A foreign dictator’s media operation, right in your living room. 

By Clifford D. May

http://www.nationalreview.com/

August 28, 2013

Joie Chen, host of the new Al Jazeera America nightly news program 'America Tonight,' sits at the anchor desk in the network's studio space at the Newseum in Washington, D.C. Al Jazeera America will have 12 bureaus in major cities in the US, three broadcast centers, a headquarters in New York City, and some 900 journalists and staff. (AFP/Getty Images)

Al Jazeera America launched last week. The new television station features such broadcast luminaries as Soledad O’Brien, Joie Chen, Sheila MacVicar, John Seigenthaler, David Shuster, and Ali Velshi.

Paul Beban, a regional correspondent, told the Denver Post’s Joanne Ostrow that he “defuses suspicions about Al Jazeera America with ‘a little bit of humor and friendliness.’” For example, when asked whether he is required to wear a burqa, Beban replies: “You know what? They were out of 42 long.”

Such drollery notwithstanding, “Some of the viewing public is more than a little wary of the latest entry in the field,” Ostrow notes. Why do you suppose that might that be?

Perhaps start with the fact that Al Jazeera America, like its well-established Arabic-language sister station, Al Jazeera, is owned, lavishly funded, and operated by “the royal family of Qatar,” the politest way of describing the petroleum-rich emirate’s dynastic dictators — who also happen to be funders of Hamas, a U.S. government-designated terrorist group, and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani had been the tiny nation’s ruling emir for only a year when he founded Al Jazeera in 1996. The network quickly became — in the words of Walter Russell Mead, the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College — Qatar’s “press poodle.”  

Shibley Telhami, the Anwar Sadat Professor for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, observed: “Even as Qatar emerged as a key ally of the United States, Al Jazeera gave voice to Osama bin Laden.”

MacArthur Fellowship–winning professor Fouad Ajami came to the same conclusion in an appraisal of Al Jazeera for the New York Times. The network, Ajami wrote, “is not subtle television.” Among the examples he cited: a documentary that presented Che Guevara as a “romantic, doomed hero.” The point, he said, was to evoke a similar view of Osama bin Laden, “the Islamic rebel.”

For years, Al Jazeera has featured Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, star of the hit show Sharia and Life. Qaradawi has praised Imad Mughniyah, the terrorist mastermind behind the 1983 suicide bombings in Beirut, in which 241 U.S. Marines were killed.

A few years back, he issued a fatwa saying that the “abduction and killing of Americans in Iraq is a [religious] obligation.” Qaradawi favors the “spread of Islam until it conquers the entire world and includes both the East and West [marking] the beginning of the return of the Islamic Caliphate.” He has extolled Hitler, saying the Führer “managed to put [Jews] in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hands of the believers [Muslims].”

In June, Sheikh Hamad abdicated, turning power over to his son, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani. The new emir, 33 years old and British educated, may be quite different from his 61-year-old father — but it’s too soon to know. 

What we do know: Qaradawi has not been given his walking papers. Last month, 22 Al Jazeera staffers in Egypt resigned over their employers’ “biased” pro-Brotherhood coverage. And earlier this month, a former Brotherhood official was given time on Al Jazeera to claim that Egypt’s current strongman, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, is Jewish, and that the crisis in Egypt is a Zionist plot based on the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The interviewer did not challenge those claims.

Al Jazeera America’s reporters, producers, and publicists will protest that their operation is completely separate from that of Al Jazeera Arabic. You decide: The two Al Jazeeras have the same owners (formally the Al Jazeera Media Network) who also provide the funding. Imagine an American corporation that exploited workers in some third-world country telling reporters: “But that division is completely separate from the division in the U.S.!” (Actually, you don’t have to imagine — but more on that in a moment.)

I’m not suggesting Al Jazeera America will be an echo of Al Jazeera Arabic. I am suggesting that, like its sister station, AJAM — as it’s affectionately called – will have a mission, drive specific messages, and observe certain prohibitions.

Soledad, Joie, Sheila, John, David, Ali: I’m sure you’ve heard the persistent rumors that Qatar is financing al-Qaeda groups in Syria. What would your employers say if you proposed to investigate? And how about the treatment of foreign workers in Qatar? Are you not curious to learn if reporting on that situation would be considered out of bounds?

I suspect Al Jazeera America will be subtle television. Christopher Harper, a longtime print and broadcast journalist, now a professor at Temple University, spent many long hours watching AJAM’s first week of broadcasts — which were widely advertised in other media, e.g.: “Support for NPR comes from Al Jazeera America.” He found the coverage had “an anti-American undercurrent.”

For example, there was a story on the force-feeding of hunger strikers at a California prison (to make a point about the hunger strike taking place at Guantanamo?), and one about “Bangladeshi workers in allegedly substandard conditions making pants for Old Navy, which again allegedly ended up in the United States” (an example of Muslims being oppressed with Americans to blame). And, yet, if Old Navy’s executives in the U.S. had said: “But our Bangladeshi division is completely separate from our division in the U.S.!” would AJAM’s reporters have bought it?

Also noteworthy: AJAM’s first guest was Stephen Walt, the Harvard professor who, in the words of The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, “makes his living scapegoating Jews.” What he said on this occasion — that the situation in Egypt is “a triumph of stupidity” — struck me as unobjectionable, but I expect he will be a frequent AJAM talking head on a range of topics.

