Intellectual Morons
By Jamie GlazovFrontPageMagazine.com October 5, 2004
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Daniel J. Flynn, the author of Why the Left Hates America and of the new book Intellectual Morons : How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas.
FP: Mr. Flynn, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Flynn: I'm a reader of Frontpage, so I particularly appreciate you having me.
FP: What motivated you to write this book? What, in general, has led to your interest in the Left and in its mindset?
Flynn: My purpose in writing Intellectual Morons is to get more people to think with their brain rather than their ideology.
The endless stream of recent scandals involving intellectuals rationalizing dishonesty in the service of a cause—Rigoberta Menchu, Betty Friedan, Michael Bellesiles, etc.—motivated me to write the book. It’s one thing for used car salesmen or politicians to lie. It’s sort of a staple of those trades. But the mission of the scholar is to find the truth. Unfortunately, truth has taken a back seat to political agendas among intellectuals.
My specific interest in the Left stems from the Right’s general disinterest in the Left. Outside of conservatives who once were on the Left—like the publisher of this site—there aren’t a lot of people on the Right who really know a whole lot about the Left. Intellectual Morons vaccinates readers against getting sucked into ideologies and gives them a better understanding of Marcuse, Foucault, Derrida, Chomsky, and other figures of great influence.
FP: If it is possible to say so briefly, why do supposedly smart people fall for stupid ideas?
Flynn: The main idea behind Intellectual Morons is that ideology acts as a mental straitjacket. It blinds adherents to reality, breeds fanaticism, and rationalizes dishonesty. It makes smart people stupid.
It doesn’t matter how intelligent you are if you don’t use your brain. Intelligent people aren’t necessarily rigorous thinkers. In fact, many of them are mentally lazy. Ideology provides a way for lazy people to respond to issues, ideas, people, and events without thinking. For the ideologue, ideology is the Rosetta Stone of everything. Why think when the system provides all the answers? Ideology is attractive to smart people because it flatters them by suggesting that a single idea from the mind of an intellectual has the power of explaining all of history or ordering the affairs of whole nations. No person is that smart; no idea that good.
FP: How do you think the Rathergate scandal meshes with the thesis of your book?
Flynn: My book is about how ideology overrides common sense among intellectuals. The Rathergate scandal is about how ideology overrides common sense among newsmen. The pattern is the same. The players are different.
How did a massive news organization with enormous resources and all that manpower miss something that lone bloggers exposed almost immediately? The answer is that the CBS eye was blinded by ideology. CBS’s documents purporting to show Texas Air National Guard officers feeling pressured to sanitize George W. Bush’s service record are as real as Harry Potter. Rather and company believed the documents were real because they wanted to believe the documents were real. Had they come across information damaging to John Kerry, they would have acted in a more careful manner. If Dan Rather’s reaction—stonewalling, belittling opponents, avoiding the charges—seems more appropriate for a partisan than of an objective newsman, maybe it’s because Dan Rather is more of a partisan than an objective newsman.
FP: Tell us what you found about Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger.
Flynn: I guess you could say Margaret Sanger was the original “feminazi.” Within a day of researching Margaret Sanger’s papers in the Library of Congress, I found a speech from 1932 in which she called for a massive system of concentration camps housing between 15 and 20 million Americans. Her eugenic dream would have been a nightmare for the poor and uneducated, both of whom would have been sent to the camps along with drug addicts, criminals, and others she saw as unfit for reproduction. Her plan is blunt and unambiguous: it would have imprisoned about one out of every six or seven Americans. The significant thing is not that I stumbled upon this information, but that not one of the dozen or so biographies of Sanger that I’ve examined even makes a fleeting reference to Sanger’s plan. This cover up is a scandal. Margaret Sanger is a towering figure in American history who is depicted as a champion of reproductive freedom and choice. This portrayal doesn’t hold up when you know that she advanced an American gulag and forced sterilization to prevent reproduction by massive portions of society.
FP: The Left continues its pathology in the War on Terror. Now we have leftist feminists showing up at demonstrations nude, wearing Saudi head-gear, and protesting Bush. Yet if they lived under the cultures and societies they are siding with, they would be exterminated within 30 seconds just for showing an ankle. We have groups like “Queers for Palestine” that show up at anti-Israel rallies and get beaten up and shouted down by Islamists at the demonstration. Homosexuals in Palestinian culture are persecuted and flee for safety in Israel.
Overall, the Left has sided with a fascist enemy that extinguishes all supposed leftist values themselves: women’s rights, gays’ rights, separation between religion and state, etc. etc.
Is there some kind of death wish or self-loathing here or what?
Flynn: When imposing a rational explanation upon the actions of irrational people you run the risk of appearing irrational yourself. Having said that, I'll try to provide a partial explanation that I think makes sense.
The Left's reflexive hatred for America and its allies overrides its genuflections to human rights. That's why they don't cheer human rights advances in Afghanistan, or Israel's tolerance of Arab homosexuals who would be severely punished for their behavior in their homelands.
The Left used to get their marching orders from the Soviet Union. They're gone now. But their enemy remains, and some leftists simply define their positions by what opposes the United States. If there has been a cohesive idea uniting the Left since the fall of the Iron Curtain, it is anti-Americanism.
FP: In other words, then, even if Adolf Hitler came back and led the Nazis all over again in our modern world today, the Left would take his side just to be anti-American?
Flynn: I don't know what the Left would do in that situation today. I do know what the Left did when this situation was real rather than hypothetical.
In the late 1930s, Leftists who vehemently opposed Nazism suddenly became vehement opponents of a war against Nazism once Hitler and Stalin became allies. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League, for instance, becomes the Hollywood League for Democratic Action in 1939 to catch-up with the Soviet line. League When the no-honor-among-thieves alliance broke apart, the Left then reverted to its vocally anti-Nazi stance.
Past performance doesn't guarantee future results, but it's usually a fairly accurate indicator.
FP: In your book you go into Chomsky's five dumb ideas. Could you share them with our readers?
Flynn: Noam Chomsky has had many dumb ideas, but I picked just five to examine in Intellectual Morons. Let me give you the abridged version of three that I discuss.
First, prior to the war in Afghanistan Chomsky warned of millions of civilian deaths in that war-torn country. The numbers are in and the highest estimates put the figure at a few thousand, while other sources put it in the high hundreds. Second, Chomsky claimed that Clinton's bombing of a medicine factory in Sudan resulted in more than 10,000 deaths. In fact, there were no more than a handful of casualties. Third, Chomsky famously denied the Cambodian genocide in an infamous book review he co-authored in The Nation in 1977. He clearly accepted the notion that "executions have numbered at most in the thousands," and were generally out of the Khmer Rouge's control. He puts "slaughter" in the obligatory scare quotes, speaks of "tales of Communist atrocities," and regards a death count of a million or more as a joke.
FP: What are your views on Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11?
Flynn: Fahrenheit 9/11 is a crude, anti-Bush campaign commercial. What's worse for Moore, it's boring, contains little original footage, and the film often appears grainy. It had a good soundtrack, though.
It's propaganda. Two types of falsehood stand out.
First, there are the specific falsehoods. One example would be Moore's claim that Bush waged the war in Afghanistan to help the Union Oil Company of California install an oil pipeline. But Unocal dropped plans for a pipeline when Bill Clinton was president. It's almost two years since we ejected the Taliban, and not only is there no pipeline but there are no plans for one either. This pipeline exists in Michael Moore's delusions, but not in Afghanistan.
Second, there are general falsehoods--dishonest portrayals. Fahrenheit 9/11 depicts smiling children riding ferris wheels, flying kites, and riding bicycles in Hussein's Iraq. Then Moore cuts to the war and images of burned, wounded, and dead children. On different grounds than Moore, I opposed the Iraq war but honesty compels me to ask: Couldn't proponents of the war just as easily have juxtaposed Saddam's pre-war brutalities with post-war happiness?
FP: What would be your definition of “intellectual moron”?
Flynn: An intellectual moron is someone who squanders his superlative cognitive abilities by relying on ideology rather than his mind to do his thinking. Next to this definition is a picture of Noam Chomsky.
FP: So Mr. Flynn, what hope is there that conservatives can win the Culture War? The Left clearly moulds our language and our society's parameters of debate.
Tell us where there is hope that this leftist control over our culture will one day, perhaps, be shattered.
Flynn: Very few people agreed with Ronald Reagan when he said that the West would transcend Communism. But it happened, and it didn't happen by accident.
In academia, Hollywood, the judiciary, and other strongholds of the Left, the prospects for conservative progress may appear bleak. But we've seen freedom triumph over totalitarianism, and conservative ideas gain at least a beachhead in the media. Progress has been made when concerted action has been taken. If conservatives focus on the campuses, for instance, in the way that they focused for many years on media bias, I think great things will happen. I'm an optimist.
FP: I hope you are right. But overall, as long as humans remain who they are -- fallen and flawed -- I think the socialist impulse will never go away, and will remain the easiest thing for people to cling to. Indeed, as long as inequality exists, so will the impulse toward equality, and so millions more humans will be tortured, starved and exterminated.
We can’t make things “right” and “perfect” in this world, because only God is perfect. And because of original sin and free will, imperfection and tragedy must be constant realities of human life. For many humans, however, the easiest thing intellectually is to believe that this can be fixed and that heaven can be built on earth – an experiment that always leads to hell on earth. And so the Left will remain powerful and continue to build more human hells in its utopian experiments, which now involves the glorification of the suicide bomber.
What do you think?
Flynn: The idea that man can be perfected is the most dangerous delusion. Whether it's an Islamic terrorist attempting to establish Allah's earthly kingdom, a Nazi believing that a perfect race of men can be created, or a Communist looking to make Heaven on Earth, the motivation of these fanatics is the same. They are all utopians.
The road to heaven on earth always seems to detour to hell on earth. If you really believe that your ideology will bring salvation to humanity, what would you be willing to do to impose this world-saving idea? Would you be willing to lie? To kill? Looking back on the last hundred years, the answer too often is yes. When you're building utopia, all is permitted. No end is greater, so no means can be too base to get there.
FP: And this is why I am saying that I don't think the Left can ever really be defeated, because the desire in many humans to believe in utopia on earth is stronger than acknowledging the limits of human hope. But you appear optimistic?
Flynn: If you're asking if I'm optimistic that the Left will disappear, the answer is no. If you're asking if I'm optimistic that the Left will diminish in strength in academia, the judiciary, Hollywood, and other strongholds, I'm saying there are reasons for optimism. In America in the early '70s, liberals had a near monopoly on DC-based policy organizations. They don't anymore. In the '80s and '90s, liberals had a near monopoly on major media outlets. They don't anymore. These changes came about because large groups of people acted in concert to change matters. Higher education and other institutions can change for the better, but only if large numbers of people make an effort.
FP: Ok, fair enough. Thank you Mr. Flynn. It was a pleasure.
Flynn: Thanks Jamie.
*
Get your copy of Dan Flynn's new book, Intellectual Morons : How Ideology Makes Smart People Fall for Stupid Ideas, for only $25.95 from the FrontPage Magazine Bookstore.
Jamie Glazov is Frontpage Magazine's managing editor. He holds a Ph.D. in History with a specialty in Soviet Studies. He edited and wrote the introduction to David Horowitz’s new book Left Illusions. He is also the co-editor (with David Horowitz) of the new book The Hate America Left and the author of Canadian Policy Toward Khrushchev’s Soviet Union (McGill-Queens University Press, 2002) and 15 Tips on How to be a Good Leftist. To see his previous symposiums, interviews and articles Click Here. Email him at jglazov@rogers.com.
Tuesday, October 05, 2004
Daniel Pipes: Profiling?
What Kind of Airport Profiling?
By Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com
October 5, 2004
Time magazine recently reported that the Transportation Security Administration, the U.S. agency charged with protecting airplanes, has concluded that the “most dangerous threat to commercial aviation is not so much the things bad people may be carrying, but the bad people themselves.”
Accordingly, Time goes on, the TSA is launching a passenger profiling system known as Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT. Under SPOT, the TSA staff learns to recognize suspicious personal behavior. “Passengers who flag concerns by exhibiting unusual or anxious behavior will be pointed out to local police, who will then conduct face-to-face interviews to determine whether any threat exists.”
However belatedly, the Bush administration has recognized that terrorists, more than the tools of their trade, must be watched and stopped. This amounts to a gigantic step forward in the protection of American travelers. The administration deserves congratulations for the courage to accept the need for profiling.
But SPOT is just a first step. Skilled terrorists learn how not to be nervous or give off other tell-tale signs. To be fully effective, profiling must focus on something more inherent to terrorism than anxiety. What might that be? Here is where the debate gets both productive and interesting.
Michael A. Smerconish, a radio talk-show host and columnist in the Philadelphia Daily News, argues in his new and brave book Flying Blind: How Political Correctness Continues to Compromise Airline Safety Post 9/11 (Running Press), that the key factor is race and ethnicity. In contrast, I hold that the key is not external attributes but what is in a person’s head, namely Islamist beliefs.
Smerconish writes “We’re fighting a war against young Arab male extremists, and yet our government continues to enforce politically correct ‘random screening’ of airline passengers instead of targeting those who look like terrorists.”
He calls for a change in policy: “Logic dictates that airport security take a longer, harder look at individuals who have ethnic, religious, nationality, and appearance factors in common with the Islamic extremist Middle Eastern men who have initiated war against us.”
This is a step in the right direction, but like SPOT, it is just a start. Yes, young Arab male extremists have carried out most terrorist attacks in the West. Yes, focusing on observable traits like Arabic names or a Middle Eastern appearance is easily done. But, like nervousness, these are crude criteria that do not get to the heart of the problem, which is the Islamist ideology.
A significant number of Islamist terrorists in the West are not Arab or immigrants at all. Their ranks include converts who began life with names like Ryan Anderson, David Belfield, Willie Brigitte, Jerome & David Courtailler, Michael Christian Ganczarski, Clement Rodney Hampton-el, Mark Fidel Kools, Jose Padilla, Adam Pearlman, Richard Reid, Pierre Robert, Jack Roche, and Steven Smyrek. These converts grew up in the West, speak Western languages with no accent, and know the local sports heroes. Some of them are even blond.
Terrorists are not stupid; focusing on Arabs, as Smerconish urges, will prompt them to turn to non-Arab operatives. This is already a concern. Jean-Louis Bruguière, the leading French anti-terrorist investigating judge, warned along these lines in May 2003, recounts Robert Leiken, that “al-Qaida had stepped up its European recruiting efforts and was on the lookout for women and light-skinned converts in particular.” The deputy director of a French intelligence agency, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, even told Leiken that “converts are our most critical work now.”
Smerconish responds to my argument by acknowledging that his book may at some point become obsolete, “but that day is not today.” He sees physical appearance remaining a key predictor of intentions.
