Mary Katherine Ham: Chicks Carrying Guns and Kicking Tail

[Reminds me of the good old days when one could purchase calendars hawked by G. Gordon Liddy that featured his scantily-clad listeners posing with their favorite firearms...now that's art...hmm...maybe those calendars are still obtainable...somehow. - jtf]

http://www.townhall.com
Monday, September 25, 2006


No, I didn’t write that headline just to get you to click through to my column. All right, maybe I did a little, but there really is no better way to describe it.

Over the past couple weeks, there have been a couple stories floating around that just warmed my little heart, but they didn’t get a lot of attention, so I have decided to give them plenty. Do you wonder what kind of story it takes to warm my cold, conservative heart? Well, wonder no longer.

This is the kind of headline I’m talking about.

Woman Kills Intruder With Bare Hands

Come on, you know you got goosebumps. How I do love to see the fairer sex meting out justice. When called upon, this 51-year-old nurse’s hands went from mothering to manslaughter in seconds flat:

A nurse returning from work discovered an intruder armed with a hammer in her home and strangled him with her bare hands, police said. Susan Kuhnhausen, 51, ran to a neighbor's house after the confrontation Wednesday night. Police found the body of Edward Dalton Haffey, 59, a convicted felon with a long police record.

Wow.

Of course, not all women are lucky enough to outweigh their attackers, as Kuhnhausen did, so they have to resort to other methods, like persistence.

Butt-Kicking Granny Turns Tables on Purse-Snatcher

Seventy-five-year-old Betty Horton had her purse snatched, but was having none of that. She chased the robber down and retrieved the purse with sheer determination and the threat of a gun.

"I was huffin' and puffin' by the time I got around the corner, but I didn't care," Horton said…
Horton found the man and told him to drop the bag.
"Because if you don't, and I get a hold of it and there's a gun in there, I'll shoot your ear off or I'll take your toe, because you're not going to take my purse away from me," she told him.

Unforgettable.

Those two stories were so fun, I decided to look around for others.

Vivian Deen saved her grocery store, and perhaps her husband’s life this week, when she opened up fire on a would-be robber:

William Deen, 60, was on the telephone about 10 a.m. when he said the man came in with a stocking over his face. He was dressed in black.

"He kind of eased in, and when I looked up, he said, 'This is a stickup,' " Deen said. "I thought it was some kind of joke, but then he put a gun in my face."

Deen said the man again demanded money and tried to crawl behind the counter. The two then struggled for the gun."All I could see was his pistol in my face, but I wasn't giving up anything," Deen said. "I work too hard for that. He was going to have to come and take it."

Deen said he didn't want his wife to get involved.

However, Vivian Deen, 45, grabbed a handgun kept behind the counter and fired at the robber's shoulder."I've never even fired a gun before. But when I saw the gun pointing at my husband, I didn't waste any time," she said.

Stand by your man.

Then there’s this Kansas woman, who not only carries a pistol, but is also armed with soundbites:

The man asked her, "Do you have anything good in that van?" The woman knew she was in trouble. She told him yes and moved to the front passenger-side door. She pulled out her pistol and heard a knife click open. When she looked back, she saw the man was holding a knife pointed downward in his hand. She quickly turned, pointed the gun right at him and asked, "Are you really sure you want to do whatever you're going to do?" He took off running, the father said.

Hot.

In 2002, Charmaine Dunbar met a man on an early-morning walk, who threatened her with a rifle. She shot him twice in the stomach. It turned out he was suspected of six sexual assaults in her neighborhood and had intended her for his seventh victim.

The second time she saw the man, she was walking up Brushton Avenue around 5:35 a.m. She recognized his clothing. "Oh my God," she thought, "It's him."

She walked faster, unobtrusively getting her gun ready, but kept it under her sleeve. When they reached the top of steep Brushton Avenue, he was out of breath and stopped; she continued. She looked behind her once, and she saw him leaning over, pulling his rifle out from his pants.
Knowing she needed to fire before he was able to take aim, she steadied her gun and fired twice at his abdomen. He continued to lean over, apparently unaffected, and Dunbar thought, "Oh my God, my bullets didn't work."

Then he stood up, yelled, and fell over.

Hero.

Mom and Pop were not to be messed with in Atlanta, and 56-year-old Gloria Doster gave the reporter the quotes of a lifetime:

"I just started shooting," said Gloria Doster, 56. "I was trying to blow his brains out is what I was trying to do."
She said she tried to open the register, but one of the men told her she wasn't moving fast enough and tried to shoot her husband. He missed -- and his gun jammed.

At that point, Bobby Doster pulled out a .380-caliber handgun and shot one of the suspects. Gloria Doster then went for a 9 mm pistol she keeps near the register.
"All hell broke loose," she said. "I was trying to shoot and dial 911 at the same time."

Ruthless.

A North Carolina woman protected four lives this spring with one gun.

A pregnant woman was lying on the couch in her home when she heard the mini-blinds on her kitchen door rustle. Police say the woman, whose 1- and 3-year-old children were also in the home, got up to investigate and found a man trying to break in.

When she spotted him, he ran around the corner of the duplex to the front door and tried to kick it in. The woman warned the prowler that she had a gun. When he replied that he also had a gun, she shot at him and he returned fire. The intruder was hit in the chest and died on the way to the hospital. No one else was injured.

Maternal instinct.

This is the kind of women’s empowerment that gets me going. A new women’s studies program just doesn’t do it for me the way a gleaming .380 does.

Highlighting stories like these is the way to get people thinking of guns that way, and I’m trying to do more of it. Other sources for empowerment are the NRA Armed Citizens Database, Clayton Cramer’s Gun Self-Defense Blog, and the Women on Target program.

I’m going to stay armed with plenty of anecdotes. That way, the next time someone comes to me with an anti-gun canard, I can say, “Are you really sure you want to do whatever you're going to do?”

Hot.

Hugh Hewitt: Touch a Sore Spot, President Clinton?

[The performance on Fox News Sunday yesterday was vintage Bill Clinton...plenty of 'moral' outrage at the antics of the all-powerful 'right-wing conspiracy'...plenty of defiant finger-wagging...plenty of craven excuse-making...never missing an opportunity to burnish the 'legacy' of his eight years in office as a 'public servant'. By the way, what the hell was Sandy Berger doing stuffing papers down his shorts in the National Archives during the 9/11 Commission hearings? I wish Chris Wallace would have asked the traitorous, philandering, rapist that one...just for starters. - jtf]

Sunday, September 24, 2006
Posted by Hugh Hewitt 5:49 PM
http://www.townhall.com/

Bill Clinton erupts when Chris Wallace makes the gentlest of inquiries about the new book The Looming Tower.

Watch the whole thing, and bookmark Bill's admission that the 9/11 Commission Report was a "political document." It was, of course, but only in the sense that it bent over to attempt to keep the Clinton Adminstration from suffering too much scrutiny.

But books like Lawrence Wright's cannot be manipulated, and so Clinton launches into a furious counterattack on Wallace, Fox and ABC, the Bush Administration and right wing critics and media. This fascinating bit of theater --part paranoia, part panic-- distills Clinton's argument to: "Who you going to believe, Dick Clarke and his memoir, or everybody and everything else?"

Bill Clinton's record vis-a-vis Osama cannot withstand even two minutes of sharp questions-and-answers. He's obliged to tightly control every encounter with the press, denounce every serious work of history, obfuscate by pointing to meeting after meeting or to non-sequitors like the fact that no one knew at the time that Osama was connected to Mogadishu (but when, Mr. Clinton, did you become aware of his connection), legal tap dancing --the FBI and CIA wouldn't let me do it-- and the worst of all, chest thumping about how he'd be waging the war if he was still president.

Whatever Clinton hoped to accomplish with this childish filibuster and tantrum, it guaranteed the opposite: No such fury is required when the facts are on your side. You don't have to control every encounter and explode with anger and accusations when asked if you would like to comment on a new book.

Here's just one relevant excerpt from my interview with Lawrence Wright on Friday:

LW: You know, it’s actually…and I see this as kind of a paradox, Hugh. Sudan was an open country for terrorists. You know, they had an Islamic revolution, and they opened their doors to anybody, any Muslim who wanted to come. And naturally, the ones who came were the ones that weren’t invited anywhere else. And so even…you had Carlos the Jackal there, and Abu Nidal, and all these different terrorist groups. And you had bin Laden, who had some money to give them. And it was in…during the Clinton administration, in 1996, that it was decided that bin Laden posed a threat by just being there. And so American authorities put pressure on the Sudanese to expel him. And the Sudanese first of all said well, do you want him? And you know, we didn’t have an indictment on bin Laden. There wasn’t very much that we could do with him. At the time, it may be that he hadn’t killed any Americans yet. So we said no.

HH: We being who?

LW: We being the State Department, and the NSC.

HH: Quite a lot of debate over whether or not President Clinton was involved in that decision. What do your researches tell you?

LW: Well, they did want to…you know, the Clinton administration clearly wanted to force bin Laden out of Sudan. They thought it was dangerous for him to be there. But the Sudanese argued, listen, he’s going to go to Afghanistan. Here, he’s under watch. Here, he has investments. You know, at least you know his address. If he goes to Afghanistan, nobody will be in control.

