Rachel Ehrenfeld
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
December 19, 2005
[The following statement by Dr. Ehrenfeld was read by Alyssa Lappen at the meeting on "Protection of Religious Sites and Prevention of the Use of Religion to Incite Terrorism/Violence" which took place at the U.N. Headquarters in New York on December 13th, 2005. Dr. Ehrenfeld was ill with pneumonia].
No churches or synagogues have been destroyed in Saudi Arabia for over 1,400 years—because none are allowed. Those who want to establish churches "are, unfortunately, fanatics," according to the Saudi First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense and Aviation and Inspector General, Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, in an interview with the Associated Press on March 13, 2003. He concluded: "There are no churches - not in the past, the present or future....”
There is no declared Muslim state, which offers full civil rights to members of other religions. Many Christians work in Saudi Arabia, but they are not allowed to practice their religion in public because there is no religious freedom in Saudi Arabia. The State Department's report on Religious Freedom points out that the Saudis do “not always respect this right in practice and do not define this right in law.”
Last April, 40 Pakistani Christians including men, women and children were arrested for holding prayers in a private home in Riyadh. Needless to say, their prayer-books were confiscated.
Moreover, in the 1990's, Christian religious services in the American Embassy were terminated at the Saudi government's request. And even websites devoted to other religions and to religious freedom and tolerance are blocked by the Saudi government.
And the Saudis not only oppress all other religions but actively promote an ideology of hate in their own country and abroad. Freedom House documented how the Saudi government is involved in propagating internationally a “religious ideology that explicitly promotes hate, intolerance, and other human rights violations, and in some cases violence, toward members of other religious groups, both Muslims and non-Muslims.”
In Iran, where the president has repeatedly said, "I want to stop Christianity in this country," last month, a Protestant pastor has been murdered because he himself converted from Islam. It is important to note that all five schools of Islamic law agree that the penalty for conversion - "apostasy" - is death.In Indonesia, especially in the Moluccan islands, thousands of Christians were massacred and tens of thousands driven from their homes in the last decade alone by Islamist mobs.
In Egypt, Christians face persecution in the form of rapes, kidnappings and forced conversions as well as economic discrimination and restriction on their property and on what they can build.
Similar situations apply in most Gulf States, which were Islamized long ago. In Yemen, “the government forbids conversions, requires permission for the construction of new places of worship and prohibits non-Muslims from proselytizing.” The country has two churches in the city of Aden. One of the churches was bombed on January 1, 2001. And on December 30, 2002 - three Southern Baptist missionaries working in the Baptist Hospital at Jibla were killed.
In November 2005, Qatar allowed to construct the first church in 14 Centuries. However, no “freestanding cross” to identify the building as a church is allowed. Yet, this is seen as a big step towards reform.
However, radical Islamists adhere to medieval traditions and laws mandating the Jihad. According to the Dictionary of Islam: conquered by jihad, subjugated people are given three choices:
1) convert,
2) pay a head tax, or
3) die.
Thirteenth Century jurist Ibn Taymiya, often quoted by Osama bin Laden, wrote that spoils of war “received the name of fay since Allah had taken them away from the infidels in order to restore them to the Muslims.... [The] infidels forfeit their persons and their belongings which they do not use in Allah's service to the faithful believers who serve Allah and unto whom Allah restitutes what is theirs....”
This creed dictated that in conquered regions, ancient religious sites be confiscated and infidels banned from using them. Thus, the Dome of the Rock was constructed on the ruins of the Temple Mount in 691 AD., Al-Aqsa Mosque over the Basilica of St. Mary in 712, AD, and the Grand Mosque of Damascus, was built over the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in 715 AD.
In India, the Vikramasli temple was razed to the ground in the 13th Century, and its foundation- stones thrown into the Ganges. According to scholar K.S. Lal, thousands of Hindu temples were destroyed and their stones used to build mosques.
Muslim scribes recount the detestation on a church in Georgia in 1551 by Safavid Shah Tahmasp. “The Shah and his nobles went to see the church and slew twenty evil priests and broke the bell of 17 maunds...and destroyed the doors of iron and gold and sent them to the treasury.”
Only when infidels surrendered could they preserve religious buildings, and then only if a clause specifically allowed them, but in that case modifications and improvements were prohibited. Furthermore, 11th Century jurist Abu Al-Hasan Al Mawardi wrote that non-Muslim dhimmis “are not allowed to erect new synagogues or churches in the territory of Islam and any built are to be demolished without compensation.”
In countries with a Muslim majority, Islamists regularly target churches, synagogues and other non-Muslim holy sites for desecration and destruction. The list of old and new examples of Islamic edicts preaching intolerance of others and calling for their destruction as well as the destruction of their holy sites is long.
Unless those - still the majority of the world - who do not adhere to such dogma, take action to stop this aggression, our future is in jeopardy.
The history of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, headed by Yasser Arafat, is filled with religious violence. From 1975 to 1982, when the PLO operated in and from Lebanon, it terrorized Christian communities and ransacked their churches. Even after the newly established Palestinian Authority committed to religious tolerance in the Oslo Accord, its own police forcefully took over Abraham's Oak Russian "Holy Trinity" Monastery in Hebron, on July 5, 1997, wounding several monks and nuns.
Then, in January 2000, the PA evicted five White Russian monks from their 19th Century Jericho Monastery.
In September 1996, Palestinians destroyed the synagogue at Joseph's tomb in Nablus. Then, in October 2000, the reconstructed synagogue and yeshiva at Joseph's Tomb was sacked and burned by mobs, and Rabbi Hillel Lieberman, who went there hoping to save Torah scrolls and other holy objects, was murdered. The next day his bullet-ridden body was found in a cave. Today, the Jewish holy site is buried under the new mosque that was built over the ruins of Joseph Tomb.
The PA’s Tanzim terrorist group invasion and desecration of Bethlehem's Church of Nativity, in May 2002, was premeditated, according to their commander Abdullah Abu-Hadid. He stated on record: "The idea was to enter the church in order to create international pressure on Israel... We knew beforehand that there was two years worth of food for 50 monks. Oil, beans, rice, olives, good bathrooms and the largest wells in old Bethlehem."
The PA terrorists "stole gold objects from the monks, ate their scarce food, and urinated on the church floor."
Muslims have attacked the “infidels” and their houses of worship in order to take over their properties for centuries. In the September 1955 “Istanbul Pogrom,” Muslims sacked the homes, businesses and churches of tens of thousands of Greek Christians, Armenians and Jews in Istanbul. “Dozens of Greek men and women were raped, and a number of men were forcibly circumcised by the mob.” Today, of the 200,000 of the Greek community, only 1,500 live in Istanbul. And only 24,000 Jews remained of more than 100,000 at the beginning of the last Century. As for the Armenians, their massacre in 1915 has been well documented.
In the Balkans, since the Serbs were defeated in Kosovo in 1999, more than 100 ancient Orthodox holy places were destroyed, some dating back to the 13th through 15th centuries.
The destruction of the two fifth-century Buddha statues lining Bamiyan Valley's soaring cliffs, in March 2001, came after a fatwa ordered by the Taliban that all Afghan “idols” be destroyed as anti-Muslim.
Islamists scholars supported the destruction of the Buddha statutes. Among the supporters was American Muslim, Sheikh Ali al-Timimi, who in July this year was sentenced by a judge in Virginia to life in prison because he worked to get a group of young Americans Muslims to obtain terrorists training so that they could go to Afghanistan and fight with the Taliban against the “infidels.” He wrote that there is “overwhelming evidence from the Quran and the Sunna where we have been commanded to destroy all images and flatten all graves.”
Unfortunately, many other holy sites of other religions have been destroyed because of the intolerant Islamists – both Shiite and Sunni dogmas that teach disrespect for the rights of Jews, Christians and other non-Muslims. The most flagrant proponent of this hate lately is Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who not only denies the Holocaust as a historical event, but uses every opportunity to reiterate that Israel "must be wiped off the map."
Statements like this encourage not only the massacre of Jews and their holy sites, but also are responsible for the mass murder of Christians and the razing of churches worldwide—in Indonesia, Pakistan, Sudan and Nigeria—which happens in in 83% of nations with Muslim majorities, according to Tom Barrett in American Daily.
To remedy the situation, the UN—as well as all other international organizations—should sanction all the countries that do not allow religious freedom and withdraw all membership privileges of all the countries that do not provide legal protection and equal rights to all their citizens.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Rachel Ehrenfeld is the director for the American Center for Democracy headquartered in New York. Author of Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It, she is the world’s leading expert on Narco-Terrorism and a noteworthy authority on international terrorism, political corruption, money laundering, drug trafficking, and organized crime. Most recently, she was a consult for the Department of Defense’s Threat Reduction Strategy.
Monday, December 19, 2005
John Leo: Unrepentant Killers Are Nobel Candidates in Eyes of the Left
December 18, 2005
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/
"Tookie" Williams, put to death by lethal injection last week in California, was a "legend" who underwent "a meaningful martyrdom that sent a lasting message to the world," according to old-time leftist Tom Hayden, formerly Mr. Jane Fonda.
"Meaningful martyrdom"? What can Hayden be talking about? Martyrs die for a cause. Williams died for executing four unarmed people during two 1979 robberies, shooting a woman in the face, and laughing uncontrollably at the gurgling sounds a male victim made as he died in agony.
Opposing the death penalty, of course, means speaking out even for people like Williams. Still, the campaign for him has been wretched excess. His book editor and friend Barbara Becnel compared him to Rosa Parks. She plans a massive funeral as well as a memorial to him in South Africa. Several people nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize (anybody can nominate anybody, by the way.)
Because California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger denied clemency, Austrians took his name off the Arnold Schwarzenegger stadium near Graz, his hometown. A Christian political group suggested the stadium be named for Williams. In the United States, all the usual suspects have been whipping up support and sympathy for Williams, including Jesse Jackson, Joan Baez, Susan Sarandon and Snoop Dogg.
So much attention to the murderer, almost none for those he killed. So let's remember them here: Albert Owens, a veteran and father of two young girls, shot at a 7-Eleven; and three members of an Asian-American family who ran the Brookhaven Motel: Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Yang and Yee-Chen Lin. In a rare bit of commentary, William John Hagan of Canada Free Press wrote: "The mainstream media has ignored the realities of the Williams case in order to promote an anti-death-penalty agenda. To present this mass murderer as a martyr is an insult to victims everywhere."
Hayden said Williams was "railroaded," another fantasy. In the Owens killing, two accomplices said he did the shooting. In the motel case, Williams was picked up 10 minutes after the shooting of the three members of the Yang family. Shotgun shells at the motel were traced to a shotgun William purchased in 1974. Williams was living with a couple who testified that he told them details of the three murders that only the killer would know. They gave police the shotgun and said Williams kept it under his bed.
One man said Williams had bragged about killing three people who lived on Vermont Street, the location of the motel. The witness later said his testimony was coerced, but a three-judge panel on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that claim.
A fellow inmate at Los Angeles County Jail testified that Williams drew up an elaborate escape plan, which involved blowing up a van carrying prisoners from jail to court and killing guards and inmates. Handwritten notes by Williams, which featured his habit of using stars to dot his I's, corroborated the story of the plan. The fellow inmate also testified that Williams had admitted the motel murders.
Williams has been riding the death-row celebrity train for some time. Jamie Foxx made a TV movie about him, "Redemption," referring to his decision to write children's books warning against the gang life. But the death row killer who writes high-minded books to promote clemency is not a new phenomenon. In his column, Hagan discusses Williams' checkered career in prison, including two instances of throwing chemicals in the eyes of guards.
In denying clemency, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pointed out that Williams had never apologized for the murders, or even admitted committing them. A farewell message from Williams contained the lyrics of "Strange Fruit," an anti-lynching song. So the unapologetic killer apparently had no clue about how he reached death row.
The media keep converting killers into celebrities deserving of our sympathy. Gary Gilmore, a Utah murderer, was the subject of an enormous book by Norman Mailer, and the ACLU furiously pursued his cause even after Gilmore said he wanted to die. Mailer turned the killer Jack Henry Abbott into a radical-chic celeb and a sought-after Manhattan dinner guest once Mailer and other prominent folk helped get him paroled. He grew suddenly less popular when he killed again, knifing a waiter to death.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, the convicted cop-killer, is a big name on the left, enlisted to speak on National Public Radio (at least until the protests got too loud) and invited to give major talks, including commencement addresses at two colleges. Now add Williams to the list: the Rosa Parks and Nobel candidate of unrepentant killers.
Copyright 2005 John Leo
Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/
"Tookie" Williams, put to death by lethal injection last week in California, was a "legend" who underwent "a meaningful martyrdom that sent a lasting message to the world," according to old-time leftist Tom Hayden, formerly Mr. Jane Fonda."Meaningful martyrdom"? What can Hayden be talking about? Martyrs die for a cause. Williams died for executing four unarmed people during two 1979 robberies, shooting a woman in the face, and laughing uncontrollably at the gurgling sounds a male victim made as he died in agony.
Opposing the death penalty, of course, means speaking out even for people like Williams. Still, the campaign for him has been wretched excess. His book editor and friend Barbara Becnel compared him to Rosa Parks. She plans a massive funeral as well as a memorial to him in South Africa. Several people nominated him for a Nobel Peace Prize (anybody can nominate anybody, by the way.)
Because California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger denied clemency, Austrians took his name off the Arnold Schwarzenegger stadium near Graz, his hometown. A Christian political group suggested the stadium be named for Williams. In the United States, all the usual suspects have been whipping up support and sympathy for Williams, including Jesse Jackson, Joan Baez, Susan Sarandon and Snoop Dogg.
So much attention to the murderer, almost none for those he killed. So let's remember them here: Albert Owens, a veteran and father of two young girls, shot at a 7-Eleven; and three members of an Asian-American family who ran the Brookhaven Motel: Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Yang and Yee-Chen Lin. In a rare bit of commentary, William John Hagan of Canada Free Press wrote: "The mainstream media has ignored the realities of the Williams case in order to promote an anti-death-penalty agenda. To present this mass murderer as a martyr is an insult to victims everywhere."
