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With that handoff, the Baptist seminary became the custodian of 85 boxes of Schaeffer's unpublished papers, notes, letters and tape-recorded discussions, most of which were shipped from Switzerland, where Schaeffer and his family lived for many years.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.''

------

Online:

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

Queen of the Castle

A Further Perspective

By Jay D. Homnick on 9.15.10 @ 6:05AM
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/


In the biggest electoral surprise of Tuesday night, conservative activist Christine O'Donnell defeated longtime GOP Rep. Mike Castle in Delaware's Republican Senate primary.

Well, well, well, if tea is not your cup of tea, perhaps we can scrounge up a few crumpets for you on Election Day. This November, we have a wide variety of teas from such exotic locales as Alaska, Nevada, Delaware and even New Hampshire. (There is even a rumor that Herb London and Al Regnery will partner up to market something called Herbal Tea.) Any movement whose influence is being felt in all of the aforementioned states is not about to be blown away by the sneers and sniggers the Democrats have been firing in opposition.

More importantly, the Tea Party candidates have jolted the Republican establishment to the core. They even managed to do that in Delaware: a consummation devoutly to be wished, as Joe Biden wrote back in his Globe Theatre days. Here the Poobahs, the nabobs, the satraps, the moguls and the Kahunas all agreed that Christine O'Donnell was the bugaboo. Well, boo-hoo about your boo-boo, fellas. It could not have happened to nicer guys.

Okay, let me get a grip on myself and come down from cheerleader mode to apply for readmission in the precincts of dispassion. In the last few days leading up to the Delaware Republican Senatorial Primary, your old-guard Republican insider types put on a full-court press in support of Mike Castle. Mike has been a Representative from Delaware for many years and polls indicated that if he won the primary he would win the general election handily. He is a classic RINO, whose horn is considered an aphrodisiac by Northern tribes. His opponent, Christine O'Donnell was getting the usual treatment from the usual suspects: "too dumb, too nutty, too slutty, too green, too yellow, too blue, too gray." The polls have been less kind to her than to Castle.

But the voters spake, and the pillars did shake. The voters smote, and the Castle lost his moat. Mike Castle will not be your Castle.

Which brings us to the fierce debate which raged between Charles Krauthammer and Rush Limbaugh prior to the primary vote. Both of these gentlemen have waived their protections under the Americans with Disabilities Act and advance their arguments with vigor. Krauthammer slammed Palin and DeMint for backing O’Donnell: they were being "irresponsible and capricious." He cited a maxim propounded by the late William F. Buckley Jr. to the effect that one ought to back in primaries the most conservative among the electable.

Limbaugh responded that such considerations are suspended in time of emergency, when the country is traveling full-speed in a hand-basket down the road paved with good intentions.

I concurred with Limbaugh yesterday and with the citizens of Delaware today. It is not enough now to elect candidates who lean rightward of Obama. We need people who understand that trillion-dollar deficits and socialized medicine are not inconveniences. They are not annoyances. They are not setbacks. They are not unpleasantnesses. They are not regrettable episodes. They are not divergent views, odd turns, eccentricities. They are not even outrages and atrocities. THEY ARE IMPOSSIBILITIES.

Only candidates who understand that the only answer to "yes, we can" is "no, we cannot" are worth fielding. That is the whole point of sideswiping the political process with a third-party non-party wrecking crew who hold their teacups with monkey wrenches. The Republican establishment is asea and a movement is afoot. This is all coming to a head in November, when we will see who is really ahead and, derivatively, what lies ahead. (Plenty of lies ahead in the campaign, that’s for sure.)

The biggest winner of all is Sarah Palin, who has been tarred by our feathered friends as the ultimate in unelectable. Well, she let down her hair and said goodbye to the Castle. Everything is different now. She is through the looking-glass, and so the last word must go to the White Queen:

"That's the effect of living backwards," the Queen said kindly: "it always makes one a little giddy at first --"

"Living backwards!" Alice repeated in great astonishment. "I never heard of such a thing!"

" -- but there's one great advantage in it, that one's memory works both ways."

"I'm sure MINE only works one way." Alice remarked. "I can't remember things before they happen."

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen remarked.


- Jay D. Homnick, commentator and humorist, is a frequent contributor to The American Spectator. He also writes for Human Events.

A Saintly Conscience

High Spirits

By Jonathan Aitken from the September 2010 issue of The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/

Cardinal John Henry Newman(1801-1890) was at the center of many controversies and calumnies during his life. He is back in the headlines again, 120 years after his death, because his beatification -- as the focal point of Benedict XVI's papal visit to Britain that begins today -- is resurrecting the Newman tradition of attracting trouble.

Among the hares that the soon-to-be Blessed Cardinal has started running are a row about his sexuality; an argument about whether he was a dissident rebel against papal infallibility; and a surge of ill feeling over the soaring costs of the beatification ceremony. These stories have been filling a surprising quantity of column inches and chat show minutes. Are they just storms in an ancient ecclesiastical teacup? Or does Newman and his beatification have some real spiritual relevance for the modern world, particularly for the aggressively secular and increasingly Muslim-influenced British public?

Newman's most enduring footprints on the sands of time and theology were made by his talents as a writer. His autobiography Apologia Pro Vita Sua; his best poems such as The Dream of Gerontius or "The Pillar of Cloud" (later turned into the hymn "Lead Kindly Light"); and his famous treatise on academic freedom, The Idea of a University, are all classics in their different genres. But in his Victorian age it was Newman's spiritual journey from early skepticism to evangelical Protestantism, High Church Anglicanism, and eventually Roman Catholicism that unleashed the strongest passions among his divided contemporaries.

The divisiveness continues but on different grounds. Was Newman homosexual? This is an issue of great excitement to campaigners of the gay lobby. They cite their hero's close relationship with Ambrose St. John, a lifelong friend who shared a house and eventually a grave with Newman. They also make much of the Cardinal's mannerisms and appearance, which would surely justify the modern term "camp." His latest biographer John Cornwell (Newman's Unquiet Grave: The Reluctant Saint, 2010) sums up his subject's demeanor as a cross between "an eternal monastic novice" and "a high bred lady." But such combinations were part of the zeitgeist of England's academic and ecclesiastical elites in the 19th century, as were their intense but platonic friendships. Since there is no evidence to suggest that Newman deviated from his self-proclaimed life of celibacy, further speculation on his sexuality is pointless. Moreover, it detracts from Newman's true importance and relevance to the 21st century, namely his pioneering role as a voice of religious conscience.

Newman's conscience did not give him a quiet life. Throughout his career he was troubled by stress-related illnesses; high profile controversies; dismissals; upheavals; resignations; polemical spats with leaders of church and state; a prosecution for criminal libel; and dramatic changes of spiritual direction. In his youth he was extreme in his hostility to Rome, denouncing the pope as "Antichrist" and Catholicism as a "polytheistic, degrading and idolatrous" religion. But after he'd moved to the position of a high church theologian, his sermons and tracts made him an immensely influential figure, particularly as one of the founders of the Oxford Movement which launched the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England.

After his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845, Newman was vilified as a hate figure by some hysterical Protestants who feared that large swathes of church-going England would soon be taking the Pope's shilling. But Newman remained his own man. He accepted Catholic doctrine but with liberal qualifications. He was ambivalent about the newly formulated dogma in 1870 of papal infallibility, famously remarking: "I shall drink-to the Pope, if you please -- still to Conscience first and to the Pope afterwards."

Intriguingly, it would appear that the Cardinal's dissident thoughts on conscience may be one of the drivers of his imminent beatification by the pope, who has long been fascinated by Newman. When Benedict XVI, as Cardinal Ratzinger, led a seminar on conscience at a synod of bishops in 1981, he singled out Newman for praise. In Newman's writings, said Ratzinger, conscience "received an attention it had not received in Catholic theology since St. Augustine." He went on to say that both Newman and Augustine had recognized the priority of a profound level of conscience, which should be preeminent in moral judgements "because we could never judge that one thing is better than another if a basic understanding of the good had not already been instilled in us."