HH: But when…let me press you on this point. When Sudan offered bin Laden to the United States, and we said no, and you said State Department and NSC, do you think President Clinton was involved in that decision?

LW: Well, you know, it certainly reflects his administration’s policies.

Bill Clinton audio confirming this account can be listened to here.

What is astonishing is that in the five years since 9/11, the Democratic Party and the nation's media has become even more feckless about the threat from Islamist terror than Bill Clinton was --and remains.

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Laurie Mylroie: Al Qaeda's Hidden Roots

Laurie Mylroie
The American Spectator
September 25, 2006

Cyrus Nowrasteh, scriptwriter for ABC's docudrama The Path to 9/11, defends the film's controversial, invented scenes, noting that the first attack on the World Trade Center occurred one month after Bill Clinton took office, and eight years passed in which Clinton did little to thwart the growing menace. Nowrasteh makes a crucial point, but it is not necessary to resort to fiction. Our understanding of the terrorist attacks -- going back to the 1993 Trade Center bombing -- has become loaded with errors obscuring Clinton's fecklessness. Correct those errors, which, unfortunately the film reproduces, and this essential point is far clearer.

The film links Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 bombing, to Osama bin Ladin. But, in fact, Yousef and bin Ladin had nothing to do with each other. Bin Laden is not indicted for the Trade Center bombing -- intended to topple the towers and kill 250,000 people -- despite an extensive effort to discover such links. Nor is that attack included in the military charges against Guantanamo Bay detainees, which outline al Qaeda's conspiracy against America. Indeed, bin Laden was not indicted until June 1998, when he was charged with one count: "conspiracy to attack defense utilities of the United States." The target is not identified, and no actual attack occurred.

Al Qaeda was long a small, secretive organization. There is virtually no public mention of it during its first decade -- a Lexis-Nexis search produces five articles -- until the August 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies. Only after those attacks, is al Qaeda added to the official U.S. list of terrorist groups. The 9/11 Commission notes, "While we now know that al Qaeda was formed in 1988, at the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the Intelligence Community did not describe this organization in documents we have seen, until 1999 (emphasis added.)

It would have been a truly massive failure of virtually every U.S. agency responsible for fighting terrorism if bin Laden had backed a plot to kill 250,000 Americans in 1993, but the Justice Department only charged him with any crime five years later and the intelligence community only began to analyze his organization the following year.

Terrorist Family Extraordinaire

George Tenet told the Congressional Joint Inquiry, "We now believe that a common thread runs between the first attack on the World Trade Center in February 1993 and the 11 September attacks....Mukhtar is the uncle of Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 bombing plot against the World Trade Center. Following the 1993 attack, Yousef and Mukhtar plotted in 1995 to blow up [twelve] U.S. planes flying East Asian routes." "Mukhtar" was an alias for Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM), the 9/11 mastermind. "

Since September 11, the CIA has come to believe that KSM may have been responsible for all bin Laden operations outside Afghanistan," the Joint Inquiry reports. Yet U.S. authorities only learned of KSM's key role after the capture and interrogation of a senior al Qaeda figure in 2002. A U.S. intelligence official later told the Washington Post, "It wasn't until recently that any of us even realized he was part of al Qaeda....The big problem nailing him down is that the informants that we relied on, especially before 9/11, were mujaheddin. They'd been in Afghanistan, in Sudan, back in Afghanistan. Khalid was never a part of any of that" (emphasis added) Ammar al-Baluchi (aka Ali Abdul Aziz Ali) -- Ramzi Yousef's first cousin and another KSM nephew -- was KSM's "right-hand man."

Al-Baluchi sent the "primary funding" to the hijackers and coached nine of them on how to behave in America. Following KSM's capture in 2003, U.S. authorities told the Washington Post they were "concerned that his nephews -- the brothers of imprisoned terrorist Ramzi Yousef -- may be positioned to take over planning of future terror attacks." They named two men: Abdul Munim and Abdul Karim. Nothing further has been reported about Abdul Munim, but Abdul Karim proved a key figure. Captured in May 2004, his interrogation led to further arrests and the discovery of a major plot against US financial centers. Thus, the official U.S. position holds that a family essentially forms the core expertise for the major attacks that began with the 1993 Trade Center bombing, culminated in 9/11, and even continued afterwards. Yet no precedent exists for a single family to be the sole, or even the key, source of expertise for a major terrorist group.

According to U.S. intelligence, this family is Baluch, a Sunni Muslim people, living in Eastern Iran and Western Pakistan (The Path to 9/11 erroneously identifies Yousef as Palestinian.) Following Yousef's arrest in Islamabad, the New York Times reported:

The Pakistan newspaper, The News, which is said to have good sources in the Pakistani military's Inter-Services Intelligence agency, said that "if features could betray geography," Mr. Yousef appeared to Pakistani investigators "as if he is from the coastal belt of Baluchistan."...[They] had noted that President Saddam Hussein's Government in Iraq had tried to exploit animosities against the Iran Government among Baluch tribal people in southeastern Iran during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. The newspaper said this could explain how Mr. Yousef came into possession of the Iraqi passport that he used when he arrived in New York in September 1992, six months before the World Trade Center bombing. "If Ramzi is in fact of Iranian Baluch origin, it would not have been big problem for him to get an Iraqi passport," the newspaper said. [February 13, 1995]

Yet the Clinton administration did not want to hear this. (In the 1992 presidential campaign, I was Clinton's adviser on Iraq; in later encounters with the White House, I found it strongly resistant to hearing about evidence linking Saddam to terrorism.)

An Alternative Explanation

An alternative explanation for al Qaeda's terrorism exists. After bin Laden was expelled to Afghanistan in 1996, two groups joined forces: 1) the original al Qaeda, represented by bin Laden and those around him; and 2) the Baluch: KSM and his extended "clan," which is probably not a family, but an elite squad. Probably, these individuals were selected in the same way we would recruit such a group: they were chosen for their special aptitudes from a much larger pool and then given additional training -- most likely, by Iraq.

The path to 9/11 really began with the Baluch before their alliance with al Qaeda -- with the 1993 Trade Center bombing and the 1995 plane bombing plot. Only after KSM joined with bin Laden, bringing with him the skills of his group, did al Qaeda's major attacks against the U.S. begin -- starting with the 1998 embassy bombings. This would help explain how a virtually unknown organization like al Qaeda managed to bomb two U.S. embassies nearly simultaneously and then carry out the most lethal single attack in U.S. history a mere three years later.

Laurie Mylroie is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein's War Against America (AEI Press, 2001). This piece is based on her article in the October issue of The American Spectator, "How Little We Know."

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Byron York: Bill Clinton's Excuses

[My initial reaction to Chris Wallace's interview with Bill Clinton is this: Someone...anyone...please...help Mr. Clinton with the length of his pants. We were all repeatedly treated to a series of peeks at the former President's pasty white appendages everytime the camera panned back to show him with his legs crossed...get the man some longer pants!...or longer socks!...whatever it takes...geez. - jtf]

No matter what he says, the record shows he failed to act against terrorism.

http://www.nationalreview.com
September 24, 2006

“I worked hard to try and kill him,” former president Bill Clinton told Fox News Sunday. “I tried. I tried and failed.”

"Him” is Osama bin Laden. And in his interview with Fox News’ Chris Wallace, the former president based nearly his entire defense on one source: Against All Enemies: Inside America’s War on Terror, the book by former White House counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke. “All I’m asking is if anybody wants to say I didn’t do enough, you read Richard Clarke’s book,” Clinton said at one point in the interview. “All you have to do is read Richard Clarke’s book to look at what we did in a comprehensive systematic way to try to protect the country against terror,” he said at another. “All you have to do is read Richard Clarke’s findings and you know it’s not true,” he said at yet another point. In all, Clinton mentioned Clarke’s name 11 times during the Fox interview.

But Clarke’s book does not, in fact, support Clinton’s claim. Judging by Clarke’s sympathetic account — as well as by the sympathetic accounts of other former Clinton aides like Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon — it’s not quite accurate to say that Clinton tried to kill bin Laden. Rather, he tried to convince — as opposed to, say, order — U.S. military and intelligence agencies to kill bin Laden. And when, on a number of occasions, those agencies refused to act, Clinton, the commander-in-chief, gave up.

Clinton did not give up in the sense of an executive who gives an order and then moves on to other things, thinking the order is being carried out when in fact it is being ignored. Instead, Clinton knew at the time that his top military and intelligence officials were dragging their feet on going after bin Laden and al Qaeda. He gave up rather than use his authority to force them into action. Examples are all over Clarke’s book. On page 223, Clarke describes a meeting, in late 2000, of the National Security Council “principals” — among them, the heads of the CIA, the FBI, the Attorney General, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the secretaries of State, Defense. It was just after al Qaeda’s attack on the USS Cole. But neither the FBI nor the CIA would say that al Qaeda was behind the bombing, and there was little support for a retaliatory strike. Clarke quotes Mike Sheehan, a State Department official, saying in frustration, “What’s it going to take, Dick? Who the shit do they think attacked the Cole, fuckin’ Martians? The Pentagon brass won’t let Delta go get bin Laden. Hell they won’t even let the Air Force carpet bomb the place. Does al Qaeda have to attack the Pentagon to get their attention?”