Hayden said Williams was "railroaded," another fantasy. In the Owens killing, two accomplices said he did the shooting. In the motel case, Williams was picked up 10 minutes after the shooting of the three members of the Yang family. Shotgun shells at the motel were traced to a shotgun William purchased in 1974. Williams was living with a couple who testified that he told them details of the three murders that only the killer would know. They gave police the shotgun and said Williams kept it under his bed.
One man said Williams had bragged about killing three people who lived on Vermont Street, the location of the motel. The witness later said his testimony was coerced, but a three-judge panel on the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals rejected that claim.
A fellow inmate at Los Angeles County Jail testified that Williams drew up an elaborate escape plan, which involved blowing up a van carrying prisoners from jail to court and killing guards and inmates. Handwritten notes by Williams, which featured his habit of using stars to dot his I's, corroborated the story of the plan. The fellow inmate also testified that Williams had admitted the motel murders.
Williams has been riding the death-row celebrity train for some time. Jamie Foxx made a TV movie about him, "Redemption," referring to his decision to write children's books warning against the gang life. But the death row killer who writes high-minded books to promote clemency is not a new phenomenon. In his column, Hagan discusses Williams' checkered career in prison, including two instances of throwing chemicals in the eyes of guards.
In denying clemency, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger pointed out that Williams had never apologized for the murders, or even admitted committing them. A farewell message from Williams contained the lyrics of "Strange Fruit," an anti-lynching song. So the unapologetic killer apparently had no clue about how he reached death row.
The media keep converting killers into celebrities deserving of our sympathy. Gary Gilmore, a Utah murderer, was the subject of an enormous book by Norman Mailer, and the ACLU furiously pursued his cause even after Gilmore said he wanted to die. Mailer turned the killer Jack Henry Abbott into a radical-chic celeb and a sought-after Manhattan dinner guest once Mailer and other prominent folk helped get him paroled. He grew suddenly less popular when he killed again, knifing a waiter to death.
Mumia Abu-Jamal, the convicted cop-killer, is a big name on the left, enlisted to speak on National Public Radio (at least until the protests got too loud) and invited to give major talks, including commencement addresses at two colleges. Now add Williams to the list: the Rosa Parks and Nobel candidate of unrepentant killers.
Copyright 2005 John Leo
Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate
Friday, December 16, 2005
David Brooks: What 'Munich' Left Out
The New York Times
December 11, 2005
Every generation of Americans casts Israel in its own morality tale. For a time, Israel was the plucky underdog fighting for survival against larger foes. Now, as Steven Spielberg rolls out the publicity campaign for his new movie, "Munich," we see the crystallization of a different fable. In this story, the Israelis and the Palestinians are parallel peoples victimized by history and trapped in a cycle of violence.
In his rollout interview in Time, Spielberg spoke of the Middle East's endless killings and counterkillings. "A response to a response doesn't really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual motion machine," Spielberg said. "There's been a quagmire of blood for blood for many decades in that region. Where does it end?"
"The main problem, he concluded, is intransigence itself. "The only thing that's going to solve this is rational minds, a lot of sitting down and talking until you're blue in the gills."
"Munich" the movie is a brilliant representation of this argument. Its hero, Avner, has been called in by Golda Meir to assassinate the terrorists responsible for the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. Over the course of the movie, as assassination piles upon assassination, Avner descends into a pit of Raskolnikovian hell. Israelis kill Palestinians and Palestinians kill Israelis and guilt piles upon paranoia. Eventually, Avner loses faith in his mission, in Zionism, in Israel itself.
This is a new kind of antiwar movie for a new kind of war, and in so many ways it is innovative, sophisticated and intelligent.
But when it is political, Spielberg has to distort reality to fit his preconceptions. In the first place, by choosing a story set in 1972, Spielberg allows himself to ignore the core poison that permeates the Middle East, Islamic radicalism. In Spielberg's Middle East, there is no Hamas or Islamic Jihad. There are no passionate anti-Semites, no Holocaust deniers like the current president of Iran, no zealots who want to exterminate Israelis.
There is, above all, no evil. And that is the core of Spielberg's fable. In his depiction of reality there are no people so committed to a murderous ideology that they are impervious to the sort of compromise and dialogue Spielberg puts such great faith in.
Because he will not admit the existence of evil, as it really exists, Spielberg gets reality wrong. Understandably, he doesn't want to portray Palestinian terrorists as cartoon bad guys, but he simply doesn't portray them. There's one speech in which a Palestinian terrorist sounds like Mahmoud Abbas, but beyond that, the terrorists are marginal and opaque.
And because there is no evil, Spielberg gets the Israeli fighters wrong. Avner is an American image of what an Israeli hero should be. The real Israeli fighters tend to be harder and less sympathetic, and they are made that way by an awareness of the evil implacability of those who want to exterminate them.
In Spielberg's Middle East the only way to achieve peace is by renouncing violence. But in the real Middle East the only way to achieve peace is through military victory over the fanatics, accompanied by compromise between the reasonable elements on each side. Somebody, the Israelis or the Palestinian Authority, has to defeat Hamas and the other terrorist groups.
Far from leading to a downward cycle, this kind of violence is the precondition to peace.
Here too, Spielberg's decision to tell a story set in the early 1970's makes "Munich" a misleading way to start a larger discussion. In 1972, Israel was just entering the era of spectacular terror attacks and didn't know how to respond. But over the years Israelis have learned that targeted assassinations, which are the main subject of this movie, are one of the less effective ways to fight terror.
Israel much prefers to arrest suspected terrorists. Arrests don't set off rounds of retaliation, and arrested suspects are likely to provide you with intelligence, the real key to defanging terror groups. Over the past few years Israeli forces have used arrests, intelligence work, the security fence and, at times, targeted assassinations to defeat the second intifada. As a result, the streets of Jerusalem are filled with teenagers, and the political climate has relaxed, allowing Ariel Sharon to move to the center.
Recent history teaches what Spielberg's false generalization about the "perpetual motion machine" of violence does not: that some violence is constructive and some is destructive. The trick is knowing the difference. That's a recognition that comes from reality, not fables.
December 11, 2005
Every generation of Americans casts Israel in its own morality tale. For a time, Israel was the plucky underdog fighting for survival against larger foes. Now, as Steven Spielberg rolls out the publicity campaign for his new movie, "Munich," we see the crystallization of a different fable. In this story, the Israelis and the Palestinians are parallel peoples victimized by history and trapped in a cycle of violence.
In his rollout interview in Time, Spielberg spoke of the Middle East's endless killings and counterkillings. "A response to a response doesn't really solve anything. It just creates a perpetual motion machine," Spielberg said. "There's been a quagmire of blood for blood for many decades in that region. Where does it end?"
"The main problem, he concluded, is intransigence itself. "The only thing that's going to solve this is rational minds, a lot of sitting down and talking until you're blue in the gills."
"Munich" the movie is a brilliant representation of this argument. Its hero, Avner, has been called in by Golda Meir to assassinate the terrorists responsible for the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. Over the course of the movie, as assassination piles upon assassination, Avner descends into a pit of Raskolnikovian hell. Israelis kill Palestinians and Palestinians kill Israelis and guilt piles upon paranoia. Eventually, Avner loses faith in his mission, in Zionism, in Israel itself.
This is a new kind of antiwar movie for a new kind of war, and in so many ways it is innovative, sophisticated and intelligent.
But when it is political, Spielberg has to distort reality to fit his preconceptions. In the first place, by choosing a story set in 1972, Spielberg allows himself to ignore the core poison that permeates the Middle East, Islamic radicalism. In Spielberg's Middle East, there is no Hamas or Islamic Jihad. There are no passionate anti-Semites, no Holocaust deniers like the current president of Iran, no zealots who want to exterminate Israelis.
There is, above all, no evil. And that is the core of Spielberg's fable. In his depiction of reality there are no people so committed to a murderous ideology that they are impervious to the sort of compromise and dialogue Spielberg puts such great faith in.
Because he will not admit the existence of evil, as it really exists, Spielberg gets reality wrong. Understandably, he doesn't want to portray Palestinian terrorists as cartoon bad guys, but he simply doesn't portray them. There's one speech in which a Palestinian terrorist sounds like Mahmoud Abbas, but beyond that, the terrorists are marginal and opaque.
And because there is no evil, Spielberg gets the Israeli fighters wrong. Avner is an American image of what an Israeli hero should be. The real Israeli fighters tend to be harder and less sympathetic, and they are made that way by an awareness of the evil implacability of those who want to exterminate them.
In Spielberg's Middle East the only way to achieve peace is by renouncing violence. But in the real Middle East the only way to achieve peace is through military victory over the fanatics, accompanied by compromise between the reasonable elements on each side. Somebody, the Israelis or the Palestinian Authority, has to defeat Hamas and the other terrorist groups.
Far from leading to a downward cycle, this kind of violence is the precondition to peace.
Here too, Spielberg's decision to tell a story set in the early 1970's makes "Munich" a misleading way to start a larger discussion. In 1972, Israel was just entering the era of spectacular terror attacks and didn't know how to respond. But over the years Israelis have learned that targeted assassinations, which are the main subject of this movie, are one of the less effective ways to fight terror.
Israel much prefers to arrest suspected terrorists. Arrests don't set off rounds of retaliation, and arrested suspects are likely to provide you with intelligence, the real key to defanging terror groups. Over the past few years Israeli forces have used arrests, intelligence work, the security fence and, at times, targeted assassinations to defeat the second intifada. As a result, the streets of Jerusalem are filled with teenagers, and the political climate has relaxed, allowing Ariel Sharon to move to the center.
Recent history teaches what Spielberg's false generalization about the "perpetual motion machine" of violence does not: that some violence is constructive and some is destructive. The trick is knowing the difference. That's a recognition that comes from reality, not fables.
Thursday, December 15, 2005
Raymond J. Keating: Familiar Faith Themes Enrich the "Chronicles"
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org
December 12, 2005
With "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" debuting at movie theaters this past weekend, a cinematic path to Narnia's imaginative creator, C.S. Lewis, was opened.
For decades, various avenues already were available for people of varying backgrounds and ages to discover this writer, scholar and leading defender of Christianity. Through his varied works, Lewis exemplified the power of imagination in stories, faith and life.
Lewis was not only a professor at Oxford and Cambridge but an accomplished author in areas such as science fiction and fantasy, literary criticism, theology, philosophy and ethics. An atheist interested in Renaissance literature, a reader looking for a page-turner or a Christian seeking illumination could all appreciate the creativity of Lewis.
But it is perhaps Lewis' seven children's books in "The Chronicles of Narnia" where the power of imagination is most fully displayed. These books don't fit neatly onto the children's literature bookshelf.
Lewis dedicated "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" to his goddaughter, noting by the time it was published she would be "too old for fairy tales." He added, though: "But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again." That observation reflects imaginative wisdom and joy.
Indeed, Narnia has been well worth visiting at various stages in life since "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," the first book Lewis wrote in the series, was published in 1950. For the young (and the rest of us), it's a great adventure. But other positives - such as love, sacrifice, courage and good conquering evil - can be seen as a parent and during times of more mature reflection.
The Christian reader is treated to familiar faith themes as well. For example, Aslan is not just a lion, but is a Christ-like figure who lays down his life for a sinner, and conquers death and the evil one. This merely scratches the surface of Christian analogies in Narnia. As quoted in "A Family Guide to Narnia," Lewis explained: "In reality, however, he [Aslan] is an invention giving an imaginary answer to the question, 'What might Christ become like, if there really were a world like Narnia and He chose to be incarnate and die and rise again in that world as He has actually done in ours?'"
It is through Narnia that Lewis captures key aspects of imagination - not to imagine just fictional worlds but also the realities of an unseen Savior and what that means in the daily lives of Christians. Indeed, faith and its consequences require imagination.
Therefore, making "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" was not like making just any movie. It could be argued that it stood as a more daunting task than the one faced by Mel Gibson with "The Passion of the Christ." Gibson was making an overtly Christian film that mattered mainly to Christians, risked his own money and harbored no great expectations for commercial success.
Meanwhile, the film version of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" must reach Lewis' monumental achievement of appealing to children and the general public while also pleasing Christians who treasure the religious themes in the book.
Amazingly, this was accomplished in the movie. How? The filmmakers largely stuck to the book. And where they strayed, it was only to enrich to the story cinematically, adding bits of humor and embellishing the battle scene toward the end of the film.
In a crowded theater, I saw the delight of children (although this is not for the very young, like preschoolers) and heard satisfied adults who simply enjoyed a good movie. And I'm sure there were Christians present who were also deeply moved by some powerful Christian imagery.
In the end, the filmmakers deserve praise for trusting the fertile imagination of C.S. Lewis.
Raymond J. Keating is a columnist for Newsday.
Copyright 2005 Newsday Inc.
The Chronicles of Narnia Boxed Set $28.77
Larry Elder: The "Redemption" of Stanley 'Tookie' Williams
http://www.townhall.com/
Dec 15, 2005
Stanley "Tookie" Williams, convicted multiple murderer and co-founder of the notorious street gang the "Crips," died via lethal injection at 12:35 a.m. on Dec. 13, 2005, in San Quentin State Prison. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, only hours before Williams' scheduled execution, refused to grant clemency. Who was Stanley "Tookie" Williams, and why did so many people want his life spared?
The Crips, co-founded by Williams in 1971, became a national -- indeed, international -- gang responsible for thousands of deaths. In 1981, a jury convicted Williams of murdering four people, and he was sentenced to death. Williams claimed he was innocent, a victim of a racist criminal justice system. He partnered with a writer and co-authored several anti-gang children's books. Williams apologized for founding the Crips, renounced his membership and urged others to do the same.
The usual suspects came out in support of Williams' clemency -- Hollywood stars and anti-death-penalty advocates. But so did the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
The NAACP took out an ad in the Los Angeles Times and began a four-city tour urging the governor to grant Williams clemency. Bruce S. Gordon, the new president and CEO of the NAACP, called Williams the organization's "secret weapon" in combating gang violence. Gordon also suggested that race played a part in Williams' conviction and noted that the criminal justice system "makes mistakes."