True, young Arab males still play a disproportionate role, but his approach nearly guarantees that will change. Law enforcement should now begin worrying about motives. Islamism, a radical reading of the Islamic religion, prompts Islamist terrorism, not speaking Arabic.
Airport security personnel has found it a challenge merely to catch weapons; finding Arab would-be terrorists will prove more difficult and stopping malign Islamists will be hardest of all, for it requires TSA knowing in some depth who’s who among passengers. But this is the gold standard of counterterrorism and it should, starting immediately, be its goal.
Daniel Pipes (http://www.danielpipes.org/) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).
By Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com
October 5, 2004
Time magazine recently reported that the Transportation Security Administration, the U.S. agency charged with protecting airplanes, has concluded that the “most dangerous threat to commercial aviation is not so much the things bad people may be carrying, but the bad people themselves.”
Accordingly, Time goes on, the TSA is launching a passenger profiling system known as Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques, or SPOT. Under SPOT, the TSA staff learns to recognize suspicious personal behavior. “Passengers who flag concerns by exhibiting unusual or anxious behavior will be pointed out to local police, who will then conduct face-to-face interviews to determine whether any threat exists.”
However belatedly, the Bush administration has recognized that terrorists, more than the tools of their trade, must be watched and stopped. This amounts to a gigantic step forward in the protection of American travelers. The administration deserves congratulations for the courage to accept the need for profiling.
But SPOT is just a first step. Skilled terrorists learn how not to be nervous or give off other tell-tale signs. To be fully effective, profiling must focus on something more inherent to terrorism than anxiety. What might that be? Here is where the debate gets both productive and interesting.
Michael A. Smerconish, a radio talk-show host and columnist in the Philadelphia Daily News, argues in his new and brave book Flying Blind: How Political Correctness Continues to Compromise Airline Safety Post 9/11 (Running Press), that the key factor is race and ethnicity. In contrast, I hold that the key is not external attributes but what is in a person’s head, namely Islamist beliefs.
Smerconish writes “We’re fighting a war against young Arab male extremists, and yet our government continues to enforce politically correct ‘random screening’ of airline passengers instead of targeting those who look like terrorists.”
He calls for a change in policy: “Logic dictates that airport security take a longer, harder look at individuals who have ethnic, religious, nationality, and appearance factors in common with the Islamic extremist Middle Eastern men who have initiated war against us.”
This is a step in the right direction, but like SPOT, it is just a start. Yes, young Arab male extremists have carried out most terrorist attacks in the West. Yes, focusing on observable traits like Arabic names or a Middle Eastern appearance is easily done. But, like nervousness, these are crude criteria that do not get to the heart of the problem, which is the Islamist ideology.
A significant number of Islamist terrorists in the West are not Arab or immigrants at all. Their ranks include converts who began life with names like Ryan Anderson, David Belfield, Willie Brigitte, Jerome & David Courtailler, Michael Christian Ganczarski, Clement Rodney Hampton-el, Mark Fidel Kools, Jose Padilla, Adam Pearlman, Richard Reid, Pierre Robert, Jack Roche, and Steven Smyrek. These converts grew up in the West, speak Western languages with no accent, and know the local sports heroes. Some of them are even blond.
Terrorists are not stupid; focusing on Arabs, as Smerconish urges, will prompt them to turn to non-Arab operatives. This is already a concern. Jean-Louis Bruguière, the leading French anti-terrorist investigating judge, warned along these lines in May 2003, recounts Robert Leiken, that “al-Qaida had stepped up its European recruiting efforts and was on the lookout for women and light-skinned converts in particular.” The deputy director of a French intelligence agency, the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, even told Leiken that “converts are our most critical work now.”
Smerconish responds to my argument by acknowledging that his book may at some point become obsolete, “but that day is not today.” He sees physical appearance remaining a key predictor of intentions.
True, young Arab males still play a disproportionate role, but his approach nearly guarantees that will change. Law enforcement should now begin worrying about motives. Islamism, a radical reading of the Islamic religion, prompts Islamist terrorism, not speaking Arabic.
Airport security personnel has found it a challenge merely to catch weapons; finding Arab would-be terrorists will prove more difficult and stopping malign Islamists will be hardest of all, for it requires TSA knowing in some depth who’s who among passengers. But this is the gold standard of counterterrorism and it should, starting immediately, be its goal.
Daniel Pipes (http://www.danielpipes.org/) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).
Monday, October 04, 2004
Johann Hari Interviews Christopher Hitchens
An Interview with Christopher Hitchens: Adieu to the Left
By Johann Hari
JohannHari.com
October 4, 2004
To many of Christopher Hitchens' old friends, he died on September 11th 2001. Tariq Ali considered himself a comrade of Christopher Hitchens for over thirty years. Now he speaks about him with bewilderment. "On 11th September 2001, a small group of terrorists crashed the planes they had hijacked into the Twin Towers of New York. Among the casualties, although unreported that week, was a middle-aged Nation columnist called Christopher Hitchens. He was never seen again," Ali writes. "The vile replica currently on offer is a double."
This encapsulates how many of Hitchens' old allies - a roll-call of the Left's most distinguished intellectuals, from Noam Chomsky to Alexander Cockburn to (until his premature death last year) Edward Said - view his transformation. On September 10th, he was campaigning for Henry Kissinger to be arraigned before a war crimes tribunal in the Hague for his massive and systematic crimes against humanity in the 1960s and 1970s. He was preparing to testify in the Vatican - as a literal Devil's Advocate - against the canonisation of Mother Theresa, who he had exposed as a sadistic Christian fundamentalist, an apologist for some of the world's ugliest dictatorships, and a knowing beneficiary of corporate fraud. Hitchens was sailing along the slow, certain route from being the Left's belligerent bad boy to being one of its most revered old men.
And then a hijacked plane flew into the Pentagon - a building which stands just ten minutes' from Hitchens' home. The island of Manhattan became engulfed in smoke. Within a year, Hitchens was damning his former comrades as "soft on Islamic fascism," giving speeches at the Bush White House, and describing himself publicly as "a recovering ex-Trotskyite." What happened?
When I arrive, he is reclining in his usual cloud of Rothmans' smoke and sipping a whisky. "You're late," he says sternly. I begin to flap, and he laughs. "It's fine," he says and I give him a big hug. On the morning of September 11th, once I had checked everybody I knew in New York was safe, I thought of Hitch who had become a friend since he encouraged my early journalistic efforts. He had been campaigning against Islamic fundamentalism for decades. I knew this assault would blast him into new political waters - and I buckled a mental seatbelt for the bumpy ride ahead.
I decide to open with the most basic of questions. Where would he place himself on the political spectrum today? "I don't have a political allegiance now, and I doubt I ever will have again. I can no longer describe myself as a socialist. I miss it like a lost limb." He takes a sip from his drink. "But I don't regret anything. I'm still fighting for Kissinger to be brought to justice. The socialist movement enabled universal suffrage, the imposition of limits upon exploitation, and the independence of colonial and subject populations. Its achievements were real, and I'm glad I was part of it. Where it succeeded, one can be proud of it. Where it failed - as in the attempt to stop the First World War and later to arrest the growth of fascism - one can honourably regret its failure."
He realised he was not a socialist any longer around three years ago. "Often young people ask me for political advice, and when you are talking to the young, you mustn't bullshit. It's one thing when you are sitting with old comrades to talk about reviving the left, but you can't say that to somebody who is just starting out. And what could I say to these people? I had to ask myself - is there an international socialist movement worth the name? No. No, there is not. Okay - will it revive? No, it won't. Okay then - but is there at least a critique of capitalism that has a potential for replacing it? Not that I can identify." "If the answer to all these questions is no, then I have no right to go around calling myself a socialist. It's more like an affectation."
But Hitch - there are still hundreds of causes on the left, even if the 'socialist' tag is outdated. You used to write about acid rain, the crimes of the IMF and World Bank, the death penalty... It's hard to imagine you writing about them now. He explains that he is still vehemently against the death penalty and "I haven't forgotten the 152 people George Bush executed in Texas." But the other issues? He seems to wave them aside as "anti-globalisation" causes - a movement he views with contempt. He explains that he believes the moment the Left's bankruptcy became clear was on 9/11.
"The United States was attacked by theocratic fascists who represents all the most reactionary elements on earth. They stand for liquidating everything the left has fought for: women's rights, democracy. And how did much of the left respond? By affecting a kind of neutrality between America and the theocratic fascists." He cites the cover of one of Tariq Ali's books as the perfect example. It shows Bush and Bin Laden morphed into one on its cover. "It's explicitly saying they are equally bad. However bad the American Empire has been, it is not as bad as this. It is not the Taliban, and anybody - any movement - that cannot see the difference has lost all moral bearings."
Hitchens - who has just returned from Afghanistan - says, "The world these [al-Quadea and Taliban] fascists want to create is one of constant submission and servility. The individual only has value to them if they enter into a life of constant reaffirmation and prayer. It is pure totalitarianism, and one of the ugliest totalitarianisms we've seen. It's the irrational combined with the idea of a completely closed society. To stand equidistant between that and a war to remove it is?" He shakes his head. I have never seen Hitch grasping for words before.
Some people on the left tried to understand the origins of al-Quadea as really being about inequalities in wealth, or Israel's brutality towards the Palestinians, or other legitimate grievances. "Look: inequalities in wealth had nothing to do with Beslan or Bali or Madrid," Hitchens says. "The case for redistributing wealth is either good or it isn't - I think it is - but it's a different argument. If you care about wealth distribution, please understand, the Taliban and the al-Qaeda murderers have less to say on this than even the most cold-hearted person on Wall Street. These jihadists actually prefer people to live in utter, dire poverty because they say it is purifying. Nor is it anti-imperialist: they explictly want to recreate the lost Caliphate, which was an Empire itself." He continues, "I just reject the whole mentality that says, we need to consider this phenomenon in light of current grievances. It's an insult to the people who care about the real grievances of the Palestinians and the Chechens and all the others. It's not just the wrong interpretation of those causes; it's their negation." And this goes for the grievances of the Palestinians, who he has dedicated a great deal of energy to documenting and supporting. "Does anybody really think that if every Jew was driven from Palestine, these guys would go back to their caves? Nobody is blowing themselves up for a two-state solution. They openly say, 'We want a Jew-free Palestine, and a Christian-free Palestine.' And that would very quickly become, 'Don't be a Shia Muslim around here, baby.'" He supports a two-state solution - but he doesn't think it will solve the jihadist problem at all.
Can he ever see a defeat for this kind of Islamofascism? "This kind of theocratic fascism will never die because we belong to a very poorly-evolved mammarian species. I'm a complete materialist in that sense. We're stuck with being the product of a very sluggish evolution. Our pre-frontal lobes are too small and our adrenaline glands are too big. Our fear of the dark and of death is very intense, and people will always be able to profit from that. But nor can I see this kind of fascism winning. They couldn't even run Afghanistan. Our victory is assured - so we can afford to be very scrupulous in our methods."
But can he see a time when this kind of jihadist fever will be as marginalised as, say, Nazism is now, confined to a few reactionary eccentrics? "Not without what that took - which is an absolutely convincing defeat and discrediting. Something unarguable. I wouldn't exclude any measure either. There's nothing I wouldn't do to stop this form of fascism." He is appalled that some people on the left are prepared to do almost nothing to defeat Islamofascism. "When I see some people who claim to be on the left abusing that tradition, making excuses for the most reactionary force in the world, I do feel pain that a great tradition is being defamed. So in that sense I still consider myself to be on the Left."
A few months ago, when Bush went to Ireland for the G8 meeting, Hitchens was on a TV debate with the leader of a small socialist party in the Irish dail. "He said these Islamic fascists are doing this because they have deep-seated grievances. And I said, 'Ah yes, they have many grievances. They are aggrieved when they see unveiled woman. And they are aggrieved that we tolerate homosexuals and Jews and free speech and the reading of literature.'" "And this man - who had presumably never met a jihadist in his life - said, 'No, it's about their economic grievances.' Well, of course, because the Taliban provided great healthcare and redistribution of wealth, didn't they? After the debate was over, I said, 'If James Connolly [the Irish socialist leader of the Easter Risings] could hear you defending these theocratic fascist barbarians, you would know you had been in a fight. Do you know what you are saying? Do you know who you are pissing on?"
Many of us can agree passionately with all that - but it is a huge leap to actually supporting Bush. George Orwell - one of Hitchens' intellectual icons - managed to oppose fascism and Stalinism from the Left without ever offering a word of support for Winston Churchill. Can't Hitch agitate for a fight against Islamofascism without backing this awful President? He explains by talking about the origins of his relationship with the neconservatives in Washington. "I first became interested in the neocons during the war in Bosnia-Herzgovinia. That war in the early 1990s changed a lot for me. I never thought I would see, in Europe, a full-dress reprise of internment camps, the mass murder of civilians, the reinstiutution of torture and rape as acts of policy. And I didn't expect so many of my comrades to be indifferent - or even take the side of the fascists." "It was a time when many people on the left were saying 'Don't intervene, we'll only make things worse' or, 'Don't intervene, it might destabilise the region,'" he continues. "And I thought - destabilization of fascist regimes is a good thing. Why should the left care about the stability of undemocratic regimes? Wasn't it a good thing to destabilize the regime of General Franco?" "It was a time when the left was mostly taking the conservative, status quo position - leave the Balkans alone, leave Milosevic alone, do nothing. And that kind of conservatism can easily mutate into actual support for the aggressors. Weimar-style conservatism can easily mutate into National Socialism," he elaborates. "So you had people like Noam Chomsky's co-author Ed Herman go from saying 'Do nothing in the Balkans,' to actually supporting Milosevic, the most reactionary force in the region."
"That's when I began to first find myself on the same side as the neocons. I was signing petitions in favour of action in Bosnia, and I would look down the list of names and I kept finding, there's Richard Perle. There's Paul Wolfowitz. That seemed interesting to me. These people were saying that we had to act." He continues, "Before, I had avoided them like the plague, especially because of what they said about General Sharon and about Nicaragua. But nobody could say they were interested in oil in the Balkans, or in strategic needs, and the people who tried to say that - like Chomsky - looked ridiculous. So now I was interested."
There are two strands of conservatism on the U.S. Right that Hitch has always opposed. The first was the Barry Goldwater-Pat Buchanan isolationist Right. They argued for "America First" - disengagement from the world, and the abandonment of Europe to fascism. The second was the Henry Kissinger Right, which argued for the installation of pro-American, pro-business regimes, even if it meant liquidating democracies (as in Chile or Iran) and supporting and equipping practitioners of genocide. He believes neoconservatism is a distinctively new strain of thought, preached by ex-leftists, who believed in using US power to spread democracy. "It's explicitly anti-Kissingerian. Kissinger hates this stuff. He opposed intervening in the Balkans. Kissinger Associates were dead against [the war in] Iraq. He can't understand the idea of backing democracy - it's totally alien to him."
