by Maxwell Goss with Roger Scruton
http://www.newpantagruel.com
Roger Scruton is a philosopher, essayist, foxhunter, farmer, publisher, composer, and man of letters, as well as a contributor to Right Reason, the weblog for philosophical conservativsm. He is also Britain’s leading conservative intellectual and The Meaning of Conservatism, which he wrote in 1980, is arguably the most important statement of the traditionalist conservative outlook since Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind (1953). One sign of the book’s success is the hostility it provoked on the left; the journal Radical Philosophy, for instance, described it as “clearly too ghastly to be taken seriously.”
Roger’s recent books include, among many others, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat (2002), News from Somewhere: On Settling (2005), and the autobiographical Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life (2005). Roger tells me he has “a strong attachment, recently acquired, to the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Hazel River.” He and his wife Sophie recently bought a house in Virginia, and divide their time between rural America and rural England.
Roger graciously agreed to an interview on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Meaning of Conservatism, now in its third edition. We discussed a range of subjects including the reaction to the book from left and right, the possibilities and limitations of free markets, the U.S. Constitution, the nature of philosophy, the social function of religion, the prospects for conservatism under Tony Blair and George W. Bush, and the joylessness of liberalism.
Max Goss:What prompted you to write The Meaning of Conservatism?
Roger Scruton:I wrote The Meaning of Conservatism in 1979, during the last year of a failing Labour Government, when the Conservatives were in the process of choosing a new leader (Margaret Thatcher), and also looking around for a new philosophy–or rather any philosophy, having subsisted to that point without one. I was teaching in the University of London, and had begun to take an interest in political thought. I was surprised to discover that the politics department of my college library contained largely Marxist or sub-Marxist books, that major conservative thinkers like Burke, de Maistre and Hayek were hardly to be found there, and that the journals were all uniformly leftist. Academic political science was in the style of the New Left Review, with a strong leaning towards the idiocies of 1968, a sneering contempt for England and its heritage, and a witch-hunting tone towards the opposition, which it dismissed as middle brow, middle class, and racist. At the same time I was troubled to discover that the Conservative Party had no principle with which to oppose this kind of ‘resentment politics,’ other than the Free Market. I wanted to remind people that there really is a tradition of conservative thinking in politics, that it is wiser and deeper than the left-liberal orthodoxies of the day, and that it is not reducible to free market principles, even if it contains them. It should be added that I would not have written the book, had I not been commissioned by Ted Honderich, then politics editor at Penguin and also a University colleague, who was desperate to find someone, somewhere, however feeble, to defend the conservative position. Meaning of Conservatism, the intellectual left–whose ideas, emotions and very existence depends upon a stance of opposition–would have had nothing to oppose. Hence the book’s appearance caused a huge sigh of relief among my colleagues, who were at last able to hate again.
MG:What about the reaction among conservatives? I’m thinking in particular of your criticism of certain capitalist arguments. While noting the conservative affinity for private property, you say these arguments “present us with a vision of politics that is desultory indeed, as though the sole aim of social existence were the accumulation of wealth and the sole concern of politics the discovery of the most effective means to it.” Did your lack of enthusiasm for free markets win you a warm reception with members of the Conservative Party?
Scruton:So far as I know The Meaning of Conservatism elicited no response whatsoever from the Conservative Party or those connected with it. There was, at the time, a small circle of intellectual conservatives at the London School of Economics–a legacy from the days when Oakeshott and Popper both taught there–and another at Cambridge. Neither of them seemed to notice the book. The Conservative Party was very much in the grip of the free market ideology relayed by the Institute for Economic Affairs. The view of the IEA at the time was that I, and the Salisbury Review which I founded, should be avoided, as exhibiting dangerous tendencies towards extremism, fascism etc., or alternatively as being part of a sophisticated KGB operation to split the Conservative Party. Later, however, the IEA’s Social Affairs Unit, under the leadership of Digby Anderson, developed in a direction that I felt closer to, and broke away from the IEA.
MG:What deleterious consequences result from the “free market ideology” you mention? Are there particular economic arrangements that conservatives ought to prefer?
Scruton:The free market is a necessary part of any stable community, and the arguments for maintaining it as the core of economic life were unanswerably set out by Ludwig von Mises. [Friedrich] Hayek developed the arguments further, in order to offer a general defence of ‘spontaneous order’, as the means to produce and maintain socially necessary knowledge. As Hayek points out, there are many varieties of spontaneous order that exemplify the epistemic virtues that he values: the common law is one of them, so too is ordinary morality. The problem for conservatism is to reconcile the many and often conflicting demands that these various forms of life impose on us. The free-market ideologues take one instance of spontaneous order, and erect it into a prescription for all the others. They ask us to believe that the free exchange of commodities is the model for all social interaction. But many of our most important forms of life involve withdrawing what we value from the market: sexual morality is an obvious instance, city planning another. (America has failed abysmally in both those respects, of course.) Looked at from the anthropological point of view religion can be seen as an elaborate (and spontaneous) way in which communities remove what is most precious to them (i.e. all that concerns the creation and reproduction of community) from the erosion of the market. A cultural conservative, such as I am, supports that enterprise. I would put the point in terms that echo Burke and Chesterton: the free market provides the optimal solution to the competition among the living for scarce resources; but when applied to the goods in which the dead and the unborn have an interest (sex, for instance) it wastes what must be saved.
MG:Shifting gears, an important theme in your book is that the notion of a social contract, “a recent and now seemingly irrepressible political idea,” cannot ground political life as we experience it. Can you say a little about the contrasting idea of the “transcendent bonds” that you say give rise to our social obligations?
Scruton:My point was simply to emphasize that the most important obligations governing our lives as social and political beings–including those to family, country and state–are non-contractual and precede the capacity for rational choice. By referring to them as ‘transcendent’ I meant to emphasize that they transcend any capacity to rationalise them in contractual or negotiable terms. They have an absolute and immovable character that we must acknowledge if we are to understand our social and political condition. The refusal of people on the left to make this acknowledgement stems from their inability to accept external authority in any form, and from their deep down belief that all power is usurpation, unless wielded by themselves.
MG:Does your emphasis on authority give any substance to the claim, so often found on the lips of liberals, that conservatism is repressive and dictatorial?
Scruton:To describe an obligation as transcendent in my sense is not to endow it with some kind of oppressive force. On the contrary, it is to recognize the spontaneous disposition of people to acknowledge obligations that they never contracted. There are other words that might be used in this context: gratitude, piety, obedience–all of them virtues, and all of them naturally offered to the thing we love. What I try to make clear in my writings is that, while the left-liberal view of politics is founded in antagonism towards existing things and resentment at power in the hands of others, conservatism is founded in the love of existing things, imperfections included, and a willing acceptance of authority, provided it is not blatantly illegitimate. Hence there is nothing oppressive in the conservative attitude to authority. It is part of the blindness of the left-wing worldview that it cannot perceive authority but only power. People who think of conservatism as oppressive and dictatorial have some deviant example in mind, such as fascism, or Tsarist autocracy. I would offer in the place of such examples the ordinary life of European and American communities as described by 19th century novelists. In those communities all kinds of people had authority–teachers, pastors, judges, heads of local societies, and so on. But only some of them had power, and almost none of them were either able or willing to oppress their fellows.
MG:The authority of the hunt master also comes to mind; an interesting study might be “the foxhunt as mediating institution.” Are there freedoms or other goods that could not exist without the benign forms of local authority you identify?
Scruton:The example of the hunt master is a good one, since it shows both the spontaneity of authority and the willingness of people to accept it, when they see how intricately it is connected to their own well-being and to the well-being of their community. To put the point in the arid terms of game theory: authority is a spontaneous solution to problems of coordination, and may be the only solution available. In all matters when discussion, voting and bargaining would delay the decision beyond the point when it must be made, the artifact of authority is the rational solution to problems of collective choice. This is obviously so in the military, but the principle extends through all society. And once authority is in place it becomes part of the culture: there grows around it that sense of security and of being at home in the world that we knew in childhood, and which now radiates from the people, offices and institutions to which we turn for answers. Without authority the mass of people have only questions, and it is not possible to live with a diet of unanswered questions.
MG:Is this why religion is important? Is a shared religion required for the forms of spontaneous authority you mention?
RS:Of course religion offers the certainties that people need–if it didn’t do that at least, it would have no congregation. But the social function of religion can be fulfilled whether its content is true or false, and whether it is compatible or not with modernity. Not every religion is tolerant of the unbeliever, and it is a remarkable fact about our own religious tradition that it allows not only apostasy but overt atheism–emphasizing that we bear witness through forgiveness and not through usurping a right of punishment that belongs only to God. In short it is a religious tradition that presents certainty in the midst of doubt, and allows the two to compete freely for our affections.
MG:In your book you criticize “the attempt to remake the nation through statute, and to substitute statute wherever possible for common law.” In the U.S., however, conservatives tend to be suspicious of what they term “the rule of judges,” and pin their hopes largely on a judiciary that hews as closely as possible to the letter of the law. Is there a tension here?
Scruton:American conservatives have rightly complained against the power of judges under the American constitution. For the Supreme Court has been able to use its authority as constitutional arbiter to expropriate the law-making powers of the Legislature. The doctrine of the division of powers is like the doctrine of the Trinity: it enshrines a mystery, and nobody really knows how to keep the three powers separate but united. There is a constant danger that they will collapse into one, as they have done under the rule of liberal judges in the Supreme Court. The British experience is related but different. In our case the collapse has gone the other way, with the legislature displacing and canceling the work of the courts. This is because we have a single chamber Parliament (the House of Lords now counting for nothing) and an unwritten constitution that places no real brakes on the abuse of legislative power (witness the recent Hunting Act). The conservative view, as I see it, is to advocate balance, which means respect offered by each organ of government to the others, and a refusal to arrogate powers when there is any doubt concerning the right to do so. I would also point out that the common law–a great gift of history that both our countries still possess–is both intrinsically conservative, and better able to resolve social conflicts than the schemes of politicians.
MG:You are often described as a “paleoconservative,” a term that Russell Kirk, who was described the same way, eschewed. Do you accept this designation?
Scruton:I am not hostile to American neo-conservatism, which seems to me to show a commendable desire to think things through and to develop an active alternative to liberalism in both national and international politics. But I suppose I am more of a paleo than a neo-conservative, since I believe that the conservative position is rooted in cultural rather than economic factors, and that the single-minded pursuit of competitive markets is just as much a threat to social order as the single-minded pursuit of equality.
MG:What do you make of the critique of industrial society presented by the Southern Agrarians, or by contemporary agrarians such as Wendell Berry?
Scruton:Things have moved on since the Southern Agrarians, who were able to enjoy the last twilight glow from a way of life which now barely glimmers in the ashes. Of course people like Wendelll Berry will awaken a strong feeling of loss, and a longing for homecoming, in many Americans. But the real conservative is the one who wishes to recuperate the lasting sense of life and its value, even in circumstances that seem unpropitious–such as those that prevail in a modern city. Industrial society was rightly criticised from both the right and the left; but industrial society has all but disappeared. The future lies with the self-employed, and it is for them to form the new communities, on the model of the old.
MG:The sort of conservatism you espouse is not easily expressed in slogans, nor do the arguments for it seem as easily mastered as those advanced in behalf of more populist varieties. What hope, if any, does your vision of conservatism have for gaining ascendancy?
Scruton:Of course it is not easy to put my kind of conservatism into slogans. That is a defect in slogans, and not in my conservatism. You cannot put Hayek’s theory of the common law, Kant’s theory of republican government, or Hegel’s theory of civil society into slogans. But they are true, for all that. A philosophy is nothing if it does not aim at truth. (That is why Jacques Derrida and Giles Deleuze are not philosophers.) To aim also to persuade is commendable, and for this reason it is necessary for a political thinker to learn how to write. Marx solved this problem, unfortunately, but then so did Burke. Good writing affects the minds of the literary elite, and ideas in the minds of that elite will eventually filter down, to the point where some slick but ignorant journalist will find the slogans that correspond, at his level of mental life, to those distantly and vaguely perceivable notions. This is in part what Plato had in mind, when he advocated the noble lie. Not “noble” but elegant; not a “lie” but journalism.
MG:If you could persuade the governments of Prime Minister Blair or President Bush to take onboard one of the lessons of your book, what would it be?
Scruton:My advice to Mr. Blair would be to stop pretending to be President and recognize instead that he is just a minister of the Crown. The burden of my argument in The Meaning of Conservatism is that proven institutions are more precious than the people who occupy them, and that those who exercise authority ought also to obey it. Mr. Blair has shown no disposition to recognize that his authority has been conferred on him by institutions that he is duty-bound to respect. His frivolous attitude to constitution, procedure and the dignities of office has done something to undermine not just his own authority, but the authority of government as such. My advice to President Bush would be to look at the ways in which the power of the state might be needed in order to support the autonomous associations and ‘little platoons of American civil society. There are two evils in particular which need to be addressed: the litigation explosion, which has vastly increased the risk of small businesses, and also sown discord among neighbours; and the disaster of the inner cities, which have suffered from the worst effects of American zoning laws and laissez-faire aesthetics, with the result that the middle class has fled from the city centres, causing social decay at the heart, and an unsustainable growth in transportation and suburban infrastructure all around. I believe that federal policies could be initiated that would address both these evils, without increasing the role of the state in the conduct of litigation or in the planning of city streets.
MG:Thanks very much for making time for this interview, Dr. Scruton. Any parting thoughts for our readers?
Scruton:I think conservatives should study the ideas and arguments that prevail on the left. There is always something to learn from these arguments, if only which way the wind of resentment is now blowing. And lifting your eyes from this joyless stuff, you will thank God that you are a conservative.
The Meaning of Conservatism belongs on the shelf of every thoughtful conservative; click here to view it on Amazon. A complete listing of Roger Scruton’s books and much else can be found on his website. Dozens of his articles are linked on the internet bibliography compiled by Christopher S. Morrissey.
Copyright 2004-2005 :: The New Pantagruel
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
George Vecsey: Opening Day Never Grows Old
GEORGE VECSEY
The New York Times
Published: April 2, 2006
OPENING day is still wonderful, even though baseball degrades it by staging it at night sometimes, for the benefit of the masters from television. Opening day belongs in the daylight, the way it will be tomorrow at Shea Stadium.
A character in "The Southpaw" by Mark Harris describes opening day in 1948 with passion that would be equally appropriate today.
As the temperature warmed up in recent days, there was no better way to prepare for the season than to reread Mark Harris's "The Southpaw," one of the finest sports books I know. The 1953 novel reminds me why so many Americans love baseball, because of the ritual of rebirth right around the first of April:
"Then the band played 'East Side, West Side' in honor of the mayor of New York, who come down and took a seat in the box behind first. There was a lot of cheering, and some booing as well, and the mayor waved his hand and pretended he did not hear the booing."
This is opening day in 1948, as described by a 17-year-old left-hander, Henry Wiggen, who dreams of pitching in the major leagues one day. For the moment, he is a brash kid from upstate New York, gawking at the monumental stadium in the Bronx.
"There was an announcement by the loudspeaker, 'Ladies and gentlemen, our national anthem,' and the band struck the tune and some lady that I could not see begun to sing, and a mighty powerful pair of lungs she had. It is really beautiful, for as the last words die away, a roar goes up from the people, and for a minute there is no sound but the echo of the singing, and no movement or motion except maybe a bird or the flags waving or the drummer on his drums, and then the music dies and the people spring to life and the chief umpire calls loud and long, 'Puh-lay ball! And the game is on."
No matter how grotesquely the Bluto Generation has bulked up on flaxseed oil, no matter how much money the players are paid, baseball seems pretty much the same as it was in 1948 when Wiggen and his dad (a former minor league pitcher) witnessed the opener.
"It's still what kids go through, throwing a ball around," said Harris, now 83 and living in Goleta, Calif., with his wife of 60 years, Josephine, the delightful model for Wiggen's girlfriend. Harris now lives the game through his children and grandchildren. "It's still wonderful."
By the 1952 opener, Wiggen is a punk rookie with the New York Mammoths, shocked to discover cork-tip cigarette butts outside his hotel-room door, a sign that a coach sat guard all night to make sure Wiggen did not go carousing, a tipoff that he is pitching the opener.
Wiggen will have a magnificent rookie season, enchanting some people and infuriating others. He remains as refreshing as opening day itself, a stand-in for all the captivating rookies who make fans wonder, how did we ever get along without Dontrelle Willis (or David Wright or Robinson Cano)?
Harris had his agendas. Wiggen is an independent soul who relishes that his black roommate (a decade or more ahead of the reality of black-white roomies) is not merely fast but also a student of how to run the bases and take somebody's job. Like the Mets' Carlos Delgado, who has sometimes ducked the playing of "God Bless America" in the seventh inning, there is a highly political catcher who hides in the runway during the national anthem. And there is a jaded old pitching ace who gives the rookie a pill that gets him through a big game. Plus ça change ...
"Essentially, the players are interested in their rewards," Harris said in a telephone interview the other day, not sounding put off by the eternal pragmatism of the athlete. Asked about the generation of apparent steroid usage, Harris did not sound shocked. After all, in his novel, he has Wiggen throw an illegal spitball to get a vital out, and then justify it to his idealistic girlfriend:
" 'Things are tight,' I said. 'Terrible tight. Every pitch is cash, Holly. Big cash. Not only my cash, but the cash of all the boys. It is a brick house for Coker Roguski's folks and a new start in life for Hams Carroll's little girl. This is for keeps. This ain't playground baseball.' "
Barry Bonds could not have said it any better.
Harris, who wrote four Wiggen novels, is perhaps best known for the second, "Bang the Drum Slowly," which was made into a movie. That book has one of the loveliest last lines in American literature, a regret from Wiggen for the way the players made fun of a slow-witted and now dead teammate: "From here on in, I rag nobody." We could all use that on our coat of arms.
