America at its best during World War II, at its worst now thanks to lightweight leaders

Mike Lupica - News

http://www.nydailynews.com/index.html

Monday, August 8th 2011, 4:00 AM

World War II veterans Bene Lupica (left) and Ed Fusco. (Photo by Mike Lupica)

They sat at the end of the long table at the restaurant Piccolo Nido in the North End of Boston, both of them out of the 15th Air Force, one of them a bombardier during World War II and one of them a navigator, talking now about the days when they were young and fighting for their country.

My dad, Bene Lupica, the bombardier, is 87 now. Ed Fusco, the father of one of my wife's best friends, the navigator, is 88. This felt like a reunion even though they were meeting for the first time, to talk about the better and safer and stronger world they thought they were making for everyone in 1944 and 1945.

The conversation would last through dinner and lunch the next day, all the way until they went to Fenway Park for Saturday's Yankees-Red Sox game.

"You take a boat over or a plane?" my dad said.

"Boat," Ed Fusco said.

My dad smiled.

"We took what looked like a brand-new plane," my dad said. "We thought it was going to be ours when we got over there."

"Were you scared?" Ed Fusco said.

My dad smiled again and said, "We were too busy doing our jobs to be scared."

And Ed Fusco said, "It's only when you get to be our age that you really think about what could have happened to you."

This was America now, the best one, in the stories they told and shared. This wasn't the America of these lightweight bickering politicians in Washington, or a President who looks more and more like a dressing-room fighter.

This wasn't the America that lost more good young men in Afghanistan over the weekend, shot out of the sky, some of them Navy SEALs from Team Six, the same team that brought down Osama Bin Laden. Now they're dead in a country we should have left long ago - dead for what? Fighting for somebody else's country?

Those tough, brave Navy SEALs were still alive when my dad and Ed Fusco talked about their war on Friday night, talked about the time when they were the ones up in the sky.

"We used to be better at things in this country," Ed Fusco said at one point. He barked out a laugh. "Now we can't even make any money."

Then the two of them, down there at their end of the table, out of '44 and '45 and their fear and their courage and their certainty about their war, were talking about where they sat in their B-24s, flying in the night sky over Italy and Austria and Yugoslavia and Germany. Ed Fusco flew 16 missions out of Italy and got shot down over Yugoslavia on his 17th and ended up serving 10 months in a German prisoner-of-war camp.

When he got out, you'd better believe he went straight to Paris. When he got there and phoned his mother, she told him, "You better call your father, he's looking for you."

Ed Fusco survived the missions he flew, and he survived prison camp. My father survived the 31 missions he flew for the 783rd Bombardment Squadron. They both came home and raised families and lived wonderful American lives. They didn't brag about what they'd done in the war, didn't imagine themselves as having done something remarkable. My dad and Ed Fusco and all like them were never the type.

They have never thought of themselves as the "greatest generation." This was just their generation, doing what it thought it was supposed to do, trying to make a better world for their children. Only now, they wonder what happened to that world, worry about the one being presented to their grandchildren. Worry about their own country most of all.

And maybe, just maybe, watching the way Congress and this President have embarrassed themselves in front of us and the rest of the world over these last months, watching the steady loss of life in wars we cannot afford or win, they wonder just what happened to the country they were fighting for nearly 70 years ago when they were young.

"It's still a great country," my dad said. "I never doubt that. We just need better people running it."

"The sooner the better," Ed Fusco said, and now the two of them laughed like the flyboys they used to be.

They were in B-24s in the terrifying European night when they were as young as my youngest son, who sat at the table with them and listened to the stories they told. They were the 15th Air Force, and by God, they are still here.

On Saturday, they walked through Boston's Public Garden, the rest of us making them pose for pictures near the swan boats.

And when it was time for the ballgame, it was just the two of them, ahead of the rest of us. Ed Fusco grabbed my dad's arm. Or maybe my dad grabbed his. Side by side they walked slowly into the American morning, somehow still believing, as they always had, in better days to come.

Today's Tune: U2 - I Will Follow (Live, 2011)

White House, New York Times: Don’t Fight Jihad, It Will Only Provoke More Jihad

Posted By Robert Spencer
http://frontpagemag.com/
August 8, 2011

How many times do you think Scott Shane is going to smear me in The New York Times (my comment on the first time is here) without bothering to even try to create the appearance of journalism by contacting me for comment?

Answer: As many times as he wants, because he is accountable to no one except his hard-Left masters, and they don’t care how viciously biased he is, as long as he serves their agenda.

“To Fight Radical Islam, U.S. Wants Muslim Allies,” by Scott Shane in The New York Times, August 3 (thanks to all who sent this in):

WASHINGTON — Rolling out a new strategy for combating radicalization, White House officials on Wednesday warned that casting broad suspicion on Muslim Americans is counterproductive and could backfire by alienating a religious minority and fueling extremism.

This is ridiculous on its face. We are not to cast “broad suspicion on Muslim Americans,” or else they will become alienated and this will fuel “extremism” — in other words, this inappropriate casting of suspicion will provoke some Muslims to turn to jihad. Yet by what criteria are we to distinguish between Muslims in the U.S. of whom we should be suspicious, and those of whom suspicion is unjustified, because that suspicion will provoke “extremism”? Wouldn’t a Muslim who would turn to violent jihad because he is unjustly suspected of an affinity for violent jihad be a justified object of suspicion?

And since no criteria are offered for non-Muslims to use to determine which Muslims are justifiably suspect and which aren’t, the implication is clear: no Muslims are justifiably suspect. There is no “extremism” among Muslims in the U.S., except that which is provoked by non-Muslim “suspicion.” Naser Abdo? Abdulhakim Muhammad? Naveed Haq? Nidal Hasan? Daniel Boyd? Faisal Shahzad? James Cromitie, David Williams and Onta Williams? Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh? Pshaw. It is only non-Muslim suspicion that provokes “extremism” among Muslims, not anything that is happening in mosques or anywhere among Muslims in the U.S.

The administration also promised to identify accurate educational materials about Islam for law enforcement officers, providing an alternative to biased and ill-informed literature in use in recent years, including by the F.B.I. Denis R. McDonough, President Obama’s deputy national security adviser, told reporters that Al Qaeda and those it inspired remained the biggest terrorist threat inside the United States. But he said the bombing and shootings in Norway last month, carried out by a right-wing, anti-Muslim extremist, were a reminder that the government could not focus exclusively on any single brand of radicalism.

Yeah, one nutcase who supposedly found incitement to violence in my (and others’) defense of human rights and freedom versus 17,000+ jihad attacks since 9/11, carried out explicitly and proudly in the name of Islam and with reference to Islamic texts and teachings, and the government should change its focus. And don’t worry: it will.

Meanwhile, the “biased and ill-informed literature” in question includes my books, but neither Scott Shane or Denis R. McDonough nor anyone else can show any inaccuracy in any of them. It is noteworthy that in this torrent of abuse and scapegoating over the last couple of weeks, blaming me for the Norway shooting, no one has come up with any gotcha quote from me — no incitement to violence, no broad-brush demonization of all Muslims (although it is routinely alleged that I do this), and not even anything false. The windy “refutations” of my work that are available online are generally windy tu quoques that point the finger at the West and Christianity without ever genuinely showing that what I say is false. And the numerous jihad attacks that happen worldwide on a daily basis show that, lo and behold, for some reason many Muslims have misunderstood Islam in the same way I have. No one ever explains how they have so drastically misunderstood their peaceful religion in such large numbers, or why the misunderstanders themselves consistently claim for themselves the mantle of Islamic authenticity, and in that generally go unchallenged by their peaceful brethren in the West.

But the demonization continues apace, and the Big Lie that I am a racist and hatemonger is repeated endlessly, despite the fact that I have consistently, over ten books, hundreds of articles, and 25,000+ blog posts, rejected racism and firmly advocated for the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the equality of rights of all people. It may be that this campaign will succeed, and all counterjihadists will be finally discredited. Then all will be well, eh? “Islamophobia” eradicated! And then the world will wake up the next day and find that the jihad continues and Islamic supremacism still advances, and there will be no one to speak up for and defend freedom.

Don’t believe me? No problem. You’ll find out soon enough. But remember one thing also: in Hamas-linked CAIR’s recent report on “Islamophobia,” it made the unexpected admission that not all criticism of Islam constituted “Islamophobia.” But did it offer any examples of critics of Islam, or of jihad, or of Islamic supremacism, who were not “Islamophobes”? Why, no. It didn’t. And that’s because it couldn’t. Its assurance that not all criticism of Islam was “Islamophobia” was just window dressing for the leftist suckers who make up its audience, when in fact Hamas-linked CAIR and its allies defame as racist and bigoted anyone and everyone who dares to stand up against the jihad in any way. And sure, they can demonize us, marginalize us, and cut us off. And then make no mistake: if you resist them, your turn will be next.

