Book Review: The Shack

"The Shack": What God Should Have Said?

http://byfaithonline.com/
Walter Henegar, Issue Number 20, June 2008

If no one has handed you a tear-stained copy yet, The Shack is a work of Christian fiction penned by first-time novelist William P. Young. The story centers on family man Mack Phillips, whose seven-year-old daughter is kidnapped and murdered in the opening chapters. After three and a half years of understandably “Great Sadness,” a mysterious note invites Mack to the site of her murder, a shack in the woods. There he spends a healing weekend with the three persons of the Trinity, who manifest primarily as an African-American woman called Papa, a middle-aged Jewish Jesus, and a wispy Asian woman named Sarayu. Literary criticism aside, give the brother credit for guts: Young attempts to answer the problem of evil and the nature of the Trinity in 248 pages.

Sales of The Shack have skyrocketed since it was first published in May 2007, garnering rapturous praise from readers (“life-changing,” “joyfully giving away copies by the case”) and glowing endorsements by the likes of Eugene Peterson—who, inexplicably, compares it to Pilgrim’s Progress.

Writing an unfavorable review of The Shack, then, is like criticizing your Aunt Martha’s macaroni casserole. Sure, it’s fattening, but everyone else in the family loves it, so why not just shut up and eat your Waldorf salad? Any critic risks stumbling directly into the book’s own well-worn stereotype: a strident religious nitpick. God the Father, as portrayed in The Shack, oughta cluck her tongue and give you a talkin’ to.

Of course, not every detail is worth dissecting; a novel is not systematic theology. Yet it’s clearly more than just fiction. Mack’s conversations with Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu make up the bulk of the book, with his questions serving as little more than prompts for their extended divine speeches. Though never citing Scripture directly, the characters make enough allusions to biblical content to imply fidelity to orthodox Christianity. Combined with chapter-heading quotes by thoughtful Christians like C.S. Lewis and Marilynne Robinson, the effect is prophet-like: not quite “Thus saith the Lord,” but not far from it.

And therein hides the book’s gravest, and most subtle, problem. Though some parts roughly align with biblical teaching (and many others explicitly contradict it), the book’s overall attitude toward Scripture is persistently dismissive. Mack’s own disdain is conveyed early on: “God’s voice had been reduced to paper. … Nobody wanted God in a box, just in a book. Especially an expensive one bound in gilt edges, or was that guilt edges?” (p. 65-67).

More significant, when Mack mentions biblical events or concepts (often in gross caricature), “God” promptly brushes them off and glibly explains how it really is. Unlike the biblical Jesus, who constantly quoted the Old Testament and spent many post-resurrection hours “opening their minds to understand the scriptures,” The Shack’s Papa, Jesus, and Sarayu turn Mack’s attention away from Scripture, coaxing him to trust instead their simplistic lessons set in idyllic, Thomas Kinkade-like scenes and delivered in the familiar therapeutic language of our age.

That’s not to say it’s all bad. Positively, The Shack’s God-figures emphasize the full divinity of each person of the Trinity, the superiority of divine wisdom over human understanding, and the absolute necessity of grace over the illusion of human merit. Those are great points to emphasize, and there are a few pithy insights on lesser matters as well.

Negatively, however—that is, in clear opposition to Scripture—they explicitly teach that there is no authority or hierarchy within the Trinity, and that God is never willing to violate human free will. There’s also a paragraph that seems to imply universal salvation, and a chapter about judgment that stubbornly avoids pronouncement about the fate of the wicked. In fact, there’s little reason to believe that The Shack’s God ever judges anyone. By the end of the book, even the daughter’s serial killer appears to be, conveniently, on the road to redemption.

Despite regular jabs at organized religion, there is something systematic about Young’s theology. Apparently, the essence of sin is our fearful desire to control God’s messy-by-design world, and thus all rules, expectations, hierarchies, or positions of authority are merely human inventions servicing this vain desire. Salvation, then—or healing, at least—is found by surrendering these misguided ideas and embracing the mystery of relationship. As Papa explains to Mack: “Submission is not about authority and it is not about obedience; it is all about relationships of love and respect. In fact, we are submitted to you in the same way… we want you to join us in our circle of relationship” (p. 145-146).

Young’s diagnosis of sin as “control” has some merit, but his prescription of an entirely flat, circular relationship between us and God ultimately violates a fundamental truth of biblical anthropology: God is the Creator, and we are His creatures. Even after we have been redeemed by Christ, our relationship to God is rightly characterized by obedience and one-way submission to Him.

The result? To the extent that you trust The Shack, you will distrust your Bible—including huge chunks of the Old Testament and at least half of the red letters. Few errors are more corrosive to vigorous Christian faith. Some will plead that there is enough meat for careful readers to spit out the bones, but sadly, this yeast leavens the whole loaf.

In the end, The Shack is spiritual comfort food loaded with theological trans fat. Though not without some nutritional value, its effect on the body of Christ is more harmful than healthy. Even if you love it, and even if it makes you cry. Junk food and bad movies can do the same.

Good fiction has the potential to illuminate biblical truth, but not when it effectively supplants it. We need the Bible, not The Shack. The true Word takes more work to understand, and it won’t always tell us what we want to hear, but we can trust it to reveal a greater, wiser, more loving, and more gloriously Triune God than any novelist could conceive.





http://byfaithonline.com/page/arts-culture/the-shack-what-god-should-have-said

Today's Tune: The Band - I Shall Be Released

Bob Dylan & The Band, Woodie Guthrie Memorial Concert, Carnegie Hall, NYC, 1968.

(Click on title to play video)

The Authentic Jesse Helms

The Authenic Jesse Helms (The one I knew and loved)

By Jane Chastain

http://janechastain.com/

Heritage President Ed Feulner (pictured at right with Helms and his wife Dorothy) presented Helms in 2002 with the Clare Boothe Luce Award, Heritage’s highest honor, calling him a “dedicated, unflinching and articulate advocate of conservative policy and principle.”

Jesse Helms was astute, kind, witty and one of the most polite and fair-minded individuals I have ever known, nothing like the caricature often painted by the media.

I met him in 1967, when I presented myself as a candidate for employment at WRAL-TV. I had broken a lot of barriers for women as a sportscaster in progressive Atlanta, but when I decided to marry Roger Chastain, an industrial designer in Raleigh, I was quite sure my career had come to an end.

The television station in nearby Durham – the only other station in the area – had offered me a job as a weather girl. WRAL was my last hope.
My knees were shaking as I stood in the office of Fred Fletcher, the president of Capitol Broadcasting. Fletcher said, “Sports? You just can’t do sports for us.” That’s when Jesse Helms, his executive vice president in charge of programing, spoke up and said, “Oh, yes she can!” Mr. Fletcher, relented and I was hired on the spot.

At that time, I had no way of knowing what an influence Jesse would have on my life. He did the station’s editorials and he instilled in me – and countless others – a love of country, a sense of personal responsibility and the importance of individual liberty, a strong national defense, the free enterprise system, limited government and strong moral values.

In those days, there were very few women in television outside of secretarial positions and very few minorities. WRAL-TV had more than its share of both. When Jesse Helms was in the United States Senate, the hair on the back of my neck would stand up when I would read that he was a “racist” and “against women.”

I discovered that when liberals have no argument against conservative logic, they call you names. If those names are repeated often enough, some stick.

Jesse Helms not only paved the way for Ronald Reagan to become president, he was his point man in the Senate. He was far to busy working to defend his country from enemies here and abroad to worry about what the newspapers said about him and wouldn’t allow his staff to spend time defending his public image. He wouldn’t go on the popular Sunday morning political shows. He went to church instead.

Like most southern politicians of his era, his views on segregation evolved. However, he was never against equal opportunity or civil rights, only set asides and quotas. He felt they were unfair and demeaning to those they reported to serve, as do many thoughtful black conservatives.

On one of my visits to Jesse Helms’ Washington office, I met James Meredith, the courageous African-American who integrated the University of Mississippi. He was one of Helms’ legislative assistants. I’ll bet you never read that. The media tends to shun black heroes like Meredith, when they refuse to march to the beat of radical leaders.

On another of my visits, Senator Helms expressed exasperation when he told me about a meeting he had just had with a well-known feminist. He had graciously granted her 30 minutes on his schedule. He said, “Jane, she spent the first 25 minutes just berating me for my pro-life views. She never once took a breath!