About the death penalty, according to the NAACP's website, the organization opposes it: "The NAACP has long opposed the death penalty because in many states there has been a disproportionate number of African-Americans sentenced to death, particularly when the crime involves a white victim."
But where was the NAACP's opposition to the death penalty back in 2000? The organization ran an ad during the 2000 presidential campaign of then-Gov. George W. Bush. The ad -- with a voiceover by the daughter of James Byrd, the man dragged to death by three men in Jasper, Texas -- attacked Bush for not passing enhanced hate-crime legislation. Bird's daughter, in a dramatic voice, said, "(I)t was like my father was killed all over again." But two of the three men convicted of killing Byrd had already received death sentences, with the third, who testified that he attempted to stop the other two from committing the murder, getting life without possibility of parole.
The NAACP ad, in essence, says that Byrd's killers should have been punished more harshly. So apparently white bigots deserve the death penalty, but a black multi-murderer who founded a street gang does not. All clear now?
Williams claims redemption, but refuses to accept responsibility for murdering four innocent people. Williams shot one victim, Albert Owens, who worked at a 7-Eleven, twice in the back, after Owens pleaded for his life. Williams, 11 days later, gunned down the owners of a small motel, a family of three.
According to Gov. Schwarzenegger's decision refusing clemency: "Williams ... robbed a family-operated motel and shot and killed three members of the family: (1) the father, Yen-I Yang, who was shot once in the torso and once in the arm while he was laying on a sofa; (2) the mother, Tsai-Shai Lin, who was shot once in the abdomen and once in the back; and (3) the daughter, Yee-Chen Lin, who was shot once in her face. For these murders, Williams made away with approximately $100 in cash. Williams also told others about the details of these murders and referred to the victims as 'Buddha-heads.'"
Consider the following hypothetical. David Duke, former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, murders, in cold blood, four innocent blacks. But, wait. Duke later renounces the Klan and pens children's books urging white kids to reject racism. But he refuses to accept responsibility for the murder of the four innocent blacks, claiming that a racist jury convicted him for his reputation, not for the murders. Imagine Snoop Dogg, Jamie Foxx, Ed Asner or the NAACP organizing a campaign to spare the "redeemed" Duke's life.
Williams' life inspired the movie called "Redemption." But a truly redeemed Williams would have said: "This is what happens. This is where you end up when you think the rules do not apply to you; when, because of anger and rage, you kill innocent people. I accept responsibility for what I did. I apologize to the family members. Please understand that I was not a victim of a racist, unfair criminal justice system, and I urge all criminals to first look into the mirror before blaming the police, the judges, the system. I made choices that put me here. The lesson of my life is -- no matter your circumstances, your race, your class -- you are responsible for making proper moral decisions. It is your duty to do so."
That's redemption.
Dec 15, 2005
Stanley "Tookie" Williams, convicted multiple murderer and co-founder of the notorious street gang the "Crips," died via lethal injection at 12:35 a.m. on Dec. 13, 2005, in San Quentin State Prison. California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, only hours before Williams' scheduled execution, refused to grant clemency. Who was Stanley "Tookie" Williams, and why did so many people want his life spared?The Crips, co-founded by Williams in 1971, became a national -- indeed, international -- gang responsible for thousands of deaths. In 1981, a jury convicted Williams of murdering four people, and he was sentenced to death. Williams claimed he was innocent, a victim of a racist criminal justice system. He partnered with a writer and co-authored several anti-gang children's books. Williams apologized for founding the Crips, renounced his membership and urged others to do the same.
The usual suspects came out in support of Williams' clemency -- Hollywood stars and anti-death-penalty advocates. But so did the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
The NAACP took out an ad in the Los Angeles Times and began a four-city tour urging the governor to grant Williams clemency. Bruce S. Gordon, the new president and CEO of the NAACP, called Williams the organization's "secret weapon" in combating gang violence. Gordon also suggested that race played a part in Williams' conviction and noted that the criminal justice system "makes mistakes."
About the death penalty, according to the NAACP's website, the organization opposes it: "The NAACP has long opposed the death penalty because in many states there has been a disproportionate number of African-Americans sentenced to death, particularly when the crime involves a white victim."
But where was the NAACP's opposition to the death penalty back in 2000? The organization ran an ad during the 2000 presidential campaign of then-Gov. George W. Bush. The ad -- with a voiceover by the daughter of James Byrd, the man dragged to death by three men in Jasper, Texas -- attacked Bush for not passing enhanced hate-crime legislation. Bird's daughter, in a dramatic voice, said, "(I)t was like my father was killed all over again." But two of the three men convicted of killing Byrd had already received death sentences, with the third, who testified that he attempted to stop the other two from committing the murder, getting life without possibility of parole.
The NAACP ad, in essence, says that Byrd's killers should have been punished more harshly. So apparently white bigots deserve the death penalty, but a black multi-murderer who founded a street gang does not. All clear now?
Williams claims redemption, but refuses to accept responsibility for murdering four innocent people. Williams shot one victim, Albert Owens, who worked at a 7-Eleven, twice in the back, after Owens pleaded for his life. Williams, 11 days later, gunned down the owners of a small motel, a family of three.
According to Gov. Schwarzenegger's decision refusing clemency: "Williams ... robbed a family-operated motel and shot and killed three members of the family: (1) the father, Yen-I Yang, who was shot once in the torso and once in the arm while he was laying on a sofa; (2) the mother, Tsai-Shai Lin, who was shot once in the abdomen and once in the back; and (3) the daughter, Yee-Chen Lin, who was shot once in her face. For these murders, Williams made away with approximately $100 in cash. Williams also told others about the details of these murders and referred to the victims as 'Buddha-heads.'"
Consider the following hypothetical. David Duke, former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, murders, in cold blood, four innocent blacks. But, wait. Duke later renounces the Klan and pens children's books urging white kids to reject racism. But he refuses to accept responsibility for the murder of the four innocent blacks, claiming that a racist jury convicted him for his reputation, not for the murders. Imagine Snoop Dogg, Jamie Foxx, Ed Asner or the NAACP organizing a campaign to spare the "redeemed" Duke's life.
Williams' life inspired the movie called "Redemption." But a truly redeemed Williams would have said: "This is what happens. This is where you end up when you think the rules do not apply to you; when, because of anger and rage, you kill innocent people. I accept responsibility for what I did. I apologize to the family members. Please understand that I was not a victim of a racist, unfair criminal justice system, and I urge all criminals to first look into the mirror before blaming the police, the judges, the system. I made choices that put me here. The lesson of my life is -- no matter your circumstances, your race, your class -- you are responsible for making proper moral decisions. It is your duty to do so."
That's redemption.
Communists For Tookie
Click on the link provided to read a very entertaining account of the freak show that was on display outside the prison at Tookie Williams' execution...plenty of pictures of wild-eyed zealots...plenty of catchy rants...something for everybody.
Saturday, December 10, 2005
Book Review: Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis
Chris Banescu
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org
C.S. Lewis is one of the most influential Christian writers of the 20th century, and probably the most down to earth theologian that Western civilization has ever produced. His eloquent and reasoned defense of the core beliefs and truths of Christianity are timeless. Lewis is indeed an expert at making complex theological issues accessible to believers and non-believers alike. Lewis' profound clarity of thought, grace, and wisdom has inexorably altered the lives of millions of readers.
An agnostic in his younger years, Lewis understands the objections of non-believers and deals with their arguments head on. In one of his most well-known observations in Mere Christianity, Lewis dismisses the most "foolish" idea people have regarding Christ: "I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God." Lewis magnificently disposes with such fallacious thinking in one paragraph:
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God; or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
The existence of evil in the world is frequently used to attack Christianity's categorical proclamation that there is a God and He is the Lord of all creation. But such simplistic criticisms and immature objections are torn to shreds by common sense and Lewis' magnificent, effortlessly articulated logic:
Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong; I cannot. If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata -- of creatures that worked like machines -- would hardly be worth creating.
Mere Christianity is full of memorable and powerful revelations that elucidate the foundations of Christian theology, our relationship to God, and the meaning of life. Only C.S. Lewis could summarize such broad concepts so eloquently without coming across as overly-religious or preachy. His extraordinary ability to focus on the core tenets of Christianity and explain them with remarkable ease reinforces the wide appeal of his writings.
Regarding man's relationship with and need for God:
God designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on. There is no other. That is why it is just not good asking God to make us happy in our own way without bothering about religion. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
Regarding true happiness and freedom:
The happiness which God designs for His higher creatures is the happiness of being freely, voluntarily united to Him and each other in an ecstasy of love and delight compared with which the most rapturous love between a man and a woman on this earth is mere milk and water. And for that they must be free.
On pursuing truth and finding comfort in our lives:
In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth -- only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.
Love is another complex subject that is described and ultimately differentiated from the more ephemeral emotion of "being in love." Countless marriages have been destroyed because people often mistake the latter for the former and go on trying to recapture that feeling without truly understanding what God intended. Many erroneously believe that ceasing to be "in love" means ceasing to love. They forget that Christ commanded us to love. Why would He need to do that if love was simply a feeling? Lewis eloquently explains:
Love as distinct from "being in love" is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both parents ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be "in love" with someone else.... It is only on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.
Finally, the idea of Christian morality is presented in its proper perspective. Rather than a "kind of bargain" that many believe God makes with mortals in which He rewards those who follow the rules, Lewis depicts salvation as a journey driven by our decisions. Each choice we make turns the central part of us, that "part that chooses," into something "a little different from what it was before."
Embracing life's "innumerable choices" allows us to turn ourselves into "heavenly" creatures that are "in harmony with God and the other creatures," or "hellish" creatures "in a state of war and hatred with God," with "other creatures," and with ourselves. "Each of us at each moment is progressing to the one state of the other," Lewis writes. It is up to individuals to decide how to live, but one thing is certain: there are no neutral acts in God's universe.
In a world that is often hostile to religion, particularly the Christian faith, Mere Christianity stands as a testament to truth, love, faith, and the value of human life; its enduring and inspiring message shines like a beacon, guiding and helping all those who have eyes to see and ears to listen.
Chris Banescu is an attorney, university professor, and public speaker. He also manages the conservative site www.OrthodoxNet.com, writes articles, and has given talks and conducted seminars on a variety of business, cultural, and religious topics. This review was originally published on Townhall.com.
Mere Christianity$9.56
Tony Snow: Publish the Barrett Report Now
Dec 9, 2005
http://www.townhall.com
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- "No wonder they call us the Stupid Party," said a disgusted Republican operative in Washington. "You've got to wonder what these guys were thinking."
At issue was the publication of a report by David Barrett, an independent counsel who has spent the better part of a decade looking into some of the most hair-raising allegations of presidential malfeasance in American history.
Like most independent counsels, Barrett didn't set out on such a mission. He was assigned the duty of looking into whether former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros committed tax fraud in trying to cover up payments to a former mistress.
Yet, as published reports have indicated, he soon discovered that he was onto something much bigger. He found unsettling evidence that Justice Department officials were actively interfering with the probe and even conducting surveillance of Barrett and his office. Worse, there were indications that Team Clinton was using key players at the IRS and Justice to harass, frighten and threaten people who somehow got in the former president's way.
The pattern was set early on, when the White House sicced the FBI on Billy Dale, who had served as the director of the White House Travel Office since the days of John F. Kennedy. They mounted a baseless probe of Dale's finances, while chasing after his daughter, his sister and others. Dale was guilty of holding a job coveted by presidential pal Harry Thomasson. But rather than simply firing Dale, the Clinton White House chose to destroy him.
By all accounts, the 400-page Barrett report is a bombshell, capable possibly of wiping out Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential prospects. At the very least, it would bring to public attention a scandal that would make the Valerie Plame affair vanish into comical insignificance.
Democrats know this. Using provisions in the independent-counsel statute that permit people named in a report to review the allegations against them and file rebuttals, attorneys close to the Clintons have spent the better part of five years reviewing every jot and tittle of the charges arrayed against their clients and friends.
This careful and continuous monitoring of the report explains why Sens. Byron Dorgan, Dick Durbin and John Kerry took the highly unusual step earlier this year of trying to slip into an Iraq-war spending bill an amendment to suppress every word of the Barrett report. (Every other independent counsel finding has been printed in its entirety, with the exception of small sections containing classified material.)
Alert Republicans, pushed by talk-radio listeners and bloggers, managed to short-circuit that effort, but Democrats patiently pursued their goal. They got what they wanted recently, when the House and Senate met to iron out differences in yet another appropriations bill. Democrats inserted language that would prevent public release of the 120 pages of the report listing the Clinton transgressions. They offered what may have looked like a good deal. They promised not to object to letting Barrett continue with any prosecutions already underway.
Republicans negotiators, led by Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., and Rep. Joe Knollenberg, R-Mich, took the bait. They agreed to keep the public in the dark about the important stuff in exchange for a big, fat nothing. Unbeknownst to Bond and Knollenberg, Barrett shut down his grand juries three years ago.
The move represents more than just boneheaded politics. It's grossly irresponsible. If the report contains the kind of bombshells that have been hinted at in reports published by The Wall Street Journal and National Review, among others, the public not only has a right to know, Congress has a duty to investigate.
If Barrett has found evidence that officials at Justice and the IRS served as a praetorian guard, that means some bureaucrats felt it appropriate or beneficial to ignore their duty to the public and instead to perform dirty work for the people who oversee their budgets.
Another big "if": If such behavior were covered up, the malefactors would conclude that they may do the same thing again for other presidents.
Something stinks, and the only way to get at the truth is to release the full report. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who fought a lonely battle to ensure the document's publication, is furious. So is House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc. The question is whether Republican leaders Bill Frist and Denny Hastert will step in and ensure the report's publication, or whether they'll just sigh and look the other way.
http://www.townhall.com
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- "No wonder they call us the Stupid Party," said a disgusted Republican operative in Washington. "You've got to wonder what these guys were thinking."
At issue was the publication of a report by David Barrett, an independent counsel who has spent the better part of a decade looking into some of the most hair-raising allegations of presidential malfeasance in American history.
Like most independent counsels, Barrett didn't set out on such a mission. He was assigned the duty of looking into whether former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros committed tax fraud in trying to cover up payments to a former mistress.