AJAM was available last week in about 48 million households via Comcast, Verizon, FiOS, DirecTV, and Dish Network. We customers don’t get to decide which networks we receive (a situation I wish Congress would address). But AJAM’s executives also don’t want providers to decide. So last week, their attorneys filed a lawsuit to compel AT&T to carry the network, in order to “enforce Al Jazeera America’s rights.”

A media operation owned by a foreign dictator now has the “right” to be in your living room? What an innovative new form of “lawfare” — the use of American laws and courts to restrict Americans’ freedoms.

In recent years, the number of lawsuits and threats of lawsuits directed at journalists, researchers, and publications has been increasing, chilling inquiry into a range of questions pertaining to some of the most powerful figures in the Middle East. This trend has received little coverage.

Soledad, Joie, Sheila, John, David, Ali: You’ve all done serious reporting in the past. Wouldn’t now be the time to find out whether your employers see you as real journalists free to go where the stories take you — or just instruments of Qatari foreign policy?

— Clifford D. May is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on national security.

The Rise of Rafael Cruz

Senator Ted Cruz’s father is a conservative force. 

By Robert Costa

http://www.nationalreview.com

August 28, 2013

Ted Cruz with his daughter, Caroline, and father, Rafael. (Credit: AP/David J. Phillip)

The political partnership between Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and his father, Rafael, is a rising force in conservative politics. To most observers, it seems like part of a familial game plan that has been in the works for years.

But according to Senator Cruz, it actually began quite recently with a phone call. “My dad poured himself into my Senate race last year,” he recalls. “In the early months, we didn’t have much of a campaign. One day, I couldn’t make an event, so he drove out to West Texas alone — no staffers, nothing — and he spoke on my behalf. A few hours later, I called and asked how it went. He said, ‘Even surrogates for the other candidates were asking for Cruz yard signs.’”

Ever since, Cruz has kept his father, a 74-year-old pastor, involved with his political shop, using him not merely as a confidant and stand-in, but as a special envoy. He is Cruz’s preferred introductory speaker, his best messenger with evangelicals, and his favorite on-air sidekick — a presence who softens his edge. This past Sunday, the pair sat for a joint CNN interview, one full of aw-shucks asides.

This summer, father and son have also been traveling together throughout the country, speaking to conservatives in Iowa and elsewhere. Their roadshow has enthralled many on the right and startled Cruz’s potential 2016 rivals. No one else in the emerging GOP field has an ally like the charismatic elder Cruz.

There Rafael Cruz was in Des Moines, Iowa, last month, speaking to ministers at the Marriott hotel and collecting business cards in the lobby; a month later, he was in Ames, Iowa, pacing the stage at a conservative summit and drawing cheers for his broadsides against President Obama. His fiery speech at a FreedomWorks event in July drew heavy praise from talk radio.

Rush Limbaugh especially loved how Rafael Cruz compared the president’s “hope and change” message to Fidel Castro’s appeal decades ago. “This guy is knocking it out of the park!” Limbaugh exclaimed.

Conservative leaders agree. Bob Vander Plaats, a top Iowa conservative who hosted the Cruz duo last month, calls Rafael Cruz’s speeches “inspiring” and says the image of a father and son laboring together resonates with values voters. Former senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, who now runs the Heritage Foundation, is another admirer. He has worked alongside Rafael Cruz this month to rally against Obamacare.

“Rafael actually called me and volunteered to contribute to Heritage’s ‘defund Obamacare’ tour, and it has been amazing to be with him,” DeMint says. “He opens with a prayer, which gets as much applause as anything else, and then he gives a call to action, talking about how his freedom was taken away in Cuba and how important it is that we never lose our freedom here.”

As part of that tour, Rafael Cruz attended his son’s town-hall meetings in Texas last week, where he called out the Republican establishment for not backing a fall standoff over Obamacare’s funding. “There is a great disconnect between promises and action,” he told a Dallas crowd, not far from his home in Carrollton. “If there’s one thing I’m proud of about my son, it’s that he’s doing exactly what he told each and every one of you that he’d do.”

Attendees there went wild for him, loving his punchy, often politically incorrect rhetoric. They leapt to their feet as he closed his remarks and a soaring rock track began to play. A minute later, Senator Cruz emerged from backstage and strolled toward the dais with his arms open. Father and son embraced as fists pumped. Another episode of Cruz-apalooza had begun.

Beyond his oratory, though, it’s Rafael Cruz’s sway in his son’s inner circle that makes him a power broker. His son trusts his father’s political instincts, and instead of hiring a big-name Republican strategist to shepherd his ascent, he uses his father for the kind of guidance you’d expect from a consultant.

Rafael Cruz has already taken five trips to Washington, D.C., this year, usually spending a week each time. He stays at his son’s apartment, and while his son is on Capitol Hill, he hosts meetings and catches up with Cruz-friendly activists and donors. In the evenings, he and his son talk politics deep into the night.

When the Senate is out of session and they hit the road, Rafael Cruz arrives at events in advance of his son’s team, informally scouting the room and huddling with organizers. He relishes the game — warming up local Republicans, shaking hands, and regaling them with stories about his son. Later on, he’ll call the busy freshman senator and give him a preview of the scene.