“When I realized that our time together was almost up, I said, ‘Don’t you have a question for me? Isn’t there something you’d like to know about my stand?’

“She replied, ‘How many unwanted children have you adopted?’
“I said, ‘I regret to say only one,’ explaining that he just couldn’t help myself. ‘It just rolled out!’”

Yes, Senator Helms was reluctant to talk about the fact that he and his beloved wife Dot adopted their son, Charles, at the age of nine, who was suffering from cerebral palsy, after reading in the newspaper that he wanted a mother and father for Christmas.

Conservatism was popular in the 80s because Jesse Helms did the heavy lifting. He laid the groundwork and made the case for it. He was not afraid to confront a president – even one from his own party. He also held the feet of weak-kneed Republicans in the Senate to the fire.

In 1994, he was distressed when Oliver North lost his Senate race in Virginia. He was looking forward to passing the baton to him. When Jesse Helms retired in 2002, it was with trepidation. There was no one to take his place.

Jesse Helms died on the 4th of July, the birthday of our country as did John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. May the selfless – often lonely — battles he waged on our behalf not be in vane.

The article has 10 responses

Written by Jane Chastain
July 10th, 2008 at 12:00 am

Posted in Congress, Political Profiles

How Hostages, And Nations, Get Liberated

By Charles Krauthammer
The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
July 11, 2008

Former hostage Ingrid Betancourt appears before the public at Paris Town Hall July 4, 2008.
(Benoit Tessier/Reuters)

WASHINGTON -- On the day the Colombian military freed Ingrid Betancourt and 14 other long-held hostages, the Italian Parliament passed yet another resolution demanding her release. Europe had long ago adopted this French-Colombian politician as a cause celebre. France had made her an honorary citizen of Paris, passed numerous resolutions and held many vigils.

Unfortunately, karma does not easily cross the Atlantic. Betancourt languished for six years in cruel captivity until freed by a brilliant operation conducted by the Colombian military, intelligence agencies and special forces -- an operation so well executed that the captors were overpowered without a shot being fired.

This in foreign policy establishment circles is called "hard power." In the Bush years, hard power is terribly out of fashion, seen as a mere obsession of cowboys and neocons. Both in Europe and America, the sophisticates worship at the altar of "soft power" -- the use of diplomatic and moral resources to achieve one's ends.

Europe luxuriates in soft power, nowhere more than in l'affaire Betancourt in which Europe's repeated gestures of solidarity hovered somewhere between the fatuous and the destructive. Europe had been pressing the Colombian government to negotiate for the hostages. Venezuela's Hugo Chavez offered to mediate.

Of course, we know from documents captured in a daring Colombian army raid into Ecuador in March -- your standard hard-power operation duly denounced by that perfect repository of soft power, the Organization of American States -- that Chavez had been secretly funding and pulling the strings of the FARC. These negotiations would have been Chavez's opportunity to gain recognition and legitimacy for his terrorist client.

Colombia's President Alvaro Uribe, a conservative and close ally of President Bush, went instead for the hard stuff. He has for years. As a result, he has brought to its knees the longest running and once-strongest guerrilla force on the continent by means of "an intense military campaign (that) weakened the FARC, killing seasoned commanders and prompting 1,500 fighters and urban operatives to desert" (Washington Post). In the end, it was that campaign -- and its agent, the Colombian military -- that freed Betancourt.

She was, however, only one of the high-minded West's many causes. Solemn condemnations have been issued from every forum of soft-power fecklessness -- the EU, the U.N., the G-8 foreign ministers -- demanding that Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe stop butchering his opponents and step down. Before that, the cause du jour was Burma, where a vicious dictatorship allowed thousands of cyclone victims to die by denying them independently delivered foreign aid lest it weaken the junta's grip on power.

And then there is Darfur, a perennial for which myriad diplomats and foreign policy experts have devoted uncountable hours at the finest five-star hotels to deplore the genocide and urgently urge relief.

What is done to free these people? Nothing. Everyone knows it will take the hardest of hard power to remove the oppressors in Zimbabwe, Burma, Sudan and other godforsaken places where the bad guys have the guns and use them. Indeed, as the Zimbabwean opposition leader suggested (before quickly retracting) from his hideout in the Dutch embassy -- Europe specializes in providing haven for those fleeing the evil that Europe does nothing about -- the only solution is foreign intervention.

And who's going to intervene? The only country that could is the country that in the last two decades led coalitions that liberated Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Having sacrificed much blood and treasure in its latest endeavor -- the liberation of 25 million Iraqis from the most barbarous tyranny of all, and its replacement with what is beginning to emerge as the Arab world's first democracy -- and having earned near-universal condemnation for its pains, America has absolutely no appetite for such missions.

And so the innocent languish, as did Betancourt, until some local power, inexplicably under the sway of the Bush notion of hard power, gets it done -- often with the support of the American military. "Behind the rescue in a jungle clearing stood years of clandestine American work," explained The Washington Post. "It included the deployment of elite U.S. Special Forces ... a vast intelligence-gathering operation ... and training programs for Colombian troops."

Upon her liberation, Betancourt offered profuse thanks to God and the Virgin Mary, to her supporters and the media, to France and Colombia and just about everybody else. As of this writing, none to the United States.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Wrote 28; Accumulated Many More

By JOHN LELAND
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
July 11, 2008

Books: A Memoir
By Larry McMurtry
259 pages. Simon & Schuster. $24.

Larry McMurtry’s fragmentary “Books: A Memoir” has little to say about the matter of writing them, other than that by the mid-1970s this process ceased to engage him as much as buying, selling and collecting them and, ultimately, creating what he calls a book town in Archer City, Tex., modeled on the Welsh village of Hay-on-Wye. This is, he concedes, a passion that may separate him from some of his readers.

“Here I am,” he writes, “34 chapters into a book that I hope will interest the general or common reader — and yet why should these readers be interested in the fact that in 1958 or so I paid Ted Brown $7.50 for a nice copy of ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy?’ How many are going to care that I visited the great Seven Gables Bookshop, or dealt with the wily L.A. dealer Max Hunley, whose little store at the corner of Rodeo Drive and Little Santa Monica in Beverly Hills is now a yogurt shop? Why should they even care that there exists a possibly unique copy of the dust wrapper of ‘Anne of Green Gables?’ ”

The answer, never quite spelled out in this book’s 109 short chapters, is that the colorful characters and frontiers Mr. McMurtry has encountered during his four decades in the antiquarian book trade are disappearing from the American landscape just as much as the vernacular cultures that have occupied his 28 novels. From his Booked Up store, which now occupies six buildings in Archer, he notes that his trade has become a fringe one that makes his neighbors uneasy. Many of the booksellers and scouts he wrangled with and admired are now dead, out of business or marginalized. Their collections now fill Booked Up. The habit they served, reading, is no longer a driving passion for many Americans.

“How,” he asks, writing about used-book stores, “did one of the pillars of civilization come, in only 50 years, to be mostly unwanted?”

Besides trotting out the usual villains — the Internet, the iPod, television, maybe the superstore — Mr. McMurtry does not much engage this question. Change happens. Instead he offers what he calls fish stories about the big ones he caught or lost, and about the anglers he encountered along the way.

These form an odd fraternity, often willing to squander fortunes or marriages in pursuit of a rare, unblemished dust cover or catalog of ancient erotica. Book collecting, like any private obsession, has its own legends and rumors, all energized by the occasional big score, as when Mr. McMurtry’s business partner, Marcia Carter, sold a copy of Winston Churchill’s “Marlborough” for $100,000.

Mr. McMurtry’s peregrinations cross those of fellow obsessives like Gershon Legman, whose unfinished dirty autobiography, “Peregrine Penis,” Mr. McMurtry agreed to subsidize; Bryan Perkins, in Fort Worth, who hid his good books from customers; and Dorman David, a millionaire whose free-spending habits left dealers intrigued, “but not so intrigued that they forgot how to work the cash register.” (“Here,” he adds, “was a young man who made selling fun.”)

Novelists all decline over time, Mr. McMurtry writes (ignoring the obvious exception of Philip Roth), but booksellers, through the accumulation of arcane and miscellaneous knowledge, get better.