That came later. But in October 2000, what would it have taken? A decisive presidential order — which never came.

The story was the same with the CIA. On page 204, Clarke vents his frustration at the CIA’s slow-walking on the question of killing bin Laden. “I still to this day do not understand why it was impossible for the United States to find a competent group of Afghans, Americans, third-country nationals, or some combination who could locate bin Laden in Afghanistan and kill him,” Clarke writes. “I believe that those in CIA who claim the [presidential] authorizations were insufficient or unclear are throwing up that claim as an excuse to cover the fact that they were pathetically unable to accomplish the mission.”

Clarke hit the CIA again a few pages later, on page 210, on the issue of the CIA’s refusal to budget money for the fight against al Qaeda. “The formal, official CIA response was that there were [no funds],” Clarke writes. “Another way to say that was that everything they were doing was more important than fighting al Qaeda.”

The FBI proved equally frustrating. On page 217, Clarke describes a colleague, Roger Cressey, who was frustrated after meeting with an FBI representative on the subject of terrorism. “That fucker is going to get some Americans killed,” Clarke reports Cressey saying. “He just sits there like a bump on a log.” Clarke adds: “I knew he was talking about an FBI representative.”

So Clinton couldn’t get the job done. Why not? According to Clarke’s pro-Clinton view, the president was stymied by Republican opposition. “Weakened by continual political attack,” Clarke writes, “[Clinton] could not get the CIA, the Pentagon, and FBI to act sufficiently to deal with the threat.”

Republicans boxed Clinton in, Clarke writes, beginning in the 1992 campaign, with criticism of Clinton’s avoidance of the draft as a young man, and extending all the way to the Lewinsky scandal and the president’s impeachment. The bottom line, Clarke argues, is that the commander-in-chief was not in command. From page 225:

Because of the intensity of the political opposition that Clinton engendered, he had been heavily criticized for bombing al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, for engaging in ‘Wag the Dog’ tactics to divert attention from a scandal about his personal life. For similar reasons, he could not fire the recalcitrant FBI Director who had failed to fix the Bureau or to uncover terrorists in the United States. He had given the CIA unprecedented authority to go after bin Laden personally and al Qaeda, but had not taken steps when they did little or nothing. Because Clinton was criticized as a Vietnam War opponent without a military record, he was limited in his ability to direct the military to engage in anti-terrorist commando operations they did not want to conduct. He had tried that in Somalia, and the military had made mistakes and blamed him. In the absence of a bigger provocation from al Qaeda to silence his critics, Clinton thought he could do no more.

In the end, Clarke writes, Clinton “put in place the plans and programs that allowed America to respond to the big attacks when they did come, sweeping away the political barriers to action.”

But the bottom line is that Bill Clinton, the commander-in-chief, could not find the will to order the military into action against al Qaeda, and Bill Clinton, the head of the executive branch, could not find the will to order the CIA and FBI to act. No matter what the former president says on Fox, or anywhere else, that is his legacy in the war on terror.

— Byron York, NR’s White House correspondent, is the author of the book The Vast Left Wing Conspiracy: The Untold Story of How Democratic Operatives, Eccentric Billionaires, Liberal Activists, and Assorted Celebrities Tried to Bring Down a President — and Why They’ll Try Even Harder Next Time.

Mark Steyn: U.N. Shows Why It's Incapable of Reform

September 24, 2006
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES


The last intervention in public affairs Ted Turner made was a month or two back, when he recounted what an agreeable vacation he'd had in Kim Jong Il's North Korea. (I sent him a postcard saying, "Wish you were still there.") He's now weighed in on the ayatollahs, and his line's pretty straightforward: Why shouldn't Iran have nukes?

"They're a sovereign state," he said. "We have 28,000. Why can't they have 10? We don't say anything about Israel -- they've got 100 of them approximately -- or India or Pakistan or Russia. And really, nobody should have them. They aren't usable by any sane person."

Cut to President Ahmadinejad's address to the United Nations. His speech was mostly a lot of run-of-the-mill kook boilerplate -- the U.N. is a stooge of the Great Satan (if only), America started the Israel-Hezbollah war (whatever) -- but he wound up the usual shtick with a prayer for the return of the Twelfth Imam, the so-called "Hidden Imam" -- or, as the Iranian president put it: "the perfect, righteous human being and the real savior who has been promised to all peoples and who will establish justice, peace and brotherhood on the planet."

This isn't just some cockamamie pie-in-the-sky deal. Last year, Ahmadinejad told the Indian foreign minister that everything would be hunky-dory in two years' time, which the minister took to mean when Iran's nukes would be ready to fly. But, as the president went on to explain, that's apparently the Twelfth Imam's ETA.

The New York Times and most other media outlets didn't mention Ahmadinejad's big Twelfth Imam finale. America would appear to be largely uninterested in the arrival in 2007 of "the perfect, righteous human being." If he shows up on schedule, the attitude of most Americans seems to be that they're washing their hair that night. But go back to Ted Turner's observation on nukes: "They aren't usable by any sane person." The annals of human history are filled with millennial cultists of one form or another but ours is the first era in which they have the capability to live up to their sandwich boards. President Ahmageddonouttahere is an apocalyptic with a delivery system: "The end is nigh" is an old slogan. Now the means are nigh.

What to do? Alan Dershowitz is a big liberal but he's a sane liberal and, unlike many of his chums, he acknowledges the threat. So what's his big idea?

He thinks Iran should be expelled from the United Nations.

Yeah, right. There's more chance of the Twelfth Imam eloping with Paris Hilton.

Iran's president was a huge hit at the U.N. Short of bringing out some burqa-clad Rockettes and doing a couple of choruses of "This Is the Dawning of the Age of a Scary Us," he couldn't have been a bigger smash. I said a year or two back, apropos the U.N., that it's a good basic axiom that if you take a quart of ice cream and blend it with a quart of dog poop the result will taste more like the latter than the former. And last week's performances at the General Assembly were a fine illustration of that. Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez were the star finalists of "UnAmerican Idol," and, just when you need Simon Cowell, the only Brit in sight was the oleaginous Mark Malloch Brown, Kofi Annan's deputy, fawning over every crazy in town. The rest of the bigwigs reacted like Paula Abdul, able to discern good points even in fellows who boast about not having any. That's the reality the Dershowitzes refuse to confront: that structurally the U.N. enables thugs to punch above their weight.

As further evidence of my fecal ice-cream thesis, the Iranian president followed his boffo speech with a trip to the Council on Foreign Relations, where he said the Palestinians were the ones being penalized for an event they had nothing to do with: World War II and the Holocaust, "if it, in fact, occurred." On the matter of whether it did occur, he said that "more unbiased research should be carried out on the subject." A survivor of Dachau, Morris Greenberg, happened to be in the room and pointed this out. President Ahmouttamatree then queried whether Greenberg was old enough to have been at Dachau.

Chavez was an even bigger hit, in part because he eschewed the Holocaust denying, doesn't see himself as the warm-up act for the Twelfth Imam, and stuck closer to the American left's talking points: It's all the Bushitler's fault. He denounced Bush as an "imperialist, fascist, assassin, genocidal" and also "the devil," he held up a copy of some unreadable Noam Chomsky book, gave it a big plug and subsequently regretted that he couldn't meet with the late Professor Chomsky. Chomsky isn't late, he's alive and well. Granted, it's easy to get the impression he's been dead for 30 years, since he hasn't had a new idea since the early '70s. Speaking of which, Sen. Tom Harkin, the Iowa Democrat, agreed that President Chavez was a little overheated but was broadly sympathetic to the general Venezuelan line: "Let me put it this way: I can understand the frustration, ah, and the anger of certain people around the world because of George Bush's policies." Without Bush "frustrating" them, Chavez and Ahmadinejad would be as rhetorically bland as the prime minister of the Netherlands.

It may be news to the Council of Foreign Relations types and the Dems, but the U.N. demonstrated this last week that it is utterly incapable of reform. Indeed, any reforms would be more likely to upgrade and enhance the cliques of thugs and despots than of the few states willing to stand up to them. The most sensible proposal this week came from Chavez, who demanded the U.N. relocate to Venezuela. You go, girl! Dershowitz would be better off trying to get America expelled from the U.N., and encouraging it to join a new group of nations serious about defending freedom in the world: It would be a very small club. This week Jacques Chirac dropped the threat of sanctions against Iran. A few months ago, he briefly mused about nuking the Persians, but he's now folded like ... well, not like the Arabs and their tents: They're busily pitching them all over Europe with no plans to fold at all. Anyone who thinks the U.N. is the body to mediate Iran's nuclearization or anything else is more deluded than Ahmadinejad. At this rate, the Twelfth Imam will be the next secretary-general.

©Mark Steyn 2006

Jeff Jacoby: A Whiff of the Devil

The Boston Globe
September 24, 2006

US AMBASSADOR John Bolton dismissed Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez's speech before the UN General Assembly last Wednesday as ``comic strip" material unworthy of respect. That was unfair to comic strips. Dilbert, Beetle Bailey, and Hagar the Horrible may not be world leaders, but they are models of thoughtful statesmanship next to Chávez, whose crackpot screed set a new low for UN oratory.

