Rangers' Josh Hamilton adds to legacy by going where Ruth and Mantle never did

By Tim Cowlishaw
The Dallas Morning News
http://www.dallasnews.com/sports/
May 9, 2012

BALTIMORE, MD - MAY 8: Josh Hamilton #10 of the Texas Rangers hits a home run in the ninth inning during a baseball game against the Baltimore Orioles at Oriole Park at Camden Yards on May 8, 2012 in Baltimore, Maryland. Hamilton hit four home runs during the game to become the 16th player in MLB history to make the accomplishment. (Photo by Mitchell Layton/Getty Images)

Beyond Belief is the title of Josh Hamilton's book. It was written in 2008. He just keeps adding new chapters.

The Ranger slugger, who seemingly never does anything in life halfway, etched his name alongside 15 others for the absolute coolest single-game record in sports. Really is there anything better than the four home run game?

For pitchers, the perfect game actually happens slightly more often. Football has 250-yard rushing games or 500-yard passing days, but there's not a distinct number that defines those great players the way a four-homer game identifies a hitter. In basketball, there is Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game, likely never to be duplicated. The rest are just guys with a bunch of points.

"I've always wanted to get three in a game,'' Hamilton said in a postgame TV interview. "I'd never done that. To get four is a blessing from above.''

The home runs came in a 10-3 win at Baltimore, where the Rangers have scored 24 runs in two nights. To Orioles skipper Buck Showalter, it just feels like Hamilton has driven in all 24 runs.

Leave it to Josh to make certain that a four home run night -- the first ever by a Ranger -- wasn't all that he managed. Throw in the fifth-inning double, and Hamilton's 18 total bases are an American League record.

When you start breaking marks that have been kept for more than a century, that establishes that you have gone where Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, Reggie Jackson and every other AL slugger never did, you're carving out your own place in baseball history.

Hamilton, with his regular-season MVP and home run derby and postseason heroics, just keeps adding to his legacy.

There is simply no hyperbole involved when you speak of Hamilton and you talk of things "beyond belief." Tuesday night at Camden Yards provided the latest but surely not the last.

The New Snake Oil

By Mark Steyn

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner

May 7, 2012 6:06 P.M.

Chinese pills containing human flesh confiscated in S. Korea. Photo: China Daily

It’s the cure for what ails you – “powdered fetus”:

Thousands of pills filled with powdered human flesh have been discovered by customs officials in South Korea, it was revealed today.

The capsules are in demand because they are viewed as being a medicinal ‘cure-all’.

The grim trade is being run from China where corrupt medical staff are said to be tipping off medical companies when babies are aborted or delivered still-born.

The tiny corpses are then bought, stored in household refrigerators in homes of those involved in the trade before they are removed and taken to clinics where they are placed in medical drying microwaves.

The pills are 99.7 per cent “human remains,” and are said to enhance sexual performance.

The Daily Mail report contains, en passant, the statistic that 38 per cent of women of childbearing age have been sterilized. As I always say, China’s problem is that it will get old before it gets rich: You can’t have your babe and eat it.

But no doubt Thomas “Why can’t we be more like China?” Friedman will see this as further evidence of the innovative thinking you get from the People’s Republic. In the print edition of NR the other day, I reviewed Robert Kagan’s book The World America Made. One of the saddest passages is when he acknowledges that Beijing is on course to become the world’s leading economic power (perhaps as early as 2016, according to the IMF) but that, with a little bit of political liberalization, this will be no different from the Anglo-American transfer of global leadership:

Just as the British could safely cede power to a rising United States, so Americans could have an easier time ceding some power and influence across the Pacific to a rising democratic China.

Sure. Have some powdered fetus with that Kool-Aid.

Today's Tune: Justin Townes Earle - Look the Other Way

Interview: Tom Holland, author of "In the Shadow of the Sword"

Historian Tom Holland tells DAVID ROBINSON how he decided to tackle a highly contentious topic

By David Robinson
The Scotsman
http://www.scotsman.com/the-scotsman
7 April 2012

ANYONE who has ever read any of Tom Holland’s bestselling history books – Rubicon, Persian Fire, Millennium and now, Shadow of the Sword, about the eclipse of Roman and Persian power and the rise of Islam – already knows that few writers can match his ability to bring antiquity back to dramatic, vivid, pulsing life.

“It all goes back to my childhood,” he says. “I had the classic small boy’s fascination with dinosaurs – because they’re glamorous, dangerous and extinct – and essentially the appeal of the empires of antiquity is much the same. There’s a splendour and a terror about them that appealed to me – and that kind of emotional attachment is something that stays with you.”

He must have been a parent’s dream: a child fascinated by everything he learnt, avid to learn more. At 13 he asked for Barbara Tuchman’s The Distant Mirror, and that was him off into the blood-drenched 14th century. Yet in another three year’s he’s reading Catullus – not the bowdlerised stuff they’d already done for O-Level “but something that opened my eyes to how Latin wasn’t a dead language, but full of life and rudeness, real filth”. Next thing, he’s reading Cicero’s defence of Caelius, “and it opens up this world of exotic, upper-class manoeuvring, of incest, of parties, and it’s not too far removed from Heat magazine.”

Already you might have gathered two things, perhaps interconnected, about Holland: first, that he gives a breezily good quote, and secondly, that his approach to history isn’t dustily academic. When he went to Cambridge, he didn’t even study it – or classics, come to that. Instead, he read English, and in his early twenties, “mouldering in semi-unemployment in Earl’s Court” ,he might well have wondered why.

By that time, he was writing vampire books. “There was one in which I convincingly proved to my own satisfaction that Byron was a vampire, then I did one with Oscar Wilde set at the time of the Jack the Ripper murders”. The last one was a three-parter set in Egypt. I really went to town on the research, and I remember going to the library in High Street Kensington and finding this book, From Alexander to Actium, by Peter Green, about the Hellenistic Age in Egypt and their conquest by the Romans.

“It came out in the 1990s, just when the concept of globalisation was kicking in, and here was this portrait of a world that was eerily like our own – a distant mirror in fact! – and it was like a match lighting a gas flame. All my old fascination with antiquity just went Whoosh! up again. From that moment I started re-immersing myself in that world. I had a sense that antiquity was almost like a science fiction world, that it was utterly remote and yet eerily like our own. I was doing vampire books at the time and it never crossed my mind to write history – but I was finding that my real interests were welling up, and the vampire books were really historical novels, and that I was much less interested in the fiction than in the research.”

No-one noticed how much effort he’d made to get everything right about the Valley of the Kings in 1922 or the world of the 18th dynasty pharaohs – “why should they? It was just horror” – and the novel fell almost lifeless from the presses. Yet one good thing had come of it. He was now in his late twenties, and he had finally worked out what he wanted to do. From now on, he was going to write history.

For Rubicon, he went back to the fall of the Roman republic. “I’d been obsessed by it ever since I was ten and I was given a book called The Roman Army. There were these wonderful illustrations on the cover and I remember a Roman soldier with a spear embedded in his stomach – a seamless move, you see, from dinosaurs shredding each other – but while I knew readers would know all about the Romans in Britain, how could I get their interest in the engagement of a superpower republic in wars in the East? I was midway through writing it when 9/11 happened, so the argument that I was making – that ancient history could have a resonance for the modern day – struck home.”