"So that interest in the neocons re-emerged after September 11th. They were saying - we can't carry on with the approach to the Middle East we have had for the past fifty years. We cannot go on with this proxy rule racket, where we back tyranny in the region for the sake of stability. So we have to take the risk of uncorking it and hoping the more progressive side wins." He has replaced a belief in Marxist revolution with a belief in spreading the American revolution. Thomas Jefferson has displaced Karl Marx. But can we trust the Bush administration - filled with people like Dick Cheney, who didn't even support the release of Nelson Mandela - to support democracy and the spread of American values now?
He offers an anecdote in response. There is a new liberal-left heroine in the States called Azar Nafisi. Her book Reading Lolita in Tehran documents an underground feminist resistance movement to the Iranian Mullahs that concentrated on reading great - and banned - works of Western literature. "And who is this book by an icon of the Iranian resistance dedicated to? [Deputy Secretary of Defence] Paul Wolfowitz, the bogeyman of the left, and the intellectual force behind [the recent war in] Iraq."
With the fine eye for ideological division that comes from a life on the Trotskyite Left, Hitch diagnoses the intellectual divisions within the Bush administration. He does not ally himself with the likes of Cheney; he backs the small sliver of pure neocon thought he associates with Wolfowitz. "The thing that would most surprise people about Wolfowitz if they met him is that he's a real bleeding heart. He's from a Polish-Jewish immigrant family. You know the drill - Kennedy Democrats, some of the family got out of Poland in time and some didn't make it, civil rights marchers? He impressed me when he was speaking at a pro-Israel rally in Washington a few years ago and he made a point of talking about Palestinian suffering. He didn't have to do it - at all - and he was booed. He knew he would be booed, and he got it. I've taken time to find out what he thinks about these issues, and it's always interesting."
He gives an account of how the neocon philosophy affected the course of the Iraq war. "The CIA - which is certainly not neoconservative - wanted to keep the Iraqi army together because you never know when you might need a large local army. That's how the U.S. used to govern. It's a Kissinger way of thinking. But Wolfowitz and others wanted to disband the Iraqi army, because they didn't want anybody to even suspect that they wanted to restore military rule." He thinks that if this philosophy can become dominant within the Republican Party, it can turn U.S. power into a revolutionary force.
I feel simultaneously roused by Hitch's arguments and strangely disconcerted. Why did Hitch so enthusiastically back the administration's bogus WMD arguments - arguments he still stands by? I think of the Bush administration's denial of global warming, the hideous 'structural adjustment' programmes it rams down the throats of the world's poor (including Iraq's), its description of Ariel Sharon as "a man of peace"? Why intellectually compromise on all these issues and back Bush?
Bosnia was not the only precedent for Hitch's reaction to 9/11. He was disgusted by the West's slothful, grudging reaction to the fatwa against his friend Salman Rushdie. Back in 1989, he was writing about the "absurdity" of "seeing Islamic fundamentalism as an anti-imperial movement." He was similarly appalled by the American Left's indulgence of Bill Clinton's crimes, including the execution of a mentally disabled black man and the bombing of a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan that led to the deaths of more than 10,000 innocent Sudanese people. This brought him into close contact with the Clinton-hating Right - and made him view their opponents with disgust.
And so the separation of Hitch and the organized Left occurred. Is it permanent? Nobody was a better fighter for left-wing causes than Hitch. Nobody makes the left-wing case against Islamofascism and Ba'athism better than him today. Yet he undermines these vital arguments by backing Bush and indulging in wishful thinking about the Republicans. As I luxuriate in the warm bath of his charisma, I want to almost physically drag him all the way back to us. He might be dead to the likes of Tariq Ali but there is still a large constituency of people on the left who understand how abhorrent Islamic fundamentalism is. Why leave us behind? I stammer that I can't imagine him ever settling down on the American Right. He pauses, and I desperately hope that he will agree with me. "Not the Buchanan-Reagan Right, no," he says. There is a pause. I expect him to continue, but he doesn't. Back in the mid-1980s, Hitch lambasted a small U.S. magazine called the Partsian Review for its "decline into neoconservatism". I don't think Hitch is lost to the Left quite yet. He will never stop campaigning for the serial murderer Henry Kissinger to be brought to justice, and his hatred of Islamic fundamentalism is based on good left-wing principles. But it does feel at the end of our three-hour lunch like I have been watching him slump into neoconservatism. Come home, Hitch - we need you.
Saturday, October 02, 2004
Mark Steyn: Why Conservatism Thrives In America
This article does a pretty nice job of describing why I'm a conservative...
Spectator.com.uk
Conservatism thrives in America, says Mark Steyn, because citizens — not subjects — are suspicious of government and want to be left to their own devices.
New Hampshire- Conservatism is a going concern hardly anywhere these days, alas and alack. And, even if you find a chap willing to be labelled as such, he’s not always reliably so in practice.
Stephen Harper, the leader of the new Conservative party of Canada, is a pleasant fellow, but nobody who used approvingly the phrase ‘a woman’s right to choose’, as he did in an election debate earlier this year, could get the Republican nomination south of the border: I understand the soft-pedalling on abortion, but I do object to him adopting the horrible slippery euphemism of the Left.
Likewise, John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, is America’s doughtiest ally in the war on terror, but I wouldn’t want to live under his government’s gun-control laws. As for Jacques Chirac, the fact that he’s what passes for a conservative in France is all most of us crazy right-wingers need to know about his country.
But in America large swaths of the nation are still robustly conservative. Not all of them, of course, and, because Fleet Street correspondents are disproportionately concentrated in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, it’s easy for them to get the impression that there’s not all that many conservatives — just a few isolated communities in the Bible Belt and a couple of survivalist militias up in the Rockies.
This leads to the careless assumptions of so many in the European media about John Kerry’s election prospects and the inevitable tears on the morning of 3 November. But the way Kerry’s campaigning on cultural issues gives you the real clue to the dominant forces in American life: he talks up his Catholicism; on abortion, he says he ‘personally believes’ life begins at conception, it’s just that as a Democrat he can’t find it in him to legislate according to his principles; everywhere he goes he gets photographed brandishing guns, even guns that he, as an effete Massachusetts panty-waist, has voted to ban; he boasts to hunting magazines about his favourite assault rifle — at least until the legality of his ownership of such a weapon is called into question. This is how a big-government, anti-globalisation, socialised-healthcare, Francophiliac Democrat has to campaign in America: pro-guns, pro-God, deeply evasive on abortion. In almost any other Western nation, none of these things would matter.
Before September 11, most observers assumed that the Left’s coalition was the coherent one and it was the Right’s that was unwieldy — what did the Wall Street crowd have in common with the gun nuts, or the national-security types with the religious Right? But 9/11 exposed the internal contradictions of modish multiculturalism: true, many gays and feminists are so invested in their loathing of George W. Bush that on Afghanistan and Iraq they’re happy to make common cause with Islam’s women-oppressing, sodomite-beheading theocrats. But eventually the penny will drop, as it did for Pim Fortuyn in Holland.
The American Right, on the other hand, is supposed to be split from top to toe between ‘neocons’ and ‘paleocons’, the latter being the isolationist Right and the former being sinister Jewish intellectuals who’ve turned the Bush administration into an arm of Israeli foreign policy. One problem for those who see conservatism in terms of this epic struggle is that one side doesn’t exist. The ‘paleocons’ boil down to a handful of anti-war conservatives, the most prominent being Pat Buchanan, who in the 2000 presidential election got 0.42 per cent of the vote. He’s no BNP, never mind Ukip.
The real divide is between the neocons (for want of a better term) and the ‘assertive nationalists’ — that’s to say, those who think we ought to bomb rogue states, smash their regimes and rebuild them as democratic societies, and those who think we ought to bomb rogue states, smash their regimes, and then leave them to stew in their own juices, with a reminder that if the next thug is foolish enough to catch Washington’s eye, then (as Arnie says) ‘Ah’ll be back!’
This difference can seem like a big deal — those who think we need to win their hearts and minds vs those who think they’re mostly heartless and mindless, so who cares? But in truth it’s only a difference of degree. To British conservatives, for whom there are no constituencies equivalent to the evangelical Christians and the Second Amendment types, the American Right can look a little freaky.
But one of the consequences of September 11 is that it revealed the conservative coalition to be much more cohesive than superficial appearances might suggest. For starters, take small government. Every true conservative ought to be sceptical about government, because there’s hardly anything the government does that wouldn’t be better done by somebody else. Imagine if the GPO still ran Britain’s telephone network. Imagine the kind of Internet service you’d have. Because of a compromise deal to avoid redundancies with the Amalgamated Union of Fax Machine Installers, you’d be paying different rates according to which domain you sent an email to: .uk? That’d be 30p. .fr? That’d be one pound. .nz? That’d be 15 quid. And it would take a week. And you’d have to apply a month in advance for an online session. And take a postal order round to the nearest application-processing office.
Conservatives embrace big government at their peril. The silliest thing Dick Cheney has ever said was a couple of weeks after 9/11: ‘One of the things that’s changed so much since September 11 is the extent to which people do trust the government — big shift — and value it, and have high expectations for what we can do.’ Really? I’d say 9/11 vindicated perfectly a decentralised, federalist, conservative view of the state: what worked that day was municipal government, small government, core government — the firemen, the NYPD cops, rescue workers. What flopped — big-time, as the Vice-President would say — was federal government, the FBI, CIA, INS, FAA and all the other hotshot, money-no-object, fancypants acronyms.
Under the system operating on that day, if one of the many Algerian terrorists living on welfare in Montreal attempted to cross the US border at Derby Line, Vermont, and got refused entry by an alert official, he would be able to drive a few miles east, attempt to cross at Beecher Falls, Vermont, and they had no way of knowing that he’d been refused entry just half an hour earlier. No compatible computers. On the other hand, if that same Algerian terrorist went to order a book online, amazon.com would know that he’d bought The Dummy’s Guide to Martyrdom Operations two years ago and their ‘We have some suggestions for you!’ box would be proffering a 30 per cent discount on The A-Z of Infidel Slaying and 72 Hot Love Tips That Will Have Your Virgins Panting For More. Amazon is a more efficient miner of information than US Immigration. Is it to do with their respective budgets? No. Amazon’s system is very cheap, but it’s in the nature of government to do things worse, and slower.
To take another example from September 11, on three planes the crew and passengers followed Federal Aviation Administration procedures largely unchanged from the Seventies and they all died, along with thousands of other people; on the fourth plane, Flight 93, they used their cellphones, discovered that FAA regulations weren’t going to save them, and then acted as free-born citizens, rising up against the terrorists and, at the cost of their own lives, preventing that flight carrying on to its target in Washington. On a morning when big government failed, the only good news came from private citizens. The Cult of Regulation failed, but the great American virtues of self-reliance and innovation saved the lives of thousands: ‘Let’s roll!’ as Todd Beamer told his fellow passengers. Within 90 minutes of the first flight hitting the tower, the heroes of Flight 93 had figured out what was going on and came up with a way to stop it.
By contrast, on 11 March 2002, six months to the day after Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi died flying their respective planes into the twin towers, their flight school in Florida received a letter from the Immigration and Naturalisation Service informing it that Mr Atta’s and Mr al-Shehhi’s student visas had been approved. Even killing thousands of people wasn’t enough to impede Mr Atta’s smooth progress through a lethargic bureaucracy. And the bureaucrats’ defence — which boiled down to: don’t worry, we’re only issuing visas to famous dead terrorists, not obscure living ones — is one that Americans largely have to take on trust. So one of the lessons of 9/11 is that in the end citizen initiative is more reliable than nanny-state regulation.
That’s one reason no Democrat in a competitive district wants to run on an anti-gun platform. In the weeks after 9/11, gun sales in some states were up over 20 per cent, especially sales to women. ‘Let’s roll!’ beats gun control any day. The supposedly opposite ends on the conservative continuum — the foreign-policy think-tanks fussing over geopolitical trends in post-Soviet Central Asia and the stump- toothed guys in plaid with full gun-racks in their pick-ups — turn out to have an identical world view: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Three years ago, I got a flurry of emails from Yorkshire, Oslo, Marseilles and elsewhere recounting incidents of gangs of Muslim youths enthusiastically celebrating the glorious victory of 9/11 by swarming around cars, banging on the windows, intimidating the drivers, yelling Osama’s name. If you tried that in Texas, the guy would reach in his glove box and blow your head off.
Second Amendment conservatism is more secure and better integrated with the bespoke mainstream than it’s been in years. The government can’t tell you you’ve got to be on full alert and at the same time announce new restrictions on the right to defend yourself and your home. Social conservatism is also more secure. Fainthearted Canadian Tories may have signed on to ‘a woman’s right to choose’, but the refusal of American conservatives to accept, as the rest of the West has, that the abortion issue is settled looks sounder every day. Whether or not individual women should have the right to choose, the state has no interest in encouraging them to do so. What Western societies need is more babies. Without them, the Dar al-Islam will win by default, slowly annexing shrivelled, barren, secular Europe.
Unlovely though they may be to worldly British Tories, America’s religious Right has in fact a more rational view of the world than European hyper-rationalists. At dinner parties in London in recent years, I’ve noticed a question recurring from time to time about whether Britons see themselves as ‘citizens’ or ‘subjects’. It’s a loaded question usually thrown out by some Guardian-reading republican who thinks the country would benefit from a president of the Mary Robinson school.
But I must say I never feel more like a ‘subject’ than when I go to some grimly egalitarian government agency. Some years ago, I was obliged to visit an SAAQ office (Société de l’Assurance Automobile du Quebec) in Montreal — that’s where you go to register a car or apply for a test or renew a driver’s licence. When you go in you have to stand in a long line to get a number telling you which of the other long lines to go and stand in — B173 or E289 or whatever. I knew they didn’t take payment by credit card, but they had said they took debit cards, so I had mine with me. When I got to the front, the clerk said the only card machine had broken so I’d have to go off and get the cash and then stand in the first line all over again to get the number for the second line — B497 or E923. My objection in those days was mainly on grounds of inconvenience and aesthetics. But since 9/11 I’ve come to believe that what’s worst about it is the way it enfeebles those who submit to it.
At a certain stage — socialised healthcare certainly comes into it — states reach a tipping point where the citizens are getting so much from the state that you can no longer have truly conservative government ever again. Or, more accurately, they think they’re getting a lot. For what Britons and Canadians pay in taxes for their miserable government health service, they ought to be entitled to three terminal diseases a year. If I wasn’t a conservative before 9/11, I’d certainly be one now. On one side I see decayed, self-absorbed passivity: citizens reduced to junkies with government as the pusher. On the other stand the gun-crazies, the religious Right, the home-schoolers, the flat-taxers and all the rest: you don’t have to agree with them on everything to appreciate that, in a new war which not all of the West will survive, they have an advantage over the Swedes and Belgians. A self-reliant conservative citizenry is a better bet than the subjects of an overbearing state.