Sources close to Cruz say those who run Cruz’s operation, both in his Senate office and on the political side, have learned to work with Rafael, and that for many of them, their boss’s father has become a mentor. They also appreciate his tact: He’s clearly the insider of insiders within Cruz’s camp, but he doesn’t overdo it, leaving the mechanics of Cruz, Inc., to aides such as his campaign adviser Jason Johnson, or his chief of staff, Chip Roy.

Rafael Cruz does not take his arrival in the heart of the conservative movement’s upper echelon for granted. He may project confidence and verve when he’s in front of a tea-party audience, but, he tells me, he wept when his son took his oath, and every day he says a prayer of thanks that he and his son can work together at the national level.

Whereas his son’s biography is a straightforward narrative of a child prodigy turned senator — Princeton, Harvard Law, Supreme Court clerk, and Texas solicitor general — Rafael Cruz’s life has been far more complicated.

Born in Matanzas, Cuba, he grew up in the Cuban middle class in the 1950s, as the son of an RCA salesman and an elementary-school teacher. As a teenager, he grew to detest the regime of Fulgencio Batista. He and some of his schoolmates frequently clashed with Batista’s officials. Eventually, he linked up with Castro’s guerrilla groups and supported their attempts to overthrow Batista.

It’s a decision he still regrets. His move toward Castro, he explains, was mostly due to his anger with Batista’s government, which at one point imprisoned him and tortured him for his work with the revolutionaries. He says he never shared Castro’s Communism, but, at the time, it was the best way to fight Batista’s oppression. By age 18, in 1957, he knew he needed to get out, and a friend essentially bribed an official to secure him an exit permit.

Soon after, with his parents still in Cuba — they wouldn’t come to the U.S. until 1966 — Rafael Cruz arrived in Austin, Texas, where he began to study mathematics and chemical engineering at the University of Texas. He had little more than $100 to his name, and he could barely speak English. But, by working seven days a week, he was able to graduate in 1961.

In the early 1960s, Rafael Cruz was also beginning to start a family. He married and had two daughters, and he started to work in the energy industry. But the marriage ended after only a few years, and Cruz found himself at a difficult crossroads in his late twenties. (One of his daughters is now a physician in Texas; the other is deceased.)

Cruz decided to move to New Orleans to take a new job, which is where he met his second wife, Eleanor Darragh, a computer programmer from Delaware, who was also working for an oil company. They married, moved to Calgary, Alberta, and in late 1970 had their first and only child, Rafael Edward Cruz.

They weren’t in Canada long, choosing to move to Houston, where they continued to work for oil companies. He became a Canadian citizen while working there, he says, but it never felt like home. Back in Texas, he became a permanent legal resident, and it wasn’t until 2005 that he formally became a U.S. citizen. “Oh, I know I should have done it sooner,” he says. “I love this country so much, but you cannot change the past.”

It was also back in Texas, in 1975, when his life changed. After attending a Bible-study meeting with a colleague, he became a born-again Christian, leaving his days as a non-practicing Roman Catholic behind.

“The people at the Bible study had a peace that I could not understand, this peace in the midst of trouble,” Cruz says. “I knew I needed to find that peace by finding Jesus Christ.” His son and wife followed him, becoming born-again Christians as well. Around the dinner table, the talk was almost always about the Bible or the latest happenings in the Reagan administration.

His faith, he says, also saved him from becoming bitter and depressed when the oil industry sagged in the mid 1980s and his professional life hit a low point. “There was a big crash and many of my clients went bankrupt,” he says. “It got so bad that I had to close my business. I became a salesman here and there, and I started to build a ministry, as a sort of traveling preacher.”

As Rafael developed his own extemporaneous speaking style, he shared his methods with his son, who was a star student by middle school. But instead of pushing him toward preaching, Rafael wanted Ted to have a minister’s confidence and cadence as a debater. He repeatedly quizzed Ted on the Constitution until he memorized it, and critiqued his enunciation.

Cruz’s mother, Rafael chuckles, played more of a good-cop role. Though they are now divorced, he says his son has a similarly close relationship with her, just without the political element. “I live outside Dallas, but she lives in the same high-rise condo complex as him in Houston,” he says. “She loves taking the elevator to see her granddaughters, and he appreciates that.”

“As for our relationship, I coached him, yes, but it was a close relationship in all respects,” Cruz says. “We used to go sailing together on vacations, and we’d talk and talk. After he was at Princeton, he was on the debate team, and I’d go every time I could when he was winning all of these debates. I did the same thing when he argued before the Supreme Court.”

The dynamic of their relationship hasn’t changed much; it has adapted. Back in January, soon after his son was sworn in, Rafael followed Ted as he made the cable-news rounds in Washington, D.C. At the time, few of the producers working for CNBC or Fox News even knew who he was, other than an older gentleman with wisps of snow-white hair, standing in the back near the cameras.

One chilly January night, moments before an interview at a cramped studio on North Capitol Street, a technician asked Rafael Cruz to step away from the cables. Most guests of guests, he reminded him, stay in the green room. Senator Cruz, standing under the bright lights nearby, heard the exchange and said, “That’s my father.” The technician nodded, and Rafael Cruz, as ever, stood firm in the shadows, watching.

— Robert Costa is National Review’s Washington editor.

Today's Tune: Sam Cooke - A Change is Gonna Come

A Better Way to Honor Dr. King's Dream

The goal of the civil-rights movement was opportunity—not a 'post-racial' society.