His latest book, In the Shadow of The Sword – subtitled “the Battle for Global Empire and the End of the Ancient World” – makes that point just as clearly. But in writing about the early history of Islam he ran slap up against a massive problem – and one that is the reason this book has taken him five years to write instead of the usual two. Whereas his previous books usually had a fair range of contemporary sources, for the rise of Islam and the early Arab conquests of the Middle East, there are hardly any.

“I had read Karen Armstrong, Barnaby Rogerson and these biographies of Mohammed, and I assumed that the sources for his life and for the early conquests were pretty solid. I thought that we would have the equivalent of a Cicero or a Caesar, contemporaries writing about it that would give us at least a rough sense of the narrative. And then to discover that the first mention of Mohammad in Arabic is almost 60 years after his death and that the first datable mention of his life isn’t until 200 years after his death, and that the first mention of Mecca outside the Koran isn’t until 100 years after his death – and that it is located in Iraq – it makes you think, well, this is odd.”

This lack of historical sources isn’t seen as a problem for Muslims, to whom the Koran is the very speech of God, unedited by human hand. No text could possibly be holier. To a Muslim, the Koran offers all the explanation anyone could possibly need of how a sophisticated religion could suddenly spring up, uncontaminated by all other religions, in a desert.

Yet Holland isn’t a believer. So rather than interpret the Koran as the revealed word of God, he sees it as a sophisticated ancient text which is plugged into currents and trends reaching back for centuries. To Holland, all the monotheistic religions – Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Judaism, Islam – influence each other, even at when they start separating themselves out into codified religions.

Did he begin the book with this thesis in mind? “It was inchoately there. Having written Millennium, what struck me was how long it took the states of what became Christian Europe to get over the Roman Empire. It takes a long time for Roman Europe to become Christian medieval Europe. And I thought the same about this period. Can it really be the case that a switch gets flicked and then suddenly Persia and the Roman Near-East becomes Islamic? Civilizations don’t change like that. It must be a more gradual process.”

In the absence of contemporary sources on early Islam, Holland draws heavily on his knowledge of the empires eclipsed by its rise and of the Near East and of pre-Islamic society. The sixth century plagues that wiped out a third of the population of the Near East (but to which the nomads of the desert seemed immune), the Christian mystics in the Syrian desert, the rebellions that weakened the Persian empire, the decades-long wars waged by Constantinople, the spread of sects into Arabia – all have their part in this story.

Holland, who employed a Syriac and Arabic-speaking researcher but relied on his own Greek and Latin, emphasises that such a wide-ranging approach has its benefits. “All of the fields of study in this book are ones which take a lifetime of scholarship to really become an expert in – we’re talking Koranic scholarship, the history of early Islam, Roman, Persian and Talmudic studies. But when you look at them all together, you realise that the experts in various disciplines are hardly ever aware of what is going on in other, parallel, ones. Maybe it takes a fool to rush in where angels fear to tread …” He gives a sad laugh.

But given the paucity of contemporary sources on the rise of Islam, and also the fact that his own secular interpretation might offend Muslim sensibilities, didn’t he ever think about abandoning the project? “No. The meaning of Islamophobia is fear of Islam. The Islamophobic thing to do would be to say yes, I have looked at the construction of Christian Europe in those terms but I am not going to do the same for the construction of the Islamic Middle East.

“That, it seems to me, would be a dereliction of duty. It would be to assume that if you, as a non-Muslim, say something that would annoy a Muslim, that they are going to come and kill you. Which I don’t believe. I am putting my faith in the fact that Muslims will be realistic about this. I may be wrong.

“If you cede a whole area of history and say ‘That’s been closed off, we’re not going to look at it’ – particularly when that history is having a measurable impact on the world we live in …” He abandons the sentence with a shrug at the impossibility of the thought he has just expressed. “I think that’s what history is about, to a degree – working out where things that exist now came from and how they got here.”

• In the Shadow of the Sword by Tom Holland is published by Little, Brown, priced £25.

Book Review: In the Shadow of the Sword

A historical look at the birth of Islam

By Ed West
The Telegraph
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/edwest/
18 April 2012

If I were a theologian, my idea of Valhalla would be something like a villa in Languedoc, an endless supply of red, a smoke (I assume that won't be a problem in the afterlife) and a good history book.
Among my favourite authors is Tom Holland (pictured above), whose previous publications Rubicon, Persian Fire and Millennium have accompanied me on those increasingly rare periods of relaxation abroad.

Holland writes about antiquity with great flair and authority, capturing the sense of struggle, anxiety and desperation that often overshadowed great men and great civilisations as they battled for supremacy (and anyone who doubts Steven Pinker’s thesis that we are all getting nicer and less violent should study ancient history more closely).

Holland’s latest, In the Shadow of the Sword, takes a look at a period of antiquity, the 6th and 7th centuries, that has fallen to the very back of the western mind, largely because for our ancestors the light of civilisation had gone out (or had not yet been switched on); in the eastern Mediterranean and Near East, however, the Roman Empire continued much as normal, although now centred in Constantinople and speaking Greek. During this period the Romans battled for supremacy with the Persian Empire, occasionally fighting ferociously in Mesopotamia or Syria but more often in a state of uneasy truce.

But Holland’s latest book is interesting in a different way, for as Charles Moore noted on Monday, it delves into a seriously controversial area – the birth of Islam.

The Near East at the time was a fascinating hodge-podge of different faiths; Holland opens the narrative with the story of Yusuf As’ar Yath’ar, an Arab king who defeated the Christians in the Najran region by the Red Sea – the twist being that Yath’ar was not Muslim but Jewish, and there were communities of both living in Arabia at the time.

And sometimes the dividing line between the faiths was unclear. Further north in modern-day Iraq, where Jews had lived for a millennium and Christians for several centuries, there were Jews who still prayed to Jesus and Christians who practised Jewish rites. Iran itself was Zoroastrian, the world’s oldest major religion: although today rather tiny (Freddie Mercury is perhaps the only Zoroastrian many of us could name) it was to influence Islam heavily, as Holland points out. Another even smaller group, the Samaritans (so small in number that they’ve been forced to marry out for genetic reasons) were still a significant force at this time, before their strength was broken by two failed uprisings.

Further out in the wilds of Arabia there were all sorts of pagans, some of who worshipped cubes (which seems to have been a particular thing with Arabs at the time).

And it was out of this wilderness that came one of the world’s great religions, whose followers would in a short space of time conquer an empire from Spain to central Asia, and whose scholars would form a coherent religion that has flourished to this day.

And yet from a historical point of view the study of Islam and its founder is problematic. The oldest biographies of Mohammed, in the form we have them, date back to more than two centuries after his death, and despite the diligent work of Al-Bukhari, who is said to have collected 600,000 supposed sayings of the prophet and dismissed all but 7,225, the religion is as vulnerable to higher criticism as Judaism and Christianity.

That criticism, which began with historians such as Edward Gibbon and accelerated in 1863 when Ernest Renan published a biography of Jesus that treated his subject as a man, leading one critic to describe it as a “new crucifixion of Our Lord”, has been irreversible.

Yet while in the 18th century Muslim jurists concluded that the “gate of interpretation” was closed because all there was to learn had been learned, by the late 19th century Western scholars such as Ignác Goldziher also began to ask questions about Islam, especially about the hadiths, the collection of sayings that made up the Sunna, or Islamic law – a question that Muslim scholars had asked a thousand years before (concluding that many were fakes).