2004 the Spectator.com.uk
Spectator.com.uk
Conservatism thrives in America, says Mark Steyn, because citizens — not subjects — are suspicious of government and want to be left to their own devices.
New Hampshire- Conservatism is a going concern hardly anywhere these days, alas and alack. And, even if you find a chap willing to be labelled as such, he’s not always reliably so in practice.
Stephen Harper, the leader of the new Conservative party of Canada, is a pleasant fellow, but nobody who used approvingly the phrase ‘a woman’s right to choose’, as he did in an election debate earlier this year, could get the Republican nomination south of the border: I understand the soft-pedalling on abortion, but I do object to him adopting the horrible slippery euphemism of the Left.
Likewise, John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister, is America’s doughtiest ally in the war on terror, but I wouldn’t want to live under his government’s gun-control laws. As for Jacques Chirac, the fact that he’s what passes for a conservative in France is all most of us crazy right-wingers need to know about his country.
But in America large swaths of the nation are still robustly conservative. Not all of them, of course, and, because Fleet Street correspondents are disproportionately concentrated in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, it’s easy for them to get the impression that there’s not all that many conservatives — just a few isolated communities in the Bible Belt and a couple of survivalist militias up in the Rockies.
This leads to the careless assumptions of so many in the European media about John Kerry’s election prospects and the inevitable tears on the morning of 3 November. But the way Kerry’s campaigning on cultural issues gives you the real clue to the dominant forces in American life: he talks up his Catholicism; on abortion, he says he ‘personally believes’ life begins at conception, it’s just that as a Democrat he can’t find it in him to legislate according to his principles; everywhere he goes he gets photographed brandishing guns, even guns that he, as an effete Massachusetts panty-waist, has voted to ban; he boasts to hunting magazines about his favourite assault rifle — at least until the legality of his ownership of such a weapon is called into question. This is how a big-government, anti-globalisation, socialised-healthcare, Francophiliac Democrat has to campaign in America: pro-guns, pro-God, deeply evasive on abortion. In almost any other Western nation, none of these things would matter.
Before September 11, most observers assumed that the Left’s coalition was the coherent one and it was the Right’s that was unwieldy — what did the Wall Street crowd have in common with the gun nuts, or the national-security types with the religious Right? But 9/11 exposed the internal contradictions of modish multiculturalism: true, many gays and feminists are so invested in their loathing of George W. Bush that on Afghanistan and Iraq they’re happy to make common cause with Islam’s women-oppressing, sodomite-beheading theocrats. But eventually the penny will drop, as it did for Pim Fortuyn in Holland.
The American Right, on the other hand, is supposed to be split from top to toe between ‘neocons’ and ‘paleocons’, the latter being the isolationist Right and the former being sinister Jewish intellectuals who’ve turned the Bush administration into an arm of Israeli foreign policy. One problem for those who see conservatism in terms of this epic struggle is that one side doesn’t exist. The ‘paleocons’ boil down to a handful of anti-war conservatives, the most prominent being Pat Buchanan, who in the 2000 presidential election got 0.42 per cent of the vote. He’s no BNP, never mind Ukip.
The real divide is between the neocons (for want of a better term) and the ‘assertive nationalists’ — that’s to say, those who think we ought to bomb rogue states, smash their regimes and rebuild them as democratic societies, and those who think we ought to bomb rogue states, smash their regimes, and then leave them to stew in their own juices, with a reminder that if the next thug is foolish enough to catch Washington’s eye, then (as Arnie says) ‘Ah’ll be back!’
This difference can seem like a big deal — those who think we need to win their hearts and minds vs those who think they’re mostly heartless and mindless, so who cares? But in truth it’s only a difference of degree. To British conservatives, for whom there are no constituencies equivalent to the evangelical Christians and the Second Amendment types, the American Right can look a little freaky.
But one of the consequences of September 11 is that it revealed the conservative coalition to be much more cohesive than superficial appearances might suggest. For starters, take small government. Every true conservative ought to be sceptical about government, because there’s hardly anything the government does that wouldn’t be better done by somebody else. Imagine if the GPO still ran Britain’s telephone network. Imagine the kind of Internet service you’d have. Because of a compromise deal to avoid redundancies with the Amalgamated Union of Fax Machine Installers, you’d be paying different rates according to which domain you sent an email to: .uk? That’d be 30p. .fr? That’d be one pound. .nz? That’d be 15 quid. And it would take a week. And you’d have to apply a month in advance for an online session. And take a postal order round to the nearest application-processing office.
Conservatives embrace big government at their peril. The silliest thing Dick Cheney has ever said was a couple of weeks after 9/11: ‘One of the things that’s changed so much since September 11 is the extent to which people do trust the government — big shift — and value it, and have high expectations for what we can do.’ Really? I’d say 9/11 vindicated perfectly a decentralised, federalist, conservative view of the state: what worked that day was municipal government, small government, core government — the firemen, the NYPD cops, rescue workers. What flopped — big-time, as the Vice-President would say — was federal government, the FBI, CIA, INS, FAA and all the other hotshot, money-no-object, fancypants acronyms.
Under the system operating on that day, if one of the many Algerian terrorists living on welfare in Montreal attempted to cross the US border at Derby Line, Vermont, and got refused entry by an alert official, he would be able to drive a few miles east, attempt to cross at Beecher Falls, Vermont, and they had no way of knowing that he’d been refused entry just half an hour earlier. No compatible computers. On the other hand, if that same Algerian terrorist went to order a book online, amazon.com would know that he’d bought The Dummy’s Guide to Martyrdom Operations two years ago and their ‘We have some suggestions for you!’ box would be proffering a 30 per cent discount on The A-Z of Infidel Slaying and 72 Hot Love Tips That Will Have Your Virgins Panting For More. Amazon is a more efficient miner of information than US Immigration. Is it to do with their respective budgets? No. Amazon’s system is very cheap, but it’s in the nature of government to do things worse, and slower.
To take another example from September 11, on three planes the crew and passengers followed Federal Aviation Administration procedures largely unchanged from the Seventies and they all died, along with thousands of other people; on the fourth plane, Flight 93, they used their cellphones, discovered that FAA regulations weren’t going to save them, and then acted as free-born citizens, rising up against the terrorists and, at the cost of their own lives, preventing that flight carrying on to its target in Washington. On a morning when big government failed, the only good news came from private citizens. The Cult of Regulation failed, but the great American virtues of self-reliance and innovation saved the lives of thousands: ‘Let’s roll!’ as Todd Beamer told his fellow passengers. Within 90 minutes of the first flight hitting the tower, the heroes of Flight 93 had figured out what was going on and came up with a way to stop it.
By contrast, on 11 March 2002, six months to the day after Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi died flying their respective planes into the twin towers, their flight school in Florida received a letter from the Immigration and Naturalisation Service informing it that Mr Atta’s and Mr al-Shehhi’s student visas had been approved. Even killing thousands of people wasn’t enough to impede Mr Atta’s smooth progress through a lethargic bureaucracy. And the bureaucrats’ defence — which boiled down to: don’t worry, we’re only issuing visas to famous dead terrorists, not obscure living ones — is one that Americans largely have to take on trust. So one of the lessons of 9/11 is that in the end citizen initiative is more reliable than nanny-state regulation.
That’s one reason no Democrat in a competitive district wants to run on an anti-gun platform. In the weeks after 9/11, gun sales in some states were up over 20 per cent, especially sales to women. ‘Let’s roll!’ beats gun control any day. The supposedly opposite ends on the conservative continuum — the foreign-policy think-tanks fussing over geopolitical trends in post-Soviet Central Asia and the stump- toothed guys in plaid with full gun-racks in their pick-ups — turn out to have an identical world view: the price of freedom is eternal vigilance. Three years ago, I got a flurry of emails from Yorkshire, Oslo, Marseilles and elsewhere recounting incidents of gangs of Muslim youths enthusiastically celebrating the glorious victory of 9/11 by swarming around cars, banging on the windows, intimidating the drivers, yelling Osama’s name. If you tried that in Texas, the guy would reach in his glove box and blow your head off.
Second Amendment conservatism is more secure and better integrated with the bespoke mainstream than it’s been in years. The government can’t tell you you’ve got to be on full alert and at the same time announce new restrictions on the right to defend yourself and your home. Social conservatism is also more secure. Fainthearted Canadian Tories may have signed on to ‘a woman’s right to choose’, but the refusal of American conservatives to accept, as the rest of the West has, that the abortion issue is settled looks sounder every day. Whether or not individual women should have the right to choose, the state has no interest in encouraging them to do so. What Western societies need is more babies. Without them, the Dar al-Islam will win by default, slowly annexing shrivelled, barren, secular Europe.
Unlovely though they may be to worldly British Tories, America’s religious Right has in fact a more rational view of the world than European hyper-rationalists. At dinner parties in London in recent years, I’ve noticed a question recurring from time to time about whether Britons see themselves as ‘citizens’ or ‘subjects’. It’s a loaded question usually thrown out by some Guardian-reading republican who thinks the country would benefit from a president of the Mary Robinson school.
But I must say I never feel more like a ‘subject’ than when I go to some grimly egalitarian government agency. Some years ago, I was obliged to visit an SAAQ office (Société de l’Assurance Automobile du Quebec) in Montreal — that’s where you go to register a car or apply for a test or renew a driver’s licence. When you go in you have to stand in a long line to get a number telling you which of the other long lines to go and stand in — B173 or E289 or whatever. I knew they didn’t take payment by credit card, but they had said they took debit cards, so I had mine with me. When I got to the front, the clerk said the only card machine had broken so I’d have to go off and get the cash and then stand in the first line all over again to get the number for the second line — B497 or E923. My objection in those days was mainly on grounds of inconvenience and aesthetics. But since 9/11 I’ve come to believe that what’s worst about it is the way it enfeebles those who submit to it.
At a certain stage — socialised healthcare certainly comes into it — states reach a tipping point where the citizens are getting so much from the state that you can no longer have truly conservative government ever again. Or, more accurately, they think they’re getting a lot. For what Britons and Canadians pay in taxes for their miserable government health service, they ought to be entitled to three terminal diseases a year. If I wasn’t a conservative before 9/11, I’d certainly be one now. On one side I see decayed, self-absorbed passivity: citizens reduced to junkies with government as the pusher. On the other stand the gun-crazies, the religious Right, the home-schoolers, the flat-taxers and all the rest: you don’t have to agree with them on everything to appreciate that, in a new war which not all of the West will survive, they have an advantage over the Swedes and Belgians. A self-reliant conservative citizenry is a better bet than the subjects of an overbearing state.
2004 the Spectator.com.uk
Friday, October 01, 2004
John Podhoretz: Judging the Debate
JUDGING THE DEBATE: A WASTED NIGHT
The New York Post
October 1, 2004 -- IT'S a mark of how high- toned last night's debate was that the only real howler came when John Kerry called the Moscow headquarters of the KGB "Treblinka," which was a Nazi concentration camp, rather than by its actual name, "Lubyanka."
Yes, it was exactly the sort of debate that warms the cockles of every pompous commentator's heart — you know, the sort of person who complains that politics has gotten just so terribly dirty.
The debate was high-minded.
The candidates discussed their differences.
They didn't take cheap shots at each other. Bush said, over and over again, that you need to be consistent and resolute as president. Kerry said, over and over again, that the Iraq war was a mistake but that since the mistake had been made, he had a plan to win it.
They tussled on the question of whether bilateral or multilateral talks are best for dealing with North Korea. They agreed on the role of the African Union in dealing with the problem in Darfur.
The president admired John Kerry's daughters. John Kerry admired the president's wife.
God, was it boring.
Booooooorrrring.
Many people will say — have already said, in fact, because the bloggers never sleep — that because John Kerry stayed in the ring with the president for 90 minutes and didn't get knocked out, he won the night. They say Kerry came off as the president's equal, and that can only help him.
Well, it didn't hurt, but I don't know that it helped very much. That's not because Kerry didn't acquit himself well. He did — though I think he handed Bush an issue when he complained that American research into a nuclear bunker-buster bomb was bad because we are trying to prevent nuclear proliferation.
Message to John Kerry: The United States is not a nuclear proliferator. We are researching that weapon because it might help us take out nuclear sites like the ones you say you're so worried about in Iran and North Korea — or at least scare the pants off people who start playing the proliferation game.
But that's a matter for the blogs and the chat shows to take up over the coming days.
What was important last night was the high tedium factor. It hurts Kerry. Boredom isn't going to do anything to change the dynamics of the race in Kerry's favor. As for the president, because he's leading and because he has the enthusiastic support of his Republican base, Bush needs only to reassure people between now and Nov. 2.
So tedium actually works for him in this context.
Bush wanted to make clear that he intends to win the war in Iraq and that people think of him as a strong leader. He did so by contrasting his own consistency with John Kerry's vacillations — and he did it over and over again, until even his eyes seemed to glaze over from the repetitiveness.
There were no memorable lines. There were no gasp-inducing moments. But there was one grace note between the two men. It came around the 75th minute, so it's possible that half the audience had already found something else to do. Jim Lehrer, who did a magnificent job as moderator, asked the president whether he thought there were character issues that should prevent John Kerry from serving as president.
"Hoo," Bush said. "That's a loaded question." And then he proceeded to praise Kerry's service to the country both in Vietnam and in the Senate (before adding that "I'm not so sure that I admire the record" Kerry compiled as a senator).
That humanizing moment then got a little cloying when Bush started talking about the Kerry and Bush daughters, but it was the kind of thing that can deepen precisely the sense that the president knows and cares about ordinary people.
One more thing. John Kerry said, "They had to close down the subway in New York when the Republican Convention was there."
Um, no. They didn't.
E-mail:
podhoretz@nypost.com
The New York Post
October 1, 2004 -- IT'S a mark of how high- toned last night's debate was that the only real howler came when John Kerry called the Moscow headquarters of the KGB "Treblinka," which was a Nazi concentration camp, rather than by its actual name, "Lubyanka."
Yes, it was exactly the sort of debate that warms the cockles of every pompous commentator's heart — you know, the sort of person who complains that politics has gotten just so terribly dirty.
The debate was high-minded.
The candidates discussed their differences.
They didn't take cheap shots at each other. Bush said, over and over again, that you need to be consistent and resolute as president. Kerry said, over and over again, that the Iraq war was a mistake but that since the mistake had been made, he had a plan to win it.
They tussled on the question of whether bilateral or multilateral talks are best for dealing with North Korea. They agreed on the role of the African Union in dealing with the problem in Darfur.
The president admired John Kerry's daughters. John Kerry admired the president's wife.
God, was it boring.
Booooooorrrring.
Many people will say — have already said, in fact, because the bloggers never sleep — that because John Kerry stayed in the ring with the president for 90 minutes and didn't get knocked out, he won the night. They say Kerry came off as the president's equal, and that can only help him.
