Springsteen makes surprise appearance at guitar fest
Monday, January 16, 2006
BY JAY LUSTIG
Newark Star-Ledger Staff
NEW YORK -- No one has ever sounded more alone than Bruce Springsteen did on his 1982 "Nebraska" album, which was dominated by bleak, minimally arranged ballads. "Deliver me from nowhere," he sang, and that's precisely where it sounded like he was.
Saturday night at the World Financial Center Winter Garden, a community of musicians joined Springsteen in that nowhere. The free "Nebraska Project" concert, which kicked off the 2006 New York Guitar Festival, featured covers of "Nebraska" songs by rock, folk, country and blues artists, as well as a surprise appearance by Springsteen himself.
The Boss waited until the end of the show to make his entrance, and led the ensemble through the encore, a rousing cover of Woody Guthrie's "Oklahoma Hills." (Guthrie was a huge influence on "Nebraska.")
About 20 musicians joined Springsteen, who played acoustic guitar and sang lead on two verses, reading the words off a piece of paper. Appropriately enough for a guitar festival, there were plenty of the six-stringed instruments onstage. But this was probably the first version of "Oklahoma Hills" to also feature a tuba (played by George Rush, who had previously backed singer-guitarists Dan Zanes and Vernon Reid on "State Trooper") and a boisterous trumpet solo (by Rich Armstrong, who had played the instrument on Michelle Shocked's cover of the "Nebraska" title track).
The concert featured the "Nebraska" songs in the album's original running order. There were also some instrumental interludes not related to "Nebraska," and covers of two other Springsteen songs: "Born in the USA" (which had been considered for "Nebraska," but became the title track of his next album) and "I'm On Fire."
Jen Chapin's "Born in the USA" was arguably the concert's biggest revelation. It was a guitar-free version, featuring just her voice and standup bass playing by her husband, Stephan Crump. Her grim, focused singing brought the song's tragic lyrics into sharp focus, and Crump's jazzy bass playing was absorbing in its own right.
The Shocked/Armstrong "Nebraska" was also a highlight. Armstrong had plenty of room to solo and added a yearning flavor, somewhat reminiscent of another Springsteen song, "Meeting Across the River."
Marc Anthony Thompson (a k a Chocolate Genius Inc.) slowed down "Johnny 99," making it sound unprecedentedly sad and dreamlike. Kevin Kinney (of Drivin' N' Cryin') and Lenny Kaye (of Patti Smith's band) added an upbeat country-gospel coda to "Reason to Believe."
Mark Eitzel's rich, resonant voice fit "My Father's House" perfectly. Using loops, guitarist Gary Lucas created an extravagantly blaring wall of sound during one of the instrumental interludes.
Less successfully, Martha Wainwright brought an emotionally raw quality to "Highway Patrolman" that didn't fit the song's stoic lyrics, and the spooky "State Trooper" didn't benefit from the loose funk arrangement Zanes and Reid gave it.
Between numbers, the show's MC John Platt -- a disc jockey on radio station WFUV (90.7 FM) -- discussed the making of the "Nebraska" album and asked the artists to talk about "Nebraska," and their upcoming projects.
At times, these segments were jarringly out of place in a show full of such uncompromising music. "What is the name of your forthcoming album, and when should we expect it?," Platt asked Chapin, after her masterful "Born in the USA." Eitzel's short answers made it clear he had no interest in cooperating.
New York Guitar Festival shows take place at various venues through Feb. 8. For information, visit www.newyorkguitarfestival.org.
Friday, January 20, 2006
Appreciation: Wilson Pickett
Wilson Pickett, 64, Soul Singer of Great Passion, Dies
By JEFF LEEDS
The New York Times
January 20, 2006
Wilson Pickett, the soul music pioneer whose insistent wail turned songs like "In the Midnight Hour" into hits, died yesterday in Virginia. He was 64.
The cause was a heart attack, Margo Lewis, his manager, said. She added that Mr. Pickett had spent the twilight of his career playing dozens of concert dates a year, but had finally started an extended hiatus last year as his health began to worsen.
Still, Mr. Pickett, who lived in Ashburn, Va., had enjoyed a series of accolades as he approached retirement. His first album in more than a decade - 1999's "It's Harder Now" - was honored with a Grammy nomination for best traditional rhythm and blues vocal performance. In 2000, he picked up three W. C. Handy Awards from the Blues Foundation, including one for comeback album of the year.
At the close of 2004, however, "we sort just said, 'Let's take a year off,' and eased him out of the responsibility of having to think about gigging," Ms. Lewis said. "It wasn't necessary for him financially."
Mr. Pickett had long since cemented his legacy; his shift from gospel music to rhythm and blues and soul led to a string of 1960's classics, including "Mustang Sally," "Land of 1,000 Dances" and "634-5789."
Born in Prattville, Ala., Mr. Pickett was one of 11 children; he told interviewers that he had suffered an abusive childhood. As a teenager he moved to Detroit, where he formed a gospel band, the Violinaires, that performed in local churches.
But his chance at pop fame emerged in 1961, when he was invited to join the Falcons, an R & B act that had already scored a Top 20 hit, "You're So Fine."
While the Falcons enjoyed modest success, Mr. Pickett struck out on his own, recording the song "If You Need Me." His performance hit the market at roughly the same time the soul singer Solomon Burke released his own version. Still, both treatments sold well, and Mr. Pickett soon had a contract with Atlantic Records.
He quickly cranked out a series of hits, including one of his signature songs, "In the Midnight Hour." Most of his songs were recorded in either Memphis or Muscle Shoals, Ala., which at the time were the hotbeds of soul recording activity in the South. His sidemen included Southern musicians like the guitarist Steve Cropper (who co-wrote "Midnight Hour" and other songs with Mr. Pickett) and, later, the guitarist Duane Allman of the Allman Brothers.
He soon found himself with the nickname "Wicked Pickett" - which has been described as a reference both to his screaming delivery and to his offstage behavior.
He continued to record songs that would become part of the soul canon, including "Funky Broadway" and "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love." He also earned a reputation as one of music's most compelling live performers, delivering stage shows in which he mixed gospel-tinged solemnity with funk stylings that evoked James Brown.
Through the 1970's, Mr. Pickett reached beyond his own repertory, covering songs by Randy Newman ("Momma Told Me Not to Come"), Steppenwolf ("Born to Be Wild"), the Beatles ("Hey Jude") and even the Archies ("Sugar Sugar").
Like other soul performers, he found his star beginning to wane with the advent of disco and other genres in the 1970's. He enjoyed a revival of sorts in 1991, when he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. His music also featured prominently in the film "The Commitments," about a start-up Irish band seeking its fortune in soul music.
But he also suffered from a string of run-ins with the law. In 1991, he was arrested and charged with shouting death threats while driving his car over the mayor's front lawn in Englewood, N.J., where he lived at the time. About a year later he was charged with assaulting his girlfriend. In 1993, Mr. Pickett was convicted of drunken driving, also in Englewood, and sentenced to a year in jail and five years' probation.
Reflecting on his career years after his chart performance had begun to slip, Mr. Pickett said he had once harbored mixed feelings about abandoning his gospel roots, fearing that "if you leave God and go to the devil, you're going to go to hell," as he told Rolling Stone. "You see, I wanted to sing gospel, but I wanted to make me some money, too."
Thursday, January 19, 2006
Ann Coulter: 'Chocolate City' Sprinkled With Nuts
January 19, 2006
http://www.anncoulter.com
So Hillary Clinton thinks the House of Representatives is being "run like a plantation." And, she added, "you know what I'm talking about."
First of all: Think about what a weird coincidence it is that Hillary would have made these remarks in a black church in Harlem on Martin Luther King Day. What are the odds? Did she even know it was a holiday? Bravely spoken, Senator. I haven't been this surprised since finding out Hollywood likes a movie about gay cowboys.
As Hillary explained, the House "has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard."
Yes, that's what was really missing on plantations during the slavery era: the opportunity to present a contrary view. Gosh, if only the slaves had been allowed to call for cloture votes. What a difference that would have made!
Madam Hillary also said the Bush administration "will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country." While Hillary is certainly qualified to comment on what the all-time worst presidential administrations were, having had firsthand experience in one of them, I think she might want to avoid the phrase "go down in history."
All I can say is: It's a good thing we had a stealth candidate like Harriet Miers to tiptoe past these powerful, scary Democrats! Sorry if that sounds churlish, but after Judge Samuel Alito's magnificent performance last week, I think Republicans can stop being afraid of their shadows when it comes to our judicial nominees.
Ever since Bork, Republicans have been terrified of nominating candidates with something in their background that might possibly suggest the nominee did not get down on his knees (another phrase Hillary should avoid) and thank God for Roe v. Wade every night. That's how we ended up with mediocrities like David Hackett Souter and Anthony "Third Choice" Kennedy on the Supreme Court.
Besides being stunningly qualified, the characteristics of the current stellar Supreme Court nominee include these:
His mother immediately told the press, "Of course he's against abortion."
He had expressed support for the Reagan administration's positions on abortion in a 1985 memo.
He refused to accede to the Democrats' endless browbeating and tell them that Roe was "settled law."
And the Democrats couldn't lay a finger on him. Sam Alito marks the final purging of the Bork experience.
All the Democrats could do was scream about his inactive membership -- back in the '70s -- in CAP, Concerned Alumni of Princeton, which had a magazine called Prospect, which once ran an article, apparently satirical, complaining about Princeton admitting co-eds. In my mind, the only potentially disqualifying aspect of Alito's record was that he wasn't a more active member of CAP, a group opposed to quotas, set-asides and the lowering of academic standards at Princeton.
Then this week, we found out Sen. Teddy Kennedy still belongs to an organization that doesn't admit women. Oh -- also, he killed a girl.
I'm fairly certain I've mentioned that before -- I don't recall, Mr. Chairman -- but I don't understand why everyone doesn't mention it every time Senator Drunkennedy has the audacity to talk about how "troubled" and "concerned" he is about this or that nominee. I bet Mary Jo was "troubled" and "concerned" about the senator leaving her in trapped in a car under water while he went back to the hotel to create an alibi.
It's not as if Democrats can say: OK, OK! The man paid a price! Let it go! He didn't pay a price. The Kopechne family paid a price. Kennedy weaved away scot-free.
But the Democrats are "troubled" about Sam Alito's membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton 30 years ago. If they're "concerned" about lifetime appointments for people with memberships in "troubling" organizations, wait until they hear about Bob Byrd! (Former Kleagle, Ku Klux Klan.)
They're a rotten bunch, these Democrats, and I'm happy to see an end to their reign of terror.
Now that Zell Miller is out of office, the only office-holding Democrat I like anymore is Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans. I had never heard of him until Hurricane Katrina, but after his "gaffe" this week, he's my favorite Democrat. I like a politician who casually spouts off insanely politically incorrect remarks in front of large audiences and TV cameras.
Nagin cheerfully told a crowd gathered for a Martin Luther King Day celebration that New Orleans would soon be "Chocolate City" again. I don't know who's supposed to be offended by that. I'm not. Perhaps all the white mayors who know they couldn't have said it. True, life's unfair. Oh well.
When it comes to choice-of-word crimes, I'd prefer detente to mutually assured destruction. Lead us off the chocolate plantation, Mayor Nagin!
Copyright 2005 Ann Coulter
http://www.anncoulter.com
So Hillary Clinton thinks the House of Representatives is being "run like a plantation." And, she added, "you know what I'm talking about."
First of all: Think about what a weird coincidence it is that Hillary would have made these remarks in a black church in Harlem on Martin Luther King Day. What are the odds? Did she even know it was a holiday? Bravely spoken, Senator. I haven't been this surprised since finding out Hollywood likes a movie about gay cowboys.
As Hillary explained, the House "has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard."
Yes, that's what was really missing on plantations during the slavery era: the opportunity to present a contrary view. Gosh, if only the slaves had been allowed to call for cloture votes. What a difference that would have made!
Madam Hillary also said the Bush administration "will go down in history as one of the worst that has ever governed our country." While Hillary is certainly qualified to comment on what the all-time worst presidential administrations were, having had firsthand experience in one of them, I think she might want to avoid the phrase "go down in history."
All I can say is: It's a good thing we had a stealth candidate like Harriet Miers to tiptoe past these powerful, scary Democrats! Sorry if that sounds churlish, but after Judge Samuel Alito's magnificent performance last week, I think Republicans can stop being afraid of their shadows when it comes to our judicial nominees.
Ever since Bork, Republicans have been terrified of nominating candidates with something in their background that might possibly suggest the nominee did not get down on his knees (another phrase Hillary should avoid) and thank God for Roe v. Wade every night. That's how we ended up with mediocrities like David Hackett Souter and Anthony "Third Choice" Kennedy on the Supreme Court.
Besides being stunningly qualified, the characteristics of the current stellar Supreme Court nominee include these:
His mother immediately told the press, "Of course he's against abortion."
He had expressed support for the Reagan administration's positions on abortion in a 1985 memo.
He refused to accede to the Democrats' endless browbeating and tell them that Roe was "settled law."
And the Democrats couldn't lay a finger on him. Sam Alito marks the final purging of the Bork experience.
All the Democrats could do was scream about his inactive membership -- back in the '70s -- in CAP, Concerned Alumni of Princeton, which had a magazine called Prospect, which once ran an article, apparently satirical, complaining about Princeton admitting co-eds. In my mind, the only potentially disqualifying aspect of Alito's record was that he wasn't a more active member of CAP, a group opposed to quotas, set-asides and the lowering of academic standards at Princeton.
Then this week, we found out Sen. Teddy Kennedy still belongs to an organization that doesn't admit women. Oh -- also, he killed a girl.
I'm fairly certain I've mentioned that before -- I don't recall, Mr. Chairman -- but I don't understand why everyone doesn't mention it every time Senator Drunkennedy has the audacity to talk about how "troubled" and "concerned" he is about this or that nominee. I bet Mary Jo was "troubled" and "concerned" about the senator leaving her in trapped in a car under water while he went back to the hotel to create an alibi.
It's not as if Democrats can say: OK, OK! The man paid a price! Let it go! He didn't pay a price. The Kopechne family paid a price. Kennedy weaved away scot-free.
But the Democrats are "troubled" about Sam Alito's membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton 30 years ago. If they're "concerned" about lifetime appointments for people with memberships in "troubling" organizations, wait until they hear about Bob Byrd! (Former Kleagle, Ku Klux Klan.)
They're a rotten bunch, these Democrats, and I'm happy to see an end to their reign of terror.
Now that Zell Miller is out of office, the only office-holding Democrat I like anymore is Ray Nagin, mayor of New Orleans. I had never heard of him until Hurricane Katrina, but after his "gaffe" this week, he's my favorite Democrat. I like a politician who casually spouts off insanely politically incorrect remarks in front of large audiences and TV cameras.
Nagin cheerfully told a crowd gathered for a Martin Luther King Day celebration that New Orleans would soon be "Chocolate City" again. I don't know who's supposed to be offended by that. I'm not. Perhaps all the white mayors who know they couldn't have said it. True, life's unfair. Oh well.
When it comes to choice-of-word crimes, I'd prefer detente to mutually assured destruction. Lead us off the chocolate plantation, Mayor Nagin!
Copyright 2005 Ann Coulter
Wednesday, January 18, 2006
Mark D. Tooley: A Gay Easter?
Gay-rights groups make covert plans to crash the annual White House Easter egg roll.
The Weekly Standard
01/17/2006 2:40:00 PM
FOR OVER A HUNDRED YEARS children have gathered on the South Lawn of the White House on the Monday after Easter to roll Easter eggs across the yard and meet the Easter Bunny. Seemingly few (if any) Washingtonians have ever tried to exploit the annual White House Easter Egg Roll for political purposes. Until now.
A church-based homosexual rights group is planning to crash the event with a "family visibility action" to spotlight their non-traditional families. "On April 17, 2006, when the White House lawn is opened to families for the Annual Easter Egg Roll, imagine if the first 1,000 families onto the lawn were LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] families," enthused a January 4 email alert from Soulforce. Once America sees the White House lawn awash in LGBT families, "there will be no going back," Soulforce promised.
Soulforce is the political organizing tool of self-described "militant gay activist" Mel White, the former Jerry Falwell speech writer who discovered his gayness and became a clergyman in the predominantly homosexual Metropolitan Community Churches. White and his supporters routinely show up at church conventions and other events to protest, perform acts of civil disobedience and demand that denominations change their teachings about homosexuality. They apply the "soul force" of principles from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi to the "struggle for justice for sexual minorities."
According to Soulforce, "LGBT" participants are being urged to gather at the White House gate the night before so as to be the first to enter the next morning. Volunteers will stand in line for "LGBT" parents who cannot do it themselves. Although Soulforce insists this will not be a political protest, only a gathering for families, its supporters will arrive with special "non-political" t-shirts to identify themselves as "LGBT."
THE WHITE HOUSE EASTER EGG ROLL dates back to Rutherford Hayes, who opened up the South Lawn to children after the Easter egg roll at the Capitol was shut down. In typical fashion, a fusty Congress became concerned about damage to its lawn and turned the kiddies away. President Hayes and his successors have been glad to compensate for Congress' lack of hospitality. Besides thousands of children and parents, the roll often includes prominent entertainers, the Easter Bunny, and sometimes the president and first lady. The Easter Egg Roll has remained non-controversial for too long, apparently.
Soulforce, in cooperation with other homosexuality advocacy groups, such as Family Pride, wants same-sex couples and other non-traditional "sexual minorities" to bring their children to the White House so as to expose America to "LGBT" families. "The media will be there (they are always there for the egg roll) and millions of Americans--many for the first time--will meet our families," the Soulforce email explained. "This is an amazing opportunity to reach homes in blue states and red states with positive images of our families participating in this great American family tradition."