Mr. McDonough said that Al Qaeda had a “bankrupt ideology,” but that accusing the entire Muslim community of complicity in terrorism could “feed the sense of disenchantment and disenfranchisement that may spur violent extremist radicalization.”

No one I know has ever accused the “entire Muslim community of complicity in terrorism.” I have never done that, and challenge Scott Shane or anyone else to show that I have. But here again, does McDonough’s mouth connect to his brain at all? He is saying that falsely accusing peaceful Muslims of “complicity in terrorism” could make them turn toward…terrorism? So then how peaceful were they in the first place?

See, I am being accused every day now of being complicit in mass murder and even of being a murderer myself. Yet there is no amount of this defamation that I could be subjected to that would ever make me become a murderer myself. There is no amount of lies and abuse they could throw at me that would ever make me turn to violent “extremism” myself. And I think this is true of most people — at least most who are sane. Yet McDonough and Shane seem to take it for granted that false accusations against Muslims will make them kill, and that instead of telling the Muslims in question to get hold of themselves and be reasonable, this means we have to tiptoe around them and avoid saying anything that even appears to be a false accusation — and we even have to stop telling truths, for fear they will fuel “extremism.” After all, the U.S. government and the media are engaged in a massive operation of denial of the obvious fact that Islamic jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence and supremacism. And why? Because they are afraid of fueling “extremism” by appearing to associate Islam with terrorism. And so Islamic jihadists can associate Islam with terrorism all day, but we are not allowed to notice.
This is madness.

Instead, he said, Muslim Americans should be treated as a crucial ally of the government in combating extremism….

Fine. Such as who? Hamas-linked CAIR, with its “Don’t Talk to the FBI” poster? MPAC, with its hollow and deceptive condemnations of terror? Exactly which Muslim group in America has actually shown itself to be a “crucial ally of the government in combating extremism”? Can McDonough answer that? Can Shane?

Since the Fort Hood attacks, there have been a number of foiled plots by radicalized Muslims in the United States, as well as by extreme right-wing and white supremacist ideologues.

Far more of the former than of the latter, but Scott Shane will not tell you that.

Conservative critics of the Obama administration, including Representative Peter T. King, Republican of New York, have accused it of political correctness in avoiding applying the “Islamic” label to plots and attacks by Muslims. Mr. King, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, has held a series of hearings focusing exclusively on the threat from Muslim extremists, drawing fire from Muslim groups. In March, on the eve of Mr. King’s first hearing, Mr. McDonough spoke at a Virginia Islamic center to reassure Muslim Americans that the government would fight extremism without practicing “guilt by association.”…

No reassurance was offered to non-Muslim Americans that the government would fight extremism by doing anything effective to call Muslim groups in the U.S. to account for their deceptive and empty support for anti-terror efforts.

A National Security Council expert on extremism who helped devise the new strategy, Quintan Wiktorowicz, said the administration was aware of “inaccurate training” on Islam for law enforcement officers. He said the administration would compile “gold standard” materials to be posted on the Web for officials to draw upon.

A January study by a liberal research group found a pattern of misleading and inflammatory training about Islam across the country, and a 2009 F.B.I. training document obtained recently by the American Civil Liberties Union gave a provocative account of Islam. That F.B.I. PowerPoint presentation was used for classes for law enforcement personnel at the bureau’s academy in Virginia, but it is no longer in use, according to the bureau.

The F.B.I. document recommended two books by Robert Spencer, an anti-Muslim blogger and author whose work was repeatedly cited in the online manifesto of Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian accused of killing at least 76 people last month. Mr. Spencer, who operates the Web site Jihad Watch, has said he opposes violence and condemns Mr. Breivik’s actions.

Yep. But Scott Shane thinks it pertinent to drag Breivik into this piece anyway, since he can’t find anything actually “misleading and inflammatory” in what I write. Breivik will have to serve. And he will. Now at last the media and its Islamic supremacist allies have someone other than Tim McVeigh to cite as evidence of “right-wing extremism.” And they will ride it for all it’s worth.

How About Some Real Cuts?

The grass was trimmed, but the landscaping postponed.

By Jonah Goldberg
http://www.nationalreview.com
August 5, 2011 12:00 A.M.

Uncle Sam now owes more on his credit cards than he makes in a year. The national debt passed the total U.S. GDP this week. Mull that over for a bit.

Now mull this over: Until the budget deal this week, the federal government borrowed 40 cents for every dollar it spent.

And the budget deal didn’t do very much to change that. It “cut” $2 trillion over ten years, which means Uncle Sam will overspend slightly less. If we hold to the deal — and who among us doubts that Congress won’t keep its word? — spending will “only” increase by $1.8 trillion over ten years. That’s because in the topsy-turvy, laugh-clown-laugh world of so-called baseline budgeting, we’ve been talking about trimming the rate of increase. Think of Uncle Sam walking in a wind tunnel leading to insolvency. The cuts increased the headwind he has to walk into, but they don’t do anything that forces him to turn around.

More importantly, there are no structural reforms. It’s the difference between trimming the grass and re-landscaping the lawn.

Now, the one great advantage the forces of the status quo have had in the budget debates over the last year is that they like the current system. Recall that the Democrats’ preferred position was a “clean” debt-ceiling hike (no spending cuts at all), and President Obama’s original budget called for increasing the deficit and extending the status quo until he was reelected, if not into retirement.

In May, when House minority leader Nancy Pelosi was asked what her plan was to fix Medicare, she responded, “We have a plan, it’s called Medicare.”

And whenever someone proposed serious reforms to the current system — i.e., actual landscaping — the Pelosi crowd responded that the reforms wouldn’t solve the problem. And since they don’t go far enough, why do anything at all?

Rep. Paul Ryan came up with one such plan. It was once called “The Path to Prosperity” but is now known as the only budget that has actually passed a congressional vote.

Anyway, the response from Democrats and liberal policy wonks was ridicule. It doesn’t solve the problem! It actually increases the debt over the next ten years! It ends Medicare as we know it! Republicans are hypocrites! Oh, and: Bush!

They sounded like slacker teenagers sitting on the couch mocking your inadequate techniques for putting out the fire in your living room. “Get back to me when you have a real plan to put out the fire, Dad.”

So, look, if the intelligent and sophisticated position is that your budget numbers don’t have to add up, can’t we do a lot better than this? Over the last ten years the federal government doubled in size, in terms of spending. Doubled. Do you feel as if you’re getting twice the value out of government you got ten years ago? Is it really so absurd to suggest that we didn’t live in a state of government-deficient anarchy in the year 2001? I mean, it wasn’t quite Thunderdome, was it?

Opponents of radical changes to the tax code — say, the Fair Tax, or a flat tax, or a VAT system, or some other variation — whine that such schemes wouldn’t raise enough revenue. It seems to me there are two reasonable responses to this. First, no one really knows if that’s true. A truly radical change to the tax system that doesn’t punish work or savings just might generate massive growth (or at least a lot more growth than the non-growth we have now). A lot more growth, even with lower tax rates, would generate a lot more revenue. Certainly the one thing we’ve all learned from the last few years is that no expert is infallible, and the ones who’ve defended the status quo are very fallible.

Second, the current system is doing a pretty terrible job already. Seems to me that if it’s okay to take in $1 for every $1.40 you spend, that leaves a pretty big margin of error for us to try out a better system, right? I mean, surely we can bankrupt ourselves less expensively?

While I don’t think you can throw seniors currently dependent on the system under the bus, it’s time to think big. Really big. But that requires leadership that amounts to more than talking “Yes We Can!” while walking “No We Can’t!”

— Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large of National Review Online and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. You can write to him by e-mail at JonahsColumn@aol.com, or via Twitter @JonahNRO. © 2011 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Christie’s ‘Crazies’

Sharia is not a figment of our imagination

By Andrew C. McCarthy
http://www.nationalreview.com
August 6, 2011

Governor Chris Christie attends the Swearing-In Ceremony for Sohail Mohammed as New Jersey Superior Court Judge at the Passaic County Courthouse in Paterson, N.J. on Tuesday, July 26, 2011. (Governor's Office/Tim Larsen)

This “sharia-law business is crap . . . and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies!” So blustered Chris Christie. Bluster is the New Jersey governor’s default mode. It has certainly served him well. When directed at surly advocates of New Jersey’s teachers’ unions — who, after all, deserve it — bluster can apparently make a conservative heartthrob out of a pol whose bite is bipartisan moderate, however titillating his bark may be.