And in the past four decades Islam has come under a far more rigorous microscope. In 1950 the German professor Joseph Schacht wrote that: “We must abandon the gratuitous assumptions that there existed originally an authentic core of information going back to the time of the Prophet.”
Instead, as Holland concludes, many of the inventions of Islam already existed at the time it arose. It seems unlikely that Mecca, so biographers of Mohammed say, was a pagan city, devoid of any Jewish or Christian presence, in a great desert. This would indeed make the rise of fully-fledged monotheism there, complete with references to Abraham, Moses and Jesus, a miracle. As Holland writes:

Muslims, understandably sensitive to any hint that the Prophet might have been a plagiarist, have always tended to resent the inevitable implications of such a project; and yet, once God is discounted as an informant, it is surely not unreasonable to wonder just how it came to be that so many characters from the Bible feature in the Qur’an.

And, as with all religions, much of Islam was probably formed in the centuries after the original founder, following the Arab conquests of the Near East, and was influenced by the religions of that region. While the Koran, for example, suggests that adulterers should be whipped, the hadiths, and Muslim jurists, demand stoning, which is probably an import from Judaism. Similarly, the call to pray five times a day probably comes from Zoroastrianism.

Trying to operate a spiritual empire composed of conquerors and, now, the conquered, Muslim jurists constructed much of Islam in the 8th, 9th and 10th centuries. Holland says:

The Prophet had been made to serve as the mouthpiece for a whole host of rival, and often directly antagonistic, traditions. Many of these, far from deriving from Muhammad, were not even Arab in origin, but originated instead in the laws, the customs, or the superstitions of infidel peoples.

Stitching together a whole new legal framework for the infant empire, it had become the habit of these ingenious scholars to attribute their rulings, not to their own initiative or judgement, but rather to that ultimate in authorities: the Prophet.

It will be interesting to see if Islam continues to come under the same criticism as the other Abrahamic religions, and how believers respond. There are differences, of course: the German Biblical scholars did not have to face any physical threats, and criticism of the Bible came from within Christianity, which made it easier for Christians to take; far harder to accept criticism of one’s sacred traditions from outsiders.

Not that Muslims need feel threatened; after reading this fascinating sweep of the world of Justinian and the Shahanshah, and the desert folk who would beat both empires, it is hard to come away without a great admiration for the civilisation of early Islam. Neither, of course, is it a bad thing to learn just how much the world’s various civilisations owe to each other.

Tags: Charles Moore, In the Shadow of the Sword, Islam, Jesus, Koran, Prophet Mohammed, Roman Empire, Tom Holland
Ed West is a journalist and social commentator who specialises in politics, religion and low culture. He is @edwestonline on Twitter.

Interview: Tom Holland- In the Shadow of the Sword

Tom Holland responds to Glen Bowersock's review of "In the Shadow of the Sword"

Many scholars would now agree that the origins of the Qur'an are obscure, so why does Glen Bowersock's review of my book suggest it is reprehensible to bring this to light?

By Tom Holland
The Guardian
guardian.co.uk
Monday 7 May 2012 07.52 EDT
Article history

Is it justifiable to question what Muslim tradition has to say about the origins of Islam? Readers of Glen Bowersock's review of my book might very well conclude not. That Qur'anic studies are currently in a state of the utmost disarray is a fact he simply shrugs aside. Instead, my book is cast by him as something worse than irresponsible. In a dyspeptic final paragraph, he strongly implies that it was cooked up by "author, agent and publisher" as something truly reprehensible: an attempt to exploit Islamophobia for commercial gain.

This is a serious charge – and since it is founded on Bowersock's claim that my scholarship is shoddy and out on a limb, I hope that he will forgive me defending myself. I am accused of twisting my sources. I could, however, level much the same charge against Bowersock's criticisms of me. In a passage on the early Qur'anic manuscripts found in Sana'a, for instance, he condemns my failure to mention that various palimpsests are currently "with the publisher". But he has missed the two points that I am clearly using my brief mention of the Sana'a manuscripts to make. First – since "with the publisher" effectively equals "not yet published" – it has been impossible for any scholarly consensus as to their precise significance to emerge. Second, what research on them has so far been published points to the fact that the Qur'anic text, far from evolving over the seventh and eighth centuries, as some venturesome scholars have suggested in the past, seems to have been broadly stable throughout that period. My conclusion, in other words, could hardly be more sober. "There is not a hint of deliberate fabrication in any of the Sana'a fragments."

This, it seems to me, is as much certainty as the ferociously contested fields of Qur'anic palaeography and orthography will permit. If I did not cite a manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale dated by the French scholar François Déroche to the third quarter of the seventh century, it was not – as Bowersock charges – because I had "missed" it, but because the dating of early Qur'an manuscripts is notoriously a work in progress. Déroche himself, for instance, originally placed the origins of the Bibliothèque Nationale manuscript in the early eighth century – and there are other scholars who still do. Nor, unfortunately, does carbon dating offer any greater certainty. At a conference in 2010, the same Christian Robin cited by Bowersock in his review revealed that a preliminary carbon dating of some pages from one of the Sana'a palimpsests had given dates in the late 500s – a most awkward misfire. I hope, then, that it will be understandable why, in a book aimed at a general readership, I opted not to venture into such a quagmire.

Instead, in my attempt to explore where and how the Qur'an might have emerged, if not from God, I adopted what is currently a fashion in Qur'anic studies, by looking at it in its historical context. The challenge with adopting this approach – which in any other field of history would be wholly uncontroversial – is that Muslim accounts of its composition, all of them written long after the lifetime of Muhammad, and often in direct contradiction of the Qur'an itself, are the only accounts we possess. No wonder, then, that Fred Donner, the éminence grise of early Islamic studies, should openly have acknowledged that "we simply do not know some very basic things about the Qur'an – things so basic that the knowledge of them is usually taken for granted by scholars dealing with other texts." Attempts to explain its origins, then, cannot help but be provisional. I could hardly have been any clearer in emphasising that point. It is precisely why my chapter on Muhammad is titled "More Questions than Answers".

It is in this light that most of Bowersock's criticisms should be seen. When I suggest that "Quraysh", the name given by Muslim tradition to Muhammad's tribe, might have derived from a Syriac word, "qarisha", I am casting it as precisely that: a suggestion. Bowersock is wrong that the Syriac root verb – "QRSh" – means only to congeal or clot. Look up page 1,418 of the most recent Syriac lexicon, by Michael Sokoloff, and a definition can be found corresponding to an Arabic cognate: "to gather people". Hardly the stuff of gripping popular history, of course; and yet readers need to be reassured that my narrative, however "swashbuckling," draws on years of careful research.

Of course, even Homer nods – and Bowersock himself can sometimes nap. How he can approvingly cite the seminal study on Meccan trade by his erstwhile Princeton colleague, Patricia Crone, and simultaneously claim that "no one before has seriously doubted the conjunction of Muhammad and Mecca," I am at a loss to explain. It is precisely such a doubt that lies at the heart of Crone's book. Nor is she alone: many leading Qur'anic scholars would now admit that it remains deeply obscure where the Qur'an might originally have taken shape.

Most egregiously of all, Bowersock says that the Dutch title of the book – The Fourth Beast – "looks like" it was chosen "to profit from recent Dutch anxiety over Muslim immigrants". Au contraire – as with my previous book, so with this, Dutch and British publishers chose different titles, from a whole number suggested by me. The Fourth Beast was a phrase derived from the Biblical Book of Daniel, applied successively to the pagan Roman empire, its Christian heir, and the Arab Caliphate – making it the perfect title for a survey of all three. I invite anyone who doubts that simply to read the penultimate paragraph of my book.