The nature of their trade involves going to great lengths to find things almost no one has or wants, then to connect with the few who do want. Though all sellers hit it big now and then, more often they sell a book to another dealer for a modest profit, then watch him flip it for hundreds or thousands of dollars. The prospect of finding such underpriced books, Mr. McMurtry notes, is one thing that keeps people coming to his shop. So booksellers must themselves be gulled to survive.

A purpose of this memoir, Mr. McMurtry writes, is to “raise ghosts” of booksellers past, in the same way that Booked Up has become an “anthology” of their wares. In 1950, when Fourth Avenue was bookstore row, Manhattan had 175 bookstores. The online business that replaced them, Mr. McMurtry laments, is precise and efficient but lacks the human contact and serendipity of poring through shelves of dust in search of treasure.

“Books: A Memoir” echoes some of this random discursiveness. The short, scattershot chapters drift or meander and allow little room for extended storytelling. This puts a damper on the fun factor. Characters appear for a sentence or two, and every store remains its own fortress, unknowable except by spending hours among its secrets. Mr. McMurtry does not try to teach the love of books.

But the fetish is surely universal, at least among readers, and the occasional goodie pops up as an unexpected payoff for sticking around.

Toward the end of the book Mr. McMurtry describes finding a rare copy of “The Whale,” as “Moby-Dick” was called in England, apparently the working copy given to a writer named Charles Reade to abridge to a more manageable length. Reade, a contemporary of Melville’s, “was not a man to be intimidated by a mere American classic.” His first stroke is through the opening line: “Call me Ishmael.”

This copy of “The Whale” got away from Mr. McMurtry, but in “Books: A Memoir” the fish story remains.

Today's Tune: Drive-By Truckers - The Righteous Path

(Click on title to play video)



Lyrics:

I got a brand new car that drinks a bunch of gas
I got a house in a neighborhood that's fading fast
I got a dog and a cat that don't fight too much
I got a few hundred channels to keep me in touch
I got a beautiful wife and three tow-headed kids
I got a couple of big secrets I'd kill to keep hid
I don't know God but I fear his wrath
I'm trying to stay focused on the righteous path

I got a couple of opinions that I hold dear
A whole lot of debt and a whole lot of fear
I got an itch that needs scratching but it feels alright
I got the need to blow it out on Saturday night
I got a grill in the backyard and a case of beers
I got a boat that ain't seen the water in years
More bills than money, I can do the math
I'm trying to keep focused on the righteous path

I'm trying to keep focused as I drive down the road
On the ditches and the curves and the heavy load
Ain't bitching bout things that aren't in my grasp
Just trying to hold steady on the righteous path

There's this friend of mine I've known all my life
Who can't get it right no matter how hard he tries
He's got kids he don't see and several ex-wives
And a list of bad decisions bout eight miles wide
Trouble with the law and the IRS
And where he'll get the money's anybody's guess
He's a long way off but if you was to ask
He'd say he's trying to stay focused on the righteous path

Trying to keep focused as we drive down the road
Like we did back in High School before the world turned cold
Now the brakes are thin and the curves are fast
We're trying to hold steady on the righteous path

We're hanging out and we're hanging on
We're trying the best we can to keep keeping on
We got messed up minds for these messed up times
And it's a thin thin line separating his from mine

Trying to hold steady on the righteous path
80 miles and hour with a worn out map
No time for self-pity or self-righteous crap
Trying to stay focused on the righteous path

Jackson's Cutting Remark May Be Helpful To Obama

By John Kass
Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/
July 10, 2008


Barack Obama with Jesse Jackson in March, 2007.

So what part of Barack Obama will Rev. Al Sharpton want to chop off now?

Barack's pinkie toe? A nose hair? The vast Barackian ego?

Sharpton's got to find something, now that his fellow racial crisis broker, Rev. Jesse Jackson, said something not even Don Imus would dare utter.Speaking into a microphone on Fox News, Jackson whispered he was tired of Obama talking down to black people. And he said he wanted to cut off Obama's special purpose. Both of them.

Both of what?

"Manhood, er, genitals," muttered a flustered CNN reporter, obviously unnerved that Jackson made his comments exclusively on the rival Fox News network. "Uh, male private parts."

Then CNN's Wolf Blitzer, who said he couldn't be specific for reasons of taste (though the real reason was that he didn't have Fox's tape) uttered one of the greatest lines in the history of American broadcasting. It should be carved into stone, with a bust of Blitzer illuminated by an eternal flame.

"Male private parts?" shrieked Blitzer. "The suggestion really was CASTRATION, IF YOU WILL!"

The tape was on the Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor," and host Bill O'Reilly offered it with glee at the top of his show, with Jackson muttering about Obama's desire to carry on the Bush White House policy of funding faith-based programs.

"See, Barack's been talking down to black people on this faith-based—," Jackson says during a break in taping. "I want to cut his nuts out."

The national media was stunned, as if they'd just found out Obama is a Chicago politician rather than a mythic hero of Kennedyesque proportions, who drew the great sword Axelrod from the cornerstone of Chicago's City Hall.

So stunned, they missed the truly freaky part, Jackson twisting his right wrist, as if he held a curved blade, giving a little pull, grunting for emphasis, like a butcher of the old school, if you will.

Blessed are the peacemakers.

Here in Chicago we're not shocked. Chicago was once the hog butcher for the world, so our politics is stuffed with meat metaphors and references to animal reproductive parts.

Our Machine Democrats who back Obama are constantly preoccupied with nuts of all kinds. When our first king, Richard I, was elected, the hacks went around saying that "Daley is the dog with the big nuts," though they wouldn't dare say so in the presence of mob boss Paul Ricca.

And when Daley's son, Richard Shortshanks, began the restoration, his anatomy was also favorably described by trembling politicians who still act like puppies in his presence. Our own Machine-backed governor, Rod "The Unreformer" Blagojevich, once made news by bragging he had "testicular virility" to make tough decisions, although now everyone's patiently waiting for him to get indicted without making a mess.

Rather than listen to Washington talking heads explain our town's politics, I called a friend, a prominent African-American activist of the far left persuasion. He considers me his token conservative buddy.

"All I want to know," he said, "is how much David Axelrod paid Jesse to say that @#$%! [rhymes with "it"].

He was speaking rhetorically, knowing that Obama/Daley strategist Axelrod wouldn't pay Jackson for such nonsense when he could get it for free. Jackson's rhetorical castration—and the grunting—helps Obama with white voters. Even those Hillary Clinton voters who, in Obama's mind, cling to their guns and religion can see it.

"Jesse's got an ego. He can't stand it. He couldn't stand it when Harold ran things. He can't stand it now, watching Barack climb up the Daleys into the White House," said my friend.

He was talking about Chicago's first black mayor, the late Harold Washington. I covered Washington's opening announcement of his historic campaign. The platform at the Hyde Park Hilton was ringed with large, tough, black police officers in plain clothes, their arms locked, letting no one up there with Washington.

The reason?

Washington didn't want Jackson up there. He knew the Rev. would try to grab the limelight. Once Washington was elected, Jackson was politically invited to leave Chicago for Washington, where he ultimately ran for the presidency.

That's what Chicago does with politicians who could threaten the mayor.

We get them to run for the White House.

Of course he's got to be green-eyed, when Jackson sees white liberals in the news media all but hug Barack's trouser leg, seeking affirmation and expiation of guilt. Barack knows the game. He's already suffered worse insults by other aging black leaders of the civil rights generation, as when Sharpton and others publicly entertained whether Obama was "black enough."

His ascendancy threatens their positions as exclusive brokers of white guilt. Naturally, they're terrified, and for good reason.

Actually, two of them.

jskass@tribune.com

FILM REVIEWS: MONGOL

How the East Was Won: The Romance Of Genghis Khan

By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Friday, June 20, 2008; Page C01

Tadanobu Asano as the conqueror, a warrior with heart in Sergei Bodrov's epic "Mongol." (Stv Via Associated Press)

Perhaps the most reliable modern empirical gauge of a movie's effectiveness is this: How fast does it send you to Wikipedia? The faster, the better, because that means you've got to know more.