In "The Southpaw," reissued in 2003 by the University of Nebraska Press, Harris is dealing with the eternal goofiness of humanity. He has the servile road secretary, the owner's hard-drinking daughter, the blustering manager, the selfish players, the venal sportswriters. Sounds about right.
Harris loves the game itself, and he never loses sight of its value to America. In the words of an aimless socialite Wiggen meets at a party on Beacon Hill in Boston: "I wish I was a ballplayer, for a ballplayer is a man that lives by what he does in life."
The ballplayer lives by what he does, starting on opening day. It's been a long and lonely winter. Puh-lay ball! indeed.
E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com
The New York Times
Published: April 2, 2006
OPENING day is still wonderful, even though baseball degrades it by staging it at night sometimes, for the benefit of the masters from television. Opening day belongs in the daylight, the way it will be tomorrow at Shea Stadium.
A character in "The Southpaw" by Mark Harris describes opening day in 1948 with passion that would be equally appropriate today.
As the temperature warmed up in recent days, there was no better way to prepare for the season than to reread Mark Harris's "The Southpaw," one of the finest sports books I know. The 1953 novel reminds me why so many Americans love baseball, because of the ritual of rebirth right around the first of April:
"Then the band played 'East Side, West Side' in honor of the mayor of New York, who come down and took a seat in the box behind first. There was a lot of cheering, and some booing as well, and the mayor waved his hand and pretended he did not hear the booing."
This is opening day in 1948, as described by a 17-year-old left-hander, Henry Wiggen, who dreams of pitching in the major leagues one day. For the moment, he is a brash kid from upstate New York, gawking at the monumental stadium in the Bronx.
"There was an announcement by the loudspeaker, 'Ladies and gentlemen, our national anthem,' and the band struck the tune and some lady that I could not see begun to sing, and a mighty powerful pair of lungs she had. It is really beautiful, for as the last words die away, a roar goes up from the people, and for a minute there is no sound but the echo of the singing, and no movement or motion except maybe a bird or the flags waving or the drummer on his drums, and then the music dies and the people spring to life and the chief umpire calls loud and long, 'Puh-lay ball! And the game is on."
No matter how grotesquely the Bluto Generation has bulked up on flaxseed oil, no matter how much money the players are paid, baseball seems pretty much the same as it was in 1948 when Wiggen and his dad (a former minor league pitcher) witnessed the opener.
"It's still what kids go through, throwing a ball around," said Harris, now 83 and living in Goleta, Calif., with his wife of 60 years, Josephine, the delightful model for Wiggen's girlfriend. Harris now lives the game through his children and grandchildren. "It's still wonderful."
By the 1952 opener, Wiggen is a punk rookie with the New York Mammoths, shocked to discover cork-tip cigarette butts outside his hotel-room door, a sign that a coach sat guard all night to make sure Wiggen did not go carousing, a tipoff that he is pitching the opener.
Wiggen will have a magnificent rookie season, enchanting some people and infuriating others. He remains as refreshing as opening day itself, a stand-in for all the captivating rookies who make fans wonder, how did we ever get along without Dontrelle Willis (or David Wright or Robinson Cano)?
Harris had his agendas. Wiggen is an independent soul who relishes that his black roommate (a decade or more ahead of the reality of black-white roomies) is not merely fast but also a student of how to run the bases and take somebody's job. Like the Mets' Carlos Delgado, who has sometimes ducked the playing of "God Bless America" in the seventh inning, there is a highly political catcher who hides in the runway during the national anthem. And there is a jaded old pitching ace who gives the rookie a pill that gets him through a big game. Plus ça change ...
"Essentially, the players are interested in their rewards," Harris said in a telephone interview the other day, not sounding put off by the eternal pragmatism of the athlete. Asked about the generation of apparent steroid usage, Harris did not sound shocked. After all, in his novel, he has Wiggen throw an illegal spitball to get a vital out, and then justify it to his idealistic girlfriend:
" 'Things are tight,' I said. 'Terrible tight. Every pitch is cash, Holly. Big cash. Not only my cash, but the cash of all the boys. It is a brick house for Coker Roguski's folks and a new start in life for Hams Carroll's little girl. This is for keeps. This ain't playground baseball.' "
Barry Bonds could not have said it any better.
Harris, who wrote four Wiggen novels, is perhaps best known for the second, "Bang the Drum Slowly," which was made into a movie. That book has one of the loveliest last lines in American literature, a regret from Wiggen for the way the players made fun of a slow-witted and now dead teammate: "From here on in, I rag nobody." We could all use that on our coat of arms.
In "The Southpaw," reissued in 2003 by the University of Nebraska Press, Harris is dealing with the eternal goofiness of humanity. He has the servile road secretary, the owner's hard-drinking daughter, the blustering manager, the selfish players, the venal sportswriters. Sounds about right.
Harris loves the game itself, and he never loses sight of its value to America. In the words of an aimless socialite Wiggen meets at a party on Beacon Hill in Boston: "I wish I was a ballplayer, for a ballplayer is a man that lives by what he does in life."
The ballplayer lives by what he does, starting on opening day. It's been a long and lonely winter. Puh-lay ball! indeed.
E-mail: geovec@nytimes.com
Monday, April 03, 2006
Yankees' Lineup Among Best Ever?
April 3, 2006
By PETE CALDERA
STAFF WRITER
BERGEN COUNTY RECORD
OAKLAND, Calif. -- Seventy years ago, American League pitchers were forced to navigate through a Yankees lineup comprised of future Hall-of-Famers Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, Bill Dickey and Tony Lazzeri.
And those AL pitchers often found themselves thrown against the rocks.
The 1936 Yankees statistically were the most fearsome group in the Bronx Bombers' lineage since Prohibition ended, scoring more than 1,000 runs, without a designated hitter, in a 154-game schedule – more potent than even the 1927 Murderer's Row club.
And now?
"There's a chance this could be one of the best of all time," Johnny Damon said, talking about the names on manager Joe Torre's lineup card for tonight's opener.
It starts with Damon, the Yankees' prime off-season target – the kind of leadoff hitter they've craved since Chuck Knoblauch retired, and who inspires comparisons with Ichiro Suzuki.
That's how Alex Rodriguez views it, and he's the reigning AL Most Valuable Player, batting cleanup tonight between sluggers Gary Sheffield and Jason Giambi.
Hideki Matsui, whose RBI total has risen from 106 to 108 to 116 in three seasons, bats sixth. Switch-hitters Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams follow. And Robinson Cano, who hit .297 with 14 homers in his rookie season, is ninth.
Now Derek Jeter can maximize his inside-out swing to become "the best No. 2 hitter in baseball," Giambi said.
And now for the disclaimer: No one is guaranteed to repeat the numbers on the back of his baseball card. Injuries could happen at any time, especially for a lineup with an average age of 32.
Still, in the pantheon of Yankees' lineups past, "I don't think there was one better than this," said television personality Keith Olbermann, a lifelong Yankees observer and member of the Society for American Baseball Research.
For overall balance, Olbermann sees two comparables – the 1951 club, the only year DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle shared, and the 1978 team.
"Even on the greatest teams, there's always one role player," said Olbermann, who clicked off names such as Jerry Lumpe and Charlie Silvera – men who appeared on the opening-day lineups of pennant-winning Yankee teams.
But since 1978, "This is the first lineup that doesn't leave you shaking your head later and saying, 'What do you mean that Dennis Werth was the opening-day designated hitter? [in 1981]' '' Olbermann said.
As the cleanup hitter on that 1978 world championship club, Reggie Jackson admittedly has a far more personal preference for that lineup, though it scored only 735 runs – an average of 4.54 runs per game.
Looking at the current lineup, "This should be a 900-plus [runs scored] team," Jackson said. "It could be the best offensive team of the recent era. But it's not the best offense ever."
Jackson concedes that to the Yankees of the pre-World War II era.
"It's hard to match up with [Babe] Ruth or Gehrig, or any of those powerhouse lineups of the '20s and '30s," Jackson said, quickly adding the true measure of any lineup comes in October.
"Obviously, October is something I need to improve on," A-Rod said after the Yankees finished their workout Sunday in Oakland. "We need to have a team that's structured to win, and that's our goal."
Jackson credited Mickey Rivers' instinctive abilities in the leadoff spot as something that set apart the Yankees of his era. Almost 30 years later, Damon was imported to provide the very same thing.
"Johnny Damon gives us the greatest flexibility," Torre said. "As a prototypical leadoff guy, Knoblauch was that guy for us, and Johnny is that guy."
Damon said he's in a "dream spot, with all those [potential] Hall-of-Famers coming up behind me."
Jackson mostly likes how Damon's personality fits in. "From what I've seen, he's a special player,'' he said. "I think his makeup, the total package of what he brings, his style – he's a little odd, a little carefree and he just goes for it."
But like Jackson's Yankees, who "were a little heavy left-handed," these Yankees could be vulnerable to certain left-handed pitching.
Cano and Damon will bat back-to-back, but for now "we'll let it play and see how good we are," Torre said.
There's less concern about the patient Giambi and Matsui (who hit .354 against lefties last year) batting consecutively against lefties.
So is this the best lineup Torre's ever written out?
"I hope so," the manager said with a smile.
Brian Cashman, who was in his first year as general manager in 1998 when the club won 114 regular-season games and the World Series, still clings to that lineup as the most potent – a lineup of which Jeter, Williams and Posada remain.
"This lineup, obviously, is as stacked as you can get," Cashman said. "But the '98 lineup was obviously stacked, too. So, we've got a little competition going on."
E-mail: caldera@northjersey.com
By PETE CALDERA
STAFF WRITER
BERGEN COUNTY RECORD
OAKLAND, Calif. -- Seventy years ago, American League pitchers were forced to navigate through a Yankees lineup comprised of future Hall-of-Famers Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, Bill Dickey and Tony Lazzeri.
And those AL pitchers often found themselves thrown against the rocks.
The 1936 Yankees statistically were the most fearsome group in the Bronx Bombers' lineage since Prohibition ended, scoring more than 1,000 runs, without a designated hitter, in a 154-game schedule – more potent than even the 1927 Murderer's Row club.
And now?
"There's a chance this could be one of the best of all time," Johnny Damon said, talking about the names on manager Joe Torre's lineup card for tonight's opener.
It starts with Damon, the Yankees' prime off-season target – the kind of leadoff hitter they've craved since Chuck Knoblauch retired, and who inspires comparisons with Ichiro Suzuki.
That's how Alex Rodriguez views it, and he's the reigning AL Most Valuable Player, batting cleanup tonight between sluggers Gary Sheffield and Jason Giambi.
Hideki Matsui, whose RBI total has risen from 106 to 108 to 116 in three seasons, bats sixth. Switch-hitters Jorge Posada and Bernie Williams follow. And Robinson Cano, who hit .297 with 14 homers in his rookie season, is ninth.
Now Derek Jeter can maximize his inside-out swing to become "the best No. 2 hitter in baseball," Giambi said.
And now for the disclaimer: No one is guaranteed to repeat the numbers on the back of his baseball card. Injuries could happen at any time, especially for a lineup with an average age of 32.
Still, in the pantheon of Yankees' lineups past, "I don't think there was one better than this," said television personality Keith Olbermann, a lifelong Yankees observer and member of the Society for American Baseball Research.
For overall balance, Olbermann sees two comparables – the 1951 club, the only year DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle shared, and the 1978 team.
"Even on the greatest teams, there's always one role player," said Olbermann, who clicked off names such as Jerry Lumpe and Charlie Silvera – men who appeared on the opening-day lineups of pennant-winning Yankee teams.
But since 1978, "This is the first lineup that doesn't leave you shaking your head later and saying, 'What do you mean that Dennis Werth was the opening-day designated hitter? [in 1981]' '' Olbermann said.
As the cleanup hitter on that 1978 world championship club, Reggie Jackson admittedly has a far more personal preference for that lineup, though it scored only 735 runs – an average of 4.54 runs per game.
Looking at the current lineup, "This should be a 900-plus [runs scored] team," Jackson said. "It could be the best offensive team of the recent era. But it's not the best offense ever."
Jackson concedes that to the Yankees of the pre-World War II era.
"It's hard to match up with [Babe] Ruth or Gehrig, or any of those powerhouse lineups of the '20s and '30s," Jackson said, quickly adding the true measure of any lineup comes in October.
"Obviously, October is something I need to improve on," A-Rod said after the Yankees finished their workout Sunday in Oakland. "We need to have a team that's structured to win, and that's our goal."
Jackson credited Mickey Rivers' instinctive abilities in the leadoff spot as something that set apart the Yankees of his era. Almost 30 years later, Damon was imported to provide the very same thing.
"Johnny Damon gives us the greatest flexibility," Torre said. "As a prototypical leadoff guy, Knoblauch was that guy for us, and Johnny is that guy."
Damon said he's in a "dream spot, with all those [potential] Hall-of-Famers coming up behind me."
Jackson mostly likes how Damon's personality fits in. "From what I've seen, he's a special player,'' he said. "I think his makeup, the total package of what he brings, his style – he's a little odd, a little carefree and he just goes for it."
But like Jackson's Yankees, who "were a little heavy left-handed," these Yankees could be vulnerable to certain left-handed pitching.
Cano and Damon will bat back-to-back, but for now "we'll let it play and see how good we are," Torre said.
There's less concern about the patient Giambi and Matsui (who hit .354 against lefties last year) batting consecutively against lefties.
So is this the best lineup Torre's ever written out?
"I hope so," the manager said with a smile.
Brian Cashman, who was in his first year as general manager in 1998 when the club won 114 regular-season games and the World Series, still clings to that lineup as the most potent – a lineup of which Jeter, Williams and Posada remain.
"This lineup, obviously, is as stacked as you can get," Cashman said. "But the '98 lineup was obviously stacked, too. So, we've got a little competition going on."
E-mail: caldera@northjersey.com
Adrian Wojnarowski: UCLA's Tainted Dynasty
April 3, 2006
The Bergen County Record
INDIANAPOLIS -- Everywhere Jerry Tarkanian goes at this Final Four, the blue and gold, the magical four letters, the thunderous U-C-L-A chants on the streets, bring Tark back to college basketball's greatest dynasty, back to a name most synonymous with the championship seasons.
Only, it isn't John Wooden.
Or Lew Alcindor.
Or Bill Walton.
"I think about Sam Gilbert," Tark said Sunday afternoon.
And that's the name that causes a roomful of frolicking Bruins boosters and fans to go uneasily quiet. Sam Gilbert, the two dirty little words of the dynasty.
For the record, Tark will go where others genuflecting at the altar of John Wooden will never journey. He'll say the name that amid the hype for tonight's UCLA-Florida national championship game, you're guaranteed to never hear on CBS. The NCAA tournament loves its nostalgia, its mythology and you'll be getting the full force of this farce from the RCA Dome.
"To people, John Wooden is a god," Tark said.
It is a losing proposition to suggest that UCLA's 10 national championships under Wooden were won with anything but the talent of great players and the lessons and leadership of a legendary coach. It just is never talked about -- out in the open, anyway.
It was what it was, though: Sam Gilbert was a Los Angeles construction man who lavished the Wooden-era UCLA players with money, cars, gifts, the run of his mansion, whatever. Anything those players wanted, the dynasty's sugar daddy was reputed to provide it.
"To this day, what blows me away -- what still makes me angry -- is that Sam Gilbert never tried to hide what he was doing," Tark said. "But the NCAA was never going to investigate UCLA. They were the marquee team. They had all of the games on television. But I lived 20 minutes away in Long Beach and I knew what was going on there. The whole country, the NCAA, they all knew what Sam Gilbert was doing at UCLA.
"Hell, he bragged about it to a lot of people. He bragged about it to me. Once, he liked my point guard [Robert Smith] and said, 'Why don't you send him over to UCLA so I can take care of him?' The NCAA was always harassing me, but Sam Gilbert was violating more rules than anyone in America.
"I was told that John Wooden used to always say that he wished Sam would stay away from the program. I was told that he went to [the AD] J.D. Morgan about it, and Morgan told him that he would take care of it. But it went on and on."
These days, Tark is hardly on the UCLA warpath. Truth be told, he loves the Bruins' coach, Ben Howland. As funny as it sounds, Tark will be sitting in Howland's seats for the game tonight.
What's more, Tark's never had a personal problem with Wooden, who always was very nice and very generous with him through the years. His issue isn't with Wooden, but a system that selectively punished cheaters.
This isn't to absolve Tark by means of some great conspiracy to get him. He is a well-deserved and well-decorated NCAA probation loser at Long Beach, UNLV and Fresno State. I covered him for 2½ years in Fresno, had my drag-outs with him, but the years have taught me that some of the most respected names in the sport -- some of the so-called giants -- are the biggest crooks going. Tark always told me, and only in the last few years have I come to agree with him.
Ultimately, Tark thinks that if you want to believe that his four Final Fours and his 1990 national championship are tainted, then you have to take a look at UCLA, too. I always believed that his fight with the NCAA wasn't so much about his own innocence, but the fact that there were competitors of his who had been deemed untouchable and never got popped too.
If you think this is just Tark barking at the moon, trying to justify his own misdeeds, consider a different source, someone whose agenda is beyond reproach. While working with Tark on his memoir "Running Rebel," author Dan Wetzel dug up a Bill Walton quote from a 1978 book, "On the Road with the Portland Trail Blazers."
If you ever want to debate that there is a double standard between the chosen programs and those branded as renegade by the NCAA, consider this stunning passage.
"UCLA players were so well taken care of -- far beyond the ground rules of the NCAA -- that even players from poor backgrounds never left UCLA prematurely (for pro basketball) during John Wooden's championship years," Walton said. "If the UCLA teams of the late 1960s and early 1970s were subjected to the kind of scrutiny Jerry Tarkanian and his players have been, UCLA would probably have to forfeit about eight national championships and be on probation for the next 100 years.
"... The NCAA is working night and day trying to get Jerry, but no one from the NCAA ever questioned me during my four years at UCLA."