Soulforce went on to promise: "This event will be like nothing anyone has ever seen before. The White House lawn--the Bush [italics in original] White House lawn--will, quite unexpectedly, be filled with gay and lesbian families. This is something people will be talking about for a long time, an event that will make history!" According to Soulforce, "It is time to claim our place at the table. Come to our nation's capital and let America see who we really are." Less any of its supporters be lacking in enthusiasm, the email promised: "It is basically going to be the biggest LGBT family party ever, you and your kids will have a great time." Recipients of the Soulforce email were asked to be "discreet" and not to post the information on websites because the "success of this action depends on keeping it under the radar of the media and the administration!!!"
OVER THE YEARS Soulforce has become well known for its disruptive demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience at the conventions of religious denominations that do not share its views on sexual ethics. Invariably these churches, even the liberal mainline ones, are portrayed by Soulforce as "anti-gay."
Soulforce's main partner in crashing the White House Easter Egg roll is the Family Pride Coalition (FPC), which is the "only national non-profit organization solely dedicated to equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) parents and their families." "There is no more powerful way to change the national discussion around our families and our rights than to introduce ourselves to our neighbors on a grand scale," the Family Pride Coalition promises on its website. "Join us in making history, having fun and showing off our amazing families to the country!" (Like Soulforce, the FPC also wants its members to be secretive about the plan. A passage on its page about the event reads: "Important Note: If word about this reaches the administration or any of our opponents, there may be an effort to keep our families from participating. Please tell as many LGBT families as possible about this event, but please DO NOT post a link to this page on a searchable website. It is fine though, to forward the link directly to LGBT families.")
Other sponsors of the Egg Roll crashing include: the Metropolitan Community Church, PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), COLAGE (Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), Love Makes a Family, the BLGT Office of the Unitarian Universalists, and the unofficial Reconciling Ministries Network within United Methodism. Soulforce and the Family Pride Coalition warned that if the Bush administrations gets wind of their special plans, the White House Egg Roll may be declared an invitation-only event. If somehow blocked from entrance, the "LGBT" families are encouraged to still stick around outside the White House and talk to the media.
When he invited in the children turned away from the Capitol's lawn, President Hayes probably had no idea of the controversy the White House Egg Roll would bestir more than a century later. Welcome to Easter 2006.
Mark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.
© Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
The Weekly Standard
01/17/2006 2:40:00 PM
FOR OVER A HUNDRED YEARS children have gathered on the South Lawn of the White House on the Monday after Easter to roll Easter eggs across the yard and meet the Easter Bunny. Seemingly few (if any) Washingtonians have ever tried to exploit the annual White House Easter Egg Roll for political purposes. Until now.
A church-based homosexual rights group is planning to crash the event with a "family visibility action" to spotlight their non-traditional families. "On April 17, 2006, when the White House lawn is opened to families for the Annual Easter Egg Roll, imagine if the first 1,000 families onto the lawn were LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] families," enthused a January 4 email alert from Soulforce. Once America sees the White House lawn awash in LGBT families, "there will be no going back," Soulforce promised.
Soulforce is the political organizing tool of self-described "militant gay activist" Mel White, the former Jerry Falwell speech writer who discovered his gayness and became a clergyman in the predominantly homosexual Metropolitan Community Churches. White and his supporters routinely show up at church conventions and other events to protest, perform acts of civil disobedience and demand that denominations change their teachings about homosexuality. They apply the "soul force" of principles from Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi to the "struggle for justice for sexual minorities."
According to Soulforce, "LGBT" participants are being urged to gather at the White House gate the night before so as to be the first to enter the next morning. Volunteers will stand in line for "LGBT" parents who cannot do it themselves. Although Soulforce insists this will not be a political protest, only a gathering for families, its supporters will arrive with special "non-political" t-shirts to identify themselves as "LGBT."
THE WHITE HOUSE EASTER EGG ROLL dates back to Rutherford Hayes, who opened up the South Lawn to children after the Easter egg roll at the Capitol was shut down. In typical fashion, a fusty Congress became concerned about damage to its lawn and turned the kiddies away. President Hayes and his successors have been glad to compensate for Congress' lack of hospitality. Besides thousands of children and parents, the roll often includes prominent entertainers, the Easter Bunny, and sometimes the president and first lady. The Easter Egg Roll has remained non-controversial for too long, apparently.
Soulforce, in cooperation with other homosexuality advocacy groups, such as Family Pride, wants same-sex couples and other non-traditional "sexual minorities" to bring their children to the White House so as to expose America to "LGBT" families. "The media will be there (they are always there for the egg roll) and millions of Americans--many for the first time--will meet our families," the Soulforce email explained. "This is an amazing opportunity to reach homes in blue states and red states with positive images of our families participating in this great American family tradition."
Soulforce went on to promise: "This event will be like nothing anyone has ever seen before. The White House lawn--the Bush [italics in original] White House lawn--will, quite unexpectedly, be filled with gay and lesbian families. This is something people will be talking about for a long time, an event that will make history!" According to Soulforce, "It is time to claim our place at the table. Come to our nation's capital and let America see who we really are." Less any of its supporters be lacking in enthusiasm, the email promised: "It is basically going to be the biggest LGBT family party ever, you and your kids will have a great time." Recipients of the Soulforce email were asked to be "discreet" and not to post the information on websites because the "success of this action depends on keeping it under the radar of the media and the administration!!!"
OVER THE YEARS Soulforce has become well known for its disruptive demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience at the conventions of religious denominations that do not share its views on sexual ethics. Invariably these churches, even the liberal mainline ones, are portrayed by Soulforce as "anti-gay."
Soulforce's main partner in crashing the White House Easter Egg roll is the Family Pride Coalition (FPC), which is the "only national non-profit organization solely dedicated to equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) parents and their families." "There is no more powerful way to change the national discussion around our families and our rights than to introduce ourselves to our neighbors on a grand scale," the Family Pride Coalition promises on its website. "Join us in making history, having fun and showing off our amazing families to the country!" (Like Soulforce, the FPC also wants its members to be secretive about the plan. A passage on its page about the event reads: "Important Note: If word about this reaches the administration or any of our opponents, there may be an effort to keep our families from participating. Please tell as many LGBT families as possible about this event, but please DO NOT post a link to this page on a searchable website. It is fine though, to forward the link directly to LGBT families.")
Other sponsors of the Egg Roll crashing include: the Metropolitan Community Church, PFLAG (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays), COLAGE (Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere, National Gay and Lesbian Task Force (NGLTF), Love Makes a Family, the BLGT Office of the Unitarian Universalists, and the unofficial Reconciling Ministries Network within United Methodism. Soulforce and the Family Pride Coalition warned that if the Bush administrations gets wind of their special plans, the White House Egg Roll may be declared an invitation-only event. If somehow blocked from entrance, the "LGBT" families are encouraged to still stick around outside the White House and talk to the media.
When he invited in the children turned away from the Capitol's lawn, President Hayes probably had no idea of the controversy the White House Egg Roll would bestir more than a century later. Welcome to Easter 2006.
Mark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy.
© Copyright 2005, News Corporation, Weekly Standard, All Rights Reserved.
Michelle Malkin: The "D" Stands for Demagogue
January 18, 2006
Michelle Malkin
The freaks come out at night. The demagogues came out on Martin Luther King Day.
Democrat N.Y. Sen. Hillary Clinton, perhaps looking to distract attention from those pesky Code Pink protesters who've been dogging her over the Iraq war, commemorated the holiday by pulling a reverse Sister Souljah at race hustler Al Sharpton's pulpit in Harlem. The Canaan Baptist Church welcomed her pandering with what the Associated Press described as "thunderous applause."
When a Democrat politician stumps at a church, you see, it's "minority outreach." When a Republican politician stumps at a church, it's a theocratic outrage.
Asked to explain the difference between Democrats and Republicans, Hillary's response oozed with righteous flava (did Bill "Our first black president" Clinton help her practice?):
"For the last five years, we've had no. Power. At All. And that makes a big difference, because when you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation. And you know what I'm talkin' about. It has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary point of view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard. The Senate's not that bad. But it's been difficult. It's been difficult."
Yes, Hillary, we're living in the antebellum South all over again. Forget the existence of the raucus Congressional Black Caucus. Pay no attention to the ubiquitous Rep. Charlie Rangel on cable television and radio airwaves.
Look past the mainstream status bestowed on the fanatical black separatist Louis Farrakhan, most recently honored as Black Entertainment Television.com's person of the year. And ignore the true ideological plantation mentality that punishes every prominent conservative minority dissenter who strays from leftist orthodoxy.
What racial demagogic stunt will Hillary sink to next? Cornrows and a cameo on Bush-bashing rapper Kanye West's next album? Go on, girl. Go ahead. Get down.
While Hillary wallowed in Farrakhan-esque rhetoric about Republican slavemasters oppressing black people's right to be heard, Democrat New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin paid tribute to civil rights and the fight for equality by freely mouthing off about his racial dream -- a dream for a divinely ordained "chocolate" New Orleans:
"I don't care what people are saying [in predominantly white] Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day. This city will be a majority African-American city. It's the way God wants it to be."
Asked by a local reporter for WDSU-TV in New Orleans to explain his remarks, Nagin sniffed condescendingly: "Do you know anything about chocolate? How do you make chocolate? You take dark chocolate, you mix it with white milk, and it becomes a delicious drink. That's the chocolate I'm talkin' about."
Nagin reminds me of something else on the Dairy Queen menu: Nuts. But watch as the media swallow his weasel rationalizations whole.
These calculated moments of Democrat demagoguery illuminate liberalism's three-decade-old moral bankruptcy on issues of race. From the party's smearing of Clarence Thomas to the bigoted attacks on Condoleezza Rice and Maryland GOP Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, to its opposition to school choice for inner-city students and denigration of California businessman Ward Connerly's campaign against government racial preferences, to its latest desperate attempts to blame racism for Hurricane Katrina and to portray Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito as a red-necked bigot, the Left has offered nothing but slime and obstructionism.
Yet, there isn't a day that goes by without Democrats effectively using the race card against their opponents in every political debate ranging from education to border security to the courts. It's time for conservatives, Republicans in Washington and minorities with half a brain to call their bluff. Stand up. Defend your honor. Don't let it pass.
You know what I'm talkin' about?
Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate
Michelle Malkin
The freaks come out at night. The demagogues came out on Martin Luther King Day.
Democrat N.Y. Sen. Hillary Clinton, perhaps looking to distract attention from those pesky Code Pink protesters who've been dogging her over the Iraq war, commemorated the holiday by pulling a reverse Sister Souljah at race hustler Al Sharpton's pulpit in Harlem. The Canaan Baptist Church welcomed her pandering with what the Associated Press described as "thunderous applause."
When a Democrat politician stumps at a church, you see, it's "minority outreach." When a Republican politician stumps at a church, it's a theocratic outrage.
Asked to explain the difference between Democrats and Republicans, Hillary's response oozed with righteous flava (did Bill "Our first black president" Clinton help her practice?):
"For the last five years, we've had no. Power. At All. And that makes a big difference, because when you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation. And you know what I'm talkin' about. It has been run in a way so that nobody with a contrary point of view has had a chance to present legislation, to make an argument, to be heard. The Senate's not that bad. But it's been difficult. It's been difficult."
Yes, Hillary, we're living in the antebellum South all over again. Forget the existence of the raucus Congressional Black Caucus. Pay no attention to the ubiquitous Rep. Charlie Rangel on cable television and radio airwaves.
Look past the mainstream status bestowed on the fanatical black separatist Louis Farrakhan, most recently honored as Black Entertainment Television.com's person of the year. And ignore the true ideological plantation mentality that punishes every prominent conservative minority dissenter who strays from leftist orthodoxy.
What racial demagogic stunt will Hillary sink to next? Cornrows and a cameo on Bush-bashing rapper Kanye West's next album? Go on, girl. Go ahead. Get down.
While Hillary wallowed in Farrakhan-esque rhetoric about Republican slavemasters oppressing black people's right to be heard, Democrat New Orleans mayor Ray Nagin paid tribute to civil rights and the fight for equality by freely mouthing off about his racial dream -- a dream for a divinely ordained "chocolate" New Orleans:
"I don't care what people are saying [in predominantly white] Uptown or wherever they are. This city will be chocolate at the end of the day. This city will be a majority African-American city. It's the way God wants it to be."
Asked by a local reporter for WDSU-TV in New Orleans to explain his remarks, Nagin sniffed condescendingly: "Do you know anything about chocolate? How do you make chocolate? You take dark chocolate, you mix it with white milk, and it becomes a delicious drink. That's the chocolate I'm talkin' about."
Nagin reminds me of something else on the Dairy Queen menu: Nuts. But watch as the media swallow his weasel rationalizations whole.
These calculated moments of Democrat demagoguery illuminate liberalism's three-decade-old moral bankruptcy on issues of race. From the party's smearing of Clarence Thomas to the bigoted attacks on Condoleezza Rice and Maryland GOP Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, to its opposition to school choice for inner-city students and denigration of California businessman Ward Connerly's campaign against government racial preferences, to its latest desperate attempts to blame racism for Hurricane Katrina and to portray Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito as a red-necked bigot, the Left has offered nothing but slime and obstructionism.
Yet, there isn't a day that goes by without Democrats effectively using the race card against their opponents in every political debate ranging from education to border security to the courts. It's time for conservatives, Republicans in Washington and minorities with half a brain to call their bluff. Stand up. Defend your honor. Don't let it pass.
You know what I'm talkin' about?
Copyright 2006 Creators Syndicate
Charles Krauthammer: The Iran Charade, Part II
January 18, 2006
The Washington Post
Charles Krauthammer
"It was what made this EU Three approach so successful. They (Britain, France and Germany) stood together and they had one uniform position.''
-- German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Jan. 13, 2006
WASHINGTON -- Makes you want to weep. One day earlier, Britain, France and Germany admitted that their two years of talks to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program had collapsed. The Iranians had broken the seals on their nuclear facilities and were resuming activity in defiance of their pledges to the EU Three. This negotiating exercise, designed as an alternative to the U.S. approach of sanctioning Iran for its violations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, had proved entirely futile. If anything, the two-year hiatus gave Iran time to harden its nuclear facilities against bombardment, acquire new antiaircraft capacities and clandestinely advance its program.
With all this, the chancellor of Germany declares the exercise a success because the allies stuck together! The last such success was Dunkirk. Lots of solidarity there too.
Most dismaying was that this assessment comes from a genuinely good friend, the new German chancellor, who, unlike her predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder (now a wholly owned Putin flunky working for Russia's state-run oil monopoly), actually wants to do something about terrorism and nuclear proliferation.
Ah, success. Instead of being years away from the point of no return for an Iranian bomb, as we were before we allowed Europe to divert anti-proliferation efforts into transparently useless talks, Iran is probably just months away. And now, of course, Iran is run by an even more radical government, led by a president who fervently believes in the imminence of the apocalypse.
Ah, success. Having delayed two years, we now have to deal with a set of fanatical Islamists that we know in advance will not be deterred from pursuing nuclear weapons by any sanctions.
Even if we could get real sanctions. Which we will not. The last remaining months before Iran goes nuclear are about to be frittered away in pursuit of this newest placebo.
First, because Russia and China will threaten to veto any serious sanctions. The Chinese in particular have secured in Iran a source of oil and gas outside the American sphere to feed their growing economy and are quite happy geopolitically to support a rogue power that -- like North Korea -- threatens, distracts and diminishes the power of China's chief global rival, the United States.
Second, because the Europeans have no appetite for real sanctions either. A travel ban on Iranian leaders would be a joke; they don't travel anyway. A cutoff of investment and high-tech trade from Europe would be a minor irritant to a country of 70 million people with the second largest oil reserves in the world and with oil at $60 a barrel. North Korea tolerated 2 million dead from starvation to get its nuclear weapons. Iran will tolerate a shortage of flat-screen TVs.
The only sanctions that might conceivably have any effect would be a boycott of Iranian oil. No one is even talking about that because no one can bear the thought of the oil shock that will instantly follow taking 4.2 million barrels a day off the market.
Indeed, the threat here works in reverse. It is the Iranians who have the world over a barrel. On Jan. 15, Iran's economy minister warned that Iran would retaliate for any sanctions by cutting its exports to ``raise oil prices beyond levels the West expects.'' A full cutoff could bring $100 oil and plunge the world into economic crisis.
Which is one of the reasons the Europeans are so mortified by the very thought of a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. The problem is not just that they are spread out and hardened, making them difficult to find and to damage sufficiently to seriously set back Iran's program.
The problem that mortifies the Europeans is what Iran might do after such an attack -- not just cut off its own oil exports but shut down the Strait of Hormuz (through which nearly half of the world's export oil passes) by firing missiles at tankers or scuttling its own vessels to make the strait impassable. It would require an international armada led by the United States to break such a blockade.
Such consequences -- serious economic disruption and possible naval action -- are something a cocooned, aging, post-historic Europe cannot even contemplate. Which is why the Europeans have had their heads in the sand for two years. And why they will spend the little time remaining -- before a group of apocalyptic madmen go nuclear -- putting their heads back in the sand. And congratulating themselves on allied solidarity as they do so in unison.
© 2006, Washington Post Writers Group
The Washington Post
Charles Krauthammer
"It was what made this EU Three approach so successful. They (Britain, France and Germany) stood together and they had one uniform position.''