In the case of "Mongol," the answer was: very fast, close to a new record. It was about nine minutes from theater to computer. Add another two minutes as I tried to figure out the random distribution of h's in the name Ghenghis Khanh, or possibly Hgenghis Khhhhan or even Genghis Kahn (it turns out to be Genghis Khan), and I learned that "Mongol," while a hell of a good time at the movies in its chronicle of the first 30 years of the man who went from slave to conqueror, is more romantic and less squalid than the reality.

This is because the Russian filmmaker Sergei Bodrov -- his big international hit was "Prisoner of the Mountains" in 1997 -- has clearly followed John Ford's advice from "The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance," which was something like, "When confused by the legend or the facts, make the movie about the legend. That's where the box office is."
The result is a wallow in old movie pleasures, full of battles, flying dust, thousands of men on horseback, beautiful women, treachery, slaughter, really cool hats, and even more slaughter. Moreover, it has a kind of morphic connection to the American imagination, in that, while watching the comings and goings of these fleet, horse-borne, extremely handsome warrior-archers and warrior-archer women across undulating grassy infinity, it's hard not to see the Lakota Sioux or the Cheyenne Dog Soldiers or the Mescalero Apache in the mind's eye. When you consider that Temudjin (played by Japanese heartthrob Tadanobu Asano), as the man who would become Genghis was once known, controlled the world from China to Bulgaria, you think: Okay, that's one for the Indians.

But when the big-budget, cast o' thousands Russian epic begins, he's a pudgy-faced, imperious 9-year-old kid (the excellent Odnyam Odsuren) on his way to pick out a bride, accompanied by his father, a minor lord. The place is central Mongolia in the 12th century, which is to say, really, no place, nowhere. It's grasslands forever and a day, and human presence is marked only occasionally by the appearance of a cluster of yurts. One can see a hunter-gatherer existence in full flower as everything is built of leather and bone and nothing is permanent because at any moment the clan may have to up and follow the -- er, not buffalo, the yak, I'm guessing. Yet it's far from primitive: A complex society of clan networks and obligations has sprung up, and the marriage being set up has more political purpose than social. Love's got nothing to do with it.

But immediately young Temudjin, who knows his own mind, shows his emperor's will, demanding of his father that the selection take place now, that is, at a way-station among a minor clan rather than at a more powerful, politically appropriate camp. Temudjin has seen Börte, and that's enough for him.

It's somewhat akin to believing that the Trojan War was fought for Helen to believe, as the movie theorizes, that Temudjin conquered the world for Börte, but both Diane Kruger, who played Helen in "Troy," and Khulan Chuluun, who plays Börte in "Mongol," make you believe it. Beautiful, talented actresses, the two have that little something extra that makes us boys say: You know, I'd raze a few cities and execute a few prisoners for a date with this one.

So that core of love, lust and touchy-feely-more-touchy- lots-of-touchy is what drives "Mongol," more than politics or land-lust, and the surprise is that the movie is as much about Börte's cunning and relentlessness in dealing with the obstacles between her and Temudjin (such as five mythical years in a Chinese prison) as about conquest. In fact, a better title might have been: "Genghis Khan: A Love Story.

Still, there's a lot of guy stuff. When the young man's father is poisoned, his clan is dispersed, prey to stronger clans. For the first of several times he is captured and imprisoned. Instead of wilting under the challenge of slavery, he grows stronger, more cunning and more virile (he's a little like the proto-Conan, which is perhaps a way of saying that Robert E. Howard, Conan's creator, modeled his hero on Temudjin, not the other way around). He escapes several times, each time returning to Börte, each time recaptured. At one point he makes an alliance with another noble youth, Jamukha, who becomes his "brother," thus setting up a famous Genghis legend.

They ride, they fight, they ride some more, they fight some more. Bodrov loves to watch as thousands of horsemen clash on the plains, not a smokepole in sight (it's 1207, after all) so the heavy lifting is done with blade and spear. Whoever was on the electronic blood spurt machine probably got overtime or at least a bonus, for there's a lot of arterial spray and some wet loogies of plasma that look like jellyfish sailing through the air.

In the end, we're about a third of the way through the great Khan's life; he hasn't even begun to take down the cities of Cathay or spread his seed (his genetic traces are found in about 8 percent of Central Asia and 0.5 percent of the male population today, according to some researchers, meaning the guy did even better than Warren Beatty!). That suggests two sequels. I, for one, can't wait.

Mongol (124 minutes, at area theaters) is rated R for violence and sequences of bloody warfare. In Mongolian with subtitles.

By JOE MORGENSTERN
The Wall Street Journal
http://online.wsj.com/
June 6, 2008; Page W1

'Mongol' Brings Style and Sumptuous Scale to Genghis Khan Saga

If the Genghis Khan of "Mongol" were running for president, he'd give Hillary, Obama or McCain a gallop for their money. Sergei Bodrov's thrilling steppe epic upgrades the brutal head of those bloodthirsty hordes to the status of visionary. This Mongol of all Mongols is a modern, merciful leader ahead of his time -- 800 years ahead of his time. He's so cool and self-contained in his sense of personal destiny that it's no wonder scads of nomads follow him.

The director, who wrote the script with Arif Aliyef, might have called it "Temudgin," though that doesn't quite sing as a selling title. Genghis Khan was born with that name, in 1162, and Temudgin's emergence from boyhood into full and fearless manhood is the subject of the movie, the first part of a projected trilogy. The production was Kazakhstan's entry for a best-foreign-film Oscar in the most recent Academy Awards, but it's a huge, and hugely impressive, international enterprise.

Mr. Bodrov is the Russian filmmaker best known to American audiences for the superb 1997 drama "Prisoner of the Mountain." The adult Temudgin is played -- with remarkable intensity -- by the Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano. Honglei Sun, who's Chinese, is the hero's blood brother and mortal enemy, the mercurial, funny and frightening Jamukha. Temudgin's wife, a beautiful woman named Borte, is played by the movie's only Mongolian star, Khulan Chuluunn, and it's her first time in front of a camera. She's a great argument for native talent, and against acting classes.

I don't know the Mongolian word for panache, but "Mongol's" got plenty of it. The battle scenes are as notable for their clarity as their intensity; we can follow the strategies, get a sense of who's losing and who's winning. The physical production is sumptuous. (The film was shot by Sergey Trofimov, who is Russian, and Rogier Stoffers, who is Dutch.) And through all of Temudgin's extravagant trials and hard-won triumphs, there's a sense of a singular child serving as father to a powerful man whose power flows from his instinctive devotion to justice, and to his wife. It's an austere epic that turns the stuff of pulp adventure into a persuasive take on ancient history.

MONGOL
Empire Magazine
http://www.empireonline.com/
Reviewer: Will Lawrence

Plot

An epic account of the rise of Genghis Khan (Asano), charting his journey from his ninth birthday, in 1172 AD, through to 1206 AD, the moment he unites the Steppe tribes and embarks on his staggering journey of conquest.

Review

Drawn from the one extant piece of original source material - The Secret History Of The Mongols, a curious blend of myth, legend and apparent fact - Sergei Bodrov’s Oscar-nominated Mongol is an impressive piece of epic filmmaking. The ancient manuscript, like many sagas, is somewhat repetitive, moving swiftly from a mythical ‘origin’ story into the early life of Genghis Khan (Tadanobu Asano) - or Temudzhin as he was originally known – which unfolds in a seemingly endless cycle of triumph and loss. Life on the ancient steppe was dominated by tribal warfare, as horsemen constantly battered one another in a bid to capture livestock, women, and good grazing for their herds.

For Bodrov, this presents a challenge. He conceived the film as the first part of a trilogy, and it extends no further than the moment when Temudzhin vanquishes Jamucha (Honglei Sun), his former blood brother, to position himself on the cusp of greatness. The director sifts through the multiple layers of betrayal and revenge that lead to that point, a sequence that could disintegrate into a bloody, martial monotony.

Thankfully, the Secret History contains an intriguing chapter in which a rival clan kidnaps Temudzhin’s intended spouse, Borte (Khulan Chuluun), and the director develops her role to the point where she plays a pivotal part in her husband’s political and spiritual evolution. Mongol offers a considered portrait of Genghis, with Borte’s presence adding depth to the warlord’s emotional makeup; if there is simplicity in his and his brethren’s actions, they are simple folk. Bodrov also benefits immeasurably from his leading man’s performance, with Japanese actor Asano Tadanobu bringing a confidence and quietude to the part, which in turn adds gravitas to his epic journey. Like many sagas, Mongol carries its principal player through a period of shadow, when he is imprisoned by the Tangut kingdom. He endures his privations with grace and dignity. When he emerges, freed by Borte’s cunning, his goes on to fulfil his destiny, his journey painted on a truly epic canvas. The cinematography, rendering the stark, unworldly beauty of the Central Asian Steppe, is astounding.