Here's the thing, too: This doesn't make Wooden less of a philosopher, less of a teacher, less of a great American icon. To me, it doesn't change the fact that the afternoon I spent in his condo two years ago rates as one of the best days I've ever had in this business. It's just a reminder there is no Camelot in sports. And there are no saints.
Wooden is 95 years old, bigger and more beloved than ever, and as Tark said one Hall of Fame coach told him this weekend, "People won't really start talking about [Wooden's] legacy until he's gone."
Wooden is still the kind of man, just like those Bruins were the kind of champions, who never will be duplicated. The banners are still hanging in Pauley Pavilion, the 100 years of probation that Walton swears would've been warranted never did come. Admire the UCLA history tonight, but don't let yourself get lost in the mythology. There was no Camelot in college basketball, no saint.
E-mail: wojnarowski@northjersey.com
The Bergen County Record
INDIANAPOLIS -- Everywhere Jerry Tarkanian goes at this Final Four, the blue and gold, the magical four letters, the thunderous U-C-L-A chants on the streets, bring Tark back to college basketball's greatest dynasty, back to a name most synonymous with the championship seasons.
Only, it isn't John Wooden.
Or Lew Alcindor.
Or Bill Walton.
"I think about Sam Gilbert," Tark said Sunday afternoon.
And that's the name that causes a roomful of frolicking Bruins boosters and fans to go uneasily quiet. Sam Gilbert, the two dirty little words of the dynasty.
For the record, Tark will go where others genuflecting at the altar of John Wooden will never journey. He'll say the name that amid the hype for tonight's UCLA-Florida national championship game, you're guaranteed to never hear on CBS. The NCAA tournament loves its nostalgia, its mythology and you'll be getting the full force of this farce from the RCA Dome.
"To people, John Wooden is a god," Tark said.
It is a losing proposition to suggest that UCLA's 10 national championships under Wooden were won with anything but the talent of great players and the lessons and leadership of a legendary coach. It just is never talked about -- out in the open, anyway.
It was what it was, though: Sam Gilbert was a Los Angeles construction man who lavished the Wooden-era UCLA players with money, cars, gifts, the run of his mansion, whatever. Anything those players wanted, the dynasty's sugar daddy was reputed to provide it.
"To this day, what blows me away -- what still makes me angry -- is that Sam Gilbert never tried to hide what he was doing," Tark said. "But the NCAA was never going to investigate UCLA. They were the marquee team. They had all of the games on television. But I lived 20 minutes away in Long Beach and I knew what was going on there. The whole country, the NCAA, they all knew what Sam Gilbert was doing at UCLA.
"Hell, he bragged about it to a lot of people. He bragged about it to me. Once, he liked my point guard [Robert Smith] and said, 'Why don't you send him over to UCLA so I can take care of him?' The NCAA was always harassing me, but Sam Gilbert was violating more rules than anyone in America.
"I was told that John Wooden used to always say that he wished Sam would stay away from the program. I was told that he went to [the AD] J.D. Morgan about it, and Morgan told him that he would take care of it. But it went on and on."
These days, Tark is hardly on the UCLA warpath. Truth be told, he loves the Bruins' coach, Ben Howland. As funny as it sounds, Tark will be sitting in Howland's seats for the game tonight.
What's more, Tark's never had a personal problem with Wooden, who always was very nice and very generous with him through the years. His issue isn't with Wooden, but a system that selectively punished cheaters.
This isn't to absolve Tark by means of some great conspiracy to get him. He is a well-deserved and well-decorated NCAA probation loser at Long Beach, UNLV and Fresno State. I covered him for 2½ years in Fresno, had my drag-outs with him, but the years have taught me that some of the most respected names in the sport -- some of the so-called giants -- are the biggest crooks going. Tark always told me, and only in the last few years have I come to agree with him.
Ultimately, Tark thinks that if you want to believe that his four Final Fours and his 1990 national championship are tainted, then you have to take a look at UCLA, too. I always believed that his fight with the NCAA wasn't so much about his own innocence, but the fact that there were competitors of his who had been deemed untouchable and never got popped too.
If you think this is just Tark barking at the moon, trying to justify his own misdeeds, consider a different source, someone whose agenda is beyond reproach. While working with Tark on his memoir "Running Rebel," author Dan Wetzel dug up a Bill Walton quote from a 1978 book, "On the Road with the Portland Trail Blazers."
If you ever want to debate that there is a double standard between the chosen programs and those branded as renegade by the NCAA, consider this stunning passage.
"UCLA players were so well taken care of -- far beyond the ground rules of the NCAA -- that even players from poor backgrounds never left UCLA prematurely (for pro basketball) during John Wooden's championship years," Walton said. "If the UCLA teams of the late 1960s and early 1970s were subjected to the kind of scrutiny Jerry Tarkanian and his players have been, UCLA would probably have to forfeit about eight national championships and be on probation for the next 100 years.
"... The NCAA is working night and day trying to get Jerry, but no one from the NCAA ever questioned me during my four years at UCLA."
Here's the thing, too: This doesn't make Wooden less of a philosopher, less of a teacher, less of a great American icon. To me, it doesn't change the fact that the afternoon I spent in his condo two years ago rates as one of the best days I've ever had in this business. It's just a reminder there is no Camelot in sports. And there are no saints.
Wooden is 95 years old, bigger and more beloved than ever, and as Tark said one Hall of Fame coach told him this weekend, "People won't really start talking about [Wooden's] legacy until he's gone."
Wooden is still the kind of man, just like those Bruins were the kind of champions, who never will be duplicated. The banners are still hanging in Pauley Pavilion, the 100 years of probation that Walton swears would've been warranted never did come. Admire the UCLA history tonight, but don't let yourself get lost in the mythology. There was no Camelot in college basketball, no saint.
E-mail: wojnarowski@northjersey.com
Interview: Daniel Pipes
Daniel Pipes: An Expert Unplugged
By Bill Steigerwald
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
April 3, 2006
It's no surprise Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes has made so many political friends and enemies. A conservative columnist, counter-terrorism analyst and author or co-author of 18 books, he's a staunch supporter of Israel and a harsh critic of radical Islam. Praised as an "authoritative commentator on the Middle East" by his allies at the Wall Street Journal, he's been branded "an anti-Islamist extremist" by some Arab-American groups. He's also the founder of the Middle East Forum (http://www.meforum.org/), a think tank that includes a website called Campus Watch that monitors how Middle East studies are taught at U.S. colleges. I talked to Pipes by phone last Tuesday from Sydney, Australia.
Q: Were you in favor of going to war in Iraq, and how do you think it's progressing or regressing?
A: I was in favor. I continue to be in favor of the campaign to eliminate the rule of Saddam Hussein, with all the dangers to the Iraqis, to the region and to ourselves. From April 2003 on, I have argued that the U.S. government and its allies should have lower expectations than actually is the case. That we should treat the Iraqis like adults; that we should understand that they are going to run their own future, their own destiny, not us; that our role there is at best advisory, and that we should be patient. So lower expectations and a longer time horizon.
Q: Does that mean a significant change in what we are doing now, in terms of policy. Should we announce withdrawals?
A: The number of troops is not my issue. It's the placement and role of the troops. For three years now I have been protesting the use of American troops to mediate between tribes, help rebuild electricity grids, oversee school construction, which seems to me to be a wrong use of our forces, of our money. The Iraqis should be in charge of that. We should keep the troops there, in the desert, looking after the international boundaries, making sure there are no atrocities, making sure oil and gas goes out, otherwise leaving Iraq to the Iraqis.
Q: How do you define your politics?
A: Conservative.
Q: You're not one of those neocons who allegedly talked President Bush into going to war in the Middle East?
A: I have been called a neo-conservative. I don't exactly know how a neo-conservative differs from a conservative.
Q: Do you generally agree with President Bush's Middle East policy -- its goals and its methods? A: I agree with the goals much more than the methods. I just gave an example of Iraq, where I believe the goal of getting rid of Saddam Hussein and trying to have a free and prosperous Iraq are worthy goals. I criticize the implementation. The same goes with democracy. I think democracy is a great goal for the region. I criticize the implementation; I think it's too fast, too American, too get-it-done yesterday.
Q: Is there anything major that the Bush administration should do now to make things go smoother?
A: We did something good in getting rid of the Taliban and getting rid of Saddam Hussein. That is really the extent of our role, to get rid of the hideous totalitarian regimes. Let me add that I see these issues as basically sidelines. We are engaged in a war, a profound war and long-term war, in which Afghanistan and Iraq are sideshows. The real issue is the war that radical Islam, a global phenomenon, has declared on us and that has already been underway for many years, and we're still at the beginning of it. That's the really major issue.
Q: Recently I talked to Peter Galbraith and Ivan Eland, foreign policy experts who both favor a three-part partition of Iraq as a way to forestall or make a civil war in Iraq go away. Any thoughts on that?
A: Well, the neighborhood is unanimously against it and Iraqis are fearful of it, so I don't think there is much of a chance.
Q: What should U.S. policy be in the Middle East?
A: Well, I endorse the president's vision of a Middle East that is no longer under the control of tyrants, as it is today, or despots -- unelected officials, at best. But it is a long-term project that's going to take decades, not months, and has to be approached with that in mind. Secondly, if we go too fast, as is the case, we bring our most fervent enemies to power, as we've seen most dramatically in the Palestinian territories, where a terrorist organization (Hamas) won a majority of Palestinian support. One can see that also in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Egypt, Algeria. We have to be very cautious about pushing a process before the people of the area are really quite ready for it -- until they've gone beyond what I call the "totalitarian temptation," so that they have a more balanced, moderate view of the world than they do at this time.
Q: Do they have a lot of catching up to do?
A: To give an imperfect analogy: Germany went through a hideous period between 1933 and 1945. The condition of the Muslim world is not that bad but it's comparable. It's going through a particularly bad time...Our goal is to help the Muslim world move beyond this war through educational programs and other means. Fundamentally, we're at war with a substantial minority of the Muslim world and we are at war with them because they have declared war on us and we have to answer that.
Q: What is the biggest lesson you have learned from the Iraq war?
A: The ingratitude of the Iraqis for the extraordinary favor we gave them -- to release them from the bondage of Saddam Hussein's tyranny. They have rapidly interpreted it as something they did and that we were incidental to it. They've more or less written us out of the picture.
Q: How will we know when the occupation or the invasion of Iraq was a success or a failure?
A: Oh, it was a success. We got rid of Saddam Hussein. Beyond that is icing.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Bill Steigerwald is the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's associate editor. Call him at (412) 320-7983. E-mail him at: bsteigerwald@tribweb.com.
By Bill Steigerwald
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
April 3, 2006
It's no surprise Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes has made so many political friends and enemies. A conservative columnist, counter-terrorism analyst and author or co-author of 18 books, he's a staunch supporter of Israel and a harsh critic of radical Islam. Praised as an "authoritative commentator on the Middle East" by his allies at the Wall Street Journal, he's been branded "an anti-Islamist extremist" by some Arab-American groups. He's also the founder of the Middle East Forum (http://www.meforum.org/), a think tank that includes a website called Campus Watch that monitors how Middle East studies are taught at U.S. colleges. I talked to Pipes by phone last Tuesday from Sydney, Australia.
Q: Were you in favor of going to war in Iraq, and how do you think it's progressing or regressing?
A: I was in favor. I continue to be in favor of the campaign to eliminate the rule of Saddam Hussein, with all the dangers to the Iraqis, to the region and to ourselves. From April 2003 on, I have argued that the U.S. government and its allies should have lower expectations than actually is the case. That we should treat the Iraqis like adults; that we should understand that they are going to run their own future, their own destiny, not us; that our role there is at best advisory, and that we should be patient. So lower expectations and a longer time horizon.
Q: Does that mean a significant change in what we are doing now, in terms of policy. Should we announce withdrawals?
A: The number of troops is not my issue. It's the placement and role of the troops. For three years now I have been protesting the use of American troops to mediate between tribes, help rebuild electricity grids, oversee school construction, which seems to me to be a wrong use of our forces, of our money. The Iraqis should be in charge of that. We should keep the troops there, in the desert, looking after the international boundaries, making sure there are no atrocities, making sure oil and gas goes out, otherwise leaving Iraq to the Iraqis.
Q: How do you define your politics?
A: Conservative.
Q: You're not one of those neocons who allegedly talked President Bush into going to war in the Middle East?
A: I have been called a neo-conservative. I don't exactly know how a neo-conservative differs from a conservative.
Q: Do you generally agree with President Bush's Middle East policy -- its goals and its methods? A: I agree with the goals much more than the methods. I just gave an example of Iraq, where I believe the goal of getting rid of Saddam Hussein and trying to have a free and prosperous Iraq are worthy goals. I criticize the implementation. The same goes with democracy. I think democracy is a great goal for the region. I criticize the implementation; I think it's too fast, too American, too get-it-done yesterday.
Q: Is there anything major that the Bush administration should do now to make things go smoother?
A: We did something good in getting rid of the Taliban and getting rid of Saddam Hussein. That is really the extent of our role, to get rid of the hideous totalitarian regimes. Let me add that I see these issues as basically sidelines. We are engaged in a war, a profound war and long-term war, in which Afghanistan and Iraq are sideshows. The real issue is the war that radical Islam, a global phenomenon, has declared on us and that has already been underway for many years, and we're still at the beginning of it. That's the really major issue.
Q: Recently I talked to Peter Galbraith and Ivan Eland, foreign policy experts who both favor a three-part partition of Iraq as a way to forestall or make a civil war in Iraq go away. Any thoughts on that?
A: Well, the neighborhood is unanimously against it and Iraqis are fearful of it, so I don't think there is much of a chance.
Q: What should U.S. policy be in the Middle East?
A: Well, I endorse the president's vision of a Middle East that is no longer under the control of tyrants, as it is today, or despots -- unelected officials, at best. But it is a long-term project that's going to take decades, not months, and has to be approached with that in mind. Secondly, if we go too fast, as is the case, we bring our most fervent enemies to power, as we've seen most dramatically in the Palestinian territories, where a terrorist organization (Hamas) won a majority of Palestinian support. One can see that also in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Egypt, Algeria. We have to be very cautious about pushing a process before the people of the area are really quite ready for it -- until they've gone beyond what I call the "totalitarian temptation," so that they have a more balanced, moderate view of the world than they do at this time.
Q: Do they have a lot of catching up to do?
A: To give an imperfect analogy: Germany went through a hideous period between 1933 and 1945. The condition of the Muslim world is not that bad but it's comparable. It's going through a particularly bad time...Our goal is to help the Muslim world move beyond this war through educational programs and other means. Fundamentally, we're at war with a substantial minority of the Muslim world and we are at war with them because they have declared war on us and we have to answer that.
Q: What is the biggest lesson you have learned from the Iraq war?
A: The ingratitude of the Iraqis for the extraordinary favor we gave them -- to release them from the bondage of Saddam Hussein's tyranny. They have rapidly interpreted it as something they did and that we were incidental to it. They've more or less written us out of the picture.
Q: How will we know when the occupation or the invasion of Iraq was a success or a failure?
A: Oh, it was a success. We got rid of Saddam Hussein. Beyond that is icing.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Bill Steigerwald is the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review's associate editor. Call him at (412) 320-7983. E-mail him at: bsteigerwald@tribweb.com.
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Ray Ratto: Selig, as ever, a step slow
Ray Ratto
The San Fransisco Chronicle
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Once upon a time, George Mitchell was considered a candidate to become commissioner of baseball. He wasn't much of a candidate, though, because we know that baseball owners still like to fix their meetings, and outsiders tend to stay that way.
So Bud Selig got the job instead, and now Mitchell is the big name among the people who are going to run the shiny new investigation into steroid use and performance enhancement in baseball.
Sounds like Mitchell was one lucky loser. I mean, it could have been the other way around, and he could have been the one hemming and hawing and putting out releases announcing the season-long Barry-Fest.
The announcement comes today, and the intent of the Selig Administration seems to be to get the monomaniacal media focus off Bonds himself while looking to attack a problem that is allegedly in the past.
So let's call this what it is -- the real Game of Shadows, after the troublesome pamphlet of the same name.
The investigation is supposed to go, well, wherever it goes, but given that the book has enumerated what happened in one laboratory, it is hard to know just where the investigation is supposed to go beyond what Mark Fainaru-Wada, Lance Williams and the boys and girls at Gotham Publishing already have provided.
In other words, this will be an uncomfortable time for Bonds, Gary Sheffield and Jason Giambi. All the other players mentioned in the book are now out of baseball, and all the other players who have used (or are still using) performance enhancers aren't in the book.
So why is this investigation anything more than a really involved book report? An excellent question, that.
Everything about Selig's interest in the steroid story has come after BALCO news, and his (and therefore the game's) reactions have been routinely hesitant and insincere, unless there was a way to bring in the players' union to share the blame. It surely can be said that there would have been no investigation of the sort being announced today if not for the seamlessness and unassailable thoroughness in reportage, and the utterly convincing narrative that drives the book. Put another way, you could blow $26 in lots worse ways.
Indeed, there have been other books about steroids in the game, most notably Howard Bryant's "Juicing the Game," a fairly thorough overview of the story, but none of those spurred Selig out of his clinical torpor on the subject. No, it took this one -- in fact, news of the planned investigation was released two days after the authors did 12 minutes on David Letterman, which suggests at least circumstantially that it took Selig this long to realize that the book had made a serious impact across all segments of the nation -- except of course for here, Bonds' own Little Switzerland.
Thus, we can assume, George Mitchell's reputation for honor and veracity notwithstanding, that the breadth of this investigation will be kept as narrow as possible, widened only if the public actually demands it. It is baseball's way to do nothing until it is shown that a problem won't go away, and then to deal with it as halfheartedly as possible.
Unless, of course, money is involved. Then, the baseball folks spring into action like the cast of Cirque du Soleil with a snootful of nandrolone.
In other words, barring a public backlash and the rules of evidence, this investigation will follow only the trail of the footnotes in the back of the book, because there is no other place for the investigators to go. For all the players who are suspected of using the junk to prolong and improve their careers, only Bonds, Sheffield and Giambi end up being truly vulnerable, which your morning paper told you some time ago.