The current media noise about Newman's beatification is loudest about the money being spent on the papal visit. This is linked to other outbursts of Benedict-bashing which suggest that he is coming to Britain "to sanitize Newman" and to suppress all sorts of other uncomfortable truths about matters such as gays in the priesthood and child sex abuse scandals. This is about as illogical and inaccurate as the vilification that Newman had to endure in the 1840s.

There is little doubt that both the finances and the administration of the papal visit have so far been badly handled. The Vatican is said to be furious with the English hierarchy over its poor administration of the logistical arrangements. The costs are soaring and the planning is in disarray. The pope's beatification mass for Newman was scheduled to be held at Coventry Airport, with an expected attendance of more than 200,000. At the eleventh hour it has been switched to a park in Birmingham, which can only accommodate 80,000 worshippers. Even after this downsizing there is much grumbling in the pews as the Catholic faithful are being asked to fork over $7 million to fund what many see as an expensive extravaganza.

David Cameron's new coalition government has also become worried about the troubles besetting the first state visit it is to host. So it has underwritten a larger share of the costs and appointed a logistical supremo. He is Lord Patten, a leading liberal Catholic who has done the state some service as a former governor of Hong Kong, cabinet minister, and chancellor of Oxford University.

Although Pope Benedict is not noted for his theological liberalism, he may surprise his wider British audience by continuing his earlier championing of Newman's view of conscience. For this is a theme that speaks across the secular, spiritual, and agnostic divides in a multi-faith society. The central message of Newman's life is that nobody should accept in docile fashion what they are taught by their parents, their school, their church, their mosque, or by any self-proclaimed source of authority. Instead they should travel on their own journey, searching for truth by the light of their conscience.

If the combined forces of Cardinal Newman's memory and Pope Benedict's preaching can encourage people in Britain to search their consciences and find the great truths proclaimed by Jesus Christ, then contrary to current expectations this will be a papal visit and a beatification ceremony well blessed by success. 

- Jonathan Aitken, The American Spectator's "High Spirits" columnist, is most recently author of John Newton: From Disgrace to Amazing Grace (Crossway Books). His biographies include Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed (Doubleday) and Nixon: A Life, now available in a new paperback edition (Regnery).

BOOK REVIEWS: 'The Tiger'

By Cynthia Grenier
The Washington Times
12:41 p.m., Friday, September 10, 2010
http://www.washingtontimes.com/

THE TIGER: A TRUE STORY OF VENGEANCE AND SURVIVAL
By John Vaillant
Knopf, $26.95 329 pages

''The Tiger" is a tale of the Wild East with all the power, energy and terror that once animated our own Wild West. The action takes place in Russia's southeastern province of Primorye by the East Sea/Japan Sea, not far from the Chinese border. People in the thickly forested, mountainous and sparsely populated region exist by logging, mining, fishing and hunting. They have to contend with pitiful wages, corrupt officialdom, thriving black markets and, most threatening of all, some of the world's largest cats - Amur tigers.

The Amur tiger is a rare and precious commodity and as dangerous to the people who are there trying to protect it as those who would profit from it. People in Russia and China will pay thousands of dollars for a tiger's skin. Tigers in that part of the world are like drugs, sold by the gram and by the kilo, and their value increases according to the refinement of product and seller. An important difference: Tigers can weigh up to 600 pounds. They've been hunting large prey, including mankind, for 2 million years and are endowed with an especially dangerous prodigious memory.

John Vaillant has compiled an extraordinary book, bringing vividly to life this rare and terrifying creature and the men who are setting their lives at stake every day in a barely civilized part of the world. This is a real-life adventure story that is rarely encountered: How many times do you read an on-the-scene account of a man having been eaten alive by a tiger?

Primorye, once considered part of Outer Manchuria, is home to 4 million people. Its capital, Vladivostok is a two-day journey to Beijing. Moscow, on the other hand, is a week-long, 5,800-mile haul on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Inspection Tiger, the organization with the mission of protecting the tiger - and people from the tiger - is in Vladivostok, whose bays stay frozen until April even though it lies farther south than the French Riviera. During hard winters, tigers prowl the outskirts of the city to hunt for dogs. In 1997, one tiger had to be shot after repeatedly charging cars by the airport.

Primorye is also the virtual meeting place of four distinct bioregions: plants and animals from the Siberian taiga, the steppes of Mongolia, the subtropics of the Koreas and Manchuria, and the boreal forests of the far north. One attempt by botanists to identify this region resulted in the likes of: Transbaikalian Province of the Circumboreal Region. The Amur that gives its name to the tigers that roam this region is the third longest river in Asia, and the longest undammed river in the world.

The area abounds in unclassifiable species, such as a bizarre tropical canid called a dhole that hunts humans and tigers as well as more conventional prey. This boreal jungle is unique, and the Amur tiger reigns supreme.

The Amur tiger is the only one of the six surviving subspecies habituated to Arctic conditions. In addition to having a larger skull than other subspecies, it carries more fat and a heavier coat, giving it a rugged, primitive burliness that is missing from its sleeker tropical cousins. Mr. Vaillant describes the beast this way:

"This is what you get when you pair the agility and appetites of a cat with the mass of an industrial refrigerator." Its fangs are the length of a man's finger; claws "a hybrid of a meat hook and a stiletto," fitted to a frame 9 feet or more from nose to tail, and 3 1/2 feet high at the shoulder. Its head can be as broad as a man's chest and shoulders, its paws comparable to pot lids. The cat is strong enough to drag a 1,000-pound carcass through the forest for up to 100 yards before devouring it.

Amur tigers eat everything from salmon and ducks to adult brown bears. Few wolves roam this region, largely because tigers eat them as well.

Mr. Vaillant has structured his book in roughly three parts mirroring the fates of three men who run afoul of the tiger. The first is Markov, a poacher who made the mistake of stealing boar meat killed by a tiger and who in turn is hunted down and eaten alive by the tiger.

Then there is Andrei Pochepnya, a quiet young man and friend of Markov, who went off into the taiga days after Markov's funeral. After a few days, when his family had had no word of him, a small search party set forth. They found a heap of blood-soaked clothing in a circle of exposed earth. Nothing lay there but shredded cloth and a pair of empty boots, nearby a watch and a crucifix. The remains, as one of the search party observed, were so small and few they could have fit into a shirt pocket.

The third and final part of Vaillant's book is devoted to Yuri Trush, who headed the team that hunted down and slew the man-eating tiger in an amazing encounter of man and beast. As Mr. Vaillant puts it, "It is still not clear whether it was a symptom of shock or an example of extraordinary sangfroid, but Trush's first impulse after standing and taking an inventory of himself was to get it on film."

Trush said, "I got my video camera and filmed where the tiger was. I filmed it all." Brad Pitt has bought the movie rights to "The Tiger," but with all due respect to Mr. Pitt, there's no way the movie will match Mr. Vaillant's book.

Cynthia Grenier is a Washington writer and critic.


Book review- 'The Tiger': John Vaillant's mesmerizing tale of a man-eating tiger, vengeance and survival

By by Steve Weinberg
Special to The Seattle Times
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/home/index.html
August 28, 2010

In the middle of a brutal Siberian winter 13 years ago, a rare breed of tiger killed two men, in attacks about a week apart, near a remote Russian village not far from the Chinese border.

Normally, such an occurrence would attract little attention in the English-speaking Western world. But the deaths received attention because of multiple factors: First, tigers seldom kill humans. Second, the specific breed of tiger involved is so rare it is a protected species, because its extinction is a real worry. Third, the men deputized to stop the carnage experienced something so rare as to defy belief.

If ever the maxim "truth is stranger than fiction" applies, it applies to the saga told in "The Tiger" by Canadian author John Vaillant, author of 2005's "The Golden Spruce."

Not so incidentally, if ever a nonfiction author has used the techniques of fiction any better to recount a real-life narrative, it is difficult to imagine who that author would be. For readers who enjoy literary nonfiction, think of Vaillant as a younger version of John McPhee, but on steroids.