-- German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Jan. 13, 2006
WASHINGTON -- Makes you want to weep. One day earlier, Britain, France and Germany admitted that their two years of talks to stop Iran's nuclear weapons program had collapsed. The Iranians had broken the seals on their nuclear facilities and were resuming activity in defiance of their pledges to the EU Three. This negotiating exercise, designed as an alternative to the U.S. approach of sanctioning Iran for its violations of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, had proved entirely futile. If anything, the two-year hiatus gave Iran time to harden its nuclear facilities against bombardment, acquire new antiaircraft capacities and clandestinely advance its program.
With all this, the chancellor of Germany declares the exercise a success because the allies stuck together! The last such success was Dunkirk. Lots of solidarity there too.
Most dismaying was that this assessment comes from a genuinely good friend, the new German chancellor, who, unlike her predecessor, Gerhard Schroeder (now a wholly owned Putin flunky working for Russia's state-run oil monopoly), actually wants to do something about terrorism and nuclear proliferation.
Ah, success. Instead of being years away from the point of no return for an Iranian bomb, as we were before we allowed Europe to divert anti-proliferation efforts into transparently useless talks, Iran is probably just months away. And now, of course, Iran is run by an even more radical government, led by a president who fervently believes in the imminence of the apocalypse.
Ah, success. Having delayed two years, we now have to deal with a set of fanatical Islamists that we know in advance will not be deterred from pursuing nuclear weapons by any sanctions.
Even if we could get real sanctions. Which we will not. The last remaining months before Iran goes nuclear are about to be frittered away in pursuit of this newest placebo.
First, because Russia and China will threaten to veto any serious sanctions. The Chinese in particular have secured in Iran a source of oil and gas outside the American sphere to feed their growing economy and are quite happy geopolitically to support a rogue power that -- like North Korea -- threatens, distracts and diminishes the power of China's chief global rival, the United States.
Second, because the Europeans have no appetite for real sanctions either. A travel ban on Iranian leaders would be a joke; they don't travel anyway. A cutoff of investment and high-tech trade from Europe would be a minor irritant to a country of 70 million people with the second largest oil reserves in the world and with oil at $60 a barrel. North Korea tolerated 2 million dead from starvation to get its nuclear weapons. Iran will tolerate a shortage of flat-screen TVs.
The only sanctions that might conceivably have any effect would be a boycott of Iranian oil. No one is even talking about that because no one can bear the thought of the oil shock that will instantly follow taking 4.2 million barrels a day off the market.
Indeed, the threat here works in reverse. It is the Iranians who have the world over a barrel. On Jan. 15, Iran's economy minister warned that Iran would retaliate for any sanctions by cutting its exports to ``raise oil prices beyond levels the West expects.'' A full cutoff could bring $100 oil and plunge the world into economic crisis.
Which is one of the reasons the Europeans are so mortified by the very thought of a military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities. The problem is not just that they are spread out and hardened, making them difficult to find and to damage sufficiently to seriously set back Iran's program.
The problem that mortifies the Europeans is what Iran might do after such an attack -- not just cut off its own oil exports but shut down the Strait of Hormuz (through which nearly half of the world's export oil passes) by firing missiles at tankers or scuttling its own vessels to make the strait impassable. It would require an international armada led by the United States to break such a blockade.
Such consequences -- serious economic disruption and possible naval action -- are something a cocooned, aging, post-historic Europe cannot even contemplate. Which is why the Europeans have had their heads in the sand for two years. And why they will spend the little time remaining -- before a group of apocalyptic madmen go nuclear -- putting their heads back in the sand. And congratulating themselves on allied solidarity as they do so in unison.
© 2006, Washington Post Writers Group
Tuesday, January 17, 2006
W. Thomas Smith, Jr.: The Saddam-Al Qaeda Connection
http://www.townhall.com
Jan 16, 2006
The recent revelation by Stephen F. Hayes in The Weekly Standard that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had ties to – and was training thousands of – terrorists in the years prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is actually no revelation at all. It is being treated as such by many Americans, cautiously praised by the White House, and dismissed as groundless by those opposed to the war.
Don’t get me wrong: Hayes’ assertions are on the mark. But those with connections to the U.S. special operations community have long known that the pre-war link between Saddam and the Al Qaeda terrorist network is not only a fact, but one that had to be addressed as part of the global war on terror.
I first began writing about this in August 2004 after a conversation with a good friend of mine, Commander Mark Divine, a U.S. Navy SEAL officer who had just returned from Iraq, where he was tasked with evaluating joint operations between SEALs and a then-developing Marine Corps special ops team. Divine told me, and I subsequently reported in National Review Online, “There is tremendous evidence to suggest there were terrorist training camps in Iraq before 9/11.”
I also wrote about the publicly and journalistically glossed-over 9/11 Commission Report that clearly stated, “[Osama] bin Laden himself met with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer in Khartoum in late 1994 or early 1995.” Bin Laden asked the Iraqi official for weapons procurement assistance and – get this – permission to establish terrorist training facilities in Iraq.
Granted, the Commission did say, “There is no evidence that Iraq responded to this request.” But my question today is: what about any evidence to suggest Iraq did not respond? There is no such evidence, and to me that is a far more important question, considering the fact that the Commission concluded, “The ensuing years saw additional efforts to establish connections.”
Moreover, there was Ansar al Islam, an Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group with training camps in Northern Iraq prior to 2003. This group was hoping to establish an Islamist state in Iraq. But the – again, rarely read – 9/11 Commission Report clearly states, “There are indications that [by 2001] the Iraqi regime tolerated and may even have helped Ansar al Islam against the common Kurdish enemy.”
But don’t take my word for it, or the Commission’s.
In her book, Masters of Chaos, author and U.S. News & World Report senior writer Linda Robinson describes an attack on Sargat – an enormously significant international terrorist training camp in northeastern Iraq, near the Iranian border. The camp was being run by Ansar al Islam, and based on Robinson’s conversations with the U.S. Army special operators who led the attack, it is indeed "more than plausible" that Al Qaeda members trained there.
“[A Special Forces sergeant] believed, given the heavy fortifications, ample weaponry, and quality of the fighters, that his team had just invaded the world’s largest existing terrorist training camp since the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan,” writes Robinson. “This was no way-station, in his view. It was remote yet in the heart of the region, so radicals could wreak havoc all over the Middle East.”
According to Robinson, the American Green Berets discovered among the dead in Sargat: foreign ID cards, airline-ticket receipts, visas, and passports from Yemen, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Tunisia, Morocco, and Iran.
Sargat wasn’t the only terrorist camp discovered by U.S. forces.
As Hayes reported, “Secret training took place primarily at three camps — in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak — and was directed by elite Iraqi military units.”
At Salman Pak, a facility south of Baghdad, “videos and other materials turned up after the invasion that showed terrorist training footage, where the targets were clearly Americans, along with other Jihadist propaganda,” Divine, who also operates NavySEALs.com, told me last week, “If this were an Iraqi military training site, or even a secret police site, it would not have had Jihadist focus, nor been visited by Arab members of Al Qaeda, as had been reported by several intelligence agencies.”
About the time Divine and I were having our initial conversation about the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, Dr. Walid Phares – a senior fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and author of Future Jihad – was poring over captured Iraqi intelligence documents (written in Arabic).
Last week, Phares told me he concluded from the documents, “There obviously were connections and talks, not only between Baghdad and the Jihadists of Osama Bin Laden, but between other Arab regimes such as Sudan, Syria and officials in Saudi Arabia and the radical Islamists who would later form Al Qaeda. In this regional maze, everybody talks to everybody and explores possibilities, plans.”
This is key to understanding the nature of terrorist organizations in the Middle East: Alliances are often ad hoc, opposing groups often train together, and the terrorists themselves switch loyalties depending upon whose leading what organization and what propaganda is being fomented by whom. To think otherwise would be dangerous for America and the world. And those on both sides of the U.S. political divide recognize Phares’ grasp of the complexities of global terrorism, particularly as they relate to the complex relationships that have existed in the Middle East for thousands of years.
Phares, who regularly conducts Congressional and State Department briefings, added, “The Saddam-Al Qaeda cooperation was centered around weakening the U.N.-sponsored, U.S.-British-backed sanctions against Iraq. Al Qaeda would strike U.S. interests, prompting a U.S. withdrawal from the region. Iraq would in-turn provide some facilities and other services to Al Qaeda’s operatives and local allies without necessarily becoming their main supplier or strategic partner.”
Consequently, international terrorists like Jordanian-born Abu Musab al Zarqawi were able to access many locations in Iraq prior to 2003. If nothing else, Zarqawi’s direct links to both Al Qaeda and Ansar al Islam, directly linked post-invasion Iraq and Al Qaeda. There is simply no way around that.
But there is much more to consider than Zarqawi, his crowd, and their freedom-of-movement. Intelligence gathered since the U.S. invasion indicates that as early as the late 1990’s, Iraq’s Unit 999 (a special branch of the old regime’s army) was directly involved in the training of foreign terrorists inside Iraq. Intelligence about U.S. and other Western forces was shared between operatives of the Iraqi intelligence services and Al Qaeda. And foreign terrorists operating in the region (outside of Iraq) who needed medical attention or other support received it once inside Iraqi borders.
Additionally, previously positioned operators – the “connections” – would have been necessary to coordinate the reception of Al Qaeda operatives crossing into post-invasion Iraq. Any student of guerrilla operations knows the former must assist the latter to establish deep bases, recruit new members, and develop some semblance of trust in an untrusting tribal society.
So let’s forget for the moment any weapons of mass destruction (and the verdict is still out over whether or not WMDs were spirited across the borders). Forget the fact that Saddam was providing monetary support to the Palestinian families of suicide bombers. Forget the fact that he had violated umpteen U.N. resolutions since the end of Gulf War I. Forget the fact that his air-defense forces were regularly shooting at American and British pilots. Forget that he was a brutal dictatorial thug whose henchmen systematically raped, tortured, and murdered anyone who so much as hinted at any domestic political opposition. Forget all of the collaterally related geo-strategic reasons for gaining a foothold in the middle of the Islamist-fascist world during a global war against Middle-Eastern-based terrorism.
Instead, let’s consider the question that continues coming back to me:
Why is the White House not jumping all over the fact that terrorists were indeed training in pre-invasion Iraq as defensible proof of why we had no choice but to invade that country?
The answer is simple and unfortunate: Many in the mainstream media have been so successful at debunking any evidence, proof, or substantive facts as they relate to the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, that any new information supporting any facts those of us in-the-know already know will simply be rejected. The new information will be seen as desperate backtracking on old ground. The White House, which is committed to winning the war, will be seen as being in a defensive mode regarding issues that now have no strategic or tactical relevance in the future prosecution of the war. And the general public, which has been fed a steady diet of Iraq-is-the-wrong-theater since 2003, no longer knows what to believe.
Opponents of the war say the only Al Qaeda elements in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion were those in Kurdish areas not controlled by Saddam. This simply is not so, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it is. And if so, would not the U.S. – as a critical front in the global war on terror – have to invade those areas to shut down the Al Qaeda cells? Of course. And that in itself would have been a far more dangerous “limited war” with Iraq involving a direct ground confrontation with Saddam’s army anyway.
“Those who have decided that the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection claims (along with WMD) were ginned up by Bush to bolster the rationale for going into Iraq, are so firmly invested in those beliefs that they wouldn't believe any corroborating evidence anyhow,” says Divine.
True, but the facts are still with us, and the evidence for those facts – now supported by a growing body of post-invasion intelligence – is getting stronger. And to be fair to Hayes, the confirmation by 11 government officials of some two-million “exploitable items,” including notes, documents, tapes, CDs, floppies, and hard drives connecting the dots, is indeed a new revelation reinforcing what we already knew.
“There were terrorists training in Iraq prior to our invasion of that country,” said retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. John Bruce Blount, former chief of staff of Allied Forces Southern Europe, in a phone conversation on Friday. “No question about it. There also were many things Saddam was doing – money, passports, visas, you name it – to further the terrorists ability to operate in other places throughout the world.”
Even more disturbing is what U.S. Congressman Joe Wilson (R -S.C.) said to me back in September 2004: “If this is what we know, imagine what we don’t know.”
W. Thomas Smith Jr. is a Townhall.com columnist.
Jan 16, 2006
The recent revelation by Stephen F. Hayes in The Weekly Standard that Iraq under Saddam Hussein had ties to – and was training thousands of – terrorists in the years prior to the 2003 invasion of Iraq, is actually no revelation at all. It is being treated as such by many Americans, cautiously praised by the White House, and dismissed as groundless by those opposed to the war.
Don’t get me wrong: Hayes’ assertions are on the mark. But those with connections to the U.S. special operations community have long known that the pre-war link between Saddam and the Al Qaeda terrorist network is not only a fact, but one that had to be addressed as part of the global war on terror.
I first began writing about this in August 2004 after a conversation with a good friend of mine, Commander Mark Divine, a U.S. Navy SEAL officer who had just returned from Iraq, where he was tasked with evaluating joint operations between SEALs and a then-developing Marine Corps special ops team. Divine told me, and I subsequently reported in National Review Online, “There is tremendous evidence to suggest there were terrorist training camps in Iraq before 9/11.”
I also wrote about the publicly and journalistically glossed-over 9/11 Commission Report that clearly stated, “[Osama] bin Laden himself met with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer in Khartoum in late 1994 or early 1995.” Bin Laden asked the Iraqi official for weapons procurement assistance and – get this – permission to establish terrorist training facilities in Iraq.
Granted, the Commission did say, “There is no evidence that Iraq responded to this request.” But my question today is: what about any evidence to suggest Iraq did not respond? There is no such evidence, and to me that is a far more important question, considering the fact that the Commission concluded, “The ensuing years saw additional efforts to establish connections.”
Moreover, there was Ansar al Islam, an Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist group with training camps in Northern Iraq prior to 2003. This group was hoping to establish an Islamist state in Iraq. But the – again, rarely read – 9/11 Commission Report clearly states, “There are indications that [by 2001] the Iraqi regime tolerated and may even have helped Ansar al Islam against the common Kurdish enemy.”
But don’t take my word for it, or the Commission’s.
In her book, Masters of Chaos, author and U.S. News & World Report senior writer Linda Robinson describes an attack on Sargat – an enormously significant international terrorist training camp in northeastern Iraq, near the Iranian border. The camp was being run by Ansar al Islam, and based on Robinson’s conversations with the U.S. Army special operators who led the attack, it is indeed "more than plausible" that Al Qaeda members trained there.
“[A Special Forces sergeant] believed, given the heavy fortifications, ample weaponry, and quality of the fighters, that his team had just invaded the world’s largest existing terrorist training camp since the fall of the Taliban in Afghanistan,” writes Robinson. “This was no way-station, in his view. It was remote yet in the heart of the region, so radicals could wreak havoc all over the Middle East.”
According to Robinson, the American Green Berets discovered among the dead in Sargat: foreign ID cards, airline-ticket receipts, visas, and passports from Yemen, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman, Tunisia, Morocco, and Iran.
Sargat wasn’t the only terrorist camp discovered by U.S. forces.
As Hayes reported, “Secret training took place primarily at three camps — in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak — and was directed by elite Iraqi military units.”
At Salman Pak, a facility south of Baghdad, “videos and other materials turned up after the invasion that showed terrorist training footage, where the targets were clearly Americans, along with other Jihadist propaganda,” Divine, who also operates NavySEALs.com, told me last week, “If this were an Iraqi military training site, or even a secret police site, it would not have had Jihadist focus, nor been visited by Arab members of Al Qaeda, as had been reported by several intelligence agencies.”
About the time Divine and I were having our initial conversation about the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, Dr. Walid Phares – a senior fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies and author of Future Jihad – was poring over captured Iraqi intelligence documents (written in Arabic).
Last week, Phares told me he concluded from the documents, “There obviously were connections and talks, not only between Baghdad and the Jihadists of Osama Bin Laden, but between other Arab regimes such as Sudan, Syria and officials in Saudi Arabia and the radical Islamists who would later form Al Qaeda. In this regional maze, everybody talks to everybody and explores possibilities, plans.”
This is key to understanding the nature of terrorist organizations in the Middle East: Alliances are often ad hoc, opposing groups often train together, and the terrorists themselves switch loyalties depending upon whose leading what organization and what propaganda is being fomented by whom. To think otherwise would be dangerous for America and the world. And those on both sides of the U.S. political divide recognize Phares’ grasp of the complexities of global terrorism, particularly as they relate to the complex relationships that have existed in the Middle East for thousands of years.
Phares, who regularly conducts Congressional and State Department briefings, added, “The Saddam-Al Qaeda cooperation was centered around weakening the U.N.-sponsored, U.S.-British-backed sanctions against Iraq. Al Qaeda would strike U.S. interests, prompting a U.S. withdrawal from the region. Iraq would in-turn provide some facilities and other services to Al Qaeda’s operatives and local allies without necessarily becoming their main supplier or strategic partner.”
Consequently, international terrorists like Jordanian-born Abu Musab al Zarqawi were able to access many locations in Iraq prior to 2003. If nothing else, Zarqawi’s direct links to both Al Qaeda and Ansar al Islam, directly linked post-invasion Iraq and Al Qaeda. There is simply no way around that.
But there is much more to consider than Zarqawi, his crowd, and their freedom-of-movement. Intelligence gathered since the U.S. invasion indicates that as early as the late 1990’s, Iraq’s Unit 999 (a special branch of the old regime’s army) was directly involved in the training of foreign terrorists inside Iraq. Intelligence about U.S. and other Western forces was shared between operatives of the Iraqi intelligence services and Al Qaeda. And foreign terrorists operating in the region (outside of Iraq) who needed medical attention or other support received it once inside Iraqi borders.