Bowersock is a formidable scholar for whom I have great admiration – and his most recent work on ancient Ethiopia shows him to be as on the ball as ever. But this review, which is targetted not just at me but at an entire efflorescence in contemporary scholarship, is unworthy of him. Far from it being inappropriate to place the rise of Islam in the context of "languages and ideas floating around in the Near East", the truly inappropriate thing, I would suggest, is to veil an important trend in scholarship from the gaze of the general public, and to scold those who would seek to lift it.

Related

• 4 May 2012
  In the Shadow of the Sword by Tom Holland – review
• 30 Mar 2012
  The fall of the Roman empire and the rise of Islam
• 20 May 2011
  A Quiet Revolution by Leila Ahmed – review
• 20 Jan 2012
  Heaven on Earth: A Journey Through Shari'a Law by Sadakat Kadri – review

George Lindsey dies at 83; 'The Andy Griffith Show's' Goober Pyle

The character actor played Mayberry's genial auto mechanic, the cousin of naive gas station attendant Gomer Pyle. He also was a regular on 'Hee Haw.'

By Dennis McLellan
Los Angeles Times
http://www.latimes.com/
May 7, 2012

George Lindsey, the Southern-born character actor who played dim hayseed Goober Pyle, the genial gas station auto mechanic on "The Andy Griffith Show" and "Mayberry R.F.D.," died early Sunday morning. He was 83.

Lindsey, who later was a regular on the long-running country music comedy show "Hee Haw," died at a healthcare center in Nashville after a brief illness, said his manager and booking agent, Carrie Moore-Reed.

"George Lindsey was my friend," Andy Griffith said in a statement. "I had great respect for his talent and his human spirit."

Noting that he had his last conversation with Lindsey a few days ago, Griffith said: "I am happy to say that as we found ourselves in our 80s, we were not afraid to say, 'I love you.' That was the last thing George and I had to say to each other. 'I love you.' "

"The Andy Griffith Show," the classic 1960s situation comedy starring Griffith as the kindly sheriff of Mayberry, N.C., was in its fourth season in 1964 when Lindsey first appeared as the cousin of naive gas station attendant Gomer Pyle, played by Jim Nabors.

Lindsey's character became more prominent after Nabors left the show to star in the spin-off series "Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C." in 1964.

As Goober, Lindsey wore a brown felt beanie with turned-up scalloped edges and had a tire gauge, pens and pencils stuffed into the pocket of his work shirt and a rag hanging out of the back pocket of his high-wasted pants.

"I had a lot of trouble with that part," he said in a 2005 interview with Alabama's Montgomery Advertiser newspaper. "I'd been playing a lot of heavy character roles. I'd done them on 'Alfred Hitchcock,' and 'Twilight Zone' and some others, and at first I found myself just doing an impersonation of Jim Nabors doing Gomer. I finally said, 'Look, tell me about this guy and who he is.' "

Lindsey often recalled that Griffith told him, "Goober's the kind of guy that would go into a restaurant and say, 'This is great salt.' "

"Andy Griffith turned out to be the greatest teacher I've ever had," Lindsey, an Alabama native, told The Times in 1968. "He kept tellin' me to play myself, to let it happen to me, instead of trying to be funny."

Over the years, fans of the show often would ask Lindsey to repeat a line he said during his first appearance on the series: a scene in Sheriff Andy Taylor's office in which Gomer asks Goober to do his "take-off on Cary Grant" for Andy.

The bashful Goober quickly gives in and delivers a humorously terrible: "Judy, Judy, Judy, Judy, Judy."

"Couldn't you just swear Cary Grant was right here in this room?" an impressed Gomer says.

"Yeah, that was good, Goober," says Andy.

One of Lindsey's favorite episodes was the one in which, as a practical joke, young Ron Howard's Opie and a friend hide a miniature walkie-talkie under the collar of the stray dog Goober has adopted.

"Goober thought he had a talking dog," Lindsey said in a 1985 Associated Press interview. "It revealed Goober's childlike qualities; it made you laugh and cry."

Lindsey believed "The Andy Griffith Show," which earned Don Knotts five Emmy Awards as Deputy Barney Fife, was popular because "it was honest and simple."

"At that time, we were the best acting ensemble on TV," he said. "The scripts were terrific."

After Griffith left the high-rated CBS series in 1968, Lindsey continued to play Goober on the sequel series, "Mayberry R.F.D.," starring Ken Berry. It was canceled in 1971.

An only child in a poor family, he was born in Fairfield, Ala., on Dec. 17, 1928, and grew up in Jasper, Ala. He majored in biological science and physical education at what is now the University of North Alabama.

After graduating in 1952, he spent four years in the Air Force and another year as a history teacher and head basketball coach at Hazel Green High School in Alabama before moving to New York City, where he studied acting on the GI Bill at the American Theatre Wing.

One of his first jobs on TV was as one of the liars on the quiz panel show "To Tell the Truth." He did a stand-up comedy act to make ends meet and later played opposite Ray Bolger in the 1962 Broadway musical comedy "All American."

After landing in Hollywood that same year, Lindsey actually auditioned for the role of Gomer Pyle — and, he later said, was told he had the part — before it went to Nabors, a fellow Alabama native.

Lindsey's later credits included providing voices for characters in the Disney animated features "The Aristocats," "The Rescuers" and "Robin Hood." He also had a long run on the syndicated "Hee Haw."

"I really don't do Goober on 'Hee Haw.' I do George Lindsey," he told the Associated Press in 1982. "Maybe I don't know where George Lindsey stops and Goober begins. If you're in a series, as I was for seven and a half years, you draw on every personal experience for that character."

Although he once resented being typecast as Goober, Lindsey learned to embrace the role that brought him fame and provided the title for the 1995 book "Goober in a Nutshell," which he wrote with Ken Beck and Jim Clark.

As Lindsey said in the 1985 AP interview, "Goober is Everyman. Everyone finds something to like about ol' Goober."

Lindsey, who was divorced, is survived by his son, George Lindsey Jr.; his daughter, Camden Jo Lindsey Gardner; two grandsons; and his longtime companion, Anne Wilson.

dennis.mclellan@latimes.com

Today's Laugh Track: Andy Griffith Show- Barney & Goober

Excruciating Beginning to Trial of 9/11 Plotters

By Rick Moran
http://frontpagemag.com/
May 7, 2012

It was supposed to be a routine arraignment — a reading of the charges and entering of pleas by the defendants.

But the hearing before the military commission charged with trying the 5 major 9/11 plotters for crimes ranging from nearly 3,000 counts of murder to terrorism quickly bogged down and became a circus. A legal proceeding that was expected to last about 2 hours became a 13 hour marathon when defense attorneys used a variety of delaying tactics that bordered on the surreal at times, while the defendants ignored the presiding judge, Col. James Pohl, and refused to enter pleas as a protest against what they believe is an “unfair” system. Their pleas were deferred until a later date.

The arraignment, broadcast on closed circuit TV to 4 other military bases, was witnessed by members of the press, military officials, human rights advocates, and six family members who lost loved ones on 9/11. Some family members who spoke to the press after the arraignment were outraged at the cavalier attitude toward the hearing by the terrorists. The untried system of military commissions will no doubt slow the legal process down even more, as defense attorneys explore the limits of their client’s rights. President Obama and Congress amended the system in 2009 and gave the defendants more legal rights while denying some evidence from being presented that was obtained from the prisoners via “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Human rights groups still say the proceedings are unfair and wish the trials to take place in civilian court.

