HINDERAKER: ANTICHRIST?

John Hinderaker criticizes the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Peace Not Walls resolution which condemns Israel's separation barrier. Hinderaker's piece is typical wingnuttery in that it entirely avoids the issue of Israel's almost four decades-long occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the illegal settlement enterprise which that occupation facilitates, and instead makes the issue the ELCA's lack of mention of Palestinian terror, which Hinderaker insists reveals the Lutheran Church's anti-Israel bias. Boring and by the numbers, really.

But this last sentence caught my attention:

The fact that the leadership of mainline Protestant churches is dominated by liberals who substitute their own political biases for Christian doctrine and principles is an important factor limiting the growth of those denominations in comparison to the newer, evangelical churches whose leadership is not dominated by political liberalism.

Hoo boy. Leaving aside the fact that Hinderaker does not come within a mile of demonstrating that the liberals who supposedly dominate mainline Protestant churches "substitute their own political biases for Christian doctrine," even granting this, Hinderaker's got to be smoking some extremely high grade reefer to imagine that conservative religioners don't do this, and do it more blatantly and to a much greater degree than liberals.

More significantly, Hinderaker is clearly suggesting that the growth and success of newer, more conservative evangelical congregations can be attributed to their more faithful adherence to Christian doctrine. This is stone nonsense. Having attended more than a few of these churches (don't ask) and read quite a bit of the literature they produce, I can report that their "doctrine" boils down to two basic elements: 1) God loves you and wants you to be happy (and sometimes rich), and 2) Vote Republican. There is really no doctrine to speak of, no tough theological questions grappled with, nothing that might cause the congregants to feel stupid. And this is all on purpose, as the practices of these churches have, to a very great extent, been developed according to, and their growth attributable to their adherence to, principles of marketing.

If anything, the success of these new evangelical churches is proof against their theological and spiritual rigor. Jesus himself warned his followers to expect persecution, to expect their friends and families to turn away from them, to expect the great masses to reject the spiritual revolution which Jesus was trying to bring about. He did not warn his followers to expect a big sing-along with a barbecue afterward. Nor, by the way, did he ever command his followers to take control of the machinery of government and rule in his name. Jesus's way was one of Poverty, Humility, and Service. Anyone who thinks he can reconcile the way of Jesus with a life of wealth, nationalism, and tax-cuts is quite simply full of shit. Or, to be more doctrinaire (isn't that what Hinderaker wants?), anti-Christ in its original meaning of "false Christ."

MORNING WEIRDNESS

I have a savant-like talent, I guess one would call it a talent, maybe a tendency, for remembering obscure actors and then bothering my friends with lists of other movies they've been in. Like we could be settling down to watch such and such and I'll see a name in the credits and I'll go, "Oh wow, Jimmy Lee Goldstein! He played the lion-keeper's assistant in Kickboxing Catholic Girls from Outer Space, Part II!" or "Sujata Prawrvadhi! She played the flight attendant who spills the coffee in Gemütlichkeit at 30,000 Feet!"

To which the response is usually some variant of that's nice, shut up, or too bad you can't make any money with that.

Anyway, sitting here this morning sipping my precious, precious coffee and reading da news, I come across a review of a new jukebox musical based upon the later work of John Lennon. Apparently, the musical is crap. Didn't see that coming. Lennon's late career is definitely spotty, though it contains some genuine masterpieces, but let's just say this fad of shoehorning rock and pop repertoires into Broadway sing-alongs appeals to a...certain sensibility. And it's not a rock n' roll one. I imagine John sitting in his little breakfast nook up in rock n' roll heaven, drinking his tea, flipping through the paper, reading this review, and throwing up a little, in his mouth. Or maybe he's delighted about the attention. Probably both at once. He was a complicated man.

What caught my eye, however, was the name of the director of the show, Don Scardino, who I of course remember as the city-slicker hero of the 1976 horror classic Squirm, in which a small southern town is infested by a plague of flesh-eating mutant earthworms, as if you couldn't immediately figure that out from the title.

This film occupies a special place in Duss family history. When we were kids, my brother Brian and I watched it on Channel 11 some Saturday afternoon when we probably should have been outside playing, and were good and grossed out by it. But here was my master-stroke: from that time on, whenever we'd be sitting at the dinner table and my notoriously picky-eater brother would be faced with some new culinary concoction of our mom's that he wasn't quite sure about, I would mutter "Squirm," which would immediately conjure up for him images of undulating mounds of slimy, ravenous earthworms devouring screaming yokels, and would, without fail, kill his appetite. Dead. He'd get mad and complain that he didn't want to eat, and my parents would make him finish what was on his plate, and he would whine in protest and I would turn and smile evily into the camera. It was the perfect crime. It got so that I wouldn't even need to say the word, I could just look at him across the dinner table and nod, and he'd know exactly what I meant, and would get grossed out again just the same. It's good to be the older brother.

So, ladies and gentlemen, Don Scardino: from battling mutant earthworms to directing a schmaltzy Broadway adaptation of John Lennon's not-greatest work.

Your morning weirdness.

AVNERY ON SHARON

Excellent essay by Israeli activist Uri Avnery of Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc) on the settlements, the Gaza pullout and Sharon's brand of Zionism.

For 37 years, the Israeli army has been the Settlers Defense Army. It has planned, openly and in secret, the placement of the settlements, including the "illegal" settlement outposts all over the West Bank. It has devoted most of its forces and resources to their defense. That has reached grotesque dimensions: for example, the Netzarim settlement, in the middle of the Gaza Strip, was defended by three whole battalions. Seventeen male and female soldiers lost their lives in the defense of Netzarim, about which Ariel Sharon said some years ago: "Netzarim's fate is the same as Tel-Aviv's!" The story about the settlers' children going to music classes escorted by armored troop carriers has become a part of Israeli folklore.

[snip]

Sharon's is a classic Zionist ideology, consistent and pragmatic: to enlarge the borders of the Jewish State as much as possible, in a continuing process, without including in it a non-Jewish population. To settle everywhere possible, using every possible trick. To do much and talk little about it. To make declarations about the desire for peace, but not to make a peace that would hinder expansion and settlement.

[snip]

That is...Sharon's outlook. He wants to expand Israel's borders as much as possible, and minimize the number of Arabs within them. Therefore it makes sense to him to give up the tiny Gaza strip with the million and half Palestinians living there, and also the centers of Palestinian population in the West Bank. He wants to annex the settlement blocs and the sparsely populated areas, where new settlement blocs can be set up. He is content to leave to future generations the problem of the Palestinian enclaves.

Read the whole thing.

REMEMBERING SEAN RYAN

Very moving essay by Ashley Ryan Gaddis in memory of her brother, Sean, a Rainier mountain ranger who died ten years ago, along with fellow ranger Philip Otis, while attempting to rescue a stranded climber.

I grew up with Sean Ryan in Nyack, New York. He was a year ahead of me in school. We weren't close friends, but we had close friends in common, and our paths often crossed because we were both musicians. I will always remember Sean as an extremely gifted bass player.

My thoughts are with his family.

Life is precious.

INTELLIGENT DESIGN

Good article on ID by Chris Mooney in the American Prospect.

The most eloquent documentation of ID’s religious inspiration comes in the form of a Discovery Institute strategic memo that made its way onto the Web in 1999: the “Wedge Document.” A broad attack on “scientific materialism,” the paper asserts that modern science has had “devastating” cultural consequences, such as the denial of objective moral standards and the undermining of religious belief. In contrast, the document states that ID “promises to reverse the stifling dominance of the materialist worldview, and to replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.” In order to achieve this objective, the ID movement will “function as a ‘wedge’” that will “split the trunk [of scientific materialism] … at its weakest points.”

The Wedge Document puts ID proponents in an uncomfortable position. Discovery Institute representatives balk at being judged on religious grounds and accuse those who probe their motivations of engaging in ad hominem attacks. Yet given the express language of the Wedge Document, it’s hard to see why we shouldn’t take them at their own word. Discovery’s ultimate agenda -- the Wedge -- clearly has far more to do with the renewal of religiously based culture by the overthrow of key tenets of modern science than with the disinterested pursuit of knowledge.

But have you heard the competing theory of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism?

HEBRON

David Brooks chimes in today with, wouldn't you know it, a column full of folksy wisdomy culturey trendy stuff. It's about globalization or segmentization or some damn thing that popped into his head over Wheaties, go read it if you want, but this jumped out at me:

Meanwhile, if you look around the world you see how often events are driven by groups that reject the globalized culture. Islamic extremists reject the modern cultures of Europe, and have created a hyperaggressive fantasy version of traditional Islamic purity. In a much different and less violent way, some American Jews have moved to Hebron and become hyper-Zionists.

Actually, the hyperaggressive fantasy version of traditional purity that militant Islamists have created is very much like that of religious Jewish settlers, in that both of them are fundamentalist, exclusivist, supremacist reactions to what they perceive as a corrupting modernity. Many of the condemnations levelled by orthodox Jews against their more modern co-religionists sound exactly like those of Islamists against liberal Muslims.

