Springsteen warmed up Oslo

Afternposten
"News From Norway"
http://www.aftenposten.no/english/
First published: 08 Jul 2008, 11:09

The 40,000 fans who packed Oslo's Valle Hovin stadium Monday night didn't seem to care that it was cold and damp outdoors. The man they came to see, legendary rocker Bruce Springsteen, delivered a concert that was fabulous by most accounts, and warmed up everyone.

Some fans braved cold rain to start lining up outside the stadium early Monday morning, in the hopes of getting the best spots near the stage. The concert had sold out in a matter of minutes when tickets went on sales months ago, and a second concert was scheduled for Tuesday night. It was sold out as well.

"The Boss" was back in Oslo, and delivered a concert (here with Little Steven) that won top marks from critics and fans alike.
PHOTO: MAGNUS KNUTSEN BJØRKE

Diehard fans Terje Bergan and Roar Bakken had come straight from Springsteen's concert in Stockholm. They hadn't reckoned with all the early arrivals, so hopes of getting spots near the stage faded quickly.

It didn't seem to matter. Bakken, president of Springsteen's Norwegian fan club "Blood Brothers," looked forward to the concert anyway, since a new line-up of music was likely. "The thing that's so exciting with this concert tour is that he changes 16 or 17 of the songs from concert to concert," said Bakken, who figured out that Monday night's event was the 30th time he'd been in Springsteen's audience.

Roar Bakken (left), Øyvind Hagen and Terje Bergan on their way into the Springsteen concert in Oslo Monday evening.
PHOTO: MAGNUS KNUTSEN BJØRKE

Few were happier when it was all over than Lena Milde, age 47, and her daughter Mia, 18. They'd fitted themselves out with a sign asking for a kiss, and they both got one.

"It was just incredible, it went so fast," said Lena. Springsteen had spotted their sign, climbed down from the stage and kissed both of them.

"Suddenly he was just standing there," marveled Lena, who's been a Springsteen fan since the early 1980s. "It was unreal. Great fun."

The entire concert turned into what the Norwegians affectionately call a folkefest, literally a "peoples' party." From his opening hit "Two Hearts," through "Hungry Heart," "The River," "Born to Run" and "American Land" some 30 songs later, Springsteen absolutely thrilled the crowd.

Lena and Mia Milde got their request filled, much to their own amazement.
PHOTO: HANS O. TORGERSEN

As one critic wrote in Aftenposten, "In Bruce Springsteen's world, the term spilleglede (joy of playing) takes on a whole new meaning..." Springsteen was described as "a storyteller, a charmer, a comrade and the successful boy-next-door," all at once.

Commenting on the sheer energy of a man approaching 60, Springsteen was described as, "put simply, quite special."

Another 40,000 or so fans could look forward to Tuesday night's concert back at Valle Hovin. And the sun was even shining.

Aftenposten English Web Desk
Nina Berglund

Setlist- July 7 / Oslo, NOR / Valle Hovin Stadion

Two Hearts
Radio Nowhere
No Surrender
Lonesome Day
Hungry Heart
Cover Me
Cadillac Ranch
Gypsy Biker
The River
Atlantic City
Prove It All Night
Darlington County
The Promised Land
Because the Night
She's the One
Livin' in the Future
Mary's Place
Waitin' on a Sunny Day
Racing in the Street
The Rising
Last to Die
Long Walk Home
Badlands
* * *
Tenth Avenue Freeze-out
Born to Run
Bobby Jean
Glory Days
Seven Nights to Rock
Dancing in the Dark
American Land

photograph by Jan Lundahl

Setlist- July 8 / Oslo, NOR / Valle Hovin Stadion

Night
Out in the Street
Radio Nowhere
Adam Raised a Cain
Spirit in the Night
Growin' Up
You Can Look (But You Better Not Touch)
The Promised Land
If I Should Fall Behind
I’ll Work for Your Love
Roulette
Trapped
Murder Incorporated
Working on the Highway
Livin' in the Future
Mary's Place
Waitin' on a Sunny Day
From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come)
The Rising
Born in the U.S.A.
Last to Die
Long Walk Home
Badlands
* * *
Girls in Their Summer Clothes
Hungry Heart
Thunder Road
Born to Run
Bobby Jean
American Land
Twist and Shout

State Dept. Stands Alone on Virginia Saudi School

by IPT
IPT News
http://www.investigativeproject.org/

June 26, 2008



Christine Brim of Fairfax County, an official with the District-based Center for Security Policy, joins a protest at the Islamic Saudi Academy in Alexandria on Tuesday. "They don't have a First Amendment right in this country to incite violence against other groups," she said.
The Washington Times


Updated July 1, 1:25 p.m. EST - High school students in the Wahhabi-led school learn that "the Jews conspired against Islam" and Sunni Muslims should shun all Shia Muslims. They also are taught that killing an apostate or an adulterer is acceptable under Islamic law. And polytheists (defined elsewhere as Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews and even Shia and Sufi Muslims) likewise can be subject to death for their transgressions.

It is troubling enough to consider such lessons being ingrained in the minds of teenagers in Riyadh and throughout the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. But the same textbooks are in use in Alexandria, Va., at the Islamic Saudi Academy (ISA), a report issued earlier in June by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) found.

The school issued a statement disputing the findings as "erroneous," and claiming the commission used "mistranslated and misinterpreted texts, and references to textbooks that are no longer in use at the Academy."

But this week, the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, which leases property to the Saudi Academy, appealed to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice for guidance. According to a local news report, Fairfax County Chairman Gerry Connolly, who signed the letter, "offered a strong defense of the Islamic Saudi Academy and accused the school's critics of slander during a meeting last month in which the school's lease was" renewed.

*Updated July 1: The Traditional Values Coaltion has called on Connolly to return a $500 to his congressional campaign from Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). The Coalition statement said Awad gave the contribution under the name "Nehad Hammad," which Awad listed on CAIR's 1994 Internal Revenue Service Form 990. The Coalition statement asks whether Connolly's previous support for the Academy was influenced by "leaders of radical Islam involved in or financing Mr. Connolly's campaign?"
Aside from his previous defenses, Fairfax County now the county seems less sure about the Saudi Academy, as its letter to Rice indicates:

"As a local governmental entity, Fairfax County is not capable of determining whether textbooks, written in Arabic, contain language that promotes violence of religious intolerance, or is otherwise offensive to the interests of the United States. The County simply does not employ the linguists and scholars required to make such a determination, and more important, such an effort is well beyond the scope and responsibility of local government."

Early indications are that the State Department won't be of much assistance. In a news briefing after the USCIRF report was released, spokesman Gonzalo Gallegos told reporters the department expected all the questionable passages would be gone by the start of fall classes. But when asked why the Department wasn't issuing more of an ultimatum, spokeswoman Nicole Thompson minimized the government's role in the book controversy.

"This is a private school," Thompson said. "It is not a part of the Saudi embassy. It is not part of a diplomatic mission."

That seems to be the crux of the dispute. The USCIRF notes that the Saudi ambassador to Washington leads the school's board of directors, the Saudi Embassy owns one of the school's two properties and leases the other from Fairfax County and the ISA receives funding from the embassy, while sharing the embassy's IRS employer identification number.

In a report last October, the commission cited the Foreign Missions Act, which it says empowers the Secretary of State to regulate foreign missions in the United States, going so far as to force a mission to divest itself of a property:

The ISA is an arm of the Saudi Government, and the US Government has a right to stop foreign governments from engaging in activities on our soil in violation of the Foreign Missions Act, particularly because significant past documented concerns remain about whether what is being taught at the ISA explicitly promotes hate, intolerance and human rights violations, in some cases violence, and therefore may adversely affect the interests of the United States.

The State Department either disagrees or is reluctant to wield such a heavy stick. It has copies of textbooks used at the Islamic Saudi Academy and those books are being reviewed, Thompson said. She could not say by whom, or whether the results of that review would be released to the public.