Of course, this might be a bleak picture we paint here. Perhaps this investigation will be more than we suspect it is -- grout for a leaking shower. Maybe George Mitchell will, by the power of his intellect and doggedness, actually expand the trail, or at least find facts independent of those we already paid to read. Maybe this is more than merely an elaborate book report for him.
If he manages that, if the game comes closer to distancing itself from the public health nightmare it has avoided, then baseball will be the poorer for his having never been named commissioner way back when.
If not, well, you know the old baseball saying -- nothing ventured, nobody the wiser.
The San Fransisco Chronicle
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Once upon a time, George Mitchell was considered a candidate to become commissioner of baseball. He wasn't much of a candidate, though, because we know that baseball owners still like to fix their meetings, and outsiders tend to stay that way.
So Bud Selig got the job instead, and now Mitchell is the big name among the people who are going to run the shiny new investigation into steroid use and performance enhancement in baseball.
Sounds like Mitchell was one lucky loser. I mean, it could have been the other way around, and he could have been the one hemming and hawing and putting out releases announcing the season-long Barry-Fest.
The announcement comes today, and the intent of the Selig Administration seems to be to get the monomaniacal media focus off Bonds himself while looking to attack a problem that is allegedly in the past.
So let's call this what it is -- the real Game of Shadows, after the troublesome pamphlet of the same name.
The investigation is supposed to go, well, wherever it goes, but given that the book has enumerated what happened in one laboratory, it is hard to know just where the investigation is supposed to go beyond what Mark Fainaru-Wada, Lance Williams and the boys and girls at Gotham Publishing already have provided.
In other words, this will be an uncomfortable time for Bonds, Gary Sheffield and Jason Giambi. All the other players mentioned in the book are now out of baseball, and all the other players who have used (or are still using) performance enhancers aren't in the book.
So why is this investigation anything more than a really involved book report? An excellent question, that.
Everything about Selig's interest in the steroid story has come after BALCO news, and his (and therefore the game's) reactions have been routinely hesitant and insincere, unless there was a way to bring in the players' union to share the blame. It surely can be said that there would have been no investigation of the sort being announced today if not for the seamlessness and unassailable thoroughness in reportage, and the utterly convincing narrative that drives the book. Put another way, you could blow $26 in lots worse ways.
Indeed, there have been other books about steroids in the game, most notably Howard Bryant's "Juicing the Game," a fairly thorough overview of the story, but none of those spurred Selig out of his clinical torpor on the subject. No, it took this one -- in fact, news of the planned investigation was released two days after the authors did 12 minutes on David Letterman, which suggests at least circumstantially that it took Selig this long to realize that the book had made a serious impact across all segments of the nation -- except of course for here, Bonds' own Little Switzerland.
Thus, we can assume, George Mitchell's reputation for honor and veracity notwithstanding, that the breadth of this investigation will be kept as narrow as possible, widened only if the public actually demands it. It is baseball's way to do nothing until it is shown that a problem won't go away, and then to deal with it as halfheartedly as possible.
Unless, of course, money is involved. Then, the baseball folks spring into action like the cast of Cirque du Soleil with a snootful of nandrolone.
In other words, barring a public backlash and the rules of evidence, this investigation will follow only the trail of the footnotes in the back of the book, because there is no other place for the investigators to go. For all the players who are suspected of using the junk to prolong and improve their careers, only Bonds, Sheffield and Giambi end up being truly vulnerable, which your morning paper told you some time ago.
Of course, this might be a bleak picture we paint here. Perhaps this investigation will be more than we suspect it is -- grout for a leaking shower. Maybe George Mitchell will, by the power of his intellect and doggedness, actually expand the trail, or at least find facts independent of those we already paid to read. Maybe this is more than merely an elaborate book report for him.
If he manages that, if the game comes closer to distancing itself from the public health nightmare it has avoided, then baseball will be the poorer for his having never been named commissioner way back when.
If not, well, you know the old baseball saying -- nothing ventured, nobody the wiser.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Jagr Conjures Memories of Some Ranger Greats
By DAVE ANDERSON
Published: March 29, 2006
The New York Times
Greenburgh, N.Y.
SOONER or later, almost any conversation about the Rangers these days gets around to Jaromir Jagr, and as Coach Tom Renney leaned against the glass wall of the team's weight room after practice yesterday, he quietly defined Jagr's value.
"On the ice," he said, "he's as important a player as this franchise has ever had."
Notice that he didn't say that Jaromir Jagr was the most important player the Rangers have ever had, merely that he was as important. And you can't rebut that, because in addition to his 52 goals and 109 points, Jagr's most endearing contribution has been his waking the echoes of so many names, which were, in each one's time, as important to the Rangers and their long frustrated followers as he is now.
Those names drift back through eight decades. Names like Mark Messier, Adam Graves, Jean Ratelle, Rod Gilbert, Vic Hadfield, Andy Bathgate, Chuck Rayner, Buddy O'Connor, Bryan Hextall and Bill Cook.
Jagr knows Messier, of course. When Jagr was with the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Washington Capitals, he skated against Messier, who this season called Jagr "the best hockey player in the world." Which is what Messier was when he led the Rangers to the Stanley Cup in 1994 after a 54-year famine.
Jagr also skated against Graves, now in the Rangers' front office as a special assistant for community relations. Jagr's 52 goals has tied Graves's single-season record for the Rangers, who visit the Islanders tonight in their pursuit of a playoff berth after seven shameful seasons. Not that Graves was surprised.
"When I had 40," Jagr said yesterday, "Adam told me he thought I would do it. I wasn't that confident. It looks easier when you're outside."
Jagr has also tied Ratelle's franchise record of 109 points, set during the 1971-72 season. Ratelle was the smooth center for Gilbert and Hadfield, who had 50 goals that year. Ratelle had 46 goals and 63 assists in only 63 games before a broken ankle sidelined him.
"I know Rod, too," Jagr said, referring to Gilbert, now the Rangers' director of community relations, "but I never met Ratelle or Hadfield."
Jagr is surely a candidate for the Hart Trophy as the N.H.L.'s most valuable player. If he wins the Hart, he will be only the fifth Rangers recipient, the first since Messier in 1991-92, his first season as a Ranger. The other M.V.P.'s were Andy Bathgate, Chuck Rayner and Buddy O'Connor.
Bathgate, a classy right wing, was the 1958-59 M.V.P. He also shared the point-scoring title with Bobby Hull and led the league in assists in 1961-62, when Doug Harvey was the Rangers' coach and the Norris Trophy winner as the league's top defenseman.
Rayner was the goaltender when the Rangers went to the 1950 Stanley Cup finals before losing Game 7 to the Detroit Red Wings in double overtime. O'Connor was a center who finished second in the league in points in the 1947-48 season.
If Jagr were to earn the Art Ross Trophy as the league's top scorer, he would be only the only third Ranger to lead the league in points scored. Bryan Hextall, the right wing who scored the Stanley Cup-winning goal in 1940, did so in 1941-42. In what is now considered the prehistoric era, right wing Bill Cook twice led the N.H.L. in scoring, in 1926-27, the Rangers' first season, and again in 1932-33, when they won their second Cup.
With eight rookies, these Rangers aren't likely to win the Stanley Cup, but they could win a playoff round or two, especially if they finish first in the Atlantic Division. That would give them home-ice advantage, at least in the opening round.
"Home ice, that would be huge," Jagr said. "Especially for our fans after not having been in the playoffs for so long. For us now, it's important to play all our games like they were playoff games, to believe you can beat any team in the league."
Of the Rangers' 10 remaining games (including 6 on the road), 6 are against teams below them in the standings — 3 with the Islanders and one each with the Devils, Boston and Pittsburgh. They play two against a team higher in the standings (Ottawa) and two against the Philadelphia Flyers, whom they are battling for first place in the division.
"We have to get back to the efficient, smart, economical, hard-working team that we were before the Olympics," Renney said. "We have to bring urgency to our game because of what we're in pursuit of."
After those seven empty seasons without playoffs (eight, if you count the season-long lockout in 2004-5), Jaromir Jagr has put the Rangers back on the hockey map and resurrected some glorious Rangers names, names that many of their long-frustrated followers, and Jagr himself, may not have even known.
"What he's done for the franchise, the city, the fans," Renney said. "His tentacles reach really far."
Published: March 29, 2006
The New York Times
Greenburgh, N.Y.
SOONER or later, almost any conversation about the Rangers these days gets around to Jaromir Jagr, and as Coach Tom Renney leaned against the glass wall of the team's weight room after practice yesterday, he quietly defined Jagr's value.
"On the ice," he said, "he's as important a player as this franchise has ever had."
Notice that he didn't say that Jaromir Jagr was the most important player the Rangers have ever had, merely that he was as important. And you can't rebut that, because in addition to his 52 goals and 109 points, Jagr's most endearing contribution has been his waking the echoes of so many names, which were, in each one's time, as important to the Rangers and their long frustrated followers as he is now.
Those names drift back through eight decades. Names like Mark Messier, Adam Graves, Jean Ratelle, Rod Gilbert, Vic Hadfield, Andy Bathgate, Chuck Rayner, Buddy O'Connor, Bryan Hextall and Bill Cook.
Jagr knows Messier, of course. When Jagr was with the Pittsburgh Penguins and the Washington Capitals, he skated against Messier, who this season called Jagr "the best hockey player in the world." Which is what Messier was when he led the Rangers to the Stanley Cup in 1994 after a 54-year famine.
Jagr also skated against Graves, now in the Rangers' front office as a special assistant for community relations. Jagr's 52 goals has tied Graves's single-season record for the Rangers, who visit the Islanders tonight in their pursuit of a playoff berth after seven shameful seasons. Not that Graves was surprised.
"When I had 40," Jagr said yesterday, "Adam told me he thought I would do it. I wasn't that confident. It looks easier when you're outside."
Jagr has also tied Ratelle's franchise record of 109 points, set during the 1971-72 season. Ratelle was the smooth center for Gilbert and Hadfield, who had 50 goals that year. Ratelle had 46 goals and 63 assists in only 63 games before a broken ankle sidelined him.
"I know Rod, too," Jagr said, referring to Gilbert, now the Rangers' director of community relations, "but I never met Ratelle or Hadfield."
Jagr is surely a candidate for the Hart Trophy as the N.H.L.'s most valuable player. If he wins the Hart, he will be only the fifth Rangers recipient, the first since Messier in 1991-92, his first season as a Ranger. The other M.V.P.'s were Andy Bathgate, Chuck Rayner and Buddy O'Connor.
Bathgate, a classy right wing, was the 1958-59 M.V.P. He also shared the point-scoring title with Bobby Hull and led the league in assists in 1961-62, when Doug Harvey was the Rangers' coach and the Norris Trophy winner as the league's top defenseman.
Rayner was the goaltender when the Rangers went to the 1950 Stanley Cup finals before losing Game 7 to the Detroit Red Wings in double overtime. O'Connor was a center who finished second in the league in points in the 1947-48 season.
If Jagr were to earn the Art Ross Trophy as the league's top scorer, he would be only the only third Ranger to lead the league in points scored. Bryan Hextall, the right wing who scored the Stanley Cup-winning goal in 1940, did so in 1941-42. In what is now considered the prehistoric era, right wing Bill Cook twice led the N.H.L. in scoring, in 1926-27, the Rangers' first season, and again in 1932-33, when they won their second Cup.
With eight rookies, these Rangers aren't likely to win the Stanley Cup, but they could win a playoff round or two, especially if they finish first in the Atlantic Division. That would give them home-ice advantage, at least in the opening round.
"Home ice, that would be huge," Jagr said. "Especially for our fans after not having been in the playoffs for so long. For us now, it's important to play all our games like they were playoff games, to believe you can beat any team in the league."
Of the Rangers' 10 remaining games (including 6 on the road), 6 are against teams below them in the standings — 3 with the Islanders and one each with the Devils, Boston and Pittsburgh. They play two against a team higher in the standings (Ottawa) and two against the Philadelphia Flyers, whom they are battling for first place in the division.
"We have to get back to the efficient, smart, economical, hard-working team that we were before the Olympics," Renney said. "We have to bring urgency to our game because of what we're in pursuit of."
After those seven empty seasons without playoffs (eight, if you count the season-long lockout in 2004-5), Jaromir Jagr has put the Rangers back on the hockey map and resurrected some glorious Rangers names, names that many of their long-frustrated followers, and Jagr himself, may not have even known.
"What he's done for the franchise, the city, the fans," Renney said. "His tentacles reach really far."
Thomas Sowell: Guests or Gate Crashers? Part II
March 29, 2006
Thomas Sowell
Bogus arguments are a tip-off that you wouldn't buy the real reasons for what someone is doing. Phony arguments and phony words are the norm in discussions of immigration policy.
It starts with a refusal to call illegal aliens "illegal aliens" and ends with asking for "guest worker" status for people who are not guests but gate crashers. As for the substantive arguments, they are as phony as the verbal evasions.
What about all those illegal workers that we "need"? Many of the illegals are working in agriculture, producing crops that have been in chronic surplus for decades. These surplus crops are costing the American taxpayers billions of dollars in government storage costs and in the inflated prices created by deliberately keeping much of this agricultural output off the market.
Do we "need" illegal workers to produce bigger surpluses?
In California, surplus crops grown and harvested by illegal immigrants are often also subsidized by federal water projects which charge the farmers in dry California valleys far less than the cost to the government of providing that water -- and a fraction of what people in Los Angeles or San Francisco pay for the same amount of water.
Surplus crops grown with water supplied at the taxpayers' expense and raised by illegal workers can be grown elsewhere with water provided free of charge from the clouds and raised by American workers paid American wages.
Naturally, when the real costs of those crops have to be paid by the farmers who raise them, less will be grown -- that is, there will not be as much of a surplus going to waste in government-rented storage bins.
With some crops, we don't really "need" any of it. If the United States had not produced a single grain of sugar in the past 50 years, Americans could have gotten all the sugar they wanted and at lower prices, simply by buying it on the world market for half or less of what domestic sugar costs.
Sugar has been in chronic surplus on the world market for generations. It can be grown in the tropics far cheaper than it can be grown in the United States. All the land, labor, and capital that has been spent growing sugar here has been one huge waste.
We don't "need" to grow sugar, with or without illegal workers.
Many people are understandably sympathetic toward Mexican workers who come across the border illegally, not only because of the poverty which drives them from their homelands but also because their willingness to work makes them in demand.
When you see beggars on the street, they are usually white or black, but almost never Mexican.
But American immigration laws and policies are not about whether you like or don't like Mexicans, though some demagogues try to play the race card.
For too long, we have bought the argument that being unfortunate entitles you to break the law. The consequence has been disastrous, whether the people allowed to get away with breaking the law are Americans or foreigners.
Legalizing illegal actions is the easy way out, so it is hardly surprising that politicians go for that.
One of the ways of legalizing illegal acts is by the automatic conferring of American citizenship on babies born to illegal aliens in the United States.
The law that made all people born here American citizens made sense when people crossed an ocean and made a commitment to become Americans.
Today, it is just another way of essentially legalizing illegal acts by making it harder to deport those who broke the law.
One of the most bogus of all the bogus arguments for a "guest worker" program is that it is impossible to find all the millions of illegal aliens in the country, so it is impossible to deport them.
If tomorrow someone came up with some brilliant way to identify every illegal alien in the country, it would not make the slightest difference. Right now, those who are identified as illegal, whether at the border, in prisons, at traffic stops or in any of our institutions, face no penalty whatsoever.
Identification is not the problem. Doing nothing is the problem.
Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate
Thomas Sowell
Bogus arguments are a tip-off that you wouldn't buy the real reasons for what someone is doing. Phony arguments and phony words are the norm in discussions of immigration policy.
It starts with a refusal to call illegal aliens "illegal aliens" and ends with asking for "guest worker" status for people who are not guests but gate crashers. As for the substantive arguments, they are as phony as the verbal evasions.
What about all those illegal workers that we "need"? Many of the illegals are working in agriculture, producing crops that have been in chronic surplus for decades. These surplus crops are costing the American taxpayers billions of dollars in government storage costs and in the inflated prices created by deliberately keeping much of this agricultural output off the market.
Do we "need" illegal workers to produce bigger surpluses?
In California, surplus crops grown and harvested by illegal immigrants are often also subsidized by federal water projects which charge the farmers in dry California valleys far less than the cost to the government of providing that water -- and a fraction of what people in Los Angeles or San Francisco pay for the same amount of water.
Surplus crops grown with water supplied at the taxpayers' expense and raised by illegal workers can be grown elsewhere with water provided free of charge from the clouds and raised by American workers paid American wages.
Naturally, when the real costs of those crops have to be paid by the farmers who raise them, less will be grown -- that is, there will not be as much of a surplus going to waste in government-rented storage bins.
With some crops, we don't really "need" any of it. If the United States had not produced a single grain of sugar in the past 50 years, Americans could have gotten all the sugar they wanted and at lower prices, simply by buying it on the world market for half or less of what domestic sugar costs.
Sugar has been in chronic surplus on the world market for generations. It can be grown in the tropics far cheaper than it can be grown in the United States. All the land, labor, and capital that has been spent growing sugar here has been one huge waste.
We don't "need" to grow sugar, with or without illegal workers.
Many people are understandably sympathetic toward Mexican workers who come across the border illegally, not only because of the poverty which drives them from their homelands but also because their willingness to work makes them in demand.
When you see beggars on the street, they are usually white or black, but almost never Mexican.
But American immigration laws and policies are not about whether you like or don't like Mexicans, though some demagogues try to play the race card.
For too long, we have bought the argument that being unfortunate entitles you to break the law. The consequence has been disastrous, whether the people allowed to get away with breaking the law are Americans or foreigners.
Legalizing illegal actions is the easy way out, so it is hardly surprising that politicians go for that.