Yet, as published reports have indicated, he soon discovered that he was onto something much bigger. He found unsettling evidence that Justice Department officials were actively interfering with the probe and even conducting surveillance of Barrett and his office. Worse, there were indications that Team Clinton was using key players at the IRS and Justice to harass, frighten and threaten people who somehow got in the former president's way.
The pattern was set early on, when the White House sicced the FBI on Billy Dale, who had served as the director of the White House Travel Office since the days of John F. Kennedy. They mounted a baseless probe of Dale's finances, while chasing after his daughter, his sister and others. Dale was guilty of holding a job coveted by presidential pal Harry Thomasson. But rather than simply firing Dale, the Clinton White House chose to destroy him.
By all accounts, the 400-page Barrett report is a bombshell, capable possibly of wiping out Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential prospects. At the very least, it would bring to public attention a scandal that would make the Valerie Plame affair vanish into comical insignificance.
Democrats know this. Using provisions in the independent-counsel statute that permit people named in a report to review the allegations against them and file rebuttals, attorneys close to the Clintons have spent the better part of five years reviewing every jot and tittle of the charges arrayed against their clients and friends.
This careful and continuous monitoring of the report explains why Sens. Byron Dorgan, Dick Durbin and John Kerry took the highly unusual step earlier this year of trying to slip into an Iraq-war spending bill an amendment to suppress every word of the Barrett report. (Every other independent counsel finding has been printed in its entirety, with the exception of small sections containing classified material.)
Alert Republicans, pushed by talk-radio listeners and bloggers, managed to short-circuit that effort, but Democrats patiently pursued their goal. They got what they wanted recently, when the House and Senate met to iron out differences in yet another appropriations bill. Democrats inserted language that would prevent public release of the 120 pages of the report listing the Clinton transgressions. They offered what may have looked like a good deal. They promised not to object to letting Barrett continue with any prosecutions already underway.
Republicans negotiators, led by Sen. Kit Bond, R-Mo., and Rep. Joe Knollenberg, R-Mich, took the bait. They agreed to keep the public in the dark about the important stuff in exchange for a big, fat nothing. Unbeknownst to Bond and Knollenberg, Barrett shut down his grand juries three years ago.
The move represents more than just boneheaded politics. It's grossly irresponsible. If the report contains the kind of bombshells that have been hinted at in reports published by The Wall Street Journal and National Review, among others, the public not only has a right to know, Congress has a duty to investigate.
If Barrett has found evidence that officials at Justice and the IRS served as a praetorian guard, that means some bureaucrats felt it appropriate or beneficial to ignore their duty to the public and instead to perform dirty work for the people who oversee their budgets.
Another big "if": If such behavior were covered up, the malefactors would conclude that they may do the same thing again for other presidents.
Something stinks, and the only way to get at the truth is to release the full report. Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who fought a lonely battle to ensure the document's publication, is furious. So is House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wisc. The question is whether Republican leaders Bill Frist and Denny Hastert will step in and ensure the report's publication, or whether they'll just sigh and look the other way.
Friday, December 09, 2005
Frederica Mathewes-Green: Doing Lewis Justice
December 09, 2005, 8:57 a.m.
Classic
http://www.nationalreview.com
Any director who attempts to bring a beloved novel to the screen can expect his fair share of slings and arrows. Just ask Peter Jackson, the hardworking genius behind the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or any of the parade of directors who have delivered Harry Potter films. The latest to step up for a smackdown is Andrew Adamson, previously known for Shrek, as he offers his fresh and magnificent production of C. S. Lewis’s novel, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
Unlike the Potter directors, Adamson has not only junior readers to please, but armies of adults who have treasured every page in this seven-book series over the 50-plus years since it was published. (That accounts for the bulky title: The whole set is The Chronicles of Narnia, and the Wardrobe volume, published first, makes an excellent introduction.) And, unlike Jackson, Adamson has to deal with fairly explicit religious content. J. R. R. Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings, and Lewis were fellow professors at Oxford; they were close friends, and Tolkien facilitated Lewis’s conversion to Christian faith. Both men hoped to use fiction to convey profound truths, and they met regularly to share works in progress. But Tolkien felt that Lewis went too far in Narnia, and warned his friend that the allegory was laid on too thick. Evangelical Christians prize this book because it presents the Gospel squarely, and any attempt to soften those elements would bring out the gangs carrying pitchforks and torches.
Never fear. Thanks no doubt to the guiding hand of Lewis’s stepson, Douglas Gresham (himself a well-known evangelical), the script keeps the faith. Yet the message does not overpower the story (despite Tolkien’s fears), but rather hits the very target Lewis intended. It draws its emotional power from the spot inside that lifts up when we catch the refrain of that “old, old story,” in which a supernatural battle is won by glorious self-sacrifice. This is a story, Lewis would say, that God has prepared human beings to recognize when we hear it, and hid inside our hearts from our creation.
Everything that is strong and good and satisfying in this movie can be found in the book. The main characters are brilliantly realized, and skirt potential problems by wise casting. The littlest of the four children, Lucy Pevensie (Georgie Henley) is indisputably a child, with a broad face made squarer by a side part, wearing a Peter Pan collar and with a bow pinned in her hair. This is a refreshing change after excessively pretty leads in movies like A Series of Unfortunate Events and Because of Winn Dixie, young actresses who look more like beauty pageant sweethearts than real little girls.
Lucy’s sister Susan (Anna Popplewell) and brother Edmund (Skandar Keynes) are likewise believably real, and only big brother Peter (William Moseley) appears to have been plucked from a teenaged Brad Pitt lookalike file. Unfortunately, Peter also has the most unrelievedly noble role of the four children, and such a character threatens to turn bland even with much more experienced actors.
Tilda Swinton is extraordinary as the White Witch. When I made a recording of this book for my grandchildren, I gave the Witch the full Cruella DeVil treatment, going from oily to raging to haughty to manic in a single paragraph. Well, that’s one approach, and at least one young recipient preferred to listen to the recording with the lights on. But Swinton does something much more intelligent with the role. Even when most exhilarated, at the height of her powers, she is still apprehensive; she breathes with her mouth open, like an animal. She’s pale, hungry and tense. It’s an original approach, and juices up the movie.
Aslan caps all, however. I expected to be disappointed — it would seem that any visible depiction of this majestic character would inevitably reduce it. But this Aslan succeeds, and I think one secret is that the character’s eyes are somewhat hard to read. They’re the same color as his tawny mane, and sometimes hidden by it. This inscrutability preserves mystery in a character who, if he was fully comprehensible, would be too small.
But if the film just misses perfection, it’s because elements that don’t appear in the book have been imported to fit contemporary moviegoers’ expectations. For example, though the book’s battle scene takes just three swift, clean pages, in the film it is a grand set-piece, piled with all the CGI extravagance we now take for granted. There’s an invented sequence in which the children must cross a frozen river as it thaws, and ride an ice floe down the flood, but it feels contrived, not to mention pointless. Not for a moment do we believe that any of these characters are in serious danger. Tension is cranked up and cranked down again, just because that’s the way the formula goes.
Moviegoers expect tension in the dialogue, too. In the book, the children are touchingly polite and sensitive to others’ feelings. In an early passage, when a guilt-stricken Faun tries to tell Lucy that he is a wicked kidnapper, she persists in consoling and reassuring him, not realizing that she is his victim. Yet children aren’t touchingly polite any more, so these characters must bicker at each other (“Why can’t you do as you’re told!” “Mom isn’t here!”). I guess they don’t apologize either; the exchange toward the end, when Edmund asks his siblings’ forgiveness, is quietly dropped. Sarcasm is now ubiquitous, and even innocent Lucy has an occasional snarky line.
Not every new element is unwelcome, however. Book fans will be surprised by the opening, which shows London during a wartime bombing raid. We see the children and their mother huddling for shelter as a formation of planes, regular as a wallpaper pattern, cover the night sky. This supplies the backstory that Lewis’ original readers would have known too well, and explains why the children are sent to the Professor’s countryside estate. In the shelter, Edmund grips a framed photo of his soldier dad, though the glass is smashed. Later, the Faun Tumnus looks at his own father’s portrait, and mourns that he is not as good a Faun as his dad; on a next visit to Tumnus’s cave, the portrait is smashed on the floor. And, when the great battle begins, the flying griffins that hurl rocks on the enemy cover the sky in familiar formation. Visual echoes like these work well in a movie, but would seem forced in print.
The best parts of this film are those that are urgent and authentic — the tense and glittering Witch, the dear, believable child Lucy, the piercing moment of Aslan’s death. The parts that limp are those that were invented to fulfill the dreary rules about what a contemporary family blockbuster must include. Those are the moments that, a few decades from now, will seem dated and out of tune with the harmonious original. But that’s all right, because in the future there will still be fast-forward buttons on home-video systems, when your great-great grandchildren watch and re-watch this marvelous story — as they surely will.
— Frederica Mathewes-Green writes regularly for NPR's Morning Edition, Beliefnet.com, Christianity Today, and other publications. She is the author of Gender: Men, Women, Sex and Feminism, among other books.
Catherine Seipp: Narnia & Its Enemies
December 09, 2005, 8:59 a.m.
Sexist, racist, intolerant Lewis?
http://www.nationalreview.com
This weekend’s long-anticipated opening of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first film adaptation of C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series of children’s fantasy novels, has brought in the past few weeks a torrent of Narnia commentary in the media — most of it intelligent and worth reading, but also, in many instances, absolutely wrong.
For those unfamiliar with the stories, (and given the power of the Hollywood publicity machine, I wonder how many remain?), Narnia is a magical country in a parallel universe created and ruled by a Christ-like lion deity named Aslan. Various English schoolchildren find themselves transported there by magical means; the wardrobe of the first book, for instance, leads to an snowy enchanted forest, which an evil White Witch has made “always winter and never Christmas.”
The series is generally called Christian allegory, but that’s simplistic as well as somewhat misleading. Lewis, whose theological writing for adults made him one the 20th-century’s great Christian apologists, coined the word “supposal” to describe Narnia — suppose the Son of God appeared as the King of Beasts in a land of talking animals? And suppose that humans, with all their sins, entered this world? What then?
To call the stories allegory also gives no hint of why readers return to them many times (as I have over the years, even past childhood), long after the page-turning adventures hold no more surprises. Lewis was a master stylist, and his children’s series are marked by the same dryly witty prose, comic characters, and shrewd insight into the human condition that distinguish The Screwtape Letters and his other books for adults. Yet Narnia has its enemies, and now they are out in force.
Chief among them is the British fantasy writer Philip Pullman, whose popular His Dark Materials trilogy was conceived as an atheistic answer to Lewis’s vision. Pullman, as the Washington Post reminded readers Thursday, sees Narnia as “a peevish blend of racist, misogynistic and reactionary prejudice.” In the British Guardian last week, Polly Toynbee wrote that “Narnia is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America — that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right.”
Even critics generally appreciative of Lewis have come up with some strange notions. Last month, in The New York Times Magazine, Charles McGrath wrote that the Narnia stories “are not nearly as well written” as J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books or Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials. And writing in The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik declared that a lion isn’t a very Christ-like animal — Aslan really should have been a humble donkey instead.
So let’s consider these complaints:
Narnia is sexist. “Girls always come second to boys,” Alison Lurie wrote last week in the Guardian. “They have fewer adventures.” Actually, Lewis typically makes his main protagonists in each story one boy and one girl, and the girl is usually more sympathetic. The English child who discovers Narnia in the first book is a girl, the brave and virtuous Lucy, who also has the closest relationship to Aslan.
Lewis clearly favors independent, free-thinking girls over those stuck in traditionally frivolous female roles. In The Horse and His Boy, Aravis, a girl escaping a forced marriage in an autocratic land south of Narnia called Calormen, runs into an old acquaintance who seems to be something of a Maureen Dowd in miniature: “The fuss she made over choosing the dresses nearly drove Aravis mad,” Lewis writes. “She remembered now that Lasaraleen had always been like that, interested in clothes and parties and gossip. Aravis had always been more interested in bows and arrows and horses and dogs and swimming. You will guess that each thought the other silly.”
Narnia is racist. Speaking of those Calormenes, McGrath’s complaint in the New York Times that they “are oily cartoon Muslims” is typical, if not quite correct; actually, they are pre-Islamic Islamofascists who keep slaves, oppress women, and worship a Baal-like god named Tash. That they have dark complexions, which Lewis’s critics harp on more than Lewis did, really isn’t the problem. As it happens, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’s evil White Witch, interpreted by Tilda Swinton as an Aryan goddess in the movie, is “not merely pale,” as the book describes her, “but white like snow or paper or icing-sugar...proud and cold and stern.”
The Calormenes speak in a flowery, Arabian Nights-style manner worthy of Osama bin Laden, but Lewis gives them their due for that. In Calormen, he explains in The Horse and His Boy, story-telling “is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.”
Lewis is religiously intolerant. Critics are horrified that a bland, minor character named Susan doesn’t make it to heaven in The Last Battle, which depicts Narnia’s Armageddon. Susan had convinced herself that Narnia wasn’t real, and was “interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations.” Philip Pullman accuses Lewis of condemning Susan for reaching puberty, although since she was supposed to be about 21 during her nylons-and-lipstick phase, puberty would seem to be long past. The passage appears to be more about the danger of focusing only on material things — and denying the truth — than sexuality.
In any case, those upset by Susan’s exclusion from heaven in The Last Battle never mention that in its final chapter, an honorable (but Tash-worshipping) Calormene is surprised to find himself face to face with a welcoming Aslan. As Gregg Easterbrook noted in The Atlantic a few years ago, the message here is that “paradise awaits anyone of good will.” So it hardly seems fair to lump Lewis with Left Behind fans.
Aslan should have been a donkey. Adam Gopnik’s complaint in The New Yorker is interesting, but he forgets that Aslan exists in a post-Christian universe: Jesus has come and gone from earth centuries before two Victorian children travel from London to witness Aslan’s creation of Narnia in The Magician’s Nephew. So, since he’s already risen as the King of Kings, there seems no reason that his new incarnation shouldn’t be the King of Beasts.