As for the "less violent" part, I suppose hyper-Zionist settlers are less violent in that they don't focus their violence on The West, and are instead content to focus their violence on their Palestinian neighbors. It's almost humorous that poor Brooksie chose Hebron, of all places, for his example. Hebron is where some 400 Jewish settlers live amidst 30,000 Palestinians, requiring a constant Israeli army presence (approximately 2000 IDF troops, or about 4 soldiers for every 1 settler). Hebron settlers are known to be the most militant, violent, and openly racist of any of the Jewish settler groups, regularly invading and vandalizing the homes and crops of Palestinians, usually under the averted gaze of those Israeli troops who are there ostensibly to "protect" Palestinians.

Hebron is where, in 1994, Baruch Goldstein (an American Jew who moved to Hebron and became a hyper-Zionist) walked into a mosque and gunned down 29 Muslims at prayer. He is celebrated by religious settlers as a martyr-hero, and his grave is an orthodox shrine, maintained and visited regularly by many other American-born hyper-Zionists who hold celebrations there.

I bring this up because Brooks' comment is indicative of the deep American ignorance of the realities and effects of the Israeli occupation and the ongoing settlement activity which it facilitates. Settler violence against Palestinians is a regular occurrence, though American media for some reason don't deem this as newsworthy as they do suicide bombings. Perhaps that's understandable, perhaps not, but the actions and ideology of the Hebron settlers are by no means unique, only the most openly eliminationist. Most other religious settlers are more willing to allow the IDF to commit violence against Palestinians on their behalf.

There is also the fact that, aside from the specific and frequent acts of violence committed by settlers, the occupation itself represents a very tangible form of daily violence against Palestinians, who are denied freedom of movement to and from their farmland, places of work, or to visit family by a network of military checkpoints, and are regularly physically and verbally harassed by the Israeli troops manning those checkpoints. The damaging effect of this upon the spirit of a people over the course of almost four decades is hard to quantify, but make no mistake: it is a form of warfare, one that Israel is and has been waging upon the Palestinians. It's certainly not my intention to defend or justify violence against civilians, by any side, only to argue that Palestinian violence must be understood in this context.

SEE, IT WORKS!

There are many reasons to criticize the transportation bill that President Bush signed yesterday, such as Bush's decision to sign it represents a blatant flip-flop, or that it's Exhibit Z that Bush has no interest in making government smaller, only in making sure that those in his tax bracket don't have to pay for it, or that it's loaded with more pork than Jonah Goldberg's third and fourth plates at the Old Country Buffet. What bothers me most, however, is that regardless of such massive infusions of government money into the economy of which this bill is only the latest example, the Supply Side Zombies will continue to insist that any economic growth is attributable to...tax cuts.

TOUCHED BY HIS NOODLY APPENDAGE

Flying Spaghetti Monsterism posits a credible challenge to Intelligent Design.

TV THEMES

Okay, it's pointless list time. TV themes are a minor obsession of mine, I think it's a great form because of its economy. You've got 60 seconds to encapsulate what the show's about, something that hits hard but won't grow stale week after week, and then get out. So...

1. Sanford and Son, Quincy Jones. I'm sorry, but for me there's just no question about it. This is the greatest TV theme ever. It's a proven fact that listening to this tune before playing basketball will increase your shooting percentage by a good 25%.
2. Mission Impossible, Lalo Schifrin. This is spy music. Yes, it's ubiquitous. It's also some of the freshest, most furious 62 seconds ever put to wax. It all comes down to those bongos.
3. Streets of San Francisco, Pat Williams. Big, gorgeous, 70s jazz-funk extravaganza. If I were a TV detective, and on some days I am, it would be hard to choose between this one and...
4. Magnum PI, Mike Post and Pete Carpenter. This theme captures its lead character's idiom better than any other. Evokes diving choppers, peeling Ferraris, and a big, booshy mustache. I should mention that Post and Carpenter were the McCartney and Lennon of 80s TV theme music.
5. Barney Miller, Jack Elliott. From that lone, slinky bass line to full grooving Headhunters' style funk in 47 seconds. I'm tempted to suggest that no white man deserves a theme this funky. Except maybe when you pair him with Abe Vigoda.
6. Six Feet Under, Thomas Newman. I'm not a fan of the show, but this theme is a stunningly brilliant piece of work. Maybe it's the oboe. Maybe it's the ukelele. No, it's the whole.
7. The Twilight Zone, Marius Constant. Gotta mention this one, since these four guitar notes notes have become shorthand for "Wow, that was weird." The theme also has an interesting origin:

In 1960, CBS Music Director Lud Gluskin was asked to find a new Main Title/End Credits THEME for the second season of the series, to replace the original THEME written by veteran radio/TV/film composer Bernard Herrmann.

Finally in desperation, Lud Gluskin tried splicing together two short cues written by a French Avant-Garde classical composer Marius Constant -- who had composed them for CBS to use as backgrounds for episodes of "The Twilight Zone", and then recycled in the network cue library. CBS had a policy in those days to have music composed and recorded overseas to skirt US Musician Union re-use fees which were 100% of the original session fee for any subsequent re-use. This policy was intended to keep producers from using recordings over and over, but it had the opposite effect -- inspiring producers and networks to find alternatives and music packagers who recorded outside the U.S. so they could use "track" (re-cycle) cues...

Such commissioned cues were available to be shared by any CBS series which needed them. The internal title for this cue library was the "CBS Foreign Library".

The cues which Gluskin spliced together were originally named "Etrange 3 (Strange No. 3)" and "Milieu 2 (Middle No. 2)". They were so fragmentary and unusual that they had not been used much. These were two of the six short dramatic cues Constant wrote and recorded with a small ensemble featuring a two guitars, percussion including bongo drums, a saxophone and French horns.

They had never been designed to be a Main Title or End Credits THEME. Spliced together by Gluskin, their unique qualities appealed to Serling, who was looking for something different. So TV history was changed when they became the new "Twilight Zone" THEME from the 2nd season on...and now the most recognized by the atonal guitar motif which opens "Etrange 3."

In 1982 correspondence with composer Constant, he explained that in 1959 he composed six cues at the request of Lud Gluskin "for a few hundred dollars"; He knew they were intended for their first use on a new show described by CBS as "strange, incredible, bizarre, fantastic"; Composer Constant went on to say it wasn't until much later that he learned that two of his cues had been spliced together to become its Main Title and End Credits THEME for this U.S. Television series.

Honorable mentions: The Prisoner, The X-Files, The Munsters, Simon and Simon, Star Trek. I'm sure I'm forgetting some.

THE SYRIAN DOMINO?

Via the Free Arab Forum, an article on the prospects for reform in Syria.

MMORPGs CAN KILL

Should this be considered for a Darwin Award?

A South Korean man has died after reportedly playing an online computer game for 50 hours with few breaks.

The 28-year-old man collapsed after playing the game Starcraft at an internet cafe in the city of Taegu, according to South Korean authorities.

The man had not slept properly, and had eaten very little during his marathon session, said police.

CONDI!

Interesting review of Condoleezza Rice's tenure as Sec of State thus far.

BIBI

Benjamin Netanyahu has resigned as Israeli finance minister, in protest over the Gaza pullout. It's well known that Bibi is interested in Sharon's job, so it's interesting how he timed this: late enough in the timeline so as to have little actual effect upon the pullout which he is supposedly protesting, but near enough to Israeli election season so that his brave act of conscience will still be in Israeli voters' minds when they go to the polls.

RUSHDIE

Good column by Salman Rushdie, a man whose life was disrupted by Islamic fundamentalism before most of us paid any attention to it.

ALBUM COVER ART

I came across this great collection of record album cover art. There are a lot of excellent ones, but this is probably my favorite:

It also happens to be a fantastic record. Those of you unfamiliar with the brilliant Juan Garcia Esquivel should seriously consider checking him out.  

SOMETHING VERY SPECIAL

Jonah Goldberg outdoes himself today:

It turns out that the famously "homegrown" terrorists of the London bombings were much more like John Walker Lindh or even the Patty Hearst types of the 1960s and '70s. Radical chic may be as a big a part of the story as radical Islam.

We've always understood this was the case to a certain extent. Osama bin Laden's prattling about the Crusades, for instance, merely shows how poisoned Islamism is by Western Marxism and anti-imperialism. Muslims used to brag about winning the Crusades. It was only after the West started exporting victimology that Islamic and Arab intellectuals started to whine about how poorly they'd been treated.

I really don't know from where Jonah drew this analysis. It takes a very, very, very special kind of dumb to look at the phenomenon of radical Islamism and see...Marxism. There may be some element of radical chic in young Western Muslims turning militant, but I've seen no evidence for this among militants from the Muslim world, and of course, true to form, Jonah doesn't present any. His claim that Islamism is "infected by Marxism" only makes sense when you understand that he is very angry about not having been around to peddle his unique brand of smug during the Cold War, and thus must continue to discover Marxism's pernicious effects everywhere.