By John McWhorter

http://online.wsj.com

August 27, 2013

On the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington, we will hear a good deal about how life in this country for black Americans has not changed as much as Martin Luther King Jr. might have wished. We will hear little to nothing about the role that certain strains of black progressive ideology have played in delaying the realization of King's dream.

"It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment and to underestimate the determination of the Negro," King announced from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963. He was right, and America knew it. The following year, segregation was outlawed with the Civil Rights Act. The year after, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.

It is easy to forget what an awesome moral landmark it was for an oppressed group to force the larger society to outlaw barriers to its success. But the victory of the 1964 and 1965 laws had an even greater impact than prohibiting segregation and racial discrimination in voter registration: It changed the culture. Personal racist sentiment rapidly became socially proscribed. The Norman Lear sitcoms of the early 1970s, in which bigoted whites were regularly held up to ridicule, would have been unthinkable just 10 years before.

But "the struggle," as civil-rights veterans term the fight against racial discrimination, was hardly over. Practices and attitudes change slowly. As a black man, I can attest that as late as 1986 I was transparently denied a summer job at a restaurant in New Jersey simply because of my skin color.

Enlarge Image

© Flip Schulke/CORBIS

Heading for the Lincoln Memorial, Aug. 28, 1963.

However, in the decades since the March on Washington, black America has been taken on a detour by too many self-described progressive black thinkers and leaders, whose quixotic psycho-social experiment they disguise as a continuation of the civil-rights movement. With segregation illegal and public racism considered a moral outrage, we black Americans are now told that we will not truly overcome until Americans don't even harbor private racist sentiment, until race plays not even a subtle role in America's social fabric.

In other words, our current battle is no longer against segregation or bigotry but "racism" of the kind that can be revealed only by psychological experiments and statistical studies.

This battle is as futile as seeking a world without germs. "We have come to the nation's capital to cash a check," King said. But the preacher was talking about being freed from "the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination"—not asking whether Americans are aware of skin color or are more likely to associate black faces with negative words in an experiment.

Along these lines, the term "institutional racism," which the Black Power movement injected into the lexicon in the late 1960s, is more damaging to the black psyche than the n-word or any crude jokes about plantations or food stamps. The term encourages blacks to think of society—in which inequality, while real, is complex and faceless—as actively and reprehensibly racist in the same way that Archie Bunker was. The result is visceral bitterness toward something that can't feel or think.

Equally distracting is the notion that America needs a "conversation" about race, one in which whites submit to a lesson from blacks about so-called institutional racism. "Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening," King told us in his speech. What we awaken to now is the rudeness of idle talk, of those who blow off steam by demanding a "conversation" that will not bear fruit—look no further than President Clinton's national effort on that front in the late 1990s—and in any case wouldn't provide greater opportunity to any poor person.

The "conversation" idea is fundamentally passive because it assumes that what black people need most is for white people to think better of them and more about them. So why does it command such allegiance among blacks? Because it channels the idea that our most urgent task is to speak truth to power, rather than to help black people who need it. Too many suppose that the two tasks are still the same as they were in 1963, when the reality is now quite different.

The "conversation" illusion is also why black America is more disturbed by whites killing blacks than by blacks killing blacks. Commentators who claim that black leaders ignore black-on-black crime miss the fact that black communities have long organized Stop the Violence forums to get citizens involved in stopping crime in their neighborhoods. Yet many black people are indeed angrier at one George Zimmerman for killing Trayvon Martin than at the thousands of black boys who murder one another year after year. This is because we have been taught that our main task is uncovering racism rather than concretely addressing the things that make life hardest for the most blacks.

Today's struggle should focus on three priorities. First, the war on drugs, a policy that unnecessarily tears apart black families and neighborhoods. Second, community colleges and vocational education, which are invaluable in helping black Americans get ahead. And third, the AIDS and obesity epidemics, which are ravaging black communities.

The only reason why ideas like "institutional racism" and "a conversation about race" seem more compelling is because they are more morally dramatic. Drama is not what will make a difference in black lives.

"We will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream," King said. But if justice is an America without racism of any kind, then we will never be satisfied.

Too many blacks seem to have internalized just that: The essence of contemporary blackness in America is eternal indignation. Notice, for example, the fire-breathing hostility that against-the-grain black writers attract from other blacks. As I know from personal experience, these writers are accused of tempting whites into some kind of antiblack backlash.

Instead, in recent years, the black middle class has flourished. Housing segregation for blacks is the lowest it has been since the 1920s. And a black president has been elected twice. Yet the fury persists, since what actually rankles these critics is the threat to what they feel is their very identity: underdogs with a bone to pick.

This is not where the March on Washington was pointing us. There is work left, but we are free at last. No, we aren't living in a "post-racial" America, but that fantasy will never be realized. What we black Americans are free to do, in a permanently imperfect world, is shape our own destiny together.

In 2013, how white people feel about us has nothing to do with that task. Only by facing that reality will we truly honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.

Mr. McWhorter teaches linguistics and American Studies at Columbia University. He is a contributing editor at the New Republic and columnist for Time magazine.

Today's Tune: Curtis Mayfield - People Get Ready

Songs of the Summer of 1963 . . . and 2013

Rap songs celebrating tattooed thugs make a sad contrast with the sweet music of the March on Washington.

By 
• JUAN WILLIAMS

 http://online.wsj.com

 August 26, 2013

Fifty years after the March on Washington, mystical memories of that seminal moment in the civil-rights era are less likely to focus on movement politics than on the great poetry and great music.