Additionally, previously positioned operators – the “connections” – would have been necessary to coordinate the reception of Al Qaeda operatives crossing into post-invasion Iraq. Any student of guerrilla operations knows the former must assist the latter to establish deep bases, recruit new members, and develop some semblance of trust in an untrusting tribal society.
So let’s forget for the moment any weapons of mass destruction (and the verdict is still out over whether or not WMDs were spirited across the borders). Forget the fact that Saddam was providing monetary support to the Palestinian families of suicide bombers. Forget the fact that he had violated umpteen U.N. resolutions since the end of Gulf War I. Forget the fact that his air-defense forces were regularly shooting at American and British pilots. Forget that he was a brutal dictatorial thug whose henchmen systematically raped, tortured, and murdered anyone who so much as hinted at any domestic political opposition. Forget all of the collaterally related geo-strategic reasons for gaining a foothold in the middle of the Islamist-fascist world during a global war against Middle-Eastern-based terrorism.
Instead, let’s consider the question that continues coming back to me:
Why is the White House not jumping all over the fact that terrorists were indeed training in pre-invasion Iraq as defensible proof of why we had no choice but to invade that country?
The answer is simple and unfortunate: Many in the mainstream media have been so successful at debunking any evidence, proof, or substantive facts as they relate to the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection, that any new information supporting any facts those of us in-the-know already know will simply be rejected. The new information will be seen as desperate backtracking on old ground. The White House, which is committed to winning the war, will be seen as being in a defensive mode regarding issues that now have no strategic or tactical relevance in the future prosecution of the war. And the general public, which has been fed a steady diet of Iraq-is-the-wrong-theater since 2003, no longer knows what to believe.
Opponents of the war say the only Al Qaeda elements in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion were those in Kurdish areas not controlled by Saddam. This simply is not so, but for the sake of argument, let’s say it is. And if so, would not the U.S. – as a critical front in the global war on terror – have to invade those areas to shut down the Al Qaeda cells? Of course. And that in itself would have been a far more dangerous “limited war” with Iraq involving a direct ground confrontation with Saddam’s army anyway.
“Those who have decided that the Iraq-Al Qaeda connection claims (along with WMD) were ginned up by Bush to bolster the rationale for going into Iraq, are so firmly invested in those beliefs that they wouldn't believe any corroborating evidence anyhow,” says Divine.
True, but the facts are still with us, and the evidence for those facts – now supported by a growing body of post-invasion intelligence – is getting stronger. And to be fair to Hayes, the confirmation by 11 government officials of some two-million “exploitable items,” including notes, documents, tapes, CDs, floppies, and hard drives connecting the dots, is indeed a new revelation reinforcing what we already knew.
“There were terrorists training in Iraq prior to our invasion of that country,” said retired U.S. Army Lt. Gen. John Bruce Blount, former chief of staff of Allied Forces Southern Europe, in a phone conversation on Friday. “No question about it. There also were many things Saddam was doing – money, passports, visas, you name it – to further the terrorists ability to operate in other places throughout the world.”
Even more disturbing is what U.S. Congressman Joe Wilson (R -S.C.) said to me back in September 2004: “If this is what we know, imagine what we don’t know.”
W. Thomas Smith Jr. is a Townhall.com columnist.
Mark Helprin: The myth that shapes Bush's world
The Los Angeles Times
January 15, 2006
Mark Helprin is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. His novels include "A Soldier of the Great War" and "Winter's Tale."
THE PRESIDENT believes and often states, as if it were a self-evident truth, that "democracies are peaceful countries." This claim, which has been advanced in the past in regard to Christianity, socialism, Islam and ethical culture, is the postulate on which the foreign policy of the United States now rests. Balance of power, deterrence and punitive action have been abandoned in favor of a scheme to recast the political cultures of broad regions, something that would be difficult enough even with a flawless rationale because the power of even the most powerful country in the world is not adequate to transform the world at will.
Nor is the rationale flawless. It is possible to discover various statistical correlations among democracy and war and peace, depending on how they are defined and in what time frames. The chief pitfall in such social-science exercises is in weighing something such as, for example, the Mughal Campaign in Transoxiana, 1646-47, against something like, for example, World War II. Generally, a straightforward historical approach is better. And what does it show?
Even without reference to the case of a democracy that, finding self-defense insufficient justification and retaliation an insufficient end, makes war on a non-democracy so as to make the non-democracy a democracy, the postulate on which the president has in all good faith chosen to rely is contradicted by inconvenient fact.
Germany, the primary instigator of World War I, was a democracy. Although party governance weakened immediately before the war, it did so according to the popular will. When hostilities broke out, power flowed back to the Reichstag as a result of its increased belligerency in reaction to the threat of, perhaps ironically, nondemocratic Russia. Democratic Italy joined the entente because it had been spoiling for a fight to wrest South Tyrol from Austria. Extending its northern defenses to the natural Alpine barrier was obviously in Italy's interest, and popular sovereignty acted not as a break on war for this purpose but as a stimulus.
Less a democracy but a democracy nevertheless, Japan saw its parliamentary government wax and wane in the decades before World War II, losing eventually to the militarists but resurging as late as 1937 almost to regain control, with the Meiji Constitution unrepudiated and in force throughout the war.
What is one to make of the many 19th century colonial conquests on the part of democratic European powers? What is one to make of the Mexican and Spanish-American wars, in which, on the flimsiest pretexts, the United States, the leading democracy in the world, moved to war?
And, four score and five years after the American founding, the most destructive war in American history arose entirely from within, in belated and necessary fulfillment of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, documents unexcelled as the guide stars of democracy itself.Immediate counters to these examples might be that Prussian democracy is an oxymoron, Italian democracy was more feeble then than it is even now, the Japanese had made only a shadow play of Western constitutionalism, colonial conquests don't count because they had begun before the European democracies matured and were continued out of habit (oops, there goes the Congo; we did it again). And as for the United States, well, the Mexican War had something to do with Texas, the Spanish-American with the Maine, and at the time of the Civil War, not a single woman was able to vote and a large portion of the population was enslaved.
But such attempts at explaining the complexity of a democracy's relation to war — young democracies are ferocious, old ones serene; the extent and/or speed of economic development predisposes a democracy one way or another in regard to war and peace; as do limitation or extensions of the franchise; etc. etc. — tend to founder because the sample is simultaneously too varied and too small to produce valid rules. And that is just the point. It isn't that democracies are too old or too young or too fat or too thin, but that none is perfect and that, therefore, all are subject to forces that may override the theoretical peacefulness of representative governments. Even perfect democracies, which have never been and will never be, cannot offer the kind of Pax Democratica that the United States now seeks to construct among a group of states that are famous for their immunity to liberal governance.
Other than Israel, the major countries of the region that are the most democratic are Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon and Kuwait. If democracy in Turkey and Pakistan could be drawn as a horse, it would have to have a soldier in the saddle. In Lebanon, it would have a Syrian in the saddle. And the more Turkey and Pakistan approach the genuine democracy to which American policy would direct them, the more Islamist they will become and the more they will want to do exactly the opposite of what we desire. The more Kuwait democratizes too, the more Islamist it becomes. In the 2003 elections, only 20% of contested seats went to neither traditionalists nor Islamists, and of late the democratically nascent governments of Iraq and Kuwait have had to erect a fence along their border to prevent Kuwaiti youth from crossing to join the insurgency.
Not only does the U.S. expend a great deal of effort to usher politically impure states into a form of popular sovereignty that will not stop them from acting inimically to our interests, but in distancing itself from authoritarian states that are willing to work with us, it forgoes potentially critical advantages. For the pleasure of displaying our virtue, we may someday suffer innumerable casualties in a terrorist attack that a compromised state might have helped us to prevent.In foreign policy, carelessness and confusion often lead to tragedy.
Thus, a maxim chosen to guide the course of a nation should be weighed in light of history and common sense.
Or is that too much to ask?
January 15, 2006
Mark Helprin is a senior fellow of the Claremont Institute. His novels include "A Soldier of the Great War" and "Winter's Tale."
THE PRESIDENT believes and often states, as if it were a self-evident truth, that "democracies are peaceful countries." This claim, which has been advanced in the past in regard to Christianity, socialism, Islam and ethical culture, is the postulate on which the foreign policy of the United States now rests. Balance of power, deterrence and punitive action have been abandoned in favor of a scheme to recast the political cultures of broad regions, something that would be difficult enough even with a flawless rationale because the power of even the most powerful country in the world is not adequate to transform the world at will.
Nor is the rationale flawless. It is possible to discover various statistical correlations among democracy and war and peace, depending on how they are defined and in what time frames. The chief pitfall in such social-science exercises is in weighing something such as, for example, the Mughal Campaign in Transoxiana, 1646-47, against something like, for example, World War II. Generally, a straightforward historical approach is better. And what does it show?
Even without reference to the case of a democracy that, finding self-defense insufficient justification and retaliation an insufficient end, makes war on a non-democracy so as to make the non-democracy a democracy, the postulate on which the president has in all good faith chosen to rely is contradicted by inconvenient fact.
Germany, the primary instigator of World War I, was a democracy. Although party governance weakened immediately before the war, it did so according to the popular will. When hostilities broke out, power flowed back to the Reichstag as a result of its increased belligerency in reaction to the threat of, perhaps ironically, nondemocratic Russia. Democratic Italy joined the entente because it had been spoiling for a fight to wrest South Tyrol from Austria. Extending its northern defenses to the natural Alpine barrier was obviously in Italy's interest, and popular sovereignty acted not as a break on war for this purpose but as a stimulus.
Less a democracy but a democracy nevertheless, Japan saw its parliamentary government wax and wane in the decades before World War II, losing eventually to the militarists but resurging as late as 1937 almost to regain control, with the Meiji Constitution unrepudiated and in force throughout the war.
What is one to make of the many 19th century colonial conquests on the part of democratic European powers? What is one to make of the Mexican and Spanish-American wars, in which, on the flimsiest pretexts, the United States, the leading democracy in the world, moved to war?
And, four score and five years after the American founding, the most destructive war in American history arose entirely from within, in belated and necessary fulfillment of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, documents unexcelled as the guide stars of democracy itself.Immediate counters to these examples might be that Prussian democracy is an oxymoron, Italian democracy was more feeble then than it is even now, the Japanese had made only a shadow play of Western constitutionalism, colonial conquests don't count because they had begun before the European democracies matured and were continued out of habit (oops, there goes the Congo; we did it again). And as for the United States, well, the Mexican War had something to do with Texas, the Spanish-American with the Maine, and at the time of the Civil War, not a single woman was able to vote and a large portion of the population was enslaved.
But such attempts at explaining the complexity of a democracy's relation to war — young democracies are ferocious, old ones serene; the extent and/or speed of economic development predisposes a democracy one way or another in regard to war and peace; as do limitation or extensions of the franchise; etc. etc. — tend to founder because the sample is simultaneously too varied and too small to produce valid rules. And that is just the point. It isn't that democracies are too old or too young or too fat or too thin, but that none is perfect and that, therefore, all are subject to forces that may override the theoretical peacefulness of representative governments. Even perfect democracies, which have never been and will never be, cannot offer the kind of Pax Democratica that the United States now seeks to construct among a group of states that are famous for their immunity to liberal governance.
Other than Israel, the major countries of the region that are the most democratic are Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon and Kuwait. If democracy in Turkey and Pakistan could be drawn as a horse, it would have to have a soldier in the saddle. In Lebanon, it would have a Syrian in the saddle. And the more Turkey and Pakistan approach the genuine democracy to which American policy would direct them, the more Islamist they will become and the more they will want to do exactly the opposite of what we desire. The more Kuwait democratizes too, the more Islamist it becomes. In the 2003 elections, only 20% of contested seats went to neither traditionalists nor Islamists, and of late the democratically nascent governments of Iraq and Kuwait have had to erect a fence along their border to prevent Kuwaiti youth from crossing to join the insurgency.
Not only does the U.S. expend a great deal of effort to usher politically impure states into a form of popular sovereignty that will not stop them from acting inimically to our interests, but in distancing itself from authoritarian states that are willing to work with us, it forgoes potentially critical advantages. For the pleasure of displaying our virtue, we may someday suffer innumerable casualties in a terrorist attack that a compromised state might have helped us to prevent.In foreign policy, carelessness and confusion often lead to tragedy.
Thus, a maxim chosen to guide the course of a nation should be weighed in light of history and common sense.
Or is that too much to ask?
Friday, January 13, 2006
Colt's coach Dungy preaches what he practices
Friday, January 13, 2006
By Chuck Finder, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
INDIANAPOLIS -- The inextinguishable, everlasting memory is not of a coach but of a man. A man at the pulpit. Tony Dungy seems so at home on such a platform. Because he is. When the Tampa Bay Buccaneers no longer required his services, he considered a career path in prison ministry. When a football card was fashioned in his coaching image, the inscription on the back spoke about how far greater to him than the pursuit of a Super Bowl was the quest for eternal life.
There he was Dec. 27, between the altar of the Idlewild Baptist Church in suburban Tampa, Fla., and the pews packed with his former Steelers teammates, players from his former Buccaneers and current Indianapolis Colts, along with team co-workers, friends, family, more. It was the most solemn, most heartrending occasion a parent could face, the funeral of his own child, the Dungys' oldest son, James, 18. And the father drew on his moment at the pulpit to preach.
He urged his 1,500 fellow mourners never to take family for granted. Hug your kids each chance you get. Spread your love, for you never know when it might be the last chance to express it.
He implored the players present -- among them Atlanta's Warrick Dunn, Denver's John Lynch, Tampa Bay's Derrick Brooks and Ronde Barber and Mike Alstott, Oakland's Warren Sapp, and the Colts who were part of a 200-member group that flew south from Indianapolis two days after Christmas -- to grab every opportunity to be exemplary men. Use your pulpit on NFL Sundays and your public ministry the rest of your days to spread a sense of manhood, fatherhood, brotherhood. If anything, be bolder in who you are.
The man once known as Mean Joe Greene nearly gasped.
"When Tony came up, when it was his time to talk at the service, he said, 'It's a pleasure for me to be here,' " recalled Greene, a former teammate and fellow assistant, a longtime friend, and this week something of a foe, with the Steelers -- for whom Greene is a special assistant -- playing against Dungy's Colts in the AFC divisional playoffs Sunday. "He said, 'Well, let me explain that under these circumstances.' Then he quoted from a scripture from the Bible, Saul, how he was running for his life and he took the opportunity to give glory to his Lord. And that was powerful. Powerful.
"But that also gave him a forum to tell everybody who was listening and everybody who plays in the National Football League that these guys are role models. The point he was making is that it's difficult for young men today to understand what manhood is. That they were getting mixed messages. The role models they should look up to is men. And I thought that was a great moment to tell that. A great message to everybody who is listening."
"The things he reminded us at the funeral -- character, being a role model ..." linebacker David Thornton said. "We were there to support him, but, in the end, he supported us."
"Inspirational?" Colts defensive tackle Montae Reagor continued. "It would probably be an understatement."
It's a family thing
Coach Dungy, as no less a light in the football firmament than Peyton Manning calls him, stood at a lectern yesterday in the Union Federal Football Center, the Colts' west-side training complex. He smiled. He joked.
How his Colts, his dutiful congregants, can square the man at the pulpit Dec. 27 with the coach standing before them daily is indeed puzzling to an outsider, to a disbeliever. Yet he is Coach, he is friend Tony, he is a man -- if not The Man -- to whom they abide, even more so, if that's possible, since the Florida funeral of James Dungy. His death, in the hours after their first defeat following a 13-0 start, was ruled a suicide. Loss? They've experienced that tenfold in a 14-2 season.
Perhaps above all, what Dungy instills in his football team is a feeling of family, a unity of spirit, be it religious or otherwise. James used to stand on the football-complex sidelines at practices and on the RCA Dome sidelines on game days. They felt such a kinship. Doris Harris -- the Sewickley woman who is mother to Tony Dungy's wife Lauren and grandmother to Tiara, Jade, Eric and Jordan Dungy -- described the players as "grieving and crying and feeling the loss themselves." Seventeen days later, as they embark on only the second second-round playoff in the franchise's 22 seasons in Indianapolis, Thornton said they are still mourning, still grieving.
"James is as much a part of our family as his family," Thornton said, purposefully speaking in the present tense. "He's in the back of our minds. We know this is a special season. We have J.D. on the back of our helmets to remember. And it's important to go out and play the caliber of football [Dungy] wants us to."
Dungy, 50, is a father in both respects of the word. A paternal leader whom Thornton talks about following anywhere. A religious figure commanding their attention, respect, hearts, minds. In no way does Dungy ask them to win for James, for the family, for him.
"To win one for the city of Indianapolis and our organization and [owner] Jim Irsay, that's what it's all about," he said. "Our team is very close, and these guys are close to me, and we shared some special moments. But that's not what the playoffs are all about. With my son's situation and our family, it puts it all into perspective. I always thought that the playoffs are great and the Super Bowl's great, but it's not the most important thing in the world."
"There's nothing that prepared our team for what happened to our coach and his family," Manning said. "That was a true life-changing event, a true tragedy."
Yet Dungy prodded them, preached to them, coached them at his worst of personal times. They contend that it raised their already high admiration and respect for the man who pointed them to a 48-16 record and three consecutive AFC South titles in his four Indianapolis seasons, the man who coaxed a 58-32 mark in his last five seasons with the heretofore woebegone Buccaneers, although he was fired in 2001 for perpetually failing to reach the Super Bowl that successor Jon Gruden attained the next season without coming close since. Just the same, there are no records kept for funerals, for life-altering days such as those after Christmas.