Well, it didn't hurt, but I don't know that it helped very much. That's not because Kerry didn't acquit himself well. He did — though I think he handed Bush an issue when he complained that American research into a nuclear bunker-buster bomb was bad because we are trying to prevent nuclear proliferation.
Message to John Kerry: The United States is not a nuclear proliferator. We are researching that weapon because it might help us take out nuclear sites like the ones you say you're so worried about in Iran and North Korea — or at least scare the pants off people who start playing the proliferation game.
But that's a matter for the blogs and the chat shows to take up over the coming days.
What was important last night was the high tedium factor. It hurts Kerry. Boredom isn't going to do anything to change the dynamics of the race in Kerry's favor. As for the president, because he's leading and because he has the enthusiastic support of his Republican base, Bush needs only to reassure people between now and Nov. 2.
So tedium actually works for him in this context.
Bush wanted to make clear that he intends to win the war in Iraq and that people think of him as a strong leader. He did so by contrasting his own consistency with John Kerry's vacillations — and he did it over and over again, until even his eyes seemed to glaze over from the repetitiveness.
There were no memorable lines. There were no gasp-inducing moments. But there was one grace note between the two men. It came around the 75th minute, so it's possible that half the audience had already found something else to do. Jim Lehrer, who did a magnificent job as moderator, asked the president whether he thought there were character issues that should prevent John Kerry from serving as president.
"Hoo," Bush said. "That's a loaded question." And then he proceeded to praise Kerry's service to the country both in Vietnam and in the Senate (before adding that "I'm not so sure that I admire the record" Kerry compiled as a senator).
That humanizing moment then got a little cloying when Bush started talking about the Kerry and Bush daughters, but it was the kind of thing that can deepen precisely the sense that the president knows and cares about ordinary people.
One more thing. John Kerry said, "They had to close down the subway in New York when the Republican Convention was there."
Um, no. They didn't.
E-mail:
podhoretz@nypost.com
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Robert Spencer Reviews Horowitz's "Unholy Alliance"
National Security & Defense
Exposing Leftists' Radical Islam Connection
by Robert Spencer
Posted Sep 29, 2004
http://www.humaneventsonline.com
I have long insisted that the problem of radical Islam is not a liberal or conservative issue; it's a human rights issue. The unfortunate fact, however, is that largely it is only conservatives who care about it. In the face of the global jihad, the left is strangely silent: no protest marches, no angry full-page ads in the New York Times. When the Left does notice an adulterous woman being stoned to death under Sharia law, or some other outrage in the Islamic world, it is usually dismissed as an aberration or somehow blamed on their all-purpose bogeyman: the United States government. Why? Because to the left any conflict in the world must be the result of Western aggression, either historic (the Crusades, colonialism) or current. And as David Horowitz illustrates in harrowing detail in his new book Unholy Alliance, the American left not only shares the radical jihadist view of America as the source of all evil in the world, but is now actively making common cause with America's enemies."The demise of the Cold War involving the USA and the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s left military strategists in the West searching for a new enemy"--and they fastened on radical Islam. This was the assessment of Pakistani journalist Abdus Sattar Ghazali. But it isn't original to him. Horowitz shows that it has become a commonplace among Westerners as well. He quotes Columbia professor Eric Foner in the wake of 9/11: "I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House."
The left, Horowitz recounts, quickly turned its attention entirely away from the murder and mayhem of 9/11 to half-baked "analyses" of the "real causes" of the atrocities of that day. This search for root causes, he says, "was a code for the utopian agendas of the left. It was a declaration of war against the War on Terror"--a war that is being waged with particular ferocity in the 2004 presidential campaign.This anti-anti-terrorism is motivated by an anti-Americanism that was born, as Horowitz details, in Communism and the Vietnam-era antiwar movement.
Although the revolutionary fact (the Soviet bloc) has been consigned to the dustbin of history, the revolutionary illusion persists, and continues to identify America as the chief obstacle to its utopia. Horowitz quotes another Columbia professor, Nicholas De Genova: "Peace is not patriotic [but] subversive. . . . Peace anticipates a very different world than the one in which we live -- a world where the U.S. would have no place." De Genova, of course, won nationwide notoriety when he declared just before the beginning of the Iraq war: "The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military. . . . I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus." Horowitz explains that "as long as America continues to maintain the will and ability to protect what radicals regard as the global order of 'social injustice,' all reforms and social advances within the existing structure of American democracy will be illusory."
In other words, it won't be enough for the left to elect John Kerry: America itself must be brought down. What's more, this creates a peculiar harmonic convergence between the left and radical Islam. "The goals of radical jihad," says Horowitz, "are purification and social justice, both of which are to be achieved through the institution of Islamic law in the states conquered by Islamic arms." Hence we see the phenomenon, which Horowitz traces in detail, of leftists like lawyer Lynne Stewart, who has been indicted for aiding and abetting the terrorist activities of her client, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. Rahman is currently doing time for his role in the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. For this Stewart has been stoutly defended by the ACLU, the American Bar Association, and other stalwarts of the left. "In their defense of America's terrorist enemies," Horowitz notes, "the organizations of the legal left are reminiscent of Communist Party fronts of the Cold War era."Ghazali was right about one thing: Communism and radical Islam are indeed quite similar in many ways. And as Horowitz outlines in this book, the American Left is once again showing what side it's on.
Mr. Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery Publishing -- a HUMAN EVENTS sister company) and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).
Exposing Leftists' Radical Islam Connection
by Robert Spencer
Posted Sep 29, 2004
http://www.humaneventsonline.com
I have long insisted that the problem of radical Islam is not a liberal or conservative issue; it's a human rights issue. The unfortunate fact, however, is that largely it is only conservatives who care about it. In the face of the global jihad, the left is strangely silent: no protest marches, no angry full-page ads in the New York Times. When the Left does notice an adulterous woman being stoned to death under Sharia law, or some other outrage in the Islamic world, it is usually dismissed as an aberration or somehow blamed on their all-purpose bogeyman: the United States government. Why? Because to the left any conflict in the world must be the result of Western aggression, either historic (the Crusades, colonialism) or current. And as David Horowitz illustrates in harrowing detail in his new book Unholy Alliance, the American left not only shares the radical jihadist view of America as the source of all evil in the world, but is now actively making common cause with America's enemies."The demise of the Cold War involving the USA and the Soviet Union at the beginning of the 1990s left military strategists in the West searching for a new enemy"--and they fastened on radical Islam. This was the assessment of Pakistani journalist Abdus Sattar Ghazali. But it isn't original to him. Horowitz shows that it has become a commonplace among Westerners as well. He quotes Columbia professor Eric Foner in the wake of 9/11: "I'm not sure which is more frightening: the horror that engulfed New York City or the apocalyptic rhetoric emanating daily from the White House."
The left, Horowitz recounts, quickly turned its attention entirely away from the murder and mayhem of 9/11 to half-baked "analyses" of the "real causes" of the atrocities of that day. This search for root causes, he says, "was a code for the utopian agendas of the left. It was a declaration of war against the War on Terror"--a war that is being waged with particular ferocity in the 2004 presidential campaign.This anti-anti-terrorism is motivated by an anti-Americanism that was born, as Horowitz details, in Communism and the Vietnam-era antiwar movement.
Although the revolutionary fact (the Soviet bloc) has been consigned to the dustbin of history, the revolutionary illusion persists, and continues to identify America as the chief obstacle to its utopia. Horowitz quotes another Columbia professor, Nicholas De Genova: "Peace is not patriotic [but] subversive. . . . Peace anticipates a very different world than the one in which we live -- a world where the U.S. would have no place." De Genova, of course, won nationwide notoriety when he declared just before the beginning of the Iraq war: "The only true heroes are those who find ways that help defeat the U.S. military. . . . I personally would like to see a million Mogadishus." Horowitz explains that "as long as America continues to maintain the will and ability to protect what radicals regard as the global order of 'social injustice,' all reforms and social advances within the existing structure of American democracy will be illusory."
In other words, it won't be enough for the left to elect John Kerry: America itself must be brought down. What's more, this creates a peculiar harmonic convergence between the left and radical Islam. "The goals of radical jihad," says Horowitz, "are purification and social justice, both of which are to be achieved through the institution of Islamic law in the states conquered by Islamic arms." Hence we see the phenomenon, which Horowitz traces in detail, of leftists like lawyer Lynne Stewart, who has been indicted for aiding and abetting the terrorist activities of her client, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. Rahman is currently doing time for his role in the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. For this Stewart has been stoutly defended by the ACLU, the American Bar Association, and other stalwarts of the left. "In their defense of America's terrorist enemies," Horowitz notes, "the organizations of the legal left are reminiscent of Communist Party fronts of the Cold War era."Ghazali was right about one thing: Communism and radical Islam are indeed quite similar in many ways. And as Horowitz outlines in this book, the American Left is once again showing what side it's on.
Mr. Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery Publishing -- a HUMAN EVENTS sister company) and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).
Stephen F. Hayes: Inconvenient Facts
John Kerry has now decided that he must deny any links between Saddam's Iraq and terrorism. There are some facts which he should be confronted with at tomorrow's debate. 09/29/2004 7:39:00 AM
http://www.weeklystandard.com
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION argues that the Iraq war was the central front in the war on terror. Not long ago, John Kerry agreed. He called Saddam Hussein a terrorist. He worried about Iraq passing weapons to terrorists. His running mate prominently cited Iraq's terrorist connections as a chief reason for the war. As recently as early September, Kerry praised soldiers in Iraq as freedom fighters in the war on terror.
All of this has changed. The Iraq war, Kerry says now with borrowed conviction, was a distraction.
"The invasion of Iraq was a profound diversion from the battle against our greatest enemy: al Qaeda," Kerry claimed, adding, "Iraq is now what it was not before the war--a haven for terrorists."
In an interview with Time magazine, Kerry claimed that the 9/11 Commission found not only that Iraq was not behind the September 11 attacks, but that Iraq had "nothing to do with al Qaeda."
In the past two weeks, his surrogates have gone even further. To wit: "There was no terrorism in Iraq before we went to war," said Stephanie Cutter, chief spokeswoman for the Kerry campaign, on September 9. "Iraq and terrorism had nothing to do with one another. Zero," said Teresa Heinz Kerry in a September 22 speech in Arizona. "Saddam Hussein and Iraq never were a threat to our national security or to the United States," claimed Ted Kennedy in an appearance on Hardball on Monday.
Why is Team Kerry so eager to separate the Iraq war from the broader war on terror? If voters believe that Iraq is an important part of the war on terror, they are more likely to be patient with difficulties there. On the flip side, if Kerry were able to convince voters that the Iraq war was a distraction from the war on terror, he would erode confidence not only in Bush's handling of Iraq but also of the broader war on terror. According to numbers released in yesterday's USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll Kerry needs to do just that. Self-identified likely voters were asked about whether they approve of Bush's handling of the situation in Iraq and the war on terror.
Forty-eight of those surveyed approved of Bush's handling of the "situation in Iraq" and 49 percent disapproved. But the numbers spike when likely voters were asked about Bush's handling of the war on terror; 62 percent approve and only 36 percent disapprove.
So it's not difficult to understand why Kerry's campaign wants to separate Iraq and the war on terror. But to claim that Saddam had "nothing to do with al Qaeda?" That there was no terrorism in Iraq before the war? That Iraq has never been a threat to the United States? These are preposterous statements. They're not debatable, or a matter of interpretation. They are demonstrably false.
Here are some relevant facts about Iraqi support for terrorism:
* On March 28, 1992, the Iraqi Intelligence Service compiled a 20-page list of terrorists the regime considered intelligence assets. Atop each page was the designation "Top Secret." On page 14 of that list is Osama bin Laden. The Iraqi Intelligence document reports that bin Laden "is in good relationship with our section in Syria." The document has been vetted and authenticated by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The existence of the document was first reported on CBS's 60 Minutes. It has been widely ignored.
* Saddam Hussein hosted regular conferences for terrorists in Baghdad throughout the 1990s. Mark Fineman, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, reported on one such gathering in an article published January 26, 1993. "There are delegates from the most committed Islamic organizations on Earth," he wrote. "Afghan mujahideen (holy warriors), Palestinian militants, Sudanese fundamentalists, the Islamic Brotherhood and Pakistan's Party of Islam." One speaker praised "the mujahid Saddam Hussein, who is leading this nation against the nonbelievers. Everyone has a task to do, which is to go against the American state."
* Abdul Rahman Yasin is an Iraqi who mixed the chemicals for the bomb used in the first World Trade Center attack on February 26, 1993. We know this because he has confessed--twice to the FBI and once on national television in the United States. He fled to Iraq on March 5,1993, with the help of an Iraqi Intelligence operative working under cover in the Iraqi Embassy in Amman, Jordan. A reporter for Newsweek interviewed Yasin's neighbors in Baghdad who reported that he was living freely and "working for the government." U.S. soldiers uncovered Iraqi government documents in postwar Iraq that confirm this. The documents show Yasin was given both safe haven and financing by the Iraqi regime until the eve of the war in Iraq.
* Later that same month--March 1993--Wali al Ghazali was approached by an Iraqi Intelligence officer named Abdel Hussein. Ghazali, a male nurse from Najaf, met another IIS agent named Abu Mrouwah who gave him an urgent mission: assassinate former President George H.W. Bush on his upcoming trip to Kuwait. On April 14, Kuwaiti police found Ghazali and other Iraqi Intelligence assets with two hundred pounds of explosives in a Toyota Landcruiser. Ghazali, the would-be assassin, told a Kuwait court that he had "been pushed by people who had no mercy." He said: "I fear the Iraqi regime, the Iraqi regime pushed me."
* According to numerous press reports, the deputy director of Iraqi Intelligence, Faruq Hijazi, met face-to-face with Osama bin Laden in 1994. Bin Laden asked for anti-ship mines and al Qaeda training camps in Iraq. There is no indication that Iraq made good on his requests.
* That same year, according to internal Iraqi Intelligence documents authenticated by the U.S. intelligence community and reported in the June 25, 2004, New York Times, a Sudanese government official met with Uday Hussein and the director of Iraqi Intelligence to facilitate the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.
* According to the New York Times, the same Iraqi Intelligence document said that bin Laden earlier "had some reservations about being labeled an Iraqi operative" and that "presidential approval" had been granted to the Iraqi Intelligence service to meet with him. Bin Laden "also requested join operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia. At bin Laden's request, Saddam Hussein also agreed to broadcast on Iraqi television sermons of an anti-Saudi cleric.
* The Clinton administration cited an "understanding" between Iraq and al Qaeda in its 1998 indictment of Osama bin Laden. "Al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq."
* The 9/11 Commission reports that Iraq and al Qaeda had a series of "friendly contacts" that did not appear to have developed into a "collaborative operations relationship." The final report provides details of meetings between senior Iraqi Intelligence officials and al Qaeda terrorists throughout the spring and summer of 1998 and indicates that "Iraqi official offered bin Laden a safe haven in Iraq."