The reporting is awesomely detailed, as in McPhee's narratives for The New Yorker magazine and in his books. The phrasing is precise, much like McPhee's. McPhee's writing, however, does not call attention to itself, at least not attention in the sense of flamboyant. Vaillant's writing is flamboyant, but almost never in a show-offy kind of way. The word "lyrical" comes close.

Vaillant builds the story around five characters, three of them human, one of them an animal and one the vast natural world: Markov, the first villager killed by the tiger; Pochepaya, the second villager killed by the tiger; Trush, whose job entails protecting the endangered tiger species from poachers while simultaneously capturing the rare renegade tiger; the tiger itself, a predator perhaps at least 9 feet long and weighing at least 500 pounds; plus the region of the Russian Far East known as Primorye, about the size of Washington state.

Throughout the narrative, Vaillant explores the central question of why the tiger attacked Markov. Vaillant comes dangerously close to anthropomorphizing the tiger, as he marshals evidence that the tiger was seeking revenge. Revenge for what? Markov, a talented hunter-gatherer practicing subsistence living, might have stolen meat from one of the tiger's animal kills.

Before Markov died, mauled by the tiger, he shot a rifle round that wounded the magnificent animal. Because of the wound, the tiger could no longer kill other animals with efficiency, so focused instead on a second vulnerable human — Pochepaya by name, who unwisely left the village on what he intended as a day trip, leaving despite warnings that a human-eating tiger might be lurking.

Trush is the most fully developed character, almost certainly because he is still alive. Vaillant, after all, could not interview Markov and Pochepaya. A mix of a conservationist with a badge and an apprehender of felonious poachers, Trush is a man's man with a thoughtful streak. He comes across as a hero of sorts, heightened by the details of what occurs when Trush himself is attacked by the tiger being tracked.

The balance of nature is at stake, a precarious balance perhaps more vital than a human life or a tiger's life.

In the Epilogue, as Vaillant wrestles with what his narrative means, he mentions that humans "have found themselves in charge of the tiger's fate. This is not a burden anyone consciously chose, but it is ours nonetheless. It is an extraordinary power for one species to wield over another, and it represents a test of sorts. The results will be in shortly."

Steve Weinberg is the author of eight nonfiction books.

Copyright © 2010 The Seattle Times Company

Related

Author appearance
John Vaillant

The author of "The Tiger" will discuss his book at these area locations: at 7 p.m. Sept. 22 at Seattle's Elliott Bay Book Co. (206-624-6600 or http://www.elliottbaybook.com/). Vaillant will also read at 7 p.m. Sept. 23 at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park (206-366-3333 or http://www.thirdplacebooks.com/).



The True Story Of A Man-Eating Tiger's 'Vengeance'

http://www.npr.org/
September 14, 2010


In the late 20th century, the Amur tiger was nearly hunted to the brink of extinction -- at one point, there were just 30 animals left in the wild. Above, an Amur tiger sits in the snow at a wildlife rehabilitation center.


John Vaillant's The Tiger is part natural history, part Russian history and part thriller; it tells a gripping and gory story of what it's like to stalk — and be stalked by — the largest species of cat still walking the Earth.

The most bio-diverse region in all of Russia lies on a chunk of land sandwiched between China and the Pacific Ocean. There, in Russia's Far East, subarctic animals — such as caribou and wolves — mingle with tigers and other species of the subtropics. It was very nearly a perfect habitat for the tigers — until humans showed up.

The tigers that populate this region are commonly referred to as Siberian tigers, but they are more accurately known as the Amur tiger. "Imagine a creature that has the agility and appetite of the cat and the mass of an industrial refrigerator," Vaillant tells NPR's Linda Wertheimer. "The Amur tiger can weigh over 500 pounds and can be more than 10 feet long nose to tail."

These majestic tigers can jump as far as 25 feet — vertically, they can jump over a basketball hoop. Vaillant cites a famous tiger biologist who, when asked how high a tiger can jump, responded: "As high as it needs to."

At the center of the story is Vladimir Markov, a poacher who met a grisly end in the winter of 1997 after he shot and wounded a tiger, and then stole part of the tiger's kill.

The injured tiger hunted Markov down in a way that appears to be chillingly premeditated. The tiger staked out Markov's cabin, systematically destroyed anything that had Markov's scent on it, and then waited by the front door for Markov to come home.

"This wasn't an impulsive response," Vaillant says. "The tiger was able to hold this idea over a period of time." The animal waited for 12 to 48 hours before attacking.

When Markov finally appeared, the tiger killed him, dragged him into the bush and ate him. "The eating may have been secondary," Vaillant explains. "I think he killed him because he had a bone to pick."

The other central character in The Tiger is Yuri Trush, the head of the local squad of an anti-poaching unit known as Inspection Tiger, an organization created by the Russian government to combat the black-market trafficking of tigers and tiger parts.

Trush was "a guy well-suited to work in tiger country," Vaillant says. Physically imposing and a skilled fighter, Trush was a larger-than-life figure, and a "real warrior."

For most of his time with Inspection Tiger, Trush's job involved setting up sting operations and catching poachers. But Markov's death — which is followed later by the death of a second man — meant that Trush ended up having to hunt the same animal he had worked to protect.

Trush needed to anticipate what the tiger's next move would be, and then get there before the tiger did, Vaillant explains. "Trush was charged not just with protecting tigers, but now with saving human lives."

Vaillant's retelling is a life-and-death, moment-by-moment chase — and at times, it can be hard to remember whether you're rooting for the tiger or the humans.

"The tiger is just trying to be a tiger," Vaillant says.

"What's so fascinating to me about that region is that there are human beings and tigers hunting for the same prey in the same territory — and they don't have conflicts." But if you make the mistake of attacking a tiger, you will regret it, he says.

Markov certainly learned that the hard way. Vaillant says the tiger's response was "logical" and "understandable," but in the case of the revenge it exacted on Markov, it was anything but typical. In writing the book, Vaillant interviewed people of all ages from families who had lived in the Russian Far East for generations.

"In living memory, there was no record of an incident like this, of a tiger hunting a human being," he says. "This was a highly unusual circumstance, completely driven by human behavior. If the tiger hadn't been shot, there would be no story."

Related- Listen to an interview with John Vaillant:

http://www.npr.org/player/v2/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=129551459&m=129849498


NATURE- 'The Tiger,' by John Vaillant

By John McMurtrie, San Francisco Chronicle Book Editor
http://www.sfgate.com/
August 29, 2010

Should you wish to set off on an expedition to view the Siberian tiger, you might first study its physical attributes.

"Picture the grotesquely muscled head of a pit bull," writes John Vaillant, "and then imagine how it might look if the pit bull weighed a quarter of a ton. Add to this fangs the length of a finger backed up by rows of slicing teeth capable of cutting through the heaviest bone. Consider then the claws: a hybrid of meat hook and stiletto that can attain four inches along the outer curve, a length comparable to the talons on a velociraptor. Now, imagine the vehicle for all of this: nine feet or more from nose to tail, and three and a half feet high at the shoulder. ... Able to swim for miles and kill an animal many times its size, the tiger also possesses the brute strength to drag an awkward, thousand-pound carcass through the forest for fifty or a hundred yards before consuming it."

Still want to go on that expedition?

Wise choice. Probably best not to travel all the way to the Russian Far East to take in this splendid creature. But by all means read Vaillant's magnificent book about the animal: "The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival" offers readers a shiver-inducing portrait of a predator that has been revered - and feared - like no other animal.

Yes, readers learn a lot of fascinating details about the beautiful and ferocious Panthera tigris in "The Tiger." (For example: It is, as Vaillant writes, "literally tattooed: If you were to shave one bald, its stripes would still be visible, integral to its skin.") But the book is more a profound examination of the myriad factors that threaten the animal's continued existence in the wild. And it's a largely sympathetic portrayal of impoverished people who have turned to poaching, out of desperation, to get by in a forbidding land that has suffered at the hands of Perestroika (also known as "Katastroika"), which, as Vaillant writes, "opened the door to a run on Russia's natural resources."