To other Colts, such as middle linebacker Gary Brackett, the quintessential moment came Dec. 28, the day after the funeral and four days before the Arizona regular-season finale, when Dungy returned to his team. The man walked through the complex door "with the same pep in his step as before, maybe even more," Brackett said. It's still there this week. "He really doesn't have to say anything. We can see it in his expression, how energized he is coming back to work."
"He did as a husband and a father would do: He was supportive to his wife and family. He felt the loss himself. He gave his proper time," said Harris, his mother-in-law. "He wouldn't let football get in the way of his obligations as a father, a husband and a man. But he knew he had to get himself back together for his team; he couldn't let his team down. They worked so hard getting to where they are now, he wouldn't desert them at this point."
Finding his faith and way
Before finding his faith anew in -- of all places -- Bonaventure Hall at St. Vincent College during Steelers training camp 1978, before venturing in whatever direction football would take him, Anthony Kevin Dungy was the son of academicians and the big brother in an athletic family from Jackson, Mich. Their father, Wilbur, was the first African-American professor at Jackson Community College and later taught physiology at Delta (Mich.) College. Their mother, Cleomae, taught high-school English for more than 30 years.
Eldest Sherrilyn became a nurse. Younger twins Lyndon and Lauren became a dentist and obstetrician. And skinny Tony ...
"I think Tony always liked basketball more," said Lauren Dungy-Poythress, who lives in Indianapolis close enough to her brother that their children often get together. "When Tony went to Minnesota, he was on the basketball team for a year; but it's my understanding that they sort of asked him not to play so he wouldn't hurt himself for football."
The star Golden Gophers quarterback wound up a free-agent safety with the Steelers, learning defense, learning how to tackle, learning everything. Yet, as Professor and Mrs. Dungy had ingrained in him, he was forever the student. Minnesota coaches gave him an office key of his own so he could study without them.
In 1977, he distinguished himself by becoming the emergency Steelers quarterback against Houston, establishing a dubious mark by both throwing and catching an interception in the same game. "We didn't win the game, but he probably kept us from getting slaughtered," Greene said. Before the next season, Dungy toiled so hard to prepare, he reported to Latrobe with mononucleosis. He sat there day after day with roommate Donnie Shell, who told him: "The Lord always has a plan for your life; maybe now it's to rest."
Dungy, whom Shell invited into a Bible Study group with Hall of Famer John Stallworth, linemen Jon Kolb and Larry Brown plus cornerback J.T. Thomas, relaxed and renewed his faith with zeal. Perhaps, it was no coincidence that he returned to health and topped the team in interceptions, his six outranking Hall of Famers Mel Blount and Jack Ham, even tying for second in the AFC that season. He won a Super Bowl ring with those Steelers. He earned enough cash that he gave to the twins his 1968 Buick LeSabre -- that Three Rivers Stadium security refused to allow entrance because they figured no pro would drive such a jalopy -- and bought himself a Thunderbird. Later, he gave that car to Lyndon and bought one for Lauren.
What drove Dungy? He played a season after being traded to San Francisco and was released the next year by the New York Giants, then returned at Chuck Noll's request to Pittsburgh in 1981 as the youngest NFL assistant back then, the club's new secondary coach at 25. He tutored such vets as Blount, Thomas and Shell. In 1984, he rose to defensive coordinator, again the NFL's youngest at 28.
"When we were roommates, he used to keep me awake studying film; I used to scream, 'Shut that projector off,' " remembered Shell, now the Carolina Panthers' player development director. "I'd say, 'What do you want to do, what do you want to be?' " 'A coach.' So I'd say, 'OK, you can keep that projector on.'
"As a coach, he never had a plan of defeat. He always put us in position to make plays. I loved it."
It was about that time Dungy met and fell in love with Lauren Harris, a teacher at her Quaker Valley High alma mater. The Rev. John Guest introduced him to Lauren after the young Steelers assistant gave a breakfast speech at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Sewickley.
"Actually, I was in the room most of the time because Lauren wasn't sure of him," said her mother. "You know, the reputation of football players. ... But she found out he was what he said he was: He was a Christian and a man who happened to be a football coach." Guest married them barely a year later. Doris Harris continued: "Tony has never changed, except to grow. He has grown stronger as a coach, stronger as a Christian, stronger as a father, man ... and son-in-law."
Faith, family, football, in that order. Those form the foundation of a coach who spent three seasons in Kansas City and four in Minnesota as Dennis Green's defensive coordinator before being entrusted a team of his own. Those three facets form the basis of the homilies he presents to his players, including the current and former Buccaneers who confided to Harris at the funeral that their teams' sense of family was never the same after they were separated from Dungy in 2001. He wound up not a prison minister, but the Colts' coach in Indianapolis, where his sister, the doctor, had moved six months earlier to start a new practice. Said she, "I think it was Divine Intervention, actually; it was a blessing that we ended up in the same location."
Those three components are what continue to bring him through the ultimate loss.
"He's going to put God first in whatever he does, his family, then football. He has it in order," Shell said.
"I agree people should be impressed by him," Dungy-Proythess said of the respect she sees her brother garner around Indianapolis, around the NFL. "But they have no idea why they should be impressed. It's when you personally know him that you should be impressed."
Greene added: "You see Tony, and you realize the quality of the guy when there are distractions and distress. Panic never sets in. You would never hear it in his voice or see it in his demeanor. I think he got a lot of that from Chuck, but he probably brought a lot of that on his own, too."
"We have a journey to go down together and things to accomplish," concluded Reagor, one of Dungy's Colts congregants. "This is just starting."
(Chuck Finder can be reached at cfinder@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1724.)
By Chuck Finder, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
INDIANAPOLIS -- The inextinguishable, everlasting memory is not of a coach but of a man. A man at the pulpit. Tony Dungy seems so at home on such a platform. Because he is. When the Tampa Bay Buccaneers no longer required his services, he considered a career path in prison ministry. When a football card was fashioned in his coaching image, the inscription on the back spoke about how far greater to him than the pursuit of a Super Bowl was the quest for eternal life.
There he was Dec. 27, between the altar of the Idlewild Baptist Church in suburban Tampa, Fla., and the pews packed with his former Steelers teammates, players from his former Buccaneers and current Indianapolis Colts, along with team co-workers, friends, family, more. It was the most solemn, most heartrending occasion a parent could face, the funeral of his own child, the Dungys' oldest son, James, 18. And the father drew on his moment at the pulpit to preach.
He urged his 1,500 fellow mourners never to take family for granted. Hug your kids each chance you get. Spread your love, for you never know when it might be the last chance to express it.
He implored the players present -- among them Atlanta's Warrick Dunn, Denver's John Lynch, Tampa Bay's Derrick Brooks and Ronde Barber and Mike Alstott, Oakland's Warren Sapp, and the Colts who were part of a 200-member group that flew south from Indianapolis two days after Christmas -- to grab every opportunity to be exemplary men. Use your pulpit on NFL Sundays and your public ministry the rest of your days to spread a sense of manhood, fatherhood, brotherhood. If anything, be bolder in who you are.
The man once known as Mean Joe Greene nearly gasped.
"When Tony came up, when it was his time to talk at the service, he said, 'It's a pleasure for me to be here,' " recalled Greene, a former teammate and fellow assistant, a longtime friend, and this week something of a foe, with the Steelers -- for whom Greene is a special assistant -- playing against Dungy's Colts in the AFC divisional playoffs Sunday. "He said, 'Well, let me explain that under these circumstances.' Then he quoted from a scripture from the Bible, Saul, how he was running for his life and he took the opportunity to give glory to his Lord. And that was powerful. Powerful.
"But that also gave him a forum to tell everybody who was listening and everybody who plays in the National Football League that these guys are role models. The point he was making is that it's difficult for young men today to understand what manhood is. That they were getting mixed messages. The role models they should look up to is men. And I thought that was a great moment to tell that. A great message to everybody who is listening."
"The things he reminded us at the funeral -- character, being a role model ..." linebacker David Thornton said. "We were there to support him, but, in the end, he supported us."
"Inspirational?" Colts defensive tackle Montae Reagor continued. "It would probably be an understatement."
It's a family thing
Coach Dungy, as no less a light in the football firmament than Peyton Manning calls him, stood at a lectern yesterday in the Union Federal Football Center, the Colts' west-side training complex. He smiled. He joked.
How his Colts, his dutiful congregants, can square the man at the pulpit Dec. 27 with the coach standing before them daily is indeed puzzling to an outsider, to a disbeliever. Yet he is Coach, he is friend Tony, he is a man -- if not The Man -- to whom they abide, even more so, if that's possible, since the Florida funeral of James Dungy. His death, in the hours after their first defeat following a 13-0 start, was ruled a suicide. Loss? They've experienced that tenfold in a 14-2 season.
Perhaps above all, what Dungy instills in his football team is a feeling of family, a unity of spirit, be it religious or otherwise. James used to stand on the football-complex sidelines at practices and on the RCA Dome sidelines on game days. They felt such a kinship. Doris Harris -- the Sewickley woman who is mother to Tony Dungy's wife Lauren and grandmother to Tiara, Jade, Eric and Jordan Dungy -- described the players as "grieving and crying and feeling the loss themselves." Seventeen days later, as they embark on only the second second-round playoff in the franchise's 22 seasons in Indianapolis, Thornton said they are still mourning, still grieving.
"James is as much a part of our family as his family," Thornton said, purposefully speaking in the present tense. "He's in the back of our minds. We know this is a special season. We have J.D. on the back of our helmets to remember. And it's important to go out and play the caliber of football [Dungy] wants us to."
Dungy, 50, is a father in both respects of the word. A paternal leader whom Thornton talks about following anywhere. A religious figure commanding their attention, respect, hearts, minds. In no way does Dungy ask them to win for James, for the family, for him.
"To win one for the city of Indianapolis and our organization and [owner] Jim Irsay, that's what it's all about," he said. "Our team is very close, and these guys are close to me, and we shared some special moments. But that's not what the playoffs are all about. With my son's situation and our family, it puts it all into perspective. I always thought that the playoffs are great and the Super Bowl's great, but it's not the most important thing in the world."
"There's nothing that prepared our team for what happened to our coach and his family," Manning said. "That was a true life-changing event, a true tragedy."
Yet Dungy prodded them, preached to them, coached them at his worst of personal times. They contend that it raised their already high admiration and respect for the man who pointed them to a 48-16 record and three consecutive AFC South titles in his four Indianapolis seasons, the man who coaxed a 58-32 mark in his last five seasons with the heretofore woebegone Buccaneers, although he was fired in 2001 for perpetually failing to reach the Super Bowl that successor Jon Gruden attained the next season without coming close since. Just the same, there are no records kept for funerals, for life-altering days such as those after Christmas.
To other Colts, such as middle linebacker Gary Brackett, the quintessential moment came Dec. 28, the day after the funeral and four days before the Arizona regular-season finale, when Dungy returned to his team. The man walked through the complex door "with the same pep in his step as before, maybe even more," Brackett said. It's still there this week. "He really doesn't have to say anything. We can see it in his expression, how energized he is coming back to work."
"He did as a husband and a father would do: He was supportive to his wife and family. He felt the loss himself. He gave his proper time," said Harris, his mother-in-law. "He wouldn't let football get in the way of his obligations as a father, a husband and a man. But he knew he had to get himself back together for his team; he couldn't let his team down. They worked so hard getting to where they are now, he wouldn't desert them at this point."
Finding his faith and way
Before finding his faith anew in -- of all places -- Bonaventure Hall at St. Vincent College during Steelers training camp 1978, before venturing in whatever direction football would take him, Anthony Kevin Dungy was the son of academicians and the big brother in an athletic family from Jackson, Mich. Their father, Wilbur, was the first African-American professor at Jackson Community College and later taught physiology at Delta (Mich.) College. Their mother, Cleomae, taught high-school English for more than 30 years.
Eldest Sherrilyn became a nurse. Younger twins Lyndon and Lauren became a dentist and obstetrician. And skinny Tony ...
"I think Tony always liked basketball more," said Lauren Dungy-Poythress, who lives in Indianapolis close enough to her brother that their children often get together. "When Tony went to Minnesota, he was on the basketball team for a year; but it's my understanding that they sort of asked him not to play so he wouldn't hurt himself for football."
The star Golden Gophers quarterback wound up a free-agent safety with the Steelers, learning defense, learning how to tackle, learning everything. Yet, as Professor and Mrs. Dungy had ingrained in him, he was forever the student. Minnesota coaches gave him an office key of his own so he could study without them.
In 1977, he distinguished himself by becoming the emergency Steelers quarterback against Houston, establishing a dubious mark by both throwing and catching an interception in the same game. "We didn't win the game, but he probably kept us from getting slaughtered," Greene said. Before the next season, Dungy toiled so hard to prepare, he reported to Latrobe with mononucleosis. He sat there day after day with roommate Donnie Shell, who told him: "The Lord always has a plan for your life; maybe now it's to rest."
Dungy, whom Shell invited into a Bible Study group with Hall of Famer John Stallworth, linemen Jon Kolb and Larry Brown plus cornerback J.T. Thomas, relaxed and renewed his faith with zeal. Perhaps, it was no coincidence that he returned to health and topped the team in interceptions, his six outranking Hall of Famers Mel Blount and Jack Ham, even tying for second in the AFC that season. He won a Super Bowl ring with those Steelers. He earned enough cash that he gave to the twins his 1968 Buick LeSabre -- that Three Rivers Stadium security refused to allow entrance because they figured no pro would drive such a jalopy -- and bought himself a Thunderbird. Later, he gave that car to Lyndon and bought one for Lauren.
What drove Dungy? He played a season after being traded to San Francisco and was released the next year by the New York Giants, then returned at Chuck Noll's request to Pittsburgh in 1981 as the youngest NFL assistant back then, the club's new secondary coach at 25. He tutored such vets as Blount, Thomas and Shell. In 1984, he rose to defensive coordinator, again the NFL's youngest at 28.
"When we were roommates, he used to keep me awake studying film; I used to scream, 'Shut that projector off,' " remembered Shell, now the Carolina Panthers' player development director. "I'd say, 'What do you want to do, what do you want to be?' " 'A coach.' So I'd say, 'OK, you can keep that projector on.'
"As a coach, he never had a plan of defeat. He always put us in position to make plays. I loved it."
It was about that time Dungy met and fell in love with Lauren Harris, a teacher at her Quaker Valley High alma mater. The Rev. John Guest introduced him to Lauren after the young Steelers assistant gave a breakfast speech at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Sewickley.
"Actually, I was in the room most of the time because Lauren wasn't sure of him," said her mother. "You know, the reputation of football players. ... But she found out he was what he said he was: He was a Christian and a man who happened to be a football coach." Guest married them barely a year later. Doris Harris continued: "Tony has never changed, except to grow. He has grown stronger as a coach, stronger as a Christian, stronger as a father, man ... and son-in-law."
Faith, family, football, in that order. Those form the foundation of a coach who spent three seasons in Kansas City and four in Minnesota as Dennis Green's defensive coordinator before being entrusted a team of his own. Those three facets form the basis of the homilies he presents to his players, including the current and former Buccaneers who confided to Harris at the funeral that their teams' sense of family was never the same after they were separated from Dungy in 2001. He wound up not a prison minister, but the Colts' coach in Indianapolis, where his sister, the doctor, had moved six months earlier to start a new practice. Said she, "I think it was Divine Intervention, actually; it was a blessing that we ended up in the same location."
Those three components are what continue to bring him through the ultimate loss.
"He's going to put God first in whatever he does, his family, then football. He has it in order," Shell said.
"I agree people should be impressed by him," Dungy-Proythess said of the respect she sees her brother garner around Indianapolis, around the NFL. "But they have no idea why they should be impressed. It's when you personally know him that you should be impressed."
Greene added: "You see Tony, and you realize the quality of the guy when there are distractions and distress. Panic never sets in. You would never hear it in his voice or see it in his demeanor. I think he got a lot of that from Chuck, but he probably brought a lot of that on his own, too."
"We have a journey to go down together and things to accomplish," concluded Reagor, one of Dungy's Colts congregants. "This is just starting."
(Chuck Finder can be reached at cfinder@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1724.)
Charles Krauthammer: Terrorists Win in "Munich"
January 13, 2006
The Washington Post
Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- If Steven Spielberg had made a fictional movie about the psychological disintegration of a revenge assassin, that would have been fine. Instead, he decided to call this fiction "Munich'' and root it in a real historical event: the 1972 massacre by Palestinian terrorists of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Once you've done that -- evoked the actual killing of innocents who but for Palestinian murderers would today be not much older than Spielberg himself -- you have an obligation to get the story right.
The only true part of the story is the few minutes spent on the actual massacre. The rest is invention, as Spielberg delicately puts it in the opening credits, "inspired by real events.''
By real events? Rubbish. Inspired by Tony Kushner's belief (he co-wrote the screenplay) that the founding of Israel was a "historical, moral, political calamity'' for the Jewish people.
It is an axiom of filmmaking that you can only care about a character you know. In "Munich,'' the Israeli athletes are not only theatrical but historical extras, stick figures. Spielberg dutifully gives us their names -- Spielberg's List -- and nothing more: no history, no context, no relationships, nothing. They are there to die.
The Palestinians who plan the massacre and are hunted down by Israel are given -- with the concision of the gifted cinematic craftsman -- texture, humanity, depth, history. The first Palestinian we meet is the erudite poet giving a public reading, then acting kindly toward his Italian shopkeeper -- before he is brutally shot in cold blood by the Jews.