``The devil came here yesterday," said Chávez, exaggeratedly crossing himself at the podium where President Bush had appeared the day before. ``It still smells of sulfur today." He brandished a book by the far-left extremist Noam Chomsky, suggested that Bush needs psychiatric help, called him ``the devil" a few more times (as well as ``liar," ``tyrant," and ``world dictator"), and described America as ``imperialist," ``fascist," and ``genocidal." And Chávez kept it up on Thursday, mocking Bush as an ``alcoholic" and a ``sick man."

``Even the Democrats wouldn't say that," commented Britain's appalled foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett. Well, some of them might. But House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, normally an unsparing critic of Bush, rose above party politics to answer Chávez's vitriol.
``Hugo Chávez fancies himself a modern day Simon Bolivar, but all he is an everyday thug," she said. ``He demeaned himself and he demeaned Venezuela."

Chávez may come across as a blustering loudmouth but his potential for troublemaking is no joke. He is a shrewd strategic thinker who hungers for glory and sees a showdown with the United States as his ticket into the history books. Accordingly, he denounces the American ``empire" at every opportunity and goes out of his way to cultivate relationships with America's enemies.

He made a point, for example, of visiting Saddam Hussein when the Iraqi dictator was under international sanctions, and he has cozied up to Iran's theocrats and Moammar Khadafy of Libya. He is an avid protégé of Fidel Castro, and has in turn served as mentor and patron to other anti-yanqui Latin American presidents, such as Argentina's Néstor Kirchner and Bolivia's Evo Morales . According to Thor Halvorssen of the Human Rights Foundation, Chávez has armed, financed, and provided safe haven to members of FARC, the Colombian narcoterrorists.

But Chávez, who went to prison in 1992 after trying to overthrow Venezuela's democratic government, has more in mind than striking obnoxious poses. As Franklin Foer noted in The Atlantic last spring, Chávez ``speaks incessantly about the coming military confrontation with the gringos." He has ordered his armed forces to study the Iraqi insurgency and prepare to mount a similar resistance if Venezuela is invaded. ``He has begun organizing citizen militias, purchased 100,000 new Kalashnikovs, and assigned books on asymmetric warfare to his top brass." When Foer asked Nicolas Maduro, now Venezuela's foreign minister, what Chávez foresees in US-Venezuelan relations, he answered: ``Conflict, in all likelihood war, is the future."

A crazy idea? Maybe, but Chávez is no fool. The one-time prison inmate successfully ran for president in 1998, and in just eight years has managed to transform Venezuela's political system from a stable social democracy into an increasingly authoritarian state in which every lever of state power is controlled by the president.

Chávez pushed through a new constitution that eliminated the Venezuelan Senate and made it easier to pass legislation in the remaining one-chamber National Assembly. Congressional oversight of the military was ended, along with the rule requiring presidents to step down after one term.

He has taken control of the agency that certifies election results and of the huge state-owned oil company, the source of most government revenue. He secured a new law empowering the government to supervise the media, and another authorizing the arrest of any citizen showing ``disrespect" to government officials. He got the Supreme Court enlarged from 20 to 32 justices, then packed the new slots with loyal supporters.

And repression is worsening. The State Department's latest human rights report on Venezuela lists numerous abuses, including the torture and killing of criminal suspects, and attacks on political opponents, labor unions, religious organizations, and human rights groups.

As night descends on Venezuela, thuggish rulers everywhere are finding Chávez a kindred spirit. There was indeed an odor of sulfur at the UN last week, but it didn't come from President Bush.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.
© Copyright 2006 Globe Newspaper Company.

Robert Spencer: What CAIR-Saudi Connection?

Robert Spencer
JihadWatch.org
September 22, 2006

A few days ago Ibrahim Hooper of the Council on American Islamic Relations was on Tucker Carlson's MSNBC show to discuss Pope Rage, and Carlson did a fairly good job pressing him on some points -- although Hooper was so combative that Carlson twice had to calm him down and reassure him that he agreed with him.

At the end of the segment, however, after he got Hooper to tell the Saudi government that execution for apostasy was wrong, Carlson challenged Hooper on CAIR's receiving money from the Saudi government. Hooper declared: "To my knowledge we don't take money from the government of Saudi Arabia."

Well, I know that Ibrahim Hooper words his statements as carefully as the Pope does, as in the memorable incident when Hooper told Rachel Neuwirth about allegations that CAIR supported Hamas and Hizballah: "CAIR does not support these groups publicly." So I'm not quite sure how to take this new statement. Does he mean that they don't take money from the Saudi government, but from individual Saudis? Or that CAIR may take money from the Saudi government, but if it does, no one is telling Ibrahim?

Your guess is as good as mine, but here is some information about the connections between CAIR and Saudi Wahhabis.

According to Frank Gaffney:

The Saudis have been key financiers of CAIR activities and projects for years. For example, the Weekly Standard reported in June 2003 that the construction of the Council’s Washington, D.C. headquarters was subsidized by a $250,000 grant from the Islamic Development Bank, an international financing organization based in Jeddah and run by a Saudi national, Dr. Ahmad Mohamed Ali.

American Libraries gratefully reported in February 2003 that Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal donated $500,000 to a CAIR project that aims to put Wahhabi Islamic reading materials in public libraries across the United States. Given the January 2005 Freedom House report that documented the placement by Saudi Arabia in American mosques of officially published and disseminated materials that are rabidly anti-semitic, anti-Christian and pro-jihadist, we would be foolish to view the CAIR/Saudi library initiative as a gift-horse.

Finally, no less a source than the Saudi Gazette declared in November 2002 that the World Association for Muslim Youth (WAMY) – a government-funded organization responsible for radical, Wahhabi proselytizing and recruitment – gave financial support for a 2002 CAIR weekly advertising campaign in American publications. This gift to CAIR alone was valued at $1.04 million.

And from Daniel Pipes:

A couple of items from the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia in Washington concerning its support for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) are worth noting and pondering. The first dates from August 15, 1999, and is listed under "IDB Approves New Projects Worldwide":
President of the Islamic Development Bank (IDB) Dr. Ahmad Ibn Muhammad Ali announced today that the bank has approved a number of new grants for Muslim minorities in non-Muslim countries worldwide. These include U.S. $395,000 to build a school in Tanzania, $250,000 as a contribution to the purchase of land in Washington DC to be the headquarters for an education and research center under the aegis of the Council for American Islamic Relations, and $30 million for Islamic associations in India.

For those not familiar with the Islamic Development Bank, it appears to be an international institution but is in fact an arm of Saudi foreign policy.

Pipes has more info at the link.

Remember, as Warith Deen Muhammad put it: "In Saudi Arabia it's the Wahabi school of thought...and they say, 'We're gonna give you our money, then we want you to...prefer our school of thought.' That's in there whether they say it or not. So there is a problem receiving gifts that seem to have no attachment, no strings attached."

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 Bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). His latest book, The Truth About Muhammad, is coming October 9 from Regnery Publishing

George Will: Speaking Back to Islamists

September 21, 2006
The Washington Post
George Will

WASHINGTON -- While her security contingent waits outside the Georgetown restaurant, Ayaan Hirsi Ali orders what the menu calls "raw steak tartare.'' Amused by the redundancy, she speculates that it is intended to immunize the restaurant against lawyers, should a customer be discommoded by that entree. She has been in America only two weeks. She is a quick study.

And an exile and an immigrant. Born 36 years ago in Somalia, Hirsi Ali has lived in Ethiopia, Kenya, Saudi Arabia and the Netherlands, where she settled in 1992 after she deplaned in Frankfurt, supposedly en route to Canada for a marriage, arranged by her father, to a cousin. She makes her own arrangements.

She quickly became a Dutch citizen, a member of parliament, and an astringent critic, from personal experience, of the condition of women under Islam. She wrote the script, and filmmaker Theo van Gogh directed, "Submission,'' an 11-minute movie featuring pertinent passages from the Koran (such as when it is a husband's duty to beat his wife) projected on the bodies of naked women.


It was shown twice before Nov. 2, 2004, when van Gogh, bicycling through central Amsterdam in the morning, was shot by an Islamic extremist who then slit his throat with a machete. Next, the murderer (in whose room was found a disk containing videos of "enemies of Allah'' being murdered, including a man having his head slowly sawed off) used another knife to pin a long letter to van Gogh's chest. The letter was to Hirsi Ali, calling her a "soldier of evil'' who would "smash herself to pieces on Islam.''

The remainder of her life in Holland was lived under guard. Neighbors in her apartment building complained that they felt endangered with her there and got a court to order her evicted. She decided to come to America.

Holland evidently tolerates everything except skepticism about the sacramental nature of multiculturalism. One million of the country's 16 million residents are Islamic, and the political left has appropriated the European right's traditional celebration of identity grounded in racial and ethnic traditions and culture. But the recoil of many Dutch people from Hirsi Ali suggests that the tolerance about which Holland preens is a compound of intellectual sloth and moral timidity. She was more trouble than the Dutch evidently think free speech is worth.

Her story is told in a riveting new book, "Murder in Amsterdam,'' by Ian Buruma, who is not alone in finding her -- this "Enlightenment fundamentalist'' -- somewhat unnerving and off-putting. Having experienced life circumscribed by tribal and religious communities (as a girl she suffered the genital mutilation called female circumcision), she is a fierce partisan of individualism against collectivism.