Fairfax County's letter marks the fourth time in less than a year that government representatives have appealed to the State Department to act. In citing the Foreign Missions Act, the USCIRF report last fall urged that the school be shut down until it can prove the offending textbooks have been replaced. A handful of U.S. House members, including Steve Israel (D-NY) and Frank Wolf (R-Va.) introduced Continuing Resolution 262, which asked the State Department to grant the Commission's requests about ISA textbooks and create a way to track reforms that the Saudis promised back in 2006.

That call was followed by a letter from a dozen U.S. Senators, led by Arizona Republican John Kyl, expressing concern that State Department officials have claimed progress on Saudi education reform, but little tangible gains can be seen. That is due, in part, to the Saudi government's refusal to grant full access to the textbooks. "Despite this lack of transparency, the State Department has repeatedly asserted that reforms have been made," the letter said.

In a response, Assistant Secretary for Legislative Affairs Jeffrey Bergner never directly addresses the Senators' requests, but notes:

"The Foreign Missions Act provides the Department broad authority to regulate foreign missions in the United States in order to facilitate relations, to protect the interests of the United States, and for other specified purposes. The Department has not determined that action against the ISA under the FMA is appropriate, but will continue to carefully monitor the situation."

"I guess we need to know what ‘monitoring the situation' means," said USCIRF spokeswoman Judith Ingram. "It would be good to know where the books are in the State Department. Which office is holding them?"

In addition, State Department officials have defied repeated requests by the USCIRF for access to those textbooks. Department officials have not explained why they will not share the books, but repeatedly say the Academy has offered its book directly to the USCIRF for review. "[W]e understand that ISA has offered to make textbooks available to USCIRF," Bergner wrote in his letter to the senators.

Many of the books were collected by a congressional staffer at an ISA open house last fall. But a 12th grade textbook in the report – which discusses whether killing an apostate is allowable – wasn't at the open house. The USCIRF obtained a copy from Ali al-Ahmed, a Saudi scholar and activist who directs the Institute for Gulf Affairs. He has monitored education in the kingdom and at the ISA for the past seven years. Parents of ISA students help him keep track of the textbooks in use, he said.

"They have never been straight in giving a complete set of textbooks," al-Ahmed said in an interview.

That concerns seems to be shared by Wolf, who wrote his own letter to Rice Tuesday asking "that the State Department provide a complete English translation of the textbooks and issue an official assessment of the material contained in these books."

"The United States government owes it to those who are concerned and to the parents and students at the ISA to thoroughly examine this matter and find out the truth about the content of the textbooks in question," the letter continued. Wolf added a biting, handwritten postscript next to his signature:

"The State Department is not doing its duty."

Saudi officials acknowledged intolerant teachings in its textbooks and promised a comprehensive reform nearly two years ago. A CNN report at the time rings familiar to those monitoring the debate today:

Saudi Arabia said it had expunged all intolerant language from its textbooks. But a recent review of Saudi texts for the current academic year by the group Freedom House revealed, despite Saudi statements to the contrary, an ideology of hatred toward Christians, Jews and Muslims who do not follow the Wahhabi version of Islam.

Books al-Ahmed obtained do show signs of editing. In some cases, offending pages have been physically removed. Other sentences are whited out. What's left, he said, is a more subtle approach that doesn't alter the underlying message.

"There are still some problems," he said. "It is not harmless when you talk about the polytheists and you remove the section naming the polytheists, including Christians, Jews and other Muslims. It still says kill the polytheists."

Meanwhile, as detailed by Andrew Cochran at the Counterterrorism Blog, the school's 1999 valedictorian, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, was convicted in 2005 of joining Al Qaeda and plotting to assassinate President Bush. The 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the conviction earlier in June.

The school received additional unwelcome attention two days before the USCIRF report's release, when principal Abdallah I. Al-Shabnan was arrested by Fairfax County police for obstruction of justice. Al-Shabnan is accused of failing to report sexual abuse allegations by a 5-year-old student against her father.

According to an Arab News report:

Police said in court papers that Al-Shabnan ordered a written report about the girl's complaint, which had been prepared by other school officials, to be deleted from a school computer.

Virginia state law requires school officials to report allegations of abuse within 72 hours.

"At no time did Mr. Al-Shabnan report the allegations to any child protective agency or law enforcement agency," an affidavit for a search warrant filed in the Fairfax County Circuit Court says. "He further stated that he was not aware that he was required to make such a report."

Court documents also say Al-Shabnan "stated he did not believe the girl's complaint and felt she may be attempting to gain attention."

The State Department, as spokeswoman Thompson indicated, sees no need to draw a harder line against the Saudis even when it comes to Saudi influence over an American-based school.

"Diplomatic actions don't always yield results immediately. Of course we would want the Saudis to not promote intolerance in the textbooks that they use," Thompson said.

"We will continue to work with the Saudis on this issue."

The Oprahization of Academia

University classrooms are starting to look a lot like Oprah as the Western canon is replaced with emotive, postmodern bunkum.

July 7, 2008 - by Mary Grabar

http://pajamasmedia.com/


Oprah Winfrey, talk show host and philanthropist, gives a commencement speech to Stanford's University class of 2008 in Palo Alto, California, June 15, 2008. Winfrey topped Forbes magazine's list of most powerful celebrities list for the second year in a row, based on fame and earnings.REUTERS/Kimberly White (UNITED STATES)

I suppose I should not have been surprised that Oprah Winfrey gave the commencement address at Stanford University.

My college classroom, if I follow the dominant pedagogical directives, should resemble Oprah’s emotive coffee klatches. The mantra of workshops and orientations is “Be the guide on the side, not the sage on the stage.” Every time I am advised in an article about pedagogy to be such a “facilitator,” I think of the therapist who “facilitates” a couple with an ailing marriage into pouring out their deepest childhood fears in front of a national audience. Of course, our national facilitator is Oprah, who offers either motherly praise after a make-over or reassurance after a teary public confession.

And it’s something that I sense my students have come to expect, already versed as they are in the mantra of “I feel” and “that’s your opinion.” The hands are quick to pop up when I pose a question like “Did you like the poem?” or “What did you think of the Misfit?” But when it comes time to closely interpret a couple of lines from Paradise Lost, most of the students (those who have brought the book) do not deign even to look at the page. Few bother to note my clarifications or explications. My colleagues repeat similar observations.

Oprah is us. Course offerings on Oprah appear in college catalogs, while those on Milton disappear.

The same fate is befalling living intellectuals. Compare the welcome Oprah got at prestigious Stanford — as first choice of the selection committee and with calls of “I love you” from graduating seniors — to the faculty petition against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas at my alma mater, the University of Georgia, a land grant university with a reputation for parties and football.

I blame it on women, specifically those women who, instead of working their ways into the club through rules of evidence, common values, and objective scholarship, have pushed in their alternate “ways of knowing.” The feminization of education has led to the idolization of Oprah. In the matriarchal upheaval in the academy, the great works of the canon that draw from our Western tradition, like Milton’s majestic Paradise Lost, are replaced by crudely rendered emotive investigations into oppression, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” or any of the “multicultural” offerings in the latest anthology.

In addition to eviscerating the canon to add women’s writing, of whatever dubious value (personal letters, diary entries, popular books), the academic feminists’ project was to attack the base of our way of thinking, which they correctly traced back to the notion of a monotheistic God who created a universe with an order based on reason, however indiscernible that at times might be to those he endowed with reason. The matriarchs’ attacks began on linearity, logic, argumentation — the very notion of the individual thinking self. Theorists promoting the “maternal presence in the classroom” accused even the thesis statement of the freshman five-paragraph essay of having embedded within it masculine goal-oriented thinking that in a rapacious manner eliminates weaker ideas.

Repeatedly, in the literature and in instructor orientations, I have been enjoined to encourage students in “group work,” to use the classroom to promote a more equitable society, to refrain from telling a student her answer is “wrong,” and to encourage the exploration of feelings through assignments.