Then there is the elderly PLO man who dotes on his 7-year-old daughter before being blown to bits. Not one of these plotters is ever shown plotting Munich, or any other atrocity for that matter. They are shown in the full flower of their humanity, savagely extinguished by the Jews.
But the most shocking Israeli brutality involves the Dutch prostitute -- apolitical, beautiful, pathetic -- shot to death, naked, of course, by the now half-crazed Israelis settling private business. The Israeli way, I suppose.
Even more egregious than the manipulation by character is the propaganda by dialogue. The Palestinian case is made forthrightly: the Jews stole our land and we're going to kill any Israeli we can to get it back. Those who are supposedly making the Israeli case say ... the same thing. The hero's mother, the pitiless committed Zionist, says: We needed the refuge. We seized it. Whatever it takes to secure it. Then she ticks off members of their family lost in the Holocaust.
Spielberg makes the Holocaust the engine of Zionism, and its justification. Which, of course, is the Palestinian narrative. Indeed, it is the classic narrative for anti-Zionists, most recently the president of Iran, who says that Israel should be wiped off the map. And why not? If Israel is nothing more than Europe's guilt trip for the Holocaust, then why should Muslims have to suffer a Jewish state in their midst?
It takes a Hollywood ignoramus to give flesh to the argument of a radical anti-Semitic Iranian. Jewish history did not begin with Kristallnacht. The first Zionist Congress occurred in 1897. The Jews fought for and received recognition for the right to establish a "Jewish national home in Palestine'' from Britain in 1917 and from the League of Nations in 1922, two decades before the Holocaust.
But the Jewish claim is far more ancient. Israel was their ancestral home, site of the first two Jewish Commonwealths for a thousand years -- long before Arabs, long before Islam, long before the Holocaust. The Roman destructions of 70 A.D and 135 A.D. extinguished Jewish independence but never the Jewish claim and vow to return to their home. The Jews' miraculous return 2,000 years later was tragic because others had settled in the land and had a legitimate competing claim. Which is why the Jews have for three generations offered to partition the house. The Arab response in every generation has been rejection, war and terror.
And Munich. Munich, the massacre, had only modest success in launching the Palestinian cause with the blood of 11 Jews. "Munich,'' the movie, has now made that success complete 33 years later. "Munich'' now enjoys high cinematic production values and the imprimatur of Steven Spielberg, no less, carrying the original terrorists' intended message to every theater in the world.
This is hardly surprising, considering that "Munich's'' case for the moral bankruptcy of the Israeli cause -- not just the campaign to assassinate Munich's planners but the entire enterprise of Israel itself -- is so thorough that the movie concludes with the lead Mossad assassin, seared by his experience, abandoning Israel forever. Where does the hero resettle? In the only true home for the Jew of conscience, sensitivity and authenticity: Brooklyn.
© 2005, Washington Post Writers Group
The Washington Post
Charles Krauthammer
WASHINGTON -- If Steven Spielberg had made a fictional movie about the psychological disintegration of a revenge assassin, that would have been fine. Instead, he decided to call this fiction "Munich'' and root it in a real historical event: the 1972 massacre by Palestinian terrorists of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Once you've done that -- evoked the actual killing of innocents who but for Palestinian murderers would today be not much older than Spielberg himself -- you have an obligation to get the story right.
The only true part of the story is the few minutes spent on the actual massacre. The rest is invention, as Spielberg delicately puts it in the opening credits, "inspired by real events.''By real events? Rubbish. Inspired by Tony Kushner's belief (he co-wrote the screenplay) that the founding of Israel was a "historical, moral, political calamity'' for the Jewish people.
It is an axiom of filmmaking that you can only care about a character you know. In "Munich,'' the Israeli athletes are not only theatrical but historical extras, stick figures. Spielberg dutifully gives us their names -- Spielberg's List -- and nothing more: no history, no context, no relationships, nothing. They are there to die.
The Palestinians who plan the massacre and are hunted down by Israel are given -- with the concision of the gifted cinematic craftsman -- texture, humanity, depth, history. The first Palestinian we meet is the erudite poet giving a public reading, then acting kindly toward his Italian shopkeeper -- before he is brutally shot in cold blood by the Jews.
Then there is the elderly PLO man who dotes on his 7-year-old daughter before being blown to bits. Not one of these plotters is ever shown plotting Munich, or any other atrocity for that matter. They are shown in the full flower of their humanity, savagely extinguished by the Jews.
But the most shocking Israeli brutality involves the Dutch prostitute -- apolitical, beautiful, pathetic -- shot to death, naked, of course, by the now half-crazed Israelis settling private business. The Israeli way, I suppose.
Even more egregious than the manipulation by character is the propaganda by dialogue. The Palestinian case is made forthrightly: the Jews stole our land and we're going to kill any Israeli we can to get it back. Those who are supposedly making the Israeli case say ... the same thing. The hero's mother, the pitiless committed Zionist, says: We needed the refuge. We seized it. Whatever it takes to secure it. Then she ticks off members of their family lost in the Holocaust.
Spielberg makes the Holocaust the engine of Zionism, and its justification. Which, of course, is the Palestinian narrative. Indeed, it is the classic narrative for anti-Zionists, most recently the president of Iran, who says that Israel should be wiped off the map. And why not? If Israel is nothing more than Europe's guilt trip for the Holocaust, then why should Muslims have to suffer a Jewish state in their midst?
It takes a Hollywood ignoramus to give flesh to the argument of a radical anti-Semitic Iranian. Jewish history did not begin with Kristallnacht. The first Zionist Congress occurred in 1897. The Jews fought for and received recognition for the right to establish a "Jewish national home in Palestine'' from Britain in 1917 and from the League of Nations in 1922, two decades before the Holocaust.
But the Jewish claim is far more ancient. Israel was their ancestral home, site of the first two Jewish Commonwealths for a thousand years -- long before Arabs, long before Islam, long before the Holocaust. The Roman destructions of 70 A.D and 135 A.D. extinguished Jewish independence but never the Jewish claim and vow to return to their home. The Jews' miraculous return 2,000 years later was tragic because others had settled in the land and had a legitimate competing claim. Which is why the Jews have for three generations offered to partition the house. The Arab response in every generation has been rejection, war and terror.
And Munich. Munich, the massacre, had only modest success in launching the Palestinian cause with the blood of 11 Jews. "Munich,'' the movie, has now made that success complete 33 years later. "Munich'' now enjoys high cinematic production values and the imprimatur of Steven Spielberg, no less, carrying the original terrorists' intended message to every theater in the world.
This is hardly surprising, considering that "Munich's'' case for the moral bankruptcy of the Israeli cause -- not just the campaign to assassinate Munich's planners but the entire enterprise of Israel itself -- is so thorough that the movie concludes with the lead Mossad assassin, seared by his experience, abandoning Israel forever. Where does the hero resettle? In the only true home for the Jew of conscience, sensitivity and authenticity: Brooklyn.
© 2005, Washington Post Writers Group
Ann Coulter- Democrats: The Hook-Up Party
January 12, 2006
I'm not sure Sen. John Cornyn was helping with that lengthy presentation attempting to establish the many similarities between Samuel Alito and Sandra Day O'Connor.
It doesn't matter. Liberals are being routed. They can change the lineup, the manager, the coach, but the losing streak never ends. By and large, Republicans aren't even bothering to send in their A team anymore. Alito can start wearing his iPod to the hearings. By the end of the hearings, he'll be addressing the senators as "dude."
For fun, we ought to replace all the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee with "American Idol" contestants (assuming they wouldn't object to serving on a committee that includes a degenerate like Teddy Kennedy). Democrats would still not be able to persuade a single normal American that Sam Alito is "out of the mainstream."
With all their hysteria about Valerie Plame, I had nearly forgotten what the Democratic Party stands for. It's good to be reminded that the sole item on the Democrats' agenda is abortion.
According to Dianne Feinstein, Roe v. Wade is critically important because "women all over America have come to depend on it." At its most majestic, this precious right that women "have come to depend on" is the right to have sex with men they don't want to have children with.
There's a stirring principle! Leave aside the part of this precious constitutional right that involves (1) not allowing Americans to vote on the matter, and (2) suctioning brains out of half-born babies. The right to have sex with men you don't want to have children with is not exactly "Give me liberty, or give me death."
In the history of the nation, there has never been a political party so ridiculous as today's Democrats. It's as if all the brain-damaged people in America got together and formed a voting bloc.
The Federalists drafted the greatest political philosophy ever written by man and created the first constitutional republic. The anti-Federalists -- or "pre-Democrats, as I call them -- were formed to oppose the Constitution, which, to a great extent, remains their position today.
Andrew Jackson, the father of the Democratic Party, may have had some unpalatable goals, but at least they were big ideas. Wipe out the Indians, kill off the national bank and institute a spoils system. Love him or hate him, he never said, "I'll be announcing my platform sometime early next year." The Whigs were formed in opposition to everything Jackson stood for.
The Republican Party emerged from the Whigs when the Whigs waffled on slavery. (They were "pro-choice" on slavery.) The Republican Party was founded expressly as the anti-slavery party, which to a great extent remains their position today.
Having won that one, today's Republican Party stands for life, limited government and national defense. And today's Democratic Party stands for ... the right of women to have unprotected sex with men they don't especially like. We're the Blacks-Aren't-Property/Don't-Kill-Babies party.
They're the Hook-Up party.
Leave aside any moral questions about baby-killing -- a term I have come to understand the baby-killing party dislikes. Smoking is fun too, but even I wouldn't support a political party whose sole raison d'etre was to eliminate non-smoking sections across the nation. That's not exactly the Magna Carta.
This week's conventional wisdom is that the Democrats weren't even trying to nail Alito at the confirmation hearings. Au contraire! The Democrats were tigers! They proved exactly what they set out to prove.
In fact, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-Hillary's state, was so deft in his questioning, he even has me convinced that Alito is going to vote to overrule Roe v. Wade. (And just when I thought I couldn't be more enthusiastic about the nomination!)
I'll go out on a limb and bet that, after the Democrats' expert cross-examination, Judge Alito has lost the support of every single member of NARAL.
The problem for the Democrats is: NARAL members aren't like most people. "Give me liberty or give me the right to have unprotected sex with men I don't want to have a child with" just isn't that attractive a principle in the light of day.
Copyright 2005 Ann Coulter
Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate
I'm not sure Sen. John Cornyn was helping with that lengthy presentation attempting to establish the many similarities between Samuel Alito and Sandra Day O'Connor.
It doesn't matter. Liberals are being routed. They can change the lineup, the manager, the coach, but the losing streak never ends. By and large, Republicans aren't even bothering to send in their A team anymore. Alito can start wearing his iPod to the hearings. By the end of the hearings, he'll be addressing the senators as "dude."
For fun, we ought to replace all the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee with "American Idol" contestants (assuming they wouldn't object to serving on a committee that includes a degenerate like Teddy Kennedy). Democrats would still not be able to persuade a single normal American that Sam Alito is "out of the mainstream."
With all their hysteria about Valerie Plame, I had nearly forgotten what the Democratic Party stands for. It's good to be reminded that the sole item on the Democrats' agenda is abortion.
According to Dianne Feinstein, Roe v. Wade is critically important because "women all over America have come to depend on it." At its most majestic, this precious right that women "have come to depend on" is the right to have sex with men they don't want to have children with.
There's a stirring principle! Leave aside the part of this precious constitutional right that involves (1) not allowing Americans to vote on the matter, and (2) suctioning brains out of half-born babies. The right to have sex with men you don't want to have children with is not exactly "Give me liberty, or give me death."
In the history of the nation, there has never been a political party so ridiculous as today's Democrats. It's as if all the brain-damaged people in America got together and formed a voting bloc.
The Federalists drafted the greatest political philosophy ever written by man and created the first constitutional republic. The anti-Federalists -- or "pre-Democrats, as I call them -- were formed to oppose the Constitution, which, to a great extent, remains their position today.
Andrew Jackson, the father of the Democratic Party, may have had some unpalatable goals, but at least they were big ideas. Wipe out the Indians, kill off the national bank and institute a spoils system. Love him or hate him, he never said, "I'll be announcing my platform sometime early next year." The Whigs were formed in opposition to everything Jackson stood for.
The Republican Party emerged from the Whigs when the Whigs waffled on slavery. (They were "pro-choice" on slavery.) The Republican Party was founded expressly as the anti-slavery party, which to a great extent remains their position today.
Having won that one, today's Republican Party stands for life, limited government and national defense. And today's Democratic Party stands for ... the right of women to have unprotected sex with men they don't especially like. We're the Blacks-Aren't-Property/Don't-Kill-Babies party.
They're the Hook-Up party.
Leave aside any moral questions about baby-killing -- a term I have come to understand the baby-killing party dislikes. Smoking is fun too, but even I wouldn't support a political party whose sole raison d'etre was to eliminate non-smoking sections across the nation. That's not exactly the Magna Carta.
This week's conventional wisdom is that the Democrats weren't even trying to nail Alito at the confirmation hearings. Au contraire! The Democrats were tigers! They proved exactly what they set out to prove.
In fact, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-Hillary's state, was so deft in his questioning, he even has me convinced that Alito is going to vote to overrule Roe v. Wade. (And just when I thought I couldn't be more enthusiastic about the nomination!)
I'll go out on a limb and bet that, after the Democrats' expert cross-examination, Judge Alito has lost the support of every single member of NARAL.
The problem for the Democrats is: NARAL members aren't like most people. "Give me liberty or give me the right to have unprotected sex with men I don't want to have a child with" just isn't that attractive a principle in the light of day.
Copyright 2005 Ann Coulter
Distributed by Universal Press Syndicate
Thursday, January 12, 2006
Robert Spencer: The Economist's Surrender
The Economist's Surrender
By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com
January 12, 2006
Several weeks ago I wrote about how some cartoons of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper became an international incident. At stake is much more than some cartoons; this matter has become a test case for the continued viability of freedom of speech in Western countries. And now The Economist has written about the story in a way that reveals the biases and false assumptions so prevalent in the public discourse today.
As Islamic terrorism and jihad violence spread all over the globe, The Economist has doggedly maintained its tone of blame-the-West-first dhimmitude. Instead of seeing the cartoon controversy as another threat to freedom of speech in the West, it places the onus all on Danish racism and xenophobia. The spin starts in the lead sentence: “For much of last year, various squabbles have simmered over several prominent Danes' rude comments about Islam.”
Imagine you are a writer for The Economist, sitting down to write your story about the cartoon controversy. What is this story about? You could start it with a reference to the Van Gogh murder and the chill on free speech about Islam in Europe. Or you could refer to one of the many anti-Christian broadsides lauded in European art museums and on its airwaves, and the stout defenses of freedom of speech that the likes of The Economist published in the face of any Christian protest. You could refer to the menacing rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, and to increasing intimidation by Islamic thugs.
Or you could cast the whole thing all as being about "rude comments about Islam." Yes, of course! That's it! How could non-Western non-Christians, largely non-white, be anything but victims!
And so The Economist story got its proper lead. Then it follows with this: “Now a schoolboy prank...” Oh, so that's what it was. Not a trial balloon to see if free speech still existed in Europe. Not an attempt to defend it against attack. Just a schoolboy prank. Those idiotic schoolboys at Jyllands-Posten! Don't they realize they're playing with fire? “Now a schoolboy prank by a newspaper has landed the prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, in the biggest diplomatic dispute of his tenure in office.”
True, but it also showed him, at least initially, to be one of the few European statesmen with a clear understanding just how deep and serious was the cultural challenge presented by the cartoon protests and other instances of Muslim indignation. But as far as The Economist is concerned, all that matters here is that a schoolboy prank ended up embarrassing the Prime Minister.
The Danish paper that printed the cartoons should evidently be embarrassed too: “The paper insists that it meant no offence: it was merely protesting against the self-censorship of some cartoonists who had refused to illustrate a children's book about Muhammad for fear of reprisals.” Using the word "insist" implies a defensiveness: in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, the paper insists...In other words, The Economist is fairly sure that the paper was up to some racist no-good. But its journalistic integrity requires it to note that they "insist" the contrary. The Economist story continues:
Louise Arbour, the United Nations human-rights commissioner, said she was "alarmed" by such an "unacceptable disregard for the beliefs of others". Similar condemnations came from the European Commission, the Council of Europe and the Arab League. The affair has led to protest marches in Copenhagen and Karachi, and a wave of disapproving e-mails to Danish embassies. The cartoons were even condemned by many in Denmark's liberal-minded intelligentsia, not because they favour censorship but because they see the drawings as part of an increasingly xenophobic tone that has infected all Danish dealings with foreigners.
Do you consider yourself liberal-minded? Like to think of yourself as part of the intelligentsia, or at least in tune with what the knowing people know? Then you better pile on and condemn these cartoons, along with all the right-thinking folks and forward-looking institutions.
The Economist makes sure you know that Denmark is not right-thinking: “In a country where a member of parliament can liken Muslims to "cancer tumours" and still not lose her seat, unfettered public debate is seen as normal.” Ah, see, Denmark is just sort of unhinged, you see. They have mad members of Parliament and schoolboy pranksters running newspapers. Really, they need to rein themselves in a little. “Danes, like most people, cherish their freedom of speech. But their secular society may have blinded them to some people's religious sensitivities. Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, a former foreign minister, laments his country's lack of manners.” Is that what it was – lack of manners? Well, no one wants to be unmannerly. Danish secularism has gotten out of hand, you see, that's all. The Danes just have to recover their manners. Did The Economist pontificate about manners and religious sensitivities during the Piss Christ controversy? Somehow I rather think it didn't.