J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman are better writers than C. S. Lewis. This is just jaw-droppingly wrong. Rowling and Pullman are writers of great accomplishment, and both the Harry Potter and His Dark Materials books are absorbing page-turners. But leaving religion entirely out of it, I can’t imagine reading anything in either series more than once. Pullman’s imagined worlds are fascinating and powerfully eerie, but his characters are flat, humorless, and generally annoying. Rowling, unlike Pullman, writes with sympathy and charm, but the Potter stories often descend into potboiler mode. Maybe in a generation or two Rowling and Pullman will prove to be as enduring as Lewis, but I doubt it. And until then, he stands head and shoulders above them.
— Catherine Seipp is a writer in California who publishes the weblog Cathy's World. She is an NRO contributor.
Paul Sperry: Sami's Guardian Angel
By Paul Sperry
FrontPageMagazine.com
December 9, 2005
"I didn't see the evidence," explained one male juror who this week voted to acquit former Florida professor Sami al-Arian on charges he conspired to help Palestinian terrorists kill Israelis and Americans.
Don't blame federal prosecutors for that. They did the best they could with the reams of circumstantial evidence they had, which was powerful enough by itself to sway even al-Arian's defense team to admit he had at least "some affiliation" with Palestinian Islamic Jihad and may have cheered news of the terror group's attacks.
But prosecutors could have had an open-and-shut case if it weren't for a reluctant FBI agent who in hindsight turned out to be al-Arian's guardian angel.
Gamal Abdel-Hafiz, a devout Muslim from Egypt who speaks fluent Arabic, refused to secretly tape-record his fellow Muslim brother al-Arian in defiance of repeated requests from FBI colleagues working the al-Arian case. And that ultimately hurt the government's chances of putting al-Arian away.
Rewind to 1998
That year, Abdel-Hafiz met a Muslim activist through a friend at the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center outside Washington, a hard-line Wahhabi mosque the agent regularly attended at the time, and the same mosque that would later give aid and comfort to some of the 9/11 hijackers.
The two men exchanged business cards. Not long afterward, Abdel-Hafiz got a call from al-Arian in Florida.
The Tampa professor and Muslim activist said he got the agent's business card from the mutual acquaintance and wanted to know if he would do him a favor and, among other things, poke around the FBI to see if it had ever opened an investigation into alleged death threats against terrorism researcher Steve Emerson. Al-Arian wanted to try to catch the pro-Israel Emerson possibly exaggerating claims he made in congressional testimony about such threats. Remarkably, Abdel-Hafiz agreed to look into the issue for al-Arian, bureau sources tell me.
Hearing of the encounter, the FBI's Tampa field office asked Abdel-Hafiz to follow up by asking al-Arian several questions related to a counterterrorism case they were building against him -- and secretly record his answers. Abdel-Hafiz agreed to speak to al-Arian by phone but said he would not record the conversation without al-Arian's knowledge. The lead Tampa agent on the case, Barry Carmody, was scandalized by his refusal, calling it "outrageous."
Then Abdel-Hafiz met, unexpectedly, with al-Arian at an American Muslim Council conference in Washington and wrote a summary of their conversation, which he had not coordinated with Tampa. The report he filed was not well received by Carmody and his team of investigators in Tampa -- or by FBI agents John Vincent and Robert Wright, whose Chicago investigation dovetailed with the al-Arian case."
After Gamal had a conversation with Sami al-Arian, he made a lot of self-serving statements for al-Arian and denigrated the FBI agent (Carmody) who was investigating the case," says Vincent, who also had a run-in with Abdel-Hafiz over his refusal to wear a wire to record another Muslim under terror investigation -- Soliman Biheiri, who is tied to al-Arian (investigators found the his phone number in Biheiri's computer address book). Abdel-Hafiz tried to explain to Vincent that a "Muslim does not record another Muslim.""So we knew there was a problem," Vincent adds. "We had suspicions about whether Gamal would write down conversations accurately."What's more, "There were also complaints that he was meeting with subjects of investigations in Washington without advising the Washington field office," he says. Abdel-Hafiz, 46, is a good friend and former college roommate of Biheiri's Washington-based ex-bookkeeper, Abbas Ebrahim, as I first revealed in my book, "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington."Agent Carmody says Abdel-Hafiz hurt the al-Arian probe by refusing to record the professor in the bureau's effort to get him to admit financing Palestianian terrorist acts. Al-Arian even bragged to Abdel-Hafiz that the Tampa office did not have a strong case against him -- thanks in large part to Abdel-Hafiz.
'Sami is a very smart man'
In an exclusive interview for my book, I asked Abdel-Hafiz why he did not record al-Arian at their private meeting. And he told me, simply, "I had no recording equipment with me." Hmm.
But then he went on to say the Tampa office of the FBI handled the case clumsily. "These people think Sami al-Arian is an idiot," he says. "But Sami al-Arian is a very smart man."Or at least smart enough to get a little help from a friend on the inside.
Abdel-Hafiz, a devout Sunni Muslim whose Egyptian father is known as a Quran memorizer, showed a pattern of pro-Islamist behavior, say agents who worked with him. Yet FBI headquarters overlooked it and even promoted him.Carmody, Vincent, and Wright all complained to headquarters about Abdel-Hafiz twice refusing on religious grounds to tape-record Muslim terrorist suspects. Despite that, he was handpicked in early 2001 by former FBI Director Louis Freeh to become the FBI's deputy legal attache at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia -- a key post in the battle against al-Qaida, which had hit American military barracks inside Saudi and a warship in neighboring Yemen.
After 9/11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers turned out to be Saudi nationals, Abdel-Hafiz was in a prime position to run down leads in the Saudi capital. Only, that didn't happen, at least not as often as headquarters had hoped. Agents back in Washington complained about his performance there, saying they were not getting answers to the hundreds of leads they were sending him in Riyadh. Abdel-Hafiz says he was one of only two people manning the office there and was further hobbled by an antiquated computer system.
But he and his boss Wilfred Rattigan, a black convert to Islam, had nonetheless found time to fly off to Mecca for the hajj, where they surrendered their FBI cell phones to Saudi nationals and were out of contact with officials back in the U.S. who were trying to ring them up about investigations into al-Qaida and 9/11. Both Rattigan and Abdel-Hafiz, who have since been reassigned within the bureau, wore traditional Muslim headgear and robes while on the job in Saudi Arabia, further outraging fellow agents.
When a senior supervisor was sent to the Riyadh office nearly a year after 9/11, she found secret documents strewn all over the office, some even wedged between cabinets. She also found a huge backlog of boxes each filled with three feet of paper containing secret, time-sensitive leads. Much of the materials, including information on Saudi airline pilots, had not been translated or reviewed.
It's anyone's guess how many terror cases were compromised in the Saudi office. But agents who worked with, or tried to work with, Abdel-Hafiz on domestic terror cases have no doubt he hurt their efforts to put away al-Arian. And if prosecutors don't retry al-Arian on any of the counts the jury deadlocked over, investigators fear they might lose momentum in a related terror-financing case in the Washington suburbs involving the so-called Safa group -- a case that is potentially bigger than the al-Arian case.
Safa case now in jeopardy?
A key conduit in the alleged Safa terror-financing network, a think tank called the International Institute of Islamic Thought, or IIIT, is headquartered in a three-story brick office building at 500 Grove Street in Herndon, Va. (this site and others raided after 9/11 can be viewed by clicking on the "Wahhabi Corridor" link posted on the companion website to my book at http://www.sperryfiles.com). Investigators traced funds from IIIT to al-Arian, who had been accused of heading the U.S. wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Taha al-Alwani, an Islamic scholar at IIIT, was an alleged unindicted co-conspirator in the al-Arian indictment. Investigators have accused al-Alwani -- who also heads one of the nation's most prestigious Islamic institutions, the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences (which has trained Muslim chaplains for the U.S. military and U.S. prison system) -- of taking steps to conceal alleged payments to Palestinian terrorists. In a letter seized by investigators, al-Alwani advised his pal al-Arian to construct a "facade" to disguise a $50,000 donation to one of al-Arian's alleged PIJ terror fronts in the U.S.Despite the government investigation, IIIT is still in business, still listed in the lobby directory on the second floor of the Herndon building.What's more, IIIT president al-Alwani once signed a copy of a fatwah declaring that violent "jihad is the only way to liberate Palestine," according to a federal affidavit for a search warrant used to raid the think tank in 2002. In a search of al-Arian's home computer, investigators back in Tampa found copies of a document called "The Manifesto of the Islamic Jihad in Palestine," which shuns any peaceful resolution to the conflict with Israel. It also calls the U.S. "the great Satan America."Another Safa group leader, Jamal Barzinji, is also directly connected to al-Arian -- and closely tied to Palestinian terror causes, according to the same affidavit."Barzinji is not only closely associated with PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] but also with Hamas," alleges senior federal agent David Kane in the affidavit, which was also used to obtain warrants to search the homes of Barzinji and his partner al-Alwani.In addition, Barzinji is a long-time associate of al-Qaida fundraiser Abdurahman Alamoudi, now serving time in federal prison. Al-Arian is also close to Alamoudi.
Some of the information gleaned from the Herndon raids aided the conviction of Alamoudi. And investigators say their investigation of Barzinji, al-Alwani and their Saudi-backed Safa group entities is still alive.
But they had hoped for a conviction of al-Arian, because it would have moved the Safa case forward. "We were hoping for a snowball effect," says a law enforcement official who originally helped the feds build the case.
Right now he says only a small share of the hard drives and other materials confiscated from the homes and offices raided more than three years ago have been fully translated. "They don't have the damn resources," explains the official, who works with the FBI and the National Counter Terrorism Center in McLean, Va. "They don't have the (Arabic) language skills or computer forensic personnel to go through it all. And yet it's a gold mine of information."
Secret plot to 'infiltrate' Washington
One of the more disturbing developments from both investigations so far is the allegation that al-Arian and al-Alwani and other Islamic activists in the Washington area may have hatched a secret plan, according to other confiscated documents, to "infiltrate the sensitive intelligence agencies"in Washington, and spy for the enemy.
Both Alamoudi and al-Arian were no strangers to the White House. During the trial, al-Arian's lawyers used his meetings with senior government officials, including Karl Rove in the White House, to defend him against charges he was involved in terrorist activities. They argued that official Washington would not have embraced a terrorist (even though they had embraced convicted terrorist Alamoudi).
But that may have been part of the plan. Al-Arian had ingratiated himself with Rove's best friend Grover Norquist, a powerful GOP operative in Washington sympathetic to Muslim causes. Norquist, whose name was invoked by al-Arian's lawyers in the trial, started an Islamic lobbying group several years ago and recently married a Palestinian Muslim activist. The Islamic group, which was founded with seed money from Alamoudi, has placed a number of questionable Muslim activists -- including the son of a Wahhabi preacher who helped Osama bin Laden's second in command raise money -- inside the Bush administration, including the White House, the Transportation Department and the Homeland Security Department, as well as other sensitive agencies.
Al-Arian, who has met privately with Norquist in his Washington offices, has said that Norquist "delivered" on his promise to get President Bush, via Rove, to agree to end the government's use of undisclosed evidence to deport suspected Middle Eastern terrorists. A paid lobbyist for Norquist's Islamic Institute -- David Hossein Safavian -- in fact lobbied the government hard on that issue, as I first reported in my book. (Safavian also shows up on Senate lobbying records as a paid agent for terrorist Alamoudi.) And before 9/11, al-Arian was scheduled to meet with Bush in person to discuss the issue. It seems plausible to some investigators now that al-Arian may have also got Norquist to deliver on the placement -- or infiltration -- operation. Even Safavian ended up inside the White House with a high-level job, before getting caught up in the Jack Abramoff corruption scandal and losing his coveted position.
And loyal Muslim brother Abdel-Hafiz all the while was inside the FBI also doing al-Arian favors -- and he is still working there as an agent with access to classified information. And believe it or not, the bureau is busy hiring more Muslim agents like him.
That's right: before Abdel-Hafiz graduated from the FBI academy in 1995, there were no other Muslim agents in the bureau. Now there are seven, and FBI Director Robert Mueller is busy recruiting more."We are recruiting Muslims as special agents," he said. "We have been very active in pushing more for Muslim Americans to consider a career with the FBI."
How comforting.
Paul Sperry, formerly Washington bureau chief of Investor's Business Daily, is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington" (Nelson Current, 2005). Email: sperry@sperryfiles.com.
(Note: The backdrop to this story is the Muslim Brotherhood, a worldwide jihadist movement that gave rise to Hamas, PIJ and al-Qaida. The more famous members of this Muslim mafia include Osama bin Laden's mentor Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But it has a large American presence, too, and its known American members include Alamoudi. Before going to the slammer, he attended 9/11-tied Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Va., which is run by several members of the Muslim Brotherhood who also run the Muslim American Society, or MAS, which is headquartered in neighboring Alexandria, Va. -- in the same office park where bin Laden's nephew ran a charitable front. Investigators believe MAS operates as the U.S. front for the Brotherhood. Dar al-Hijrah's original deed of trust was signed by Alamoudi pal Barzinji. Their associate Biheiri is also a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Biheiri's ex-bookkeeper is pals with FBI agent Abdel-Hafiz, who is from Egypt, birthplace of the Muslim Brotherhood. Abdel-Hafiz also attended Dar al-Hijrah. I will stop there.)
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
FrontPageMagazine.com
December 9, 2005
"I didn't see the evidence," explained one male juror who this week voted to acquit former Florida professor Sami al-Arian on charges he conspired to help Palestinian terrorists kill Israelis and Americans.
Don't blame federal prosecutors for that. They did the best they could with the reams of circumstantial evidence they had, which was powerful enough by itself to sway even al-Arian's defense team to admit he had at least "some affiliation" with Palestinian Islamic Jihad and may have cheered news of the terror group's attacks.
But prosecutors could have had an open-and-shut case if it weren't for a reluctant FBI agent who in hindsight turned out to be al-Arian's guardian angel.