In Feminism and Composition Studies, a volume emblematic of the scholarship that teachers and directors of freshman composition participate in, old assumptions about what students should be taught are replaced. Taking issue with such commonsense notions that writing courses are “firmly grounded in the ‘self’ of the writer-student” and “based on the notion of the subject as a rational, coherent individual who, at times, is present to himself,” Mas’ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton reveal their agenda: “Writing courses … have become the last bastion of defense of traditional humanism against radical (post)modern critical theory.” My former boss at the University of Georgia, the director of the largest freshman composition program in the state, provides her own contribution to this volume in an essay advocating “a pedagogy based on a feminist politics of friendship”; for support, she cites such theories as bell hooks’s rejection of “phallic logic.”

In the years around and after 1991, when this volume was published, fluid, emotive group experiences, facilitated by the teacher, have become the standard mode. Perhaps, most females, by nature, thrive in such environments. And there is a place for such interaction — the nursery or kindergarten classroom.

The feminist imperative, not to exclude anyone from the playground, however, applies only to those who play by their — new — rules.
Consider this description in The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing of an article in the prestigious journal College English:

Students frequently attack a teacher’s feminist perspective as something personal that does not belong in the classroom. … Feminist teachers should recognize that teaching these students will be a form of persuasion, in which they need to adopt an authoritative but not authoritarian position in setting the course’s ethical agenda. … In seeking to persuade students to feminism, teachers should aim to provoke not only resistance to sexism but also identification … with feminism’s egalitarian vision of the social order.

What about those who resist “feminism’s egalitarian vision of the social order”? Our rapidly dwindling number of male college students, especially in the humanities, may evidence that this new feminine “social order” is smothering to them. At departmental meetings as a temporary assistant professor at one of the low-rung state universities in Georgia, I felt smothered by the preponderance of women, all feminist, in attendance. The fact that I was served cookies by the department head did not ease the pain of watching an older gentlemanly “man of letters,” a Shakespeare scholar, steamrollered over with the ideas of these women as they assertively proposed and incorporated such nonsense as the study of ladies’ undergarments and rap lyrics into the curriculum.

It makes me wonder if women as a group are simply not as suited to the academic or intellectual life. Contrary to the propaganda about the bad old 1950s, women scholars were working alongside men, though not in as large a number. Their scholarship stands head and shoulders above the nonsensical babbling of today’s feminist. And they weren’t driving men out of the classroom either, as my thesis director, a former student of the late Marjory Nicolson, attests.

One would expect that the saccharine gushing from Oprah as a commencement speech would have raised an objection at least from those who are not in her fan base, the men. Adam Gorlick of Stanford News Service accurately sums up her speech as another rendition of her standard theme of “feelings, failure, and finding happiness” — and organized in an associative, fluid manner. According to Jack Hubbard, associate director of news services at Stanford, other than one online letter criticizing the speaker’s lack of intellectual accomplishments, Oprah was “very well-received.” In fact, my call to ask if formal objections had been raised was greeted with a tone of wonder at the possibility of such a question.

Oprah not only gave the pep talk that believing in yourself is even more important than formal education, but left graduates two gifts on their seats, Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth and Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind. A whole new mind, indeed. These books are the popular version of the new philosophy reigning in the academy. Only a couple of my fifteen students last semester recognized the reference to “judge not that we be not judged” in Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address: “It’s somewhere in the Bible, isn’t it?” they asked.

Need we say more to demonstrate how far our educational system has deteriorated in the hands of women and weak men?

- Mary Grabar earned her Ph.D. in English from the University of Georgia and teaches in the Atlanta area. She is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and published fiction writer. Visit her website and get on her mailing list at marygrabar.com.

Today's Tune: Luciano Pavarotti - Ave Maria

(Click on title to play video)

Why GOP is Losing the Working Class

By Rod Dreher
Dallas Morning News
http://www.dallasnews.com/
July 07, 2008

In her 2001 memoir of seminary life, Episcopal priest Chloe Breyer expressed befuddlement that the Rikers Island inmates to whom she was ministering mocked her liberal approach to religion.

"They want answers, not questions," Ms. Breyer wrote in frustration. "The more contradictions I point out in the Bible, the more the inmates decide there is no point in wasting their time with a religion that lacks answers."

Can you blame them? The poor and working class tend to prefer non-squishy religion prescribing a stark moral code - even if they struggle to live up to its demands. It's not hard to see why. Unlike Ms. Breyer, whose father is a Supreme Court justice, and other social elites, folks living nearer the economic margins have far more to lose from individual and communal moral failure.

A Mexican immigrant housekeeper whose husband works on the road told me that her Pentecostal congregation in Dallas is the only thing she has to help her keep her teenage girls on a path to a stable future. Given the skyrocketing teen pregnancy rate among Latinas, you can see why a mother like this housekeeper gravitates toward Pentecostalism, not liberal Protestantism or laissez-faire Catholicism.

This innate cultural conservatism partly explains why the white working classes have voted Republican over the past generation (and why blacks, despite being reliably Democratic in their voting habits, are fairly conservative in their social views). Democrats see these Republican voters as closet racists at worst or, at best, dupes of Republican wedge politics.

This is condescending and mostly wrong. In fact, when you fear a loss of control over your future, identifying with culturally conservative candidates is a reasonable response.

Elites look at working-class anxiety over illegal immigration and see only nativism. What elites don't, or won't, see is that the working classes are pressed harder by the presence of illegal immigrants, in ways that typically don't affect academics, media types or affluent suburbanites.

Cultural issues have played a paramount role in American party politics since the late 1960s and have been a key determinant in voting (on the left and the right) during the long Reagan and post-Reagan economic boom. But now, with the nation facing what some economists warn is its worst fiscal crisis since the Great Depression, that may change. And Republicans have no idea what to do about it.

In their thoughtful and important new book, Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream, young conservative journalists Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam point out that while Democrats are clueless about why cultural values can produce material suffering, Republicans fail to grasp how economics can affect cultural decline.

Liberals correctly call out conservatives, they write, for "diagnosing the working class' cultural problems and then pretending that those problems are the only ones there are."

"In reality, you can't disentangle the sociological trends that have created familial instability from the economic trends, at home and worldwide, that have increased financial insecurity for working-class voters," they continue. "Divorce and illegitimacy lead to economic disadvantage, but the reverse is also true."

Mr. Douthat and Mr. Salam, two of the brightest comers in the next generation of conservative public intellectuals, offer policy proposals designed to appeal to working-class voters by shoring up families and addressing economic insecurity (as distinct from economic inequality).

They show that the most reliable Republican voters are actually more socially conservative, suspicious of big business and favor a larger government role in helping families manage economic risk than the GOP's stale rhetoric would allow.

Mike Huckabee's surprising success in the GOP primaries, to say nothing of Barack Obama's skill in peeling away some conservatives by feinting rightward on culture and religion, suggests an emerging centrist constituency that's culturally conservative but economically liberal.

What does the Republican Party have to offer these voters? The tried-and-true tax-cut litany is as stale as anything Walter Mondale had to say in 1984. Free-market clichés may suit GOP money men and radio talkers, but they do not satisfy working-class voters for whom the changing economic order undermines family stability.

Though Grand New Party doesn't provide all the answers, it asks the right questions. After this fall's election results, the shell- shocked Republican leadership will be catching up to Mr. Douthat and Mr. Salam, who are pioneering tomorrow's conservatism today.

Rod Dreher is a Dallas Morning News editorial columnist. His e-mail address is rdreher@dallasnews.com.