* The offer of asylum was also included in the Senate Intelligence Committee's unanimous, bipartisan review of prewar intelligence. From p. 335 of the Senate report: "A [CIA Counterterrorism Center] operational summary from April 13, 1999, notes four other intelligence reports mentioning Saddam Hussein's "standing offer of safe haven to Osama bin Laden."
* This, from p. 316 of the Senate Intelligence Committee report: "From 1996 to 2003, the [Iraqi Intelligence Service] focused its terrorist activities on western interests, particularly against the U.S. and Israel. The CIA summarized nearly 50 intelligence reports as examples, using language directly from the intelligence reports. Ten intelligence reports, from multiple sources, indicated IIS 'casing' operations against Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Prague began in 1998 and continued into early 2003. The CIA assessed, based on the Prague casings and a variety of other reporting, that throughout 2002 the IIS was becoming increasingly aggressive in planning attacks against U.S. interests."
* Page 331 of the Senate report: "Twelve reports received [redacted] from sources that the CIA described as having varying reliability, cited Iraq or Iraqi national involvement in al Qaeda's CBW [chemical and biological weapons] efforts."
* Abu Musab al Zarqawi traveled to Iraq in May 2002. He lived in Baghdad with the knowledge--and perhaps sponsorship--of the Iraqi regime. A passage from p. 337 of the Senate Intelligence Committee report cites a CIA report called Iraqi Support for Terrorism: "A variety of reporting indicates that senior al Qaeda terrorist planner al Zarqawi was in Baghdad [redacted]. A foreign government service asserted that the IIS knew where al Zarqawi was located despite Baghdad's claims it could not find him." More, from p. 338: "Al Zarqawi and his network were operating both in Baghdad and in the Kurdish-controlled region of Iraq. The HUMINT reporting indicated that the Iraqi regime certainly knew that al Zarqawi was in Baghdad because a foreign government service gave that information to Iraq."
* More recently, Hudayfa Azzam, the son of bin Laden's longtime mentor Abdullah Azzam, told Agence France Presse that the Iraqi regime worked closely with al Qaeda in Iraq before the war. "Saddam Hussein's regime welcomed them with open arms and young al Qaeda members entered Iraq in large numbers, setting up an organization to confront the occupation," he said in an interview published August 29, 2004. Azzam added that al Qaeda fighters "infiltrated into Iraq with the help of Kurdish mujahideen from Afghanistan, across mountains in Iran" and that once they arrived, Saddam "strictly and directly" controlled their activities.
Does John Kerry truly believe that "Iraq and terrorism had nothing to do with one another?" Good question.
Does Jim Lehrer read THE DAILY STANDARD?
Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and author of The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America.
© Copyright 2004, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
http://www.weeklystandard.com
THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION argues that the Iraq war was the central front in the war on terror. Not long ago, John Kerry agreed. He called Saddam Hussein a terrorist. He worried about Iraq passing weapons to terrorists. His running mate prominently cited Iraq's terrorist connections as a chief reason for the war. As recently as early September, Kerry praised soldiers in Iraq as freedom fighters in the war on terror.
All of this has changed. The Iraq war, Kerry says now with borrowed conviction, was a distraction.
"The invasion of Iraq was a profound diversion from the battle against our greatest enemy: al Qaeda," Kerry claimed, adding, "Iraq is now what it was not before the war--a haven for terrorists."
In an interview with Time magazine, Kerry claimed that the 9/11 Commission found not only that Iraq was not behind the September 11 attacks, but that Iraq had "nothing to do with al Qaeda."
In the past two weeks, his surrogates have gone even further. To wit: "There was no terrorism in Iraq before we went to war," said Stephanie Cutter, chief spokeswoman for the Kerry campaign, on September 9. "Iraq and terrorism had nothing to do with one another. Zero," said Teresa Heinz Kerry in a September 22 speech in Arizona. "Saddam Hussein and Iraq never were a threat to our national security or to the United States," claimed Ted Kennedy in an appearance on Hardball on Monday.
Why is Team Kerry so eager to separate the Iraq war from the broader war on terror? If voters believe that Iraq is an important part of the war on terror, they are more likely to be patient with difficulties there. On the flip side, if Kerry were able to convince voters that the Iraq war was a distraction from the war on terror, he would erode confidence not only in Bush's handling of Iraq but also of the broader war on terror. According to numbers released in yesterday's USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll Kerry needs to do just that. Self-identified likely voters were asked about whether they approve of Bush's handling of the situation in Iraq and the war on terror.
Forty-eight of those surveyed approved of Bush's handling of the "situation in Iraq" and 49 percent disapproved. But the numbers spike when likely voters were asked about Bush's handling of the war on terror; 62 percent approve and only 36 percent disapprove.
So it's not difficult to understand why Kerry's campaign wants to separate Iraq and the war on terror. But to claim that Saddam had "nothing to do with al Qaeda?" That there was no terrorism in Iraq before the war? That Iraq has never been a threat to the United States? These are preposterous statements. They're not debatable, or a matter of interpretation. They are demonstrably false.
Here are some relevant facts about Iraqi support for terrorism:
* On March 28, 1992, the Iraqi Intelligence Service compiled a 20-page list of terrorists the regime considered intelligence assets. Atop each page was the designation "Top Secret." On page 14 of that list is Osama bin Laden. The Iraqi Intelligence document reports that bin Laden "is in good relationship with our section in Syria." The document has been vetted and authenticated by the Defense Intelligence Agency. The existence of the document was first reported on CBS's 60 Minutes. It has been widely ignored.
* Saddam Hussein hosted regular conferences for terrorists in Baghdad throughout the 1990s. Mark Fineman, a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, reported on one such gathering in an article published January 26, 1993. "There are delegates from the most committed Islamic organizations on Earth," he wrote. "Afghan mujahideen (holy warriors), Palestinian militants, Sudanese fundamentalists, the Islamic Brotherhood and Pakistan's Party of Islam." One speaker praised "the mujahid Saddam Hussein, who is leading this nation against the nonbelievers. Everyone has a task to do, which is to go against the American state."
* Abdul Rahman Yasin is an Iraqi who mixed the chemicals for the bomb used in the first World Trade Center attack on February 26, 1993. We know this because he has confessed--twice to the FBI and once on national television in the United States. He fled to Iraq on March 5,1993, with the help of an Iraqi Intelligence operative working under cover in the Iraqi Embassy in Amman, Jordan. A reporter for Newsweek interviewed Yasin's neighbors in Baghdad who reported that he was living freely and "working for the government." U.S. soldiers uncovered Iraqi government documents in postwar Iraq that confirm this. The documents show Yasin was given both safe haven and financing by the Iraqi regime until the eve of the war in Iraq.
* Later that same month--March 1993--Wali al Ghazali was approached by an Iraqi Intelligence officer named Abdel Hussein. Ghazali, a male nurse from Najaf, met another IIS agent named Abu Mrouwah who gave him an urgent mission: assassinate former President George H.W. Bush on his upcoming trip to Kuwait. On April 14, Kuwaiti police found Ghazali and other Iraqi Intelligence assets with two hundred pounds of explosives in a Toyota Landcruiser. Ghazali, the would-be assassin, told a Kuwait court that he had "been pushed by people who had no mercy." He said: "I fear the Iraqi regime, the Iraqi regime pushed me."
* According to numerous press reports, the deputy director of Iraqi Intelligence, Faruq Hijazi, met face-to-face with Osama bin Laden in 1994. Bin Laden asked for anti-ship mines and al Qaeda training camps in Iraq. There is no indication that Iraq made good on his requests.
* That same year, according to internal Iraqi Intelligence documents authenticated by the U.S. intelligence community and reported in the June 25, 2004, New York Times, a Sudanese government official met with Uday Hussein and the director of Iraqi Intelligence to facilitate the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.
* According to the New York Times, the same Iraqi Intelligence document said that bin Laden earlier "had some reservations about being labeled an Iraqi operative" and that "presidential approval" had been granted to the Iraqi Intelligence service to meet with him. Bin Laden "also requested join operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia. At bin Laden's request, Saddam Hussein also agreed to broadcast on Iraqi television sermons of an anti-Saudi cleric.
* The Clinton administration cited an "understanding" between Iraq and al Qaeda in its 1998 indictment of Osama bin Laden. "Al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq."
* The 9/11 Commission reports that Iraq and al Qaeda had a series of "friendly contacts" that did not appear to have developed into a "collaborative operations relationship." The final report provides details of meetings between senior Iraqi Intelligence officials and al Qaeda terrorists throughout the spring and summer of 1998 and indicates that "Iraqi official offered bin Laden a safe haven in Iraq."
* The offer of asylum was also included in the Senate Intelligence Committee's unanimous, bipartisan review of prewar intelligence. From p. 335 of the Senate report: "A [CIA Counterterrorism Center] operational summary from April 13, 1999, notes four other intelligence reports mentioning Saddam Hussein's "standing offer of safe haven to Osama bin Laden."
* This, from p. 316 of the Senate Intelligence Committee report: "From 1996 to 2003, the [Iraqi Intelligence Service] focused its terrorist activities on western interests, particularly against the U.S. and Israel. The CIA summarized nearly 50 intelligence reports as examples, using language directly from the intelligence reports. Ten intelligence reports, from multiple sources, indicated IIS 'casing' operations against Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty in Prague began in 1998 and continued into early 2003. The CIA assessed, based on the Prague casings and a variety of other reporting, that throughout 2002 the IIS was becoming increasingly aggressive in planning attacks against U.S. interests."
* Page 331 of the Senate report: "Twelve reports received [redacted] from sources that the CIA described as having varying reliability, cited Iraq or Iraqi national involvement in al Qaeda's CBW [chemical and biological weapons] efforts."
* Abu Musab al Zarqawi traveled to Iraq in May 2002. He lived in Baghdad with the knowledge--and perhaps sponsorship--of the Iraqi regime. A passage from p. 337 of the Senate Intelligence Committee report cites a CIA report called Iraqi Support for Terrorism: "A variety of reporting indicates that senior al Qaeda terrorist planner al Zarqawi was in Baghdad [redacted]. A foreign government service asserted that the IIS knew where al Zarqawi was located despite Baghdad's claims it could not find him." More, from p. 338: "Al Zarqawi and his network were operating both in Baghdad and in the Kurdish-controlled region of Iraq. The HUMINT reporting indicated that the Iraqi regime certainly knew that al Zarqawi was in Baghdad because a foreign government service gave that information to Iraq."
* More recently, Hudayfa Azzam, the son of bin Laden's longtime mentor Abdullah Azzam, told Agence France Presse that the Iraqi regime worked closely with al Qaeda in Iraq before the war. "Saddam Hussein's regime welcomed them with open arms and young al Qaeda members entered Iraq in large numbers, setting up an organization to confront the occupation," he said in an interview published August 29, 2004. Azzam added that al Qaeda fighters "infiltrated into Iraq with the help of Kurdish mujahideen from Afghanistan, across mountains in Iran" and that once they arrived, Saddam "strictly and directly" controlled their activities.
Does John Kerry truly believe that "Iraq and terrorism had nothing to do with one another?" Good question.
Does Jim Lehrer read THE DAILY STANDARD?
Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard and author of The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America.
© Copyright 2004, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
Mark Steyn: Polygamy, Coming Soon
http://www.marksteyn.com
The better advocates of gay marriage are an ingenious crowd, full of artful arguments to support their claim. Initially, most of us on the other side found it hard to believe a countervailing argument was necessary, and by the time it became clear that neither “Oh, come off it, you can’t be serious” nor “Well, I dunno, it just don’t sound right” were going to suffice, the gays were already on their way to victory in the only arenas that matter – the media and the courts.
But the activists’ intellectual rigor only goes so far. If you suggest, as some defendants of “traditional marriage” do, that gay marriage is the slippery slope to polygamy and bestiality, the activists roll their eyes and go into “Oh, come off it, you can’t be serious” mode. Like the chichi gay couple from New York who’ve built their dream home in rural Vermont, they don’t want any other incomers muscling in. Gay marriage, they assure us, is the merest amendment to traditional marriage, and once we’ve done that we’ll pull up the drawbridge.
Sorry, but it’s not going to work like that. If you can get ‘em past the don’t-be-so-ridiculous stage, the gays point out that there are no constituencies clamoring for polygamy and bestiality. That’s true in the latter case. There aren’t many “zoo couples” (as they’re known) demanding their rights. Offhand, I can think only of Phillip Buble of Maine, who petitioned the Piscataquis County Superior Court a couple of years back to allow his spouse to attend a hearing with him. (“I’ve been informed your personal permission is needed given that my wife is not human, being a dog of about 36lbs weight and very well behaved.” The letter ended with his signature and a paw-print, and underneath them the words “Phillip and Lady Buble”.)
But there’s a very obvious constituency for polygamy and it says something about the monumental self-absorption of the gay marriage crowd that they seem unaware of it. Indeed, it’s already here. Earlier this summer, Le Monde leaked a government report revealing that polygamy was routinely practiced in Muslim ghettoes in France. Anecdotal evidence suggests things aren’t so very different in the Islamic communities of Ontario: as The Christian Science Monitor airily put it, polygamous unions “are being performed by the same religious figures adjudicating matters under sharia” – ie, under the province’s Muslim-friendly Arbitration Act.
Another clue to what’s going on comes in the invaluable British publication Pensions News, which had an interesting item about a hitherto arcane point of law. Contracting marriage with more than one spouse simultaneously is a crime in the United Kingdom. However, if a polygamous marriage is entered into abroad in a jurisdiction permitting polygamy, that marriage is regarded as valid under English law. Hence, the interest of Pensions News. Previously, spousal inheritance was a relatively simple matter: you kick the bucket and your wife gets a big payout. Now it’s relatively less simple, relative-wise: trustees of pensions funds were concerned that, under new anti-discrimination regulations which came into effect in Britain last year, they’d be obligated to payout to more than one widow, thus doubling, trebling or quadrupling their liability. For the moment, they’ve been reassured that they’re unlikely to have to pay full widow’s benefits automatically to every relict of a polygamous marriage, but that what benefits are paid out have to be shared between all the widows.
But you see how easy it is to start talking about polygamy in a nuts-and-bolts, incremental, utilitarian, legal-harmonisation partners’-benefits insurance-agent kind of a way. It’s not a hypothetical issue: apparently many British subjects marry one spouse in Leicester or Bradford and then, while on a trip back to their homeland, marry another. Given immigration patterns in Canada and given the number of legal residents with dual citizenship, I wouldn’t expect things to be so very different over here. And, if so, it’s inevitable that at some point, in Vancouver or Toronto or Halifax, a local version of Puspo Wardoyo will turn up.