Verdict

With its breathtaking landscapes, bloody battles, bitter betrayals and an aching love story, Mongol is a sumptuously crafted epic.

The New York Times vs. Helms, Part 529,876

By Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com/
July 9, 2008

On Oct. 26, 1982, President Reagan joined Sen. Jesse Helms at the Raleigh Civic Center to bestow the Presidential Medal of Freedom on singer Kate Smith, who lived in Raleigh.

Last Friday, on the Fourth of July, the great patriot Jesse Helms passed away. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson also went to their great reward on Independence Day, so this is further proof of God.

Helms is now the second great American patriot I've always wanted to meet and never will, at least in this lifetime. The only other one is the magnificent Reagan aide Lyn Nofziger. (Wikipedia quote: "I sometimes lie awake at night trying to think of something funny that Richard Nixon said.")

After a week of hundreds of Helms obituaries -- one or two of which were not completely dishonest -- I will mention just a few items that were not addressed or given sufficient attention.

The two most obsessively discussed topics among Senate staffers are: (1) Who is the stupidest senator? (Sen. Barbara Boxer pulled into the lead when Sen. Lincoln Chafee retired), and (2) which senators are beastly and which are wonderful to their staff?

When I worked in the Senate in the '90s, the two senators famous for being absolute princes to work for were Sen. Helms and -- it pains me to tell you this, so you know it has to be true -- Sen. Teddy Kennedy. (He was so nice to his staffers, he frequently offered them rides home in his car after parties.)

I never knew -- and you never knew, unless you read one of the two honest obituaries this past week -- that in 1962 Helms and his wife "Dot" adopted a 9-year-old orphan with cerebral palsy. They already had two daughters and Helms was 41 years old at the time. But it was Christmastime and they read about Charlie in a newspaper. He said all he wanted for Christmas was a mother and father.

In the 1976 North Carolina Republican primary, Helms engineered Ronald Reagan's upset victory over Gerald Ford, the sitting president. That victory carried Reagan to the convention and made him the front-runner in 1980. The night Reagan won the 1980 presidential election, Helms famously uttered the beautiful words: "God has given America one more chance."

In 1984, Helms' re-election campaign was the then-most expensive Senate race in history. His Democratic opponent, Gov. Jim Hunt, received campaign contributions from the usual dotty liberals: Barbra Streisand, Phil Donahue, Marlo Thomas, Paul Newman, Woody Allen -- all, no doubt, steeped in North Carolina politics.

Shockingly, Hunt also received a donation from Arthur Sulzberger, publisher of the nonpartisan, totally objective, straight-down-the-middle New York Times. Which I guess explains the nasty obituary last week.

Meanwhile, Helms received contributions mostly from America's two most dangerous fringe groups: housewives and businessmen. His few celebrity supporters included Gene Autry and Ellin Berlin, wife of composer Irving Berlin, the patriotic Jewish immigrant who wrote "White Christmas" and "God Bless America."

Other Republicans loved to run in years when Helms was up for election because, like a Marine exposing himself to enemy fire to let his comrades escape, all the Hollywood money would be dedicated to defeating Helms.

On election night 1984, a friend of mine was at a Republican victory party in Michigan when suddenly a group of Hasidim broke out in cheering and dancing. Was "Fiddler on the Roof" being made into a major motion picture? He looked up at the mammoth TV screen. It read: "Jesse Helms Wins North Carolina."

Helms was viciously and falsely portrayed as a racist -- including in the totally objective New York Times obituary last week. In January 1963, a decade before Helms would run for office, he editorialized about Harvey Gantt, the first black student to be admitted to Clemson University in South Carolina.

Helms praised Gantt to the skies, saying he had "stoutly resisted the pose of a conquering hero" and had "turned away from the liberal press and television networks which would glorify him." Gantt, Helms said, just wanted to be an architect and "Clemson is the only college in South Carolina that can teach him how to be one."

Funny how that little tidbit didn't make the Times obituary. They must have cut it for "space."

Helms was for integration; he was simply against "movements." He would later hire James Meredith, who was the first black to attend the University of Mississippi -- with the assistance of federal troops. By 1989, Meredith's views had come around to those of Helms, not the other way around.

After years of reading and studying and attending law school at Columbia University, Meredith concluded that blacks had been better off when they worked for themselves and not for white liberals. (Having worked for white liberals myself, I couldn't agree more.) Meredith claimed Helms fired him as domestic policy adviser after a year because he was too right-wing for Helms.

Which reminds me: I'll have to try to meet Meredith before the next Fourth of July.

Liberals discount Helms' hiring of Meredith on the grounds that Meredith had wandered off the reservation. (Blacks are allowed to have only one set of political views.) It just shows you how stupid liberals are: Blacks don't live on reservations; Indians do.

It's pretty much the same thing liberals are accusing B. Hussein Obama of right now. In its July 4 editorial, the Times harangued Obama for his diversions from the liberal line on Iraq, the domestic surveillance bill, capital punishment and guns. I believe the editorial was titled something like, "Get in Line, N-word."

To paraphrase Dan Quayle, to be called a racist by these people is a badge of honor. Rest in peace, Jesse Helms: New York Times stock was recently lowered to a notch above junk bond status.

Why Do We "Keep and Bear Arms"? Part 2

By Larry Elder
http://www.townhall.com/
Thursday, July 10, 2008

Did it work -- the Washington, DC, gun ban, that is?

The Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, struck down the ban, holding that a) the Second Amendment gives individuals the right to keep and bear arms, and b) while the government may regulate the boundaries of the Second Amendment, the DC ban goes too far.

The New York Times, in an editorial condemning the Supreme Court case, says: "Thirty-thousand Americans are killed by guns every year -- on the job, walking to school, at the shopping mall. The Supreme Court on Thursday all but ensured that even more Americans will die senselessly."

Really?

The 30,000 number includes 17,000 suicides. But a person intent on suicide finds a way -- gun or no gun. In Japan, for example, more than twice as many people, per capita, kill themselves, yet that country bans handguns.

The hand-wringing New York Times editorial fails to ask the following questions: How many Americans use guns to defend themselves? Of that number, how many believe that but for their ability to use their guns in self-defense, they would be dead?

"When a robbery victim does not defend himself," former assistant district attorney and firearms expert David Kopel writes, "the robber succeeds 88 percent of the time, and the victim is injured 25 percent of the time. When a victim resists with a gun, the robbery success rate falls to 30 percent, and the victim injury rate falls to 17 percent. No other response to a robbery -- from drawing a knife to shouting for help to fleeing -- produces such low rates of victim injury and robbery success."

Criminologist and researcher Gary Kleck, using his own commissioned phone surveys and number extrapolation, estimates that 2.5 million Americans use guns for defensive purposes each year. One in six of that number, or 400,000, believe someone would have been dead but for their ability to resort to their defensive use of firearms. Kleck points out that if only one-tenth of the people are right about saving a life, the number of people saved annually by guns would still be 40,000.

The Department of Justice's own National Institute of Justice study entitled "Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms" estimates that 1.5 million Americans use guns for defensive purposes every year. Although the government's figure estimates a million fewer people defensively using guns, the NIJ calls their figure "directly comparable" to Kleck's, noting, "It is statistically plausible that the difference is due to sampling error." Furthermore, the NIJ reports that half of their respondents who said they used guns defensively also admitted having done so multiple times a year -- making the number of estimated uses of self-defense with a gun 4.7 million times annually.

UCLA Professor Emeritus James Q. Wilson, a respected expert on crime, police practices and guns, says: "We know from Census Bureau surveys that something beyond 100,000 uses of guns for self-defense occur every year. We know from smaller surveys of a commercial nature that the number may be as high as 2 1/2 or 3 million. We don't know what the right number is, but whatever the right number is, it's not a trivial number."

But what of the Washington, DC, gun ban?