The emotional uplift of the monumental march is a universe of time away from today's degrading rap music—filled with the n-word, bitches and "hoes"—that confuses and depresses race relations in America now.

The poetry of Aug. 28, 1963, is best on view when Martin Luther King Jr. went off his speech script and started using a musical, chanting reprise—"I have a dream." The transforming insight born of the power of the interracial gathering at that time of turmoil, combined with the power of the spoken word, created an emotional message that still grips the American mind.

"I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood," King said, in verse that somehow spanned a history of slavery and the Founding Fathers' uniquely American promise of equality.

"I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but the content of their character. I have a dream today!"

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Getty Images

The March on Washington, Aug. 28, 1963

That poetry rose above the reality that as King spoke the civil-rights movement was stalled. Few schools had integrated after the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Educationdecision nine years earlier. One hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil Rights Act was stuck in Congress. NAACP leader Medgar Evers had been killed in June. After a violent April in Alabama, in which protest marchers were beaten and set upon by police dogs, an estimated 15,000 more civil-rights activists had been arrested at protests across the country that summer.

King sailed past all those sad realities to invoke his soaring vision of the nation at racial peace. When he finished speaking, the crowd spontaneously broke into singing "We Shall Overcome," holding hands and swaying as if in communal prayer.

That sense of unity, promise and purpose was also evident in the music of the march. It's music that still stirs emotions to this day.

Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind," written in 1962, hit No. 2 on the Billboard charts just before the crowd gathered in Washington. When the folk-music trio Peter, Paul and Mary sang the song for the 250,000 people in front of the Lincoln Memorial that day, it became an interracial anthem for change. The song itself drew inspiration from two others: The lyrics brought to mind Woody Guthrie's "Bound for Glory," which included an allegory about newspapers blowing down city streets, and its melody came from a slave protest song called "No More Auction Block."

And so they sang in Washington: "Yes, how many years can some people exist before they're allowed to be free? Yes, how many times can a man turn his head, pretending that he just doesn't see? The answer my friend is blowin' in the wind, the answer is blowin' in the wind."

Sam Cooke, the black gospel and rhythm-and-blues singer began performing the Dylan song immediately after the march. He had been working on a song about the hurt he felt as a black man living with racism yet also with hope for better times. In December 1963, Cooke recorded "A Change Is Gonna Come." The song became a hit on black radio, another anthem of yearning for a nation without racial rancor.

"I go to the movie and I go downtown, somebody keep telling me don't hang around," Cooke wrote. "It's been a long time coming but I know a change is gonna come, oh yes it will."

The next year, in 1964, Curtis Mayfield—also openly inspired by the music of the march—wrote an even more hopeful song: "People Get Ready." It, too, picked up on a frequent image of American folklore, the train of salvation.

Just as Woody Guthrie and Johnny Cash had sung "This Train's Bound for Glory," Mayfield, a black Chicago singer steeped in church gospel music and the blues, sang about faith in the American struggle for racial justice.

"People get ready, there's a train a comin'; you don't need no baggage you just get on board . . . there ain't no room for the hopeless sinner who would hurt all mankind just to save his own. Have pity on those whose chances grow thinner. For there's no hiding place against the Kingdom's throne."

The uplifting lyrics made "People Get Ready" one of the earliest hits on both black and white radio. Bob Marley later used some of the words in his poignant song "One Love." Bruce Springsteen used the song as a healing anthem at concerts after the 9/11 terror attacks.

The songs by Dylan, Cooke and Mayfield have been ranked 14th, 12th and 24th on Rolling Stone magazine's list of greatest songs of all time. All three have roots in the March on Washington.

Now, half a century after the lyrical promise of that inspiring music and poetry, there is the inescapable and heartbreaking contrast with the malignant, self-aggrandizing rap songs that define today's most popular music.

In Jay-Z's current hit, "Holy Grail," he sings about "psycho bitches" and uses the n-word seven times while bragging that he is "Living the life . . . Illest [n-word] alive." Another top rapper, Lil Wayne, released a song in the spring with an obscenity in the title, using the n-word repeatedly and depicting himself as abusing "hoes" and "bitches."

Similar examples abound in the rap-music world and have persisted for years with scarcely any complaint from today's civil-rights leaders. Their failure to denounce these lyrics for the damage they do to poor and minority families—words celebrating tattooed thugs and sexually indiscriminate women as icons of "keeping it real"—is a sad reminder of how long it has been since the world heard the sweet music of the March on Washington.

Mr. Williams is a political analyst for Fox News and a columnist for the Hill. He is the author of "Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years 1954-1965" (Viking, 1987).

A version of this article appeared August 27, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Songs of the Summer of 1963 . . . and 2013.

Obama’s third war

The folly of striking Syria

By Ralph Peters

http://www.nypost.com

August 27, 2013

You might as well try to teach a snake to juggle as hope the Obama administration will think strategically. The “peace president” is about to embark on his third military adventure, this time in Syria, without having learned the lessons of his botched efforts in Afghanistan and Libya. He hasn’t even learned from the Bush administration’s mistakes — which he mocked with such delight.

Before launching a single cruise missile toward Syria, Team Obama needs to be sure it has a good answer to the question, “What comes next?”

If Obama does a Clinton and churns up some sand with do-nothing cruise-missile strikes, it will only encourage the Assad regime. But if our president hits Assad hard and precipitates regime change, then what?