Regarding anti-imperialism, maybe it's me, but I think you're entitled to be anti-imperialist when you've been colonized, as much of the Arab world was at the time that modern radical Islam was born. There was really no need to import victimhood into the Arab world, because Arabs were actual victims of imperialism.

As I've written before, radical political Islam grew up and should be understood primarily as a response to imported Western secular ideologies such as fascism and socialism. It's true that some Islamists have incorporated a quasi-Marxian critique into their ideology, but to locate the source of the problem with Marx, or with "whining intellectuals" or with whatever other conservative bogeyman Goldberg comes up with, and ignore the factors which made such ideas attractive, specifically Western support for authoritarian regimes in exchange for access to oil, is just bafflingly ignorant.

One more comment about "victimhood." It's funny how Goldberg condemns this mentality in America's enemies, but absolutely revels in it and helps to cultivate it among conservatives in regards to American media's purported hostility to right-wing ideas. To the extent that a sense of victimhood must be fostered in order to consider one's self a "radical" fighting against "the system," American conservatives do this about as well as anyone.

CHAPPELLE

Via Majikthise, Charlie Murphy ("What did the five fingers say to the face?")says that Chappelle's Show is over.

Very sad if true. Goodbye to the funniest show on television. I think I laughed harder at Black Bush than almost anything else I've ever watched on the tube.

The partially completed third season will, I suppose, occupy a place in TV lore similar to My Bloody Valentine's never completed follow-up to Loveless.

SETTLEMENTS AND DEMOGRAPHY

Israel has announced plans to build more houses in the Beitar Ilit settlement, south of Jerusalem, near the Palestinian town of Bethlehem.

Beitar Ilit is already home to more than 20,000 settlers. The extension of the settlement would make it part of the Gush Etzion settlement bloc.

US President George Bush has warned Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon against further settlement expansion in the West Bank.

The expansion also contravenes commitments made by Israel under the US-backed roadmap peace plan.

Here's an article from yesterday's Daily Star by Yossi Alpher, a senior adviser to former Israeli PM Ehud Barak, who argues that Israel's settlement policy has proven largely counterproductive to Israel's genuine security. Alpher does pose an intriguing question, though:

Did the spread of settlements, particularly in the West Bank, constitute a factor in the PLO's decision in 1988 to negotiate a two-state solution - in the sense that, if Palestinians had waited much longer there would have been little left to negotiate? This is an intriguing theory that could, in a sense, justify the construction of settlements retrospectively at the strategic level.

But by the same token, the more the settlements continue to spread today in the West Bank, the more the moderate Palestinians are beginning to argue that they will soon preclude any possibility of separating the two peoples into two separate states. The day that viewpoint again becomes official PLO policy, the settlements will indeed cease to be a main focus of violence because, thanks to them, the green line will no longer function as a border and Palestinian violence will be directed indiscriminately at all Israelis.

In this context, some opponents of disengagement argue that the West Bank mountain heartland settlements, as an expression of the right of the Jewish people to live in the cradle of biblical Hebrew civilization, are worth any security price. However, from a national Jewish standpoint, this can only be termed a suicidal approach.

Also related, an article from the San Francisco Chronicle regarding Israeli efforts to prevent Jewish immigration into Germany:

The Israeli government, concerned about the declining number of Russian Jews emigrating to Israel, has persuaded Germany to institute unprecedented measures restricting the influx of Jews from the former Soviet Union, according to several Israeli officials.

Prompted by an intense behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign waged by Israel, new immigration rules would grant residence only to Jews from the former Soviet Union who are under 45, fluent in German and financially stable. The rules, announced late last month, do not include Jews from other non- Soviet countries or any other ethnic or religious group. They are expected to take effect at the beginning of next year.

Israel has long been concerned about diaspora Jews emigrating to anywhere but Israel.

Is this is ironic, or just tragic? Israel pressures Germany to prohibit the immigration of Jews to Germany in the hopes that those Jews will then decide to immigrate to Israel and strengthen Jewish numbers vis a vis non-Jewish residents of Israel-Palestine, helping to counter the demographic threat posed by a growing Arab population and maintain Israel's integrity as Jewish state. Get your head around that.

Even more troubling is the fact that many of new immigrants to Israel will be provided incentives to move into West Bank settlements. Contrary to what some believe, the majority of settlers are not religious fanatics, but economically disadvantaged Israelis, many of them recent immigrants, who are induced to move to settlements through massive government subsidies.

HIS JOURNEY TO THE DARK SIDE IS COMPLETE

Christopher Hitchens is now writing in NRO's the Corner.

UNSUNG MASTERPIECE

New regular feature, friends. I won't attempt reviews, I'll just throw 'em out. First entry is Rev, by Ultra Vivid Scene, from 1992. I've spun this disc probably as many times as any in my collection.

TAKING IT EASY AT THE POTEMKIN RANCH

President Bush is preparing to take the longest presidential vacation on record.

The president departed Tuesday for his longest stretch yet away from the White House, arriving at his Crawford ranch in the evening for a stretch of clearing brush, visiting with family and friends, and tending to some outside-the-Beltway politics. By historical standards, it is the longest presidential retreat in at least 36 years.

The August getaway is Bush's 49th trip to his cherished ranch since taking office and the 319th day that Bush has spent, entirely or partially, in Crawford -- nearly 20 percent of his presidency to date, according to Mark Knoller, a CBS Radio reporter known for keeping better records of the president's travel than the White House itself. Weekends and holidays at Camp David or at his parents' compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, bump up the proportion of Bush's time away from Washington even further.

On the one hand, as an aspiring Man of Leisure myself, I can't get too worked up over long vacations, though rather than spend five weeks at a fake ranch, fishing in a fake lake, staring at somebody else's cows, and avoiding horses because I'm a fake cowboy, I'd be more inclined toward a cabin on Orcas Island, drinking tea and shooting croquet with friends, strumming my guitar and letting out the occasional contented sigh.

On the other hand, it seems in extremely bad taste to flake off for a five-week vacation while a substantial part of the labor force has to cobble together several minimum-wage jobs to stay above water, not to mention the young men and women who continue to be picked off in Iraq and Afghanistan because of a post-war for which he didn't adequately plan. I'm not saying that all the problems of the world need to be solved before the president takes a break, just that he could, perhaps, occasionally give some small sign that he's aware and appreciates that people are in difficult circumstances. But, then again, who the heck knows what Bush thinks about the state of things. This is, after all, a man who apparently believes that Rafael Palmeiro was using steroids without knowing it, sooo...yeah.

AIR FRANCE

I wonder if this was a treat for John Gibson:

An Air France passenger jetliner carrying 309 people skidded off a runway in Toronto and burst into flames yesterday afternoon while landing in a dangerous thunderstorm —yet no one died in the crash.

I can hear the Gibson quote right now, delivered through his little bunny teeth: "Maybe they should spend a little more time paying attention to the runway and a little less time hating America. What do you think, folks?"

Back in the sane world, I'm very glad that no one was seriously injured, though I am of course curious if, when they all thought they were going to die, anybody had time to tear their clothes off and get making with the love. These are the hard-hitting questions this blog is not afraid to ask.

UNSURPRISING

President Bush thinks Intelligent Design should be taught in schools alongside evolution.

During a round-table interview with reporters from five Texas newspapers, Bush declined to go into detail on his personal views of the origin of life. But he said students should learn about both theories, Knight Ridder Newspapers reported.

"I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought," Bush said. "You're asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes."

The theory of intelligent design says life on earth is too complex to have developed through evolution, implying that a higher power must have had a hand in creation.

It should be noted that the ID movement has scored a considerable success in that ID is regularly referred to as a "theory," which in fact it is not, as it offers no testable hypothesis.

More on Intelligent Design here.

VIC DOESN'T GET IT

In his need to continually beat his chest about something or other, Victor Hanson commits some seriously bad history:

Quite simply, Islam is not in need of a reformation, but of a civil war in the Middle East, since the jihadists cannot be reasoned with, only defeated. Only with their humiliation, will come a climate of tolerance and reform, when berated and beaten-down moderates can come out of the shadows.

Yes, let us openly wish for civil war. That way, we can declare Iraq to be a success. As for Hanson's "humiliate 'em" strategy, a sense of humiliation at the hands of an invasive West is widely acknowledged to be one of the roots of Islamic fundamentalist rage. Hanson's solution is to crank that humiliation up a few notches. Israel has been using this strategy against Hamas and other Palestinian Islamist groups since the first intifada in 1987, shall we consider how well it's served them? I'm not suggesting, as Hanson and his sort would probably insist I am, that militant fundamentalists just need a hug, but there is a difference between discrediting an ideology, which should be our project, and humiliating its adherents, which would likely produce more of the same.