Gamal Abdel-Hafiz, a devout Muslim from Egypt who speaks fluent Arabic, refused to secretly tape-record his fellow Muslim brother al-Arian in defiance of repeated requests from FBI colleagues working the al-Arian case. And that ultimately hurt the government's chances of putting al-Arian away.
Rewind to 1998
That year, Abdel-Hafiz met a Muslim activist through a friend at the Dar al-Hijrah Islamic Center outside Washington, a hard-line Wahhabi mosque the agent regularly attended at the time, and the same mosque that would later give aid and comfort to some of the 9/11 hijackers.
The two men exchanged business cards. Not long afterward, Abdel-Hafiz got a call from al-Arian in Florida.
The Tampa professor and Muslim activist said he got the agent's business card from the mutual acquaintance and wanted to know if he would do him a favor and, among other things, poke around the FBI to see if it had ever opened an investigation into alleged death threats against terrorism researcher Steve Emerson. Al-Arian wanted to try to catch the pro-Israel Emerson possibly exaggerating claims he made in congressional testimony about such threats. Remarkably, Abdel-Hafiz agreed to look into the issue for al-Arian, bureau sources tell me.
Hearing of the encounter, the FBI's Tampa field office asked Abdel-Hafiz to follow up by asking al-Arian several questions related to a counterterrorism case they were building against him -- and secretly record his answers. Abdel-Hafiz agreed to speak to al-Arian by phone but said he would not record the conversation without al-Arian's knowledge. The lead Tampa agent on the case, Barry Carmody, was scandalized by his refusal, calling it "outrageous."
Then Abdel-Hafiz met, unexpectedly, with al-Arian at an American Muslim Council conference in Washington and wrote a summary of their conversation, which he had not coordinated with Tampa. The report he filed was not well received by Carmody and his team of investigators in Tampa -- or by FBI agents John Vincent and Robert Wright, whose Chicago investigation dovetailed with the al-Arian case."
After Gamal had a conversation with Sami al-Arian, he made a lot of self-serving statements for al-Arian and denigrated the FBI agent (Carmody) who was investigating the case," says Vincent, who also had a run-in with Abdel-Hafiz over his refusal to wear a wire to record another Muslim under terror investigation -- Soliman Biheiri, who is tied to al-Arian (investigators found the his phone number in Biheiri's computer address book). Abdel-Hafiz tried to explain to Vincent that a "Muslim does not record another Muslim.""So we knew there was a problem," Vincent adds. "We had suspicions about whether Gamal would write down conversations accurately."What's more, "There were also complaints that he was meeting with subjects of investigations in Washington without advising the Washington field office," he says. Abdel-Hafiz, 46, is a good friend and former college roommate of Biheiri's Washington-based ex-bookkeeper, Abbas Ebrahim, as I first revealed in my book, "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington."Agent Carmody says Abdel-Hafiz hurt the al-Arian probe by refusing to record the professor in the bureau's effort to get him to admit financing Palestianian terrorist acts. Al-Arian even bragged to Abdel-Hafiz that the Tampa office did not have a strong case against him -- thanks in large part to Abdel-Hafiz.
'Sami is a very smart man'
In an exclusive interview for my book, I asked Abdel-Hafiz why he did not record al-Arian at their private meeting. And he told me, simply, "I had no recording equipment with me." Hmm.
But then he went on to say the Tampa office of the FBI handled the case clumsily. "These people think Sami al-Arian is an idiot," he says. "But Sami al-Arian is a very smart man."Or at least smart enough to get a little help from a friend on the inside.
Abdel-Hafiz, a devout Sunni Muslim whose Egyptian father is known as a Quran memorizer, showed a pattern of pro-Islamist behavior, say agents who worked with him. Yet FBI headquarters overlooked it and even promoted him.Carmody, Vincent, and Wright all complained to headquarters about Abdel-Hafiz twice refusing on religious grounds to tape-record Muslim terrorist suspects. Despite that, he was handpicked in early 2001 by former FBI Director Louis Freeh to become the FBI's deputy legal attache at the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia -- a key post in the battle against al-Qaida, which had hit American military barracks inside Saudi and a warship in neighboring Yemen.
After 9/11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers turned out to be Saudi nationals, Abdel-Hafiz was in a prime position to run down leads in the Saudi capital. Only, that didn't happen, at least not as often as headquarters had hoped. Agents back in Washington complained about his performance there, saying they were not getting answers to the hundreds of leads they were sending him in Riyadh. Abdel-Hafiz says he was one of only two people manning the office there and was further hobbled by an antiquated computer system.
But he and his boss Wilfred Rattigan, a black convert to Islam, had nonetheless found time to fly off to Mecca for the hajj, where they surrendered their FBI cell phones to Saudi nationals and were out of contact with officials back in the U.S. who were trying to ring them up about investigations into al-Qaida and 9/11. Both Rattigan and Abdel-Hafiz, who have since been reassigned within the bureau, wore traditional Muslim headgear and robes while on the job in Saudi Arabia, further outraging fellow agents.
When a senior supervisor was sent to the Riyadh office nearly a year after 9/11, she found secret documents strewn all over the office, some even wedged between cabinets. She also found a huge backlog of boxes each filled with three feet of paper containing secret, time-sensitive leads. Much of the materials, including information on Saudi airline pilots, had not been translated or reviewed.
It's anyone's guess how many terror cases were compromised in the Saudi office. But agents who worked with, or tried to work with, Abdel-Hafiz on domestic terror cases have no doubt he hurt their efforts to put away al-Arian. And if prosecutors don't retry al-Arian on any of the counts the jury deadlocked over, investigators fear they might lose momentum in a related terror-financing case in the Washington suburbs involving the so-called Safa group -- a case that is potentially bigger than the al-Arian case.
Safa case now in jeopardy?
A key conduit in the alleged Safa terror-financing network, a think tank called the International Institute of Islamic Thought, or IIIT, is headquartered in a three-story brick office building at 500 Grove Street in Herndon, Va. (this site and others raided after 9/11 can be viewed by clicking on the "Wahhabi Corridor" link posted on the companion website to my book at http://www.sperryfiles.com). Investigators traced funds from IIIT to al-Arian, who had been accused of heading the U.S. wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
Taha al-Alwani, an Islamic scholar at IIIT, was an alleged unindicted co-conspirator in the al-Arian indictment. Investigators have accused al-Alwani -- who also heads one of the nation's most prestigious Islamic institutions, the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences (which has trained Muslim chaplains for the U.S. military and U.S. prison system) -- of taking steps to conceal alleged payments to Palestinian terrorists. In a letter seized by investigators, al-Alwani advised his pal al-Arian to construct a "facade" to disguise a $50,000 donation to one of al-Arian's alleged PIJ terror fronts in the U.S.Despite the government investigation, IIIT is still in business, still listed in the lobby directory on the second floor of the Herndon building.What's more, IIIT president al-Alwani once signed a copy of a fatwah declaring that violent "jihad is the only way to liberate Palestine," according to a federal affidavit for a search warrant used to raid the think tank in 2002. In a search of al-Arian's home computer, investigators back in Tampa found copies of a document called "The Manifesto of the Islamic Jihad in Palestine," which shuns any peaceful resolution to the conflict with Israel. It also calls the U.S. "the great Satan America."Another Safa group leader, Jamal Barzinji, is also directly connected to al-Arian -- and closely tied to Palestinian terror causes, according to the same affidavit."Barzinji is not only closely associated with PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] but also with Hamas," alleges senior federal agent David Kane in the affidavit, which was also used to obtain warrants to search the homes of Barzinji and his partner al-Alwani.In addition, Barzinji is a long-time associate of al-Qaida fundraiser Abdurahman Alamoudi, now serving time in federal prison. Al-Arian is also close to Alamoudi.
Some of the information gleaned from the Herndon raids aided the conviction of Alamoudi. And investigators say their investigation of Barzinji, al-Alwani and their Saudi-backed Safa group entities is still alive.
But they had hoped for a conviction of al-Arian, because it would have moved the Safa case forward. "We were hoping for a snowball effect," says a law enforcement official who originally helped the feds build the case.
Right now he says only a small share of the hard drives and other materials confiscated from the homes and offices raided more than three years ago have been fully translated. "They don't have the damn resources," explains the official, who works with the FBI and the National Counter Terrorism Center in McLean, Va. "They don't have the (Arabic) language skills or computer forensic personnel to go through it all. And yet it's a gold mine of information."
Secret plot to 'infiltrate' Washington
One of the more disturbing developments from both investigations so far is the allegation that al-Arian and al-Alwani and other Islamic activists in the Washington area may have hatched a secret plan, according to other confiscated documents, to "infiltrate the sensitive intelligence agencies"in Washington, and spy for the enemy.
Both Alamoudi and al-Arian were no strangers to the White House. During the trial, al-Arian's lawyers used his meetings with senior government officials, including Karl Rove in the White House, to defend him against charges he was involved in terrorist activities. They argued that official Washington would not have embraced a terrorist (even though they had embraced convicted terrorist Alamoudi).
But that may have been part of the plan. Al-Arian had ingratiated himself with Rove's best friend Grover Norquist, a powerful GOP operative in Washington sympathetic to Muslim causes. Norquist, whose name was invoked by al-Arian's lawyers in the trial, started an Islamic lobbying group several years ago and recently married a Palestinian Muslim activist. The Islamic group, which was founded with seed money from Alamoudi, has placed a number of questionable Muslim activists -- including the son of a Wahhabi preacher who helped Osama bin Laden's second in command raise money -- inside the Bush administration, including the White House, the Transportation Department and the Homeland Security Department, as well as other sensitive agencies.
Al-Arian, who has met privately with Norquist in his Washington offices, has said that Norquist "delivered" on his promise to get President Bush, via Rove, to agree to end the government's use of undisclosed evidence to deport suspected Middle Eastern terrorists. A paid lobbyist for Norquist's Islamic Institute -- David Hossein Safavian -- in fact lobbied the government hard on that issue, as I first reported in my book. (Safavian also shows up on Senate lobbying records as a paid agent for terrorist Alamoudi.) And before 9/11, al-Arian was scheduled to meet with Bush in person to discuss the issue. It seems plausible to some investigators now that al-Arian may have also got Norquist to deliver on the placement -- or infiltration -- operation. Even Safavian ended up inside the White House with a high-level job, before getting caught up in the Jack Abramoff corruption scandal and losing his coveted position.
And loyal Muslim brother Abdel-Hafiz all the while was inside the FBI also doing al-Arian favors -- and he is still working there as an agent with access to classified information. And believe it or not, the bureau is busy hiring more Muslim agents like him.
That's right: before Abdel-Hafiz graduated from the FBI academy in 1995, there were no other Muslim agents in the bureau. Now there are seven, and FBI Director Robert Mueller is busy recruiting more."We are recruiting Muslims as special agents," he said. "We have been very active in pushing more for Muslim Americans to consider a career with the FBI."
How comforting.
Paul Sperry, formerly Washington bureau chief of Investor's Business Daily, is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington" (Nelson Current, 2005). Email: sperry@sperryfiles.com.
(Note: The backdrop to this story is the Muslim Brotherhood, a worldwide jihadist movement that gave rise to Hamas, PIJ and al-Qaida. The more famous members of this Muslim mafia include Osama bin Laden's mentor Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri and 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But it has a large American presence, too, and its known American members include Alamoudi. Before going to the slammer, he attended 9/11-tied Dar al-Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Va., which is run by several members of the Muslim Brotherhood who also run the Muslim American Society, or MAS, which is headquartered in neighboring Alexandria, Va. -- in the same office park where bin Laden's nephew ran a charitable front. Investigators believe MAS operates as the U.S. front for the Brotherhood. Dar al-Hijrah's original deed of trust was signed by Alamoudi pal Barzinji. Their associate Biheiri is also a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Biheiri's ex-bookkeeper is pals with FBI agent Abdel-Hafiz, who is from Egypt, birthplace of the Muslim Brotherhood. Abdel-Hafiz also attended Dar al-Hijrah. I will stop there.)
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Debbie Schlussel: Why Al-Arian Walked
Debbie Schlussel
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
December 9, 2005
My friend, Michael Eisenstadt, dedicated his life, among other things, to seeing terrorist leader Sami Al-Arian face justice.
In September, Mike, spokesman for Tampa's Jewish community, died of lung cancer. While his passing is a source of great sadness, I'm glad Mike didn't get to see Al-Arian's acquittal, Tuesday.
It was a sad day in America, but not one that was unexpected. At least by me. Everyone predicted that the jury would throw the book at the man who was a founder of terrorist group Islamic Jihad, and ran its worldwide headquarters from his University of South Florida offices.
But not me.
I followed the trial and predicted all along (here and here) that Sami Al-Arian and his three co-defendants would walk. Why? Because our Justice Department, while desperate for victories, is really not serious about the War on Terror. In fact, more important to Gonzalez and Company (and before that, Ashcroft and Company) is outreach to radical Islamic individuals and groups that support terrorists like Al-Arian and prosecution of anything they perceive as "hate crimes" against those Muslims.
One need only look at the Justice Department record of fighting terrorism in court. It's a complete failure.
It's not just this case, blown big-time by Assistant U.S. Attorney Cherie Krigsman, but a host of other high profile case that were either flat-out lost or botched beyond belief.
Take the Sami Omar Al-Hussayen. A Saudi graduate student living in Boise, Idaho, he used his computer expertise to set up websites for Islamic terrorist groups and help them recruit members and financial donors. The evidence was pretty clear. One of the sites urged followers to use planes as weapons, flying them into American buildings. And that was BEFORE 9/11. And did I mention, he was here illegally?
Yet, the Justice Department--with all resources at its disposal--managed to lose. Al-Hussayen was acquitted.
Then, there is the Detroit Al-Qaeda terror cell trial. It was the first major jury terror trial after 9/11. The four men he was trying lived in Detroit house they shared with Nabil Al-Marabh, a Bin Laden associate who was among the FBI's 25 most wanted. They had over 100 extremist jihadi tapes urging the murder of Americans, Christians, and Jews. They also took videotape of major American sites and tourist attractions with girls singing Al-Qaeda songs in the background of the tapes. They had diagrams of American and Israeli F-16 and AWACS planes and their order of take-off from the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey.