The style is so effective that Christie seems to be trying it out on everyone. A few weeks back, a local reporter had the audacity to ask His Honor whether he believes in creationism or evolution — a question that seemed more pertinent than impertinent in light of the controversy over whether the former ought to be taught in the schools that the governor’s 9 million constituents subsidize to the tune of $11 billion annually. Yet his answer was to growl, “That’s none of your business.”

“None of your business,” has moved to the front of the Christie repertoire. So discovered a citizen who recently had the temerity to ask her governor why he does not send his children to the public schools whose bloated budgets he is trying to pare. It was a pretty tame question, one customarily asked of politicians who crow about the alleged greatness of our public-education system while opting out of it when it comes to their own kids.

As it happened, the governor had a compelling, three-part answer: Like other New Jersey homeowners, he pays the exorbitant property taxes that subsidize the state’s public-employee pensions . . . er, I mean, public schools. Second, the Christies, like many parents, choose parochial schools so their kids get religious instruction. Third, Christie’s fiduciary obligation as governor requires his best judgment about what’s right for the state and its schools, regardless of what private choices he makes for his own family. Perfect. Except Christie couldn’t help being Christie: Even as he made it his business to share these convincing views, the state’s top public servant couldn’t resist telling his public, “It’s none of your business. I don’t ask you where you send your kids to school, don’t bother me about where I send mine.” Probably best not to ask him about charm school.

Former Bush speechwriter Pete Wehner, whose monitory posts at Commentary’s “Contentions” blog frequently stress the need for civility in public discourse, evidently missed these and other Christie gems. But Pete certainly caught this week’s diatribe against the “sharia crazies,” and it’s got him just as goose-bumpy as the Washington Post’s left-wing blogger Greg Sargent.

According to Pete, “unfair animus toward Muslim Americans” is among the “troubling tendencies” in today’s conservatism, particularly among the tea-party types who are the bête noir of establishment GOP commissars of compassion. That’s why Pete is “grateful,” he continued, that Christie “spoke out in defense of his appointment of Sohail Mohammed to a state bench.”

Media questions about the Mohammed appointment were the provocation for Christie’s outburst. “Ignorance is behind the criticism of Sohail Mohammed,” the governor thundered. He complained that disquiet over the appointment owed solely to a toxic combination of irrational bias (because Mohammed is a Muslim) and ignorance (because the fact that a lawyer defended people detained in the 9/11 investigation, as Mohammed did, does not mean the lawyer sympathizes with the terrorists).

As far as they go, both these assertions are true. But, as we’ll see, they don’t come close to telling the whole story. There are Muslims in the United States who despise the West, and there are patriotic American Muslims who embrace the West, some of whom serve honorably in our military, are key assets to our intelligence community, and have enabled us to infiltrate terror networks, thwart plots, and save lives. The question is how to figure out which is which.

Moreover, our Constitution guarantees counsel to people accused of crimes, a guarantee that courts routinely extend to people who are temporarily detained in the civilian justice system even if they are never formally charged, much less convicted. Some of the most patriotic Americans I know are defense lawyers who’ve represented convicted terrorists. These attorneys took on the obligation to defend people who can’t afford counsel, a duty without which our civilian justice system could not function. They dutifully represented indicted terrorists upon request and assignment by the court. By contrast, many of Mohammed’s clients were never charged with participation in the 9/11 plot, although that hardly means they were “wrongly arrested,” as Christie claimed.

Christie was just getting warmed up. He exploded when a reporter followed up with a question about sharia, the law of Islam. “Sharia law has nothing to do with this at all, it’s crazy!” he snapped, adding that this “Sharia-law business is just crap . . . and I’m tried of dealing with the crazies.”

Maybe Governor Christie ought to ask S.D. if sharia law concerns are “just crap.” We know “S.D.” only by her initials to protect her from further indignity. She is a Muslim woman from Morocco who was serially raped and beaten in New Jersey by the Muslim man to whom she was wed as a teenager — one of those arranged marriages common in Islamic cultures. A New Jersey judge declined to give her a protective order, though. Under sharia, a man cannot rape his wife: “A woman cannot carry out the right of her Lord til she carries out the right of her husband,” declares one relevant hadith (Ibn Majah 1854). “If he asks her to surrender herself she should not refuse him even if she is on a camel’s saddle.” Or, as S.D.’s husband translated this sharia tenet as he forced himself on her, “This is according to our religion. You are my wife, I [can] do anything to you. The woman, she should submit and do anything I ask her to do.”

Based on this, the judge (who, thankfully, was later reversed) reasoned that the husband couldn’t be criminally culpable. According to the New Jersey court, “He was operating under his belief that it is, as the husband, his desire to have sex when and whether he wanted to . . . consistent with his practices, and it was something that was not prohibited.”

This is far from the only instance in which American courts have supplanted American legal protections with Islamic legal principles. To be sure, there is no critical mass of such cases in the United States, as there is beginning to be in parts of Europe. Consequently, while sympathetic to the underlying concerns, I’m not a fan of anti-sharia legal initiatives that have sprung up in various states. We don’t need law to pull the society along. We need sunshine.

If Americans examined the classical interpretations of sharia, core tenets of which are antithetical to Western liberalism, you wouldn’t need to pass a law against it; it would be discredited. But that is an examination government officials like Governor Christie — taking their cues from the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations — seem determined to make sure we never have. It’s a religion of peace; now move along, there’s nothing else to see here.

And similarly, you are to understand that there’s nothing else to see in the matter of Sohail Mohammed’s elevation to the bench. He is, Christie blustered, a solid American citizen and an “outstanding lawyer” who “played an integral role in the post–September 11th period in building bridges between the Muslim American community in this state and law enforcement.” Ah yes, “building bridges” — code for “Muslim outreach,” the law-enforcement strategy that started in the Clinton years, picked up steam in the Bush years, and has become the backbone of Obama counterterrorism.

Like many bad ideas, this one began with the best of intentions. When the Islamic-terror onslaught started in the early 1990s, it was treated as a crime problem. State and federal law-enforcement agencies had precious little intelligence about the Muslim communities in which terrorists insinuated themselves. The solution: reach out to Muslim leaders, show them we see this as a “violent extremism” issue, not an Islam issue, and they’ll share information with us.

Nice idea on the drawing board, utterly wrongheaded in practice. You see, the problem is Muslim leaders. Rank-and-file Muslims in the U.S. tend to be pro-American and supportive of counterterrorism efforts, albeit quietly so. That’s because they are intimidated by the leadership in the mosques and Islamic centers, which tends to be heavily influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood, and thus anti-Western, anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic, anti-assimilationist, and wedded to the fundamentalist, classical interpretation of sharia.

That’s why, as Governor Christie ought to understand, sharia concerns can’t be dismissed as “crap.” They help us sort out the pro-American Muslims we want to empower from the Islamists. When we dismiss these concerns, we end up building bridges to all the wrong people, as government has done, to its repeated embarrassment, for two decades. That is how we end up “partnering” with the likes of Abdurrahman Alamoudi and Sami al-Arian (both ultimately convicted, with their ties to terrorism duly exposed); Salam al-Marayati, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee leader who argued that Israel should be at the top of the 9/11 suspect list; and such Islamist organizations as CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America, which, though not indicted, were shown by the Justice Department to be co-conspirators in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism-financing case.

Governor Christie would have you believe opposition to Mr. Mohammed was sheer bigotry: “It’s just unnecessary to be accusing this guy of things just because of his religious background,” he railed to reporters. It’s a narrative Christie fans would like to help cement. It’s not true.

For the record, Sohail Mohammed is not just an attorney. He served as a board member for an Islamist organization, the American Muslim Union, which, as Commentary’s Jonathan S. Tobin and terrorism expert Steve Emerson have shown, has a checkered past of rationalizing jihadist attacks and supporting jihadists.

Indeed, when the Holy Land Foundation was shuttered in 2001 for its facilitation of terrorist groups, Mohammed told the Bergen Record that the federal government was unjustly singling out Muslim organizations. Seven years later, a jury convicted several HLF operatives for channeling millions of dollars to Hamas, the terrorist organization that is the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch.
Mohammed also ripped the Justice Department’s prosecution of al-Arian as a “witch-hunt” and a “politically motivated indictment.” Al-Arian eventually pleaded guilty to a terrorism charge in a case that showed him to be a key operative of the murderous Palestinian Islamic Jihad organization.