In the five years preceding the 1976 ban, the per capita murder rate in Washington, DC, fell. At the time the law passed, the murder and non-negligent manslaughter rate was 26.8 per 100,000 people. By 1991, the rate rose to 80.6. In 2006, the number stood at 29.1, almost 9 percent higher than the 1976 rate. DC's per capita murder rate remains higher than surrounding states.

A "hot burglary" occurs when the bad guy enters a home knowing it is occupied. The hot burglary rate in the United States is about 10 percent, while the hot burglary rate in the U.K. -- which banned handguns in 1997 -- is around 50 percent.

Why not ask the real experts -- criminals?

The U.S. Department of Justice's National Institute of Justice surveyed 2,000 felons in state prisons. It asked whether "one reason burglars avoid houses when people are at home is that they fear being shot during the crime." Seventy-four percent of the felons said yes. The survey also asked these felons whether they had abandoned at least one crime because they feared the intended suspect might be armed. Thirty-nine percent said they abandoned at least one crime; 8 percent had abandoned such a crime "many" times; 34 percent admitted being "scared off, shot at, wounded, or captured by an armed victim"; and nearly 70 percent knew a "colleague" who had abandoned a crime, been scared off, been shot at, wounded or captured by a victim packing heat.

So, did the Washington, DC, gun ban "work"?

As the city's former Mayor Marion Barry once put it, "Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country."

So there.

About The Author

Larry Elder is host of the Larry Elder Show on talk radio and author of Showdown : Confronting Bias, Lies, and the Special Interests That Divide America .

Popular Articles By Elder

How Can a "Fellow Black Republican" Oppose Obama?

Warming Up to Obama's Message of Hope and Change

What Does Obama's Victory Mean?

Why Do We 'Keep and Bear Arms'? Part 1

If 'The Media' Dislike Hillary, How Do They Feel About Those ----- Republicans?

Join The Debate!
Post Your Comment
(8 comments so Far)

Honor Killing in Georgia

By Robert Spencer

http://www.frontpagemag.com/

Thursday, July 10, 2008

AP
July 7: Chaudhry Rashid waits with other inmates to make his first appearance in Magistrate Court at the Clayton County Courthouse in Jonesboro, Ga.

Last Sunday Chaudhry Rashid, a Pakistani immigrant living in Clayton County, Georgia, strangled his daughter to death. According to police, Rashid explained to them that he had killed his daughter, Sandeela Kanwal, in order to restore his family’s honor, which she had sullied by planning to divorce the husband to whom she had been given in an arranged marriage. Clayton County Police spokesman Tim Owens explained: “Apparently she and the father had argued over the marriage and the fact that it was arranged, and at some point during the altercation he did end up killing his daughter.”

The family appears to have adhered to traditional Islamic mores. A neighbor noted: “I would see the young lady outside every once in a while dressed in the traditional Muslim gear.” Added another: “The father, he would pray at certain times of the mornings and evenings.” And indeed, honor killing most commonly occurs among Muslims. While there is no direct sanction given in the Qur’an or Islamic law for it, the practice is encouraged by the shame/honor culture that Islam has created. A transgression of the moral law is not seen only as a sin to be somehow expiated by the individual who committed it, but as a blot upon the honor and purity of the family of the victim – and that blot inheres in the sullied purity of the victim, not the perpetrator.

“Honor killings” are distressingly common throughout the Muslim world. Phyllis Chesler reports that “in 1997, in Cairo Egypt, twenty-five-year-old Nora Marzouk Ahmed’s honeymoon ended when her father chopped off her head and carried it down the street. ‘Now,’ he said, ‘the family has regained its honor.’ Nora’s crime? She had eloped.” And “in 2002, in Tehran, an Iranian man cut off his seven-year-old daughter’s head after suspecting she had been raped by her uncle. ‘The motive behind the killing was to defend my honor, fame, and dignity.’ Some people called for this man’s death under Islamic law, but ironically, only the father of the victim can demand the death sentence.”

Chesler recounts many such killings. “In 1999, in Lahore, Pakistan, Samia Imran was shot dead in her feminist lawyer’s office by a man whom her parents had hired to kill her. Her crime? Seeking a divorce….In 2001, in Gujar Khan, Pakistan, Zahida Perveen’s husband attacked her, gouged out both her eyes, her nose, and her ears. He wrongly suspected her of adultery. He was arrested, but male relatives shook his hand and men decided she ‘must have deserved it’ and that a ‘husband has to do what a man has to do.’…In 2005, in Gaza, five masked members of Hamas…shot Yusra Azzumi, a twenty-year-old Palestinian woman, to death, brutalized her corpse, and savagely beat both her brother, Rami, and her fiancé, Ziad Zaranda, whom she was to marry within days. This self-appointed Morality Squad wrongly suspected Yusra (herself a Hamas member) of “immoral behavior.”

Islamic clerics are partially responsible for the strong association of this practice with Islam. One notorious example of this association came in the relatively moderate Muslim country of Jordan in 2003, when the Jordanian Parliament voted down a provision designed to stiffen penalties for honor killings. Al-Jazeera reported with unintentional irony that increasing penalties for honor killings would destroy families: “Islamists and conservatives said the laws violated religious traditions and would destroy families and values.”

Ignoring the clear and close link between of honor killing and Islamic culture, however, the mainstream media searched for explanations elsewhere. CNN consulted Ajay Nair, associate dean of multicultural affairs at Columbia University, to see if honor killing was a “South Asian” problem. Certainly not, explained Nair: “My immediate reaction was that this is an anomaly in the South Asian community. This isn’t a rampant problem within South Asian communities. What is a problem, I think, is domestic violence, and that cuts across all communities.”

Also ignoring the incidence of honor killings in Jordan, Egypt, Iran, Gaza and elsewhere (including among Muslim immigrants in Germany, Britain, Canada, and Texas), the Chicago Tribune attributed it to the cultural rigidity of Pakistani and Indian immigrants, and even dragged in the crowned heads of Europe: “Such cultural unions serve as social contracts among South Asians and other communities, where a marriage agreement is more about families joining forces than about two people finding love—akin to the arranged marriages of European royalty…”

To this Warner Todd Huston of NewsBusters trenchantly responded: “Last I checked my history books common Europeans didn’t go around killing their daughters for marrying ‘wrong’ and neither did their ages old Monarchs.”

In line with the widespread acceptance of this practice in Islamic culture, when he appeared before a judge, Chaudhry Rashid insisted: “I have done nothing wrong.” Speaking to the judge, he demanded prison food prepared according to Islamic requirements, and declared that he would refuse pork in any form. It was a clear indication of the strength of his commitment to Islam, even as the mainstream media remained determined not to notice any such commitment.

The price of this politically correct refusal to confront the ugly realities of the Islamic link to honor killing will be, quite simply, more honor killings. No one will call upon Islamic groups to do something about this practice. No special scrutiny will be focused upon Muslims in the United States, or any studies undertaken about how honor killings can be prevented. No one will examine the question of unrestricted Muslim immigration in light of this problem. While learned analysts search for clues in South Asian cultural habits and the practices of European royalty, more young women will be murdered by their Muslim fathers, husbands, and brothers to cleanse their family’s honor. These young women are the ultimate victims of political correctness.

- Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of seven books, eight monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His next book, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs, is coming this November from Regnery Publishing.

Illegal Voting

The non-citizen electorate.

By Hans A. von Spakovsky

National Review Online

http://www.nationalreview.com/

July 10, 2008

Amid all the talk of new voters becoming involved in the election, hopefully one group of voters will not vote in November — non-citizens, many of whom are illegally registered to vote all over the country, particularly in the southwest. Although there is no reliable method to determine the exact number registered aliens, there is evidence that this is a significant and growing problem.

The Government Accountability Office estimated that up to 3 percent of individuals called for jury duty from voter registration rolls in just one U.S. district court were not U.S. citizens. While that may not seem like a large number, it’s more than enough to tip close elections — say, Florida in 2000. Florida has over a million illegal aliens, and the Justice Department has prosecuted non-citizens, including a state-legislature candidate, for voting there. In California, a congressional seat came within 200 votes of being stolen in 1996 by non-citizens’ voting; a city councilmember was permanently disqualified from public office for soliciting non-citizens to vote in Compton in 2001.