One of the ways of legalizing illegal acts is by the automatic conferring of American citizenship on babies born to illegal aliens in the United States.
The law that made all people born here American citizens made sense when people crossed an ocean and made a commitment to become Americans.
Today, it is just another way of essentially legalizing illegal acts by making it harder to deport those who broke the law.
One of the most bogus of all the bogus arguments for a "guest worker" program is that it is impossible to find all the millions of illegal aliens in the country, so it is impossible to deport them.
If tomorrow someone came up with some brilliant way to identify every illegal alien in the country, it would not make the slightest difference. Right now, those who are identified as illegal, whether at the border, in prisons, at traffic stops or in any of our institutions, face no penalty whatsoever.
Identification is not the problem. Doing nothing is the problem.
Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate
Book Review: Consent To Kill by Vince Flynn
CONSENT TO KILL
Vince Flynn
Atria Books
Thriller
ISBN: 0743270363
• Read an Excerpt
• Author Interview -- Month DD, YYYY
• Reading Group Guide
CONSENT TO KILL heralds the welcome return of Mitch Rapp, CIA operative extraordinaire. Rapp is not afraid to color outside the lines, and he usually uses a red crayon; he's one of those guys who you're thankful to have on your side, watching the collective back of the country --- unless of course you are given the thankless job of attempting to rein him in. The problem is that Rapp is almost always right, so reining him in is the wrong course of action to take; better by far to let him do what he needs to do. Rapp is who you go to when there is a need to work outside of the U.S. Constitution in order to preserve it; the result is that he has a tendency to acquire right-thinking friends, and wrong-thinking enemies.
The nefarious plot that Rapp is forced to thwart in CONSENT TO KILL is an extremely personal one. Saeed Ahmed Abdullah holds Rapp personally responsible for the death of his son, a terrorist whose plot against the United States was thwarted by Rapp. Abdullah now wants revenge; to obtain it, he goes to his powerful friend Prince Muhammad bin Rashid. Rashid lives in the shadow of his half-brother, the crown prince, and Rashid despises him as a weak-kneed tool of the west. Seeing a way to aid his friend while undermining the prince's authority --- and increasing his own --- Rashid sets a plan in motion to assassinate Rapp, an idea almost as bold as it is unthinkable. It is also done at tremendous risk, as Rapp has previously demonstrated a great and unquenchable capacity for revenge. If the plot fails, all who are involved know that Rapp will stop at nothing to exact total retribution.
Flynn is at his best here, as he describes the labyrinthian plotting through which an assassination team is located and retained. There are layers upon layers of duplicity, traveling up and down the chain of command in a world where trust is an elusive commodity. Flynn takes an interesting chance here as well, making CONSENT TO KILL in part a character study of the instrument of the assassination attempt. The result is a work that is equal parts psychological thriller and action thriller with a conclusion that, while controversial, is oddly and unexpectedly satisfying.
In CONSENT TO KILL Flynn combines a mesmerizing protagonist with a superb plot and an addicting narrative to create the latest installment of his ongoing treatise as to how the world far removed from the perfumed princes and talking heads truly works. Highly recommended. ---
Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
Click here to get the audiobook from Audible.com.
© Copyright 1996-2006, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
Vince Flynn
Atria Books
Thriller
ISBN: 0743270363
• Read an Excerpt
• Author Interview -- Month DD, YYYY
• Reading Group Guide
CONSENT TO KILL heralds the welcome return of Mitch Rapp, CIA operative extraordinaire. Rapp is not afraid to color outside the lines, and he usually uses a red crayon; he's one of those guys who you're thankful to have on your side, watching the collective back of the country --- unless of course you are given the thankless job of attempting to rein him in. The problem is that Rapp is almost always right, so reining him in is the wrong course of action to take; better by far to let him do what he needs to do. Rapp is who you go to when there is a need to work outside of the U.S. Constitution in order to preserve it; the result is that he has a tendency to acquire right-thinking friends, and wrong-thinking enemies.
The nefarious plot that Rapp is forced to thwart in CONSENT TO KILL is an extremely personal one. Saeed Ahmed Abdullah holds Rapp personally responsible for the death of his son, a terrorist whose plot against the United States was thwarted by Rapp. Abdullah now wants revenge; to obtain it, he goes to his powerful friend Prince Muhammad bin Rashid. Rashid lives in the shadow of his half-brother, the crown prince, and Rashid despises him as a weak-kneed tool of the west. Seeing a way to aid his friend while undermining the prince's authority --- and increasing his own --- Rashid sets a plan in motion to assassinate Rapp, an idea almost as bold as it is unthinkable. It is also done at tremendous risk, as Rapp has previously demonstrated a great and unquenchable capacity for revenge. If the plot fails, all who are involved know that Rapp will stop at nothing to exact total retribution.
Flynn is at his best here, as he describes the labyrinthian plotting through which an assassination team is located and retained. There are layers upon layers of duplicity, traveling up and down the chain of command in a world where trust is an elusive commodity. Flynn takes an interesting chance here as well, making CONSENT TO KILL in part a character study of the instrument of the assassination attempt. The result is a work that is equal parts psychological thriller and action thriller with a conclusion that, while controversial, is oddly and unexpectedly satisfying.
In CONSENT TO KILL Flynn combines a mesmerizing protagonist with a superb plot and an addicting narrative to create the latest installment of his ongoing treatise as to how the world far removed from the perfumed princes and talking heads truly works. Highly recommended. ---
Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub
Click here now to buy this book from Amazon.com.
Click here to get the audiobook from Audible.com.
© Copyright 1996-2006, Bookreporter.com. All rights reserved.
Robert Spencer: Killing for Allah
Robert Spencer
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
March 29, 2006
Before he drove a rented SUV onto the campus of the University of North Carolina and tried to run down and kill as many people as he could on March 3, Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar left a letter of explanation in his apartment. It is chillingly detached, almost clinical: “In the name of Allah, the merciful, the compassionate. To whom it may concern: I am writing this letter to inform you of my reasons for premeditating and attempting to murder citizens and residents of the United States of America on Friday, March 3, 2006 in the city of Chapel Hill, North Carolina by running them over with my automobile and stabbing them with a knife if the opportunities are presented to me by Allah.”
In the letter, Taheri-azar identifies himself simply as “a servant of Allah.” He declares that “in the Qur’an, Allah states that the believing men and women have permission to murder anyone responsible for the killing of other believing men and women.…After extensive contemplation and reflection, I have made the decision to exercise the right of violent retaliation that Allah has given me to the fullest extent to which I am capable at present.” And further, “Allah’s commandments are never to be questioned and all of Allah’s commandments must be obeyed. Those who violate Allah’s commandments and purposefully follow human fabrication and falsehood as their religion will burn in fire for eternity in accordance with Allah’s will.”
In a letter written a week later, Taheri-azar asserted: “I live with the holy Koran as my constitution for right and wrong and definition of justice…. Allah gives permission in the Koran for the followers of Allah to attack those who have raged [sic] war against them, with the expectation of eternal paradise in case of martyrdom and/or living one’s life in obedience of all of Allah’s commandments found throughout the Koran’s 114 chapters. I’ve read all 114 chapters approximately 15 times since June of 2003 when I started reading the Koran.” And he did not try to murder UNC students “out of hatred for Americans, but out of love for Allah instead. I live only to serve Allah, by obeying all of Allah’s commandments of which I am aware by reading and learning the contents of the Koran.”
Taheri-azar may have been referring to passages such as Qur’an 2:190 (“Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you…”) and 9:111: “Allah hath purchased of the believers their persons and their goods; for theirs in return is the garden of Paradise: they fight in His cause, and slay and are slain…” There are numerous other passages enjoining violence against unbelievers (2:216; 9:5; 9:29; 47:4; etc.). But in response, according to a local news report, “several leaders of the Triangle Muslim community say Taheri-azar’s personal interpretation of the Quran is wrong and it goes against the true belief of Muslims across the world -- which is peace.”
Such a response was predictable both in its content and lack of specificity. Every day brings more evidence that Muslims believe the Qur’an enjoins anything but peace: Monday saw hundreds of Muslim clerics demonstrating in Afghanistan against the release of Christian convert Abdul Rahman. They chanted “Death to Christians!” and called for the killing of Abdul Rahman in accord with Islam’s traditional prohibition of apostasy. One cleric, Faiez Mohammed of Kunduz, was succinct: “Abdul Rahman must be killed. Islam demands it.”
It is abundantly clear that even if Mohammed Taheri-azar acted alone on March 3 in Chapel Hill, his view of the Qur’an is not eccentric among Muslims worldwide. Yet three and a half years after Muhammad Atta and his crew flew a plane into the World Trade Center out of love for Allah, we still don’t see any sustained or concerted effort by self-proclaimed peaceful Muslims in the United States or anywhere else to disabuse their coreligionists of this jihad ideology, and its globalist, supremacist, totalitarian political agenda. Such an effort should not be seen as optional or incidental; without it, the very commitment of these self-proclaimed moderates to the United States and its Constitution can and should be called into question.
Also, analysts keep focusing on the question of whether or not Taheri-azar was a “terrorist.” I don’t care if you call him a canteloupe. The real problem here is that anyone anywhere at any time can read the Qur’an and come to the same conclusion that he did. If American officials were really serious about preventing a future attack, they would address that. If American Muslim advocacy groups were really serious about being loyal, patriotic Americans, they would address that.
Am I saying that the Qur’an should be outlawed, as was attempted long ago in Calcutta and about which there have been some rumblings recently in Germany?
No, I would prefer to deal more in the realm of what is realistically possible. I’d like to see an honest public discussion of the elements of the Qur’an and Sunnah that give impetus to violence and fanaticism. I’d like to see American Muslim spokesmen explain how they will specifically address these elements, and teach Muslims to reject them in favor of the principles of the equality of dignity and rights of all people, women as well as men, non-Muslims as well as Muslims. And I’d like to see them follow through on these explanations with real action.
Only then might we be getting somewhere against the phenomenon represented by Mohammed Taheri-azar. I am not holding my breath.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of five books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). He is also an Adjunct Fellow with the Free Congress Foundation.
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
March 29, 2006
Before he drove a rented SUV onto the campus of the University of North Carolina and tried to run down and kill as many people as he could on March 3, Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar left a letter of explanation in his apartment. It is chillingly detached, almost clinical: “In the name of Allah, the merciful, the compassionate. To whom it may concern: I am writing this letter to inform you of my reasons for premeditating and attempting to murder citizens and residents of the United States of America on Friday, March 3, 2006 in the city of Chapel Hill, North Carolina by running them over with my automobile and stabbing them with a knife if the opportunities are presented to me by Allah.”
In the letter, Taheri-azar identifies himself simply as “a servant of Allah.” He declares that “in the Qur’an, Allah states that the believing men and women have permission to murder anyone responsible for the killing of other believing men and women.…After extensive contemplation and reflection, I have made the decision to exercise the right of violent retaliation that Allah has given me to the fullest extent to which I am capable at present.” And further, “Allah’s commandments are never to be questioned and all of Allah’s commandments must be obeyed. Those who violate Allah’s commandments and purposefully follow human fabrication and falsehood as their religion will burn in fire for eternity in accordance with Allah’s will.”
In a letter written a week later, Taheri-azar asserted: “I live with the holy Koran as my constitution for right and wrong and definition of justice…. Allah gives permission in the Koran for the followers of Allah to attack those who have raged [sic] war against them, with the expectation of eternal paradise in case of martyrdom and/or living one’s life in obedience of all of Allah’s commandments found throughout the Koran’s 114 chapters. I’ve read all 114 chapters approximately 15 times since June of 2003 when I started reading the Koran.” And he did not try to murder UNC students “out of hatred for Americans, but out of love for Allah instead. I live only to serve Allah, by obeying all of Allah’s commandments of which I am aware by reading and learning the contents of the Koran.”
Taheri-azar may have been referring to passages such as Qur’an 2:190 (“Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you…”) and 9:111: “Allah hath purchased of the believers their persons and their goods; for theirs in return is the garden of Paradise: they fight in His cause, and slay and are slain…” There are numerous other passages enjoining violence against unbelievers (2:216; 9:5; 9:29; 47:4; etc.). But in response, according to a local news report, “several leaders of the Triangle Muslim community say Taheri-azar’s personal interpretation of the Quran is wrong and it goes against the true belief of Muslims across the world -- which is peace.”
Such a response was predictable both in its content and lack of specificity. Every day brings more evidence that Muslims believe the Qur’an enjoins anything but peace: Monday saw hundreds of Muslim clerics demonstrating in Afghanistan against the release of Christian convert Abdul Rahman. They chanted “Death to Christians!” and called for the killing of Abdul Rahman in accord with Islam’s traditional prohibition of apostasy. One cleric, Faiez Mohammed of Kunduz, was succinct: “Abdul Rahman must be killed. Islam demands it.”
It is abundantly clear that even if Mohammed Taheri-azar acted alone on March 3 in Chapel Hill, his view of the Qur’an is not eccentric among Muslims worldwide. Yet three and a half years after Muhammad Atta and his crew flew a plane into the World Trade Center out of love for Allah, we still don’t see any sustained or concerted effort by self-proclaimed peaceful Muslims in the United States or anywhere else to disabuse their coreligionists of this jihad ideology, and its globalist, supremacist, totalitarian political agenda. Such an effort should not be seen as optional or incidental; without it, the very commitment of these self-proclaimed moderates to the United States and its Constitution can and should be called into question.
Also, analysts keep focusing on the question of whether or not Taheri-azar was a “terrorist.” I don’t care if you call him a canteloupe. The real problem here is that anyone anywhere at any time can read the Qur’an and come to the same conclusion that he did. If American officials were really serious about preventing a future attack, they would address that. If American Muslim advocacy groups were really serious about being loyal, patriotic Americans, they would address that.
Am I saying that the Qur’an should be outlawed, as was attempted long ago in Calcutta and about which there have been some rumblings recently in Germany?
No, I would prefer to deal more in the realm of what is realistically possible. I’d like to see an honest public discussion of the elements of the Qur’an and Sunnah that give impetus to violence and fanaticism. I’d like to see American Muslim spokesmen explain how they will specifically address these elements, and teach Muslims to reject them in favor of the principles of the equality of dignity and rights of all people, women as well as men, non-Muslims as well as Muslims. And I’d like to see them follow through on these explanations with real action.
Only then might we be getting somewhere against the phenomenon represented by Mohammed Taheri-azar. I am not holding my breath.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of five books, seven monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades). He is also an Adjunct Fellow with the Free Congress Foundation.
Debra Saunders: The 'Immigration Backlash'
March 29, 2006
The San Fransisco Chronicle
Debra Saunders
Of course America needs immigrants. This is a country founded by immigrants and made richer by the imprint of newcomers in search of a land that rewards their hard work and determination to make a better life for their families.
The problem is that no country -- certainly, no country with a social safety net -- can afford to accommodate everyone who wants in. (Or as Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., put it, "We cannot be the HMO to the world.") That's why there are immigration policies that limit the number of people who can immigrate here legally.
The lack of an open-door policy has spawned this week's victim class, illegal or "undocumented" immigrants, who have flouted American law and apparently believe they should not have to pay the consequences of that choice. Hence Sunday's huge demonstration in Los Angeles, where activists carried signs that called for "Amnistia, Full Rights for All Immigrants."
The Los Angeles Times duly reported, "Some Republicans fear that pushing too hard against illegal immigrants could backfire nationally, as with Proposition 187 (the 1994 ballot measure that sought to deny benefits for illegal immigrants that) helped spur record numbers of California Latinos to become U.S. citizens and register to vote. Those voters subsequently helped Democrats regain political control in the state."
Call that the Backlash Myth. In fact, Prop. 187 passed with 59 percent of the vote, and GOP Gov. Pete Wilson, who championed the measure, was re-elected in 1994. In 2003, when Democratic Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill that would allow illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses, he so enraged voters that he sealed his political demise. After Davis was recalled from office, the heavily Democratic California Legislature repealed the bill.
That's your backlash.
Don't blame racism. While some in the media may think all Latinos vote alike, the Los Angeles Times poll found that 38 percent of Latino voters in California strongly opposed giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.
If there is a backlash, it probably will be against the demonstrators. Even before students began blocking the Los Angeles streets to protest legislation in Congress to toughen penalties for illegal immigrants and smugglers, Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies told me over the telephone, "I hope they keep doing it. It just makes it less and less likely the Senate's going to pass any amnesty."
A bill passed by the House would make it a felony for illegal immigrants to stay in the United States. Jeff Lungren of the House Judiciary Committee explained that, while it is a crime to cross the border illegally, staying here after sneaking in or after your visa expires has been only a civil offense. The House wanted to make it an actual crime.
When members of Congress complained that a felony was too harsh, House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner put forward an amendment in December to reduce the proposed penalty to a misdemeanor.
This shows what a setup the felony issue was: Only eight Dems voted to reduce the penalty, and the amendment failed by a 257-164 vote. U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., announced that she opposed the misdemeanor amendment because: "In one stroke, it would subject the entire undocumented population, estimated by some to be 11 million people, to criminal liability." So the Dems stuck with the felony language.
Rohrabacher stresses that 90 percent of illegal immigrants -- if not more -- are "wonderful human beings." He notes that no one expects the government to deport all 11 million or 12 million illegal immigrants in America.
The answer is for Washington to toughen enforcement, penalize employers who hired undocumented workers and make border crossing more costly. Then fewer people will move illegally to America.
Instead, on Monday, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a bill with a guest-worker program that would allow illegal immigrants to apply for citizenship. Big mistake. If Washington passes an immigration bill that grants citizenship to illegal immigrants and includes a phony temporary guest-worker program -- phony, because there is no way the government can or would remove workers after six years, as one scheme promises -- then the deception will be official. The message Washington will send will resound louder than ever: Forget immigration laws. Legal, illegal, no dif.
dsaunders@sfchronicle.com
The San Fransisco Chronicle
Debra Saunders
Of course America needs immigrants. This is a country founded by immigrants and made richer by the imprint of newcomers in search of a land that rewards their hard work and determination to make a better life for their families.