One of the AMU’s most influential members is Mohammed Qatanani, a 47-year-old Palestinian firebrand from Jordan, who is not just an associate but a client of Sohail Mohammed’s. According to federal law enforcement, Qatanani is a former Muslim Brotherhood member who, when apprehended by Israeli authorities in 1993, confessed to being a member of Hamas. Not surprisingly, Qatanani is also an avowed enthusiast of the Brotherhood-Hamas one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As Mr. Tobin notes, he’d have the Jewish state disappear by its absorption into an Islamic “Greater Syria.”

New Jersey has one of the country’s largest Islamic populations, and Qatanani has been the imam of one of the state’s largest Muslim communities, the Islamic Center of Passaic County. His predecessor as imam there, Mohammed el-Mezain, is among the five defendants convicted of financing Hamas in the HLF case. In fact, el-Mezain boasted of raising money at the mosque for Hamas. No surprise, then, to learn, as Steve Emerson recounts, that imam Qatanani included his predecessor and the other HLF defendants in a 2007 prayer for relief from oppression

Oh Allah assist our brothers and sisters in Philistine [Palestine], and Iraq and Chechnya . . . Oh Allah remove occupation and oppression, and oh Allah improve the matters of our community . . . to assist our brothers and sisters in the Holy Land Foundation, ask oh Allah . . . to assist them and to remove the difficulty that they have been inflicted with, all of the brothers and sisters in this country, oh Allah to prove them non-guilty.

The Department of Homeland Security has been trying for some time to deport Qatanani for lying on his 1999 immigration paperwork. He’d been granted a religious-worker visa in 1996, enabling him to be the imam at the Islamic Center. When it expired in 1999, he sought to become a permanent U.S. resident. Though specifically asked about his criminal history, Qatanani failed to disclose that he was convicted in an Israeli military court for his membership in, and support of, Hamas. Mohammed’s firm helped Qatanani prepare the I-485, and Qatanani later claimed that he’d signed the form because he “trusted his attorney, Sohail Mohammed.” (See Homeland Security Investigation, Appendix, p. 4.)

The deportation case against Qatanani was heard by an immigration judge in 2008. Christie was then the Bush-appointed U.S. attorney for New Jersey, though his office did not handle the case. In light of Qatanani’s track record and the Islamic Center of Passaic County’s connections to the Bush Justice Department’s then-ongoing HLF prosecution, it is nothing short of shocking that U.S. attorney Christie went to Qatanani’s mosque for a Ramadan celebration while the immigration case was underway. There, he is reported to have embraced Qatanani and praised the former Hamas operative as “a man of great good will.”

More astoundingly, Christie permitted one of his assistant U.S. attorneys, Charles B. McKenna, to testify at the immigration hearing as a character witness on behalf of Qatanani — i.e., a Justice Department official was dispatched to undermine the Homeland Security Department’s case against Qatanani, which was built in part on an investigation conducted by the FBI, an agency of the Justice Department.

The immigration judge, Alberto Riefkohl, ultimately ruled in Qatanani’s favor, an absurd decision in which he baselessly discredited two federal agents who’d testified about Qatanani’s admission that he’d been arrested for Hamas activities, and irrationally discounted the evidence of Qatanani’s Israeli conviction. The judge stressed, in arriving at this ruling, how impressed he’d been by “law-enforcement officers that took time from their respective duties to appear before the court.” I’m sure. But the feel-good hallucinations of bridge-building can’t erase the reality of terror promotion. Judge Riefkohl was later reversed by the Board of Immigration Appeals, which found that there was no basis for Riefkohl to have ignored the government’s evidence.

The questions about Governor Christie’s appointment of Sohail Mohammed and his exertions on behalf of Mohammed’s client, Mohammed Qatanani, have nothing to do with either sharia or the all-purpose smear of Islamophobia. They are about the governor’s judgment. They are about a U.S. attorney with political ambitions pandering to a politically active constituency at the expense of national security and enforcement of the immigration laws. They are about his decision to award a state judgeship to an attorney who was an active and vocal board member of a very troubling Islamist organization — and who has a penchant for presuming that perfectly valid anti-terror prosecutions are, instead, anti-Muslim persecutions.

Those questions are not answered by bluster.

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

Debt ceiling more an abyss

By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
August 5, 2011

On Thursday, in honor of Barack Obama's 50th birthday, the Dow dropped 10 points for every year he has walked among us. It was the ninth-largest drop in history. We should be relieved he wasn't turning 80.

The markets are apparently concerned that the entire global economy may be "stalling."

You don't say? Observant fellows, these market chappies.

And yet, in a certain sense, these are still the good times. At the end of the week, U.S. Treasury yields plunged to Eisenhower-era rates. America, explained Ethan Harris of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, "still gets the safe-haven money." That's to say, as crazy as Washington is, Europe is perceived to be crazier. In confirmation of the point, over in Italy, which is (believe it or not) a G7 economy, police raided Moody's and Standard & Poor's over allegations that all the meanie things that the rating agencies have been saying about the Italian economy were having an impact on Italian stock prices. Apparently that's a crime in Italy. They're not yet shooting the messenger. But they are dragging him through the streets in chains pour encourager les autres. Good luck with that.

But I wonder if "the safe-haven money" is quite as safe as its investors assume. Under the "historic" "resolution" of the debt crisis (and don't those very words "debt crisis" already feel so last week?), America will be cutting federal spending by $900 billion over 10 years. "Cutting federal spending by $900 billion over 10 years" is Washington-speak for increasing federal spending by $7 trillion over 10 years. And, as they'd originally planned to increase it by $8 trillion, that counts as a cut. If they'd planned to increase it by $20 trillion and then settled for merely $15 trillion, they could have saved five trillion. See how easy this is?

As part of this historic "cut," we've now raised the "debt ceiling" – or, more accurately, lowered the debt abyss. Do you ever discuss the debt with your neighbor? Do you think he has any serious intention to repay the 15 trillion racked up in his and your name? Does your congressman? Does your senator? Look into their eyes. You can see the answer. And, if none of these parties seem inclined to pay down the debt now, what are the chances they'll feel like doing so by 2020 when, under these historic "cuts," it's up to 23-25 trillion?

Like America's political class, I have also been thinking about America circa 2020. Indeed, I've written a book on the subject. My prognosis is not as rosy as the Boehner-Obama deal, as attentive readers might just be able to deduce from the subtle clues in the title: "After America: Get Ready For Armageddon". Oh, don't worry, I'm not one of these "declinists". I'm way beyond that, and in the express lane to total societal collapse. The fecklessness of Washington is an existential threat not only to the solvency of the republic but to the entire global order. If Ireland goes under, it's lights out on Galway Bay. When America goes under, it drags the rest of the developed world down with it.

When I go around the country saying stuff like this, a lot of folks agree. Somewhere or other, they've a vague memory of having seen a newspaper story accompanied by a Congressional Budget Office graph with the line disappearing off the top of the page and running up the wall and into the rafters circa mid-century. So they usually say, "Well, fortunately, I won't live to see it." And I always reply that, unless you're a centenarian with priority boarding for the Obamacare death panel, you will live to see it. Forget about mid-century. We've got until mid-decade to turn this thing around.

Otherwise, by 2020 just the interest payments on the debt will be larger than the U.S. military budget. That's not paying down the debt, but merely staying current on the servicing – like when you get your MasterCard statement, and you can't afford to pay off any of what you borrowed but you can just about cover the monthly interest charge. Except in this case the interest charge for U.S. taxpayers will be greater than the military budgets of China, Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Germany, Saudi Arabia, India, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, Australia, Spain, Turkey and Israel combined.

When interest payments consume about 20 percent of federal revenue, that means a fifth of your taxes are entirely wasted. Pious celebrities often simper that they'd be willing to pay more in taxes for better government services. But a fifth of what you pay won't be going to government services at all, unless by "government services" you mean the People's Liberation Army of China, which will be entirely funded by U.S. taxpayers by about 2015. When the Visigoths laid siege to Rome in 408, the imperial Senate hastily bought off the barbarian king Alaric with 5,000 pounds of gold and 30,000 pounds of silver. But they didn't budget for Roman taxpayers picking up the tab for the entire Visigoth military as a permanent feature of life.

And even those numbers pre-suppose interest rates will remain at their present historic low. Last week, the firm of Macroeconomic Advisors, one of the Obama administration's favorite economic analysts, predicted that interest rates on 10-year Treasury notes would be just shy of nine percent by 2021. If that number is right, there are two possibilities: The Chinese will be able to quintuple the size of their armed forces and stick us with the tab. Or we'll be living in a Mad Max theme park. I'd bet on the latter myself.