The Jesse Helms You Should Remember

By Marc Thiessen

The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Monday, July 7, 2008; A13

In this Aug. 22, 2001 photo, Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., gives the thumbs-up sign as he leaves WRAL-TV in Raleigh, N.C., Wednesday, after taping a announcement that he will retire when his current term ends in 2003. Helms has died at age 86, the Jesse Helms research center says.(AP Photo/Grant Halverson, file)

With the passing of Sen. Jesse Helms, the media have demonstrated one final time that they never fully understood the power or impact of this great man. Consider, for example, The Post's obituary of Helms; here are some things you would not learn about his life and legacy by reading it:

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Helms led the successful effort to bring Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic into the NATO alliance. He secured passage of bipartisan legislation to protect our men and women in uniform from the International Criminal Court. He won overwhelming approval for his legislation to support the Cuban people in their struggle against a tyrant. He won majority support in the Senate for his opposition to the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. He helped secure passage of the National Missile Defense Act and stopped the Clinton administration from concluding a new anti-ballistic missile agreement in its final months in office -- paving the way for today's deployment of America's first defenses against ballistic missile attack. He helped secure passage of the Iraq Liberation Act, which expressed strong bipartisan support for regime change in Baghdad. He secured broad, bipartisan support to reorganize the State Department and bring much-needed reform to the United Nations, and he became the first legislator from any nation to address the U.N. Security Council -- a speech few in that chamber will forget.

Watching this record of achievement unfold, columnist William Safire wrote in 1997: "Jesse Helms, bete noire of knee-jerk liberals . . . is turning out to be the most effectively bipartisan chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee since Arthur Vandenberg. . . . Let us see if he gets the credit for statesmanship that he deserves from a striped-pants establishment." This weekend, we got our answer.

What his critics could not appreciate is that, by the time he left office, Jesse Helms had become a mainstream conservative. And it was not because Helms had moved toward the mainstream -- it was because the mainstream moved toward him.

When Helms arrived in Washington in 1973, conservatives were a minority not only in our nation's capital but also within the Republican Party. He often took to the floor as the lonely opposition in 99-to-1 votes. By the time he became chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in 1995, Republicans were in the majority in the Senate and conservatives were in control of the Republican Party. And Helms was winning floor votes by wide bipartisan majorities.

What made Helms stand out was his willingness to stand up for his beliefs before they were widely held -- even if it meant challenging those closest to him. In 1985, his dear friend Ronald Reagan was preparing for his first summit with Mikhail Gorbachev when a Ukrainian sailor named Miroslav Medvid twice jumped off a Soviet ship into the Mississippi River seeking political asylum. The Soviets insisted that Medvid had accidentally fallen off -- twice. The State Department did not want an international incident on the eve of the summit. But Helms believed it was wrong to send a man back behind the Iron Curtain -- no matter the cost to superpower diplomacy. He tried to block the ship's departure by requiring the sailor to appear before the Senate Agriculture Committee, which he chaired then -- and he had the subpoena delivered to the ship's unwitting captain in a carton of North Carolina cigarettes.

Despite Helms's efforts, the ship was allowed to leave for the Soviet Union with the Ukrainian sailor aboard. Miroslav Medvid was not heard from again until 15 years later, when he came to Washington to visit the man who fought so hard for his freedom. I was working at the time on Helms's Foreign Relations Committee staff and witnessed this emotional meeting. Yes, Medvid told Helms, he had been trying to escape -- that was why he joined the Merchant Marine in the first place. When he was returned to the Soviet Union, he said, he was incarcerated in a mental hospital for the criminally insane. The KGB tried to drug him, but a sympathetic nurse injected the drugs into his mattress. Eventually he was released; today he is a parish priest in his native village in Ukraine.

In the course of dozens of interrogations, he told Helms, "the KGB didn't fulfill its desire about what they wanted to do with me. They were afraid of something," he said, "and now I know what they were afraid of." They were afraid of Jesse Helms.

President Bush had it right when he said on Friday that "from Central America to Central Europe and beyond, people remember: In the dark days when the forces of tyranny seemed on the rise, Jesse Helms took their side." This is the Jesse Helms that Miroslav Medvid remembers. Unfortunately, it was not the Jesse Helms written about this weekend.

The writer, the chief White House speechwriter, was Foreign Relations Committee spokesman for Sen. Jesse Helms from 1995 to 2001.

'Spiritual' Democrats and the Satanic Rape Ritual

By Jon Sanders

http://www.townhall.com/

July 7, 2008

Joy Suzanne Johnson, left, and Joseph Scott Craig.

In Durham, N.C., a leader in the local Democrat Party and her husband are facing multiple charges in what WTVD ABC 11 News called "a satanic ritual that got out of hand." Charges in the case include kidnapping, rape, sexual assault, and assault with a deadly weapon.

Now this is Durham, remember, where approximately one out of every 98 rape cases becomes news and several of those have turned out to be hoaxes. In other words, don't let the suspects be nifonged. Let the criminal justice system work as it should, without pot-banging activists demanding the accused's immediate neutering, Duke professors denouncing America (more), Nancy Grace getting her dander up (more), and all that rot.

That having been said, the report prompts the question of when, exactly, a satanic ritual gets out of hand. Most would probably say something along the lines of "When you called it 'satanic,' see, that's when." But for those who agreed to such a ritual, where would they draw the line?

A look at the allegations is in order at this point. The initial report on WTVD was that "Joy Johnson watched as her husband, Joseph Craig, beat and raped a female victim then kidnapped and beat another male victim with a wooden cane and a cable cord." Craig, 25, has been charged with second-degree rape, second-degree forcible sexual offense, three counts of second-degree kidnapping and two counts of assault with a deadly weapon. His wife, Johnson, 30, faces charges of aiding and abetting. The News & Observer of Raleigh reported that arrest warrants "accuse Johnson of 'instigating and encouraging' her husband as he handcuffed a man and forced him 'into a dog cage, leaving him there for hours, terrorizing him.'"

According to reports, Craig is a dispatcher for a waste disposal service. Johnson was a third vice chairwoman of the Durham County Democratic Party and vice chairwoman of the Young Democrats (she has since resigned).

The first vice chairwoman (when does naming vice chairwomen get out of hand?), Diana Palmer, was later charged with one count of accessory after the fact. Her lawyer asserts that his client had no association with a satanic cult nor had any knowledge of a crime being committed. And this is still Durham.

Palmer is a business partner with Johnson and Craig in a venture called "Indigo Dawn," which was "founded to raise the vibration of energy on Earth" (don't tell Al Gore) and which styles itself "your resource for spiritual growth." (Technically, satanism is "spiritual.") Products and service include "astral projection oil," "dream pillows," "Chakra/aura cleansing" (and who doesn't hate those stubborn Chakra/aura stains?), "Rune-casting," "past-life regression" (which presumably involves imagining oneself as the infant Napoleon), "Shamanic healing," and private lessons in "Establishing a coven" (which, for the record, are not called "Easy-Make Covens").

There doesn't seem to be anything about handcuffs, dog cages, rape, sexual assault, beatings with coaxial cable, etc., but maybe those are covered in private lessons under the umbrella "Others made by request for your specific needs." Or, this being Durham, maybe those were all made up.

The "Who We Are" section of their web site is instructive. There Craig is known as "Rev. Joseph Craig," who claims that he has lived on this earth before and is a "devout student of magick and self-discovery" and perhaps alternative spelling. His biography also includes the plea "Do not judge this young man by his age, for his soul goes far beyond this," whatever that means.

Johnson's biography tells the origin of the business' name: "The Indigo Dawn started as a vision during a meditation where she was clearly shown the enlightenment glyph and given the name Indigo Dawn." Only time will tell whether she should have been clearly shown the Don't Egg On a Satanic Rapist glyph, assuming there is such a thing. It also tells of her reviving and presiding over the N.C. Association of Teen Democrats, serving as vice president of Young Democrats in Durham County, presiding over the United Nations Association of Wake County, and serving on the Human Relations Commission of Durham, N.C.

She also "traveled to Iraq with the Christian Peacemaker Team." One can only imagine how that came about. Did Johnson promote herself as "spiritual" to insinuate herself among the "Christian Peacemakers" or was the group that desperate? If the latter, what if the head of the CPT joked, "Hey, we'll take pretty much anyone. Just so long as you don't take part in any, I don't know, satanic rape rituals or something, ha ha ha!"