"The Tiger" revisits events that took place in 1997 in Primorye, a remote territory roughly the size of Washington state that, in Vaillant's words, "combines the backwoods claustrophobia of Appalachia with the frontier roughness of the Yukon." (Its capital, Vladivostok, is closer to Australia than Moscow.)

Primorye also has one of the most unusual ecosystems on Earth: "winter can bring blizzards and paralyzing cold, and summer will retaliate with typhoons and monsoon rains. ... Here, timber wolves and reindeer share terrain with spoonbills and poisonous snakes, and twenty-five-pound Eurasian vultures will compete for carrion with saber-beaked jungle crows."

It's in this not-so-inviting region that a Siberian tiger (more formally known as the Amur tiger) goes on a rampage, killing men in what appear to be premeditated attacks. Tigers, of course, have killed countless humans throughout history, but, as Vaillant shows, they will more or less leave people alone if they themselves are left alone.

The tiger at the heart of Vaillant's book tracked his victims "with a kind of calculated audacity" and waited for them before striking. One man isn't just dispatched; Vaillant writes, in an image that is hard to shake, that his remains "were so small and so few they could have fit in a shirt pocket." This prompts one of the author's many insightful and eloquent asides: "[I]f the body journeys through the viscera of an animal - if its substance and essence become that animal - what happens to the soul?"

The reaction from the man investigating the case, by contrast, displays a Russian appreciation for understatement and black humor: "The tiger undressed him quite well."

That line is from Yuri Trush, who is more or less the hero of "The Tiger." He's a likable tough guy with heart, a former weightlifting champion who heads the regional unit of Inspection Tiger, which goes after poachers. "In many ways," writes Vaillant, "Inspection Tiger's mandate resembles that of detectives on a narcotics detail, and so does the risk: the money is big, and the players are often desperate and dangerous individuals. Tigers are similar to drugs in that they are sold by the gram and the kilo, and their value increases according to the refinement of both product and seller."

Trush protects tigers, but, in the end, he must, in an unfortunate irony, hunt down the animal that has killed men. The final pages of Vaillant's book are suspenseful, but also deeply sad. The tiger has clearly lashed out in anger against humans - humans who are encroaching on its land and shooting at it - and one can't help but feel that its fate symbolizes the fate of its breed (to say nothing of that of other endangered animals). The tiger's numbers are dwindling (fewer than 400 may live in the Russian Far East), and its land is being stripped away.

"If the tiger is permitted to go extinct in the wild," writes Vaillant, "it would be the largest carnivore to do so since the American lion (Panthera leo atrox) died out at the end of the Pleistocene, approximately ten thousand years ago."

What becomes of the tiger, as Vaillant concludes, rests entirely in our hands. But will we do the right thing?

E-mail John McMurtrie at jmcmurtrie@sfchronicle.com; go to www.twitter.com/McMurtrieSF.(C) San Francisco Chronicle 2010


The Exchange: John Vaillant on the Siberian Tiger

Posted by Ian Crouch
The New Yorker
http://www.newyorker.com/
September 3, 2010

The Amur, or Siberian, tiger is a startling creature. Not just in terms of its remarkable size, strength, and speed, but perhaps especially because of the seeming incongruity of where it lives: in the cold, unforgiving hinterlands of northern Asia, far from the grasslands or swamps favored by its cousins to the south. The idea of a blaze of orange coming at you across a white expanse of snow is almost too otherworldly and terrifying to imagine.

In “The Tiger,” out last week from Knopf, John Vaillant confronts us with that very scenario, revisiting a deadly, mysterious tiger attack in 1997 that shocked the residents of Primorye Territory, in Russia’s Far East. The book is at once a riveting adventure story and a wider study about how lax regulations, crippling economic hardship, and greed that crosses borders have led to a situation wherein tigers and humans pose a greater risk to one another than ever before.

This week, I exchanged e-mails with Vaillant about his new book.

The Amur tiger sounds like such an incredible animal. What surprised and fascinated you most about it as a subject?

Besides its size and beauty, I was most struck by this tiger’s stoic durability. That an animal we so strongly associate with the jungle, heat, and lounging around could thrive in an environment as cold and hostile as the Russian Far East impressed me—moved me, really. The tiger I came to know in the book was able not only to function, but to adapt and refine its methods, alone, in minus-forty temperatures with serious wounds. This animal possessed an almost supernatural determination to live that changed the way I look at the life force.

How did you create such a compelling narrative from a story wherein several of the key players—the dead hunter Markov, the tiger—are shadowy, absent figures, their fate often unknown?

I used the same methods I used to write my first book, “The Golden Spruce” (which first appeared as an article in The New Yorker), in which the two principal characters were also absent or dead. Virtually everyone leaves a trail behind them in the form of tracks, objects, relationships, official documents, and the memories of others. These bits and pieces are preserved in their environment, though they may be scattered across it like shards. The writer’s job is to find them, sort them, and assemble them in such a way that offers the reader a coherent collage of that character. In the case of “The Tiger,” my job was made easier because the inspectors who investigated the attacks described in the book treated the evidence forensically, almost as one would a murder. As a result, I had video footage, photos, maps, and interview transcripts that fortified my own research.

You write a lot about man’s place in the hunter/prey dynamic. In the modern, developed world, what have we forgotten about this longstanding connection?

What we’ve forgotten is the notion of enlightened coexistence. Prior to the advent of agriculture and the settlement that goes with it, humans—of necessity—maintained a much more considered, and considerate, attitude toward animals and their environment. For many human inhabitants of Russia’s Bikin River Valley, the tiger is still seen as a fellow hunter—a colleague of sorts—whom one may encounter at any time, and whom one must respect accordingly. Prior to the attacks described in this book, which were incited by the poacher, Vladimir Markov, man-eating was virtually unknown in the Bikin valley, a large area with a vigorous tiger population. I met hunters there who know the tigers in their area by their faces, who are familiar with their age, gender, and disposition—just as we are familiar with neighborhood dogs. In most cases, these tigers are seen as more of a nuisance than a mortal threat.

Nowadays, nature is a place most of us visit, suppress, exploit, or avoid, rather than inhabit. This illusion of controlled remove encourages a lethal disconnect—to the point that it takes a major hurricane, oil spill, or tiger attack to remind us that we are actually connected, that everything is “personal.”

You balance the need for conservation and protection of the tiger with the natural fear and distrust that the human population has about these creatures. Is it likely that people can be made to see the tiger as something to be respected, or even to be grateful about?

It is absolutely within the realm of possibility, in part because there is an established precedent: among the native population of Primorye, tiger attacks—recalled, recorded, or mythic—are exceptionally rare, despite the fact that these peoples have always shared space and game with tigers. The reasons for this lack of incident are caution and common sense on the part of humans, and the fact that tigers are taught by their mothers to pursue four-legged prey, not people. If the ecosystem is intact, and understood by its inhabitants, the possibility of conflict is dramatically reduced.

The chief causes of the current breakdown in this historical détente are:

•The radical depletion of the prey base due to poaching, which leads to increased competition for game.

•The loss of habitat due to logging, which leads to more chance encounters between poachers and tigers.

•And—above all—the commodification of tigers for the illegal-wildlife trade, which leads to extinction.

Is there hope looking forward for groups like Inspection Tiger, the task force charged with protecting tigers from illegal hunting? And what conclusions have you drawn about the future that the tigers face in eastern Russia, and across Asia more generally?

I could not have written “The Tiger” if there was no hope. The Russians have already saved the Amur tiger from extinction, not once but twice: first in the nineteen-forties, when they became the first country in the world to declare the tiger a protected species, and again in the nineteen-nineties, when poaching surged dramatically and Inspection Tiger was created to combat it. These inspection teams, whose courage and determination are detailed in the book, are a powerful deterrent to poachers and traffickers. While funding cuts and political instability have weakened this agency in recent years, other groups and agencies, with the help of foreign funding, have stepped in to fill the gap.