The problem is that no country -- certainly, no country with a social safety net -- can afford to accommodate everyone who wants in. (Or as Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., put it, "We cannot be the HMO to the world.") That's why there are immigration policies that limit the number of people who can immigrate here legally.
The lack of an open-door policy has spawned this week's victim class, illegal or "undocumented" immigrants, who have flouted American law and apparently believe they should not have to pay the consequences of that choice. Hence Sunday's huge demonstration in Los Angeles, where activists carried signs that called for "Amnistia, Full Rights for All Immigrants."
The Los Angeles Times duly reported, "Some Republicans fear that pushing too hard against illegal immigrants could backfire nationally, as with Proposition 187 (the 1994 ballot measure that sought to deny benefits for illegal immigrants that) helped spur record numbers of California Latinos to become U.S. citizens and register to vote. Those voters subsequently helped Democrats regain political control in the state."
Call that the Backlash Myth. In fact, Prop. 187 passed with 59 percent of the vote, and GOP Gov. Pete Wilson, who championed the measure, was re-elected in 1994. In 2003, when Democratic Gov. Gray Davis signed a bill that would allow illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses, he so enraged voters that he sealed his political demise. After Davis was recalled from office, the heavily Democratic California Legislature repealed the bill.
That's your backlash.
Don't blame racism. While some in the media may think all Latinos vote alike, the Los Angeles Times poll found that 38 percent of Latino voters in California strongly opposed giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.
If there is a backlash, it probably will be against the demonstrators. Even before students began blocking the Los Angeles streets to protest legislation in Congress to toughen penalties for illegal immigrants and smugglers, Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies told me over the telephone, "I hope they keep doing it. It just makes it less and less likely the Senate's going to pass any amnesty."
A bill passed by the House would make it a felony for illegal immigrants to stay in the United States. Jeff Lungren of the House Judiciary Committee explained that, while it is a crime to cross the border illegally, staying here after sneaking in or after your visa expires has been only a civil offense. The House wanted to make it an actual crime.
When members of Congress complained that a felony was too harsh, House Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner put forward an amendment in December to reduce the proposed penalty to a misdemeanor.
This shows what a setup the felony issue was: Only eight Dems voted to reduce the penalty, and the amendment failed by a 257-164 vote. U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., announced that she opposed the misdemeanor amendment because: "In one stroke, it would subject the entire undocumented population, estimated by some to be 11 million people, to criminal liability." So the Dems stuck with the felony language.
Rohrabacher stresses that 90 percent of illegal immigrants -- if not more -- are "wonderful human beings." He notes that no one expects the government to deport all 11 million or 12 million illegal immigrants in America.
The answer is for Washington to toughen enforcement, penalize employers who hired undocumented workers and make border crossing more costly. Then fewer people will move illegally to America.
Instead, on Monday, the Senate Judiciary Committee passed a bill with a guest-worker program that would allow illegal immigrants to apply for citizenship. Big mistake. If Washington passes an immigration bill that grants citizenship to illegal immigrants and includes a phony temporary guest-worker program -- phony, because there is no way the government can or would remove workers after six years, as one scheme promises -- then the deception will be official. The message Washington will send will resound louder than ever: Forget immigration laws. Legal, illegal, no dif.
dsaunders@sfchronicle.com
Kathleen Parker: When Illegal is Right, What is Wrong?
March 29, 2006
The Orlando Sentinel
Kathleen Parker
There's nothing like the sight of 500,000 protesters on U.S. turf, demanding rights in Spanish while waving Mexican flags, to stir Americans from their siestas.
In Los Angeles, the iconic phrase may be "Si se puede," but in Muncie, it's "What the ... ?"
Suddenly, in the flash of a newscast, polite political debate about guest worker programs visually morphed into what seemed like a full-blown invasion.
Demonstrations have the desired effect of focusing attention on an idea - and television cameras can tighten that focus so that a slow drip looks like a tsunami. But the same imagery can backfire. I suspect that the sight of so many people demanding rights to which they have no legal claim will not help the cause of illegals in this country, even if it motivates politicians to act, well, politically.
Let's just say that convincing others of one's desire to become an American citizen would be more effective if one were to do so in English - while waving an American flag. Just imagine how welcome 500,000 bubbas waving American flags and chanting, "Hell no, we won't go," would be in Mexico City.
Now before I'm accused of being biased against Latinos, let me be clear. Yo quiero a los Latinos. I could go on in Espanol, but when in America, I always say, do as the Americans do. Speak English. Otherwise, I'm over-the-top pro-Latino and pro-immigrant.
I grew up in Florida with Cubans as my closest friends, and my stepfather is Mexican - a legal immigrant who came to this country at age 16 to attend medical school.
I am, in other words, an unapologetic Hispanophile.
But, like a majority of Americans who think Congress should secure our borders, I'm a fan of laws and of those who respect them - even though I occasionally turn right on red when the sign says not to.
The question of what to do with some 11 million to 20 million illegal immigrants already living and working in this country may be too problematic for mere politicians. The issue is exacerbated by our refusal to speak plain, non-PC English about what's what. Illegal immigrants are not "undocumented workers." They're illegal. And, if we're to use the legal language accurately, they're "aliens."
Then again, when we talk about illegal aliens, it is useful to remind ourselves that we're also talking about human beings. To see television images of shadows crossing the desert into the U.S. is to see criminals intent on misdeeds rather than poor people, hundreds of whom die each year in the process, trying to find jobs and plenty to eat.
As we've been told hundreds of times, these people do the work Americans won't do, which is both true and not true. It is true that Americans don't want to work for the low wages that illegal workers gratefully earn, but not necessarily true that no American would do those jobs under any circumstances.
Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies (cis.org), says that unemployment figures tell the truer story of how native workers are being crowded out of the market by cheap labor: 11 percent of American construction workers are unemployed, as are 9 percent of workers in food processing and 11 percent in cleaning and maintenance.
"The least educated Americans are getting hurt," he says.
Standing around a Washington, D.C., Metro station the other day, I watched a Latino sweeping the tiled floor. He was one of those people you barely notice - an invisible soul, dignified, unobtrusive - but plainly attentive to his job. I don't know if he's here legally, but I do know the floor was spotless. I tried to imagine any other American doing the same job. A college student? Another minority? Is there really an involuntarily unemployed American citizen keeping warm on a street grate because this small brown man is sweeping the floor of an underground tunnel?
Before I bleed to death or start writing poetry, let me balance this romantic view of the illegal immigrant with another nugget: About 27 percent of all inmates in the federal prison system are criminal aliens, according to government figures. Then again, millions of illegals who are otherwise law-abiding people have lived here for 10-20 years, buying houses, attending parent-teacher meetings and giving birth to native-born Americans.
Although there seems no simple solution to such a complex issue, two nagging thoughts persist: (1) The right to protest was a gift from America's Founding Fathers to the nation's citizens, ergo, non-citizens should protest in their own countries; and (2) the purpose of the legislative branch of government is to pass laws that serve the best interests of the nation's citizens.
Which may mean, No se puede.
kparker@orlandosentinel.com
The Orlando Sentinel
Kathleen Parker
There's nothing like the sight of 500,000 protesters on U.S. turf, demanding rights in Spanish while waving Mexican flags, to stir Americans from their siestas.
In Los Angeles, the iconic phrase may be "Si se puede," but in Muncie, it's "What the ... ?"
Suddenly, in the flash of a newscast, polite political debate about guest worker programs visually morphed into what seemed like a full-blown invasion.
Demonstrations have the desired effect of focusing attention on an idea - and television cameras can tighten that focus so that a slow drip looks like a tsunami. But the same imagery can backfire. I suspect that the sight of so many people demanding rights to which they have no legal claim will not help the cause of illegals in this country, even if it motivates politicians to act, well, politically.
Let's just say that convincing others of one's desire to become an American citizen would be more effective if one were to do so in English - while waving an American flag. Just imagine how welcome 500,000 bubbas waving American flags and chanting, "Hell no, we won't go," would be in Mexico City.
Now before I'm accused of being biased against Latinos, let me be clear. Yo quiero a los Latinos. I could go on in Espanol, but when in America, I always say, do as the Americans do. Speak English. Otherwise, I'm over-the-top pro-Latino and pro-immigrant.
I grew up in Florida with Cubans as my closest friends, and my stepfather is Mexican - a legal immigrant who came to this country at age 16 to attend medical school.
I am, in other words, an unapologetic Hispanophile.
But, like a majority of Americans who think Congress should secure our borders, I'm a fan of laws and of those who respect them - even though I occasionally turn right on red when the sign says not to.
The question of what to do with some 11 million to 20 million illegal immigrants already living and working in this country may be too problematic for mere politicians. The issue is exacerbated by our refusal to speak plain, non-PC English about what's what. Illegal immigrants are not "undocumented workers." They're illegal. And, if we're to use the legal language accurately, they're "aliens."
Then again, when we talk about illegal aliens, it is useful to remind ourselves that we're also talking about human beings. To see television images of shadows crossing the desert into the U.S. is to see criminals intent on misdeeds rather than poor people, hundreds of whom die each year in the process, trying to find jobs and plenty to eat.
As we've been told hundreds of times, these people do the work Americans won't do, which is both true and not true. It is true that Americans don't want to work for the low wages that illegal workers gratefully earn, but not necessarily true that no American would do those jobs under any circumstances.
Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies (cis.org), says that unemployment figures tell the truer story of how native workers are being crowded out of the market by cheap labor: 11 percent of American construction workers are unemployed, as are 9 percent of workers in food processing and 11 percent in cleaning and maintenance.
"The least educated Americans are getting hurt," he says.
Standing around a Washington, D.C., Metro station the other day, I watched a Latino sweeping the tiled floor. He was one of those people you barely notice - an invisible soul, dignified, unobtrusive - but plainly attentive to his job. I don't know if he's here legally, but I do know the floor was spotless. I tried to imagine any other American doing the same job. A college student? Another minority? Is there really an involuntarily unemployed American citizen keeping warm on a street grate because this small brown man is sweeping the floor of an underground tunnel?
Before I bleed to death or start writing poetry, let me balance this romantic view of the illegal immigrant with another nugget: About 27 percent of all inmates in the federal prison system are criminal aliens, according to government figures. Then again, millions of illegals who are otherwise law-abiding people have lived here for 10-20 years, buying houses, attending parent-teacher meetings and giving birth to native-born Americans.
Although there seems no simple solution to such a complex issue, two nagging thoughts persist: (1) The right to protest was a gift from America's Founding Fathers to the nation's citizens, ergo, non-citizens should protest in their own countries; and (2) the purpose of the legislative branch of government is to pass laws that serve the best interests of the nation's citizens.
Which may mean, No se puede.
kparker@orlandosentinel.com
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
Lowell Ponte: Goodbye Europe
Lowell Ponte
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
March 28, 2006
The best genes spawned in Europe had the dynamism, like Europa herself, to cross the ocean. They settled and thrived in freer lands such as the United States and Australia. Others among Europe’s best offspring died patriotically in the mass carnage of 500 years of Europe’s religious and civil wars, leaving behind mostly dregs. As the lunatic poet Ezra Pound wrote in 1920 of the soldiers of World War I: “There died a myriad, / And of the best, among them, / For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization….”
Europe’s botched civilization, perverted by socialism and lost faith, seems to have lost the will, the passion to sustain itself. If it continues to practice today’s multiculturalist leftism, Europe’s demographic doom will be sealed. Some harbingers:
* In Brussels, Belgium, the most popular name for baby boys is now Mohammad. Sustaining the population of a nation requires that on average each couple gives birth to 2.1 children. The average European couple now has fewer than 1.4 babies, compared to 3.6 babies born to the average Muslim immigrant couple in Europe. Across Western Europe 16 to 20 percent of babies are being born into Muslim families.
* In France at least 12 percent of the population is already Muslim, the fruits mostly of immigrants from former French colonies in North Africa. If present birth trends continue, by 2030 a quarter of France’s people will be Muslim, more than enough to determine who controls the national parliament and executive. As this columnist recently noted, the nuclear-armed French military is already 15 percent Muslim. Adjacent Switzerland is now 20 percent Muslim.
* The German newspaper Deutsche Welle days ago reported that Germany’s birth rate in 2005 fell to a level lower than at the end of World War II, to a “historic low,” more than fifty percent lower than those of France and Great Britain. But at a meeting this week in Berlin that brought together the interior ministers of six European nations, Germany’s leftwing Social Democrats continued to oppose the application of any test or standard that would restrict who could migrate into Germany.
The burgeoning Muslim population within Europe is not evenly spread. It is largely concentrated in and around big cities, whose local politicians feel its pressure acutely and often bend to that pressure. In the Netherlands the cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam nearly have Muslim majorities now.
These Islamic enclaves are already taking on the character of conquered provinces that no longer belong to the European countries around them. As FrontPage Magazine recently quoted from the new book While Europe Slept by liberal American expatriate Bruce Bawer:
In France, a public official met with an imam at the edge of Roubaix’s Muslim district out of respect for his declaration of the neighborhood as Islamic territory to which she had no right of access. In Britain, imams have pressed the government to officially designate certain areas of Bradford as being under Muslim, not British, law. In Denmark, Muslim leaders have sought the same kind of control over parts of Copenhagen. And in Belgium, Muslims living in the Brussels neighborhood of Sint-Jans-Molenbeek already view it not as part of Belgium but as an area under Islamic jurisdiction in which Belgians are not welcome.
Europe has several potential choices in the face of a flood of immigrants and families within its borders who refuse to assimilate European values of mutual toleration and liberal social policies.
Europe’s cultural polarization vis-à-vis its Muslim underclass is being exacerbated by socialist policies that are producing stagnant economies and high unemployment. These fruits of Euro-socialism have also created a political tinderbox of Muslim frustration and, as we saw in recent days of protests in Paris, an angry refusal by many traditional Europeans to reform or relinquish their welfare state and job security benefits. This climate discourages investors and pits new and traditional Europeans against one another.
If Europe continues as it is now, the rising Muslim tide will, one at a time, transform the members of the European Union into Islamic Republics under Islamic Shari’a law as Muslims become the majority population.
Already the wealth of traditional Europeans is being bled away and transferred to new Muslim immigrants and their children. One mechanism for this is the European welfare state. In Denmark, observed Bawer, only five percent of the population is Muslim, but this minority demands and receives 40 percent of the Danish government’s total welfare payments and other taxpayer-subsidized social benefits. Even the liberal New York Times Magazine in February reported on the social impact of this growing Islamic drain on the resources of European welfare states such as Sweden and Denmark.
Another method used to transfer wealth from Europeans to Eurabian Muslims is theft. Some radical Mullahs have told their European congregations that Islamic Shari’a law justifies shoplifting and other forms of stealing from European merchants and companies as a way to make non-Muslims pay the discriminatory jizya tax that is extracted from non-Muslim citizens in Muslim countries.
And in Europe’s growing Islamic neighborhoods, where police are often afraid to go, European law is being supplanted by Shari’a. European women venturing into or near such enclaves have been assaulted and, in some cases, raped by gangs of macho Islamic males for violating Muslim dress codes and failing to exhibit the subservient status some Islamic subcultures require of females.
Forty percent of Muslims living in Great Britain want Islamic Shari’a law introduced into parts of that country, according to a poll reported last month by the London Sunday Telegraph.
Shari’a differs dramatically from modern Western notions of law and society. Shari’a has no separation of church and state; to the contrary, under Shari’a the Koran is the ultimate law book and constitution, and the Islamic Mullah is the magistrate who punishes violators of this law. Under Shari’a, as practiced in much of the Islamic world, equality exists only among Muslim men; women are inferior to men, and Jews and Christians are inferior to all Muslims. Risk-taking and usury, i.e., money-lending for profit, are forbidden, so we would kiss capitalism goodbye.
Religious freedom is non-existent under Shari’a. A Christian or a Jew is permitted to convert to Islam, but the penalty for any Muslim converting to a different faith is death. In American-liberated Afghanistan a 41-year-old former Muslim, Abdul Rahman, is on trial in Kabul for the crime of converting to Christianity. The prosecutor in the case, Abdul Wasi, has asked for a death penalty, as Shari’a requires. Wasi, reported Associated Press, said that he “had offered to drop the charges if Rahman changed his religion back to Islam, but the defendant refused.” The Muslim judge’s ruling is expected by mid-May.
It seems worth asking American authorities whether the U.S. would intervene to prevent the execution of an Afghan whose only crime was converting to Christianity.
European Muslims demand toleration and respect and accommodation for their laws, garb, Halal (Islamic “Kosher”) dietary rules, customs, and faith. But as the world has seen in recent months, radical Muslims have no respect for Western traditions such as press freedom. Cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad set off riots, killings and death threats against European journalists.
(Oddly, as this columnist uniquely noted, the tradition prohibiting depictions of the Prophet began with Muhammad himself, who gave such guidance to avoid becoming an object of idolatry by misguided Muslims tempted to worship him instead of Allah. Logically, therefore, a devout Muslim should object to any positive depiction of Mohammad, but negative depictions of Mohammad, as in the European cartoons, pose no such danger of causing idol worship. It was the Islamists who fanatically objected to negative European cartoons of the Prophet who were practicing idolatry by turning Mohammad into an image too sacred to depict in any way.)
Islamic Shari’a is incompatible with Western traditions of tolerance. Too much of today’s Islam preaches “an eye for an eye” but not “live and let live.”
No wonder, then, that earlier this month the chairman of Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, responded to the Telegraph poll by urging the 40 percent of his nation’s Muslims who want part of the country ruled by Shari’a law to move elsewhere. “We have one set of laws” in Britain, said Phillips. “They are decided by one group of people, members of Parliament, and that’s the end of the story.” (In February Australia’s Federal Treasurer Peter Costello, said much the same, suggesting in a public speech that Shari’a advocates would feel more comfortable living in Saudi Arabia or Iran.)