The five accused included the boastful mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; Ramzi Binalshibh, who allegedly scouted flights schools; Waleed bin Attash, who allegedly ran a terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and researched flight simulators; Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, who allegedly supplied Western clothing and credit cards, as well as acting as a conduit for money to the hijackers; and Mohammed’s nephew, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, who also helped with financing the operation. The crimes committed by the 5 are outlined in an 87-page indictment that includes charges such as “conspiracy, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, murder in violation of the law of war, destruction of property in violation of the law of war, hijacking or hazarding a vessel or aircraft, and terrorism.”

It became clear that one of the tactics of defense lawyers — both civilian and military — was to put the entire concept of military commissions on trial. In pursuit of this goal, they have filed hundreds of motions challenging every conceivable aspect of the proceedings, leading Col. Pohl to put back the start of the trial until May, 2013.

The cloak of secrecy — necessary to protect counterterrorism methods and confidential informants — is one of the major bones of contention about the commissions pointed to by human rights groups. While evidence obtained from defendants at CIA black sites has been made inadmissible by congressional reforms, some testimony from witnesses who may have been “renditioned” will be accepted. And there will be no mention of alleged mistreatment of the prisoners by their attorneys, although Col. Pohl allowed he will hear motions challenging that matter. Also, as a matter of secrecy, attorneys will not be able to discuss the government’s treatment of their clients while in custody.

Commission critics say that secrecy could still be maintained at a civilian trial — a questionable supposition given the opportunity for the terrorists and their lawyers to wreak havoc under the far more generous protections granted by the Constitution in such a trial. The outrage expressed by both Republicans and Democrats to the Obama administration’s announcement two years ago that Mohammed and his 4 co-conspirators would be tried in New York City caused the Justice Department to beat a hasty retreat and the idea of a civilian trial was dropped.

Prisoners now have access to civilian defense attorneys who specialize in complex death sentence cases — at taxpayer expense. And it was from civilians that most of the posturing and courtroom antics came from. For instance, attorneys for two of the plotters asked that the entire 87-page indictment be read word for word — a right that is granted defendants but is rarely exercised. It took 2 1/2 hours and 6 prosecutors to plow their way through the mind-numbing legalese. At one point, it was thought that all 2,976 names of the 9/11 victims would be read aloud, but prosecutors only mentioned the number of dead without objection.

But that was a small blessing. There were constant interruptions and trivial objections. Binalshibh’s attorney, James Harrington, interrupted the hearing to inform the judge, “My client would prefer to have his name pronounced Bin-al-shib-ah.” Pohl acceded to the request while Binalshibh laid a rug on the floor and began to pray. No attempt was made to stop him.

One female attorney for Mr. bin Attash, Cheryl Bormann, came dressed to the hearing in an abaya, covered head to toe with only her face showing. She suggested that females on the prosection side do likewise, “so that our clients are not forced to not look at the prosecution for fear of committing a sin under their faith,” she said.

The defendants themselves were alternately defiant and disinterested. Mr. Bin Attash had to be brought into the courtroom chained to a wheelchair because he refused to enter voluntarily. They all refused to put on headphones to listen for the simultaneous translation in Arabic, so Col. Pohl ordered the loudspeakers in the courtroom to carry the translation. This slowed the pace of the hearing down even more as the defendant’s lawyers would often speak over the Arabic translation, causing confusion and forcing the translator to repeat. The Guardian referred to the “near-farcical scenes in which the defendants prayed, read the Economist, talked among each other and ignored the judicial events around them.”

At one point during the reading of the charges, Judge Pohl asked Mr. bin Attash’s attorney Capt. Michael Schwartz, who was the attorney who demanded that the charges be read in their entirety, why he wasn’t paying attention. “You are the one who wanted it to be read,” Pohl said. “Your honor, it’s not my right. It is my client’s right,” the lawyer replied.

All of these antics angered many of the family members of 9/11 victims who were granted access to the proceedings at Guantanamo after winning a lottery. Prominent spokesperson for the families, Debra Burlingame, whose brother Charles was a pilot of the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, said, “They’re engaging in jihad in a courtroom.” An emotional statement issued by Eddie Bracken, whose sister died in the World Trade Center, echoed the thoughts of many family members:
“I came a long way to see you, eye to eye. … If you would have this in another country, it would be a different story. They would have given you your wish to meet your maker quicker than you would realize. But this is America, and you deserve a fair and just trial, according to our Constitution, not yours. That’s what separates us Americans from you and your ideology,” he said.

The hearing will continue next month as Judge Pohl will entertain the first of several hundred motions filed by attorneys for the defendants.

Image: Reuters

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Thanks, Obama, but wealth is not theft

By Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
http://www.boston.com/
http://www.jeffjacoby.com/
May 6, 2012

There is nothing new under the sun, including politicians who seek to win votes by milking the gap between rich and poor.

Today it’s Barack Obama, demanding a “Buffett rule” and decrying the harm caused when “the gap between those at the very, very top and everybody else keeps growing wider and wider and wider and wider.” Not so long ago it was John Edwards, intent on riding his “Two Americas” stump speech (“One America does the work while another America reaps the reward”) all the way to the White House. Earlier still it was FDR, lambasting the wealthy who “did not want to pay a fair share” and boasting that he’d “increased still further the taxes paid by individuals in the highest brackets” because that was “the American thing to do.”

Those who peddle class resentment can always find ready takers; otherwise politicians wouldn’t keep selling the same rug. But the demand for it is never as great as the demagogues imagine. Most Americans don’t hate the rich, or even the very rich, and they don’t despise the economic system that makes great wealth possible. “That all men are created equal” goes to the core of our national creed; its undeniable moral force led Americans to fight a horrific Civil War over slavery in the 19th century, and to embrace the legal and social upheaval of the Civil Rights movement in the 20th.

But what Americans honor is equality in the eyes of the law, political equality — not equality of income or material circumstances. The two kinds of equality are inherently in conflict, as every effort to impose egalitarianism eventually proves. “There is all the difference in the world between treating people equally and attempting to make them equal,” wrote Friedrich Hayek in 1948. The fact that some people make much more money than others has never convinced the American people that a fundamental overhaul of society is necessary or even desirable. For all the extravagant claims made last year about Occupy Wall Street’s significance, is anyone surprised that the movement has fizzled?

For months President Obama has been calling income inequality “the defining issue of our time,” but relatively few Americans agree. In a recent Gallup poll, only 2 percent of respondents identified the gap between rich and poor as their top economic concern. Even among the Democrats in Gallup’s survey, inequality didn’t show up as a major worry.

Armed with a bully pulpit and backed by a liberal media chorus, Obama may have good political reasons to keep hammering away at the wealth gap. No doubt he can mobilize some voters with his suspect claims about billionaires paying a 1 percent tax rate, or the charge that Republicans want “everybody left to fend for themselves and play by their own rules.”

But most voters understand intuitively that in a free society, unequal productivity will generate unequal wealth. Incentives and rewards are powerful motivators of work and risk-taking; and the greater the potential rewards, the more an economy will achieve. A Bill Gates or Steve Jobs or Sam Walton is far more likely to flourish in a nation where people can become millionaires and billionaires — and to enrich all of us in the process of enriching themselves.

“In a democratic, capitalist society, gaps in income are inevitable,” write Peter Wehner and Robert Beschel Jr. in the current issue of National Affairs. “Yet it is worth noting that democratic capitalism has done far more to create wealth, advance human flourishing, and lift people out of destitution than any other economic and political system. . . A policy agenda that has as its top priority the elimination of income gaps. . . not only encourages resentment but also threatens the American economy — because a narrow focus on closing gaps tends to go along with reduced overall growth.”