After a grand-jury investigation of the 1982 Illinois governor’s race resulted in the conviction of aliens for illegally registering and voting, the U.S. Attorney estimated that there were 80,000 non-citizens registered to vote in Chicago. In 1985, the district director of the Immigration and Naturalization Services testified in the Illinois legislature that 25,000 illegal and 40,000 legal aliens remained registered in Chicago. The grand jury found that aliens registered so they could “obtain documents identifying them as U.S. citizens” and had used their voter registration cards “to obtain a myriad of benefits, from social security to jobs with the Defense Department.” More recently, Bexar County, Texas, found hundreds of aliens registered to vote, some of whom had voted in a dozen local, state, and federal elections, and Harris County found a Norwegian citizen who had voted in a state legislative race decided by only 33 votes. Similar accounts from other states such as Utah and Arizona demonstrate that this is a widespread phenomena.

The weaknesses of the current registration system are to blame. First, in order to make registration easier, federal laws do not require proof of citizenship when registering, and states routinely offer registration to anyone getting a driver’s license, regardless of citizenship. Moreover, federal agencies in charge of immigration and customs enforcement refuse to comply with a federal law that requires them to cooperate with election officials in checking the citizenship status of registered voters. Overall, this amounts to an “honor” system — expecting immigrants, including those who broke the law to come here, to obey the law.

And even if an illegal alien would normally follow the rules, federal law provides an incentive for him to register to vote: Voter-registration cards, obtainable after a limited or no identification check, can be used to verify legal work status. They can also help when it comes to drivers’ licenses.

There are a number of solutions to this problem. The most important is that we must stop relying on an honor system, and require voters to provide proof of citizenship; election officials should have access to the government databases used by employers to verify the citizenship status of prospective employees. The federal government already uses these tools on everyone trying to get a job, negating the argument that proof of citizenship is discriminatory. Arizona, the only state that requires proof of citizenship to register to vote, has already turned away thousands of non-citizens who attempted to register — including almost 3,000 who tried to register when they applied for drivers’ licenses. State and federal courts should notify election officials when potential jurors are excused because they are not U.S. citizens.

Americans may disagree on many areas of immigration policy, but they should not disagree on the basic principle that only citizens should vote. Government officials have an obligation to enforce those laws.

— Hans A. von Spakovsky served as a member of the Federal Election Commission and as counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights at the U.S. Department of Justice. His new study on “The Threat of Non-Citizen Voting” is available at www.heritage.org.

Today's Tune: Neal Coty - Tainted

(Click on title to play video)

Jesse Helms And Mangled Manners

By Brent Bozell III

http://www.townhall.com/

July 09, 2008

Conservatives across America mourned at the news of the death of Sen. Jesse Helms, a man credited with impeccable conservative credentials in the U.S. Senate, a conscience of a movement devoted to the defeat of communism abroad and the defense of liberty at home. He was the staunchest of social conservatives as well, unflinching in his opposition to the abortion lobby and the gay agenda.

To liberals he was "Senator No," which meant only that he would strongly oppose everything they wanted to impose on America. Their badly disguised loathing of Helms, well-expressed over the decades, only endeared him to conservatives all the more.

Jesse Helms relished that opposition. In 1990, the media declared him politically dead, his re-election an utter impossibility. On election night, a thousand cheering supporters were made to wait before their man finally emerged to declare victory, 20 minutes late. He opened his remarks by apologizing for his tardiness. "Ah was up in mah room," he explained, "ah had to watch the grievin' face of Dan Rathuh when he had to say we'd won agin." The crowd went wild.

When Helms announced his retirement from the Senate in 2001, the media elite made their own distaste very clear. "He was so wonderfully odious," declared top Newsweek editor Evan Thomas. "He was very comforting to the East Coast media establishment to know that there was an evil guy out there that you could really fear." Thomas doesn't feel the need ever to express hatred of the Soviets. He didn't fear or hate the Maoists. He didn't fear or hate a Holocaust-denying Islamofascist like Ahmadinejad. He feared and hated an American patriot.

Their loathing was so acute they even called him a dictator and a terrorist. When Helms held up President Clinton's nomination of soft-on-drugs Republican William Weld as ambassador to Mexico in 1997, ABC's Sam Donaldson said, "beneath that courtliness beats the heart of a dictator." George Stephanopoulos added: "Or a terrorist." NBC also decried his "dictatorial tactics" in delaying a confirmation hearing for Weld -- something Democrats have done routinely throughout the Bush years without any of these media slurs.

Civility demands that when a major political figure dies, journalists (and others, too) should summon their respects, acknowledge the importance of this national figure and perhaps even concede that the intentions of his public service were good. Not so with Jesse Helms. The Washington Post stressed Helms "rode his divisiveness to victory." The New York Times obituary threw punches, describing him as the senator "whose courtly manner and mossy drawl barely masked a hard-edged conservatism that opposed civil rights, gay rights, foreign aid and modern art."

The networks were no better. NBC's Lester Holt blatantly copied the Times: "He staked out firm positions against everything from communism and foreign aid to civil rights and modern art." NBC reporter Martin Savidge called Helms an "ultra-rightist." But when ultra-leftist Sen. Howard Metzenbaum died in March, NBC found no time for a label (or even a political party). They sweetly praised "the classic American success story" of a man who "always fought for the little guy, taking on the oil and insurance industries" as he "stuck to his populist principles."

Perhaps unsurprisingly, liberals on the Internet made these old-media critiques look sedate. They didn't see any need to observe any kind of civility, letting their rage and ill will erupt like a spewing volcano. The blog Wonkette featured the headline "See You In Hell: Jesse Helms Finally Dead." They cheered: "Jesse Helms was apparently still alive, and now he's dead, hooray! He was a sour troll and a bigot, and it's a testament to every rotten thing about this country that for a quarter century, he was one of the most powerful people in American politics."

Wonkette linked to Ken Layne on America Online's Political Machine blog, whose headline was "Jesse Helms, American Garbage." Layne said Helms died "25 years too late," and he was "a mean little troll whose heart was so wrecked by wickedness that doctors had to patch it up with coronary valves from a pig."

The gossip site Gawker said being nice to Helms would be unthinkable, akin to saying "Hitler was kind to animals." Leftist blogger Phil Nelson summed it up for mean-spirited liberals with his headline: "Jesse Helms Is Finally Dead. Let's Have a Cookout."

You wouldn't have this kind of "luck" searching around the Web looking for high-profile conservative bloggers cheering Howard Metzenbaum's death and describing him as evil and destined for Hell. Go ahead, liberals: look.
At a moment like this, when friends and family and allies of Sen. Helms mourn, it's quite clear that liberals should not suggest in public that they are somehow losing to conservatives in a contest to demonstrate who has more capacity to display callous, middle-finger meanness and breathtaking insensitivity.

About The Author

Founder and President of the Media Research Center, Brent Bozell runs the largest media watchdog organization in America.

Popular Articles By Bozell III

Who Dares Oppose the Obamas?
Remembering George Carlin
Liberal Smears Unchallenged
"Weeds" and Marijuana Chic
Dan Rather, Journalism Guardian?

Join The Debate!

Post Your Comment
(7 comments so Far)

Dancing on the grave of Jesse Helms

By Jeff Jacoby
Boston Globe

http://www.boston.com/
July 9, 2008

In this Nov. 5, 1996 photo, Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., left, is congratulated by Sen. Lauch Faircloth, R-N.C., after Helms won his fifth term to the U.S. Senate by defeating Democrat Harvey Gantt in Raleigh, N.C. Helms has died at age 86, the Jesse Helms research center says. (AP Photo/Alan Marler, file) (Alan Marler - AP)

LIBERALS DIDN'T think much of Jesse Helms when he was alive, and their feelings didn't soften with his death.

"Jesse Helms, you rat bastard, burn in hell," announced a headline at Daily Kos, the hugely popular left-wing blog; "Please excuse me while I dance upon his grave," gloated another.

In The Nation, the former North Carolina senator was memorialized as "Jesse Helms, American Bigot." For its online audience, The Washington Post resurrected a column David Broder produced when Helms announced his retirement: "Jesse Helms, White Racist."

The invective streamed in from across the pond as well. "There seemingly wasn't a right-wing, retrograde social issue Helms met that he didn't like," wrote Melissa McEwan in a savage essay on the Guardian's website. "It was . . . his unmitigated intolerance toward people of color that will define his legacy.