Did you know there's a U.S. Bureau of the Public Debt? Hey, why not? There's a bureaucracy for everything else. I'm sure somewhere or other there's a CBO graph showing that by 2050 all federal revenue will be going either to the Chinese Politburo or to the lavish pension plans of retired officials of the Bureau of the Public Debt. At any rate, the BPD is headquartered in Parkersburg, West Virginia, and it's easy to find because it's the only building in the state other than the Klan lodge not named after Robert C. Byrd. The Bureau uses as its motto the words of Alexander Hamilton:

"The United States debt, foreign and domestic, was the price of liberty."

But in the early 21st century foreign and domestic debt is a threat to liberty. As the Brokest Nation in History drowns in its profligacy, its commissars will grow ever more rapacious and desperate. If you think Obama's dreary attempt to blame America's woes on corporate-jet owners is unbecoming to the chief of state, wait till he's reduced to complaining about two-car families. By the way, if you're reading this out on the runway at O'Hare, what's the difference between a corporate jet landing and Obama flying in?

With Air Force One, even when they switch the engines off, all you can hear is the whining.

No author writes a dystopian apocalyptic doomsday book because he wants it to happen: Apart from anything else, the collapse of the banking system makes it hard to cash the royalty check. You write a doomsday book in hopes you can stop it happening. But time is running short. If you think we've got until 2050 or 2025, you're part of the problem.

©MARK STEYN

New Muslim 'Reality' Show Is Anything But

by Raymond Ibrahim
http://www.hudson-ny.org/2314/muslim-reality-show
August 4, 2011

The American TV network TLC recently announced that it is making a reality series following the lives of Muslims living in America. The program—called "All American Muslim"—will follow five Muslim families in Dearborn, Michigan, hoping to expose the "misconceptions and conflicts" they face "outside and within" their own community…In a statement TLC's general manager Amy Winter said:…"Through these families and their diverse experiences, we will explore how they blend their values and traditions with everyday life in America." She added the program would provide: "Insight into their culture with care and compassion."

In other words, at a time when the need for objective knowledge concerning Islam is at a premium, many Americans are to be subliminally indoctrinated on what Islam is really about—not through Muslim theology or history, nor yet politics and current events—but rather by a "reality" show of a handful of American Muslims.

One of TLC's goals in airing this program is to show us "diversity" in Islam: According to the network's statement: "The families featured in the series share the same religion, but lead very distinct lives that oftentimes challenge the Muslim stereotype."

For example, there is a girl that "sports piercings and tattoos"—as if the fact that a tattoo-wearing American female who identifies herself as a Muslim is supposed to tell us anything about Islam. Other characters are not so colorful, but are formulated simply to gain sympathy for Muslims: their claim to fame is that they are "trying to find the balance between their traditional Muslim roots and American culture," or working "tirelessly to educate … about the Muslim religion in an effort to reduce discrimination and ignorance."

In short, through five families who supposedly represent a religion of over one billion, the show is dedicated to depicting Muslims as "just like us." Indeed, one might argue that these five families are not even representative of their own Muslim neighbors in Dearborn, chosen by the producers for having "one of America's largest Muslim populations and has the largest mosque in North America."

In fact, Dearborn is also a hotbed of Muslim extremism, where the FBI had a shoot-out in the streets with jihadists; where a former resident was indicted in a Hezbollah terror plot targeting Israel; where one American politician says Sharia law holds sway; and where a Christian preacher was threatened by shouts of "Allahu Akbar!"

Will these sorts of "diverse experiences" find their way into the reality show?

What is more ironic is that TLC's motives appear superfluous and unnecessary: the same report does not conclude by saying that, because anti-Muslim sentiment is on the rise in America it needs to be combated by such shows, but quite the opposite: "The announcement comes as positive attitudes in America towards Muslims appear to be on the rise. Earlier this year CNN found that 46 percent of Americans have a positive view of American Muslims, while 26 percent have an [sic] negative view. In 2002, the number of Americans with a positive view of Muslims stood at 39 percent."

One may argue that this is just a show, and that people should know better than to base their opinions of Islam on it. While this is true, it is also true that the ideas and images that the media presents to us tend to condition people's perceptions and opinions— a consequence especially critical at a time of war.

If one truly wished to understand the differences between the Muslim and Western mindsets, one need only look to their respective medias. Far from trying to depict the "other"—the infidel—as "just one of us," the Arab media is devoted to making the West look as if it is on a "crusade" to destroy Islam, and that the Jews are "pigs and monkeys" who are behind any number of animal-related conspiracies. Meanwhile, here is America's media, floating in an idealistic, Utopian bubble, conditioning minds accordingly.

Raymond Ibrahim, a widely published author on Islam, is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Today's Tune: Billy Joe Shaver - Georgia on a Fast Train (Live)

AAA or AA: Important for Choosing Batteries Not for Our Financial Future

By Claude Sandroff
http://www.americanthinker.com/
August 4, 2011

Standard and Poor's has warned that there's a 50% chance it would downgrade the credit rating of the United States of America from its once-untarnished AAA perch to a Spain-like AA. It seems that the credit rating agency and its peers including Moody's are finally concerned about the creditworthiness of the US, even with a debt ceiling compromise. And they are looking for firm government commitments to large cuts in spending, perhaps as large as $4 trillion. Or else.

First, what took them so long? Second, who cares? After all, it was once the case that S&P and the other ratings agency declared Freddie and Fannie mortgage obligations to be AAA as well. We might forgive their incompetence and conflict-laden corruption if they hadn't been a major agent in the mortgage meltdown disaster of 2008 and all that it engendered, from TARP to the 2009 stimulus and from QE 1 to QE 2. But who, at this stage in our country's path to insolvency and currency degradation, is naive enough to take any proclamation by a rating agency seriously?

The opportunity to downgrade our debt for maximum effect has long since passed. A downgrade might have riveted our attention had it come in January 2010 a year after the stimulus package added $860 billion to our debt but led to no rise in employment levels therefore providing no new source of organic growth to offset Obama's added debt. Or perhaps a downgrade might have been welcome on March 22, 2010, the day after ObamaCare passed, promising to add another $1 trillion to the national debt. Maybe a downgrade was appropriate last Friday, completely unrelated to the debt ceiling negotiations, but rather reflecting the downward revision in gross domestic product to under 1% for the first half of 2011.

Instead of enduring another dead-boring press conference presided over by Obama, Reid, or Boehner, S&P, Moody's, and Fitch should have scheduled their own press conferences on stages festooned with black bunting. That might have helped rouse the country from its slumber of dependency.
But even in less turbulent economic times, downgrades by the ratings firms have a mixed predictive history. Tom Lauricella of the Wall Street Journal cataloged the effect of agency downgrades on stock, bond, and currency markets, in several countries with original AAA ratings. In Australia in 1986 and Canada in 1995 the major indices rallied after the downgrade. And in Australia the dollar rallied as well, though in Sweden in 1991 the krona crashed after the downgrade. Clearly a ratings agency downgrade is hardly a death knell, and each unhappy country is unhappy for its own reasons.

Of course, the US is not Australia, Canada, or Sweden, at least not yet. It possesses the world's reserve currency and the deepest, most liquid bond markets. So a US debt downgrade by any of the major ratings firms might cause a reflexive sell-off in US financial assets. But then again, perhaps the opposing reflex will prevail. Investors might panic because Obama has dragged us down from our once-exalted and exceptional heights. Or, investors might be temporarily consoled that with the downgrade will come a corrective remedy to our fiscal follies. We might arrive at the long-awaited recognition that much of our recent affluence was illusory based on excessive debt not on private productivity. Or maybe S&P will just be ignored, and the wisdom of markets alone will determine how much and at what terms the world will lend to us. The credibility of the agencies might be so damaged that everyone decides to completely ignore their belated wake-up call.

Indeed, it's our overspending government, underperforming economy, and flagging dollar that pose our major long-term problems, not our ability to borrow based on agency ratings. An indication of this came during a dizzying 12-hour period from Sunday night into Monday that first saw the Dow futures up nearly 200 points when a debt ceiling breakthrough compromise was announced and futures markets immediately relieved, soared euphorically only to crash on Monday when a miserable Institute for Supply Management number was reported. Well below estimates of 54.5%, the July ISM report came in at 50.9%, indicating a manufacturing sector on the verge of contracting. The real economy trumped the ratings bureaucrats.

Whether or not S&P decides to follow through on their threat of a downgrade (and they might be intimidated to shelve it), a downgrade is among the least of our financial worries. Our legislative branch seems to believe that adding only $7 trillion to our debt between now and 2020 instead of $10 trillion represents a victory for prudent budgeting. And even that modest $3-trillion haircut is merely a theoretical or aspirational number. Nothing can bind a congress in 2018 to follow the will of Americans expressed in 2011. And that's a more frightening thought than any credit downgrade.