Sounds like a slam-dunk, right? Well, not exactly.
Prosecutor Richard Convertino's superiors at the Justice Department repeatedly, deliberately put obstacles in his way at every turn. His own boss, then-U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Collins, didn't want Convertino to win this case, let alone pursue it. The men had ties to Detroit's Islamic community, whom the ambitious Collins was aggressively courting, ad absurdum.
The accused terrorists received thousands of dollars in federal job training money from a major Detroit Arab welfare agency, dominated by Muslims. The "job training" consisted of commercial driving lessons and attempts to get hazardous materials hauling certificates--exactly what an Al-Qaeda operative wanting to blow things up would have on his Ramadan gift wish list. Collins could not afford to see these men convicted because it would embarrass the Islamic community and--especially--himself.
So when Convertino won terror convictions against the Detroit terror cell, Collins and the Justice Department higher-ups, like then-Assistant Attorney General James Comey and Justice Department official Barry Sabin set to get the convictions overturned. They began a witch-hunt investigation and searched Convertino's office, looking for ways to get his successful verdict against terrorists overturned. They also set out to destroy Convertino's reputation in a campaign of whispers in cooperation with the case's judge, Gerald Rosen and a fabricating Detroit News reporter.
Since then, Detroit's new U.S. Attorney, Stephen Murphy III, has made it his priority to prosecute not terrorism, but trumped up "hate crimes" against Detroit area Muslims.
Remember, this is OUR Justice Department. But it seems like someone else's. Someone who prays at an extremist mosque and wants to destroy America.
Then, there is Cherie Krigsman, the "prosecutor" in the Al-Arian trial. She could have taken a few lessons from Convertino. He had as much evidence as she did in her trial. But he knew how to trim the fat from the meat. Krigsman took over five months to put on her case--five months in which she threw in every piece of evidence no matter how weak, causing jurors' eyes to repeatedly glaze over. A Tampa TV reporter I know told me that he and other reporters were so bored, they stayed awake by betting on which juror would fall asleep next.
Clearly Krigsman was out of touch with the jury and didn't know what she was doing. She had strong evidence, including a videotape of Al-Arian at the Cleveland Mosque--at which he was proudly identified as the chief of "armed operations" for Islamic Jihad and he and the Cleveland Mosque imam, Fawaz Abu Damra, call for violent jihad and death to America, Christians, and Jews. She had evidence of money transfers, a letter to Kuwait in which Al-Arian speaks of a merger with "the brothers in HAMAS" which is almost complete, a speech in which Al-Arian calls for a river of gushing blood. Krigsman's case should have taken a month to put on, but instead she took more than five--confusing the jury with a myriad of weak evidence that ended up overwhelming the strong stuff.
Then, there is the judge. Federal Judge James S. Moody, a Clinton appointee, is the Dancing Judge Ito of terror trials. Caught up in the glamour of intense media coverage, he used the trial to showcase his bad nightclub-style comedy act, just like Judge Rosen in the Detroit terror trial.
When a female attorney objected to the inclusion of a certain male juror, he joked that he would get the attorney his phone number after the trial. When Krigsman wrapped up cross-examination on a witness, saying "And finally," Moody interrupted with, "You're teasing us, right?" Not the kind of guy you want overseeing a serious terror trial.
If anything is an argument for treating terrorists as a national security problem, instead of a legal one in the courts, this is it. But the judge, jury, and prosecutors are exemplary of America's psyche, today. We've fallen asleep again, forgotten 9/11, and don't take Islamic terrorism very seriously.
Contrast that with the brave men of yesteryear. Sixty years ago, the Nuremberg trials of Germany's most heinous war criminals began. "The were evil men, and what they did was our task to expose," American Nuremberg prosecutor Whitney Harris, now 93, remembers. "And we did get the evidence and we were able to do so." Twelve of the 21 men on trial were sentenced to death, six received tough prison terms, and only three were acquitted.
Back then, most Americans knew what we were fighting, had the resolve to do it, and we beat the Nazis. Today, we're just too busy with XBox 360 to notice--or give a damn.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Visit Debbie Schlussel's website at DebbieSchlussel.com. She can be reached at dschlussel@yahoo.com.
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
December 9, 2005
My friend, Michael Eisenstadt, dedicated his life, among other things, to seeing terrorist leader Sami Al-Arian face justice.
In September, Mike, spokesman for Tampa's Jewish community, died of lung cancer. While his passing is a source of great sadness, I'm glad Mike didn't get to see Al-Arian's acquittal, Tuesday.
It was a sad day in America, but not one that was unexpected. At least by me. Everyone predicted that the jury would throw the book at the man who was a founder of terrorist group Islamic Jihad, and ran its worldwide headquarters from his University of South Florida offices.
But not me.
I followed the trial and predicted all along (here and here) that Sami Al-Arian and his three co-defendants would walk. Why? Because our Justice Department, while desperate for victories, is really not serious about the War on Terror. In fact, more important to Gonzalez and Company (and before that, Ashcroft and Company) is outreach to radical Islamic individuals and groups that support terrorists like Al-Arian and prosecution of anything they perceive as "hate crimes" against those Muslims.
One need only look at the Justice Department record of fighting terrorism in court. It's a complete failure.
It's not just this case, blown big-time by Assistant U.S. Attorney Cherie Krigsman, but a host of other high profile case that were either flat-out lost or botched beyond belief.
Take the Sami Omar Al-Hussayen. A Saudi graduate student living in Boise, Idaho, he used his computer expertise to set up websites for Islamic terrorist groups and help them recruit members and financial donors. The evidence was pretty clear. One of the sites urged followers to use planes as weapons, flying them into American buildings. And that was BEFORE 9/11. And did I mention, he was here illegally?
Yet, the Justice Department--with all resources at its disposal--managed to lose. Al-Hussayen was acquitted.
Then, there is the Detroit Al-Qaeda terror cell trial. It was the first major jury terror trial after 9/11. The four men he was trying lived in Detroit house they shared with Nabil Al-Marabh, a Bin Laden associate who was among the FBI's 25 most wanted. They had over 100 extremist jihadi tapes urging the murder of Americans, Christians, and Jews. They also took videotape of major American sites and tourist attractions with girls singing Al-Qaeda songs in the background of the tapes. They had diagrams of American and Israeli F-16 and AWACS planes and their order of take-off from the Incirlik Air Base in Turkey.
Sounds like a slam-dunk, right? Well, not exactly.
Prosecutor Richard Convertino's superiors at the Justice Department repeatedly, deliberately put obstacles in his way at every turn. His own boss, then-U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Collins, didn't want Convertino to win this case, let alone pursue it. The men had ties to Detroit's Islamic community, whom the ambitious Collins was aggressively courting, ad absurdum.
The accused terrorists received thousands of dollars in federal job training money from a major Detroit Arab welfare agency, dominated by Muslims. The "job training" consisted of commercial driving lessons and attempts to get hazardous materials hauling certificates--exactly what an Al-Qaeda operative wanting to blow things up would have on his Ramadan gift wish list. Collins could not afford to see these men convicted because it would embarrass the Islamic community and--especially--himself.
So when Convertino won terror convictions against the Detroit terror cell, Collins and the Justice Department higher-ups, like then-Assistant Attorney General James Comey and Justice Department official Barry Sabin set to get the convictions overturned. They began a witch-hunt investigation and searched Convertino's office, looking for ways to get his successful verdict against terrorists overturned. They also set out to destroy Convertino's reputation in a campaign of whispers in cooperation with the case's judge, Gerald Rosen and a fabricating Detroit News reporter.
Since then, Detroit's new U.S. Attorney, Stephen Murphy III, has made it his priority to prosecute not terrorism, but trumped up "hate crimes" against Detroit area Muslims.
Remember, this is OUR Justice Department. But it seems like someone else's. Someone who prays at an extremist mosque and wants to destroy America.
Then, there is Cherie Krigsman, the "prosecutor" in the Al-Arian trial. She could have taken a few lessons from Convertino. He had as much evidence as she did in her trial. But he knew how to trim the fat from the meat. Krigsman took over five months to put on her case--five months in which she threw in every piece of evidence no matter how weak, causing jurors' eyes to repeatedly glaze over. A Tampa TV reporter I know told me that he and other reporters were so bored, they stayed awake by betting on which juror would fall asleep next.
Clearly Krigsman was out of touch with the jury and didn't know what she was doing. She had strong evidence, including a videotape of Al-Arian at the Cleveland Mosque--at which he was proudly identified as the chief of "armed operations" for Islamic Jihad and he and the Cleveland Mosque imam, Fawaz Abu Damra, call for violent jihad and death to America, Christians, and Jews. She had evidence of money transfers, a letter to Kuwait in which Al-Arian speaks of a merger with "the brothers in HAMAS" which is almost complete, a speech in which Al-Arian calls for a river of gushing blood. Krigsman's case should have taken a month to put on, but instead she took more than five--confusing the jury with a myriad of weak evidence that ended up overwhelming the strong stuff.
Then, there is the judge. Federal Judge James S. Moody, a Clinton appointee, is the Dancing Judge Ito of terror trials. Caught up in the glamour of intense media coverage, he used the trial to showcase his bad nightclub-style comedy act, just like Judge Rosen in the Detroit terror trial.
When a female attorney objected to the inclusion of a certain male juror, he joked that he would get the attorney his phone number after the trial. When Krigsman wrapped up cross-examination on a witness, saying "And finally," Moody interrupted with, "You're teasing us, right?" Not the kind of guy you want overseeing a serious terror trial.
If anything is an argument for treating terrorists as a national security problem, instead of a legal one in the courts, this is it. But the judge, jury, and prosecutors are exemplary of America's psyche, today. We've fallen asleep again, forgotten 9/11, and don't take Islamic terrorism very seriously.
Contrast that with the brave men of yesteryear. Sixty years ago, the Nuremberg trials of Germany's most heinous war criminals began. "The were evil men, and what they did was our task to expose," American Nuremberg prosecutor Whitney Harris, now 93, remembers. "And we did get the evidence and we were able to do so." Twelve of the 21 men on trial were sentenced to death, six received tough prison terms, and only three were acquitted.
Back then, most Americans knew what we were fighting, had the resolve to do it, and we beat the Nazis. Today, we're just too busy with XBox 360 to notice--or give a damn.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Visit Debbie Schlussel's website at DebbieSchlussel.com. She can be reached at dschlussel@yahoo.com.
Thursday, December 08, 2005
Bernie Williams: Yank of a Singular Stripe
By Mike Lupica
New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Wednesday, December 7th, 2005
It started with Bernie Williams as much as any of them, back in Joe Torre's first October, in 1996. Williams had finished off the Rangers in the first round of the playoffs, hitting home runs from both sides of the plate in the game that put the Yankees into the American League Championship Series. All he did then, against the Orioles, was hit that 11th-inning shot off Randy Myers in Game 1, tie Game 3 with an eighth-inning hit off Mike Mussina, hit a two-run shot in the first inning of Game 4.
In the series that put the Yankees back in the World Series, Bernie Williams hit .474 and was named MVP and was the best of all of them. But then he has been one of them for a long time, as much a Yankee as they have ever had.
When the Yankees last won the World Series, against the Mets in October of 2000, maybe it was fitting that the last out ended up in Williams' glove. Mike Piazza hit it and Bernie tracked it down, way out there in left center at Shea. We didn't know at the time that Williams and the Yankees would go the next five years without winning it all. Nobody would have believed such a thing possible at the time.
Nothing lasts forever. Joe DiMaggio limped away from center field at the Stadium at the age of 36, a year younger than Bernie is right now. Mickey Mantle limped away. If Williams leaves the Yankees today, he will leave in better shape than either one of them, even if he isn't close to what he used to be. It doesn't change that when you talk about all the center fielders in the history of the New York Yankees, there is DiMaggio, there is Mantle, there is Williams. It is not such a terrible way to run third.
He has played 1,945 regular-season games for the Yankees. He has played 115 more in the postseason, during which he came to the plate 443 times and had 22 home runs and 79 RBI and hit .280. Once he finally made it to October with the Yankees, in 1995, that unforgettable first-round series against the Mariners, he ended up having the equivalent of a whole season of Octobers. And in those games, he was one of the truly great Yankees, the one who came from some of the worst teams in Yankee history to play center field on Yankee teams that won four World Series in five years and once again made the Yankees the proudest name in sports.
"There is such a thing as Yankee character, and it's real," Reggie Jackson said yesterday. "If you want to trace it all the way back, you'd have to say it starts with Lou Gehrig. Character plus class. Bernie's been that kind of class, and he's been that kind of Yankee.
"There are special Yankees, and special people. Bernie's been both. He would have fit in on any great Yankee team of any era, and he would have delivered the way he always did with the money on the table. And the whole time, he never made it about him. What was good for him was good for the Yankees."
Finally Jackson said, "One of those quiet, special guys. They tell me Bobby Richardson was like that. Catfish Hunter was always like that. Bernie's been like that. It's why in my heart, I hope he's not going anywhere."
Maybe midnight tonight is a deadline for the Yankees and Williams, maybe not. If the Yanks don't offer Williams arbitration, he can't re-sign with them, even if he wants to, until May 1. Sometimes there is a wink and a nod between a team and a player, an arrangement where arbitration is offered and rejected, and the deadline is extended for another month.
Suddenly, after a Yankee career that goes back to 1991, after 2,000 games in the uniform, it has come to that for Bernie Williams.
He will come back in some form of the role Ruben Sierra has filled the last couple of years, a switch-hitter off the bench, a part-time outfielder. Or Williams will leave the Yankees for good, after the kind of good long run only a handful of great Yankees have ever had. Reggie was here for five seasons. A-Rod would have to play here until he is 40 to play as many games for the Yankees as Bernie Williams has. If Williams doesn't put on the uniform again until his first Old Timers' Day, he has played 200 more games as a Yankee than Don Mattingly did.
Williams and Jeter were a center fielder and shortstop teaming up for a decade of big October games the way DiMaggio and Scooter Rizzuto did. The only difference between them is that Jeter never lost here the way Bernie Williams did at the beginning of his career. It is one of the reasons why Yankee fans, and that means ones who didn't decide to start rooting for the Yankees in 1996, have always cheered Bernie the way they have. It was as if they all got up together.