There is no fixed limit to the wealth a society can produce, and today’s “1 percent” produce an amazing amount of it. But their wealth takes nothing away from the other 99 percent. We are all free to rise as high as talent, education, and hard work will take us. Wealth is not theft. Productivity is not zero-sum. If economic disparity is a problem, then the way to solve it is by raising those who are stuck near the bottom, not tearing down those who have climbed to the top.

Today's Tune: John Coltrane - Central Park West

What Does 'Composite Girl' Tell Us About Obama?

By Jack Cashill
http://www.americanthinker.com/
May 6, 2012

Barack Obama and former girlfriend Genevieve Cook

Within hours after Dylan Byers of Politico created a mini-firestorm on Wednesday with the article titled "Obama: 'New York girlfriend' was composite," David Graham of the Atlantic had all but smothered the flames with his article, "Obama's Composite Girlfriend: How Politico and Drudge Created Fake News."

Graham argued that since Obama owned up to using composite characters in the forward of the book in question, his 1995 memoir, Dreams from My Father, there was nothing shady about the practice. Not surprisingly, Graham overlooked the real problem. So did Byers. So did veteran Washington Post reporter David Maraniss, whose forthcoming book, Obama: The Story,ignited the controversy when it was excerpted in Vanity Fair. No, the real problem with Dreams is the inexcusable dishonesty throughout the book. The promiscuous use of composites is merely a symptom of the larger problem.

In the Vanity Fair excerpt, Maraniss profiles two former Obama girlfriends, heretofore unknown to Obama fans. One of them, the Australian Genevieve Cook, seems to have provided most of the grist for Obama's white "mystery woman," the only girlfriend mentioned in Dreams -- and she only briefly.

"Like many characters in the memoir," says Maraniss of Cook, "[Obama] introduced her to advance a theme, another thread of thought in his musings about race." What Maraniss does not say, and may not know, is that most, if not all, of the dramatic racial moments in the book are fully manufactured.

With the help of his muse and co-author, Bill Ayers, Obama wove a series of racial grievances into the narrative to toughen up Obama's life story. These stories aren't "compressed," as Obama claims. They are contrived. In his own memoir, Fugitive Days, Ayers likewise shows a casual disdain for facts. "Is this then the truth?" he asks. "Not exactly. Although it feels entirely honest to me." When lesser memoirists do the same -- James Frey of A Million Little Pieces fame comes quickly to mind -- they get trashed on national TV by Oprah.

In the case of composite girl, for instance, Obama tells of how their relationship came to a bitter end over her failure to understand black angst. "We had a big fight, right in front of the theater, writes Obama. "When we got back to the car she started crying. She couldn't be black, she said." Cook denies that this ever happened.

As Obama later explained to Maraniss, "I thought that [the anecdote] was a useful theme to make about sort of the interactions that I had in the relationships with white girlfriends." Frey felt much the same way. "A memoir literally means my story. A memoir is a subjective retelling of events," he protested, adding, "I never expected the book to come under the type of scrutiny that it has." When Obama used the theater story in Dreams, he never expected this kind of scrutiny, either. At the time, no one beyond his neighborhood knew who Obama was. Nor did Obama expect scrutiny when he shared in Dreams the following racial life lessons, all of which have since been proven false (For a fuller accounting, see Friday's WND):

• As a nine year-old, he saw in Life magazine a story about a black man turned grotesquely white in a desperate chemical effort to lighten his appearance. Life never ran such an article. When challenged, Obama claimed that it was Ebony. Ebony ran no such article, either.
• In his first days at his Hawaiian prep school, Obama shamefully rejects "Coretta," the only other black student, lest he be tainted by her blackness. Obama biographer David Remnick found the girl. She had no such memory. "He was my knight in shining armor," she gushed. In his book, A Kind and Just Parent, Ayers tells much the same story. He talks of a useful reading assignment about the travails of Clint, one of two black students in an otherwise all-white school, who rudely tries to distance himself from Marvin, the other black boy. Like Obama, Clint feels guilty on reflection.
• After Columbia, Obama worked for what he describes in Dreams as "a consulting house to multinational corporations." He observes, "As far as I could tell I was the only black man in the company." In full grievance mode, he considers his unique status "a source of shame." A former coworker (and fan) revealed Obama's account to be a "serious exaggeration." It was not a multinational corporation, but a "small company that published newsletters." Obama was not the only black. He did not, as claimed, have his own office, wear a jacket and tie, interview international businessmen, or write articles.
• In Dreams, "Frank," the real-life Communist Frank Marshall Davis, slams college education. "Understand something, boy," he tells the college-bound Obama. You're not going to college to get educated. You're going there to get trained." Adds Frank, "They'll train you so good, you'll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way and all that shit." Davis would never say this. In his memoir, Livin the Blues, he tells of the richly rewarding years he spent at Kansas State University: its "beautiful" campus, its "usually agreeable" students, its "excellent" journalism department. Later, he would see open-minded white college students as the hope for America's racial future. His college poetry-reading tours on the mainland in 1973 and 1974 were huge successes. It was Ayers who had the grudge against orthodox education. "Education is for self-activating explorers of life, for those who would challenge fate, for doers and activists, for citizens," he writes in his 1993 book To Teach. "Training," on the other hand, "is for slaves, for loyal subjects, for tractable employees, for willing consumers, for obedient soldiers." Sound familiar?
• In Dreams, the composite character "Asante Moran" tells Obama, "The public school system is not about educating black children. Never has been. Inner-city schools are about social control. Period." Social control -- no surprise here -- is an Ayers obsession. "The message to Black people was that at any moment and for any reason whatsoever your life or the lives of your loved ones could be randomly snuffed out," he writes in Fugitive Days. "The intention was social control through random intimidation and unpredictable violence."
• To shore up the black base in a book calculated to get Obama elected mayor of Chicago, Obama suggests that the mystery white woman was the only white woman he dated. "There are several black ladies out there who've broken my heart just as good," Obama tells his half-sister Auma. This has yet to be proven false, but I doubt if even Maraniss will turn up any of these ladies.

Although I believe Maraniss wrote the Obama book in good faith, too much of what he learned from these two women in question is too convenient. The events they "remember" fill holes in the Obama narrative much too neatly. Maraniss has been misled by useful memories of old Obama friends before. In fact, on the eve of the election in 2008, he misinterpreted one such memory so completely it may have saved Obama's campaign -- but more on this later. Given Obama's elusiveness, Maraniss should have been more on guard here. He should have asked out loud why he was allowed to "find" sources no one else, including Obama's most prominent biographer, David Remnick, had.

When celebrity biographer Christopher Andersen went looking for the mystery woman post-election, he came up with nothing. "No one," he writes in Barack and Michelle: Portrait of an American Marriage, "including his roommate and closest friend at the time, Siddiqi, knew of this mysterious lover's existence." Siddiqi apparently regained his memory. Maraniss writes, "If Barack and Genevieve were in social occasions as a couple, it was almost always with the Pakistanis. ... Sohale Siddiqi was part of the crowd."

Here is what I wrote about this narrative hole in my book Deconstructing Obama: "Given Remnick's list of the allowable ways to interpret Dreams -- verifiable fact, recollection, recreation, invention, and artful shaping -- I choose 'D' for the mystery woman, 'invention.' In the absence of any contrary information, best evidence argues for a creation largely of Ayers' contrivance."