The challenge for the Middle East is analogous to our own prior war with Hitler who sought to redefine Western culture along some racial notion of a pure Volk long ago unspoiled by Romanizing civilization. Proving the West was not about race or some notion of an ubermenschen ruling class did not require an “internal dialogue,” much less another religious reformation, but the complete annihilation of Nazism.

Can we go a day without somebody making this lazy, patently ridiculous analogy? We didn't go to war with Germany to disprove Nazi ideology, we went to war to defeat Nazi armies, which were, like, running all over the place with the tanks and the planes and the motorcycles with the sidecars and the Achtung! Al Qaeda fields no similar army, and represents an entirely dissimilar threat. They're waging a global insurgency and propaganda war, one they win simply by not losing. The global war on terror, err, the global struggle against violent extremism is a battle of ideas to a much greater extent than was the war against Hitler, and the prosecution of the one should and will be substantially different from the other. With the Bush administration trotting out a bevy of new slogans and essentially adopting John Kerry's strategy for combating violent extremism, Hanson would seem one of the few people who doesn't get this by now.

Contrary to popular opinion, there has not been a single standard doctrine of hatred in the Middle East. Radical Islam is just the most recent brand of many successive pathologies, not necessarily any more embraced by a billion people than Hitler’s Nazism was characteristic of the entire West.

In the 1940s the raging -ism in the Middle East was anti-Semitic secular fascism, copycatting Hitler and Mussolini — who seemed by 1942 ascendant and victorious.

Between the 1950s and 1970s Soviet-style atheistic Baathism and tribal Pan-Arabism were deemed the waves of the future and unstoppable.

By the 1980s Islamism was the new antidote for the old bacillus of failure and inadequacy.

Each time an -ism was defeated, it was only to be followed by another — as it always is in the absence of free markets and constitutional government.

Oy. Far from being an inheritor of Arab socialism and authoritarianism, as Hanson bafflingly claims, modern Islamic fundamentalism, which can be traced to Hassan al Banna's founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, in fact began as a reaction to, and has continued to function as a mode of resistance to, those imported secular ideologies. It's certainly not difficult to understand the initial appeal of al Banna's philosophy. For much of the Arab world, the experience of modernization has been of Western governments empowering small, unaccountable groups in their domination of crudely drawn Arab states in exchange for oil and other strategic concessions from the ruling clique. The Arab experience of secularism has been one in which the ulama was either co-opted or simply swept out of its traditional role as adjudicator, leaving no similar institution in its place to act as a check upon rulers who were then free to plunder and abuse as they would. And plunder and abuse they did.

So there's blame to go around for the bad ideas at work in the Middle East. Understanding the causes and dimensions of Islamic fundamentalism should obviously be part of any project aimed at reducing terrorism and increasing democracy in the region, but Hanson frankly doesn't seem interested in anything like this. His plan, which can be described as "give them a good, sound whupping and that'll learn 'em," is thuggish and unserious. It's true that there is a tiny number of extremists intent on causing great harm. Even if we could snap our fingers and make every one of these fanatics disappear in a puff of smoke, that would not end their war, as it would do nothing to diminish the appeal of their ideas.

REBRANDING THE USA

Ramez Maluf has some advice for Karen Hughes on how to improve the U.S.'s image in the Arab world.

There exists in some minds the notion that the United States can improve its image by somehow “winning the argument” over U.S. policy. Don’t buy it. Defending American policy will always be an important element of your work, but if your office confines its activities to justifying U.S. policies, its success will be limited and you’ll burn out in no time. This head–on approach actually restricts dialogue and cements the existing counterproductive imagery. Instead, your work must focus on issues over which you have some control, and where U.S. policy can do the least harm.

Don’t waste your time disputing the stereotype. Move the argument elsewhere and introduce other images. The United States needs to change its “brand” in the Arab world, and the focus should be on images relevant to Arabs in their own context.

[snip]

Most Arabs live in societies where popular expression, other than in support of the government’s agenda, is almost nonexistent. The Arab world generally sees only the results of American political debates in the form of U.S. government policy. But Arabs love to watch Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, or hear actor Sean Penn rail against the war in Iraq, or read that a senator or congressperson argued in favor of a more equitable policy in the Middle East. This dynamic, and its electoral and social complexities, is not sufficiently advertised outside the United States. Try a hard–hitting documentary on the 2004 U.S. election. Odd as it may seem, your office should take pride in making opposition to its policies known. It’s one of the beauties of the American system.

It would be interesting to see Hughes trumpeting the existence of political dissent in the U.S. while abroad at the same time her boss and his party are vilifying those dissenters here at home.

I remain extremely skeptical of Hughes' fitness for this position. She's proven very skilled at selling Bush to the folks, but as far as I know she has shown no particular interest or knowledge of Arab or Islamic culture. Her "I'm jes' a girl from Texas" cornpone schtick may make Tim Russert tremble with glee, but I suspect it will go over in Arab media about as well as one of those Acme anvils that always seemed to be falling on Wile E. Coyote.

On the other hand, as a campaign flack, Hughes was able to convince a substantial number of American voters that the layabout rich kid George W. Bush was a reg'lar ole hardworking Texas guy, so maybe she can work miracles for the U.S.'s image in the region. We'll see.

BUT DOES SHE DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP?

From the BBC:

Japanese scientists have unveiled the most human-looking robot yet devised - a "female" android called Repliee Q1.

She has flexible silicone for skin rather than hard plastic, and a number of sensors and motors to allow her to turn and react in a human-like manner.

A little late, my Japanese friends. The U.S. has had four Laura Bush models operating since 2001.

THE NEW REALITY-BASED PENTAGON?

About a year and a half ago, apparently, Donald Rumsfeld sat stark upright in bed in the middle of the night as it occurred to him that counterterrorism was best handled cooperatively between nations. The entire universe then responded "No shit."

The Pentagon's new strategy

emphasizes "encouraging" and "enabling" foreign partners, especially in countries where the United States is not at war. Concluding that the conflict cannot be fought by military means alone--or by the United States acting alone--the new Pentagon plan outlines a multipronged strategy that targets eight pressure points and outlines six methods for attacking terrorist networks.

[snip]

Going after high-value targets like Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab Zarqawi, his emir in Iraq, is still a big part of the strategy but only a part. Three less direct approaches will now receive much greater emphasis: helping partner nations confront terrorism, going after supporters of terrorist organizations, and helping the State Department-led campaign to reduce the ideological appeal of terrorism. The latter category includes such things as military-provided humanitarian aid. U.S. aid to tsunami victims, for example, dramatically swung Asian public opinion from a negative to a positive view of America. Despite fears that the U.S. military is waging a duplicitous propaganda war, many military officials say that "information operations" are an inevitable dimension of warfare and must play a role, along with the State Department's public-diplomacy efforts.

I hope this will be perceived as a thumb in the eye to the priapic warblogger types who constantly ridicule the "law enforcement" approach to counterterrorism. Yes, Glenn, it's a lot less exciting than the Abrams-tank-crashing-through-a-wall method that gets you and your 101st Fighting Keyboarders so moist, but it's also more likely, indeed has proven, to produce actual results. Just saying.

Also:

For a Pentagon that has been seen as primarily championing pre-emptive attacks against terrorist threats, the new strategy's enthusiastic embrace of foreign partners is a real sea change. [Doug] Feith describes the reasons for it. "How do you fight an enemy that is present in numerous countries with whom you're not at war?" he asked. "The answer, in many cases, is we're going to have to rely on the governments of the countries where the terrorists are present. We can't do it ourselves, because you're talking about actions on the sovereign territory of other countries. . . . We need to have countries willing to cooperate with us and capable of doing the things they need to do to serve our common interests."

This seems an almost complete, though of course completely welcome, retreat from the obstinate unilateralism of the Bush Doctrine. Hopefully, some Democrat much more notable than me will take the opportunity to point out that Rumsfeld's Pentagon has essentially adopted John Kerry's strategy for fighting the war on terror.

UNCLE ROY

Responding to Gene Stone, Kathryn Lopez writes in the Corner:

THERE ARE RULES [K. J. Lopez]
From Gene Stone on the dark side of the H-Bomb (most of it), writing about Rick Santorum's outed staffer:

There has to be word for a gay Uncle Tom. Uncle Bruce? Mr. Traynham wins the weekly Uncle Bruce award.

In other words, if you happen to be gay, there is only one acceptable way to think.

I can't say that I'm completely unfriendly to Lopez's point here, hackneyed as it may be. I've always been uncomfortable with the idea that someone's race, gender, or sexual orientation necessarily proscribes certain political views for them. On the other hand, it's hard not to take issue with members of disadvantaged groups who throw their lot in with the opponents of social progress and equality.