Those musings aside, it's still not clear exactly when a satanic ritual gets out of hand. There are the alleged kidnapping, handcuffing in a dog cage, beatings, terrorizing, sexual assault, and rape. Where, oh where, would a spiritual Democrat human-rights activist for peace say that the line was crossed?

- Jon Sanders is a policy analyst and research editor at the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, N.C.

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American Spirit Reflected in the Brave Deeds on Flight 93

C. Fraser Smith
Baltimore Sun
http://www.baltimoresun.com/
July 6, 2008


SHANKSVILLE, Pa.- I made my long-delayed Flight 93 pilgrimage a week before July 4 this year.

This is where the United Airlines plane crashed on 9/11. It's the final resting place of 40 passengers and crew, some of whom apparently overwhelmed a group of terrorists - in all likelihood saving lives and national treasure in Washington, D.C., the terrorists' target destination.

I've always marveled at the story: the image of ordinary people accepting what surely they feared would be a fatal challenge. On my brief visit, I learned there was even more to the story.Before they acted, they made a plan - and then they voted on it. That's what we do in our country. We vote. That's what we've fought and died for from the beginning.

I wasn't thinking about the Fourth of July when I got here, but the acts of the Flight 93 passengers are the kinds of brave, selfless acts we remember on this holiday.

"We've decided we're going to do something," one passenger told his wife on the phone. "We're not going to just sit here."

"What can I do?" she asked."Just pray," he said.

"This doesn't look good," another passenger told his father by phone. "I don't think we're going to get out of this."

As many know, Todd Beamer, one of the passengers, shouted, "Let's roll," as the counterassault began. I would add that two-word battle cry to the nation's list of defiant refusals to live in thrall to any threat - whether king or dictator or terrorist.

The passengers had learned of the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. They also learned that their own plane, Flight 93, was on its way to Washington. No one knows exactly where the hijacked plane was headed. One of the terrorist planners had delayed and delayed, apparently waiting for Congress to resume its business. Was the Capitol their third target? Or was it the White House?



"We know it wasn't a field in Pennsylvania," says "Ambassador Kathi" (she declined to give her last name), one of the U.S. Park Service volunteer guides who, every hour or so, take visitors through the final minutes of Flight 93 for visitors. Transcripts of phone conversations and other material were used to re-create the drama.

Every passenger's name can be found etched into benches or on other memorabilia at the temporary memorial. In a sense, these men and women had been deputized by the fates to defend their countrymen and their country's national monuments.

One passenger had been a stewardess. On the phone with her husband, she spoke calmly, as if all her disaster training had kicked into action. One of the callers spoke as if he were dealing with a problem at the office.

Another was a pilot. He'd never flown a jumbo jet, but he would try. If the others could get him into the cockpit, he would do his best. He would need a lot of hand-holding from the air controllers, he said - as if he'd get his chance to work a miracle.

Kathi, a nurse, now spends most of her time describing the last minutes of Flight 93 to visitors and recording oral histories from everyone involved in the events that followed the plane's crash. Some 385 of these accounts have been compiled so far. Two men at a nearby scrap heap felt a large shadow passing overhead just before the crash.

Assuming that many Americans would want to visit the site, some in Shanksville decided to be part of the remembrances. "There needed to be a point of human contact," Kathi said. More than 125,000 people have come to the still largely barren site every year. They and their children leave an assortment of tributes: religious medals, crosses, toy cars, dolls and peace signs. Schoolchildren built benches for the visitors, engraving them with the names of the 40 passengers.

As part of the memorial, there will be a walkway approximating the final descent of the plane. Visitors will be able to walk where the plane struck the ground. There will be wind chimes and a 93-foot "Tower of Voices."

From the day of the crash, this land has been consecrated - hallowed and preserved as a memorial to those who voted, perished and rolled into history.

C. Fraser Smith is senior news analyst at WYPR-FM. His column appears Sundays in The Sun. His e-mail is fsmith@wypr.org.

Rafael Nadal Shows Superhuman Spirit

By Barry Flatman,
London Times Tennis Correspondent
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/
July 7, 2008

LONDON - JULY 06: Rafael Nadal of Spain celebrates winning match point and the Championship during the men's singles Final match against Roger Federer of Switzerland on day thirteen of the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club on July 6, 2008 in London, England. (Photo by Ian Walton/Getty Images)

Has sport ever been so dramatic? Has a Wimbledon final, predicted to be one of the finest of all time, ever so outdone its’ billing? Has tennis of this miraculously high quality ever been played so long and so late on the most hallowed of courts?

For those fortunate enough to be inside Centre Court as darkness was falling and the luminous clock on the scoreboard ticked to 9.16 pm at almost the precise moment Rafael Nadal sunk ecstatically to the turf after Roger Federer’s final forehand thudded into the net, the memory will live with them to their dying day.

This truly was history being made and though the elements tried to intervene, they could not stop this becoming a masterpiece. The wind buffeted and blew, the rain came and darkness fell but still this was tennis of the very highest standard that mere mortals can only dream of recreating.

Not only is Nadal the first man to lift the trophies of the French Open, Queens Club and Wimbledon within the space of month. He also did it in the longest final ever played at the All England Club and, in his opinion, he overcame the greatest player in history.

Federer had his sights set on a sixth successive Wimbledon title, so beating the record he now has to share with Bjorn Borg. And there were moments during this great contest that the world no.1 did not just live up to his reputation, he further enhanced it.

Why was it Nadal eventually prevailed after 4 hours and 48 minutes of sheer drama that was in fact spread over nearly seven hours because of two cruel rain delays? Ultimately it was a question of which of these tennis superstars had the greater mental strength in a true battle royal.

Rafael Nadal of Spain (R) and Roger Federer of Switzerland (L) hold their respective trophies after Nadal beat Federer 6-4, 6-4, 6-7, 6-7, 9-7, in the Men's Singles Final during the 2008 Wimbledon Championships at the All England Tennis Club in south-west London, July 6, 2008. AFP PHOTO/CARL DE SOUZA (Photo credit should read CARL DE SOUZA/AFP/Getty Images)

Other aspects of course came into play, not least superior night vision. Surely if Nadal had not finally won 6-4,6-4,6-7,6-7,9-7 when he did, then the players would have been ushered off for the night to return after daylight had returned. Those who thought the conditions were dark as Andy Murray finally prevailed against Richard Gasquet six days earlier would have been amazed that such supreme tennis could be played in such conditions.

But Nadal is unquestionably a superhuman performer with the resolve and will that now makes it clear that anything is possible. He shrugged off the disappointment of seeing two \Championship points go to waste in the fourth set tie-break but then stood firm in the face of enormous pressure as Federer, of course intent on completing a comeback that would have demanded a rewriting of the history books.

Nobody had battled back from a two set deficit to win the men’s final at Wimbledon since Henri Cochet beat his French compatriot Jean Borotra
81 years earlier. And no player had recovered from match points down to win the title since Bob Falkenberg beat John Bromwich in 1948.

The improvement in Nadal’s grass court game over the last few years is truly outstanding. Though he may have delivered just six aces compared to Federer’s 25, he still served supremely with 73% of his first deliveries getting into play. So many of these were hugely effective body serves making a telling return from the world’s paramount grass court expert virtually impossible. The fact Federer was successful on just one of 13 break point opportunities speaks volumes.

Surely now the rivalry that is already one of the most compelling in tennis history will continue and hopefully scale to new heights of excellence. But Nadal has not just brought to a close Federer’s imperious 65 match winning run on grass. He has established another step in the evolution of the game and the standard continues to rise and rise.