It is why they cheered him at the Stadium the way they did this season, at the last regular-season home game, cheered him because the Yankees still weren't a lock to make the playoffs then, cheered him every chance they got thinking it might be his last game as a Yankee.
He almost left once for the Red Sox. Now he might leave for good. If he does, it means that only Jeter and Mo Rivera and Jorge Posada are left from the glory years. Those years really started in October of 1996, when the Yankees became the Yankees again and the center fielder, the best since Mantle, had 20 hits that month and was the best of all of them.
New York Daily News - http://www.nydailynews.com
Wednesday, December 7th, 2005
It started with Bernie Williams as much as any of them, back in Joe Torre's first October, in 1996. Williams had finished off the Rangers in the first round of the playoffs, hitting home runs from both sides of the plate in the game that put the Yankees into the American League Championship Series. All he did then, against the Orioles, was hit that 11th-inning shot off Randy Myers in Game 1, tie Game 3 with an eighth-inning hit off Mike Mussina, hit a two-run shot in the first inning of Game 4.
In the series that put the Yankees back in the World Series, Bernie Williams hit .474 and was named MVP and was the best of all of them. But then he has been one of them for a long time, as much a Yankee as they have ever had.
When the Yankees last won the World Series, against the Mets in October of 2000, maybe it was fitting that the last out ended up in Williams' glove. Mike Piazza hit it and Bernie tracked it down, way out there in left center at Shea. We didn't know at the time that Williams and the Yankees would go the next five years without winning it all. Nobody would have believed such a thing possible at the time.
Nothing lasts forever. Joe DiMaggio limped away from center field at the Stadium at the age of 36, a year younger than Bernie is right now. Mickey Mantle limped away. If Williams leaves the Yankees today, he will leave in better shape than either one of them, even if he isn't close to what he used to be. It doesn't change that when you talk about all the center fielders in the history of the New York Yankees, there is DiMaggio, there is Mantle, there is Williams. It is not such a terrible way to run third.
He has played 1,945 regular-season games for the Yankees. He has played 115 more in the postseason, during which he came to the plate 443 times and had 22 home runs and 79 RBI and hit .280. Once he finally made it to October with the Yankees, in 1995, that unforgettable first-round series against the Mariners, he ended up having the equivalent of a whole season of Octobers. And in those games, he was one of the truly great Yankees, the one who came from some of the worst teams in Yankee history to play center field on Yankee teams that won four World Series in five years and once again made the Yankees the proudest name in sports.
"There is such a thing as Yankee character, and it's real," Reggie Jackson said yesterday. "If you want to trace it all the way back, you'd have to say it starts with Lou Gehrig. Character plus class. Bernie's been that kind of class, and he's been that kind of Yankee.
"There are special Yankees, and special people. Bernie's been both. He would have fit in on any great Yankee team of any era, and he would have delivered the way he always did with the money on the table. And the whole time, he never made it about him. What was good for him was good for the Yankees."
Finally Jackson said, "One of those quiet, special guys. They tell me Bobby Richardson was like that. Catfish Hunter was always like that. Bernie's been like that. It's why in my heart, I hope he's not going anywhere."
Maybe midnight tonight is a deadline for the Yankees and Williams, maybe not. If the Yanks don't offer Williams arbitration, he can't re-sign with them, even if he wants to, until May 1. Sometimes there is a wink and a nod between a team and a player, an arrangement where arbitration is offered and rejected, and the deadline is extended for another month.
Suddenly, after a Yankee career that goes back to 1991, after 2,000 games in the uniform, it has come to that for Bernie Williams.
He will come back in some form of the role Ruben Sierra has filled the last couple of years, a switch-hitter off the bench, a part-time outfielder. Or Williams will leave the Yankees for good, after the kind of good long run only a handful of great Yankees have ever had. Reggie was here for five seasons. A-Rod would have to play here until he is 40 to play as many games for the Yankees as Bernie Williams has. If Williams doesn't put on the uniform again until his first Old Timers' Day, he has played 200 more games as a Yankee than Don Mattingly did.
Williams and Jeter were a center fielder and shortstop teaming up for a decade of big October games the way DiMaggio and Scooter Rizzuto did. The only difference between them is that Jeter never lost here the way Bernie Williams did at the beginning of his career. It is one of the reasons why Yankee fans, and that means ones who didn't decide to start rooting for the Yankees in 1996, have always cheered Bernie the way they have. It was as if they all got up together.
It is why they cheered him at the Stadium the way they did this season, at the last regular-season home game, cheered him because the Yankees still weren't a lock to make the playoffs then, cheered him every chance they got thinking it might be his last game as a Yankee.
He almost left once for the Red Sox. Now he might leave for good. If he does, it means that only Jeter and Mo Rivera and Jorge Posada are left from the glory years. Those years really started in October of 1996, when the Yankees became the Yankees again and the center fielder, the best since Mantle, had 20 hits that month and was the best of all of them.
Golden Years Have Been a Blast for Clemens
Dec. 8, 2005, 12:11AM
By DAVID BARRON
The Houston Chronicle
In the giddy days of January 2004, with Houston engaged in a collective pinch to assure itself that Roger Clemens really was coming home to pitch for the Astros, skeptics speculated Clemens might soil his Hall of Fame credentials by pitching again at age 41.
It was a fair question for the master of all statisticians, baseball historian Bill James, whose predictions that day would become astonishing reality in Clemens' brief but spectacular career in Houston.
"Could he damage his legacy? Sure," James wrote in an e-mail to the Chronicle. "But he could build on it as well. Suppose he goes 15-8 and helps the Astros to the World Series. Suppose he goes 19-8 and wins another Cy Young Award."
Two years later, we no longer have to suppose. In 2004, Clemens went 18-4 and won an unprecedented seventh Cy Young Award. In 2005, he went 13-8 with a league-leading 1.87 ERA as Houston advanced to its first World Series.
Getting better with age
In a two-year coda that may or may not signal the end of his baseball career, Clemens solidified his stature among the game's greats.
"He's become even more of a legend," said author, broadcaster and former Astros pitcher and manager Larry Dierker. "But you're right in saying that he could have damaged his record. A lot of guys do."
While conducting research for a book he hopes to publish next year on baseball's all-time greats, Dierker said he compiled a list of more than a dozen pitchers who over 10 good seasons had ERAs in the 2.50 to 3.00 range.
"But for their careers, a lot of them wound up over 3.00 because they kept pitching," Dierker said. "It's that way with everybody. The longer you play, the more your records are diluted.
"But Clemens was able to maintain his ERA. It actually got lower (from 3.19 when he retired from the New York Yankees after the 2003 season to 3.12 after two years in Houston).
"He benefited from pitching in the National League, but what he was able to accomplish here added to his legend rather than detracted from it."
Moving up lists
In a game where numbers are everything, Clemens certainly benefited from playing in Houston. His two All-Star appearances in an Astros uniform boosted his career total to 11.
His 31 wins in Houston improved his spot on the career list from 17th with 310 wins to ninth with 341. He moved into second place on the career strikeout list at 4,502, trailing only Nolan Ryan. He is now 10th in career starts and 19th in innings pitched.
By pitching so well into his 40s, Clemens also placed himself alongside Ryan as the best of Texas pitchers.
They ranked 1-2, in fact, in a recent ESPN documentary rating the best performances by athletes in their 40s.
"Roger is the greatest pitcher in his 40s of anyone," Peter Gammons, the longtime baseball writer for the Boston Globe who now works for ESPN, said in the documentary. "To dominate the way he's done these last two years is incomprehensible."
Added Hall of Famer Don Sutton in the same show: "Every time I watch Roger Clemens go to the mound, I keep thinking, that old dude's dealing. ... I admire his work ethic, I admire his passion for the game, and I certainly admire his performance."
But Houston benefited as well by Clemens' presence, said former Phillies first baseman John Kruk, now an analyst for ESPN.
"What he did in Houston was above and beyond the call of duty," Kruk said Wednesday. "At the All-Star Game (in 2004), he took it upon himself to entertain the world. Granted, he didn't pitch well, but he accomplished his goal. Baseball in Houston was alive and well.
"I will never take away anything that Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio did for the Astros, but Roger Clemens did more for that organization in two years than anybody."
Raised franchise a notch
Even if Clemens doesn't return — some speculated Wednesday he might re-sign with the Astros after pitching for the United States in the inaugural world baseball tournament next spring — Kruk said the Astros will continue to benefit from his presence and his performance.
"Roger Clemens didn't have to say a word to anybody on that pitching staff," Kruk said. "All they had to do was watch him. You learn from the best, and he's the best."
Though the Astros still trail the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox and the California teams as a contender for big-time free agents, "Roger Clemens made people think about the Astros," Kruk said.
"When he's gone, it will free up money (for payroll). You'd be crazy not to go there. If I were a position player, you have to look at Andy Pettitte and Roy Oswalt and Brandon Backe, and you know they'll find another pitcher. Who wouldn't want to go there?"
Worth the risk
James said two years ago that Clemens will go into the books as one of the five best pitchers in baseball history, and his performance in Houston did nothing to change that.
"That's what the game's about — taking on that risk in the effort to better yourself," James wrote in 2004.
"I've got no sympathy for the guys who want to rush to the sidelines, and I have always observed that that's not really something athletes do. It's something that people who aren't competitive think that athletes ought to do. (But) there's plenty of time to be old."
david.barron@chron.com
HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com Section: Baseball This article is: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/sports/bb/3510722.html
By DAVID BARRON
The Houston Chronicle
In the giddy days of January 2004, with Houston engaged in a collective pinch to assure itself that Roger Clemens really was coming home to pitch for the Astros, skeptics speculated Clemens might soil his Hall of Fame credentials by pitching again at age 41.
It was a fair question for the master of all statisticians, baseball historian Bill James, whose predictions that day would become astonishing reality in Clemens' brief but spectacular career in Houston.
"Could he damage his legacy? Sure," James wrote in an e-mail to the Chronicle. "But he could build on it as well. Suppose he goes 15-8 and helps the Astros to the World Series. Suppose he goes 19-8 and wins another Cy Young Award."
Two years later, we no longer have to suppose. In 2004, Clemens went 18-4 and won an unprecedented seventh Cy Young Award. In 2005, he went 13-8 with a league-leading 1.87 ERA as Houston advanced to its first World Series.
Getting better with age
In a two-year coda that may or may not signal the end of his baseball career, Clemens solidified his stature among the game's greats.
"He's become even more of a legend," said author, broadcaster and former Astros pitcher and manager Larry Dierker. "But you're right in saying that he could have damaged his record. A lot of guys do."
While conducting research for a book he hopes to publish next year on baseball's all-time greats, Dierker said he compiled a list of more than a dozen pitchers who over 10 good seasons had ERAs in the 2.50 to 3.00 range.
"But for their careers, a lot of them wound up over 3.00 because they kept pitching," Dierker said. "It's that way with everybody. The longer you play, the more your records are diluted.
"But Clemens was able to maintain his ERA. It actually got lower (from 3.19 when he retired from the New York Yankees after the 2003 season to 3.12 after two years in Houston).
"He benefited from pitching in the National League, but what he was able to accomplish here added to his legend rather than detracted from it."
Moving up lists
In a game where numbers are everything, Clemens certainly benefited from playing in Houston. His two All-Star appearances in an Astros uniform boosted his career total to 11.
His 31 wins in Houston improved his spot on the career list from 17th with 310 wins to ninth with 341. He moved into second place on the career strikeout list at 4,502, trailing only Nolan Ryan. He is now 10th in career starts and 19th in innings pitched.
By pitching so well into his 40s, Clemens also placed himself alongside Ryan as the best of Texas pitchers.
They ranked 1-2, in fact, in a recent ESPN documentary rating the best performances by athletes in their 40s.
"Roger is the greatest pitcher in his 40s of anyone," Peter Gammons, the longtime baseball writer for the Boston Globe who now works for ESPN, said in the documentary. "To dominate the way he's done these last two years is incomprehensible."
Added Hall of Famer Don Sutton in the same show: "Every time I watch Roger Clemens go to the mound, I keep thinking, that old dude's dealing. ... I admire his work ethic, I admire his passion for the game, and I certainly admire his performance."
But Houston benefited as well by Clemens' presence, said former Phillies first baseman John Kruk, now an analyst for ESPN.
"What he did in Houston was above and beyond the call of duty," Kruk said Wednesday. "At the All-Star Game (in 2004), he took it upon himself to entertain the world. Granted, he didn't pitch well, but he accomplished his goal. Baseball in Houston was alive and well.
"I will never take away anything that Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio did for the Astros, but Roger Clemens did more for that organization in two years than anybody."
Raised franchise a notch
Even if Clemens doesn't return — some speculated Wednesday he might re-sign with the Astros after pitching for the United States in the inaugural world baseball tournament next spring — Kruk said the Astros will continue to benefit from his presence and his performance.
"Roger Clemens didn't have to say a word to anybody on that pitching staff," Kruk said. "All they had to do was watch him. You learn from the best, and he's the best."
Though the Astros still trail the Yankees, Mets, Red Sox and the California teams as a contender for big-time free agents, "Roger Clemens made people think about the Astros," Kruk said.
"When he's gone, it will free up money (for payroll). You'd be crazy not to go there. If I were a position player, you have to look at Andy Pettitte and Roy Oswalt and Brandon Backe, and you know they'll find another pitcher. Who wouldn't want to go there?"
Worth the risk
James said two years ago that Clemens will go into the books as one of the five best pitchers in baseball history, and his performance in Houston did nothing to change that.
"That's what the game's about — taking on that risk in the effort to better yourself," James wrote in 2004.
"I've got no sympathy for the guys who want to rush to the sidelines, and I have always observed that that's not really something athletes do. It's something that people who aren't competitive think that athletes ought to do. (But) there's plenty of time to be old."
david.barron@chron.com
HoustonChronicle.com -- http://www.HoustonChronicle.com Section: Baseball This article is: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/sports/bb/3510722.html
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)