AP

Sideshow: A UN inspector yesterday, gathering evidence at the site of a chemical attack in Syria — but the real issue is: What effective action can we take?

If al Qaeda and local Islamists seize Damascus, what will we do? The enfeebled “moderate opposition” we back rhetorically couldn’t dislodge hardcore jihadis, no matter how many weapons we sent (the jihadis would simply confiscate the gear).

What if we weaken the regime to the point where the fanatics rev up their jihad to drive out Christians and other minorities? What’s your plan then, Mr. President? After your night of explosive passion, will you still love the opposition in the morning?

Exactly which American vital security interests are at stake in Syria, Mr. President? Your credibility? Put a number on it. How many American lives is your blather about red lines worth?

Chemical weapons use? Horrible and illegal, a war crime. So is the mass slaughter of civilians. Is it really so much worse to be gassed than tortured to death by al Qaeda or burned alive in your church? Which is more important, the number of dead, or the means that killed them?

Islamist terrorists have killed tens, if not hundreds, of thousands, of innocent Muslims. Aren’t they the real enemies of civilization?

Mr. President, do you really think it’s wise to send our missiles and aircraft to provide fire support for al Qaeda? That is exactly what you’ll be doing, if you hit Assad.

Assad’s an odious butcher, filth on two legs. But in the world of serious strategy, you rarely get a choice between black and white. You choose between black and charcoal gray.

Employing our military assets to support either side in Syria would be a mistake. Employing them without a worst-case plan for what might follow would be criminal.

We just can’t seem to learn, though. Invading Iraq, the Bush team, egged on by ideologues who never served in uniform, refused to allow our military to plan for an occupation. That sure worked out. Then, in Libya, the Obama administration deposed Khadafy, but refused to plan seriously for the aftermath. Welcome to Benghazi.

There are wars worth fighting. It was essential to go to Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11 (although staying there was idiocy). There will be future conflicts that demand our blood to defend vital interests. But we’ve now had a decade of do-gooder wars that haven’t done much good.

For the record, I don’t regret getting rid of Saddam or Khadafy. I regret the ineptitude with which we did these things. When you propose a war, don’t ever expect a cheap date.

Now there’s an unholy alliance pushing for attacks on Syria. We have liberal zealots, such as our UN ambassador, Samantha Power, who believe that our military’s primary purpose is to protect people who hate America. We have a few Republican senators like John McCain and Lindsey Graham who support any war, any time. We have a president who thinks that, “Gee, maybe, well, gosh, I said I’d do something, so maybe I should...” And we have elements in the defense industry who long for a return to our free-spending years in Iraq and Afghanistan and view a war in Syria as a great way to beat the sequester.

And the one thing every member of that bomb-Syria-now coalition has in common? Not one will have to fight.

Ralph Peters is a retired US Army officer and Fox News’ strategic analyst.

NIDAL HASAN FOUND GUILTY FOR FT. HOOD SHOOTINGS

By: John Hayward

http://www.humanevents.com/

August 23, 2013

This courtroom sketch shows prosecutor Colonel Steve Henricks speaking to jurors on the opening day of the trial of Major Nidal Hasan. Photo: Brigitte Woosley /Reuters

Major Nidal Hasan has been found guilty on 13 counts of premeditated murder and 32 counts of premeditated attempted murder, by unanimous vote of a military jury, according to NBC News:

Under military law, Maj. Hasan’s conviction on at least two counts of premeditated murder makes him eligible for the death penalty.

In order for Hasan to face the death penalty, the jury’s 11 men and two women had to find him unanimously guilty of at least one count of premeditated murder as well as another murder charge. The military court system hasn’t executed an active-duty U.S. soldier since 1961.

The punishment phase of the court-martial hearing begins Monday at Fort Hood. Sixteen witnesses are expected to testify, including one family member from each of the 13 people Hasan killed on November 5, 2009.  Hasan will also be allowed to speak – unrestricted – during the next phase of the trial.

Oh, I can hardly wait to hear him speak unrestricted for a while.

Attorneys for the Ft. Hood victims said the verdict was “only a first, small step down the path of justice for the victims.”  They called on the Departments of Defense and Justice to “stop their cynical ‘workplace violence’ charade – a charade carried on despite Hasan’s confessions and the mountain of evidence demonstrating that the attack was the work of an Islamic jihadist, working on behalf of al-Qaeda, who killed Americans for his ‘brothers’ in the Middle East – and to stop denying the Fort Hood victims the Purple Hearts and medical and other benefits to which they are rightfully due.”

No one has less patience for that charade than Nidal Hasan, who kicked off his trial by admitting his guilt, describing himself as a traitor, and declaring his goal was to protect Islamist terrorists from American soldiers.  Then he declined to offer a defense or make a closing argument.

[Prosecutor Col. Steve] Henricks described how, when Hasan learned he would be part of a unit deploying to Afghanistan, he visited Guns Galore, a firearms store in Killeen, adjacent to Fort Hood about 70 miles north Austin. Hasan asked for advice and bought the most high tech, highest-capacity pistol available.

Hasan later trained at an off-base gun range and used laser sights. He eventually carefully targeted a medical building he knew would be crammed with soldiers preparing for or returned from overseas military deployments — mostly in Afghanistan or Iraq — the same day his unit would be at the building.