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Nadal over Federer: The sports world stands still

BY JAY MARIOTTI
Chicago Sun-Times
http://www.suntimes.com/index.html
July 7, 2008

LONDON - JULY 06: Roger Federer of Switzerland congratulates Rafael Nadal of Spain in winning the Championship trophy during the men's singles Final on day thirteen of the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club on July 6, 2008 in London, England. (Photo by Julian Finney/Getty Images)

Sometimes, thankfully, we are given opportunities to pause, drop everything and melt in the scorched earth. No matter where you were and what you were doing Sunday, the TV screen was a magnet, and the epic grip of sport had seized your being. We won't experience 10 or 12 greater athletic moments in our lives than the Wimbledon men's final, which was so epic in its intensity and attrition that it trivialized the concept of a mere Instant Classic.

How about Eternal Gratification? Or Better Than Sex?

After four hours and 48 minutes of majesty, when Roger Federer dumped his final forehand into the net and Rafael Nadal tumbled joyfully across the Centre Court grass that Federer no longer rules, I heard applause all around me. Which was strange because the setting was a sports joint inside O'Hare International Airport. The Cubs were playing on Channel 9. The White Sox were playing on Comcast SportsNet. Our parochial city was buzzing about why seven Cubs and only two Sox had made the All-Star Game. Cubdom was crying about C.C. Sabathia heading to the rival Brewers. Yet I looked around to see two guys in Cubs caps and one in a Sox cap staring up at the screens and smiling as Nadal, climbing like Spider-Man through the tooty-snooty stands of the All England Club, hugged his loved ones and waved the yellow-and-red flag of his native Spain.

All eight TV screens were tuned to the match, too, as they'd been for hours.

"This is much bigger than the baseball games," the manager told me. "No one has complained." The only person who had a beef of any sort was a waiter, who asked me why I wrote such a tough column this year about Cubs prospect Felix Pie. I told him to find the column -- it doesn't exist because I never wrote it -- and to, um, please excuse me so I could absorb history with my Sprite.

The game was tennis, never taken seriously by the Grabowski crowd. But for all we knew, these could have been two barbarians -- football players, boxers, mixed-martial-arts goons -- as they wailed away on each other.

Including two rain delays, the match actually encompassed around 6 hours of real time, a mood-swing marathon in which young Nadal won the first two sets in a white, sleeveless, Capri-like get-up that reflects his brawling style and highlights two guns that would rival any strong safety's. This was what we¹ve been waiting for, the child of clay to challenge the grass dynasty of the stately Federer, and who knew it would evolve in one afternoon into the most crackling rivalry in sports?

LONDON - JULY 06: Rafael Nadal of Spain plays a forehand during the men's singles Final match against Roger Federer of Switzerland on day thirteen of the Wimbledon Lawn Tennis Championships at the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club on July 6, 2008 in London, England. (Photo by Lewis Whyld-Pool/Getty Images)

Nadal is what Phil Mickelson never became in a golf world owned by Tiger Woods. He is the lefty challenger who stared down Federer's 65-match winning streak on grass, which spanned five consecutive Wimbledon championships, and interrupted his reign as the sport's top player. With 12 Grand Slam titles, Federer has been making his case as tennis' all-time greatest player, yet is it possible his place in history will be swallowed up by Nadal? Already generally regarded as the most dominant ever on clay, he has mastered the grass game quicker than anyone imagined, becoming the first player since Bjorn Borg in 1980 to pull off the Wimbledon/French Open double in the same year. To see him hold off the charging Federer repeatedly in a mesmerizing fifth set, which trickled deep into the London twilight, ranks as high as any drama ever produced by tennis.

"The greatest match I've ever seen," said NBC analyst John McEnroe.

Yes, the same McEnroe who played in what previously was viewed as the greatest match ever, the 1980 Wimbledon final won by Borg in five sets.

What made it such a colossus in time was the toppling of a champion. Had Federer become the first male player since 1927 to return from a two-set hole and win the Wimbledon final, we would have hailed it as the crowning moment of his legacy and counted the days until he passes Pete Sampras' record of 14 Grand Slam wins. Now, all eyes turn to Nadal, who might be emerging as the greatest of them all at 22. To call it a changing of the guard, right there in the midst of English royalty, wouldn't be a stretch as much as probable reality. The enduring scene -- Nadal rolling on the sod and dirtying his shirt in euphoria, then scaling the TV commentators' booth with tears in his eyes to greet all of his family members and Prince Felipe and Princess Letizia of Spain -- marks the beginning of a long association we'll have with Nadal.

"It's impossible to explain what I felt in that moment," he said after winning 6-4, 6-4, 6-7 (5), 6-7 (8), 9-7. "I'm just very happy to win this title. For me, it is a dream to play in this tournament on this court. But to win, I never imagined something like this." The result, in the longest Wimbledon men's final ever, shouldn't have shocked anyone who has studied Federer of late. His game has regressed this year, and nearing 27, he could be nearing the end of his blurry run. We've tried to group him with Woods as two impenetrable pillars. They've become friends and even did a razor commercial together, but make no mistake, Federer is not Woods because Woods doesn't have a Nadal in his crosshairs.

"Probably later in life, I'll go, 'That was a great match.' But right now, it's not much of a feel-good thing," Federer said. "It's probably my hardest loss, by far. I mean, it's not much harder than this right now." The Swiss gentleman is more of a tennis throwback. His steady comportment falls more along traditional lines, right down to the classy sweaters that bear his initials. Nadal? He's a long-haired streetfighter who wears a large headband that covers his entire forehead and ties in the back. When he wins a point, he shouts instinctively and pumps his forearms, which are covered by huge wraps. But the clash of personalities and styles is what defines this rivalry and makes it fun and cool. They also are dignified and mature about the magnitude of it all, unlike some sports rivalries manufactured in America.

"I am very happy for me, but I'm sorry for him because he deserved this title, too," Nadal said. "He's still No. 1, still the best, still a five-time champion." "I tried everything. But Rafa's a deserving champion," Federer said. "He just played fantastically." Not only were they dueling each other, they were fighting the sky, the moon and the stars. By the end, it was dusk at Centre Court, where the players were engulfed by a roof that hangs over the stands. The fifth set couldn't have lasted more than another game before play would be suspended until today. Did we hear some snippiness from Federer over visibility issues at 9:15 p.m.? "It's rough on me now, to lose the biggest tournament in the world over maybe a bit of light," he said.

He wasn't the only one playing in near-darkness. "In the last game," Nadal said, "I didn't see nothing." But the challenger persevered as the champion expired. That's why we watch sports, of course, to see champs and challengers, and when they finally raise the level of drama high enough to cut through sport's scandals and smut, we tend to stop what we're doing and just gaze.

Even at O'Hare.

Even in Baseball City USA.

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Hitler's Favorite Jihadist

By David R. Stokes
http://www.townhall.com/
Sunday, July 06, 2008

As members of the Allied Expeditionary Force entered the landing crafts that would transport them to their rendezvous with history in the early morning hours of June 6, 1944, they received individual copies of the Order of the Day drafted by their Supreme Commander, Dwight D. Eisenhower. He had given the go ahead for the massive invasion, code named Overlord, in spite of weather that was less than inviting. He wanted the men to understand what they were fighting for – and against.

He told them:

“You are about to embark upon the Great Crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty-loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers-in-arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.”

In those days leaders weren’t as concerned about the politically correct parsing of phrases and words as some seem to be today. It was clear to them that they were not fighting mere “flesh and blood” but abhorrent ideological wickedness (“Nazi tyranny”). And they passed that clarity onto those who were engaged in the perilous fight.

So, why is it so hard for some today to call things as they are?

We are not fighting a war on terror. We are fighting against a pernicious way of thinking. Terrorism is a methodology – a way to fight a battle. The technique itself is not the enemy. Our foes are people and regimes who, in the name of foul opinion, perpetrate destruction. Just like back in the 1940s.

Can you imagine what it would have sounded like if Ike, FDR, or Churchill had been bound by the sensitivities of our day? We would have been “battling the blitzkriegers,” or maybe “bringing to justice those who dared to attack too early on a Sunday morning,” - hardly clarion calls.