Ayers' great lost love, Diana Oughton, a Weatherwoman killed in a 1970 bomb blast, matches the brief description of this woman in Dreams even better than Cook does, right down to the "specks of green" in her eyes and a multi-generational estate with a lake in the middle. "The house was very old, her grandfather's house," Obama writes of his girlfriend's country home. "He had inherited it from his grandfather." In real life, Oughton's father's grandfather built the main house on their estate, a 20-room Victorian mansion, which is now on the national historic register.

Maraniss makes a point to establish that Cook and Obama visit a family house in the country in the fall. He concedes that it is not her father's house, but her stepfather's, and that Cook has "flecks of brown, not green, in her hazel eyes," but otherwise Cook does seem to fill the bill. In its inimitably oily way, Media Matters noticed. The discovery of Cook, the reader is told, undermines "one of the main pieces of 'evidence'" in my book. Media Matters headlined its article, "The Obama Ex-Girlfriend Conspiracy Inevitably Falls Apart." My suspicion is that Team Obama green-lit the Cook story expecting the Media Matters spin to prevail, not Politico's. The White House could not have been pleased with the results. All the e-mails I received were congratulatory.

It should be noted too that Cook, an avid diarist, does not produce any diary entries to corroborate the trip to the country. At least, Maraniss does not share any. Nor is there a diary entry to back Cook's least credible recollection. In his memoir, Obama relates a preposterously detailed dream about his father that sets him on his quest to find his roots. "Genevieve recalled the morning he awoke from that dream," writes Maraniss of a day thirty years prior. "He woke up from that dream and started talking about it," Cook tells Maraniss. "I think he was haunted." This memory is much too useful. It validates the legitimacy of Obama's quest and gives him full ownership of the book's thesis.

Maraniss writes for the kind of audience that reads Vanity Fair. Most of them are barely aware that serious questions have been raised about Obama's identity, his origins, and the authorship of his two books. Maraniss makes no effort to enlighten them. Unwittingly or otherwise, he immunizes his audience against the charges that will continue to bubble up as we approach November.

Alex McNear, the second and lesser mystery girl, helps shore up the "Obama as writer" myth that got him get elected in 2008. McNear apparently knew Obama at Occidental College and reconnected with him when she spent the summer of 1982 in New York. Like Cook, she conveniently kept a "lasting record" of her relationship with Obama, McNear's in the form of 30-year-old letters. One of these letters from Obama, Maraniss reproduces at length. Here are some excerpts:

Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he [T. S. Eliot] accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality.

Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.

... but you're pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.

Graham of the Atlantic dismisses Obama's youthful take on writer T.S. Eliot as "awful, pretentious gibberish," and he is not far off the mark. But the letter leaves a different first impression on casual readers, as evidenced by this e-mail from a foreign correspondent supportive of my research:

Jack,

reading Obama's letters quoted in the Vanity Fair article
I wonder whether his share in the writing of Dreams
was not bigger than you (and I) thought.

I still think that the structure of the book points to Ayers
as the main "plotter" and that he is responsible for ideas
like having composite characters. He must have edited
Obama's ramblings and improved on them.

At first glance, I felt the same way this fellow did, and then I noticed a major red flag: the letter is entirely free of the problems with punctuation, noun-verb agreement, and participle use that dog Obama to this day. From Maraniss's account, Obama's would seem to have written the letter in his senior year at Columbia, the same year he wrote the one fully documented writing sample from that era, his 1,800-word article for the Columbia Sundial, "Breaking the War Mentality." Let me cite just a couple of quick samples from this article with commentary:

The belief that moribund institutions, rather than individuals are at the root of the problem, keep SAM's energies alive.

This is one of an incredible five sentences in the piece in which the noun and verb do not agree. This should read, "The belief ... keeps SAM's energies alive." The random use of commas throws everything off. Plus, the word choice sucks all logic out of the sentence. The reader is told that these institutions are "moribund" -- that is, "nearly dead." How their debilitated state keeps the "energies" of the Students Against Militarism (SAM) "alive" is not exactly clear.

Regarding Columbia's possible compliance, one comment in particular hit upon an important point with the Solomon bill.

The subject of "hit upon," not an apt verb to begin with, should have been a person, not a "comment." Obama did not understand participle use.

What members of ARA and SAM try to do is infuse what they have learned about the current situation, bring the words of that formidable roster on the face of Butler Library, names like Thoreau, Jefferson, and Whitman, to bear on the twisted logic of which we are today a part.

I went back and reread the hard copy on this sentence to make sure it had not been deformed when digitized. This, alas, reads as weirdly as written. "Infuse" is the wrong word. One infuses something "into" something else. There should be an "and" after "situation," not a comma. Obama utterly mangles the "bring to bear" phase." It should read something like "bring the words of those formidable men on the face of the Butler Library -- Thoreau, Jefferson, Whitman -- to bear." As to how or whether we are part of a "twisted logic," I will leave that to the reader's imagination.

These same grammatical problems surface in Obama's awkward 1988 article "Why Organize" and in a published letter on affirmative action he later wrote while a student at Harvard Law. They continue to show up in his spoken words today. The letter that Maraniss reproduces, by contrast, is exquisitely punctuated and free of all such errors. The author of the letter even uses his or her participles correctly.

Given the questions around Obama's writing skills and the fact that Team Obama has been credibly accused of forging a birth certificate, Maraniss owes his reader some proof of this letter's legitimacy. He should tell us whether he saw a hard copy of the letter, whether it was typed or hand-written, and why it reads so much better than Obama's published work of the same period.

Maraniss has been down this road before. In a lengthy biographical piece on Obama for the Washington Post in August 2008, Maraniss mistakenly shored up the myth of a happy little Obama family, the myth on which Obama built his candidacy. Maraniss did so by relying on the testimony of Susan Botkin, a childhood friend of Obama's mother, Ann Dunham. In the process, he made an amateurish botch of the timeline of Obama's early years.

As Maraniss acknowledges, Obama Sr. left Hawaii for the mainland and ultimately Harvard in June 1962. Maraniss implies that the family had been living together since Obama's birth in August 1961. Based on Botkin's testimony, Maraniss contends that Dunham stopped by Seattle in the fall of 1962 on her way to visit her presumed husband at Harvard. Botkin reportedly tells Maraniss, "[She said] he had transferred to grad school and she was going to join him." Maraniss adds, "But as Botkin and others later remembered it, something happened in Cambridge, and Stanley Ann returned to Seattle. They saw her a few more times, and they thought she even tried to enroll in classes at the University of Washington, before she packed up and returned to Hawaii."

Other earlier interviews with Botkin, one of which was posted online, yield a much clearer picture. In these, Ann had come to visit "briefly" with Barry at Botkin's family home. Botkin placed the time as "a late August afternoon" in 1961 "when Barry was just a few weeks old," and she claimed to have changed Barry's diaper.

In April 2008, Botkin told the Seattle Times that Ann was excited about her husband's plans to return not to Harvard, but to Kenya. Botkin said the same thing to writer Michael Patrick Leahy, who interviewed her early in the summer of 2008. Here, too, Botkin adds a clarifying detail: "[Dunham] left [Hawaii] just as soon she had clearance from her doctor to travel with her new baby."
As Botkin acknowledged in several interviews, she never saw her friend again. The visit at Botkin's mother's house had to be in 1961, a year before Barack Sr. left for Harvard. Dunham arrived in Seattle in August 1961 and stayed for a year, enrolling at the University of Washington. Obama would not see Obama Sr. until he was ten.