Take Ann Coulter, who regularly attacks feminists, or rather attacks a sensationalized wicca-lesbian-Marxist strawwoman she insists is representative of feminism. Coulter is at at least intelligent enough to know that her ability to earn buckets of money publishing dubitably sourced anti-liberal screeds and making an ass of herself on TV owes no small debt to the feminist movement which she constantly degrades. How should this fact enter in to the debate? Is it worth pointing out? Perhaps it's better left as a meta-irony, attending everything Coulter says or writes.

Similarly, Mr. Traynham surely must understand that the only reason that he can remain chief of staff to one of the nation's most powerful lawmakers after having come out as gay is because of the hard work done, the humiliation and violence endured, by gay rights activists. It's hard for me to reconcile the image of Oscar Wilde rotting away in Reading Gaol, his life destroyed by accusations of buggery, with the idea of Robert Traynham, a century later, serving on the staff of Rick Santorum, a man who has built a political career on exploiting the same sort of prejudice that put Wilde in prison. I guess sometimes freedom is like that, but forgive me if in this case I don't particularly feel like celebrating.

But, finally, if we must call names, and I recognize that sometimes we simply must, I offer that Uncle Roy, as in Cohn, is a better choice than Uncle Bruce.

"Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live."
-Oscar Wilde

WIN-WIN

In an extraordinary example of a win-win situation, the United Arab Emirates has outlawed the use of child slaves as jockeys in camel races. Now they will be using remote-controlled robotic jockeys.

Robots weighing up to 15kg were dressed in the clothes of human jockeys during the race held in the capital Abu Dhabi, which officials described as "successful", the WAM news agency reported.

Earlier this month the UAE outlawed using children under 18 - raising the age limit from 16 - in camel races, a practice condemned internationally as a form of slavery.

Using robots would've just been cool. Dressing them up in human clothes? Now that's bloody wonderful.

On the other hand, this could be the beginning of a destabilizing arms race, as neighbouring countries seek to close the robotic jockey gap.

FEELING THE HATE ON FOX

I suppose watching Fox News is sort of my unhealthy coping mechanism, and this evening I was treated with Bo Dietl being interviewed by Neil Cavuto, or rather Cavuto letting Dietl smell an Arab shirt and then setting him loose on an entire culture.

From NewsHounds (Warning: like so much of what appears on Fox News, this is plain old hate masquerading as working-class straight-talk):

Dietl said he has been to Saudi Arabia, to Riyadh and Jeddah, "the whole joint over there, boppin' around. You got a bunch of people, about 9,000 what they call royal family. They're all inbreeds. They marry each other and half of them are mongoleze [sic], and all that kind of stuff."

Dietl again, about Saudi Arabia: "They got oil, we need oil, we should go over there and take the oil. Everyone hates us anyway in these Muslim countries."

Dietl said Muslims believe that if a bullet is dipped in pig's blood, "if they get shot with it and they get killed, they can't go to never never land with the 72 virgins." Dietl suggested all our troops in Iraq start dipping their bullets in pig's blood, they tell the world that they're doing it, and maybe that'll help.

Dietl said he just met with John Meyer's son, "just back from Flueeja [sic]. I keep sayin' the wrong words. I don't even want to say these words because I hate the places anyway." Dietl said Meyer's son told him that when they attacked that town (Fallujah), "they went in and they found more syringes, they found more crystal meth," that "not besides being religious they're all jacked up on all kinda drugs there." Dietl said sometimes "they gotta shoot three or four times to take them out. This is our problem with dealing with real crazies. What do you do with a mad dog? You put a bullet in a mad dog's head."

Needless to say, the only mad dog to be seen here was Dietl himself, flecks of spittle flying from his mouth as he barked his racist nonsense through the rolling, unshaven seas of his many chins. One could almost smell the well bourbon on his breath. I'm used to a certain level of xenophobia on Fox, but this crap almost put me off my saag paneer. Saag paneer, dammit!

Dietl is the most decorated policeman in New York City history. Excellent. Why this should cause us to give a damn what he thinks about the Middle East or Islam is anyone's guess. My best idea is that having this clown on the show made the smarmy, unctuous Neil Cavuto seem almost reasonable by comparison. That's tough, but Dietl came close.

Look, I understand that Dietl's upset. I would be upset too if Stephen Baldwin had played me in the overly sensationalized, almost straight-to-video movie version of my life. But this sort of racist shit belongs at the end of a Queens bar, not on a news channel, even one as questionable as Fox. One can imagine the sustained outrage from Cavuto, O'Reilly, Gibson and the rest of the Fox apparat were similar statements about Christianity or Judaism to appear on al Jazeera. But then, comparing al Jazeera to Fox is rather unfair. To al Jazeera. I apologize.

P.S. When it comes time to make the film version of my life, I will of course be played by Bernie Mac.

 

LERNER

My good friend Griff alerted me to this Barbara Lerner column in NRO, in which she criticizes Sharon's Gaza withdrawal as, among other things, "bad for America."

Our enemies know...we are handing Gaza over to Hamas, an international terrorist organization of global reach and ambition that is one of America's deadliest enemies. We think Hamas only attacks Jews. They know that Hamas is a main recruiting agent for Arab jihadists, not just from among the 2.4 million Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank and from the much larger numbers of Palestinians scattered in strategic enclaves throughout the region and the world, but for other Arabs too. We think Hamas sends all these jihadists only to Israel. They know Hamas sends a never-ending stream of them to Afghanistan, Chechnya, the Balkans, Kashmir, Lebanon and, most critically for us right now, to Iraq.

Reading this article, as with the vast majority of right-wing commentary on Israel-Palestine, you'd never know that Israel has maintained a brutal military occupation since 1967, and that it has been steadily expropriating Palestinian land for Jewish "settlement". That would seem an important bit of knowledge to have were one to reasonably assess the situation. Of course, Lerner is not interested in anything like that.

First, let's be clear on why Sharon proposed the Gaza withdrawal. It certainly wasn't to "jump start" the peace process, which Sharon has consistently shown nothing but contempt for, just as he as shown contempt for the very idea of, and done everything within his power to frustrate the creation of, a Palestinian State. The Gaza withdrawal is being done primarily if not solely to give cover to Israel's consolidation of control over large areas of the West Bank, including, importantly, the land around Arab East Jerusalem. A simple cost-benefit analysis told Sharon that maintaining 8,000 Israeli Jews in armed camps amidst 1.3 million Palestinian Arabs was just not feasible in the long term. Pulling out of Gaza enables him to represent himself, with the aid of extremely compliant U.S. news media, as a courageous compromiser, even as he moves to ramp up settlement activity in the West Bank.

It is unfortunately true that Hamas stands to benefit the most from the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. Some of the blame for this belongs of course to the corrupt and ineffectual Palestinian Authority, but a larger share belongs to Israel itself. Throughout the second intifada, Sharon targeted the PA infrastructure rather than concentrating on the people committing the actual terrorism. That is, even as he was demanding that the PA control violent Palestinian elements, he was destroying their ability to do so. There's also the inconvenient if not insignificant fact that the Israeli government supported Hamas in its early days as a potential counterweight to the nationalist PLO. Nice plan.

Juan Cole has more on the Gaza withdrawal.

ALLIANCE BASE

Somehow I missed this story about Alliance Base in Paris, where intelligence agencies from France, Britain, Canada, Germany, Australia, and the U.S. coordinate counterterrorism operations.

Alliance Base...was set up by the CIA and French intelligence services in 2002, according to U.S. and European intelligence sources. Its existence has not been previously disclosed.

Funded largely by the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, Alliance Base analyzes the transnational movement of terrorist suspects and develops operations to catch or spy on them.

Alliance Base demonstrates how most counterterrorism operations actually take place: through secretive alliances between the CIA and other countries' intelligence services. This is not the work of large army formations, or even small special forces teams, but of handfuls of U.S. intelligence case officers working with handfuls of foreign operatives, often in tentative arrangements.

Such joint intelligence work has been responsible for identifying, tracking and capturing or killing the vast majority of committed jihadists who have been targeted outside Iraq and Afghanistan since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to terrorism experts.

The CIA declined to comment on Alliance Base, as did a spokesman for the French Embassy in Washington.

This is interesting:

The rarely discussed Langley-Paris connection also belies the public portrayal of acrimony between the two countries that erupted over the invasion of Iraq. Within the Bush administration, the discord was amplified by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, who has claimed the lead role in the administration's "global war on terrorism" and has sought to give the military more of a part in it.

But even as Rumsfeld was criticizing France in early 2003 for not doing its share in fighting terrorism, his U.S. Special Operations Command was finalizing a secret arrangement to put 200 French special forces under U.S. command in Afghanistan. Beginning in July 2003, its commanders have worked side by side there with U.S. commanders and CIA and National Security Agency representatives.

Yes, even as Rumsfeld was running at the mouth about "Old Europe," French special forces were being put under U.S. command in Afghanistan.