She reminds Buruma of Margaret Thatcher's sometimes abrasive intelligence, and fascination with America. He is dismissive of the idea that she is a Voltaire against Islam: Voltaire, he says, offended the powerful Catholic Church, whereas she offends "only a minority that was already feeling vulnerable in the heart of Europe.''

She, however, replies that this is hardly a normal minority. It is connected to Islam's worldwide adherents. Living sullenly in European "dish cities'' -- enclaves connected by satellite television and the Internet to the tribal societies they have not really left behind -- many members of this minority are uninterested in assimilation into open societies.

She calls herself "a dissident of Islam'' because, given what Allah supposedly enjoins and what she knows is right, "the cognitive dissonance is, for me, too much.'' She says she is not "a militant atheist,'' but the emphasis is on the adjective.

Slender, elegant, stylish and articulate (in English, Dutch and Swahili), she has found an intellectual home here at the American Enterprise Institute, where she is writing a book that imagines Muhammad meeting, in the New York Public Library, three thinkers -- John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper, each a hero of the unending struggle between (to take the title of Popper's 1945 masterpiece) "The Open Society and Its Enemies.'' Islamic extremists -- the sort who were unhinged by some Danish cartoons -- will be enraged. She is unperturbed.

Neither is she pessimistic about the West. It has, she says, "the drive to innovate.'' But Europe, she thinks, is invertebrate. After two generations without war, Europeans "have no idea what an enemy is.'' And they think, she says, that leadership is an antiquated notion because they believe that caring governments can socialize everyone to behave well, thereby erasing personal accountability and responsibility. "I can't even tell it without laughing,'' she says, laughing softly. Clearly she is where she belongs, at last.

georgewill@washpost.com

(c) 2006, Washington Post Writers Group

Robert Spencer: The Guardian of Islamic Extremism

Robert Spencer
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
September 21, 2006

As the global Muslim reaction to Pope Benedict XVI’s recent remarks on Islam threaten to eclipse last winter’s Cartoon Rage in irrationality and violence, there has been the usual and by now predictable undercurrent of sympathy on the Left for those breathing threats and murder against the Pope and the West. Notable among the spokesmen for appeasement and accommodation of violent Islamic intimidation was Karen Armstrong, author of the popular books Islam: A Short History and Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet.

Armstrong on Monday published a piece in The Guardian entitled “We cannot afford to maintain these ancient prejudices against Islam: The Pope’s remarks were dangerous, and will convince many more Muslims that the west is incurably Islamophobic.” It is exquisitely ironic that she would term the Pope’s remarks, rather than the Muslim reaction to them, “dangerous” – particularly after a nun in Somalia and a lay Christian in Iraq were murdered in apparent expressions of anger against the Pope. The Pope’s words didn’t kill these people, violent Muslims did; but that fact, and the inappropriate violence of their reaction, forms no part of Armstrong’s calculus. As far as she is concerned, violent Islamic rage against the West, including the rage against the Pope, is all the fault of the West.

And it is long-standing. “Our Islamophobia,” intones Armstrong, “dates back to the time of the Crusades, and is entwined with our chronic anti-semitism.” Armstrong, like Bill Clinton, who in a similar vein explained 9/11 as part of the debt “we are still paying” to the Islamic world for the Crusades,[1] never mentions that centuries of jihad aggression and imperialism that preceded and provoked the Crusades. After the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad in 632, Muslim armies swept out of Arabia and, under the banner of jihad, conquered the lands that now form the heart of the Islamic world. In the Holy Land, the conquest of Jerusalem in 638 stood at the beginning of centuries of Muslim aggression; Christians in the Holy Land faced an escalating spiral of persecution.

A few examples: early in the eighth century sixty Christian pilgrims from Amorium were crucified; around the same time the Muslim governor of Caesaria seized a group of pilgrims from Iconium and had them all executed as spies — except for a small number who converted to Islam. Muslims demanded money from pilgrims, threatening to ransack the Church of the Resurrection if they didn’t pay. Later in the eighth century, a Muslim ruler banned displays of the cross in Jerusalem. He also increased the special poll tax (jizya) that Christians had to pay (Muslims were exempt) as ordained by Qur’an 9:29, and forbade Christians to engage in religious instruction of their own children and fellow-believers.

Brutal subordination and violence became the rule of the day for Christians in the Holy Land. In 772, the caliph al-Mansur ordered Christians and Jews in Jerusalem to be stamped on their hands with a distinctive symbol. Conversions to Christianity were dealt with particularly harshly. In 789, Muslims beheaded a monk who had converted from Islam and plundered the Bethlehem monastery of St. Theodosius, killing many more monks. Other monasteries in the region suffered the same fate. Early in the ninth century the persecutions grew so severe that large numbers of Christians fled for Constantinople and other Christian cities. Fresh persecutions in 923 saw more churches destroyed, and in 937, Muslims went on a rampage in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, plundering and destroying the Church of Calvary and the Church of the Resurrection.[2]

After a period of Byzantine resurgence, in 1004, the sixth Fatimid Caliph, Abu ‘Ali al-Mansur al-Hakim (985-1021) turned violently against the faith of his Christian mother and uncles (two of whom were Patriarchs) and ordered the destruction of churches, the burning of crosses, and the seizure of church property. He moved against the Jews with similar ferocity. Over the next ten years thirty thousand churches were destroyed, and untold numbers of Christians converted to Islam simply to save their lives. In 1009, al-Hakim gave his most spectacular anti-Christian order: he commanded that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem be destroyed, along with several other churches (including the Church of the Resurrection). The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, rebuilt by the Byzantines in the seventh century after the Persians burned an earlier version, marks the traditional site of Christ’s burial. Bizarrely, the church had served as the model for the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Caliph al-Hakim commanded that the tomb inside be cut down to the bedrock. He ordered Christians to wear heavy crosses around their necks (and Jews heavy blocks of wood in the shape of a calf). He piled on other humiliating decrees, culminating in the order that they accept Islam or leave his dominions.[3]

The erratic caliph ultimately relaxed his persecution and even returned much of the property he had seized from the Church.[4] Some of al-Hakim’s changed attitude probably came from his increasingly tenuous connection to Islamic orthodoxy. In 1021, he disappeared under mysterious circumstances; some of his followers proclaimed him divine and founded a sect based on this mystery and other esoteric teachings of a Muslim cleric, Muhammad ibn Isma’il al-Darazi (after whom the Druze sect is named).[5] Thanks to al-Hakim’s change of policy, which continued after his death, in 1027 the Byzantines were allowed to rebuild the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.[6]

Nevertheless, Christians were in a precarious position and pilgrims remained under threat. In 1056, the Muslims expelled three hundred Christians from Jerusalem and forbade European Christians from entering the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.[7] When the fierce and fanatical Seljuk Turks swept down from Central Asia, they enforced a new Islamic rigor making life increasingly difficult for both native Christians and pilgrims (whose pilgrimages they blocked). After they crushed the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071 and took the Byzantine Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes prisoner, all of Asia Minor was open to them — and their advance was virtually unstoppable. In 1076, they conquered Syria; in 1077, Jerusalem. The Seljuk Emir Atsiz bin Uwaq promised not to harm the inhabitants of Jerusalem, but once his men had entered the city, they murdered 3,000 people.[8] The same year the Seljuks established the sultanate of Rum (Rome, referring to the New Rome, Constantinople) in Nicaea, perilously close to Constantinople itself; from here they continued to threaten the Byzantines and harass the Christians all over their new domains.

The Christian Empire of Byzantium, which before Islam’s wars of conquest had ruled over a vast expanse including southern Italy, North Africa, the Middle East, and Arabia, was reduced to little more than Greece. It looked as if its death at the hands of the Seljuks was imminent. The Church of Constantinople considered the pope a schismatic and had squabbled with him for centuries, but the new Emperor Alexius I Comnenus (1081-1118), swallowed his pride and appealed for help. And that is how the First Crusade came about: it was a response to the Byzantine Emperor’s call for help. The Crusaders were responding to the emperor dialing 911.

The Crusaders and the Crusades were not perfect, but this brief survey should establish that they were in no sense a gratuitous proto-colonial attack by the Christian West against a hitherto peaceful and benign Islamic world. On the contrary, they were a response to centuries of violence by Muslims against Christians – violence that made it perfectly understandable that the 12th century Abbot Peter the Venerable would reproach Muslims for “bestial cruelty.” Yet in Armstrong’s world Peter’s words were an early manifestation among Christians of an “entrenched loathing of Islam,” a loathing that evidently had no cause or justification beyond xenophobia and sheer prejudice. And, says Armstrong portentously, “this medieval cast of mind is still alive and well….Hatred of Islam is so ubiquitous and so deeply rooted in western culture that it brings together people who are usually at daggers drawn.” But this hatred, as far as Armstong is concerned, sprang only from the West’s own actions. Again like Clinton, she invokes the Crusaders’ sack of Jerusalem in 1099, explaining that “it is always difficult to forgive people we know we have wronged. Thenceforth Jews and Muslims became the shadow-self of Christendom, the mirror image of everything that we hoped we were not -- or feared that we were.”

