For some reason, my mood lifted this weekend. After the horror of September 11, the emotional exhaustion that followed, the anthrax anxiety, the war jitters, it felt as if some kind of rhythm was coming back to the country. There is still weirdness in the air – so many helicopters always above here in D.C., the delayed mail, and so on. But I also feel secure that most Americans now know we’re in this for a while, and are prepared to put up with more terror and a long and unpredictable war. I’ve begun to block out the defeatism of some of the elite. But I also realize – and this may sound odd coming from a journalist whose job it is to be skeptical – that I deeply believe that this president can see this through. I don’t think he’s going to let us down. This may sound even odder, but I honestly feel, in an odd way, that he was meant for this. At mass today, the Gospel was about Zacchaeus, the tax collector, climbing into a sycamore tree to catch a look at Jesus. This unpopular and unlikely figure was the man Jesus chose to stay with that night in Jericho. The priest said the lesson was that anyone can be called – anyone. I’m a religious person, so forgive me for saying I find something strangely comforting in the oddity of Bush, such an unprepossessing figure, being the man for this hour. I really do believe that this is an epic battle between good and evil, and that in such battles, the least predictable people are often called to serve. In Blair, Bush and Putin – the key leaders of the three key powers in this conflict – we have three religious and highly unusual allies. The revelation of the religious bonding between Bush and Putin by Peggy Noonan doesn’t surprise me in this respect. No, this is not a holy war, or a battle between Christianity and Islam. But it is a profound moral battle, and we are lucky or blessed to have men of faith conducting it. That’s what has lifted my spirits, I guess. Call it something I haven’t felt in politics for a very long time: trust.
MORE WORRYING NEWS FROM BRITAIN: My own newspaper in Britain, the Sunday Times, just commissioned a big poll of British Muslims that is more reliable than the radio poll I mentioned last week. A stunning 96 percent want an end to the campaign in Afghanistan; and a full 68 percent said it was more important to them that they were Muslim rather than British. It seems to me that what my other boss Marty Peretz has been saying for years – that many Muslim immigrants in recent years simply do not have allegiance to their new country – is palpably true. This isn’t true of all of them – some 14 percent in the Sunday Times poll said they were British before they were Muslims. And it shouldn’t justify any intolerance or discrimination toward Muslim Americans. But it’s disturbing nonetheless. Taken together with Daniel Pipes’ latest, excellent contribution to this debate, we have a real problem on our hands. One recalls that the exception to religious toleration in John Locke’s famous letter was with regard to Catholics. He believed that at that time in England’s fraught history, some Catholics owed political allegiance to a foreign power, and therefore didn’t merit religious toleration. As an English Catholic of the twentieth century, I found such views abhorrent. In a country where terrorism had recently been associated with Catholicism (the November 5 Gunpowder plot), it wasn’t quite so outlandish. Locke’s basic point was that religious toleration doesn’t mean toleration of groups whose political loyalty is questionable or outright treacherous. I think his point still stands. And it will soon raise dark and difficult questions that Islamism as a political entity will have to answer.
LETTERS: My clothes; NPR’s politics; Islam’s texts; and Rorty’s evasions.
ARAFAT ADOPTS JIHAD: Here’s a revealing passage from a recent speech by Yassir Arafat, good friend of Tony Blair’s, invoking Jihad, quoting the Koran, and deploying Islamic rhetoric to rally Palestinians: “My brothers, you represent this principle, and the strong foundations of this people, who struggled and waged Jihad; I have great hope in you and in your heroes, because we believe that we have in us the firm, solid, reliable, and sound principle [Qaida]… I say these words so all will hear them, from Sharon to Netanyahu, to the last of the [listeners] in America, Japan, Indonesia, South Africa, Russia, in the North and in the South: ‘The Palestinian people will determine its victory whether anyone agrees or not’; ‘they see this as far [from coming about], while we see it as soon to come, and we have patience’ [Koran], ‘and they shall enter the mosque, as they entered it the first time’ [Koran]. Allah will not break his promise, Allah will not break his promise … Out of our commitment to Allah, to the homeland, and to the Christian and Muslim holy places over which we are custodians, we shall conclude the journey, we shall conclude the journey, we shall conclude the journey…”
THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “I venture to say that what is bad in the candid friend is simply that he is not candid. He is keeping something back — his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things. He has a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help. This is certainly, I think, what makes a certain sort of anti-patriot irritating to healthy citizens. I do not speak (of course) of the anti-patriotism which only irritates feverish stockbrokers and gushing actresses; that is only patriotism speaking plainly. A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men, and the explanation of him is, I think, what I have suggested: he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, ‘I am sorry to say we are ruined,’ and is not sorry at all. And he may be said, without rhetoric, to be a traitor; for he is using that ugly knowledge which has allowed him to strengthen the army, to discourage people from joining it… The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises — he has not this primary and supernatural loyalty to things.” – G. K. Chesterton, “Orthodoxy.”
SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “9/11 and its sequelae [sic] have definitely rehabilitated such traditional masculine values as physical courage, upper-body strength, toughness, resolve. The WTC attack is men vs. men–firefighters v. fanatics. (It would seem positively ungrateful to ask why, in a city half black and brown, the “heroes” were still mostly white, and, for that matter, still mostly male.)” – Katha Pollitt, The Nation. Note that she cannot use the word heroes without placing it in quotation marks.
MATH AND ME: As regular readers know, I can’t do math. The numbers in the item below are a function of a) my stupidity and b) the weird arrangement of data on our new server, which I misread. Anyway, the site is now attracting traffic at a rate of 360,000 unique visitors and 640,000 visits a month. Amazing, but not quite as amazing
as I first calculated. I’m sorry I screwed up.
The Dish 