Immigrant to Norway Iraqi Mullah Krekar, a former leader of the Kurdish guerrilla group Ansar-al-Islam, has told Norwegians that “our way of thinking…will prove more powerful than yours” and described Al Qaeda terror mastermind Osama bin Laden as “a good person.” This prompted Norway’s Minister of Labor and Social Inclusion Bjarne Hakon Hanssen to say he intended to deport Mullah Krekar back to Iraq in the near future. Selective deportation of such radical Islamist firebrands (such as those who inspired recent Muslim terrorism in London) across Europe could reduce immediate social tensions.
What Europe is doing in the meanwhile is preaching the need for press freedom and tolerance while preparing this June to prosecute, in Paris, famed Italian journalist Orianna Fallaci for daring to write a book, The Force of Reason, critical of the Muslim immigrant inundation of Europe. In today’s Europe free speech is stifled by laws that prohibit Political Incorrectness in a wide and arbitrary variety of ways.
And France, at the heart of Europe, is promoting trade barriers with a dogmatic zeal not seen since the frenzy of stone castle building in the dark ages. In the name of preserving national security, as Daniel Schwammenthal reported in the March 13 Wall Street Journal, France last winter declared 11 of its industrial sectors off limits to purchase by investors from other European nations; these sectors, noted Schwammenthal, range “from data security to (bizarrely) casinos.” What might become of France if its dice and roulette wheels became Dutch…or Russian?
France is also dragging its feet on agreements to allow European Union workers to move freely from one EU country to another. The French have phobias not only about Muslim peasant immigrants but also about what they call the “Polish plumber,” the skilled European workers who would move to Paris and undercut the high pay now pocketed by scarce French workers. The French incentive to work is dulled by an easy, lazy alternative: a fat welfare check.
If Europe can somehow buy time, then in theory it might be able to make a comeback. What it needs is cloning and fertility technology, moxie, imports of its old sturdier, healthier genetic material from the United States and Australia to restore its seminal vigor, and a renewal of faith. Europe was able to restore its lost population rather quickly after the Black Plague and spawned Baby Booms after two World Wars.
Political policies could facilitate this. When France was unable to recruit many settlers to its colony called New France, now known as Canada, it offered fat pensions to any married couple there that had six children. Quebec to this day retains the spirit of fecundity those pensions bred.
Last September French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin proposed accelerating cash benefits to encourage women to have a third child. This is yet another kind of slacker welfare, but at least it encourages the lazy to spend more time breeding and less watching television. De Villepin did not propose restricting these or other government breeder benefits to non-Muslims, although he could have made the argument that non-Muslim French are an endangered species meriting special help.
Europe has stopped rising Islamic tides before, in battle in southern France in 732 by the knights of Charles Martel, “The Hammer,” and twice at the gates of Vienna in 1529 and 1683 by holding off the Ottoman Turks. Spain even rolled back its Muslim occupiers with the Reconquista of 1492, and Greece, the cradle of Western democracy, won back its independence from Muslim rule in 1829.
In time Islam could collapse, as Communism did. More likely, this religion now living through its own dark 14th Century might flower into a Renaissance and follow the enlightened model of Ataturk’s Turkey. Modern Turkey is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a friend of Israel, and a candidate for European Union membership. Women had the right to vote in Ataturk’s Turkey before they did in England. Turkey could become the model for the future Islamic world, besting the medieval ideology of Islamism, narrow-mindedness, hate and violence preached by Osama bin Laden and his ilk.
A courageous European stand against that nest of Islamist vipers and their atomic eggs in Teheran would be a good place for Europe to demonstrate to itself and to the world that it has the will and skill to survive.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Mr. Ponte co-hosts a national radio talk show Monday through Friday 6-8 PM Eastern Time (3-5 PM Pacific Time) on the Genesis Communications Network. Internet Audio worldwide is at GCNlive .com. The show's live call-in number is 1-800-259-9231. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader's Digest.
http://www.FrontPageMag.com
March 28, 2006
The best genes spawned in Europe had the dynamism, like Europa herself, to cross the ocean. They settled and thrived in freer lands such as the United States and Australia. Others among Europe’s best offspring died patriotically in the mass carnage of 500 years of Europe’s religious and civil wars, leaving behind mostly dregs. As the lunatic poet Ezra Pound wrote in 1920 of the soldiers of World War I: “There died a myriad, / And of the best, among them, / For an old bitch gone in the teeth, / For a botched civilization….”
Europe’s botched civilization, perverted by socialism and lost faith, seems to have lost the will, the passion to sustain itself. If it continues to practice today’s multiculturalist leftism, Europe’s demographic doom will be sealed. Some harbingers:
* In Brussels, Belgium, the most popular name for baby boys is now Mohammad. Sustaining the population of a nation requires that on average each couple gives birth to 2.1 children. The average European couple now has fewer than 1.4 babies, compared to 3.6 babies born to the average Muslim immigrant couple in Europe. Across Western Europe 16 to 20 percent of babies are being born into Muslim families.
* In France at least 12 percent of the population is already Muslim, the fruits mostly of immigrants from former French colonies in North Africa. If present birth trends continue, by 2030 a quarter of France’s people will be Muslim, more than enough to determine who controls the national parliament and executive. As this columnist recently noted, the nuclear-armed French military is already 15 percent Muslim. Adjacent Switzerland is now 20 percent Muslim.
* The German newspaper Deutsche Welle days ago reported that Germany’s birth rate in 2005 fell to a level lower than at the end of World War II, to a “historic low,” more than fifty percent lower than those of France and Great Britain. But at a meeting this week in Berlin that brought together the interior ministers of six European nations, Germany’s leftwing Social Democrats continued to oppose the application of any test or standard that would restrict who could migrate into Germany.
The burgeoning Muslim population within Europe is not evenly spread. It is largely concentrated in and around big cities, whose local politicians feel its pressure acutely and often bend to that pressure. In the Netherlands the cities of Amsterdam and Rotterdam nearly have Muslim majorities now.
These Islamic enclaves are already taking on the character of conquered provinces that no longer belong to the European countries around them. As FrontPage Magazine recently quoted from the new book While Europe Slept by liberal American expatriate Bruce Bawer:
In France, a public official met with an imam at the edge of Roubaix’s Muslim district out of respect for his declaration of the neighborhood as Islamic territory to which she had no right of access. In Britain, imams have pressed the government to officially designate certain areas of Bradford as being under Muslim, not British, law. In Denmark, Muslim leaders have sought the same kind of control over parts of Copenhagen. And in Belgium, Muslims living in the Brussels neighborhood of Sint-Jans-Molenbeek already view it not as part of Belgium but as an area under Islamic jurisdiction in which Belgians are not welcome.
Europe has several potential choices in the face of a flood of immigrants and families within its borders who refuse to assimilate European values of mutual toleration and liberal social policies.
Europe’s cultural polarization vis-à-vis its Muslim underclass is being exacerbated by socialist policies that are producing stagnant economies and high unemployment. These fruits of Euro-socialism have also created a political tinderbox of Muslim frustration and, as we saw in recent days of protests in Paris, an angry refusal by many traditional Europeans to reform or relinquish their welfare state and job security benefits. This climate discourages investors and pits new and traditional Europeans against one another.
If Europe continues as it is now, the rising Muslim tide will, one at a time, transform the members of the European Union into Islamic Republics under Islamic Shari’a law as Muslims become the majority population.
Already the wealth of traditional Europeans is being bled away and transferred to new Muslim immigrants and their children. One mechanism for this is the European welfare state. In Denmark, observed Bawer, only five percent of the population is Muslim, but this minority demands and receives 40 percent of the Danish government’s total welfare payments and other taxpayer-subsidized social benefits. Even the liberal New York Times Magazine in February reported on the social impact of this growing Islamic drain on the resources of European welfare states such as Sweden and Denmark.
Another method used to transfer wealth from Europeans to Eurabian Muslims is theft. Some radical Mullahs have told their European congregations that Islamic Shari’a law justifies shoplifting and other forms of stealing from European merchants and companies as a way to make non-Muslims pay the discriminatory jizya tax that is extracted from non-Muslim citizens in Muslim countries.
And in Europe’s growing Islamic neighborhoods, where police are often afraid to go, European law is being supplanted by Shari’a. European women venturing into or near such enclaves have been assaulted and, in some cases, raped by gangs of macho Islamic males for violating Muslim dress codes and failing to exhibit the subservient status some Islamic subcultures require of females.
Forty percent of Muslims living in Great Britain want Islamic Shari’a law introduced into parts of that country, according to a poll reported last month by the London Sunday Telegraph.
Shari’a differs dramatically from modern Western notions of law and society. Shari’a has no separation of church and state; to the contrary, under Shari’a the Koran is the ultimate law book and constitution, and the Islamic Mullah is the magistrate who punishes violators of this law. Under Shari’a, as practiced in much of the Islamic world, equality exists only among Muslim men; women are inferior to men, and Jews and Christians are inferior to all Muslims. Risk-taking and usury, i.e., money-lending for profit, are forbidden, so we would kiss capitalism goodbye.
Religious freedom is non-existent under Shari’a. A Christian or a Jew is permitted to convert to Islam, but the penalty for any Muslim converting to a different faith is death. In American-liberated Afghanistan a 41-year-old former Muslim, Abdul Rahman, is on trial in Kabul for the crime of converting to Christianity. The prosecutor in the case, Abdul Wasi, has asked for a death penalty, as Shari’a requires. Wasi, reported Associated Press, said that he “had offered to drop the charges if Rahman changed his religion back to Islam, but the defendant refused.” The Muslim judge’s ruling is expected by mid-May.
It seems worth asking American authorities whether the U.S. would intervene to prevent the execution of an Afghan whose only crime was converting to Christianity.
European Muslims demand toleration and respect and accommodation for their laws, garb, Halal (Islamic “Kosher”) dietary rules, customs, and faith. But as the world has seen in recent months, radical Muslims have no respect for Western traditions such as press freedom. Cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad set off riots, killings and death threats against European journalists.
(Oddly, as this columnist uniquely noted, the tradition prohibiting depictions of the Prophet began with Muhammad himself, who gave such guidance to avoid becoming an object of idolatry by misguided Muslims tempted to worship him instead of Allah. Logically, therefore, a devout Muslim should object to any positive depiction of Mohammad, but negative depictions of Mohammad, as in the European cartoons, pose no such danger of causing idol worship. It was the Islamists who fanatically objected to negative European cartoons of the Prophet who were practicing idolatry by turning Mohammad into an image too sacred to depict in any way.)
Islamic Shari’a is incompatible with Western traditions of tolerance. Too much of today’s Islam preaches “an eye for an eye” but not “live and let live.”
No wonder, then, that earlier this month the chairman of Britain’s Commission for Racial Equality, Trevor Phillips, responded to the Telegraph poll by urging the 40 percent of his nation’s Muslims who want part of the country ruled by Shari’a law to move elsewhere. “We have one set of laws” in Britain, said Phillips. “They are decided by one group of people, members of Parliament, and that’s the end of the story.” (In February Australia’s Federal Treasurer Peter Costello, said much the same, suggesting in a public speech that Shari’a advocates would feel more comfortable living in Saudi Arabia or Iran.)
Immigrant to Norway Iraqi Mullah Krekar, a former leader of the Kurdish guerrilla group Ansar-al-Islam, has told Norwegians that “our way of thinking…will prove more powerful than yours” and described Al Qaeda terror mastermind Osama bin Laden as “a good person.” This prompted Norway’s Minister of Labor and Social Inclusion Bjarne Hakon Hanssen to say he intended to deport Mullah Krekar back to Iraq in the near future. Selective deportation of such radical Islamist firebrands (such as those who inspired recent Muslim terrorism in London) across Europe could reduce immediate social tensions.
What Europe is doing in the meanwhile is preaching the need for press freedom and tolerance while preparing this June to prosecute, in Paris, famed Italian journalist Orianna Fallaci for daring to write a book, The Force of Reason, critical of the Muslim immigrant inundation of Europe. In today’s Europe free speech is stifled by laws that prohibit Political Incorrectness in a wide and arbitrary variety of ways.
And France, at the heart of Europe, is promoting trade barriers with a dogmatic zeal not seen since the frenzy of stone castle building in the dark ages. In the name of preserving national security, as Daniel Schwammenthal reported in the March 13 Wall Street Journal, France last winter declared 11 of its industrial sectors off limits to purchase by investors from other European nations; these sectors, noted Schwammenthal, range “from data security to (bizarrely) casinos.” What might become of France if its dice and roulette wheels became Dutch…or Russian?
France is also dragging its feet on agreements to allow European Union workers to move freely from one EU country to another. The French have phobias not only about Muslim peasant immigrants but also about what they call the “Polish plumber,” the skilled European workers who would move to Paris and undercut the high pay now pocketed by scarce French workers. The French incentive to work is dulled by an easy, lazy alternative: a fat welfare check.
If Europe can somehow buy time, then in theory it might be able to make a comeback. What it needs is cloning and fertility technology, moxie, imports of its old sturdier, healthier genetic material from the United States and Australia to restore its seminal vigor, and a renewal of faith. Europe was able to restore its lost population rather quickly after the Black Plague and spawned Baby Booms after two World Wars.
Political policies could facilitate this. When France was unable to recruit many settlers to its colony called New France, now known as Canada, it offered fat pensions to any married couple there that had six children. Quebec to this day retains the spirit of fecundity those pensions bred.
Last September French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin proposed accelerating cash benefits to encourage women to have a third child. This is yet another kind of slacker welfare, but at least it encourages the lazy to spend more time breeding and less watching television. De Villepin did not propose restricting these or other government breeder benefits to non-Muslims, although he could have made the argument that non-Muslim French are an endangered species meriting special help.
Europe has stopped rising Islamic tides before, in battle in southern France in 732 by the knights of Charles Martel, “The Hammer,” and twice at the gates of Vienna in 1529 and 1683 by holding off the Ottoman Turks. Spain even rolled back its Muslim occupiers with the Reconquista of 1492, and Greece, the cradle of Western democracy, won back its independence from Muslim rule in 1829.
In time Islam could collapse, as Communism did. More likely, this religion now living through its own dark 14th Century might flower into a Renaissance and follow the enlightened model of Ataturk’s Turkey. Modern Turkey is a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a friend of Israel, and a candidate for European Union membership. Women had the right to vote in Ataturk’s Turkey before they did in England. Turkey could become the model for the future Islamic world, besting the medieval ideology of Islamism, narrow-mindedness, hate and violence preached by Osama bin Laden and his ilk.
A courageous European stand against that nest of Islamist vipers and their atomic eggs in Teheran would be a good place for Europe to demonstrate to itself and to the world that it has the will and skill to survive.
Click Here to support Frontpagemag.com.
Mr. Ponte co-hosts a national radio talk show Monday through Friday 6-8 PM Eastern Time (3-5 PM Pacific Time) on the Genesis Communications Network. Internet Audio worldwide is at GCNlive .com. The show's live call-in number is 1-800-259-9231. A professional speaker, he is a former Roving Editor for Reader's Digest.
Thomas Sowell: Guests or Gate Crashers?
March 28, 2006
Thomas Sowell
Immigration is yet another issue which we seem unable to discuss rationally -- in part because words have been twisted beyond recognition in political rhetoric.
We can't even call illegal immigrants "illegal immigrants." The politically correct evasion is "undocumented workers."
Do American citizens go around carrying documents with them when they work or apply for work? Most Americans are undocumented workers but they are not illegal immigrants. There is a difference.
The Bush administration is pushing a program to legalize "guest workers." But what is a guest? Someone you have invited. People who force their way into your home without your permission are called gate crashers.
If truth-in-packaging laws applied to politics, the Bush guest worker program would have to be called a "gate-crasher worker" program. The President's proposal would solve the problem of illegal immigration by legalizing it after the fact.
We could solve the problem of all illegal activity anywhere by legalizing it. Why use this approach only with immigration? Why should any of us pay a speeding ticket if immigration scofflaws are legalized after the fact for committing a federal crime?
Most of the arguments for not enforcing our immigration laws are exercises in frivolous rhetoric and slippery sophistry, rather than serious arguments that will stand up under scrutiny.
How often have we heard that illegal immigrants "take jobs that Americans will not do"? What is missing in this argument is what is crucial in any economic argument: price.
Americans will not take many jobs at their current pay levels -- and those pay levels will not rise so long as poverty-stricken immigrants are willing to take those jobs.
If Mexican journalists were flooding into the United States and taking jobs as reporters and editors at half the pay being earned by American reporters and editors, maybe people in the media would understand why the argument about "taking jobs that Americans don't want" is such nonsense.
Another variation on the same theme is that we "need" the millions of illegal aliens already in the United States. "Need" is another word that blithely ignores prices.
If jet planes were on sale for a thousand dollars each, I would probably "need" a couple of them -- an extra one to fly when the first one needed repair or maintenance. But since these planes cost millions of dollars, I don't even "need" one.
There is no fixed amount of "need," independently of prices, whether with planes or workers.
None of the rhetoric and sophistry that we hear about immigration deals with the plain and ugly reality: Politicians are afraid of losing the Hispanic vote and businesses want cheap labor.
What millions of other Americans want has been brushed aside, as if they don't count, and they have been soothed with pious words. But now the voters are getting fed up, which is why there are immigration bills in Congress.
The old inevitability ploy is often trotted out in immigration debates: It is not possible to either keep out illegal immigrants or to expel the ones already here.
If you mean stopping every single illegal immigrant from getting in or expelling every single illegal immigrant who is already here, that may well be true. But does the fact that we cannot prevent every single murder cause us to stop enforcing the laws against murder?
Since existing immigration laws are not being enforced, how can anyone say that it would not do any good to try? People who get caught illegally crossing the border into the United States pay no penalty whatever. They are sent back home and can try again.
What if bank robbers who were caught were simply told to give the money back and not do it again? What if murderers who were caught were turned loose and warned not to kill again? Would that be proof that it is futile to take action, when no action was taken?