This silly psychologizing ignores the fact that the sack of Jerusalem, while brutal and heinous, was nothing singular. One atrocity does not excuse another. But it does illustrate that the Crusaders’ behavior in Jerusalem was consistent with that of other armies of the period — since all states subscribed to the same notions of siege and resistance. In 1148, Muslim commander Nur ed-Din did not hesitated to order the killing of every Christian in Aleppo. In 1268, when the jihad forces of the Mamluk Sultan Baybars took Antioch from the Crusaders Baybars was annoyed to find that the Crusader ruler, Count Bohemond VI, had already left the city. So he wrote to Bohemond to make sure he knew what his men had done in Antioch: “You would have seen your knights prostrate beneath the horses’ hooves, your houses stormed by pillagers and ransacked by looters, your wealth weighed by the quintal, your women sold four at a time and bought for a dinar of your own money! You would have seen the crosses in your churches smashed, the pages of the false Testaments scattered, the Patriarchs’ tombs overturned.”[9]

Most notorious of all may be the jihadists’ entry into Constantinople on May 29, 1453, when they — like the Crusaders in Jerusalem in 1099 — finally broke through a prolonged resistance to their siege. Like the Crusaders, who violated the sanctuary of both synagogue and mosque, the jihadists raided monasteries and convents, emptying them of their inhabitants, and plundered private houses. They entered the Hagia Sophia, which for nearly a thousand years had been the grandest church in Christendom, killed the elderly and weak and led the rest off into slavery. The magnificent old church was turned into a mosque; hundreds of other churches in Constantinople and elsewhere suffered the same fate. Millions of Christians joined the wretched ranks of the dhimmis; others were enslaved, and many martyred.[10]

Yet to Armstrong, acts of Islamic aggression were nothing more than “fearful fantasies created by Europeans.” Among these “fearful fantasies” she also mentions the anti-Semitic blood libel that circulated among Christians during the time of the Crusades – the charge that Jews killed Christian children and used their blood to make Passover matzo. But she of course makes no mention of the fact that the blood libel is alive and well today, not in the Christian or post-Christian world, but in the House of Islam. Syria in 2003 and Jordan in 2005 aired during Ramadan a viciously anti-Semitic TV series dramatizing the murder of a Christian child by wicked Jews, who then used the child’s blood in baking Passover matzo. The blood libel has also been spread recently on official Iranian TV. Why have Muslims taken up this ancient Christian slander? Armstrong doesn’t say.

Armstrong’s other charges are similarly wrongly focused and lacking in substance. She points out that “the Muslims who have objected so vociferously to the Pope’s denigration of Islam have accused him of ‘hypocrisy’, pointing out that the Catholic church is ill-placed to condemn violent jihad when it has itself been guilty of unholy violence in crusades, persecutions and inquisitions and, under Pope Pius XII, tacitly condoned the Nazi Holocaust.” Leaving aside Armstrong’s repetition of the by-now common slander of Pope Pius XII, which has been thoroughly refuted by Rabbi David Dalin in his book The Myth of Hitler’s Pope, no one is actually claiming that Muslims have or have ever had a monopoly on religious violence. What Armstrong does not acknowledge is that Islam is unique among the religions of the world in having a doctrine of religious imperialism. Muhammad, the Prophet of Islam, tells his followers to call people to Islam, and if they refuse, to offer them second-class dhimmi status or war: “Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war…When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action….Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them….If they refuse to accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya [the tax on non-Muslims specified in Qur’an 9:29]. If they agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them (Sahih Muslim 4294).”

Conversion, subjugation, or war: there is not and never has been a theological imperative of this kind in Christianity. Yet Armstrong alleges that “until the 20th century, Islam was a far more tolerant and peaceful faith than Christianity. The Qur’an strictly forbids any coercion in religion and regards all rightly guided religion as coming from God; and despite the western belief to the contrary, Muslims did not impose their faith by the sword.” It is true that forced conversion is forbidden by Islamic law, although the choice of conversion, subjugation or war contains a level of coercion that Westerners may find incompatible with the notion of free choice. Muslims did not impose conversion to Islam by the sword, but they made life so difficult for non-Muslims in their domains that conversion became their only path to a better life. Armstrong’s observation that “until the middle of the eighth century, Jews and Christians in the Muslim empire were actively discouraged from conversion to Islam, as, according to Qur’anic teaching, they had received authentic revelations of their own” is largely true, but for a reason she does not mention: converts no longer paid the tax, jizya, that was collected from the non-Muslim dhimmis. Too many converts would destroy the tax base.

But Armstrong has never had an overly strong attachment to accuracy. Daniel Pipes has noted about her book Islam: A Short History that “Armstrong goes out of her way to soften every hard edge, explain away every unpleasantness, and hide what she cannot otherwise account for.” An egregious example of this comes in her biography of Muhammad: according to Islamic traditions (hadith) reported by Bukhari, the hadith collection considered most reliable by Muslims, the Prophet of Islam married his favorite wife, Aisha, “when she was six years old and he consummated his marriage when she was nine years old.” He was at this time in his early fifties. Embarrassed by this, many Islamic apologists claim – in the teeth of this evidence – that Aisha was actually older. Armstrong obligingly asserts that “Tabari says that she was so young that she stayed in her parents’ home and the marriage was consummated there later when she had reached puberty.”[11] Unfortunately, her readers are unlikely to have volumes of Tabari on hand to check her assertion; contrary to Armstrong’s account, the Muslim historian quotes Aisha thusly: “The Messenger of God married me when I was seven; my marriage was consummated when I was nine.”[12] Did Aisha go through puberty at nine, or was Armstrong covering up one of the more embarrassing aspects of Muhammad’s career?

The time for such disingenuousness is over, as is the time, if there ever were time, for the unseemly self-recrimination to which Armstrong is calling the West. The Muslim rage against the Pope’s call to eschew religious violence reveals an Islamic world in deep denial, as irrational as it is unable to take responsibility for its own actions. And in this it has Karen Armstrong and other Leftist haters of Western civilization and culture as willing accomplices.

ENDNOTES:

[1] Bill Clinton, “Remarks as delivered by President William Jefferson Clinton, Georgetown University, November 7, 2001.” Georgetown University Office of Protocol and Events, www.georgetown.edu.
[2] Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine 634-1099, Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 473-476. To his credit, Caliph al-Muqtadir did respond to the 923 persecutions by ordering the church rebuilt.
[3] Gil, A History of Palestine 634-1099, p. 376.
[4] Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, Volume I, (Cambridge University Press, 1951), pp. 35-6; Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives, (Routledge, 2000), pp. 16-17; Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: A Short History (Yale University Press, 1987), p. 44.
[5] Bernard Lewis, The Assassins, (Basic Books, 1967), p. 33.
[6] Runciman, A History of the Crusades, Volume I, p. 36.
[7] Runciman, A History of the Crusades, Volume I, p. 49.
[8] Gil, A History of Palestine 634-1099, p. 412.
[9] Thomas F. Madden, The New Concise History of the Crusades by (Rowan & Littlefield, 2005), pp. 181-182.
[10] Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453, Cambridge University Press, 1965, pp. 145ff.
[11] Karen Armstrong, Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet, Harper San Francisco, 1992, p. 157.
[12] Abu Ja’far Muhammad bin Jarir al-Tabari, The History of al-Tabari, Volume VII, The Foundation of the Community, M. V. McDonald, translator, State University of New York Press, 1987, p. 7.

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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 Bestseller The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). His latest book, The Truth About Muhammad, is coming October 9 from Regnery Publishing

Jonah Goldberg: Jihad Enablers

September 20, 2006
Jonah Goldberg

Before you can discuss the manifest seriousness of the latest controversy involving the pope, you have to acknowledge its hilarity. Pope Benedict XVI, in an austere philosophical address, invoked Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus, the 14th century ruler who offered a harsh assessment of Islam. While the Koran says, "There is no compulsion in religion," Manuel couldn't help but notice that Muslims were setting up more franchises in his neighborhood than Starbucks - and they weren't doing so by selling the best darn Mocha Frappuccinos on his side of the Bosphorus Straits.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new," Manuel complained sometime around the siege of Byzantium, "and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." Why Pope Benedict quoted Manuel is hotly debated. But one explicit reason was to enunciate the Church's opposition to using faith to justify violence or intolerance.

And this is where the hilarity comes in. A Pakistani Foreign Ministry spokeswoman responded: "Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence."

During Friday prayers in Iran, a senior cleric changed his usual script to denounce the pope, but the crowd of worshippers hadn't seen the memo, so they chanted back the usual refrain: "Death to America! Death to Israel!"

In Turkey, protestors demanded that the Justice Ministry arrest the pope when he visits there this fall and prosecute him for insulting Islam.

And just this week, clerics in Gaza reportedly suggested that the pope convert to Islam to save his own life.

But let us not dare suggest that even a whiff of intolerance can be detected in the Islamic world. If you say otherwise, I will cut off your head.

It may be amusing to note how so many Muslims are eager to confirm a stereotype in the process of denouncing that very stereotype, but it's not so funny when they put their jihad where the mouth is. Churches were attacked in the West Bank and a nun in Somalia was murdered, allegedly in reaction to the pope's comments. Al-Qaida's franchise in Iraq announced "We shall break the cross and spill the wine. ... God will (help) Muslims to conquer Rome. ... (May) God enable us to slit their throats."

