxed A-Rod is adding some joy and excitement to accompany Balco Barry’s inexorable drive toward Hank Aaron’s career-record 755 homers. To his credit, Bonds is not dragging out his chase. Three months short of 43 years old, he whacked his fifth home run yesterday, giving him 739 for his career.

•

But what if A-Rod gets there first? After all, he does have 476 home runs, heading toward 500 by July 4, doing what people have expected of him. When A-Rod came up with Seattle in 1994, just turned 18, his teammate, Ken Griffey Jr., was the viable (and popular) choice to catch Aaron.



However, injuries slowed down Junior. And something or other got into Bonds in athletic middle age, turning him into one of the great home run sluggers, not merely the superb all-around player he had been. Now here comes A-Rod, having already won two games with home runs after his abject failure last October, when he had one weak hit in 14 at-bats.

When reporters, none too subtly, suggested that Rodriguez was permanently damaged after Torre had batted him eighth, Brian Cashman, the owlish-looking general manager, stood in the silent corridor outside the stunned Yankees clubhouse in Detroit and insisted that Rodriguez was going nowhere, and if Cashman had anything to say about it, neither was Torre.

Nothing much changed with the Yankees. The portion of the faithful that wants Don Mattingly to manage as soon as possible is currently upset at Torre for using Mariano Rivera in the eighth inning Friday night as the Red Sox caught the Yankees, 7-6. But if Torre can be blamed for managing decisions that go wrong, does he get any credit for the spurt by A-Rod?

Asked yesterday if he thought he had lost Rodriguez that grim day in Detroit, Torre said, “I never thought it would have an effect on him adversely.”

Torre added that he and Rodriguez discussed the move when the Yankees’ flight landed in New York last October, and that they hugged before parting. The bluster to move A-Rod now seems like knee-jerk punditry, if not temporary insanity. Whatever Rodriguez did for himself in the off-season — and it was clearly more than his normally obsessive physical workout — he has come back with a new nuts-to-everybody attitude, not that he would say so.

Did Torre ever give Rodriguez any advice on how to loosen up? “I said to him, ‘Take what comes,’ ” Torre said. “He gets in his own way sometimes. But I sensed in spring training that he was having more fun.

“His approach is so much softer,” Torre said. “A year ago, you didn’t see the fluidity.”

During his career, Rodriguez seems to have tried too hard to please everybody, stemming from a need to be loved. In February, he showed up for camp and started blabbing about his cooled-off friendship with Derek Jeter, and a lot of people wondered when A-Rod would give up this touchy-feely stuff. Still, that admission may have been cathartic, helping him adopt some personal mantra, some psychological stance, that put him on a tear.

Does Torre have any theory why Rodriguez is so comfortable this year?

“No — and don’t ask him,” Torre commanded with a smile.

Naturally, we do ask him, on the hour. But he’s not giving much away. And that’s a good sign.

The Red Sox fans roasted A-Rod on his return to Fenway, as they have since he joined the Yanks in 2004. Of course, if Rodriguez should take advantage of the opening in his contract — his price probably went up a few more million this weekend — the Sox’ fans would instantly adore him for his good taste in moving to Fenway.

•

Yankees fans, note that until Rodriguez has a really good October, none of this matters. He left Seattle for Texas, saying it really wasn’t about the money, but of course it was. He came to Yankee Stadium for a championship. If he had left after last October, he would have been a failure, and he knew it.

What if this dedicated athlete catches Ruth and Maris, then chases down Sosa and McGwire? What if this quite decent human, with no trace of scandal to his name, roars right past Bonds’s six-year-old record of 73 home runs in a season? He couldn’t pick a better year for it.

E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com