Claude can be reached at csandroff@gmail.com.

When Obama Hands You Lemons...

By Mark Steyn
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/273642/when-obama-hands-you-lemons-mark-steyn
August 4, 2011

. . . the state enforcers won’t let you make lemonade.

Iain Murray wrote yesterday about the spate of lemonade-stand crackdowns by this once great republic’s depraved regulatory class. This is not a small thing. A land in which a child requires hundreds of dollars of permits to sell homemade lemonade in his front yard is, in a profound sense, no longer free: It is exactly the kind of micro-regulatory tyranny of which Tocqueville warned two centuries ago.

Guest-hosting for Rush a week or two back, I suggested en passant that we needed a children’s version of the Tea Party — a Lemonade Party. I see now that a concerned citizen is organizing a Lemonade Freedom Day for August 20th.

By the way, our fellow NR cruiser Ed Driscoll has posted an excerpt from my new book about another curious priority of the control freaks of the Brokest Nation In History: The church bake-sale pie crackdown. I hesitate to channel Martin Niemöller (“First they came for the kid next door’s lemonade stand and I did nothing, then they came for the widder woman across the street’s maple pecan pie”), but this is a sustained assault by the state on civic participation, and thus on citizenship itself.

The proper response of any self-respecting seven-year-old girl on being told she needs the state’s permission to sell homemade lemonade is, “You’ll never take me alive, copper!”

Environmentalists give pass to eagle-killing windmills

By Ralph Alter
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/
August 3, 2011

Greenies love their wildlife, and go ga-ga over eagles. But they are willing to overlook horrific raptor carnage caused by windmills. According to Louis Sahagun at the L.A. Times, windmill farms have been decimating bird and bat populations nationwide for over a decade.

Nationwide, about 440,000 birds are killed at windfarms each year, according to the (Federal) Wildlife Service.

Finally federal Fish and Wildlife Services authorities are investigating the deaths of golden eagles at the Pine Tree Wind Project in the Tehachapi Mountains outside Los Angeles. Unlike the logging industry in the Pacific Northwest, whose activities were seriously curtailed to protect the spotted owl, or the Alaskan oil pipeline, whose construction was delayed by the propaganda generated by the New York Times in the interest of protecting caribou herds, environmentalist wackos have remained silent about the slaughter of birds by dangerous and unproductive windmill farms.

Wind farms have been killing birds for decades and law enforcement has done nothing about it, so this investigation is long overdue (said Shawn Smallwood, an expert in on raptor ecology and wind farms.) Its going to ruffle wind industry feathers across the country.

Golden eagles are big birds, weighing up to 40 pounds and their large size and wing speed make it difficult for them to navigate amongst wind turbine blades spinning at up to 200 mph, especially when in pursuit of prey. 6 golden eagle deaths have been reported at Pine Tree and an average of 67 golden eagle deaths annually are reported at the larger Altamont Pass Wind Resource Area in Northern California. All told, it is estimated that 1,595 birds die each year at the Pine Tree Wind Project.
Local authorities seem inclined to downplay or disregard the deaths as they seek to reach Los Angeles's goal of 35% of its energy generated by renewables by 2020. The American Wind Energy Association, flacks for the windmill brigade, would have us believe that

...far more birds are killed by collisions with radio towers, tall buildings,airplanes and vehicles and encounters with household cats (than with windmills.)

I know I don't want any windmills in my neighborhood. They are unsightly and a preposterous excuse for energy generation. Then again, I don't think I am ready for neighbors with housecats that prey on golden eagles either.

Ralph Alter is a regular contributor to American Thinker.

Forsyth’s Shadowy Jackal Celebrates 40 Years of Assassination: Interview

By Hephzibah Anderson - Jul 31, 2011
http://www.bloomberg.com/

Frederick Forsyth, author of "The Day of the Jackal." Photographer: Gill Shaw/Random House via Bloomberg

Over the course of 14 novels, Frederick Forsyth has manipulated Nazis, terrorists and kidnappers. In the name of research, he has hobnobbed with drug dealers, infiltrated the arms trade and weathered an African coup. Yet the bestselling thriller writer is no match for an excitable Jack Russell puppy.

We’re on the wisteria-clad terrace of his home in England’s bucolic Buckinghamshire, and the aptly named Sassy is running circles around him. Literally.

She’s the youngest in a dynasty of terriers that Forsyth began acquiring when he left London for a farm after his first marriage ended in 1988. Though he has now remarried and downsized (even with a farm manager, 400 ewes were a handful), he still needs time alone, he says. It’s one of the traits this otherwise bluff, convivial 72-year-old shares with his celebrated villains.

“Some people are terrified of being alone,” he says over hot tea and ginger cookies. “I’m absolutely the reverse. There are periods when I need to be alone, like Greta Garbo.”

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the publication of “The Day of the Jackal,” which features one of popular fiction’s most memorable loners, the nameless assassin hired by the Organisation de l’Armee Secrete (OAS), a real-life French extremist group, to kill President Charles de Gaulle.

Portable Typewriter

It was Forsyth’s first novel, written in just 35 days at the start of 1970. He’d returned to a particularly frigid London, worn out from reporting on the Biafran conflict. Unemployed, sleeping on a friend’s couch and badly in need of cash, he sat down at his bullet-scarred portable typewriter and began bashing out a novel he’d conceived years earlier, as a “junior junior” foreign correspondent in Paris.

His job back then had been to trail de Gaulle in case he was assassinated -- which seemed a good possibility in the wake of Algerian independence. The young Forsyth figured otherwise.

“I was watching, and worked out in my head that the OAS were not going to get him. His security was too good and they were too amateurish. I thought to myself the only way they could get him is by bringing in an outsider.”

Four publishers turned the novel down, unable to see the point in a book about killing de Gaulle when de Gaulle was already in retirement. Where was the suspense? The point is to find out how close the Jackal gets, Forsyth says.

Seeing the World

Growing up in a small English market town, Forsyth had two aspirations, neither of them literary: to fly and to see the world. National Service granted his first wish and work as a foreign correspondent the second. Journalism also taught him the research skills that define him as a novelist.

Though he has switched from a manual to an electric typewriter, Forsyth refuses to have anything to do with computers, which rules out the Internet as a research tool. His preference is for first-hand observation, and it has landed him in some tight spots.

In 2009, for example, he was investigating the global cocaine trade for his most recent novel, “The Cobra.” Guinea- Bissau turned out to be an unexpected hub, and so off he set, arriving just in time to witness the start of a bloody coup d’etat.

The research is the only part of the writing process that Forsyth will admit to enjoying. “I’m a very unwriterly writer,” he says with a pinch of pride. He likes to play the mercenary, insisting that he became a novelist solely -- and misguidedly, he concedes with a laugh, given the fate of most first books -- for the money.

Backyard Fish Pond

The world has changed considerably in the four decades since “Jackal” was released, and I can’t help noticing that Forsyth is looking a little out of place even in his own home. Thanks to his wife’s passion for all things Oriental, this quintessential English buffer has a pair of plump Buddhas flanking his front door, an enormous Shinto bell sitting in the hallway and a Japanese bridge spanning the fish pond out back.

Fortunately for his fans, he has been stockpiling against obsolescence. “I have three of those still in the maker’s wrapper,” he says, gesturing to the Nakajima typewriter on his desk. “I’m just hoping that they’ll see me through. I’ll tap my last line as I hop off into the next world, leaving a ‘Goodbye,’ typewritten.”

 

A 40th-anniversary edition of “The Day of the Jackal” is published in the U.K. by Hutchinson (358 pages, 20 pounds). To buy this book in North America, click here.

(Hephzibah Anderson is a critic for Muse, the arts and leisure section of Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)

To contact the writer on the story: Hephzibah Anderson in London at Hephzibah_anderson@hotmail.com.

Today's Laugh Track: Chris Farley Interviews Paul McCartney

Today's Tune: Jason Isbell & The 400 Unit - Go It Alone (Live)

‘Life on this planet' about to change

By Mark Steyn
The Orange County Register
http://www.ocregister.com/
July 29, 2011

That thoughtful observer of the passing parade, Nancy Pelosi, weighed in on the "debt ceiling" negotiations the other day: "What we're trying to do is save the world from the Republican budget. We're trying to save life on this planet as we know it today."

It's always good to have things explained in terms we simpletons can understand. After a while, all the stuff about debt-to-GDP ratio and CBO alternative baseline scenarios starts to give you a bit of a headache, so we should be grateful to the House Minority Leader for putting it in layman's terms: What's at stake is "life on this planet as we know it today." So, if right now you're living anywhere in the general vicinity of this planet, it's good to know Nancy's in there pitching for you.