What Maraniss needs to do is explain whether he was misled by Botkin or whether he willfully misinterpreted what she told him. He also should reveal whether he actually saw the letters that Dunham allegedly sent Botkin detailing her romance with Obama Sr., the only such proof of the same. If Maraniss can correct the record on Obama's origins and tell us a little more about those heart-breaking "black ladies out there," I may even buy the book.

Compulsory Blindness

The Obama administration is enforcing a false orthodoxy.

By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/#

May 5, 2012

Mohammed Mahdi Akef. former Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood

A few years back, I wrote a book called “Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad.” It was about being on the “front lines,” so to speak, of the battle against Muslim terrorism. I put “front lines” in quotes because, though the terrorists saw themselves as fighting a doctrinally ordained war of armed combat, we were treating them as mere criminals — such that our idea of a battlefield was the federal courthouse, and our idea of a commander was, well . . . me.

Misapprehending the dimension of the challenge — that it was war, not crime — was only one part of the story. The real willful blindness was government’s failure to examine the nature of the challenge. This, of course, involves the question of why things happen. To duck that question was reckless. A failure to understand the terrorists’ rationale made it impossible to grasp how pervasive the security problem was, how likely it was that additional mass-murder plots were in the offing, what kinds of targets were vulnerable, and what should be done to try to prevent attacks.

Still, things were better 20 years ago. If the book were to be written about today’s counterterrorism approach, I’d have to call it Compulsory Blindness: A Surrender to Violent Extremism.

See, however wayward our approach in the Nineties may have been, it was still possible to tell the truth, to fashion an accurate depiction of the phenomenon. To be sure, in the Clinton years, there was plenty of feel-good “Religion of Peace” drivel coming out of the White House, the State Department, and Main Justice. But back then, willful blindness was the familiar, tacit kind of conscious avoidance: Officials who should have known better passively avoided learning basic, uncomfortable facts. For the most part, though, they did not affirmatively obstruct those who were more industrious.

No one, for example, stopped me from eliciting sworn testimony from FBI agents and other experts that the concept of “jihad” stemmed from classical Islamic doctrine, and that its original meaning involved armed combat against unbelievers in order to fulfill the divine injunction to spread Islam.
Regardless of what the politicians were saying in Washington, no one tried to stop us, in our New York courtroom, from proving that the terrorists had been animated by a supremacist ideology that was firmly rooted in Islamic scripture. No one prevented me from pointing out to the jury that the Blind Sheikh (Omar Abdel Rahman), whose various physical maladies rendered him unable to carry out terrorist acts, was nevertheless empowered to command the terrorist organization, solely because of his mastery of Islamic jurisprudence.

I marched into the courtroom every day for nine months and proved that there was an undeniable nexus between Islamic doctrine and terrorism committed by Muslims. The Blind Sheikh, the jury was allowed to learn, was not a fringe lunatic; he was a globally renowned scholar of sharia whose influence over a spate of international jihadist organizations was based on his doctorate from al-Azhar University, the world’s most influential center of Islamic thought. And when I demonstrated the straight-line, undeniable logic of the evidence — that scripture informed the Blind Sheikh’s directives; that those directives informed his terrorist subordinates; and that those subordinates then committed atrocities — the government gave me the Justice Department’s highest award.

Today, I’d be ostracized. No longer is the government content to be willfully blind. Today, it is defiantly, coercively, extortionately blind.

“Islamic outreach” started out in the post-9/11 Bush years as a well-intentioned but wrongheaded way to connect with Muslim communities: convince them to share information about jihadist elements while persuading them that America’s quarrel was with terrorists, not Islam per se. It was a wayward idea, but not fatally so. After all, outreach was just a sideline — something the FBI, the intelligence community, and the military did in addition to, and in the service of, their more conventional methods of gathering information and evidence in order to thwart a threat.

In contrast, Islamic outreach is the ne plus ultra of Obama counterterrorism. Today, conventional methods of intelligence collection — along with the basic premise that you need to understand what you are looking for — are foresworn if they are deemed to interfere with Islamic outreach in any way. Counterterrorism is not national security anymore; it is pseudo-psychology. The key to making us safer is making Muslims feel good about themselves, the theory holds. This will nullify resentment, and resentment, not ideology, is the cause of Islamic aggression — except we wouldn’t want to call it Islamic aggression because Muslims would resent that. So we must suppress all references to Islam (Islamist, “political Islam,” “Islamic supremacism,” jihad, etc.). And we must violate the first rule of good intelligence that nothing is beyond scrutiny: It is to be taken as a given that Islam is not the problem but a key part of the solution.

There are many farcical things about Islamic outreach, but the worst is that it miniaturizes the threat of Islamic supremacism. Contrary to popular wisdom, violent jihadists do not kill wantonly. It is a grave error to confuse tactical barbarism with mental dysfunction. They kill for the same reason that non-violent Muslim supremacists champion sharia, Islam’s legal system and societal framework. The rational, coherent goal of both the violent and the non-violent is to Islamize the society by imposing Allah’s law.

Islamized society is antithetical to the Western notion of free society — it rejects liberty and equality. Therefore, the threat to us is not merely violence, or “violent extremism” (the euphemism in vogue for “jihadist terror”). Violence is just the immediate part of the threat. The overall threat is that our liberty will be eroded as sharia mores take root. Sharia is extremism, and it imperils us whether or not it is implemented violently.

Moreover, the animating supremacist doctrine is the same for everyone who hears it, even if only some are moved to violence. All who accept the doctrine have the same ultimate goal; they differ only in their methods of achieving it.

By and large, the government’s outreach “partners” are leaders of Islamic organizations, many of which are affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood and al-Qaeda accept the same doctrine of Islamic supremacism. They have tactical disagreements about how to carry out the duty to spread sharia, but they are in harmony on the point that spreading it is a duty. That is why in 2008, for example, the Brotherhood’s then–Supreme Guide, Mohammed Mahdi Akef, rejected the suggestion that Osama bin Laden was a “terrorist.” He countered that bin Laden was a “mujahed” (an honorific applied to “a warrior in Allah’s cause”). Akef added that, in his “sincerity in resisting the occupation,” bin Laden was “close to Allah on high.”

If, under the guise of Islamic outreach, the government gives these Islamic-organization leaders a veto over what our agents can learn about Islam, it is giving a veto to people who believe what bin Laden believed. Even if they disagree with bin Laden’s methods, they are not going to help us discredit the ideology that causes terrorism. They are going to tell us to ignore that ideology while they go merrily on promoting it. And that it won’t incite terrorism in everyone does not mean it won’t incite terrorism in anyone.

The Obama administration has gone all in with these Islamic leaders. It is not only willfully blind to the threat, a la Clinton and Bush. Obama has made blindness compulsory. Under his direction, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and even the military are taking muscular steps to bleach training materials of any information that these Muslim leaders might find offensive, meaning: anything that explains Islamic supremacism and demonstrates the unmistakable causal relationship between Islamic scripture and Islamic terror. Disappearing along with the materials are the instructors who lecture about them. The idea is not just to airbrush Islam but to intimidate — with the specter of taint and lost employment — anyone who would dare challenge Obama orthodoxy.

The president is purging information on which, not so long ago, juries relied to convict jihadists. Notwithstanding all its willful blindness, the government used to pass out sparkling awards to the officials who stitched that information together. Now, in the era of compulsory blindness, the government stamps “Islamophobe” on your head and hands you your walking papers.

— Andrew C. McCarthy is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

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