Mr Wardoyo owns 34 grilled chicken restaurants throughout Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country but one in which polygamy was suppressed under the Suharto dictatorship. Now Mr Wardoyo has taken it up eagerly: he has four wives, is having a swell time of it, and wants to spread the word. On the menu at his eateries, he offers a “polygamy stir-fry” washed down with a “polygamy juice”, a mélange of four crushed fruits. In Canada, the fruits will be crushed to hear it, but once you’ve accepted the argument that the gender of the participants is no longer relevant to the definition of marriage, it’s hard to see why the number of participants should be.
One day, a Canadian Wardoyo will emerge, and the game will be on. How do you think our courts and media will react? If the push for polygamy came from the white male elders of that breakaway Mormon sect in Bountiful, BC, it’d be dead in the water: all you’d get from the Globe and the CBC and Maclean’s would be a lot of stories about the abuse rumours, and shots of stern Old Testament patriarchs, and comments from various Grits and NDPers about how this is not compatible with “our Canadian values”. If you’re one of Bountiful’s nubile nymphettes and you make it across the town line, you can write your own ticket on The National; they’ll put you down for one of those major multi-part documentaries that takes up 52 minutes of the show for an entire week.
But, if it’s not horny stump-toothed white guys from the backwoods, what’s the betting then? Once it gets all multicultural, the media back away from the in-depth investigations, happy to take the spokespersons for the relevant lobby groups at their word. If it’s a Muslim who finally makes it to the Supreme Court of Canada with a polygamy case, I’d reckon their lordships will rule that forbidding it is an unwarranted restriction of Charter rights. And I’d wager a few of those justices will be happy to license polygamy if only to prove that their demolition job on “traditional marriage” was legally grounded rather than mere modish solidarity.
Think that sounds ridiculous? Well, look at what happened in Dublin a couple of months ago: The Irish Government decided to make Muslim men who apply for citizenship sign an affidavit that, if they’re single, they’ll take no more than one wife and, if they’re already married, that they’ll take no additional wives. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties immediately denounced the move as offensive, racist and discriminatory.
Imagine the same thing here. You can’t. No Canadian Government would propose making certain groups of immigrants sign affidavits on any wedding plans they might have. When it comes to fainthearted officialdom, Canadian polygamists are more fortunate than Irish ones. And, as the ICCL’s reaction suggests, one of the lessons of the world since September 11th is that on the left counter-tribalism trumps all: if it’s a choice between a traditionally restrictive view of marriage or polygamy, the lefties will go with the imams. The same progressive groups who objected to the Iraq war on the grounds that Saddam was a secular leader who’d never make common cause with Islamic fundamentalists didn’t seem to notice that, for the purposes of opposing Bush and Blair, they themselves, as impeccably pro-gay pro-feminist western bien pensants, had had no trouble making common cause with the women-enslaving sodomite-beheading Islamists. It hardly seemed fair to require greater intellectual coherence from Saddam than from themselves, and indeed the bizarre western-left/Islamist-theocrat alliance of convenience looks like becoming a permanent feature of the post-9/11 world.
In France, where the courts uphold the central government’s enforcement of French identity, polygamy will remain in the shadows. But in Canada for years now the philosophers of the Liberal state have acknowledged – and, indeed, even boasted – that immigration changes our country. In the cheap-anti-monarchism of a John Manley or Brian Tobin, the well-worn line is that an immigrant from Latvia or China can’t be expected to relate to the House of Windsor. In other words, we have accepted the principle that immigration involves not the immigrant assimilating to his new land but his new land assimilating to him. That being so, what share of the population has to be Muslim for the prohibition on more-than-two-person marriage to be, in Manley-Tobin logic, indefensible? We’re closer than you think.The Western Standard, September 13th 2004
~ Mark's column can be read every fortnight in The Western Standard. In the current issue, don't miss Steyn on not mentioning Canada, only in the print edition of The Western Standard, on newsstands now - or click here to subscribe.
The better advocates of gay marriage are an ingenious crowd, full of artful arguments to support their claim. Initially, most of us on the other side found it hard to believe a countervailing argument was necessary, and by the time it became clear that neither “Oh, come off it, you can’t be serious” nor “Well, I dunno, it just don’t sound right” were going to suffice, the gays were already on their way to victory in the only arenas that matter – the media and the courts.
But the activists’ intellectual rigor only goes so far. If you suggest, as some defendants of “traditional marriage” do, that gay marriage is the slippery slope to polygamy and bestiality, the activists roll their eyes and go into “Oh, come off it, you can’t be serious” mode. Like the chichi gay couple from New York who’ve built their dream home in rural Vermont, they don’t want any other incomers muscling in. Gay marriage, they assure us, is the merest amendment to traditional marriage, and once we’ve done that we’ll pull up the drawbridge.
Sorry, but it’s not going to work like that. If you can get ‘em past the don’t-be-so-ridiculous stage, the gays point out that there are no constituencies clamoring for polygamy and bestiality. That’s true in the latter case. There aren’t many “zoo couples” (as they’re known) demanding their rights. Offhand, I can think only of Phillip Buble of Maine, who petitioned the Piscataquis County Superior Court a couple of years back to allow his spouse to attend a hearing with him. (“I’ve been informed your personal permission is needed given that my wife is not human, being a dog of about 36lbs weight and very well behaved.” The letter ended with his signature and a paw-print, and underneath them the words “Phillip and Lady Buble”.)
But there’s a very obvious constituency for polygamy and it says something about the monumental self-absorption of the gay marriage crowd that they seem unaware of it. Indeed, it’s already here. Earlier this summer, Le Monde leaked a government report revealing that polygamy was routinely practiced in Muslim ghettoes in France. Anecdotal evidence suggests things aren’t so very different in the Islamic communities of Ontario: as The Christian Science Monitor airily put it, polygamous unions “are being performed by the same religious figures adjudicating matters under sharia” – ie, under the province’s Muslim-friendly Arbitration Act.
Another clue to what’s going on comes in the invaluable British publication Pensions News, which had an interesting item about a hitherto arcane point of law. Contracting marriage with more than one spouse simultaneously is a crime in the United Kingdom. However, if a polygamous marriage is entered into abroad in a jurisdiction permitting polygamy, that marriage is regarded as valid under English law. Hence, the interest of Pensions News. Previously, spousal inheritance was a relatively simple matter: you kick the bucket and your wife gets a big payout. Now it’s relatively less simple, relative-wise: trustees of pensions funds were concerned that, under new anti-discrimination regulations which came into effect in Britain last year, they’d be obligated to payout to more than one widow, thus doubling, trebling or quadrupling their liability. For the moment, they’ve been reassured that they’re unlikely to have to pay full widow’s benefits automatically to every relict of a polygamous marriage, but that what benefits are paid out have to be shared between all the widows.
But you see how easy it is to start talking about polygamy in a nuts-and-bolts, incremental, utilitarian, legal-harmonisation partners’-benefits insurance-agent kind of a way. It’s not a hypothetical issue: apparently many British subjects marry one spouse in Leicester or Bradford and then, while on a trip back to their homeland, marry another. Given immigration patterns in Canada and given the number of legal residents with dual citizenship, I wouldn’t expect things to be so very different over here. And, if so, it’s inevitable that at some point, in Vancouver or Toronto or Halifax, a local version of Puspo Wardoyo will turn up.
Mr Wardoyo owns 34 grilled chicken restaurants throughout Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim country but one in which polygamy was suppressed under the Suharto dictatorship. Now Mr Wardoyo has taken it up eagerly: he has four wives, is having a swell time of it, and wants to spread the word. On the menu at his eateries, he offers a “polygamy stir-fry” washed down with a “polygamy juice”, a mélange of four crushed fruits. In Canada, the fruits will be crushed to hear it, but once you’ve accepted the argument that the gender of the participants is no longer relevant to the definition of marriage, it’s hard to see why the number of participants should be.
One day, a Canadian Wardoyo will emerge, and the game will be on. How do you think our courts and media will react? If the push for polygamy came from the white male elders of that breakaway Mormon sect in Bountiful, BC, it’d be dead in the water: all you’d get from the Globe and the CBC and Maclean’s would be a lot of stories about the abuse rumours, and shots of stern Old Testament patriarchs, and comments from various Grits and NDPers about how this is not compatible with “our Canadian values”. If you’re one of Bountiful’s nubile nymphettes and you make it across the town line, you can write your own ticket on The National; they’ll put you down for one of those major multi-part documentaries that takes up 52 minutes of the show for an entire week.
But, if it’s not horny stump-toothed white guys from the backwoods, what’s the betting then? Once it gets all multicultural, the media back away from the in-depth investigations, happy to take the spokespersons for the relevant lobby groups at their word. If it’s a Muslim who finally makes it to the Supreme Court of Canada with a polygamy case, I’d reckon their lordships will rule that forbidding it is an unwarranted restriction of Charter rights. And I’d wager a few of those justices will be happy to license polygamy if only to prove that their demolition job on “traditional marriage” was legally grounded rather than mere modish solidarity.
Think that sounds ridiculous? Well, look at what happened in Dublin a couple of months ago: The Irish Government decided to make Muslim men who apply for citizenship sign an affidavit that, if they’re single, they’ll take no more than one wife and, if they’re already married, that they’ll take no additional wives. The Irish Council for Civil Liberties immediately denounced the move as offensive, racist and discriminatory.
Imagine the same thing here. You can’t. No Canadian Government would propose making certain groups of immigrants sign affidavits on any wedding plans they might have. When it comes to fainthearted officialdom, Canadian polygamists are more fortunate than Irish ones. And, as the ICCL’s reaction suggests, one of the lessons of the world since September 11th is that on the left counter-tribalism trumps all: if it’s a choice between a traditionally restrictive view of marriage or polygamy, the lefties will go with the imams. The same progressive groups who objected to the Iraq war on the grounds that Saddam was a secular leader who’d never make common cause with Islamic fundamentalists didn’t seem to notice that, for the purposes of opposing Bush and Blair, they themselves, as impeccably pro-gay pro-feminist western bien pensants, had had no trouble making common cause with the women-enslaving sodomite-beheading Islamists. It hardly seemed fair to require greater intellectual coherence from Saddam than from themselves, and indeed the bizarre western-left/Islamist-theocrat alliance of convenience looks like becoming a permanent feature of the post-9/11 world.
In France, where the courts uphold the central government’s enforcement of French identity, polygamy will remain in the shadows. But in Canada for years now the philosophers of the Liberal state have acknowledged – and, indeed, even boasted – that immigration changes our country. In the cheap-anti-monarchism of a John Manley or Brian Tobin, the well-worn line is that an immigrant from Latvia or China can’t be expected to relate to the House of Windsor. In other words, we have accepted the principle that immigration involves not the immigrant assimilating to his new land but his new land assimilating to him. That being so, what share of the population has to be Muslim for the prohibition on more-than-two-person marriage to be, in Manley-Tobin logic, indefensible? We’re closer than you think.The Western Standard, September 13th 2004
~ Mark's column can be read every fortnight in The Western Standard. In the current issue, don't miss Steyn on not mentioning Canada, only in the print edition of The Western Standard, on newsstands now - or click here to subscribe.
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Christopher Hitchens: Flirting With Disaster
The vile spectacle of Democrats rooting for bad news in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Posted Monday, Sept. 27, 2004, at 11:35 AM PT
Slate.com
There it was at the tail end of Brian Faler's "Politics" roundup column in last Saturday's Washington Post. It was headed, simply, "Quotable":
"I wouldn't be surprised if he appeared in the next month." Teresa Heinz Kerry to the Phoenix Business Journal, referring to a possible capture of Osama bin Laden before Election Day.
As well as being "quotable" (and I wish it had been more widely reported, and I hope that someone will ask the Kerry campaign or the nominee himself to disown it), this is also many other words ending in "-able." Deplorable, detestable, unforgivable. …
The plain implication is that the Bush administration is stashing Bin Laden somewhere, or somehow keeping his arrest in reserve, for an "October surprise." This innuendo would appear, on the face of it, to go a little further than "impugning the patriotism" of the president. It argues, after all, for something like collusion on his part with a man who has murdered thousands of Americans as well as hundreds of Muslim civilians in other countries.
I am not one of those who likes to tease Mrs. Kerry for her "loose cannon" style. This is only the second time I have ever mentioned her in print. But I happen to know that this is not an instance of loose lips. She has heard that very remark being made by senior Democrats, and—which is worse—she has not heard anyone in her circle respond to it by saying, "Don't be so bloody stupid." I first heard this "October surprise" theory mentioned seriously, by a prominent foreign-policy Democrat, at an open dinner table in Washington about six months ago. Since then, I've heard it said seriously or semiseriously, by responsible and liberal people who ought to know better, all over the place. It got even worse when the Democratic establishment decided on an arm's-length or closer relationship with Michael Moore and his supposedly vote-getting piece of mendacity and paranoia, Fahrenheit 9/11. (The DNC's boss, Terence McAuliffe, asked outside the Uptown cinema on Connecticut Avenue whether he honestly believed that the administration had invaded Afghanistan for the sake of an oil or perhaps gas pipeline, breezily responded, "I do now.")
What will it take to convince these people that this is not a year, or a time, to be dicking around? Americans are patrolling a front line in Afghanistan, where it would be impossible with 10 times the troop strength to protect all potential voters on Oct. 9 from Taliban/al-Qaida murder and sabotage. We are invited to believe that these hard-pressed soldiers of ours take time off to keep Osama Bin Laden in a secret cave, ready to uncork him when they get a call from Karl Rove? For shame.
Ever since The New Yorker published a near-obituary piece for the Kerry campaign, in the form of an autopsy for the Robert Shrum style, there has been a salad of articles prematurely analyzing "what went wrong." This must be nasty for Democratic activists to read, and I say "nasty" because I hear the way they respond to it. A few pin a vague hope on the so-called "debates"—which are actually joint press conferences allowing no direct exchange between the candidates—but most are much more cynical. Some really bad news from Iraq, or perhaps Afghanistan, and/or a sudden collapse or crisis in the stock market, and Kerry might yet "turn things around." You have heard it, all right, and perhaps even said it. But you may not have appreciated how depraved are its implications. If you calculate that only a disaster of some kind can save your candidate, then you are in danger of harboring a subliminal need for bad news.
And it will show. What else explains the amazingly crude and philistine remarks of that campaign genius Joe Lockhart, commenting on the visit of the new Iraqi prime minister and calling him a "puppet"? Here is the only regional leader who is even trying to hold an election, and he is greeted with an ungenerous sneer.
The unfortunately necessary corollary of this—that bad news for the American cause in wartime would be good for Kerry—is that good news would be bad for him. Thus, in Mrs. Kerry's brainless and witless offhand yet pregnant remark, we hear the sick thud of the other shoe dropping. How can the Democrats possibly have gotten themselves into a position where they even suspect that a victory for the Zarqawi or Bin Laden forces would in some way be welcome to them? Or that the capture or killing of Bin Laden would not be something to celebrate with a whole heart?