RELIGION, POLITICS, AND LEGITIMACY

Sean Nelson is right that we should not assume a direct connection between Iraq and London. Terrorist violence is a standing order for the al Qaedists, regardless of current events. In Usama bin Laden's 1998 fatwa (legal pronouncement or ruling), his directions were clear: strike at them wherever and whenever. At most, Iraq should be considered just one more entry on bin Laden's very long list of grievances.

I think Nelson is off, however, when he claims that the London bombings have no political character. Nelson wrote:

[T]o connect the invasion of Iraq with the bombing of London represents the worst kind of moral blindness, because it invests the act with a political and spiritual legitimacy to which it is simply not entitled. The perpetrators of this mass murder have no legitimacy—political, spiritual, or otherwise. They're just murderers.

[snip]

This was not a political act (though politics were its Trojan horse). It was a religious one. And religion must be held accountable.

Religion is of course the motivation behind Islamist terrorism, but that by no means makes this terrorism non-political. Islamists themselves make no distinction between the religious and the political, indeed one of their goals is a polity in which any line between the two is erased. The compartmentalization of religion and politics into separate spheres is a Western innovation, one I happen to like very much (though I'd argue that many liberals have an unrealistic view of just how separate religion and politics can and should be kept.) This distinction simply does not apply, however, when we are considering the motivations and goals of Islamist terrorism.

From bin Laden's 1998 fatwa:

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim. This is in accordance with the words of Almighty God, "and fight the pagans all together as they fight you all together," and "fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in God."

Clearly, bin Laden advocates the use of terrorism as a means of changing the behaviour of governments: His goal is the removal of Western troops from Muslim lands, and the creation of a single Islamic state throughout the Middle East. This seems to me political by definition. Bin Laden's objectives may be somewhat more abstract and grandiose than those of the Irish Republican Army or the Zionist Irgun, for example, but his objectives are still political, albeit a politics which is completely entwined with religion.

As to Nelson's claims about legitimacy, I also regard both the means and ends of Islamist terrorism as illegitimate, but I'd offer that legitimacy is in the eye of the beholder. In the view of a very small minority of fundamentalist Muslims, the al Qaeda ideology (and at this point al Qaeda is much more an ideology than it is an organization) and the violence it inspires are legitimate responses to what they perceive as an aggressive and invasive West. This is certainly not meant to justify or excuse terrorism, only to point out that it matters very little whether Nelson or I consider it legitimate. For those willing to kill and die for this ideology, its legitimacy is a matter of fact.

As unspeakably tragic as the London bombings were, It's encouraging that they seem to have inspired many more moderate Muslims, both in Western and Islamic media, to publicly condemn the perversion of their religion. The largest Sunni Muslim organization in Briatin yesterday issued its own fatwa condemning suicide terrorism. This is where the true solution lies, in the growing movement of devout Muslims willing to vigorously challenge bin Laden's terrorist ideology as illegitimate, unrighteous and un-Islamic, and to champion the values of consensual government and pluralism in the Islamic world.

SOME SMALL GOOD NEWS

American fundamentalist Christian terrorist Eric Rudolph gets two life sentences.

Eric Rudolph, who has confessed to the Atlanta Olympics bombing and three other explosions that killed two and injured 150, received two life sentences today for a fatal abortion clinic blast after angrily denouncing abortion and telling the federal court that "deadly force is needed to stop it."

Mr. Rudolph, a 38-year-old former Army explosives expert, pleaded guilty in April to setting off a bomb that injured a nurse, Emily Lyons, and killed a police officer, Robert Sanderson, outside the Woman All Women abortion clinic in Birmingham, Ala., in 1998.

He was sentenced to two consecutive life terms without parole today in a federal courtroom in Birmingham.

POINT BLANK

If you haven't seen John Boorman's Point Blank, do. Just out on DVD, it's one of the great gangster movies. Lee Marvin, in my favorite of his performances, has about ten lines. Also, Archie Bunker's in the movie.

VOWELL

Sarah Vowell is funny.

The Supreme Court's ruling last month upholding the right of the Texas State Capitol to keep a Ten Commandments sculpture - sponsored by that great theologian Cecil B. DeMille to promote his Charlton Heston epic - on its grounds as an historical artifact is arguable from a legal perspective. But to the amateur historian and professional ironist, it's a delight. Because I've been to the Texas State Capitol, and that granite Moses movie ad is one of the least offensive things there.

SCARBOROUGH

Last week, the Daily Howler had this excellent post on Joe Scarborough's scolding the media, in the wake of the London bombing, for focusing on insubstantial issues and "taking their eyes off the ball" in regards to terrorism. Scarborough's critique might have made some sense had it come out of someone else's mouth, but when you understand that Scarborough has been at the forefront of the newsmedia's effort/obsession to find out "Where the White Women At?" it just sounds like stunningly self-righteous noise.

One week later on Scarborough Country:

Mediterranean mystery
Jul. 14: George Smith and Jennifer Hagel where a young Connecticut couple on a Mediterranean cruise for their honeymoon. The 26 year-old Smith vanished as the ship sailed between Greece and Turkey. Is this a crime or an accident? Joe Scarborough investigates with Hartford, Connecticut’s NBC Station WVIT reporter Lisa Salvati.

Way to keep your eye on the ball, Joe.

HANSON'S MYTHOLOGY

The latest salvo from Victor Davis Hanson contains the usual chest-pounding and poop-throwing. Hanson is quite good at distilling the dominant conservative War on Terror hogwash and gathering it in one place, the better for us to examine and dismiss. Hanson's whole argument here, such as it is, amounts to a series of tendentious, misleading non-sequiturs, and the vigorous hacking of strawmen. I'll stick to the most egregious ones, otherwise I'd be here all day.

Hanson claims that, in the Leftist "mythology, the attack on September 11 had in some vague way something to do with American culpability." There are very few at this point who deny that U.S. foreign policy was a factor in the rise of transnational jihadism. Richard Perle, not noted for leftism, has recognized that the U.S. is "in a sense, paying a price" for it's support if Arab authoritarian regimes during the Cold War. The U.S.'s role in supporting the Afghan-Arab mujahedeen against the Soviets, and the great extent to which that contributed to the Islamic fundamentalist phenomenon, is well known. Recognizing these facts is of course different from suggesting that "we had it coming," or that 9/11 was an example of chickens coming home to roost, but Hanson ignores this in order to make his crude rhetorical point and paint everyone to the left of him as a Ward Churchill.

Responding to the charge that the U.S. "unfairly tilt[s]" toward Israel, Hanson writes:

Prior to 9/11, the United States had given an aggregate of over $50 billion to Egypt, and had allotted about the same amount of aid to Israel as to its frontline enemies.

I'm very curious where Hanson got these numbers from, because he's only off by about $123 billion. In his defense, he's not a math professor. From the Christian Science Monitor:

Adjusting the official aid to 2001 dollars in purchasing power, Israel has been given $240 billion since 1973, Stauffer reckons. In addition, the US has given Egypt $117 billion and Jordan $22 billion in foreign aid in return for signing peace treaties with Israel.

"Consequently, politically, if not administratively, those outlays are part of the total package of support for Israel," argues Stauffer in a lecture on the total costs of US Middle East policy, commissioned by the US Army War College, for a recent conference at the University of Maine.

More Hanson:

Two thirds of al Qaeda’s command is now captured or dead; bases in Afghanistan are lost. Saddam’s intelligence will not be lending expertise to anyone and the Baghdad government won’t welcome in terrorist masterminds.

Quite right, now it's only the rest of Iraq's Sunni Triangle which welcomes terrorist masterminds. Good show.

And you can't have a Hanson column that doesn't decry leftist "moral equivalence":

For the hard Left there is no absolute right and wrong since amorality is defined arbitrarily and only by those in power.

Taking back Fallujah from beheaders and terrorists is no different from bombing the London subway since civilians may die in either case. The deliberate rather than accidental targeting of noncombatants makes little difference, especially since the underdog in Fallujah is not to be judged by the same standard as the overdogs in London and New York. A half-dozen roughed up prisoners in Guantanamo are the same as the Nazi death camps or the Gulag.

What's that you say? Taking back Fallujah? Not so fast, Vic.

Hanson's vilely dismissive comment about "half-dozen roughed up prisoners in Guantanamo" is quite typical of the way conservatives have downplayed both the extent of the abuse of detainees and the horrible effects that reports of that abuse have had in the Arab and Islamic world. He simply doesn't get it, or doesn't care to.

It should be obvious that it is Hanson and his type who are in fact promulgating a myth, one in which Bush has made the hard choices and walked a lonely path of bravery while the Democrats and Euroweenies jealously bit at his ankles. This mythology mistakes stubbornness for steadfastness, political utility for moral clarity, and refuses to admit the tragic state of affairs in Iraq and of the United States' reputation in the region, both of which can be traced directly to inexplicably foolish decisions undertaken by President Bush and his gang.