Tiger conservation is a complex issue exacerbated by poverty, corruption, deeply held cultural beliefs, and political instability. Today, the world’s wild tiger population is roughly three thousand animals—a shadow of its former self. More than ten per cent of these survivors live in Russia. Now, in this “Year of the Tiger,” the top priority is law and order in the forest and along porous international borders. Russia’s previous successes protecting tigers in the Far East are proof that this can be achieved again, in Russia and elsewhere.

If you’re interested in learning more about groups dedicated to protecting tigers, Vaillant shared the names of these three organizations: Wildlife Alliance, 21st Century Tiger, and Panthera.

http://www.wildlifealliance.org/

http://www.21stcenturytiger.org/

http://www.panthera.org/splash.html

And for more about the disappearance of tigers in Asia, read Caroline Alexander’s “Tigerland,” from the April 21, 2008, issue of the magazine.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_alexander

Novak Djokovic learns how large the gap is between U.S. Open champ Rafael Nadal and rest of field

By Mike Lupica
The Daily News
http://www.nydailynews.com
Tuesday, September 14th 2010, 4:00 AM

Here came Rafael Nadal at the very end, after all the rain and all the waiting and four hard sets against Novak Djokovic. Here came Nadal to remind Djokovic and remind everybody watching that he was one of the great players and great champions any U.S. Open final had ever seen. Here came Nadal off the baseline and toward the net again, toward what should have been a winner for the other guy, Nadal playing this point the way he plays them all, as if it were the biggest point he'd ever played, as if getting one more ball back would make him the champion of everything.

NEW YORK - SEPTEMBER 13: Rafael Nadal of Spain returns a shot against Novak Djokovic of Serbia during his men's singles final match on day fifteen of the 2010 U.S. Open at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center on September 13, 2010 in the Flushing neighborhood of the Queens borough of New York City.(Getty Images)

Djokovic had played against Nadal the way he had on Saturday when he came back against Roger Federer, Federer and his five Opens and his 16 major championships. On this night, Djokovic had gone gone toe-to-toe with the best hitter alive, had even gotten the first set off Nadal that anybody had gotten at this Open, squaring the final at one set all once they resumed playing after all the rain.

Djokovic had just become the No. 2 player in the world. But over the last two sets of this crackling men's final, on the night when Nadal was finally going to win the Open, he had found out how much distance there is between No. 1 and No. 2 in men's tennis when No. 1 is Nadal.

Already in this last game, at 15-0 for Nadal, Djokovic had dropped a sweet shot over the net at Arthur Ashe Stadium, seemed to have won himself a point in the game he needed to win to keep playing. But Nadal ran the ball down on fresh legs, running the way he does for every ball, running like Ray Lewis was chasing him, covering the drop shot and ripping a forehand winner within a few inches of the baseline.

He was coming on at the finish like the 7 train, two points away from the Open at Ashe, from his career Grand Slam, from his ninth major championship.

Still Djokovic stayed in there with him, the way he had stayed in there for most of this match, this match when he and Nadal threw what seemed like 100 mph baseline shots at each other all night long. There have been other lefthanded hitters here, John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors right at the top of that list. They never hit the ball as hard as Nadal did Monday night against Djokovic, even when the ball kept coming back.

When it was over, Nadal, a great and gracious champion maybe on his way to being the greatest of them all, said this of Novak Djokovic:

"You are a great player and you are going to win this trophy very soon."

Just not Monday night.

Not against Nadal, who dominates his sport right now, the French and Wimbledon and the Open in the same year, the way Tiger Woods used to dominate golf. Djokovic came back to 30-all when it was 5-2 against him in the last game of the match. Still believing that when you had hit the way he had hit against Nadal, not backed up all night, there had to be a way to keep playing.


They played another long point and Nadal hit one that touched the top of the net, dropped on Djokovic's side. Djokovic pushed it back, the ball hitting like a pillow hitting a sofa. But again here came Nadal. Running, playing, like they were just getting started. Playing every point like match point. Playing, as Connors once said to me, like he's broke. Nadal came running again in the fourth set of the Open and covered the ball and spit another winner that landed on the back line and now, at last, it was match point for him at Ashe.

Then Djokovic hit one last groundstroke wide. It was 6-4, 5-7, 6-4, 6-2 for Nadal. Nadal was on his back, because the only one who lays him out when he is healthy is himself. He was on his back on the court at Ashe and then he rolled over and finally jumped to his feet. Djokovic was on Nadal's side of the net by then. The two of them embraced.

"It was more than what I dreamed," Nadal would say a few minutes later.

Djokovic said: "He has all the capabilities, everything he needs, in order to be the biggest ever, my opinion."

Of course this was a Jets night around here. The Yankees and Rays were playing in Florida for first place. This match had started on CBS and ended up on ESPN2 because the dopes who commissioned Ashe back in the '90s built the worst stadium in tennis and maybe sports, one that doesn't have a roof to save the Open from rain and won't ever have one the way it is built. So rain postponed Nadal-Djokovic on Sunday and delayed it again Monday night. And the USTA should tear the thing down and start over.

Still: Over the last two sets Nadal played as well as anybody ever played at Ashe. Or over at Louis Armstrong Stadium, a hundred times the theater that Ashe is. It was as if Nadal got angry after Djokovic evened the match, dialed up his game and his will at the same time. Djokovic tried mightily, but did not have the stick to stay with him. Federer wouldn't have had enough. If Nadal didn't have to pull out of the Australian Open in January, he would have become the first man since Rod Laver to win the Grand Slam.

From the start of the third set on, right through those balls he ran down in the last game, nobody ever hit harder than Nadal did on the night when he finally won the U.S. Open. Nobody ever hit like this or ran like this in an Open final that I ever saw, all the way back to when Connors was young at Forest Hills. Ran until there were no balls to get back at the Open.

Obama’s Delusions of Competence

The president overestimates the government's ability to solve problems.

By Mona Charen
http://www.nationalreview.com
September 14, 2010 12:00 A.M.


‘Washington: We Have a Problem” proclaims Vanity Fair magazine. In an eerie echo of the verdicts passed during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, namely that the presidency was “too big for one man,” Vanity Fair now declares “The evidence that Washington cannot function — that it’s ‘broken,’ as Vice President Joe Biden has said — is all around.”

The Vanity Fair piece is a long apologia for President Obama’s perceived ineffectiveness, and reflects — no surprise here — the Obama interpretation of events. “The G.O.P.,” writes Todd Purdum, “has spent most of the period since the inauguration in near lockstep refusal to give the president votes for any of his major initiatives, from the economic-stimulus bill to health-care reform.” This is President Obama’s constant plaint — though it rings hollow coming from someone who took office with comfortable majorities in both houses of Congress.

But in the course of documenting the difficulty of governing, Vanity Fair does make a conservative point. Government is too big. Purdum quotes from just one day’s Federal Register:

The edition for this ordinary Wednesday comes in at 350 pages of dense, dark type. It is unimaginably varied: you’ll find rules for the importation of Chinese honey; proposed conservation standards for home furnaces; permitting procedures for the experimental use of pesticides; announcements concerning the awarding of new radio and TV licenses; and hundreds of other items.

The president himself doesn’t at all concede that government is attempting to do too much (and failing at most of it). On the contrary, his vanity (and it is a common one for left-wingers) is that he believes his particular ideas on business investment, medical procedures, housing, and thousands of other matters are the solutions to our woes, but “politics” keeps getting in the way.

We’ve seen President Obama’s delusions of expertise on display before. Without any trial period, demonstration project, or peer-reviewed study, the federal government dictated that medical records be digitalized and extracted $19 billion from taxpayers to fund the transition. The new systems, the president insisted, would prevent errors, reduce costs, and improve patient care. But as the Wall Street Journal reported, “a 2009 study in the American Journal of Medicine found that hospitals with more-advanced electronic systems fared no better than other hospitals on measures of administrative costs. . . . Meanwhile, many doctors and nurses say they’re frustrated with the technology. While some say electronic records have improved the way they practice medicine, many others say the systems are time-consuming distractions that take away from patient care.”

Digitalized medical records would certainly have evolved with time — just as paper books and newspapers are rapidly losing ground to their electronic competitors. But without government intrusion, the programs would have developed organically, adjusting to user feedback and actual experience — and costing the taxpayers nothing.