Wars make more sense, and they tend to be conducted with greater vigilance and effectiveness, when we understand things in terms of good vs. evil. But these days it’s hard to even bring up the idea that militant Islam is to blame, much less to frame the current conflict as a war against it. History, however, leaves clues that remind us that there is really not much new under the sun.

David G. Dalin and John F. Rothman have written a new book, one that should be read by all Americans seeking to understand current geopolitical reality, called: Icon of Evil: Hitler’s Mufti and the Rise of Radical Islam. They make a compelling and well-documented case that we are actually fighting the quasi-spiritual offspring of Nazism and Fascism.

Haj Amin al-Husseini (1895-1974) is by no means a household name today, but his story is a key historical plot-point helping to create the mess we now find ourselves in. From his appearance on the stage of turbulent Middle Eastern politics in 1921, until his death fifty-three years later, he was a consistent and vociferous voice preaching a blend of anti-Semitic, anti-Western, and pan-Islamic rhetoric to anyone who would lend an ear. And there were plenty of listeners. There still are. He was the grand mufti (maximum leader) of all muslims in Palestine – the big kahuna.

Mr. al-Husseini’s political journey was driven by a radical interpretation and application of Islam. He was an effective and charismatic leader of a vast movement - forerunner of the various manifestations of Islamic fanaticism extant. This virulent form of his religion took hold during the period between the two world wars and grew to become the plague it now is on all houses of freedom.

And it turns out that al-Husseini was a big fan of a man by the name of Adolf Hitler. The number one Nazi liked him, too.

In November of 1941, a little more than a week before the attack on Pearl Harbor, there was a meeting in Berlin, one that is often relegated to a footnote in the history of that great global conflict. Haj Amin al-Husseini made his way from the mansion he’d been provided by the Nazis toward the Reich Chancellery, where he was to meet Hitler in the dictator’s private office. Dalin and Rothman describe this ominous meeting in great detail.

The mufti sought to ingratiate himself with Hitler and the strategy was reciprocal. They pledged allegiance to each other. And why not? They had common goals and enemies. The German leader bestowed honorary Aryan citizenship on his guest (Hitler interpreted al-Husseini’s blond hair and blue eyes as evidence that the Islamic leader must have possessed some “pure” blood) and it was clear that his visitor was keenly interested in being set up as the Nazi leader in Palestine and its surrounding region.

Al-Husseini eventually recruited 100,000 European Muslims to partner with the Waffen-SS, and the authors of Icon of Evil hint at the idea that the cleric-politician was influential in the decision to implement the notorious Final Solution. He was good buddies with Heinrich Himmler and Adolf Eichman.

Nazis and radical Islamists – together. Nothing good could come of that, and in fact, a lot of today’s bad stuff was incubated in that Berlin laboratory.

One of the most captivating portions of Icon of Evil is devoted to the question: What if Hitler had been victorious and the war had turned out differently? Drawing on similar previous musings by writers such as William L. Shirer, John Keegan, and David Fromkin, the duo shares a chilling narrative about how radically different life would be today had Hitler won. This is important not just because of the horrifying idea of a Hitler-dominant Europe – but also due to what the Middle East would look like in such a case. Al Husseini wanted to extend the Holocaust beyond the borders of European living space to the Middle East. His goal was something near and dear to the heart of the depraved men running the Third Reich – a Palestine that would be virtually Judenrein (a reprehensible Nazi term literally meaning: “clean of Jews”).

Then there’s the story of how this wicked preacher was able to avoid the Nuremberg trial dragnet, in spite of clearly being guilty of egregious war-crimes. He would not be brought to justice, but rather would live out his days back in the Middle East. His post-war work included becoming something of a mentor to men who would become famous in his cause. What do Gamel Abdel Nassar, Anwar Al Sadat, Yassir Arafat, and Saddam Hussein have in common? They were all connected with, and deeply influenced by, Haj Amin al-Husseini. Hamas and Hezbollah are very much part of his legacy, as well. He worked closely with the theoretician of radical Islam, Sayyid Qutb, as well as Saddam’s infamous uncle, General Khairallah Talfah. The guy was connected. And the usual suspects he ran with paved the way for everything from the attacks on September 11, 2001, to the maniacal rantings of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

In fact, some of Haj Amin al-Husseini’s spirit is in the intellectual and emotional DNA of every current radical Islamist.

Now, here’s what really bugs me – why could we fight a war nearly seventy years ago, all the while referring to our enemies as Nazi thugs, and yet today be so concerned about sensibilities that we’re reduced to, at best, rhetorical beating-around-the-bush?

The war we are in is not against a weapon, no matter how dreadful that weapon is. We are fighting a virulent ideology. To be brutally honest about it - to call our enemies today terrorists, or even Islamo-Fascists, is not strong enough.

They are Islamo-Nazis and they’re really bad people - like the German-Nazis were.

About The Author
David R. Stokes (davidrstokes.com) is the host of “DAVID STOKES LIVE” heard Sunday Nights from 9:00-11:00 (eastern) across North America on XM SATELLITE CHANNEL 170 – FAMILY TALK, and at wava.com. He is Senior Pastor of Fair Oaks Church in Fairfax, Virginia (fairoakschurch.org).

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Jesse Helms: Pundit to Pol

by John Gizzi

http://www.humanevents.com/
Posted: 07/05/2008

Mr. Helms running for Senate in 1996.
Photo: Alan S. Weiner for The New York Times

Upon hearing the news July 4th that Jesse Helms had passed away, conservatives remembered and hailed the former senator from North Carolina. Certainly, HUMAN EVENTS readers felt that they had shared Helms’ three decades in the Senate (1972-2002). Not only had those years and all of his rock ‘em, sock ‘em campaigns been chronicled but HUMAN EVENTS had begun carrying the young Helms’ editorials back when he was a television commentator in Raleigh in the early 1960’s.

Whatever the cause—from opposition to the SALT II and Panama Canal treaties and federal funding for salacious art to keeping his colleagues in session over holidays to stop a gasoline tax increase—the senator was more often than not leading the charge. Indeed, a case can be made that with the exceptions of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, the figure most pivotal to the success of postwar conservatism was Jesse Helms.

When he retired from the Senate in ’02, Helms was hailed by opposite numbers such as Irish rocker Bono and Sen. Joe Biden (D.-Del.), who now wields the North Carolina Republican’s old gavel as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Their disagreements with Helms notwithstanding, they praised him as a man of principle and a gentleman.

So, of course, did his colleagues on the right. Former Sen. Gordon Humphrey (R.-NH) said Helms had the force “of the United States Marine Corps.” Paul Laxalt, former senator from Nevada and Ronald Reagan’s closest political friend, recalled how the Californian had lost three straight primaries to Gerald Ford in 1976 and then finally scored an upset in North Carolina—a result that brought him within a whisker of Ford at the national convention in Kansas City that year and paved the way for his election in 1980.

“Allied with us in North Carolina were Senator Jesse Helms and his legion of supporters,” wrote Laxalt, “Without Jesse and his people in North Carolina, Ron would never have become President.”

Former Sen. Bill Armstrong (R.-Col.), however, gave Helms the highest compliment of all, hailing the North Carolinian as “the greatest senator.”

My friend Marc Rotterman, a political consultant in North Carolina who worked closely with Helms for many years, does an outstanding job in chronicling the senator’s achievements in office in an accompanying article. For my part, my life was enriched by knowing and reporting on longtime HUMAN EVENTS subscriber Helms for twenty-nine years.

But there are two other sides of Helms that perhaps should get some attention. So many staffers on Capitol Hill I knew felt they should have the job their boss had. Many tried to win it, but few were successful. And many of my colleagues in the press—particular those in the television side of it—have let me know they are brighter than the elected officials we cover and could do the job better if elected. The problem was that more often than not, those who ran weren’t elected.

Jesse Helms was a former Hill staffer and a television newsman who did make it in electoral politics in a big way. As a young radio reporter in 1950, he worked part-time on the campaign of conservative Willis Smith in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senator against moderate Frank Porter Graham. After Smith won the Democratic nomination (then tantamount to election in the Tarheel State), he took Helms to Washington with him as his administrative assistant (what the top aides to Members of Congress were called before they all became “chiefs of staff.”).