Hanson would have us believe that there are only two ways to combat terrorism: The Way of Bush, or the Way of Appeasement. The only way for him to justify the former is to completely mischaracterize and misrepresent the latter.

IS IT CHRISTMAS?

That's what I asked myself when I saw (via Washington Monthly) that Justice Sunday II was on the way. Wasn't the first Justice Sunday only a few months ago? I thought I was going to have to wait a whole year for the next one, the excitment building as I counted down the days, weeks, and months, lying in bed unsleepingly the night before, and then leaping out of bed at dawn the day of, making sure that the TV and cable worked so that I'd be sure not to miss a righteous, fundamentalist reactionary second of it.

Cause you know the first Justice Sunday was the bomb, yo. I don't think I'll ever see a DJ battle like that again. And who can forget Bill Frist biting the head off of that bat? And the end, when James Dobson nailed himself to that cross on stage, live, on camera, and John Ashcroft stabbed him in his side and red, white, and blue confetti spurted out, and then the Rockettes came out can-canning in their little devil costumes as they wrapped the whole church in a big American flag...yeah. That was great.

AFGHAN-ARABS, TALIBAN, AND AL QAEDA

Very good series in Asharq Al-Awsat on the Afghan-Arabs. The work's origin is worth noting:

Asharq Al-Awsat has obtained a rare manuscript entitled, 'The Story of the Afghan-Arabs: From the Entry to Afghanistan to the Final Exodus with Taliban', written by a man who lived in close proximity to the most important moments of the drama. The writer reveals a number of secrets and explains many ambiguities in the activities of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda. In thorough detail, he recounts the struggles of the "hawks and the doves" within the organization, on issues such as weapons of mass destruction and the desperate efforts made by Osama bin Laden to obtain a "dirty bomb" from the Russian arsenal, through his correspondence with Khatab, the leader of the 'Arab Mujahideen' in the Caucasus.

Asharq Al-Awsat has obtained the manuscript through a mediator, but only after difficult and protracted negotiations.

The author, who is considered by fundamentalists in London to be the leading ideologue of Al-Qaeda, and one of the first batch of "Arab Afghans" who lived and worked in Qandahar, exposes the widely conflicting perceptions of Bin Laden's inner circle with regards to weapons of mass destruction and the most suitable methods to be adopted in the confrontation with America.

Asharq Al-Awsat is certain that the author had documented his experiences as they unfolded in front of him, from the vantage point of his membership to the Shura (Consultative) Council which constituted Bin Laden's inner circle and his close relationship with Mullah Omer, the deposed ruler of the Taliban. In deference to a request from those close to the author, Asharq Al-Awsat would not disclose his name, under the present circumstances.

Parts II, III, and IV.

UNDERRATED

Blogcritics list of Underrated Albums, via LGM. An additional entry that almost immediately came to my mind: All Shook Down by the Replacements. It's the Mats last record and essentially Paul Westerberg's first solo album, but the band's trademark drunken vigor makes even the mid-tempo tunes rock, something that's missing in Westerberg's later work. The lap-steel guitar work on "When We Began" is a treasure, as is the lyric

"Off with their heads, and on with my pants!"

which, given that the record was released in 1991, can also be seen as a harbinger of the Clinton years.

PERCEPTIONS: OCCUPATIONS AND WINNING

David Ignatius writing in Lebanon's Daily Star, examines two recent works and their possible implications for the U.S. in Iraq. The first is Robert Pape's Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, reviewed here by Michael Scheuer, in which Pape

analyzed the 315 suicide attacks that took place around the world from 1980 to 2003 and concluded that in nearly every case, terrorists were resisting what they regarded as foreign occupation. Their goal was "to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland." They turned to suicide attacks because, in their judgment, these worked against democratic societies, which have difficulty absorbing the pain the terrorists can inflict.

The second is an unpublished paper by Duke University political scientists Christopher Gelpi, Peter D. Feaver and Jason Reifler, in which

they argue that it isn't casualties, per se, that drive American public opinion about war. Instead, it's the public perception of whether a war is winnable.

"When the public believes the mission will succeed, then the public is willing to continue supporting the mission, even as costs mount. When the public thinks victory is not likely, even small costs will be highly corrosive," the authors wrote.

Interesting. Both of these works deal with perception: Pape's with the perception by insurgents, and the communities which aid and support them, that the occupation of their country by an invader is an end in itself; Gelpi, Feaver, and Reifler's with whether the American public perceive the war as winnable, worthwhile, and progressing accordingly. It seems that both of these elements could be dealt with to some extent with Iraq by presenting a timetable, even a rough one, for a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops over perhaps two years. I think that any tangible sign to Iraqis that they are getting their country back is much more likely to dilute support for the insurgency than it is to invigorate it. And any sort of light at the end of the tunnel will probably arrest, at least temporarily, the shrinking of support for the war among Americans, not that I'm concerned in the least with Bush's political fortunes, just with the negative implications which those declining fortunes could have for Iraq and the Middle East.

THE WALL

Ariel Sharon and other Israeli officials have insisted all along that Israel's "security barrier" was being built solely to keep out terrorists, and was not intended as a political border. This week, minister for Jerusalem Haim Ramon admitted what pretty much everyone knew to be true, which is that the wall is and always was in fact intended as a political border.

Ramon said demography was also a main factor for the barrier route in Jerusalem. It encloses Maaleh Adumim, a settlement with nearly 30,000 Jews, while excluding four Arab sections, including a refugee camp, with 55,000 Palestinians altogether. Of Jerusalem's 700,000 residents, about a third are Palestinian.

Besides keeping suicide bombers out, the route of the barrier "also makes Jerusalem more Jewish," Ramon said. "The safer and more Jewish Jerusalem will be, it can serve as a true capital of the state of Israel."

In other news, al Jazeera reports today on Palestinian farmers who are being denied access to their own crops which lie on the other side of Israel's wall.

Khalid Yassin of Ram Allah Human Rights Centre told Aljazeera.net on Tuesday that farmers in the West Bank village of Mas'ha had in effect been banned from their properties since 4 July due to the closure of Gate 46.

"Entry was always difficult - Israeli troops only allowed access at a couple of times during the day.

"But now occupation forces have shut the gate for good, even though cattle still need to graze and crops need to be tended to. The olive harvest in October and November will be impossible," Yassin said.

ONO AT GITMO

There's an extremely troubling article in the New Yorker alleging involvement by medical personnel in the interrogation of detainees at Gitmo. Unfortunately the article isn't available online, but here are two interviews with the writer, Jane Mayer, one from the New Yorker website and another from Democracy Now!

Here's Mayer in the New Yorker interview:

The chief focus of the U.S. military detention center in Guantánamo Bay is to gain "actionable intelligence" by interrogating the detainees. Everything there is geared towards this end. The reason that some critics have called it a giant psychological experiment is that U.S. military officials have deployed Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, or BSCTs, to help devise and implement interrogation strategies—a melding of psychology and military intelligence. The psychologists and psychiatrists who work in these BSCTs apparently develop individually tailored psychological approaches aimed at creating rapport with—or, if necessary, breaking the resistance of—each detainee. The techniques they have employed, I was told, follow very closely the techniques studied and perfected by behavioral scientists working in a different capacity for the military since the Cold War.

[snip]

Before 9/11, many of these behavioral scientists were affiliated with SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) schools, where they used their knowledge to train U.S. soldiers how to resist coercive interrogations. But since 9/11, several sources told me, these same behavioral scientists began to "reverse engineer" the process. Instead of teaching resistance, they used their skills to help overcome resistance in U.S.-held detainees.

Mayer's article also mentions that one of the techniques for breaking prisoner resistance is prolonged exposure to various "noxious" noises, including, and I wish this were a joke, the music of Yoko Ono. Friends, it just keeps getting worse.

ASSAD'S SYRIA

This New York Times Magazine article on Syria under Bashar al Assad is well worth your time.

AMATEURS

Apparently desperate for a way to represent the London attacks in a way that will reflect well on President Bush, Cliff May writes (in reference to this NY Times article):

Investigators now think that the attacks were carried out by homegrown extremists using low-tech explosive devices.

The attacks of 9/11/01 were highly sophisticated and killed thousands. The attacks of 3/11/04 in Madrid were somewhat less sophisticated and killed hundreds. The attacks of 7/705 appear to have been the work of amateurs and killed dozens.

Anyone see a pattern here?

And so much for the theory (contained in a recently leaked CIA “assessment”) that the battlefields of Iraq are turning out the most highly skilled terrorists ever (while our forces, presumably, learn nothing).

This is spinning of the highest order. First, if the London attacks were orchestrated by amateurs, as now looks likely, this of course in no way affects, let alone disproves, the CIA's assessment that Iraq has become a fertile training ground for Islamist militants. The salient point of the CIA report is that Iraq-trained militants will return to their home countries and provide counter-weight to President Bush's Middle East reform agenda.