I think that this detail is very important because the Kerry camp often strives to give the impression that its difference with the president is one of degree but not of kind. Of course we all welcome the end of Taliban rule and even the departure of Saddam Hussein, but we can't remain silent about the way policy has been messed up and compromised and even lied about. I know what it's like to feel that way because it is the way I actually do feel. But I also know the difference when I see it, and I have known some of the liberal world quite well and for a long time, and there are quite obviously people close to the leadership of today's Democratic Party who do not at all hope that the battle goes well in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I have written before in this space that I think Bin Laden is probably dead, and I certainly think that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a far more ruthless and dangerous jihadist, who is trying to take a much more important country into the orbit of medieval fanaticism and misery. One might argue about that: I could even maintain that it's important to oppose and defeat both gentlemen and their supporters. But unless he conclusively repudiates the obvious defeatists in his own party (and maybe even his own family), we shall be able to say that John Kerry's campaign is a distraction from the fight against al-Qaida.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His new collection of essays, Love, Poverty and War, is forthcoming in October.
More fighting words
Flirting With Disaster The vile spectacle of Democrats rooting for bad news in Iraq and Afghanistan. posted Sept. 27, 2004- Christopher Hitchens
A Thousand Killed What a little-known British poet named Bernard Spencer knew. posted Sept. 9, 2004- Christopher Hitchens
Murder by Any Other Name The rest of the world may be tiring of jihad, but The Nation isn't. posted Sept. 7, 2004- Christopher Hitchens
The Captive Mind Now What Czeslaw Milosz understood about Islam. posted Aug. 30, 2004- Christopher Hitchens
Not So Swift John Kerry's dubious Vietnam revisionism. posted Aug. 23, 2004- Christopher Hitchens
Search for more Fighting Words in our archive.
Posted Monday, Sept. 27, 2004, at 11:35 AM PT
Slate.com
There it was at the tail end of Brian Faler's "Politics" roundup column in last Saturday's Washington Post. It was headed, simply, "Quotable":
"I wouldn't be surprised if he appeared in the next month." Teresa Heinz Kerry to the Phoenix Business Journal, referring to a possible capture of Osama bin Laden before Election Day.
As well as being "quotable" (and I wish it had been more widely reported, and I hope that someone will ask the Kerry campaign or the nominee himself to disown it), this is also many other words ending in "-able." Deplorable, detestable, unforgivable. …
The plain implication is that the Bush administration is stashing Bin Laden somewhere, or somehow keeping his arrest in reserve, for an "October surprise." This innuendo would appear, on the face of it, to go a little further than "impugning the patriotism" of the president. It argues, after all, for something like collusion on his part with a man who has murdered thousands of Americans as well as hundreds of Muslim civilians in other countries.
I am not one of those who likes to tease Mrs. Kerry for her "loose cannon" style. This is only the second time I have ever mentioned her in print. But I happen to know that this is not an instance of loose lips. She has heard that very remark being made by senior Democrats, and—which is worse—she has not heard anyone in her circle respond to it by saying, "Don't be so bloody stupid." I first heard this "October surprise" theory mentioned seriously, by a prominent foreign-policy Democrat, at an open dinner table in Washington about six months ago. Since then, I've heard it said seriously or semiseriously, by responsible and liberal people who ought to know better, all over the place. It got even worse when the Democratic establishment decided on an arm's-length or closer relationship with Michael Moore and his supposedly vote-getting piece of mendacity and paranoia, Fahrenheit 9/11. (The DNC's boss, Terence McAuliffe, asked outside the Uptown cinema on Connecticut Avenue whether he honestly believed that the administration had invaded Afghanistan for the sake of an oil or perhaps gas pipeline, breezily responded, "I do now.")
What will it take to convince these people that this is not a year, or a time, to be dicking around? Americans are patrolling a front line in Afghanistan, where it would be impossible with 10 times the troop strength to protect all potential voters on Oct. 9 from Taliban/al-Qaida murder and sabotage. We are invited to believe that these hard-pressed soldiers of ours take time off to keep Osama Bin Laden in a secret cave, ready to uncork him when they get a call from Karl Rove? For shame.
Ever since The New Yorker published a near-obituary piece for the Kerry campaign, in the form of an autopsy for the Robert Shrum style, there has been a salad of articles prematurely analyzing "what went wrong." This must be nasty for Democratic activists to read, and I say "nasty" because I hear the way they respond to it. A few pin a vague hope on the so-called "debates"—which are actually joint press conferences allowing no direct exchange between the candidates—but most are much more cynical. Some really bad news from Iraq, or perhaps Afghanistan, and/or a sudden collapse or crisis in the stock market, and Kerry might yet "turn things around." You have heard it, all right, and perhaps even said it. But you may not have appreciated how depraved are its implications. If you calculate that only a disaster of some kind can save your candidate, then you are in danger of harboring a subliminal need for bad news.
And it will show. What else explains the amazingly crude and philistine remarks of that campaign genius Joe Lockhart, commenting on the visit of the new Iraqi prime minister and calling him a "puppet"? Here is the only regional leader who is even trying to hold an election, and he is greeted with an ungenerous sneer.
The unfortunately necessary corollary of this—that bad news for the American cause in wartime would be good for Kerry—is that good news would be bad for him. Thus, in Mrs. Kerry's brainless and witless offhand yet pregnant remark, we hear the sick thud of the other shoe dropping. How can the Democrats possibly have gotten themselves into a position where they even suspect that a victory for the Zarqawi or Bin Laden forces would in some way be welcome to them? Or that the capture or killing of Bin Laden would not be something to celebrate with a whole heart?
I think that this detail is very important because the Kerry camp often strives to give the impression that its difference with the president is one of degree but not of kind. Of course we all welcome the end of Taliban rule and even the departure of Saddam Hussein, but we can't remain silent about the way policy has been messed up and compromised and even lied about. I know what it's like to feel that way because it is the way I actually do feel. But I also know the difference when I see it, and I have known some of the liberal world quite well and for a long time, and there are quite obviously people close to the leadership of today's Democratic Party who do not at all hope that the battle goes well in Afghanistan and Iraq.
I have written before in this space that I think Bin Laden is probably dead, and I certainly think that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a far more ruthless and dangerous jihadist, who is trying to take a much more important country into the orbit of medieval fanaticism and misery. One might argue about that: I could even maintain that it's important to oppose and defeat both gentlemen and their supporters. But unless he conclusively repudiates the obvious defeatists in his own party (and maybe even his own family), we shall be able to say that John Kerry's campaign is a distraction from the fight against al-Qaida.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His new collection of essays, Love, Poverty and War, is forthcoming in October.
More fighting words
Flirting With Disaster The vile spectacle of Democrats rooting for bad news in Iraq and Afghanistan. posted Sept. 27, 2004- Christopher Hitchens
A Thousand Killed What a little-known British poet named Bernard Spencer knew. posted Sept. 9, 2004- Christopher Hitchens
Murder by Any Other Name The rest of the world may be tiring of jihad, but The Nation isn't. posted Sept. 7, 2004- Christopher Hitchens
The Captive Mind Now What Czeslaw Milosz understood about Islam. posted Aug. 30, 2004- Christopher Hitchens
Not So Swift John Kerry's dubious Vietnam revisionism. posted Aug. 23, 2004- Christopher Hitchens
Search for more Fighting Words in our archive.
Monday, September 27, 2004
Stanley Crouch: Defying Terror is the Only Answer
The New York Daily News
Prior to taping "Topic A with Tina Brown" last week, I was shown some footage of the latest decapitation by Islamic jihadists. There was talk on the set of the high production values, with the video including singing in a Middle Eastern style that was, perhaps, close enough to Western music to remain in the mind of one listening.
It seemed, some thought, that these murderous clowns are on to something, that they have learned how to create visual "product."
Apparently, they have studied MTV and other such television phenomena to learn how to put together a moment that builds up to a murder.
By the time the man was pushed flat and had his head sawed off, though, I found myself not frightened or intimidated by this "product" but filled with a combination of revulsion, gloom and fury.
These murderers are the same kind of people we see photographed and standing proudly at lynchings, happy as the day is long because the strange fruit of a Negro is hanging from a tree. Anybody who believes differently is some species of lunatic or naif or fool.
History is always a hard taskmaster.
Human beings can quite often be no more compassionate than nature, which maintains its balance through one species eating enough of another to keep things from getting out of order.
Of course, there is little compassion in nature and even less empathy.
As far as we know, human beings are the only ones who can imagine themselves outside of their bodies and even outside of their cultures to the extent that empathizing with others is possible.
I am not at all interested in empathizing, in "understanding" how America and Israel have, through warlike blunders of one sort or another, given life to the cause championed by these murderers. No atrocities, real or asserted, validate the actions of these people or dealing with them on any terms defined by them.
Xenophobia is at the root of what we are looking at when we see these beheadings or read about them. The destruction of that xenophobia - the fear of others - is what must breed civilization in our time.
There is no point in bargaining with barbarians. They can only take you into a world of black air.
We can never give in to them or let them believe that kidnapping and videotaped murder - no matter how sophisticated the production - is going to turn any nation around.
Originally published on September 27, 2004
Prior to taping "Topic A with Tina Brown" last week, I was shown some footage of the latest decapitation by Islamic jihadists. There was talk on the set of the high production values, with the video including singing in a Middle Eastern style that was, perhaps, close enough to Western music to remain in the mind of one listening.
It seemed, some thought, that these murderous clowns are on to something, that they have learned how to create visual "product."
Apparently, they have studied MTV and other such television phenomena to learn how to put together a moment that builds up to a murder.
By the time the man was pushed flat and had his head sawed off, though, I found myself not frightened or intimidated by this "product" but filled with a combination of revulsion, gloom and fury.
These murderers are the same kind of people we see photographed and standing proudly at lynchings, happy as the day is long because the strange fruit of a Negro is hanging from a tree. Anybody who believes differently is some species of lunatic or naif or fool.
History is always a hard taskmaster.
Human beings can quite often be no more compassionate than nature, which maintains its balance through one species eating enough of another to keep things from getting out of order.
Of course, there is little compassion in nature and even less empathy.
As far as we know, human beings are the only ones who can imagine themselves outside of their bodies and even outside of their cultures to the extent that empathizing with others is possible.
I am not at all interested in empathizing, in "understanding" how America and Israel have, through warlike blunders of one sort or another, given life to the cause championed by these murderers. No atrocities, real or asserted, validate the actions of these people or dealing with them on any terms defined by them.
Xenophobia is at the root of what we are looking at when we see these beheadings or read about them. The destruction of that xenophobia - the fear of others - is what must breed civilization in our time.
There is no point in bargaining with barbarians. They can only take you into a world of black air.
We can never give in to them or let them believe that kidnapping and videotaped murder - no matter how sophisticated the production - is going to turn any nation around.
Originally published on September 27, 2004
Sunday, September 26, 2004
Washington Times Editorial: Undermining Border Security
26 September 2004
Two stories in the news during the past week illustrate the cavalier approach this country takes toward immigration and national security in wartime. The first deals with efforts by a prominent senator to compel the Department of Homeland Security to change its policy of releasing illegal immigrants with potential terrorist ties into the United States. The second is efforts by open-borders advocates to prevent state and local law enforcement from cooperating with immigration authorities to apprehend illegals in our midst.
Homeland Security officials told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee that more than 4,000 people from nations identified by the State Department as national security concerns or sponsors of terrorism were apprehended since 2000 and that an "unknown number" were released back into the United States. In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, the chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee on immigration and border security, Sen. Charles Grassley, expressed his dissatisfaction with this state of affairs. Mr. Grassley says that Homeland Security's answers to the panel's questions show the department concluded that it was impractical to detain those people. So, it decided to release them even though it lacked information on whether any of them "were terrorists or associated with terrorist links," Mr. Grassley said. The query is part of an investigation into the detention of non-Mexican illegal aliens. Mr. Grassley said the department's practice of releasing these people after their capture is "alarming." We agree.
But DHS has a different view of reality. In its responses to Mr. Grassley's questions, Homeland Security said it was "not practical" to detain all non-criminal non-Mexicans during immigration proceedings. The department also said that most such people are released, that a majority fail to appear for immigration hearings and that they "simply disappear into the United States." Mr. Grassley points to these and other known lapses in border security as a "potential public safety threat." He is absolutely correct, and Mr. Grassley is performing a public service by highlighting the problem.
Unfortunately, much of the discussion of immigration in recent days was hijacked by groups like the National Council of La Raza, the AFL-CIO and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which staged a series of demonstrations and media events on Capitol Hill and across the country to lobby for "immigrant rights." A central goal of these groups is defeating the Clear Law Enforcement for Alien Removal, or CLEAR Act, which would strengthen the authority of the nation's 600,000 state and local police officers to assist in the enforcement of federal immigration law. CLEAR is a critical law enforcement tool. It should be taken up and passed by Congress next year.
Two stories in the news during the past week illustrate the cavalier approach this country takes toward immigration and national security in wartime. The first deals with efforts by a prominent senator to compel the Department of Homeland Security to change its policy of releasing illegal immigrants with potential terrorist ties into the United States. The second is efforts by open-borders advocates to prevent state and local law enforcement from cooperating with immigration authorities to apprehend illegals in our midst.
Homeland Security officials told a Senate Judiciary subcommittee that more than 4,000 people from nations identified by the State Department as national security concerns or sponsors of terrorism were apprehended since 2000 and that an "unknown number" were released back into the United States. In a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, the chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee on immigration and border security, Sen. Charles Grassley, expressed his dissatisfaction with this state of affairs. Mr. Grassley says that Homeland Security's answers to the panel's questions show the department concluded that it was impractical to detain those people. So, it decided to release them even though it lacked information on whether any of them "were terrorists or associated with terrorist links," Mr. Grassley said. The query is part of an investigation into the detention of non-Mexican illegal aliens. Mr. Grassley said the department's practice of releasing these people after their capture is "alarming." We agree.
But DHS has a different view of reality. In its responses to Mr. Grassley's questions, Homeland Security said it was "not practical" to detain all non-criminal non-Mexicans during immigration proceedings. The department also said that most such people are released, that a majority fail to appear for immigration hearings and that they "simply disappear into the United States." Mr. Grassley points to these and other known lapses in border security as a "potential public safety threat." He is absolutely correct, and Mr. Grassley is performing a public service by highlighting the problem.
Unfortunately, much of the discussion of immigration in recent days was hijacked by groups like the National Council of La Raza, the AFL-CIO and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which staged a series of demonstrations and media events on Capitol Hill and across the country to lobby for "immigrant rights." A central goal of these groups is defeating the Clear Law Enforcement for Alien Removal, or CLEAR Act, which would strengthen the authority of the nation's 600,000 state and local police officers to assist in the enforcement of federal immigration law. CLEAR is a critical law enforcement tool. It should be taken up and passed by Congress next year.
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