But this isn't primarily about al-Qaida or even the war on terror. Note that the parliaments and governments of Islamic nations - our allies in the war on terror - have been at the forefront of the anti-pope backlash.

The many learned disquisitions on the pope's speech notwithstanding, this isn't about theology either. After all, no serious person can take lectures on religious tolerance from the Muslim world very seriously. Spare me tales of Jewish accommodation in the 15th century. Today, throughout the Muslim world, Jew-hatred and Christian-bashing are commonplace, state-sanctioned and fashionable.

No, this is about us. The best book for illuminating what's going on in the Muslim "street" isn't some weighty treatise on Islam; it's a short little tract called "White Guilt" by Shelby Steele. The book isn't even about Islam. Steele focuses on white liberals and the black radicals who've been gaming them ever since the 1960s. Whites, he argues, have internalized their own demonization. Deep down they fear that maybe they are imperialistic, racist bastards, and they are desperate to prove otherwise. In America, black radicals figured this out a while ago and have been dunning liberal whites ever since.

The West is caught in a similarly dysfunctional cycle of extortion and intimidation with Islam, but on a grander and far more violent scale. Whether it's the pope's comments or some Danish cartoons, self-appointed spokesmen for the Islamic street say, "You have offended a billion Muslims," which really means, "There are so many of us, you should watch out." And if you didn't get the message, just look around for the burning embassies and murdered infidels.
They're not hard to find.

In response, the West apologizes and apologizes. Radical Muslims, who are not stupid, take note and become emboldened by these displays of weakness and capitulation. And the next time, they demand two pounds of flesh. Meanwhile, the entire global conversation starts from the assumption that the West is doing something wrong by tolerating freedom of speech, among other things.

This week, French President Jacques Chirac explained that everyone in the West must avoid everything that sparks tensions. In other words, we must forever be held hostage by the tactical outrage of a global mob. There's nothing funny about that.

©2006 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Daniel Pipes: Pope Benedict Criticizes Islam

Daniel Pipes
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
September 20, 2006

"Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

These words, expressed six centuries ago by a Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, in dialogue with an Iranian scholar, spur three reflections.

Pope Benedict XVI offered the above quote, neither endorsing nor condemning it, in his academic speech, "Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections," delivered in German last week in Germany. It served to introduce his erudite critique of the Western concept of reason since the Enlightenment.

But did he have other purposes? The head of the Benedictine order, Abbot Notker Wolf, understood the pope's quote as "a blatant allusion to [Iran's President Mahmoud] Ahmadinejad." Vatican insiders told the London Sunday Times that Benedict "was trying to pre-empt an aggressive letter aimed at the papacy by the president of Iran, which was why he cited the debate involving a Persian."

First reflection: Benedict has offered elusive comments, brief statements, and now this delphic quotation, but he has not provided a much-needed major statement on this vital topic of Islam.
One hopes it is in the offing.

Whatever the pope's purpose, he prompted the near-predictable furor in the Muslim world. Religious and political authorities widely condemned the speech, with some calling for violence.

· In Britain, while leading a rally outside Westminster Cathedral, Anjem Choudary of Al-Ghurabaa called for the pope "to be subject to capital punishment."

· In Iraq, the Mujahideen's Army threatened to "smash the crosses in the house of the dog from Rome" and other groups made blood-curdling threats.

· In Kuwait, an important website called for violent retribution against Catholics.

· In Somalia, the religious leader Abubukar Hassan Malin urged Muslims to "hunt down" the pope and kill him "on the spot."

· In India, a leading imam, Syed Ahmed Bukhari, called on Muslims to "respond in a manner which forces the pope to apologise."

· A top Al-Qaeda figure announced that "the infidelity and tyranny of the pope will only be stopped by a major attack."

The Vatican responded by establishing an extraordinary and unprecedented security cordon around the pope. Further away, the incitement spurred some violence, with more likely on the way. Seven churches were attacked in the West Bank and Gaza, one in Basra, Iraq (prompting this ironic headline at the "RedState" blog: "Pope implies Islam a violent religion ... Muslims bomb churches"). The murder of an Italian nun in Somalia and two Assyrians in Iraq also appear connected.

Second reflection: this new round of Muslim outrage, violence, and murder has a by-now routine quality. Earlier versions occurred in 1989 (in response to Salman Rushdie's novel, The Satanic Verses), 1997 (when the U.S. Supreme Court did not take down a representation of Muhammad), 2002 (when Jerry Falwell called Muhammad a terrorist), 2005 (the fraudulent Koran-flushing episode), and February 2006 (the Danish cartoon incident).

Vatican leaders tried to defuse the pope's quote, as well as his condemnation of jihad (holy war). The papal spokesman, Federico Lombardi, S.J., said Benedict did not intend to give "an interpretation of Islam as violent. … inside Islam there are many different positions and there are many positions that are not violent." Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the secretary of state, indicated that the pope "sincerely regrets that certain passages of his address could have sounded offensive to the sensitivities of the Muslim faithful."

Then, in what may be an unprecedented step by a pope, Benedict himself proffered the sort of semi-apology often favored by those feeling the heat. "I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address," reads the official Vatican translation into English, "which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims. These in fact were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought." In the Italian original, however, Benedict says only sono rammaricato, which translates as "I am disappointed" or "I regret."

Third reflection: the Muslim uproar has a goal: to prohibit criticism of Islam by Christians and thereby to impose Shar‘i norms on the West. Should Westerners accept this central tenet of Islamic law, others will surely follow. Retaining free speech about Islam, therefore, represents a critical defense against the imposition of an Islamic order.

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Mr. Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).

Thomas Sowell: Suicidal Hand-Wringing

September 19, 2006
Thomas Sowell

When you enter a boxing ring, you agree to abide by the rules of boxing. But when you are attacked from behind in a dark alley, you would be a fool to abide by the Marquis of Queensbury rules. If you do, you can end up being a dead fool.

Even with a nuclear Iran looming on the horizon and the prospect that its nuclear weapons will end up in the hands of international terrorists that it has been sponsoring for years, many in the media and in the government that is supposed to protect us have been preoccupied with whether we are being nice enough to the terrorists in our custody.

The issue has been brought to a head by the efforts of Senators John McCain, John Warner, and Lindsey Graham to get us to apply the rules of the Geneva convention to cutthroats who respect no Geneva convention and are not covered by the Geneva convention.

If this was just a case of a handful of headstrong senators, who want us to play by the Marquis of Queensbury rules while we are being kicked in the groin and slashed with knives, that would be bad enough. But the issue of applying the Geneva convention to people who were never covered by the Geneva convention originated in the Supreme Court of the United States.

Article III, Section II of the Constitution gives Congress the power to limit the jurisdiction of federal courts, and Congress has specifically taken away the jurisdiction of the courts in cases involving the detention of illegal combatants, such as terrorists, who are not -- repeat, not -- prisoners of war covered by the Geneva convention.

The Supreme Court ignored that law. Apparently everyone must obey the law except judges. Congress has the power to impeach judges, including Supreme Court justices, but apparently not the guts. Runaway judges are not going to stop until they get stopped.

In short, the clash between Senator McCain, et al., and the President of the United States is more than just another political clash. It is part of a far more general, and ultimately suicidal, confusion and hand-wringing in the face of mortal dangers.

The argument is made that we must respect the Geneva convention because, otherwise, our own soldiers will be at risk of mistreatment when they become prisoners of war.

Does any sane adult believe that the cutthroats we are dealing with will respect the Geneva convention? Or that our extension of Geneva convention rights to them will be seen as anything other than another sign of weakness and confusion that will encourage them in their terrorism?

No one has suggested that we disregard the Geneva convention for people covered by the Geneva convention. The question is whether a lawless court shall seize the power to commit this nation to rules never agreed to by those whom the Constitution entrusted with the power to make international treaties.

The much larger question -- the question of survival -- is whether we have the clarity and the courage to go all-out in self-defense against those who are going all-out to destroy us, even at the cost of their own lives.

There are too many signs that we do not and those signs are visible not only in our political and judicial institutions but throughout American society and western civilization.

Sheltered for years from terrorist dangers that we so much feared after the September 11th attacks, many have come to act as if those dangers do not exist and that we now have the luxury of dismantling the means by which they have been held at bay this long.

In a country where all sorts of individuals and organizations tap into our personal computers and our computerized medical, financial and other records, some have gone ballistic over the fact that the federal government tries to keep track of who is being phoned by international terrorist organizations.

No amount of security precautions can protect us from all the thousands of ways in which terrorists can strike at times and places of their own choosing -- and eventually strike with nuclear weapons. Our only hope is to get advance information from those we capture as to where other terrorists are and how they operate.

Squeamishness about how this is done is not a sign of higher morality but of irresponsibility in the face of mortal dangers.

Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate

Alan W. Dowd: Muslims Prove Papal Infallibility

Alan W. Dowd
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
September 19, 2006

It still sounds like some sort of sick, unfunny joke, but we began this year with mobs of angry Muslims rampaging through Europe, the Middle East and Asia in deadly protests over a cartoon—yes, a cartoon. Now, many in the Islamic world are lashing out over an academic lecture ironically about the compatibility of faith and reason—a lecture presented by a pope eager to promote dialogue between Islam and Christianity. Indeed, in apologizing on Sunday, Pope Benedict XVI noted that “the true meaning of my address…was and is an invitation to frank and sincere dialogue, with great mutual respect.”