Second, yes, I do see a pattern here. I see two. I see the increasing democratization of deadly force. And I see the continued willingness of conservatives like Cliff May to brazenly spin any and every event as a vindication of Bush policy.

SILWAN

In the spirit of peace and reconciliation, Israel is moving forward with a plan to build an agricultural park in a densely inhabited section of Arab East Jerusalem.

In early June, the City of Jerusalem said it would explore alternatives to demolition, though it contends the Palestinians had no permits and built without regard to urban planning. Even so, the prospect of the largest single destruction of Arab homes in East Jerusalem in almost four decades had already set off political undercurrents that reached to London and Washington.

Over 1,000 Palestinians live in the 88 affected homes, and Palestinians had received orders to tear down 64 of the homes before the city agreed to reconsider, said Sami Ershied, one of the lawyers appealing the orders.

[snip]

Palestinian ministers said that Palestinians were discriminated against when applying for building permits in East Jerusalem and that unilateral measures there by Israel would undermine the peace process. They also criticized Israeli attempts to change the city's demography, especially in the east, where about 200,000 Palestinians live.

Peace groups, made up of both Palestinians and Jews, opposed the demolitions and gave tours of the area to diplomats and journalists.

Pay special attention to that bit about discrimination against Israeli Arabs with regards to building permits, as this is a method which Israel has typically used to put more and more Arab land into Jewish hands. Israeli Arabs are consistently denied permits to develop their own land, often for the flimsiest of bureaucratic reasons. After a period of time, usually a few years, that land will be siezed by the Israeli government under eminent domain and be sold at very friendly prices to Jewish settlers who will then move in and build a mini-fortress (such as this one) in the midst of the Arab neighborhood. This process can only be understood as low-intensity ethnic cleansing: Force the Arab people out, move the Jewish people in, bit by bit.

Here's a first hand account of what the people of Silwan are going through, written by an Israeli peace activist.

You have to imagine what it feels like to wake up one morning in your own house, the house your grandfather built long before the state of Israel existed, and to find the official notice on the wall. Your home, where you have lived your life, is soon to be destroyed; you and your children will be refugees. It must seem unreal; a house is so stolid and enduring a presence, a thing of mortar and stone as well as intimate refuge. Now the intimacy has been violated; you are threatened, afraid, exposed. A long line of condemned homes stretches all the way up the hill, toward the wall of the old city. In the protest tent where we have come to plan the next moves, a large-scale aerial photograph is pinned to the wall, each of the 88 buildings circled and numbered. Abed points to number 9, his grandmother’s home: the man who built it, her grandfather, died 100 years ago, so the house goes back to the 19th century, Turkish times. Anywhere else it would be preserved as a historic monument, but in Israel-Palestine such considerations are irrelevant; Israel, or Sharon, wants this plot of land, like all the rest.

This is part of the war that Israel is waging against the Palestinians Arabs. I get extremely frustrated when I see references to the violence framed as "the insane cycle of Palestinian suicide bombing and Israeli retaliations," usually by people who clearly should know better, because this leaves out the most important part of the equation, which is the Israeli occupation, the brutality and day-to-day inhumanity of which cannot be overstated. Palestinian resistance, of which suicide bombing is one particularly egregious element, is first and foremost a response to that occupation. And Palestinians understand, as far too few Americans seem to, that the occupation exists primarily to facilitate land grabs like the one happening in Silwan.

OH BOY

Iran and Iraq have agreed to broad military cooperation, including the training of Iraqi soldiers by Iran. (BBC, al Jazeera)

Asked about possible US opposition to Iran-Iraq military cooperation, Shamkhani said: "No one can prevent us from reaching an agreement."

Iraq's al-Dulaimi echoed Shamkhani's comments.

"Nobody can dictate to Iraq its relations with other countries," he said.

This should be good.

ANOTHER WALL

As the Germans like to say, someone needs to be shot for this.

Iraqis call it Assur, the Fence. In English everyone calls it the Wall, and in the past two years it has grown and grown until it has become an almost continuous rampart, at least 10 miles in circumference, around the seat of American power in Baghdad.

The wall is not a small factor in the lives of ordinary Iraqis outside it. Khalid Daoud, an employee at the Culture Ministry, still looks in disbelief at the barrier of 12-foot-high, five-ton slabs that cuts through his garden.

A few months ago, he said, the American military arrived with a crane and tore up the trees in his garden, smashed the low wall surrounding it, swung the slabs into place and topped them with concertina wire.

Good lord, people. What supergenius thought this one up? As if the U.S. didn't have enough trouble with Islamists pointing to the presence of U.S. soldiers in Iraq as evidence of a Crusader-Israel conspiracy, now the U.S has built it's very own "separation barrier," similar, in both its appearance and its ruinous effect upon the lives, property, and livelihoods of the local population, to Israel's apartheid wall.

Do you think any Iraqis see this comparison?

"We are the new Palestine," said Saman Abdel Aziz Rahman, owner of the Serawan kebab restaurant, by the northern reaches of the wall.

Way to win the hearts and minds, guys.

DA GREAT BOOKS OF MY YOOF

Rob tags me. Here are the rules.

Do you ever read those stuffy book lists you see circulating, like 'List your five most important books,' and think to yourself- no wonder these people are so damned boring. Some of the titles give me a damned headache, they are so dull. Knowing things is great, but fiction makes life bigger and better and in color.

So, in the proud spirit of anti-intellectualism (just kidding), I am going to offer you the five books I liked enough as a teen/young adult to read again as an adult.

In no particular order:

The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas. Okay, I read it before my teens but I thought I should mention it because it's such an awesome book, and I continued to reread it into my teens and adulthood. It has everything a young (and old) boy needs: action, adventure, swordfighting, political intrigue, an inescapable island prison, buried treasure, assumed identities, beautiful ladies with great, heaving bosoms, and of course, traitorous ex-friends getting their just comeuppance.

Welcome to the Monkey House, by Kurt Vonnegut. This was my first experience reading Vonnegut, and though my love of his novels has lessened somewhat as I've gotten older, my appreciation for this collection of highly imaginative, often bizarre, and unapologetically political short stories has only grown.

The Dark Knight Returns, by Frank Miller. This book did for comics what Leone did for Westerns. It recontextualized and redefined an entire American mythos. For good measure, it also has the Joker gassing David Letterman and his entire studio audience, a young female Robin, and Batman whupping Superman's ass. Dude. No, dude.

The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien. It's possible that no single subject, certainly no book, has had more computer code expended upon it, so I'll keep it short. Loved it as a kid because it had swords and monsters and ginormous battle scenes. Rereading it as an adult was, and continues to be, an infinitely richer experience. Also, swords and monsters and ginormous battle scenes still get me all upset. Favorite scene: Aragorn looks into the Palantir to declare himself to Sauron. The stones on that guy.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X, by Malcolm X with Alex Haley. Even though it's non-fiction, I still think this belongs on the short list for the Great American Novel, along with Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, and Invisible Man (like how I snuck four more entries on to my list?). In addition to being a massive reality check for this white boy, this book was an early catalyst for my interest in Islam. The Haj sequence, where Malcolm discovers true Islam on his pilgrimage to Mecca, and turns away from the exclusivist heterodoxy of the Nation of Islam, is as moving as anything I've ever read in literature.

If I may color outside the lines for a moment, here are a couple books I read as a very young kid, but still enjoy.

James and the Giant Peach, by Roald Dahl. From the moment a giant rhinoceros shows up out of nowhere and eats James' parents, I was hooked. Of course, after I grew up, dropped acid, and had my own series of adventures with giant fruit and massive insects, I understood this book a lot better.

Fox in Socks, by Dr. Seuss. "When beetles fight these battles in a bottle with their paddles and the bottle's on a poodle and the poodle's eating noodles...they call this a muddle puddle tweetle poodle beetle noodle bottle paddle battle." I'm thirty-two years old and still have yet to make it through the entire book without a mistake.

O'CONNOR

Be sure to stop by Lawyers, Guns, and Money all regular-like to read Scott's ongoing commentary on Justice O'Connor's retirement, possible replacements, and the broader implications for our society.

UPDATE
While I still strongly recommend Scott's writing on O'Connor and other legal issues, be sure to ignore his unfortunate comments on David Lee Roth, who was, of course, one of the greatest rock n' roll frontmen of all time.

OLD POTTY MOUTH KISSINGER

BBC:

Former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has expressed regret over anti-India comments he made to former US President Richard Nixon.

"The Indians are bastards," Mr Kissinger said shortly before the India-Pakistan war of 1971, it was revealed this week.

Mr Kissinger also called former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi a "bitch" during the conversation.

[snip]

Mr Kissinger told NDTV that this was not a "formal conversation".

"This was somebody letting off steam at the end of a meeting in which both President Nixon and I were emphasising that we had gone out of our way to treat Mrs Gandhi very cordially," he said.

"There was disappointment at the results of the meeting. The language was Nixon language."

Sure, Hank. Blame the dead guy.