At a time when Senate staffs were small and senators did not think there was anything wrong with sharing a meal with staffers in the cafeteria, Helms would have lunch with freshmen Sens. Richard Nixon (R-Cal.) and Joseph McCarthy (R.-Wisc.). Helms admired McCarthy tremendously and the two maintained a correspondence after Sen. Smith died suddenly in 1951 and Helms went home to North Carolina.

In 1961, after a decade as lobbyist for the North Carolina Bankers Association, Helms was made an offer by A.J. Fletcher, owner of WRAL Radio (where Helms worked as reporter before going to Washington. “[Fletcher] bestowed on Helms a piece of the action, several highfalutin titles, and editorial control of a five minute daily ‘Viewpoint’ one-man television commentary to be run over Capitol Broadcasting Company’s television station in Raleigh,” wrote Wayne Greenshaw in “Elephants in the Cottonfields.”

For twelve years, Helms’ trademark drawl and horn-rimmed glasses would be seen daily by an estimated 100,000 viewers statewide. In addition, he had a radio program carried on seventy country-westerns stations. His fellow North Carolinians would tune in and see Helms shaking his finger at Congress for passing too many social reform programs, blasting Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, and proclaiming that it would have been a better world if Joe McCarthy had been allowed to clean all the Communists out of government.

“My family would tune in just to see which of the liberals Jesse was going to drive crazy that night,” recalled my friend Jim McIntyre, a native North Carolinian who was later active in Republican politics. “We’d watch him on the news, listen to his radio show. We loved him!”

“One of Us”

That kind of passion McIntyre recalled was critical to Helms becoming the first Republican from his state to serve in the Senate.

By the time he was nearing fifty in 1971, Helms had been a lifelong Democrat, like most of his contemporaries in North Carolina. When his twenty-one year-old daughter came to him to discuss her pending wedding that year, she also asked her father: “Will you tell me why you’re staying a Democrat? You never vote for a Democratic nominee.” Helms changed his registration to Republican. A year later, he gave in to the pleas of his poker-playing buddy, attorney Tom Ellis, and became the Republican candidate for the Senate.

Helms’ hard-hitting commentaries and years on the airwaves were critical to his defeat of Democrat Nick Galifanakis in the Senate race. As Helms biographer Ernest Furgurson wrote of the ’72 campaign: “Accompanying reporters heard it over and over: ‘I’m a strong Democrat, but I’m sure going to vote for you because you used to tell it like it was [as a commentator].”

Running on the slogan “He’s One of Us,” Helms slammed Galifanakis as a liberal in the mold of Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern. He won, with 54% of the vote, overtaking the Democrat by 118,000 votes. Helms also was helped by an appearance on his behalf by old luncheon friend Richard Nixon, who swept the state by 616,000 votes in his re-election bid as President. (Nixon apparently did not mind Helms’ commentary the previous year in which he likened the President’s trip to China to Neville Chamberlain going to Munich to appease Hitler).

As political scientists Merle and Earl Black wrote in “The Rise of Southern Republicans,” “Helms carried the traditional Republican vote in the mountains and western Piedmont cities, swept the rural and small-town textile counties in the southwestern part of the state, and began to penetrate Democratic strongholds in the east.”

Those voters in Eastern North Carolina were soon dubbed “Jessecrats.” In four more trips to the polls, they would help see their man through to victory—more often than not, with his margin bigger than polls indicated, as the mainstream media’s portrayal of Helms appeared to discourage voters from saying they were for him.

When he made his last appearance at a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in ’02, Helms was introduced by the Republican who hoped to succeed him—Elizabeth Hanford Dole. The senator was such a family friend that when his colleague Bob Dole asked Mrs. Hanford for her daughter’s hand in marriage, she replied that he would have to get the permission of Sen. Helms (He did). “If I am successful this year, I will succeed him,” Elizabeth Dole told a cheering audience, “But no one can replace Sen. Jesse Helms.”

That said it all. No one has.

- John Gizzi is Political Editor of HUMAN EVENTS.


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Jesse Helms: American Hero

by Marc Rotterman
http://www.humanevents.com/
Posted: 07/05/2008

North Carolina's Republican Senator-elect Jesse Helms celebrates his 1972 victory. (Associated Press)

One of my fondest memories of Senator Helms was election night 1990 -- when Senator Helms just defeated former Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gant.

Let me set the scene…

All the major networks had just “called the race” in Helms’s favor. My wife and I, along with other Helms loyalists and aides, were in a hotel suite in downtown Raleigh watching the returns with the Senator and his wife “Ms. Dot.”

Helms’s supporters had gathered in the first floor ballroom along with all the NC press corps and other media from across the country and the world. As Dan Rather of CBS reluctantly “called the race” for Helms -- I recall seeing a big grin coming over the Senator’s face.

By now, the time had arrived to exit the suite and head downstairs so Senator Helms could once again graciously accept another six year term and thank the people for their supported. We all crowded into the elevator.

When we disembarked and we were immediately swamped by a phalanx of reporters and cameras. I, along with several members of Helms staff, formed a cocoon around the Senator and his wife -- working to get them through the crowd to the stage and the awaiting microphones. The crowd was at “fever pitch” crying Jessse, Jesseee!

Helms -- who understood the art of seizing the moment” better than almost any other public figure I have been associated with -- paused after getting to the stage. He waited for the crowd to quiet down. Then, at precisely the right moment, Senator Helm’s said in his Southern drawl…“I’d have been down here sooner -- but I was watching the grieving face of Dan Rather as he announced my re-election to the United States Senate.”

The crowd in the ballroom went nuts.

Most of the pundits had written off Ronald Reagan as presidential prospect after his efforts to unseat then President Gerald Ford resulted in a string of defeats in the 1976 Republican primaries. Senator Helms support for Reagan in NC in the 1976 primary produced 52-48 victory for Reagan’s troubled candidacy – propelling him on to the Republican convention in Kansas City where Reagan captured if not the votes the hearts and mind of the delegates with his performance and speech that year. Many would agree that 1976 set the stage for Reagan’s victory in the 1980. The “Reagan Revolution” that followed pulled America out of’ Jimmy Carter’s malaise”, and back on the road to fiscal prosperity. And with Jesse Helm’s help Ronald Reagan hastened the end of communism worldwide.

It is no secret that Helms was no fan of United Nations. During his tenure as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Jesse Helms challenged the United Nation’s bureaucracy by refusing to approve the payment of America’s dues.

To Helms it was a matter of principal and conscience. Helms bottled up appropriations to pay millions of US back dues to United Nations until he got the UN to agree to make substantial reforms. He also was instrumental in the passage of the Helms-Burton Act that tightened the embargo on Fidel Castro’s Cuba and he worked to scuttle the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1999. As a statesman, Helms responded to accusations of obstructionism by saying his role was to slow the wheels of diplomacy and carefully consider America’s international commitments. Helms understood that he had the power to help shape US international policy by blocking initiatives and nominees with whom he disagreed.

The senior senator from North Carolina always had time for his constituents and especially for young people. Through the years of his service, the Senate interns and pages loved him. He was one of their favorites on the Capitol Hill. For those fortunate enough to have known and worked with him, we will remember Senator Helms as an “old school Southern gentlemen” who was principled and polite and courteous – even to those with whom he disagreed. His Senate colleagues on the opposite side of the isle may have argued with him -- but they always knew where he stood. Senator Helms went to Washington -- but never became a part of Washington. He remained loyal to his old friends, steadfast in his values and beliefs, and always true in his heart to the people of North Carolina.

The institution of the United States Senate was not been quite the same without him and we in NC are proud of the role that this unique and special “Tarheel” played in the history of our country and on the world stage.

He will be profoundly missed.

Mr. Rotterman is a senior fellow at the John Locke Foundation and a GOP consultant.

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