Henricks reminded jurors that before Hasan started shooting, Hasan cried “Allahu Akbar!” — Arabic for “God is great!”

The prosecutor added: “So no one should be confused about his motives that day and no one should be confused today either.”

No, no one should be.  But as a matter of official policy, the government insists on confusion.

THE DUTCH ACCENT: ELMORE LEONARD’S TALK

POSTED BY ANTHONY LANE

http://www.newyorker.com

August 22, 2013

Elmore Leonard. Photograph: Marc Hauser/Getty

Elmore Leonard, who died on Monday, at the age of eighty-seven, was hailed as one of the best crime writers in the land. High praise, but not quite high enough, and some way off the mark. He was one of the best writers, and he happened to write about crime. Even that is not entirely accurate. It’s true that his novels (more than forty of them, with another left unfinished at his death) enjoyed the company of criminals and of those who tried to stop them in their tracks. This was seldom hard, since, as Leonard delighted in showing us, crime—more than anything, even politics—allows men of all ages to disport themselves across the full range of human ineptitude. Boy, do they screw up.

But here’s the thing: as people stagger and weave from one error to the next, much of what they do, and most of what they talk about, has nothing to do with crime. Just listen to Melanie and Frank, in “The Switch.” He is in construction, a golf-adoring oaf with an undeclared million stashed in a bank in the Bahamas; she is his tootsie down there, or so he likes to believe. They come back late from the casino. She lies on the couch, leafs through W magazine, and chants the names:

“Diana Vreeland.”

“Never heard of her.”

“Betty Bacall.”

“You mean Lauren Bacall?” Frank said.

“Same one,” Melanie said. “Yves St Laurent.”

“He’s the guy that makes clothes, women’s clothes.”

“Georgia O’Keeffe.”

“Sounds like a stripper.”

“Wrong. Giancarlo Giannini.”

“Opera singer.”

“Wrong. Jeanne Moreau.”

“He’s a…writer.”

“She’s an actress. Jerome Robbins.”

“Who knows?”

“I’m giving you just the easy ones. Okay, Pat Buckley.”

“He’s the one, he was gonna punch that fag, what’s his name, on TV.”

“Pat’s his wife…. Loulou de la Falaise.”

“For Christ sake,” Frank said.

As usual, in Leonardland—and this aspect of his work has been undersung—the women, by instinct and by virtue of the lousy hand that society tends to deal them, outthink the men. Simply from the way that Melanie quizzes Frank on those celebrities, realizing that her sugar pop, bless him, knows less than zero, we can predict her plan: wrap him round her pinky at her earliest convenience and relieve him of more sugar than he will ever guess.

“The Switch” was published in 1978. Leonard (or Dutch, as his friends called him) had been writing about cowboys since the start of the nineteen-fifties, but he moved on to modern gunslingers with “The Big Bounce,” in 1969, and by the late seventies he was in full spate. The fullness required no enrichment of the style, let alone beautification; incapable of primping, Leonard chose to plane and pare until he ended up with folks like Melanie and Frank. As for their conversation, swatted back and forth like Ping-Pong, the phrasing as dry as a scoreline: if you wanted that brand of comic beat, with all the frills torn off, where did you go before Leonard came along? Early Evelyn Waugh.

Once you hear the Dutch accent you can’t get it out of your head, and for innumerable readers it became a siren song. I fell prey to it in the mid-eighties. Leonard had a breakout, with “Glitz” (1985), and it led many of us to raid the back catalogue with glee. Some of the books weren’t easy to get hold of, and the hunt only sharpened our zeal. A friend and I ravened through whatever we could lay hands on; there is a strange, barely sane satisfaction in happening upon an author—or a painter or a band—and making it your mission to consume everything that he, she, or they ever produced. You rarely succeed, yet the urge for completeness is a kind of love, doomed to be outgrown but not forgotten. I have often pursued the dead in that fashion, but Leonard may be the only living writer who spurred me to such a cause.

One problem was that a single page of him made other writers, especially the loftier and more lauded variety, seem about as legible as wallpaper paste. I recall being given a copy of “The Sea, the Sea,” the Iris Murdoch novel that won the Booker Prize in 1978. It came heartily recommended, so I wasted no time in laying it side by side with “The Switch,” which had been published in the same year. A random sample, from Dame Iris:

Oh, he was slippery, slippery, touchy, proud. I must hold him, I must be tactful, careful, gentle, firm, I must understand how. Everything, everything, I felt, now depended on Titus, he was the centre of the world, he was the key. I was filled with painful and joyful emotions and the absolute need to conceal them. I could so easily, here, alarm, offend, disgust.

Huh? It’s like being swallowed alive by a giant thesaurus. How are we supposed to work out, with any precision, what these fellows actually mean, through veils of verbal blubber such as that? Meanwhile, over in Detroit:

“You notice in the drive?” Ordell said to Louis. “He’s got an AMC Hornet, man, pure black, no shit on the outside at all, your plain unmarked car. But inside—tell him, Richard.”

Richard said, “Well, I got a rollbar. I got heavy-duty Gabriel Striders. I got a shotgun mount in front.”

“He’s got one of those flashers,” Ordell said. “Kojak reaches out, puts up on his roof?”

“Super Fireball with a magnetic bottom. Let’s see,” Richard said, “I got a Federal PA one-seventy electronic siren, you can work it wail, yelp, or hi-lo. Well, in the trunk I keep a Schermuly gas grenade gun, some other equipment. Night-chuk riot baton. An M-17 gas mask.” He thought a moment. “I got a Legster leg holster. You ever see one?”