Well, hating Helms is nothing new. More than 16 years ago, the scholar Charles Horner observed in Commentary that for many people Helms had become a "symbol of the evil against which all enlightened people are automatically ranged." As with the poisonous rhetoric of today's pathological George W. Bush-haters, the point of the virulence expressed toward Helms was typically character-assassination, not contention - it was aimed at demonizing the man rather than debating or disproving his ideas.

For some liberals, Helms's death had long been a fantasy. "I think he ought to be worried about what's going on in the Good Lord's mind," NPR's Nina Totenberg said in 1995, "because if there is retributive justice, he'll get AIDS from a transfusion. Or one of his grandchildren will get it."

What the left despised most about Helms varied with the seasons. There was his unyielding anticommunism. His visceral opposition to homosexuality. His war on government funding of obscene art. His blackball of William Weld's nomination as ambassador to Mexico. His staunch support of the tobacco industry. And, of course his segregationist past.

In the one-dimensional demonology of the left, Helms comes across as an unreconstructed racist who dreamed of Jim Crow every night and whose first words each morning were "Segregation forever!" The truth was considerably different - and more admirable.

Helms came to prominence as a foe of desegregation. "He battled as hard as any of them," editorialized the conservative National Review in 2001, "a shameful legacy, of which he was never ashamed." In those days Helms was a Democrat, as were most Southern segregationists. But by the time he entered Congress in 1973, he had changed both his party and his mind. Far from using his office to roll back civil rights, argued Walter Russell Mead, a noted scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations, Helms "deserves to be remembered as one of a handful of men who brought white Southern conservatives into a new era of race relations."

Mead, who grew up in the South, recalled listening as a boy to Helms's "anti-integration, anti-Martin Luther King commentaries on WRAL-TV." But once the battle was over and the civil rights laws were passed, Mead wrote years later, Helms did something "very revolutionary for Southern white populists: He accepted the laws and obeyed them." He shunned violence, hired black aides, and provided constituent services without regard to race. Instead of leading his followers into resistance, Helms "disciplined and tamed the segregationist South," prodding it "into grudging acceptance of the new racial order."

Yet rather than hail his statesmanship and acknowledge his contribution to the civil rights revolution, liberals marked his death by reaching for pejoratives. Helms's sin was not racism; it was his tenacious political incorrectness. Had he been willing to tack left on other issues, his racial wrongs would have been forgiven.

Consider, for example, the treatment meted out to Helms's senior colleague, Sam Ervin. He was beloved by the left notwithstanding his defense of segregation and his vote against elevating Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. When Ervin died, The Washington Post's front-page obituary began by saluting him as a "hero to many" for his role in the Watergate hearings. His opposition to nearly every civil-rights bill of his career wasn't mentioned until the 24th paragraph - of a 25-paragraph obituary.

The real Jesse Helms was never the cartoon villain his enemies so loved to hate. But then, he didn't much care what they thought while he was alive. He certainly doesn't care now.

Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.

Sharia Showdown on Wall Street

By Paul Sperry
http://www.frontpagemag.com/
Wednesday, July 09, 2008


Muhammad Taqi Usmani


Sheik Muhammad Taqi Usmani has been a rock star of the Islamic finance world, sitting on the sharia supervisory boards of no fewer than a dozen Islamic banks and financial institutions worldwide.

For nearly a decade, the mufti also has advised the Dow Jones Islamic Market Index, which licenses more than 25 stock funds that comply with Islamic laws forbidding certain Western-style investments. The venerable Dow Jones & Co. first retained him in 1999.

Usmani's name is now missing from the Dow Jones website, where it had previously been prominently displayed. His bio and photo suddenly vanished without explanation.


Meanwhile, all references to Dow Jones disappeared from the website of the North American Islamic Trust, or NAIT, which runs a sharia-compliant mutual fund out of Burr Ridge, Ill.


For years the fund had been called the Dow Jones Islamic Fund. Dow had lent NAIT its good name under a licensing agreement.


But recently the trust felt compelled to rename its lead portfolio the "Iman Fund," and amend several pages in its prospectus to remove all references to Dow Jones, as well as Usmani. Again, no explanation was offered.


What's behind the mystery? It's all been very hush-hush, but according to a high-level document I've obtained, along with interviews with company insiders, Dow Jones recently terminated NAIT's license and dumped Usmani to protect its brand. The company, now under new management, no longer wants to be associated with either of them, especially after they received a spate of bad publicity this year.


Articles published on this webzine -- as well as in the National Review, Investor's Business Daily and the Washington Times, among other media -- have called attention to Usmani's fatwahs demanding that Muslims living in the West conduct or support violent jihad against infidels at every opportunity.


"Killing is to continue until the unbelievers pay jizyah (subjugation tax) after they are humbled or overpowered," the radical Pakistani cleric wrote in his book, "Islam and Modernism," which in 2006 was translated from his native Urdu into English.


Usmani advocates spreading sharia law in America and the West -- the barbaric legal code that not only justifies holy war, but the stonings, floggings, amputations and even beheadings for petty crimes seen in Muslim nations such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Sudan. The aim of Muslims, he wrote, is to "take out people from the rule of people and put them under the rule of Allah."


More, Usmani has run a Pakistani madrassa that's trained thousands of Taliban, according to the Washington-based Center for Security Policy.

Usmani is no longer employed by Dow Jones, which says it only recently learned of such "allegations."


NAIT, which until a few months ago managed a $40 million Dow Jones portfolio, also has come under fire.


Allegedly, the trust is a Saudi-tied front for the pro-jihad Muslim Brotherhood that holds title to some of the most radical mosques in America.


The Justice Department last year named NAIT an unindicted co-conspirator in a terror money-laundering scheme to funnel more than $12 million to Hamas suicide bombers and their families under the guise of charity.


Dow has since revoked NAIT's license.


The moves against Usmani and NAIT were made quietly, without any media announcements, by Dow Jones' front office in South Brunswick, N.J.

After NAIT's links to terrorism were brought to its attention by the media, "Dow Jones terminated its license agreement with the NAIT subsidiary and required it to remove all reference to Dow Jones from its website and fund-related offering materials," Dow Jones Indexes President Michael Petronella confirmed, following the mysterious disappearance of such references from NAIT's website.


Explaining Usmani's departure, he cited "certain allegations related to Mr. Usmani who was, at the time, a member of the DJIM Index Sharia Advisory Board."


"Mr. Usmani has since resigned from our board," he asserted.


Petronella explained the changes in a May 29 letter to officials with the Center for Security Policy, a leading watchdog against the spread of Islamofascism in the West.


CSP president Frank Gaffney and the group's top lawyer had fired off a legal memo to Dow charging it with "covering up" material facts from the investing public about the sharia-compliant funds it licenses -- namely, that sharia advisers like Usmani "embrace the law of violent jihad that seeks America's destruction." Petronella responded that Dow Jones had already taken corrective action based on earlier media reports.


Indeed, sharia-compliant funds offer little transparency. They disclose neither the radical ties of the scholars who are advising and running them, nor the subversive tenets that dictate the structuring of the investments.

The prospectuses merely state the investments are "ethical" or "socially acceptable," when in fact they're grounded in a religious doctrine that threatens America and the West.


Lost in Wall Street's scramble to grab management and other fees from these Islamic-compliant funds, which are growing fast thanks to Arab petrodollars, is that the funds must "purify" their returns by transferring at least 3% into Islamic charities, many of which funnel funds to terrorists.

So, the American financial community may unwittingly be helping our sworn enemy.


Dow Jones' dumping of one of its top sharia advisers and licensees is a welcome setback to the burgeoning sharia-finance industry in America, which forbids investments in key businesses that drive our economy, including financial services, entertainment and aerospace-defense, as well as alcohol, tobacco and pork-related products.


It's also a serious blow to the credibility of one of the world's leading sharia-finance authorities, as well as that of America's largest mosque landlord.


But the case merely points up the unknown risks associated with Islamic finance.


What other sharia advisers are closet jihadists lusting after the blood of infidels? What other Islamic investment funds may be steering money to terrorists with the imprimatur of one of Wall Street's most respected institutions?

- Paul Sperry is a Hoover Institution media fellow and author of Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington. He can be contacted at Sperry@SperryFiles.com.

Today's Tune: Blondie - Maria

(Click on title to play video)