At his September 10 press conference, the president announced another “common sense” idea: We must stop “giving tax breaks to companies that are shipping jobs overseas.” A familiar trope from the 2008 campaign, this “idea” is really another tax increase.

The president’s refrain notwithstanding, there is no section of the U.S. tax code that rewards U.S. companies for outsourcing American jobs. American firms pay taxes on their worldwide income. Our effective corporate tax rate, the highest in the OECD according to a Cato Institute study, puts our companies at a competitive disadvantage abroad. The tax code accordingly does permit U.S. multinationals to “defer” taxes on income earned abroad that is reinvested abroad. They pay taxes on that income only when they repatriate the earnings to the United States.

But eliminating the “deferral” would simply increase corporate rates still further, undercutting the profitability of American companies with overseas operations. As Cato’s Daniel Griswold explains, “There is no evidence that expanding employment at U.S.- owned affiliates comes at the expense of overall employment by parent companies back home in the United States. In fact, the evidence and experience of U.S. multinational companies points in the opposite direction: foreign and domestic operations tend to complement each other and expand together. . . . More activity and sales abroad often require the hiring of more managers, accountants, lawyers, engineers, and production workers at the parent company.”

Reducing the rate of corporate taxation would make U.S. companies more competitive overseas while also attracting more foreign investment here.

But reducing taxes, like reducing regulation, or permitting the market to shape digital medical records, offends President Obama’s preference for top-down decision-making. He isn’t deciding, Carter-like, who should use the White House tennis courts, but he is attempting to do pretty much everything else, with similar results.

— Mona Charen is a nationally syndicated columnist. © 2010 Creators Syndicate.

The Looming Documentary: HBO’s 'My Trip to Al-Qaeda'

It isn’t a simple case of “why do they hate us?” as this flawed but engrossing documentary hosted by Pulitzer-winning author Lawrence Wright explains. It’s more about why they hate their own lives and why they think a supposedly noble death as a suicide bomber is their only escape.

September 12, 2010 - by Christian Toto
http://pajamasmedia.com/

HBO continues to provide a valuable service to subscribers via its original programming slate, filling a glaring gap left by other media outlets.

My Trip to Al-Qaeda, the channel’s new documentary, reveals the face of the Western world’s enemy in a way that will haunt viewers.

The film, inspired by the off-Broadway show of the same name by author turned actor Lawrence Wright, details al-Qaeda’s philosophy in ways that feel fresh and frightening.

Sure, Wright brings a liberal’s gimlet eye for blaming America to the proceedings, something likely advanced by noted Bush-bashing director Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side).

The film’s far bigger takeaway involves a death culture eager to prey on vulnerable populations.

Al-Qaeda, debuting this month, uses Wright’s one-man show as a vessel to tell an expanded version of the terror group’s roots and realities.

It isn’t a simple case of “why do they hate us?” — an inane question that emerged post-9/11. It’s more about why they hate their own lives and how a supposedly noble death as a suicide bomber is often their only escape.

Gibney wisely opens up the show to include footage taken from Middle Eastern countries, returning to the stage play for occasional close-ups of Wright’s face.

He’s a crack storyteller, and he speaks in an easy cadence that reminds one of actor Owen Wilson. But the messages behind Wright’s stories are hardly comforting.

Wright, the author of the Pulitzer Prize winning book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, has been interviewing radical and reasonable Muslims alike for years. His stories are told in sometimes illogical order, but he keeps the narrative in one piece by showing how each brushes up against al-Qaeda.

He draw out the roots of the modern terrorist movement from Egyptian President Anwar el-Sadat signing a peace treaty with Israel — akin to signing his death warrant, Wright argues — to the Egyptian prisons which tortured those responsible for Sadat’s death.

Consider al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri, a doctor who spent time in an Egyptian jail for his role in the assassination.

“He entered prison a surgeon. He came out a butcher,” Wright says.

My Trip to Al-Qaeda offers few solutions on how to deal with the terrorist organization, nor does Wright complete thoughts about his own role studying their behavior. How should he respond if he snared an interview with Osama bin Laden himself? Does he stab the militant with the nearest sharp object, or simply record his thoughts like any responsible journalist might?

“I begin to wonder, ‘who am I when I’m talking to al-Qaeda?’” he asks himself.

Wright also co-wrote The Siege, the 1998 thriller that took a prescient look at terrorists attacking on U.S. soil. The movie feared the loss of civil liberties if a terrorist attack hit our shores, and Wright believes that’s precisely what happened after 9/11.

He conflates the degradations at Abu Ghraib with America in toto, and cries in horror to learn the U.S. waterboarded several al-Qaeda members to glean more information about future attacks.

Wright’s observations on the radical Muslim’s mindset are equally chilling. The culture keeps men separated from women, leaving them socially immature.

“It’s not so easy to be a terrorist if your girlfriend won’t let you,” he cracks. The men who follow the most radical brand of Islam “are nearly incapacitated with longing.”

And that hardly begins to describe life in Saudi Arabia, a cauldron for some of today’s most radical minds. Leisure activity doesn’t have a place in society, at least not by the Western world’s standards. Parks and museums are rare, movie houses don’t exist, and the Internet is heavily controlled and monitored.

Shopping offers their only vice, and when a new IKEA opened up in the country 15,000 people lined up to visit — with two people trampled to death in the crush.

That leaves a young population bored, frustrated, and often clinically depressed.

Enter al-Qaeda, a group which “empowers people who have no power,” he notes, a collective with “an engine that runs on the despair of the Muslim world.“

The film’s waning moments spend too much time detailing one FBI agent’s horror over U.S. interrogation techniques, a one-sided cry of rage from Wright that detracts from the main story.

Wright’s on target when he says the U.S. needs to better understand the radical mindset before engaging in a war on terror. But by blasting the Iraq War, excoriating enhanced interrogation techniques, and decrying modest crackdowns on civil liberties, Wright leaves few other tools available to beat back terror cells around the globe.

Anything the Western world does to fight al-Qaeda trips the Muslim “humiliation reflex,” causing them to hate the West even more. But what’s Plan B?

Wright lets loose with platitudes like, “Al Qaeda can’t destroy America. We can only do that to ourselves.” He’s correct — in theory — but a few well placed nuclear suitcases will bring down the country far more quickly than any draconian laws we can put in place to fight terrorism.

My Trip to Al-Qaeda is tough to watch, tougher to turn away from, and an invaluable aid to those who don’t understand the true nature of the enemy we all face.

Christian Toto is a freelance writer and film critic for The Washington Times. His work has appeared in People magazine, MovieMaker Magazine, The Denver Post, The Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and Scripps Howard News Service. He also contributes movie radio commentary to three stations as well as the nationally syndicated Dennis Miller Show and runs the blog What Would Toto Watch?


Link:

http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/my-trip-to-al-qaeda/index.html

The Road to Wahhabism

Washington’s Islamic Center is an example of how moderate Muslims become marginalized.

By Victoria Toensing
http://www.nationalreview.com
September 13, 2010 4:00 A.M.

Supporters of the proposed $100 million Islamic center near Ground Zero in Manhattan argue that it offers moderate Muslims an opportunity to practice their faith and become ambassadors of Islam to America. Yet the little-known history of Washington, D.C.’s Islamic Center shows how the entity controlling the purse strings can transform even a moderate ecumenical institution into a mouthpiece for Wahhabism, an intolerant form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia.

Washington’s Islamic Center, a magnificently arched structure gracing Massachusetts Avenue on Embassy Row, was conceived in high principle as a “religious organization to provide a place of worship for the members of the Islamic faith.” Its opening ceremony, in 1957, commanded the presence of President Eisenhower, who praised Islam’s contributions to the “advancement of mankind” and concluded with the resolution that “America would fight with her whole strength for your right to have your own church,” noting that “without this, we would be something less than we are.”

The center’s first board of directors was truly representative of the Islamic world, including members from Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. And its stated mission was full of promise, including a commitment to “enlighten American public opinion on the Islamic Countries . . . and to promote friendly relations between the Muslim world and the Americas.”