Ellemann-Jensen says: "We have a right to speak our minds, not an obligation to do so," he says. What on earth does that mean? We are not forced to say what we think? There are circumstances in which speaking our minds is not called for? That is true on an individual level. But if on a society-wide basis the Danes are prevented from saying what they think for fear of reprisal or even of giving offense to some group, then they no longer actually have the right to speak their minds.
Even worse is what The Economist does to the Danish Prime Minister:
“Mr Fogh Rasmussen has tried to defuse the row mostly by ignoring it. After he had rejected a request for a meeting with 11 ambassadors from Islamic countries to Copenhagen, he was lashed by 22 former Danish ambassadors to the Muslim world, who deplored his ignorance of diplomatic niceties. After several more weeks of dithering, the prime minister at last tackled the matter in his new year's speech, condemning any attempts ‘to demonise groups of people on the basis of their religion or ethnic background’. But although he alluded to ‘a few unacceptably offensive’ instances, he did not mention Jyllands-Posten by name. And he also insisted that the general tone of the Danish debate was ‘civilised and fair’.”
How viciously unfair to Rasmussen. In fact, he didn't ignore the problem or dither. He stood up stoutly for freedom of speech, saying: "This is a matter of principle. I won’t meet with them because it is so crystal clear what principles Danish democracy is built upon that there is no reason to do so.” He added: “I will never accept that respect for a religious stance leads to the curtailment of criticism, humour and satire in the press.” The matter, he said, was beyond his authority: “As prime minister I have no tool whatsoever to take actions against the media and I don’t want that kind of tool.”
The Economist just happened not to notice that he said all that? Or did it all just not fit their paradigm? They were, after all, much more concerned with the Muslims whose feelings were hurt by the cartoons: “For many Muslims, this is too little, too late….In a sign that the row may have some time still to run, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, a 57-strong group of countries, has also announced a boycott of "Images of the Middle East", an exhibition due to be held in Denmark this summer. What should have been a celebration of Denmark's cultural links with the Islamic world now looks like falling victim to Danish free speech.”
Not "falling victim to Islamic intransigence and inability to accept the parameters of a free society."
And so the readers of The Economist, and most Westerners in general who get their news solely from such sources, continue on blissfully ignorant of just how severely threatened their free societies really are.
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.
By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com
January 12, 2006
Several weeks ago I wrote about how some cartoons of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper became an international incident. At stake is much more than some cartoons; this matter has become a test case for the continued viability of freedom of speech in Western countries. And now The Economist has written about the story in a way that reveals the biases and false assumptions so prevalent in the public discourse today.
As Islamic terrorism and jihad violence spread all over the globe, The Economist has doggedly maintained its tone of blame-the-West-first dhimmitude. Instead of seeing the cartoon controversy as another threat to freedom of speech in the West, it places the onus all on Danish racism and xenophobia. The spin starts in the lead sentence: “For much of last year, various squabbles have simmered over several prominent Danes' rude comments about Islam.”
Imagine you are a writer for The Economist, sitting down to write your story about the cartoon controversy. What is this story about? You could start it with a reference to the Van Gogh murder and the chill on free speech about Islam in Europe. Or you could refer to one of the many anti-Christian broadsides lauded in European art museums and on its airwaves, and the stout defenses of freedom of speech that the likes of The Economist published in the face of any Christian protest. You could refer to the menacing rise of anti-Semitism in Europe, and to increasing intimidation by Islamic thugs.
Or you could cast the whole thing all as being about "rude comments about Islam." Yes, of course! That's it! How could non-Western non-Christians, largely non-white, be anything but victims!
And so The Economist story got its proper lead. Then it follows with this: “Now a schoolboy prank...” Oh, so that's what it was. Not a trial balloon to see if free speech still existed in Europe. Not an attempt to defend it against attack. Just a schoolboy prank. Those idiotic schoolboys at Jyllands-Posten! Don't they realize they're playing with fire? “Now a schoolboy prank by a newspaper has landed the prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, in the biggest diplomatic dispute of his tenure in office.”
True, but it also showed him, at least initially, to be one of the few European statesmen with a clear understanding just how deep and serious was the cultural challenge presented by the cartoon protests and other instances of Muslim indignation. But as far as The Economist is concerned, all that matters here is that a schoolboy prank ended up embarrassing the Prime Minister.
The Danish paper that printed the cartoons should evidently be embarrassed too: “The paper insists that it meant no offence: it was merely protesting against the self-censorship of some cartoonists who had refused to illustrate a children's book about Muhammad for fear of reprisals.” Using the word "insist" implies a defensiveness: in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, the paper insists...In other words, The Economist is fairly sure that the paper was up to some racist no-good. But its journalistic integrity requires it to note that they "insist" the contrary. The Economist story continues:
Louise Arbour, the United Nations human-rights commissioner, said she was "alarmed" by such an "unacceptable disregard for the beliefs of others". Similar condemnations came from the European Commission, the Council of Europe and the Arab League. The affair has led to protest marches in Copenhagen and Karachi, and a wave of disapproving e-mails to Danish embassies. The cartoons were even condemned by many in Denmark's liberal-minded intelligentsia, not because they favour censorship but because they see the drawings as part of an increasingly xenophobic tone that has infected all Danish dealings with foreigners.
Do you consider yourself liberal-minded? Like to think of yourself as part of the intelligentsia, or at least in tune with what the knowing people know? Then you better pile on and condemn these cartoons, along with all the right-thinking folks and forward-looking institutions.
The Economist makes sure you know that Denmark is not right-thinking: “In a country where a member of parliament can liken Muslims to "cancer tumours" and still not lose her seat, unfettered public debate is seen as normal.” Ah, see, Denmark is just sort of unhinged, you see. They have mad members of Parliament and schoolboy pranksters running newspapers. Really, they need to rein themselves in a little. “Danes, like most people, cherish their freedom of speech. But their secular society may have blinded them to some people's religious sensitivities. Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, a former foreign minister, laments his country's lack of manners.” Is that what it was – lack of manners? Well, no one wants to be unmannerly. Danish secularism has gotten out of hand, you see, that's all. The Danes just have to recover their manners. Did The Economist pontificate about manners and religious sensitivities during the Piss Christ controversy? Somehow I rather think it didn't.
Ellemann-Jensen says: "We have a right to speak our minds, not an obligation to do so," he says. What on earth does that mean? We are not forced to say what we think? There are circumstances in which speaking our minds is not called for? That is true on an individual level. But if on a society-wide basis the Danes are prevented from saying what they think for fear of reprisal or even of giving offense to some group, then they no longer actually have the right to speak their minds.
Even worse is what The Economist does to the Danish Prime Minister:
“Mr Fogh Rasmussen has tried to defuse the row mostly by ignoring it. After he had rejected a request for a meeting with 11 ambassadors from Islamic countries to Copenhagen, he was lashed by 22 former Danish ambassadors to the Muslim world, who deplored his ignorance of diplomatic niceties. After several more weeks of dithering, the prime minister at last tackled the matter in his new year's speech, condemning any attempts ‘to demonise groups of people on the basis of their religion or ethnic background’. But although he alluded to ‘a few unacceptably offensive’ instances, he did not mention Jyllands-Posten by name. And he also insisted that the general tone of the Danish debate was ‘civilised and fair’.”
How viciously unfair to Rasmussen. In fact, he didn't ignore the problem or dither. He stood up stoutly for freedom of speech, saying: "This is a matter of principle. I won’t meet with them because it is so crystal clear what principles Danish democracy is built upon that there is no reason to do so.” He added: “I will never accept that respect for a religious stance leads to the curtailment of criticism, humour and satire in the press.” The matter, he said, was beyond his authority: “As prime minister I have no tool whatsoever to take actions against the media and I don’t want that kind of tool.”
The Economist just happened not to notice that he said all that? Or did it all just not fit their paradigm? They were, after all, much more concerned with the Muslims whose feelings were hurt by the cartoons: “For many Muslims, this is too little, too late….In a sign that the row may have some time still to run, the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, a 57-strong group of countries, has also announced a boycott of "Images of the Middle East", an exhibition due to be held in Denmark this summer. What should have been a celebration of Denmark's cultural links with the Islamic world now looks like falling victim to Danish free speech.”
Not "falling victim to Islamic intransigence and inability to accept the parameters of a free society."
And so the readers of The Economist, and most Westerners in general who get their news solely from such sources, continue on blissfully ignorant of just how severely threatened their free societies really are.
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.
Daniel Pipes: Ahmadinejad's Mission and Mysticism
January 12, 2006
Thanks to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, a new word has entered the political vocabulary: mahdaviat.
Not surprisingly, it's a technical religious term. Mahdaviat derives from mahdi, Arabic for "rightly-guided one," a major figure in Islamic eschatology. He is, explains the Encyclopedia of Islam, "the restorer of religion and justice who will rule before the end of the world."
The concept originated in the earliest years of Islam and, over time, became particularly identified with the Shi'ite branch. Whereas "it never became an essential part of Sunni religious doctrine," continues the encyclopedia, "Belief in the coming of the Mahdi of the Family of the Prophet became a central aspect of the faith in radical Shi'ism," where it is also known as the return of the Twelfth Imam.
Mahdaviat means "belief in and efforts to prepare for the Mahdi."
In a fine piece of reporting, Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor shows the centrality of mahdaviat in Ahmadinejad's outlook and explores its implications for his policies.
When he was still mayor of Teheran in 2004, for example, Ahmadinejad appears to have secretly instructed the city council to build a grand avenue to prepare for the Mahdi. A year later, as president, he allocated $17 million for a bluetiled mosque closely associated with mahdaviat in Jamkaran, south of the capital. He has instigated the building of a direct Teheran-Jamkaran railroad line. He had a list of his proposed cabinet members dropped into a well adjacent to the Jamkaran mosque, it is said, to benefit from its purported divine connection.
He often raises the topic, and not just to Muslims. When addressing the United Nations in September, Ahmadinejad flummoxed his audience of world political leaders by concluding his address with a prayer for the Mahdi's appearance: "O mighty Lord, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last repository, the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace."
On returning to Iran from New York, Ahmadinejad recalled the effect of his UN speech:
One of our group told me that when I started to say "In the name of God the almighty and merciful," he saw a light around me, and I was placed inside this aura. I felt it myself. I felt the atmosphere suddenly change, and for those 27 or 28 minutes, the leaders of the world did not blink... And they were rapt. It seemed as if a hand was holding them there and had opened their eyes to receive the message from the Islamic republic.
WHAT PETERSON calls the "presidential obsession" with mahdaviat leads Ahmadinejad to "a certitude that leaves little room for compromise. From redressing the gulf between rich and poor in Iran to challenging the United States and Israel and enhancing Iran's power with nuclear programs, every issue is designed to lay the foundation for the Mahdi's return."
"Mahdaviat is a code for [Iran's Islamic] revolution, and is the spirit of the revolution," says the head of an institute dedicated to studying and speeding the Mahdi's appearance. "This kind of mentality makes you very strong," observes the political editor of Resalat newspaper, Amir Mohebian. "If I think the Mahdi will come in two, three, or four years, why should I be soft? Now is the time to stand strong, to be hard."
Some Iranians, reports PBS, "worry that their new president has no fear of international turmoil, may think it's just a sign from God."
Mahdaviat has direct and ominous implications for the US-Iran confrontation, says an Ahmadinejad supporter, Hamidreza Taraghi of Iran's hard-line Islamic Coalition Society. It implies seeing Washington as the rival to Teheran, and even as a false Mahdi.
For Ahmadinejad, the top priority is to challenge America, and specifically to create a powerful model state based on "Islamic democracy" by which to oppose it. Taraghi predicts trouble ahead unless Americans fundamentally change their ways.
I'd reverse that formulation. The most dangerous leaders in modern history are those (like Hitler) equipped with a totalitarian ideology and a mystical belief in their own mission. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fulfills both these criteria, as revealed by his UN comments. That combined with his expected nuclear arsenal make him an adversary who must be stopped, and urgently.
Mr. Pipes (http://www.danielpipes.org/) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).
Thanks to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, a new word has entered the political vocabulary: mahdaviat.
Not surprisingly, it's a technical religious term. Mahdaviat derives from mahdi, Arabic for "rightly-guided one," a major figure in Islamic eschatology. He is, explains the Encyclopedia of Islam, "the restorer of religion and justice who will rule before the end of the world."
The concept originated in the earliest years of Islam and, over time, became particularly identified with the Shi'ite branch. Whereas "it never became an essential part of Sunni religious doctrine," continues the encyclopedia, "Belief in the coming of the Mahdi of the Family of the Prophet became a central aspect of the faith in radical Shi'ism," where it is also known as the return of the Twelfth Imam.
Mahdaviat means "belief in and efforts to prepare for the Mahdi."
In a fine piece of reporting, Scott Peterson of the Christian Science Monitor shows the centrality of mahdaviat in Ahmadinejad's outlook and explores its implications for his policies.
When he was still mayor of Teheran in 2004, for example, Ahmadinejad appears to have secretly instructed the city council to build a grand avenue to prepare for the Mahdi. A year later, as president, he allocated $17 million for a bluetiled mosque closely associated with mahdaviat in Jamkaran, south of the capital. He has instigated the building of a direct Teheran-Jamkaran railroad line. He had a list of his proposed cabinet members dropped into a well adjacent to the Jamkaran mosque, it is said, to benefit from its purported divine connection.
He often raises the topic, and not just to Muslims. When addressing the United Nations in September, Ahmadinejad flummoxed his audience of world political leaders by concluding his address with a prayer for the Mahdi's appearance: "O mighty Lord, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last repository, the Promised One, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace."
On returning to Iran from New York, Ahmadinejad recalled the effect of his UN speech:
One of our group told me that when I started to say "In the name of God the almighty and merciful," he saw a light around me, and I was placed inside this aura. I felt it myself. I felt the atmosphere suddenly change, and for those 27 or 28 minutes, the leaders of the world did not blink... And they were rapt. It seemed as if a hand was holding them there and had opened their eyes to receive the message from the Islamic republic.
WHAT PETERSON calls the "presidential obsession" with mahdaviat leads Ahmadinejad to "a certitude that leaves little room for compromise. From redressing the gulf between rich and poor in Iran to challenging the United States and Israel and enhancing Iran's power with nuclear programs, every issue is designed to lay the foundation for the Mahdi's return."
"Mahdaviat is a code for [Iran's Islamic] revolution, and is the spirit of the revolution," says the head of an institute dedicated to studying and speeding the Mahdi's appearance. "This kind of mentality makes you very strong," observes the political editor of Resalat newspaper, Amir Mohebian. "If I think the Mahdi will come in two, three, or four years, why should I be soft? Now is the time to stand strong, to be hard."
Some Iranians, reports PBS, "worry that their new president has no fear of international turmoil, may think it's just a sign from God."
Mahdaviat has direct and ominous implications for the US-Iran confrontation, says an Ahmadinejad supporter, Hamidreza Taraghi of Iran's hard-line Islamic Coalition Society. It implies seeing Washington as the rival to Teheran, and even as a false Mahdi.
For Ahmadinejad, the top priority is to challenge America, and specifically to create a powerful model state based on "Islamic democracy" by which to oppose it. Taraghi predicts trouble ahead unless Americans fundamentally change their ways.
I'd reverse that formulation. The most dangerous leaders in modern history are those (like Hitler) equipped with a totalitarian ideology and a mystical belief in their own mission. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad fulfills both these criteria, as revealed by his UN comments. That combined with his expected nuclear arsenal make him an adversary who must be stopped, and urgently.
Mr. Pipes (http://www.danielpipes.org/) is director of the Middle East Forum and author of Miniatures (Transaction Publishers).
Thomas Sowell- Education: Then and Now
January 12, 2006
Thomas Sowell
Recent news that school children in Charlotte, North Carolina, had the highest test scores among children in big cities across the country had a special impact on me. Back in the late 1930s, I went to school in Charlotte and, while I don't know what the test scores were then, I do know that we were far behind the children going to school in New York.
That became painfully clear when my family moved north and I enrolled in a school in Harlem in 1939. From being the top student in my class down in North Carolina I was suddenly the bottom student in my class in Harlem -- and struggling to try to catch up.
Decades later, my research turned up the fact that the kids I couldn't keep up with in that school back then had an average IQ of 84. Contrary to fashionable beliefs, it was not the racial segregation that made the education inferior in Charlotte, since the school in Harlem was also a black school.
It was common in those days for a kid from the South to be set back a full year when he entered school in New York. The difference in educational standards was that great.
I had somehow persuaded the principal to let me be an exception. It was a mistake on his part and mine. I was clearly a year behind the kids who had gone to school in Harlem.
Three years later, I had caught up and pulled ahead, and was now assigned to a class for advanced students, where the average IQ was over 120.
That does not mean that IQs don't matter. It means that I had a lot of work to do to get my act together in the meantime, in order to overcome the disadvantage of an inferior education in North Carolina.
Fast forward a few more years. I am now in the Marine Corps, going through boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina. When the mental test results from my platoon were tabulated, the man in charge expressed amazement at how many high scores there were.
"Where are you guys from?" he asked. "New York? Pennsylvania?"
We were from New York -- and the high quality of our schools at that time was undoubtedly a factor in the high test scores we made.
No one in those days would have thought that Charlotte schools would end up turning out better educated students than the schools in New York. I don't know what has happened in Charlotte but I do know what has happened in New York.
Some years ago, when I looked at the math textbooks that my nieces in Harlem were using, I discovered that they were being taught in the 11th grade what I had been taught in the 9th grade. Even if they were the best students around, they would still be two years behind -- with their chances in life correspondingly reduced.