But predictably, the pope’s apology is not enough for many in the Islamic world. The episode says more about Islam’s leaders than it does about Christendom’s.

The offending phrase used by the pope is actually a quote from a 14th-century discussion between a Christian Byzantine emperor and a Muslim scholar in which the former impugns efforts to grow and spread Islam by the sword. “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new,” the emperor declared, “and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

By citing the quote, the pope certainly invited listeners to consider the problem of spreading faith through violence—a timely issue. Even so, the pope did not endorse the quote, a fact underscored by his reference to the “startling brusqueness” of the emperor’s comment. Neither was he seeking to offend or condescend to Islam. To the contrary, his speech credits Islam for its faithfulness to the omnipotence of God. “For Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent,” the pope explains. “His will is not bound up with any of our categories.”

Neither was the quote central to the pope’s lecture. The pope was talking about the age-old struggle between reason and faith—a struggle Christianity and Judaism know well. “The inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry,” he concludes, “was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history—it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe.”

Those are the facts about his speech. But the facts do not matter, at least not within the Islamic world, which, according to the Washington Post, “feels besieged in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.” Really? Who knew Manhattan, Shanksville, Washington, Netanya, Haifa, Bali, Beslan, London, and Madrid were part of the “Islamic world”?

In any event, the world’s top Shiite cleric demanded a personal apology from the pope “for this false reading” of Islam. One wonders if he even read the pope’s speech, which actually calls on people of all faiths to recognize the “breadth of reason” and to become “partners in the dialogue of cultures.”

According to the Post, the Pakistani parliament condemned the pope for “derogatory comments” and also demanded an apology. A leading Turkish official accused the pope of wanting to revive the Crusades. In Egypt, protesters predictably chanted, “Oh Crusaders, oh cowards! Down with the pope!”

Primed by Hamas leader (and Palestinian prime minister) Ismail Haniyeh, Palestinians held large-scale demonstrations. In Iraq, even as bombs exploded outside an Assyrian Catholic Church, a terrorist group warned that it would begin killing Iraqi Christians unless the pope apologized. And in Somalia, the killing of a nun is being linked to the pope’s speech.

Today, as with cartoon jihad that marred January and February, Islam’s outrage is an outrage.

These violent, pitiful overreactions within the Islamic world beg a thousand questions: Do Muslims outside the West ever turn the critical eye on themselves? Where are the condemnations for those who use a holy book as a weapon of mass-murder? Why doesn’t Pakistan’s parliament condemn what is being done in the name of Islam inside its own borders and what its madrassa teachers are spawning beyond its borders?

Do Egyptian protesters ever take to the streets to show their indignation over beheadings conducted while the Koran is being read? Do Turkish officials condemn how the minarets are used in Iraq and Afghanistan to signal and coordinate terror and slaughter? Do Iraq’s religious leaders notice or care that Iraq’s agony is caused by Muslims? Was there ever a terrorist act committed anywhere that Hamas has condemned?

And perhaps the best question of all: Did the “Islamic world” hear what the pope really said—that faith and reason are not enemies, that violence is not the way to spread faith, that we must listen to “the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity”?

If only Islam’s leaders—and followers—cared as much about what is spoken and done in the name of their religion as they do about other religions.

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Alan W. Dowd is a senior fellow at Sagamore Institute for Policy Research.

Pete Rose's Signs of His Sorry Times

[Well, I'm flabbergasted...Mr. Rose has always appeared to be a paragon of moral clarity and graciousness. He always possessed an impeccable sense of style and an air of dignity...dare I say even an air of royalty....OK, I can't keep a straight face on this one any longer...I think Mr. Rose is an arrogant, tasteless, crass, self-absorbed boob...that being said, he was a very fine baseball player. Just when you think the lying rat can't sink any lower... - jtf]

Pete's signs of his sorry times
BY MICHAEL O'KEEFFE and TERI THOMPSON
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
18 September 2006

Boy, is Pete Rose sorry.

Baseball's disgraced all-time hit king may have hit an all-time low by signing balls with this shocking inscription: "I'm sorry I bet on baseball - Pete Rose."

Thanks to a New Jersey auction house, you, too, can share in Rose's sorrow. Robert Edward Auctions plans to sell 30 of the baseballs for an expected $1,000 a pop.

"This is where the baseball collectibles field has impact on the history of the game," said Rob Lifson, president of the Watchung-based Robert Edward Auctions. "The collectibles field is not just shadowing the game - it's affecting its history."

It also could dash any hope Rose, who was banned from the sport he loved in 1989 for betting on baseball, has of getting into the Hall of Fame.

The bizarre ball signing marked the latest chapter in the sad saga of a man who was once one of baseball's most revered - and successful - figures.

Rose formally applied for reinstatement in 1997.

Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig extended an olive branch by meeting with him in 2002 to discuss his possible return - a meeting based on Rose's denials that he never bet on the game.

But then Rose became embroiled in a series of incidents in which he was seen gambling at casinos and sports books, and was hit with a lien from the IRS claiming he owed almost $1 million in back taxes.

In 2004, after almost 15 years of denials, Rose did an about-face and admitted in his autobiography "My Prison without Bars" that he bet on the game as a player and manager for the Cincinnati Reds. He repeated his admissions in an interview on ABC's "Primetime."

And now there are these damning baseballs.

Rose's agent Warren Greene and attorney Roger Makley did not return calls from the Daily News. Greene, however, acknowledged to Sports Collectors Digest, a hobby publication, that Rose did sign the balls.

"Pete told me he signed a couple of dozen as a favor to the guys in Cooperstown," Greene is quoted as saying in a story set to appear in Sports Collectors Digest this week.

He was referring to Tom Catal and Andrew Vilacky, two upstate memorabilia dealers who are friendly with Rose and are affiliated with Pete Rose Collectibles and the Pete Rose Museum, a shrine on the third floor of Catal's collectibles store, in Cooperstown. Robert Edward Auctions obtained 30 of the inscribed balls from the estate of Barry Halper, the New Jersey businessman and limited partner in the Yankees who died last year at 66.

Halper is best known for assembling the most extensive sports memorabilia collection in history. Most of his collection was sold in 1999 for $25 million at Sotheby's.

But this year, Halper's family contacted Lifson, who supervised the 1999 sale, about consigning pieces the legendary collector picked up after the historic auction.

"I went out to do an inventory," Lifson said, "and there they [the Pete Rose balls] were in a box."

According to Lifson, Rose approached Halper around the time his book was released in 2004 asking the collector to help him find a way to make money off his memorabilia.

The two then cooked up a plan for the autographed apology balls, Lifson said.

The Halper family believed Rose had signed 300 of the balls, although they are in possession of only 30. The ones Lifson will auction fall between No. 215 and No. 296, and feature the Pete Rose Collectibles insignia above the numbering.

According to Lifson and Sports Collectors Digest reporter T.S. O'Connell, autograph authenticator James Spence has come across several additional balls on the open market. O'Connell said there are "40 to 50" known to exist.

Rose remains a favorite with many fans. But there are a lot autographed Rose items on the market, and supply clearly outstrips demand.

Baseballs with Rose's signature sell for $25 to $50, Lifson said, but he expects the "Confession Balls," as he will label them in the auction, to fetch upward of $1,000 each.

And Lifson will also offer another bit of Rose's history in his auction - his Hall of Fame pass, inscribed with its own plea to Halper: "Barry, I shouldn't need this pass to get into the Hall of Fame, Pete Rose."

"Barry was very good friends with Pete Rose," Lifson said. "His Hall of Fame pass was the kind of thing Barry would keep at his desk and surround himself with and pull out and show people."

With Bill Madden

Hit king's ups & downs

Here are some key dates in the amazing career and downfall of Pete Rose:

April 8, 1963: Makes debut in major league career built on grit. Earns the nickname "Charlie Hustle" for his no-holds-barred style.

Sept. 11, 1985: Passes Ty Cobb to become baseball's all-time leader in hits.

Aug. 17, 1986: Retires with an amazing 4,256 hits, mostly with Cincinnati Reds and Philadelphia Phillies.

Aug. 24, 1989: Banned from baseball by Commissioner Bart Giamatti for betting on baseball.

April 20, 1990: Pleads guilty to federal tax-evasion charges and is sentenced to five months in prison.

Feb. 4, 1991: Removed from Hall of Fame ballot.

Sept. 26, 1997: Pleads for reinstatement in letter to Commissioner Bud Selig. No action is taken.

Oct. 24, 1999: Wins rousing ovation from fans during introduction of All-Century Team at World Series game. Spars with announcer Jim Gray, who grills him about betting charges.

Nov. 25, 2002: Joined by Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt, meets secretly with Selig to discuss reinstatement.

Jan. 5, 2004: Ending years of lies, admits to betting on baseball in book, "My Prison without Bars."

Today: Daily News reveals sale of autographed baseballs with Rose's autograph and handwritten message, "I'm sorry I bet on baseball."