Alas, under Saudi control since the mid-1980s, the center has become a hotbed of misogyny and anti-American rancor. In the 1990s, for instance, it brought in Wahhabist cleric Ali Al-Timimi to preach. In 2005, a U.S. federal court in Virginia sentenced Timimi to life in prison after convicting him of ten counts related to terrorism, including soliciting fighters to wage war against the United States and counseling others to aid the Taliban.

Basing its stance on sharia law, the center also recently prohibited women from worshipping in its main prayer hall. In March of this year, three D.C. Metropolitan police officers entered the center — at the imam’s request — and removed six Muslim women who were praying peacefully in the forbidden section.

Under Saudi leadership, the Islamic Center has marginalized voices of moderation by shutting other Muslim countries out of running the center. I know this because since August 2006, I have been counsel in numerous legal proceedings involving the center. In that capacity I have seen all the documents regarding its funding since the late 1990s, including financial records and board minutes.

Some history: After the Iranian revolution in 1979, American supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini’s coup physically occupied the center for over two years, ousting director and imam Muhammad Abdul Rauf — the father of Feisal Abdul Rauf, leader of today’s Ground Zero mosque project.

Although the board replaced the imam in 1983, it did not decide until 1984 to fill the position of director, which the center’s bylaws require to be held by a “Muslim scholar with considerable fame” who has “lecture[d] in Islamic studies.”

The board allowed Saudi Arabia to name Abdullah M. Khouj, whose curriculum vitae described him as a senior officer of the Muslim World League, a Saudi-financed organization with a goal of spreading Wahhabism. Khouj had no scholarly credentials, nor did he have a diplomatic background. Yet the United States granted Khouj a diplomatic visa, enabling the Saudis to pay him over $120,000 a year tax-free.

In 1985 the Saudis replaced the board’s treasurer with Prince Mohamad Bin-Faisal, director of the religious section in the Saudi embassy in Washington. Mr. Khouj then removed the center’s accountant, thus assuming total financial control of the institution, which he has maintained ever since. Next, he dismissed the center’s imam and consolidated that authority with his position as director, just as Imam Rauf had done a decade before. Yet this time the power grab represented only Saudi Arabia, not the diverse group of Islamic countries of the 1970s.

On paper, the board governs almost every aspect of the center’s administrative and financial functions, but the Saudis circumvented this governance structure. First, Mr. Khouj opened a personal checking account, through which the Saudi government wrote checks in his name for approximately $500,000 per year. Mr. Khouj alone approved all the center’s expenses; the board was not even informed that the account existed.

For 15 years, the center’s board never met. Then, in 1999, the Saudis called a meeting to turn control of the center over to the Muslim World League. Fortunately, a number of moderate Islamic countries, including Egypt and Oman, saw this coming and thwarted the maneuver by forcing a postponement on the pretext that they wanted “additional information.”

Mr. Khouj complied so faithfully with the Saudis’ requests to bring Wahhabist radicals — including Timimi — to teach at the center that in 2004 they planned to promote him to ambassador to South Africa. To succeed Khouj as imam, the Saudis wanted to appoint the controversial Ahmad Saifuddin Turkistani, former director of the Institute of Islamic and Arab Sciences in America (IIASA). In a 2002 report, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies cited IIASA as the largest source of Saudi hate literature in the Washington metropolitan area.

So the Saudis convened the center’s second board meeting in 20 years. Once again the board indirectly blocked the Saudis’ maneuver, by declaring that it must approve any new director. The devil they knew, Mr. Khouj, remained.

Yet the Saudis continue to run the center with an iron hand and a generous checkbook. For political or cultural reasons, or both, other Muslim countries will not directly confront them or expose their machinations.

In September 2008, the Washington Post Sunday Magazine quoted Amin Kakeh, one of Khouj’s “teachers” at the center, castigating the secretary of state for her purported response to a Palestinian blast that opened a border fence: “When the gate opened to Egypt for Palestinians, Condoleezza Rice picked up the phone and said: ‘Close the gate, we want them to die!’”

Of Washington’s heightened airport security measures, Kakeh complained, “They want to see Victoria’s Secret products. That’s the reason they are running after the female Muslim. They want to see their underwear.” And on Islamic justice, he added, “If Allah says in Court you should cut off his hand, some people say it’s too extreme. Why? Are you saying Allah is too harsh?”

No one in Washington blinked. The Saudis have financially occupied the Washington Islamic Center for a quarter of a century, but this remains a well-kept secret. No one protests, or even mentions it. Not other Muslim countries, which would gain much from a vibrant and inclusive Islamic Center; not the White House, which will always desire a close relationship with Saudi Arabia; and not reporters, who fear saying anything that might be politically incorrect.

This universal silence about the Saudis’ financial and ideological control of the center is a disservice to those Muslims who truly desire a moderate, respectful house of worship, not a place to foment Wahhabism. How do we know the difference? Follow the money . . .

— Victoria Toensing is a partner in the Washington law firm diGenova and Toensing, and a board member of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.

Americans have good reason not to believe in Obamanomics

By George F. Will
The Washington Post
Sunday, September 12, 2010; A25
http://www.washingtonpost.com

Looking back with pride, the British are commemorating the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Britain, when Churchill said of the pilots fighting the Luftwaffe: Never "was so much owed by so many to so few." Looking ahead with trepidation, Americans are thinking: Never have so many of us owed so much.

Actually, they owed slightly more when the recession began, when household consumer debt was $2.6 trillion. The painful but necessary process of deleveraging is proceeding slowly: Such debt has been reduced only to $2.4 trillion. Add to that the facts that the recession has reduced household wealth by $10 trillion and that only 25 percent of Americans expect their incomes to improve next year. So they are not spending, and companies, having given the economy a temporary boost last year by rebuilding inventories, are worried. Hence, rather than hiring, companies are sitting on cash reserves much larger than the size of last year's $862 billion stimulus.

Democrats who say that another stimulus is necessary for job creation but who dare not utter the word "stimulus" are sending three depressing messages: The $862 billion stimulus did not work; the public so loathes the word that another stimulus will not happen; therefore prosperity is not "just around the corner," as Herbert Hoover supposedly said (but did not). Consumers and businesses are responding to those messages by heeding Polonius's advice in "Hamlet": "Neither a borrower nor a lender be." Hoover -- against whom Democrats, those fountains of fresh ideas, have been campaigning for 78 years -- is again being invoked as a terrible warning about the wages of sin. Sin is understood by liberals as government austerity, which is understood as existing levels of government spending, whatever they are, whenever. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner recently said that Germans favoring reduced rather than increased state spending sounded "a little bit like Hoover." Well.

Real per capita federal expenditures almost doubled between 1929, Hoover's first year as president, and 1932, his last. David Kennedy, in "Freedom from Fear," the volume in the Oxford history of the American people that deals with the Depression, writes of Hoover:

"He nearly doubled federal public works expenditures in three years. Thanks to his prodding, the net stimulating effect of federal, state and local fiscal policy was larger in 1931 than in any subsequent year of the decade." Barack Obama has self-nullifying plans for stimulating the small-business sector that creates most new jobs. He has just endorsed tax relief for such businesses but opposes extension of the Bush tax cuts for high-income filers, who include small businesses with 48 percent of that sector's earnings. The stance of other Democrats seems to be that the Bush cuts were wicked in conception, reckless in execution -- and should be largely, and perhaps entirely, extended.

Does this increase anyone's confidence? About as much as noting the one-year anniversary of the end of another of the administration's brainstorms.

The used-car market is an important mechanism for redistributing wealth to low-income persons: The price of a car drops when it is driven out of the dealership, but much of its transportation value remains when it enters the used-car market. Unfortunately for low-income people, the average price of a three-year-old automobile has increased more than 10 percent since last summer. This is largely because the Car Allowance Rebate System, aka "Cash for Clunkers," which ended in August 2009, cut the supply of used cars.