New York City has two kinds of high school diplomas -- its own locally recognized diploma, that is not recognized by the state or by many colleges, and the state's Regents' diploma for high school graduates who have scored above a given level on the Regents' exam.
The Regents diploma is for students who are serious about going on to a good college. Only 9 percent of black students and 10 percent of Latino students receive Regents diplomas.
That a Southern city's school children would now top the list of big city test scores may be due to the fact that the South has not jumped on the bandwagon of the latest fads in education to the same extent as avant garde places like New York City, where spending per pupil is about 50 percent above the national average.
These fads now include the dogma that racial "diversity" improves education, as does emphasis on racial "identity." In reality, a recent study shows that black students who perform well in racially integrated schools are unpopular with their black classmates. They are accused of "acting white," a charge that can bring anything from ostracism to outright violence.
The same is not true to the same extent among blacks attending all-black schools. Hispanic students' popularity likewise falls off sharply -- even more so than among blacks -- as their grade-point average rises.
Is it surprising that white and Asian American children do better without these self-inflicted handicaps to academic achievement? Is it surprising that New York City schools are now paying the price for avant garde educational dogmas?
Copyright 2005 Creators Syndicate
Thomas Sowell
Recent news that school children in Charlotte, North Carolina, had the highest test scores among children in big cities across the country had a special impact on me. Back in the late 1930s, I went to school in Charlotte and, while I don't know what the test scores were then, I do know that we were far behind the children going to school in New York.
That became painfully clear when my family moved north and I enrolled in a school in Harlem in 1939. From being the top student in my class down in North Carolina I was suddenly the bottom student in my class in Harlem -- and struggling to try to catch up.
Decades later, my research turned up the fact that the kids I couldn't keep up with in that school back then had an average IQ of 84. Contrary to fashionable beliefs, it was not the racial segregation that made the education inferior in Charlotte, since the school in Harlem was also a black school.
It was common in those days for a kid from the South to be set back a full year when he entered school in New York. The difference in educational standards was that great.
I had somehow persuaded the principal to let me be an exception. It was a mistake on his part and mine. I was clearly a year behind the kids who had gone to school in Harlem.
Three years later, I had caught up and pulled ahead, and was now assigned to a class for advanced students, where the average IQ was over 120.
That does not mean that IQs don't matter. It means that I had a lot of work to do to get my act together in the meantime, in order to overcome the disadvantage of an inferior education in North Carolina.
Fast forward a few more years. I am now in the Marine Corps, going through boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina. When the mental test results from my platoon were tabulated, the man in charge expressed amazement at how many high scores there were.
"Where are you guys from?" he asked. "New York? Pennsylvania?"
We were from New York -- and the high quality of our schools at that time was undoubtedly a factor in the high test scores we made.
No one in those days would have thought that Charlotte schools would end up turning out better educated students than the schools in New York. I don't know what has happened in Charlotte but I do know what has happened in New York.
Some years ago, when I looked at the math textbooks that my nieces in Harlem were using, I discovered that they were being taught in the 11th grade what I had been taught in the 9th grade. Even if they were the best students around, they would still be two years behind -- with their chances in life correspondingly reduced.
New York City has two kinds of high school diplomas -- its own locally recognized diploma, that is not recognized by the state or by many colleges, and the state's Regents' diploma for high school graduates who have scored above a given level on the Regents' exam.
The Regents diploma is for students who are serious about going on to a good college. Only 9 percent of black students and 10 percent of Latino students receive Regents diplomas.
That a Southern city's school children would now top the list of big city test scores may be due to the fact that the South has not jumped on the bandwagon of the latest fads in education to the same extent as avant garde places like New York City, where spending per pupil is about 50 percent above the national average.
These fads now include the dogma that racial "diversity" improves education, as does emphasis on racial "identity." In reality, a recent study shows that black students who perform well in racially integrated schools are unpopular with their black classmates. They are accused of "acting white," a charge that can bring anything from ostracism to outright violence.
The same is not true to the same extent among blacks attending all-black schools. Hispanic students' popularity likewise falls off sharply -- even more so than among blacks -- as their grade-point average rises.
Is it surprising that white and Asian American children do better without these self-inflicted handicaps to academic achievement? Is it surprising that New York City schools are now paying the price for avant garde educational dogmas?
Copyright 2005 Creators Syndicate
John Keegan: We should be very worried about Iran
The Daily Telegraph
(Filed: 12/01/2006)
I supported the Iraq war as, with reservations, I still do. Its opponents have a great deal of self-justification to do, all the more as the details of Saddam Hussein's iniquities unfold in the Baghdad courtroom where he is being tried.
A true Machiavellian would use the trial to argue, however, that the West's mistake was to make an enemy of Saddam when he could have been a useful ally. Indeed, during the 1980s, when he was fighting a war almost to the death against Iran, he was a useful ally. How useful, at this time when Iran has blatantly announced its resumption of its nuclear weapons programme, is becoming apparent.
Saddam merely pretended to have weapons of mass destruction, largely to feed his own fantasies of power. Iran is actually turning itself into a nuclear weapons state, a fact disputed by none of the players on the international scene. Iran, moreover, does not seek such weapons for psychological reasons. It wants them for practical purposes, including, according to a statement by its new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former revolutionary guard, to "wipe Israel from the map". Islamic extremists are, of course, given to blood-curdling rhetoric. Nevertheless, Iran's record must cause not only the West but all Iran's neighbours to take the threat seriously.
Fortunately, Iran's opponents still have a little time in hand. It has not yet developed a nuclear weapon. At present, it is proceeding with the necessary preliminaries, particularly the enrichment of nuclear fuels to weapons grade. Nevertheless, informed opinion is that, within three years, Iran will have acquired a nuclear capability, a prospect undesirable and terrifying in the extreme. How can Teheran be stopped?
The current policy of the United States, and the EU3 group, Britain, France and Germany, is to report Iran to the Security Council, through the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN agency responsible for enforcing the provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Yet neither the IAEA nor the Security Council has the power to enforce the NPT. That depends on the will and capability of UN member states. It demonstrates the weakness of the Security Council that the failure so far to report Iran is due to an international reluctance to offend Russia, which is Iran's most important international supporter. It is necessary to abandon such hesitation very promptly. Diplomatic sensitivity is a minor consideration when the aggressive tendencies of Iran's ayatollahs are driving its nuclear policies.
The pressing question is, indeed, what is to be done when a report to the Security Council fails to bring Iran to desist from nuclear enrichment? Economic and other sanctions are widely cited as a means to restrain Iran; and it is certainly true that the interruption of trade and the supply of technical equipment would cause its government serious inconvenience.
It is much more doubtful whether sanctions would make Iran change its policy. The ayatollahs do not suppose they are popular abroad, nor do they much care. Sanctions would interfere with the Western lifestyle of Iran's educated young people. The ayatollahs, however, have little interest in supporting that lifestyle, indeed, rather the opposite, while Iran's educated youth have given heavy proofs that their national pride weighs heavier than their access to Western luxuries.
America and the EU3 must therefore consider other, harsher methods to restrain Iran. The fact that the United States at present deploys a large army in Iraq is a factor that must give the ayatollahs pause. To stage a second war in the Middle East would not be a desirable initiative at present for America and would certainly be highly unpopular at home and among its allies.
Moreover, Iran, as the possessor of the second largest oil reserves in the world and occupier of a strategic position athwart the sea routes delivering oil to most of the consuming world, has its own means of retaliation ready to hand.
Which brings us, as always in the geopolitics of the Middle East, to Israel. Israel makes no attempt to conceal that it has considered and undoubtedly is now considering its ability to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities by military action. However, what it did easily against Iraq in 1981 is much more difficult against Iran. For one thing, its current domestic politics may rob it of the necessary power of decision. For another, Iran's nuclear installations are much farther away than Iraq's were when Israel destroyed the Osirak reactor.
Nevertheless, the West cannot simply let things drift. Military action by whatever agency cannot be written out, but will be a last resort. In the meantime, all means short of military action, including economic and political ostracism and economic sanctions, must be tried, together with the building of alternative oil pipelines to bypass the current routes of oil supply down the Gulf. And, of course, the intensification of anti-terrorist measures.
For if the West is considering military action, so are the ayatollahs. They are the sponsors of much of the insurgency in Iraq and suppliers of the insurgents' weapons. They also have intimate links with most of the world's worst terrorist organisations, including al-Qa'eda and Hezbollah. Iranians may well be the missing link for which MI5 is searching behind the July 7 bombings in London.
Moreover, while Iran has its own armoury of medium-range missiles suitable for nuclear delivery, the ayatollahs are also known to favour the placing of nuclear warheads in target cities by terrorists travelling by car or public transport. This is a bad and worrying time in world affairs.
(Filed: 12/01/2006)
I supported the Iraq war as, with reservations, I still do. Its opponents have a great deal of self-justification to do, all the more as the details of Saddam Hussein's iniquities unfold in the Baghdad courtroom where he is being tried.
A true Machiavellian would use the trial to argue, however, that the West's mistake was to make an enemy of Saddam when he could have been a useful ally. Indeed, during the 1980s, when he was fighting a war almost to the death against Iran, he was a useful ally. How useful, at this time when Iran has blatantly announced its resumption of its nuclear weapons programme, is becoming apparent.
Saddam merely pretended to have weapons of mass destruction, largely to feed his own fantasies of power. Iran is actually turning itself into a nuclear weapons state, a fact disputed by none of the players on the international scene. Iran, moreover, does not seek such weapons for psychological reasons. It wants them for practical purposes, including, according to a statement by its new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former revolutionary guard, to "wipe Israel from the map". Islamic extremists are, of course, given to blood-curdling rhetoric. Nevertheless, Iran's record must cause not only the West but all Iran's neighbours to take the threat seriously.
Fortunately, Iran's opponents still have a little time in hand. It has not yet developed a nuclear weapon. At present, it is proceeding with the necessary preliminaries, particularly the enrichment of nuclear fuels to weapons grade. Nevertheless, informed opinion is that, within three years, Iran will have acquired a nuclear capability, a prospect undesirable and terrifying in the extreme. How can Teheran be stopped?
The current policy of the United States, and the EU3 group, Britain, France and Germany, is to report Iran to the Security Council, through the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN agency responsible for enforcing the provisions of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Yet neither the IAEA nor the Security Council has the power to enforce the NPT. That depends on the will and capability of UN member states. It demonstrates the weakness of the Security Council that the failure so far to report Iran is due to an international reluctance to offend Russia, which is Iran's most important international supporter. It is necessary to abandon such hesitation very promptly. Diplomatic sensitivity is a minor consideration when the aggressive tendencies of Iran's ayatollahs are driving its nuclear policies.
The pressing question is, indeed, what is to be done when a report to the Security Council fails to bring Iran to desist from nuclear enrichment? Economic and other sanctions are widely cited as a means to restrain Iran; and it is certainly true that the interruption of trade and the supply of technical equipment would cause its government serious inconvenience.
It is much more doubtful whether sanctions would make Iran change its policy. The ayatollahs do not suppose they are popular abroad, nor do they much care. Sanctions would interfere with the Western lifestyle of Iran's educated young people. The ayatollahs, however, have little interest in supporting that lifestyle, indeed, rather the opposite, while Iran's educated youth have given heavy proofs that their national pride weighs heavier than their access to Western luxuries.
America and the EU3 must therefore consider other, harsher methods to restrain Iran. The fact that the United States at present deploys a large army in Iraq is a factor that must give the ayatollahs pause. To stage a second war in the Middle East would not be a desirable initiative at present for America and would certainly be highly unpopular at home and among its allies.
Moreover, Iran, as the possessor of the second largest oil reserves in the world and occupier of a strategic position athwart the sea routes delivering oil to most of the consuming world, has its own means of retaliation ready to hand.
Which brings us, as always in the geopolitics of the Middle East, to Israel. Israel makes no attempt to conceal that it has considered and undoubtedly is now considering its ability to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities by military action. However, what it did easily against Iraq in 1981 is much more difficult against Iran. For one thing, its current domestic politics may rob it of the necessary power of decision. For another, Iran's nuclear installations are much farther away than Iraq's were when Israel destroyed the Osirak reactor.
Nevertheless, the West cannot simply let things drift. Military action by whatever agency cannot be written out, but will be a last resort. In the meantime, all means short of military action, including economic and political ostracism and economic sanctions, must be tried, together with the building of alternative oil pipelines to bypass the current routes of oil supply down the Gulf. And, of course, the intensification of anti-terrorist measures.
For if the West is considering military action, so are the ayatollahs. They are the sponsors of much of the insurgency in Iraq and suppliers of the insurgents' weapons. They also have intimate links with most of the world's worst terrorist organisations, including al-Qa'eda and Hezbollah. Iranians may well be the missing link for which MI5 is searching behind the July 7 bombings in London.
Moreover, while Iran has its own armoury of medium-range missiles suitable for nuclear delivery, the ayatollahs are also known to favour the placing of nuclear warheads in target cities by terrorists travelling by car or public transport. This is a bad and worrying time in world affairs.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Michael Medved: 'Munich' Distorts History
Posted 1/10/2006 8:39 PM
USA Today
In the midst of ferocious competition for this year's Oscar nominations (to be announced Jan. 31), Steven Spielberg insists that his contender Munich counts as more than a movie. In a Time magazine interview, the director described his project as a "prayer for peace," suggesting it might even point the way to resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this context, voters of the Academy of the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will inevitably weigh the film's messages along with its camera work, acting and dramatic impact.
In fictionalizing the Israeli response to the murder of 11 members of its Olympic team in 1972, Munich deliberately blurs distinctions between those who commit terrorism and those who combat it.
"A response to a response doesn't really solve anything," the director declares — indicating that he somehow views the slaughter of unarmed athletes by Black September terrorists as "a response." A response to what, one might inquire? Israel's very existence, or its determination to resist bloodthirsty calls in 1948 and 1967 to "push all the Jews into the sea"?
Myth on Golda Meir
In the movie, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir authorizes the Israeli "response" with a line prominently featured in promotional materials: "Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values." Meir never made such a statement because she explicitly viewed striking back at terror as upholding — not compromising — civilized values.
The primary purpose of the undercover hit squads sent out against the terrorist leadership wasn't punishment, but protection. On Sept. 12, 1972, a week after the Munich massacre, Meir spoke to the Israeli Knesset. "From the blood-drenched history of the Jewish nation, we learn that violence which begins with the murder of Jews, ends with the spread of violence and danger to all people, in all nations," she explained. "We have no choice but to strike at the terrorist organizations wherever we can reach them. That is our obligation to ourselves and to peace."
The leader of the hard-line opposition, Menachem Begin, spoke even more directly of the need to move beyond ancient concepts of blood-for-blood. "Retaliation no longer suffices," he told parliament. "We demand a prolonged, open-ended assault against the murderers and their bases. ... We need to run these criminals and murderers off the face of the earth, to render them fearful, no longer able to initiate violence. If we need a special unit to do this, then now is the time to build it."
Spielberg and his screenwriter (Marxist playwright Tony "Angels in America" Kushner) not only ignore but also distort this crucial context. Instead, they traffic in the hoariest anti-Semitic stereotypes, showing the coldly calculating Jews computing the cost of their operation in dollars ($352,000 for an assassination in Rome) as they demand their eye-for-an-eye, their pound of flesh, to balance the crimes of Munich. The filmmakers remain so focused on their violence-begets-violence formula, they suggest that Israeli killing of Black September leaders produced even more brutal reactions; "I think they're trying to talk to us," says a member of the Israeli hit team, scanning headlines of some new Palestinian outrage.
The historical record shows, though, that tough responses to terrorist provocation sharply reduce violence. In Striking Back, a new book about the real Israeli reaction to Munich, Aaron Klein (of Time's Jerusalem bureau) reports that pursuing terrorists after 1972 led to dramatic declines in attacks on Israelis. If nothing else, aggressive tactics against murderous plotters keep them busy trying to stay alive, making it harder to develop plots. Recently, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's resolute reply to the latest Palestinian intifada, including targeted killings and construction of an anti-terrorism barrier, served to bring that uprising to an end and to produce dramatically enhanced security in Israel. Similarly, most Americans understand that efforts to kill or capture Osama bin Laden serve to protect all of us, not just gratify a desire for revenge.
Jewish outrage
The widespread criticism of Spielberg's film by Israelis (including the consul general in Los Angeles) and friends of Israel raises serious questions about its prospects for Oscar nominations. Hollywood Jews make up a significant segment of the Academy's membership, so their reaction to the movie's much-debated themes might impact its chances. After all, perceived anti-Semitic elements in last year's The Passion of the Christ helped ensure that Mel Gibson's successful release received only three minor technical Oscar nominations. While The Passion drew criticism for unflattering portrayals of Judean religious authorities 2,000 years ago, Munich slurs current day Israelis and (in a totally fictitious slam) even shows its main character so disgusted with his homeland that he refuses to return.
If, as expected, Munich wins major Oscar nods, it will reveal far more about the nature of Hollywood than it will about the movie. Despite prominence of Jews in the entertainment establishment, Munich represents the first big-budget, big-studio release centered on the Jewish state since Cast a Giant Shadow 40 years ago. This in itself should rebut the tired mantra that "Jews control Hollywood," but nominations for Spielberg's "prayer for peace" will do even more to show the distance between the thinking of today's Tinseltown and traditional Zionism.
The readiness to embrace a leftist message movie such as Munich— with its implicit critique of the Bush administration's harsh, violent response to terrorism — indicates that it's utopian liberalism, rather than any form of Jewish commitment, represents the reigning faith of the entertainment elite.
Syndicated talk radio host and film critic Michael Medved is the author of Right Turns and a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.
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