What about life on this planet tomorrow? How's that look if Nancy gets her way? The Democrat model of governance is to spend four trillion dollars while only collecting two trillion, borrowing the rest from tomorrow. Instead of "printing money," we're printing credit cards and preapproving our unborn grandchildren. To facilitate this proposition, Washington created its own form of fantasy accounting: "baseline budgeting," under which growth-in-government is factored in to federal bookkeeping as a permanent feature of life. As Arthur Herman of the American Enterprise Institute pointed out this week, under present rules, if the government were to announce a spending freeze – that's to say, no increases, no cuts, everything just stays exactly the same – the Congressional Budget Office would score it as a $9 trillion savings. In real-world terms, there are no "savings," and there's certainly no $9 trillion. In fact, there isn't one thin dime. But nevertheless that's how it would be measured at the CBO.

Around the world, most folks have to work harder than that to save $9 trillion. That's roughly the combined GDPs of Japan and Germany. But in America it's an accounting device. This is something to bear in mind when you're listening to the amount of "savings" touted by whatever triumphant bipartisan deal is announced at the eleventh hour in Washington.

So I find myself less interested in "life on this planet as we know it today" than in life on this planet as we're likely to know it tomorrow if Nancy Pelosi and her chums decline to re-acquaint themselves with reality. If you kinda dig life on this planet as you know it, ask yourself this: What's holding the joint up? As the old gag goes, if you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem; if you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem. If you owe the banks 15,000,000,000,000 dollars, the planet has a problem. Whatever comparisons one might make with Europe's soi-disant "PIIGS" re debt per capita or deficit-to-GDP ratio, the sheer hard numbers involved represent a threat to the planet that Portugal or Ireland does not. It also represents a threat to Americans. Three years ago, the first developed nation to hit the skids was Iceland. But, unless you're Icelandic, who cares? And, if you are Icelandic, you hunker down, readjust to straitened circumstances, and a few years down the line Iceland will still be Iceland and, if that's your bag, relatively pleasant.

That's not an option for the U.S. We are chugging a highly toxic cocktail: 21st century spendaholic government with mid-20th century assumptions about American power. After the Battle of Saratoga, Adam Smith replied to a pal despondent that the revolting colonials were going to be the ruin of Britain: "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation," said a sanguine Smith.

That's generally true. Americans of a certain bent looking at post-war France or Germany might reasonably conclude what's the big deal about genteel decline. The difference, of course, is that Europe's decline was cushioned by America. Who's around to cushion America's decline?

If the IMF is correct (a big if), China will be the planet's No. 1 economy by 2016. That means whoever's elected in November next year will be the last president of the United States to preside over the world's dominant economic power. As I point out in my rollicking new book, which will be hitting what's left of the post-Borders bookstore business any day now, this will mark the end of two centuries of Anglophone dominance – first by London, then its greatest if prodigal son. The world's economic superpower not only will be a communist dictatorship with a largely peasant population and legal, political and cultural traditions as alien to its predecessors as possible, but, even more civilizationally startling, it will be, unlike the U.S., Britain and the Dutch and Italians before them, a country that doesn't even use the Roman alphabet.

The American economy has been "stimulated" to a bloody pulp by the racketeers in Washington, mostly to buy off approved interests. Meanwhile, as Nancy defends life on this planet today, the contours of life on this planet tomorrow are beginning to emerge.

Remember the Libyan war? Oh, come on. It was in all the papers for a couple of days. And then, oddly enough, the media lost interest in Obama's war.

But it's still going on, out there on the fringes of the map. "We are generally in a stalemate," Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced to a roomful of chirping crickets the other day. At the start of NATO's desultory bombing campaign, the French and the British were demanding that Gadhafi be removed from power, leave Libya and be put on trial at the Hague. Last week, they subtly modified their position: He can remain in Libya, but he definitely has to step down from power. Expect further modifications in their next ultimatum: He can remain in the presidential palace, but he has to move to the poky guest bedroom under the eaves.

Meanwhile, the Lockerbie bomber has been appearing at delirious pro-Gadhafi rallies. Remember the Lockerbie bomber? He was returned to Libya because he was terminally ill and only had three months to live. That was two years ago. It's amazing what getting out of the care of the Scottish National Health Service can do for your life expectancy. Likewise, back in the spring, NATO declared that Gadhafi's presidency only had three weeks to live. Like his compatriot, he seems disinclined to follow the diagnosis.

The Libyan war never caught the imagination of the American public, even though you're paying for most of it. But in Tehran and Moscow and Beijing they're following it. And they regard it as a useful preview of the post-American world. Absent American will, even a tin-pot desert drag queen can stand up to the great powers and survive. The lesson of Obama's half-hearted little war isn't lost in the chancelleries of America's enemies.

For dominant powers in decline, it starts with the money, for Washington as for London and Rome before it. But it never stops there. The horizons shrivel. Two-bit provocateurs across the map pick off remnants of the old order with ever greater ease.

America has had two roles in a so-called "globalized" world: America's government was the guarantor of global order; America's economy was the engine of global prosperity. Right now, both roles are up for grabs. And there are no takers for the former. Pace Nancy Pelosi, "life on this planet as we know it today" is going to change, and very fast.

©MARK STEYN

NEW YORK TIMES READER KILLS DOZENS IN NORWAY

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
July 27, 2011

Norway's twin terror attacks suspect Anders Behring Breivik, left, sits in an armored police vehicle after leaving the courthouse following a hearing in Oslo, July 25, 2011. (Jon-Are Berg-Jacobsen/Aftenposten/AP Photo)

The New York Times wasted no time in jumping to conclusions about Anders Behring Breivik, the Norwegian who staged two deadly attacks in Oslo last weekend, claiming in the first two paragraphs of one story that he was a "gun-loving," "right-wing," "fundamentalist Christian," opposed to "multiculturalism."

It may as well have thrown in "Fox News-watching" and "global warming skeptic."

This was a big departure from the Times' conclusion-resisting coverage of the Fort Hood shooting suspect, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan. Despite reports that Hasan shouted "Allahu Akbar!" as he gunned down his fellow soldiers at a military medical facility in 2009, only one of seven Times articles on Hasan so much as mentioned that he was a Muslim.

Of course, that story ran one year after Hasan's arrest, so by then, I suppose, the cat was out of the bag.

In fact, however, Americans who jumped to conclusions about Hasan were right and New York Times reporters who jumped to conclusions about Breivik were wrong.

True, in one lone entry on Breivik's gaseous 1,500-page manifesto, "2083: A European Declaration of Independence," he calls himself "Christian." But unfortunately he also uses a great number of other words to describe himself, and these other words make clear that he does not mean "Christian" as most Americans understand the term. (Incidentally, he also cites The New York Times more than a half-dozen times.)

Had anyone at the Times actually read Breivik's manifesto, they would have seen that he uses the word "Christian" as a handy moniker to mean "European, non-Islamic" -- not a religious Christian or even a vague monotheist. In fact, at several points in his manifesto, Breivik stresses that he has a beef with Christians for their soft-heartedness. (I suppose that's why the Times is never worried about a "Christian backlash.")

A casual perusal of Breivik's manifesto clearly shows that he uses the word "Christian" similarly to the way some Jewish New Yorkers use it to mean "non-Jewish." In this usage, Christopher Hitchens and Madalyn Murray O'Hair are "Christians."

I told a Jewish gal trying to set me up with one of her friends once that he had to be Christian, and she exclaimed that she had the perfect guy: a secular Muslim atheist. (This was the least-popular option on the '60s board game Dream Date, by the way).

Breivik is very clear that you don't even have to believe in God to join his movement, saying in a self-interview:

Q: Do I have to believe in God or Jesus in order to become a Justiciar Knight?

A: As this is a cultural war, our definition of being a Christian does not necessarily constitute that you are required to have a personal relationship with God or Jesus.

He goes on to say that a "Christian fundamentalist theocracy" is "everything we DO NOT want," and a "secular European society" is "what we DO want."

"It is enough," Breivik says, "that you are a Christian-agnostic or a Christian-atheist." That statement doesn't even make sense in America.

At the one and only meeting of Breivik's "Knights Templar" in London in 2002, there were nine attendees, three of whom he describes as "Christian atheists" and one as a "Christian agnostic." (Another dozen people mistook it for a Renaissance Faire and were turned away.)

Breivik clearly explains that his "Knights Templar" is "not a religious organization but rather a Christian 'culturalist' military order." He even calls on the "European Jewish, Buddhist and Hindu community" to join his fight against "the Islamization of Europe."