Cash for Clunkers provided up to $4,500 to persons who traded in a car in order to purchase a new car with better gas mileage, but it stipulated that the used car had to be scrapped. The Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby reports that a study by Edmunds.com shows that all but 125,000 of the 700,000 cars sold during the clunkers program would have been bought even if no subsidy had been available. If this is so, each incremental sale cost taxpayers $24,000.

Even on environmental grounds the program was, Jacoby argues, "an exorbitant dud": The reduction in carbon dioxide from removing older cars from the road cost, according to research at the University of California at Davis, $237 a ton (the international market prices carbon emissions credits at about $20 a ton) and the new higher-mileage cars mean a reduction of carbon dioxide emissions of less than what Americans emit every hour.

Obama is desperately urging consumers and investors to have confidence in his understanding of economics. They may, however, remember his characteristic certitude that "cash for clunkers" was "successful beyond anybody's imagination."

georgewill@washpost.com

The Majesty of Raphael in London

By SOUREN MELIKIAN
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
September 10, 2010

LONDON — Art as a tool of international diplomacy has its ironical twists. Thanks to the imminent visit next week of Pope Benedict XVI to Britain, admirers of Raphael can enjoy a privilege that the artist himself never had.

For the first time in history, seven of the 10 “cartoons,” or full-scale compositions, commissioned in 1515 by Pope Leo X are assembled at the Victoria and Albert Museum, together with four of the tapestries woven after them to cover the lower walls of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican in the heart of Rome.

The occasion is unique. The seven surviving cartoons were bought in Genoa in 1623 on behalf of the prince of Wales, later King Charles I of England. They were to serve as models for tapestries woven in the Mortlake Manufactory. The cartoons eventually entered the Royal Collection and in 1865 were sent on permanent loan to their present home, the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Painted on joined-up sheets of paper later laid on canvas, the cartoons are too fragile to travel. So, generally, are the tapestries woven in wool, silk and gilt-metal-wrapped thread at the Brussels workshop run by Pieter van Aelst.


The Royal Collection
“The Miraculous Draught of Fishes.”

As Arnold Nesselrath, who edited the exhibition book with Mark Evans and Clare Browne, writes in his essay on the Sistine Chapel, the tapestries were displayed when major liturgical services were celebrated by the pope. Their dispatch outside the Vatican is unlikely to recur within anyone’s lifetime today.

The law of unintended consequences applies to art shows as to all other undertakings with a political slant. The exhibition underlines with startling vigor the transformation of papacy from the Renaissance to the present time. It is a brilliant reminder that five centuries ago, the papacy was a princely family business attuned to the intellectual and artistic elite of Italy.

Raphael himself was the ultimate scion of that elite. He was born in 1483 in the small duchy of Urbino, one of the main centers of humanistic culture from the 1460s to the 1480s, as Mr. Evans points out. His father, Giovanni Santi, was a court painter. This allowed the youngster access to Elisabetta Gonzaga, the duchess of Urbino, who granted him her patronage. At 17 he began training under one of the famous painters of the day, Perugino. It was from him that Raphael probably learned the technique of painting in oils recently introduced into Italy from the Netherlands.

Success quickly beckoned. Raphael was 25 when Pope Julius II invited him to decorate the papal apartments in the Vatican palace. In the course of the next nine years, the artist established himself as an acclaimed master.

Several of his assistants and pupils later became celebrities, notably Giorgio Romano and Poliodoro da Caravaggio.

Raphael turned into a figure to be reckoned with at the papal court. When Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici was elected to the papal throne, succeeding Julius II under the name Pope Leo X, the painter’s dominant position at the Vatican was confirmed at the expense of his older rival Michelangelo. A year later, Raphael scored once more. Donato Bramante had died. In addition to his many commitments, the painter then became architect of St Peter’s.

Never overcome by work, Raphael portrayed the great men of the day. His likenesses included such luminaries as his friend Balthasar Castiglione and Pope Leo X with Cardinals Giulio de’ Medici and Luigi de’ Rossi.

In 1515 and 1516 Raphael embarked on one of his greatest projects thus far, the tapestry cartoons of the Acts of the Apostles for the Sistine Chapel. He followed that up with the decoration of the bathroom and loggia of Cardinal Bibbiena in 1516 and the private loggias of Leo X in 1518-19.

When he died in 1520 at the age of 37, the indefatigable painter was completing his largest oil painting ever, the “Transfiguration” altarpiece for the cathedral at Narbonne in France, and had started to decorate the Sala di Constantino in the private apartments of Leo X.

Commenting on this Herculean amount of work, Mr. Evans puts it down to “Raphael’s artistic genius and managerial skills” and cites the ability of his assistants.

But the milieu in which this took place and the churchmen who played lead roles in succession were equally crucial, particularly Pope Leo X, the former Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici.

The cardinal’s father was Lorenzo the Magnificent, under whom Florence had soared to unrivaled artistic heights, and his mother, Clarissa Orsini, belonged to an old aristocratic family that had given Rome two popes and several cardinals.


"Christ's Charge to Peter"

Young Giovanni received a golden education. The great influence in his formative years was the poet Angelo Poliziano, who induced in him a lifelong love of the classics. But as Mark Haydu observes in a biographical essay in the exhibition book on Leo X, the future pope was equally fascinated by the novelties of his time, the discovery of the New World included.

After his election to the Holy See, Leo X displayed considerable interest in urbanism. The building of the new basilica of St. Peter’s took off. Financial incentives given by Pope Sixtus IV to encourage private owners to renovate their residences had been abolished. Leo X reinstated them in 1516.

This modern man was also profoundly pious. He made huge monthly donations to help displaced families and discharged soldiers, and to distribute food to the destitute.

A fascinating side to Leo X’s character, his passion for music, is analyzed by Adalbert Roth in the exhibition book. A renowned Flemish composer, Heinrich Isaac, was in charge of Leo’s musical education from 1485 to 1589. The young man became an accomplished musician and singer who even composed music. When pope, he paid musicians from his personal purse and made music with them as he had done while still a cardinal. In short, the princely ecclesiastic was the epitome of the cultivated Renaissance man.

The cartoons and tapestries woven after them resulted from the encounter of these two extraordinary characters of the Italian patrician elite, Leo X and Raphael.

The present time may not give the desirable scope for artistic and cultural concerns to the papal entourage, but the present show, and even more so the highly interesting book that accompanies it, unwittingly underlines the unflattering cultural contrast between past and present. If meant as a public-relations coup, it misses out.

Interestingly, the show sends another unintended message — genius is not transferable.

Some of the cartoons, particularly “The Miraculous Draught of Fishes” and “Christ’s Charge to Peter” (long known as “The Donation of the Keys”), are among Raphael’s most beautiful works. Translated into the weavers’ technique, the dramatic tension of the cartoon curiously gives way to banal gesticulation. The depth and relief of the painted work vanish. The pretty decorative tapestry hardly does justice to Raphael’s monumental tableaus, which are overwhelming.

If this unusual exhibition should move more visitors to go and admire the cartoons always on view in the V&A, where they rarely attract vast crowds, that would be enough to validate it.

There is another major justification for it. A few preparatory studies by Raphael shed light on the visionary process that leads to artistic creation. In one of these, the characters lightly done in brown wash heightened with white, as a preliminary study for “Christ’s Charge to Peter,” are ethereal apparitions in an unreal world. In the cartoon, figures with colored drapes shimmering in the light firmly stand out and each individual face is a masterly portrait.

Tapestry connoisseurs may be gripped by the differences between the original Pieter van Aelst specimens and the versions executed a century later in the Mortlake Manufactory, also by Flemish weavers, while scholars will scrutinize the engravings made by Agostino Veneziano after the Pieter van Aelst tapestries. These popularized the compositions across Europe.

Even limited to a few works, this is a show that requires a long time to be fully taken in. The aesthetic language belongs to another age. The evocation of the acts of St. Peter and St. Paul, still obvious to a Western public until the last century, will seem unfamiliar to some visitors.

To many, it will all feel like a trip into a forgotten world — beautiful, complex and remote.

Raphael. Cartoons and Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel. Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Through Oct. 17.