Let's hope the immigration bills before Congress can at least get an honest debate, instead of the word games we have been hearing for too long.
Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate
Thomas Sowell
Immigration is yet another issue which we seem unable to discuss rationally -- in part because words have been twisted beyond recognition in political rhetoric.
We can't even call illegal immigrants "illegal immigrants." The politically correct evasion is "undocumented workers."
Do American citizens go around carrying documents with them when they work or apply for work? Most Americans are undocumented workers but they are not illegal immigrants. There is a difference.
The Bush administration is pushing a program to legalize "guest workers." But what is a guest? Someone you have invited. People who force their way into your home without your permission are called gate crashers.
If truth-in-packaging laws applied to politics, the Bush guest worker program would have to be called a "gate-crasher worker" program. The President's proposal would solve the problem of illegal immigration by legalizing it after the fact.
We could solve the problem of all illegal activity anywhere by legalizing it. Why use this approach only with immigration? Why should any of us pay a speeding ticket if immigration scofflaws are legalized after the fact for committing a federal crime?
Most of the arguments for not enforcing our immigration laws are exercises in frivolous rhetoric and slippery sophistry, rather than serious arguments that will stand up under scrutiny.
How often have we heard that illegal immigrants "take jobs that Americans will not do"? What is missing in this argument is what is crucial in any economic argument: price.
Americans will not take many jobs at their current pay levels -- and those pay levels will not rise so long as poverty-stricken immigrants are willing to take those jobs.
If Mexican journalists were flooding into the United States and taking jobs as reporters and editors at half the pay being earned by American reporters and editors, maybe people in the media would understand why the argument about "taking jobs that Americans don't want" is such nonsense.
Another variation on the same theme is that we "need" the millions of illegal aliens already in the United States. "Need" is another word that blithely ignores prices.
If jet planes were on sale for a thousand dollars each, I would probably "need" a couple of them -- an extra one to fly when the first one needed repair or maintenance. But since these planes cost millions of dollars, I don't even "need" one.
There is no fixed amount of "need," independently of prices, whether with planes or workers.
None of the rhetoric and sophistry that we hear about immigration deals with the plain and ugly reality: Politicians are afraid of losing the Hispanic vote and businesses want cheap labor.
What millions of other Americans want has been brushed aside, as if they don't count, and they have been soothed with pious words. But now the voters are getting fed up, which is why there are immigration bills in Congress.
The old inevitability ploy is often trotted out in immigration debates: It is not possible to either keep out illegal immigrants or to expel the ones already here.
If you mean stopping every single illegal immigrant from getting in or expelling every single illegal immigrant who is already here, that may well be true. But does the fact that we cannot prevent every single murder cause us to stop enforcing the laws against murder?
Since existing immigration laws are not being enforced, how can anyone say that it would not do any good to try? People who get caught illegally crossing the border into the United States pay no penalty whatever. They are sent back home and can try again.
What if bank robbers who were caught were simply told to give the money back and not do it again? What if murderers who were caught were turned loose and warned not to kill again? Would that be proof that it is futile to take action, when no action was taken?
Let's hope the immigration bills before Congress can at least get an honest debate, instead of the word games we have been hearing for too long.
Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate
Monday, March 27, 2006
Durham Herald-Sun: A Terrorist's Letter
Herald Sun
March 27, 2006
This is a transcript of the letter Mohammed Taheri-Azar left in his apartment for police to find after he drove into nine people with an SUV in The Pit at UNC on March 3:
In the name of Allah, the merciful, the compassionate.
To whom it may concern:
I am writing this letter to inform you of my reasons for premeditating and attempting to murder citizens and residents of the United States of America on Friday, March 3, 2006 in the city of Chapel Hill, North Carolina by running them over with my automobile and stabbing them with a knife if the opportunities are presented to me by Allah.
I did intend to use a handgun to murder the citizens and residents of Chapel Hill, North Carolina but the process of receiving a permit for a handgun in this city is highly restricted and out of my reach at the present, most likely due to my foreign nationality.
I am a servant of Allah. I am 22 years of age and I was born in Tehran, Iran. My father, mother and older sister immigrated to the United States in 1985 when I was two years of age and I've lived in the United States ever since.
I attended elementary, middle and high school in North Carolina and I was accepted into the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I began my college career in August 2001 and graduated in December 2005 with a bachelor's degree in psychology and philosophy with Allah's help.
I do not wish to pursue my career as a student any further because I have no desire to amass the impermanent and temporary fame and material wealth this world has to offer. However I made the decision to continue my studies and to graduate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill so that the world will know that Allah's servants are very intelligent.
Due to the killing of believing men and women under the direction of the United States government, I have decided to take advantage of my presence on United States soil on Friday, March 3, 2006 to take the lives of as many Americans and American sympathizers as I can in order to punish the United States for their immoral actions around the world.
In the Qur'an, Allah states that the believing men and women have permission to murder anyone responsible for the killing of other believing men and women. I know that the Qur'an is a legitimate and authoritative holy scripture since it is completely validated by modern science and also mathematically encoded with the number 19 beyond human ability. After extensive contemplation and reflection, I have made the decision to exercise the right of violent retaliation that Allah has given me to the fullest extent to which I am capable at present.
I have chosen the particular location on the University campus as my target since I know there is a high likelihood that I will kill several people before being killed myself or jailed and sent to prison if Allah wills. Allah's commandments are never to be questioned and all of Allah's commandments must be obeyed. Those who violate Allah's commandments and purposefully follow human fabrication and falsehood as their religion will burn in fire for eternity in accordance with Allah's will.
Sincerely yours,
Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar
March 27, 2006
This is a transcript of the letter Mohammed Taheri-Azar left in his apartment for police to find after he drove into nine people with an SUV in The Pit at UNC on March 3:
In the name of Allah, the merciful, the compassionate.
To whom it may concern:
I am writing this letter to inform you of my reasons for premeditating and attempting to murder citizens and residents of the United States of America on Friday, March 3, 2006 in the city of Chapel Hill, North Carolina by running them over with my automobile and stabbing them with a knife if the opportunities are presented to me by Allah.
I did intend to use a handgun to murder the citizens and residents of Chapel Hill, North Carolina but the process of receiving a permit for a handgun in this city is highly restricted and out of my reach at the present, most likely due to my foreign nationality.
I am a servant of Allah. I am 22 years of age and I was born in Tehran, Iran. My father, mother and older sister immigrated to the United States in 1985 when I was two years of age and I've lived in the United States ever since.
I attended elementary, middle and high school in North Carolina and I was accepted into the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I began my college career in August 2001 and graduated in December 2005 with a bachelor's degree in psychology and philosophy with Allah's help.
I do not wish to pursue my career as a student any further because I have no desire to amass the impermanent and temporary fame and material wealth this world has to offer. However I made the decision to continue my studies and to graduate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill so that the world will know that Allah's servants are very intelligent.
Due to the killing of believing men and women under the direction of the United States government, I have decided to take advantage of my presence on United States soil on Friday, March 3, 2006 to take the lives of as many Americans and American sympathizers as I can in order to punish the United States for their immoral actions around the world.
In the Qur'an, Allah states that the believing men and women have permission to murder anyone responsible for the killing of other believing men and women. I know that the Qur'an is a legitimate and authoritative holy scripture since it is completely validated by modern science and also mathematically encoded with the number 19 beyond human ability. After extensive contemplation and reflection, I have made the decision to exercise the right of violent retaliation that Allah has given me to the fullest extent to which I am capable at present.
I have chosen the particular location on the University campus as my target since I know there is a high likelihood that I will kill several people before being killed myself or jailed and sent to prison if Allah wills. Allah's commandments are never to be questioned and all of Allah's commandments must be obeyed. Those who violate Allah's commandments and purposefully follow human fabrication and falsehood as their religion will burn in fire for eternity in accordance with Allah's will.
Sincerely yours,
Mohammed Reza Taheri-Azar
Mark Steyn: Facing Down a Culture
Facing down a culture where they talk like crazies
March 26, 2006
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
Fate conspires to remind us what this war is really about: civilizational confidence. And so history repeats itself: first the farce of the Danish cartoons, and now the tragedy -- a man on trial for his life in post-Taliban Afghanistan because he has committed the crime of converting to Christianity.
The cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad were deeply offensive to Muslims, and so thousands protested around the world in the usual restrained manner: rioting, torching, killing, etc.
The impending execution of Abdul Rahman for embracing Christianity is, of course, offensive to Westerners, and so around the world we reacted equally violently by issuing blood-curdling threats like that made by State Department spokesman Sean McCormack: "Freedom of worship is an important element of any democracy," he said. "And these are issues as Afghan democracy matures that they are going to have to deal with increasingly."
The immediate problem for Rahman is whether he'll get the chance to "mature" along with Afghan democracy. The president, the Canadian prime minister and the Australian prime minister have all made statements of concern about his fate, and it seems clear that Afghanistan's dapper leader Hamid Karzai would like to resolve this issue before his fledgling democracy gets a reputation as just another barbarous Islamist sewer state. There's talk of various artful compromises, such as Rahman being declared unfit to stand trial by reason of insanity on the grounds that (I'm no Islamic jurist so I'm paraphrasing here) anyone who converts from Islam to Christianity must ipso facto be out of his tree.
On the other hand, this "moderate" compromise solution is being rejected by leading theologians. Let this guy Rahman cop an insanity plea and there goes the neighborhood. "We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die," says Abdul Raoulf of the nation's principal Muslim body, the Afghan Ulama Council. "Cut off his head! We will call on the people to pull him into pieces so there's nothing left." Needless to say, Imam Raoulf is one of Afghanistan's leading "moderate" clerics.
For what it's worth, I'm with the Afghan Ulama Council in objecting to the insanity defense. It's not enough for Rahman to get off on a technicality. Afghanistan is supposed to be "the good war," the one even the French supported, albeit notionally and mostly retrospectively. Karzai is kept alive by a bodyguard of foreigners. The fragile Afghan state is protected by American, British, Canadian, Australian, Italian, German and other troops, hundreds of whom have died. You cannot ask Americans or Britons to expend blood and treasure to build a society in which a man can be executed for his choice of religion. You cannot tell a serving member of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry in Kandahar that he, as a Christian, must sacrifice his life to create a Muslim state in which his faith is a capital offense.
As always, we come back to the words of Osama bin Laden: ''When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.'' That's really the only issue: the Islamists know our side has tanks and planes, but they have will and faith, and they reckon in a long struggle that's the better bet. Most prominent Western leaders sound way too eager to climb into the weak-horse suit and audition to play the rear end. Consider, for example, the words of the Prince of Wales, speaking a few days ago at al-Azhar University in Cairo. This is "the world's oldest university," though what they learn there makes the average Ivy League nuthouse look like a beacon of sanity. Anyway, this is what His Royal Highness had to say to 800 Islamic "scholars":
"The recent ghastly strife and anger over the Danish cartoons shows the danger that comes of our failure to listen and to respect what is precious and sacred to others. In my view, the true mark of a civilized society is the respect it pays to minorities and to strangers."
That's correct. But the reality is our society pays enormous respect to minorities -- President Bush holds a monthlong Ramadan-a-ding-dong at the White House every year; the immediate reaction to the slaughter of 9/11 by the president, the prince, the prime ministers of Britain, Canada and everywhere else was to visit a mosque to demonstrate their great respect for Islam. One party to this dispute is respectful to a fault: after all, to describe the violence perpetrated by Muslims over the Danish cartoons as the "recent ghastly strife" barely passes muster as effete Brit toff understatement.
Unfortunately, what's "precious and sacred" to Islam is its institutional contempt for others. In his book Islam And The West, Bernard Lewis writes, "The primary duty of the Muslim as set forth not once but many times in the Koran is 'to command good and forbid evil.' It is not enough to do good and refrain from evil as a personal choice. It is incumbent upon Muslims also to command and forbid."
Or as the shrewd Canadian columnist David Warren put it: "We take it for granted that it is wrong to kill someone for his religious beliefs. Whereas Islam holds it is wrong not to kill him." In that sense, those blood-curdling imams are right, and Karzai's attempts to finesse the issue are, sharia-wise, wrong.
I can understand why the president and the secretary of state would rather deal with this through back-channels, private assurances from their Afghan counterparts, etc. But the public rhetoric is critical, too. At some point we have to face down a culture in which not only the mob in the street but the highest judges and academics talk like crazies.
Rahman embodies the question at the heart of this struggle: If Islam is a religion one can only convert to not from, then in the long run it is a threat to every free person on the planet. What can we do? Should governments with troops in Afghanistan pass joint emergency legislation conferring their citizenship on this poor man and declaring him, as much as Karzai, under their protection?
In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of "suttee" -- the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural:
''You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows.You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."
India today is better off without suttee. If we shrink from the logic of that, then in Afghanistan and many places far closer to home the implications are, as the Prince of Wales would say, "ghastly."
©Mark Steyn 2006
March 26, 2006
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
Fate conspires to remind us what this war is really about: civilizational confidence. And so history repeats itself: first the farce of the Danish cartoons, and now the tragedy -- a man on trial for his life in post-Taliban Afghanistan because he has committed the crime of converting to Christianity.
The cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad were deeply offensive to Muslims, and so thousands protested around the world in the usual restrained manner: rioting, torching, killing, etc.
The impending execution of Abdul Rahman for embracing Christianity is, of course, offensive to Westerners, and so around the world we reacted equally violently by issuing blood-curdling threats like that made by State Department spokesman Sean McCormack: "Freedom of worship is an important element of any democracy," he said. "And these are issues as Afghan democracy matures that they are going to have to deal with increasingly."
The immediate problem for Rahman is whether he'll get the chance to "mature" along with Afghan democracy. The president, the Canadian prime minister and the Australian prime minister have all made statements of concern about his fate, and it seems clear that Afghanistan's dapper leader Hamid Karzai would like to resolve this issue before his fledgling democracy gets a reputation as just another barbarous Islamist sewer state. There's talk of various artful compromises, such as Rahman being declared unfit to stand trial by reason of insanity on the grounds that (I'm no Islamic jurist so I'm paraphrasing here) anyone who converts from Islam to Christianity must ipso facto be out of his tree.
On the other hand, this "moderate" compromise solution is being rejected by leading theologians. Let this guy Rahman cop an insanity plea and there goes the neighborhood. "We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die," says Abdul Raoulf of the nation's principal Muslim body, the Afghan Ulama Council. "Cut off his head! We will call on the people to pull him into pieces so there's nothing left." Needless to say, Imam Raoulf is one of Afghanistan's leading "moderate" clerics.
For what it's worth, I'm with the Afghan Ulama Council in objecting to the insanity defense. It's not enough for Rahman to get off on a technicality. Afghanistan is supposed to be "the good war," the one even the French supported, albeit notionally and mostly retrospectively. Karzai is kept alive by a bodyguard of foreigners. The fragile Afghan state is protected by American, British, Canadian, Australian, Italian, German and other troops, hundreds of whom have died. You cannot ask Americans or Britons to expend blood and treasure to build a society in which a man can be executed for his choice of religion. You cannot tell a serving member of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry in Kandahar that he, as a Christian, must sacrifice his life to create a Muslim state in which his faith is a capital offense.
As always, we come back to the words of Osama bin Laden: ''When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.'' That's really the only issue: the Islamists know our side has tanks and planes, but they have will and faith, and they reckon in a long struggle that's the better bet. Most prominent Western leaders sound way too eager to climb into the weak-horse suit and audition to play the rear end. Consider, for example, the words of the Prince of Wales, speaking a few days ago at al-Azhar University in Cairo. This is "the world's oldest university," though what they learn there makes the average Ivy League nuthouse look like a beacon of sanity. Anyway, this is what His Royal Highness had to say to 800 Islamic "scholars":
"The recent ghastly strife and anger over the Danish cartoons shows the danger that comes of our failure to listen and to respect what is precious and sacred to others. In my view, the true mark of a civilized society is the respect it pays to minorities and to strangers."
That's correct. But the reality is our society pays enormous respect to minorities -- President Bush holds a monthlong Ramadan-a-ding-dong at the White House every year; the immediate reaction to the slaughter of 9/11 by the president, the prince, the prime ministers of Britain, Canada and everywhere else was to visit a mosque to demonstrate their great respect for Islam. One party to this dispute is respectful to a fault: after all, to describe the violence perpetrated by Muslims over the Danish cartoons as the "recent ghastly strife" barely passes muster as effete Brit toff understatement.
Unfortunately, what's "precious and sacred" to Islam is its institutional contempt for others. In his book Islam And The West, Bernard Lewis writes, "The primary duty of the Muslim as set forth not once but many times in the Koran is 'to command good and forbid evil.' It is not enough to do good and refrain from evil as a personal choice. It is incumbent upon Muslims also to command and forbid."
Or as the shrewd Canadian columnist David Warren put it: "We take it for granted that it is wrong to kill someone for his religious beliefs. Whereas Islam holds it is wrong not to kill him." In that sense, those blood-curdling imams are right, and Karzai's attempts to finesse the issue are, sharia-wise, wrong.
I can understand why the president and the secretary of state would rather deal with this through back-channels, private assurances from their Afghan counterparts, etc. But the public rhetoric is critical, too. At some point we have to face down a culture in which not only the mob in the street but the highest judges and academics talk like crazies.
Rahman embodies the question at the heart of this struggle: If Islam is a religion one can only convert to not from, then in the long run it is a threat to every free person on the planet. What can we do? Should governments with troops in Afghanistan pass joint emergency legislation conferring their citizenship on this poor man and declaring him, as much as Karzai, under their protection?
In a more culturally confident age, the British in India were faced with the practice of "suttee" -- the tradition of burning widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. General Sir Charles Napier was impeccably multicultural:
''You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: When men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows.You may follow your custom. And then we will follow ours."
India today is better off without suttee. If we shrink from the logic of that, then in Afghanistan and many places far closer to home the implications are, as the Prince of Wales would say, "ghastly."
©Mark Steyn 2006
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)