He doesn't believe in Christianity or want anyone else to, but apparently supports celebrating Christmas simply to annoy Muslims.

Breivik says he is "not an excessively religious man," brags that he is "first and foremost a man of logic," calls himself "economically liberal" and reveres Darwinism.

But Times reporters had their "Eureka!" moment as soon as they heard Breivik used the word "Christian" someplace to identify himself. No one at the Times bothered to read Breivik's manifesto to see that he doesn't use the term the way the rest of us do. That might have interfered with the paper's obsessive Christian-bashing.

Other famous killers dubbed conservative Christians by the Times include Timothy McVeigh and Jared Loughner.

McVeigh was a pot-smoking atheist who said, "Science is my religion."

Similarly, Breivik says in his manifesto that "it is essential that science take an undisputed precedence over biblical teachings" –- a statement that would be incomprehensible to all the real scientists, such as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Bacon, Newton, Mendel, Pasteur, Planck, Einstein and Pauli, all of whom believed the whole purpose of science was to understand God.

The Tucson shooter, Jared Loughner, was lyingly described by the Times as a pro-life fanatic. Not only did more honest news outlets, such as ABC News, report exactly the opposite -- for example, how Loughner alarmed his classmates by laughing about an aborted baby in class -- but Loughner's friends described him as "left wing," "a political radical," "quite liberal" and "a pothead." Another said Loughner's mother was Jewish.

The only reason Timothy McVeigh has gone down in history as a right-wing Christian and Jared Loughner has not -- despite herculean efforts by much of the mainstream media to convince us otherwise -- is that by January 2011 when Loughner went on his murder spree, conservatives had enough media outlets to reveal the truth.

As explained in the smash best-seller "Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America," the liberal rule is: Any criminal act committed by a white man with a gun is a right-wing, Christian conspiracy, whereas any criminal act committed by a nonwhite is the government violating someone's civil liberties.

It's too bad Breivik wasn't a Muslim extremist open about his Jihadist views, because I hear the Army is looking for a new psychiatrist down at Fort Hood.

COPYRIGHT 2011 ANN COULTER

Fanaticism, mass murder and the left

By Melanie Phillips
http://www.melaniephillips.com/
July 26, 2011

In the wake of the Norway atrocity and the reaction it has generated, I have been thinking some more about hatred, fanaticism and moral confusion.

This shouldn’t need saying, but it does: there can be no excuse, justification or rationale whatsoever for the atrocity perpetrated by Anders Behring Breivik. The reason it unfortunately needs saying is that I have been reading too many weaselly equivocations about this, along the lines of ‘Yes, it was indeed a most terrible atrocity and one’s heart bleeds for those poor victims; but Norway’s politics towards Israel do stink/Norway’s Labour Party stinks/Quisling’s country, say no more/the Islamisation of Europe stinks/it was only a matter of time before someone was provoked by the railroading of public opinion into doing something like this’.

No, no, no! Any variety of such ‘yes-buttery' inescapably makes some kind of excuse for the atrocity, however dressed up it may be in suitably pious expressions of horror. There is never any justification for mass murder. None. Any concerns about the Norwegian ambassador to Israel’s disgusting comments or European Islamisation or anything else are a totally separate matter and must be addressed through the democratic process of argument, persuasion and public debate.

Not only can mass murder never be excused, but the notion that ‘it was only a matter of time before someone was provoked into doing something like this’ is itself as nonsensical as it is obscene. Yes, there are a lot of people in Europe who are angry -- very angry indeed -- about a whole host of things. Some of them are decent people who are boiling with rage at being disenfranchised by an entire political class which seems determined to destroy their civilisation. Some of them have deeply unpleasant or racist views about some of their fellow human beings. Some of them are so angry they may join political groupings which resort on occasion to thuggery and hooliganism (the BNP, EDL or the anti-globalisation riots all come to mind). But violent as some of their behaviour may be, they would not travel to a youth camp, invite the teenagers to gather round and then open fire on them all with dum-dum bullets.

The suggestion that Breivik’s behaviour resulted from political rage – let alone from reading thinkers such as John Locke, John Stuart Mill or Winston Churchill – is frankly itself an opinion in need of treatment. The man is either in the grip of a psychosis or he is a psychopath – in other words, a grossly abnormal personality incapable of human feelings of empathy (my money is on the latter). What he himself says about his own opinions or state of mind therefore does not bear examination. Yet throughout the west, apparently intelligent people have been not only ascribing to him rational thought processes but have been poring over his own words to extract clues about what made him do this.

Repeat after me very slowly: Breivik did not murder dozens of teenagers because he was ideologically opposed to cultural Marxism; he mowed them down because he was grossly mentally abnormal.
In the Wall Street Journal, Bret Stephens makes a useful point – and also explains why the frenzy of demonisation being directed at writers and thinkers who were name-checked in Breivik’s ‘manifesto’is quite so vile, as well as deeply stupid. Observing that Breivik was neither Christian nor conservative but intended to detonate an apocalypse, Stephens writes about this particular pathology:

What it is is millennarian: the belief that all manner of redemptive possibilities lie on just the other side of a crucible of unspeakable chaos and suffering. At his arrest, Breivik called his acts ‘atrocious but necessary.’ Stalin and other Marxists so despised by Breivik might have said the same thing about party purges or the liquidation of the kulaks.

These are the politics that have largely defined our age and which conservatives have, for the most part, been foremost in opposing. To attempt to tar them with Breivik's name is worse than a slur; it's a concession to a killer with pretensions of intellectual sophistication. And it's a misunderstanding of what he was all about.

Indeed. That’s why the relationship between even ultra-nationalistic thinking and acts of terror is very different indeed from the relationship between Islamist radicalism and Islamic acts of terror. The former is characterised by terrorism perpetrated in pursuit of discrete and limited aims. The latter aims to effect an apocalypse in order to bring about the perfection of the world. The former may be appalling in its effects but is nevertheless fundamentally rational since its goal, however noxious, is achievable. The latter is fundamentally irrational since its goal is a utopian fantasy. Consequently those who are in the grip of millenarian apocalyptic fantasies tend to be lunatics or psychopaths; and so it is as ridiculous to ascribe the pathologically murderous behaviour of Breivik to political rage as it would be to do so in the case of Stalin, Hitler or Ahmadinejad.

There is however yet another aspect of the millenarian mindset which should not be overlooked. In my book The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power I consider at some length the millenarian fantasies not just of modern-day Islamists but also of the modern left. (I owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Richard Landes, who generously talked me through millenarian theories when I was writing my book some two years ago and whose own magnificent book on the subject, Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of Millennial Experience, has just been published.)

All the totemic creeds of today’s ‘progressive’ classes -- environmentalism, egalitarianism, multiculturalism, anti-Zionism and so on --- are millenarian, in that they all posit in their different ways the perfection of the world (just like, in their time, the Inquisition, Stalinism and fascism).

Consequently, today’s militantly secular leftists display some astonishing similarities to both modern-day Islamists and medieval Christian fanatics. There is the same belief in the Revealed Truth – Revealed, that is, to them alone – from which no-one is permitted to dissent. Anyone who denies it is a heretic and has to be destroyed. Because the left believes it embodies virtue -- on account of its desire to perfect the world – anyone who dissents or opposes it is evil. Because it is Manichean, all who are not left-wing are right-wing (even if they are in fact liberal). So all who oppose the left are evil right-wingers who must be destroyed. That to leftists is a moral project.

They are therefore in effect a modern secular Inquisition. They are in the same mould as the religious and political totalitarian tyrannies of the past; they make in this respect common cause with the Islamists whose agenda poses a mortal threat to their own lives and liberties and most cherished beliefs; and they share the characteristic of a closed thought system which is totally impervious to reason and destroys all who challenge it with the monsters of history and Anders Behring Breivik.

That is surely why the left seized upon the Norway atrocity with demented joy and detonated a terrifying eruption of distortion and demonisation, irrationality, hatred and sheer blood-lust as it saw in the ravings of Anders Behring Breivik the mother and father of all smears which it could use to crush those who refuse to surrender to cultural totalitarianism. So those of us who fight for life, liberty and western civilisation against their enemies found ourselves – and by implication, the many millions who share these mainstream views – grotesquely damned as accessories to mass murder by those who actually cheer on religious fascists and genocidal madmen and who are set upon silencing all who resist.

The appalling actions of a Norwegian psychopath tell us next to nothing about our society. But the reaction to that atrocity tells us a great deal more.


Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, ca. 1497–98
Albrecht Dürer (German, 1471–1528)
Woodcut