Be honest, now: Which is better, Dame or Dutch? That is to say, leaving aside both snobbery and its inverse (for no fictional setting, genteel or rough, is intrinsically superior to any other), who is more alert to the life of an English sentence—its rises, failings, falls, and emergency stops? You know the answer. It certainly saved me from spending too much time on Booker Prize novels, whether winners or nominees, then as now. Decades on, I still laugh at the Kojak line, and it’s easy to imagine how a clumsier or less adventurous writer might have handled the same idea: “It’s the kind that Kojak has on TV. He reaches out and puts it up on the roof.” See? Dead on arrival. But technique is not all; more mysterious is what radiates out from such technical command, amid the speeches, and lends dramatic energy to the owners of the mouths. The Murdoch paragraph has a lot to say, but it leaves us utterly clueless as to what either Titus or the narrator is like; they earn no place in our mind’s eye. Whereas Ordell is right there in a couple of deft strokes, egging Richard on, and Richard himself, well, even the words “he thought a moment” put us instantly in the presence of a major blockhead—a wannabe cop, who, it transpires, collects Nazi memorabilia. Character is language in action.

Sometimes, a word is too much. Leonard can make do with a single letter, or a blank where a letter is meant to be. “What in the hell’s a Albanian?,” a guy named Clement asks in Chapter 4 of “City Primeval” (1980). Typesetters may have pounced upon what they took to be a typo, but Leonard never misheard. In that respect, as in others, he was less like Hemingway—of whom he was a fan, and to whom he was often compared—than like Dickens, another city kid with his nose and ear to the ground. Try “The Pickwick Papers”:

“What should you say to a drop o’ beer, gen’l’m’n?” suggested the mottled-faced man.

“And a little bit o’ cold beef,” said the second coachman.

“Or a oyster,” added the third, who was a hoarse gentleman, supported by very round legs.

One proof of literary genius, we might say, is a democratic generosity toward your mother tongue—the conviction that every part or particle of speech, be it e’er so humble, can be put to fruitful use. If that means trimming the indefinite article, leaving us with a Albanian and a oyster, so be it. Nothing need go to waste. Richard again, aiming at the formal locutions of a police report, and missing by yards: “I cruised the street and the street back of the residence, the residence being dark, not any light on, but which didn’t mean anything.” So much dumb-ass delusion in so little space, and the linguistic shortfall squares with an overriding sense, throughout the novels, that our grip on the world—and this goes for all of us, not just the chancers and the thugs—is never as secure or as enduring as we would like. Marriages crack like plates; one side of the tracks has no concept of life on the other side, though it may harbor a risky desire to find out; and words will not stay still. That is why the movies inspired by Leonard’s fiction (a slew of disasters plus the odd success, like “Get Shorty,” “Out of Sight,” and “Jackie Brown,” which was based on “Rum Punch”) struggle to match his equilibrium. The souls that he surveyed, even when they were played by George Clooney and John Travolta, were unquiet and fairly uncool. Leonard’s gaze was cool, but, in all honesty, it belonged in a book.

My friend and I, years ago, came to the sombre conclusion that the best of Leonard lay in what was then the recent past: in the roster of short-syllabled titles that ran from “52 Pick-Up” and “Swag” to “Stick” and “LaBrava”—1974 to 1983. I still cling to that conviction with the confused nostalgia that attends our early crushes; we long to spread the news so that others can share the joy, and yet when they do we nurture a resentful suspicion that their joy, being secondhand, is not the real thing, and that they can never share the flame of our own ardor. Yes, “Freaky Deaky” (1988), “Maximum Bob” (1991), and “Riding the Rap” (1991) are wonderful to behold, and Leonard’s own favorite was “Tishomingo Blues” (2002), but you should try walking around at age twenty with a paperback of “Stick” jammed in your jacket pocket. And did the later books, conjured up when Leonard was rich and famous, not swell a touch, as if in response to warm applause? My copy of “Maximum Bob” extends to three hundred pages; my copy of “Mr. Majestyk” (1974), maybe the best novel ever written about a melon grower, is exactly half as long. Leonard was the lord of restraint, so I can’t help feeling that he suits the shorter form. You get more impact from a sawn-off book.

I met Elmore Leonard once, and spent an hour with him. He was courteous and soft-spoken, and I cherish the first edition of “Freaky Deaky” that he inscribed for me. Of himself, as expected, he gave little away, and the effort to fix him now, in my memory, is an almost impossible task. When I discovered in the diaries of Sir Alec Guinness that the great actor was a fan of Leonard, and that he took “Out of Sight” on vacation one year, the link made perfect sense. Each man was skilled in self-effacement and immune to glamour, reserving all his bravado and wits for the professional arena; you can picture Leonard, like George Smiley, eavesdropping tacitly from the fringes of a room. He is gone now, but he left us a fine consolation: if you’ve never read him, or if you’d never heard of him until yesterday, or if you merely need a fitting way to mourn, pick up “52 Pick-Up,” “LaBrava,” “Swag,” or “Glitz,” and tune into the voices of America—calling loud and clear, and largely ungrammatical, from Atlantic City, Miami, Hollywood, and his home turf of Detroit. Elmore Leonard got them right, and did them proud. As Clement would say, he was a author.