A stirring and brilliant email from former Soviet dissident Elena Bonner is doing the rounds. I hope someone bigger than me publishes it in its entirety. It reminded me again that the struggle is not over and it made me question my tolerance of the Bush administration’s nimble but worryingly diffuse dealings with the Arab-Israeli conflict. I hope it stiffens your sinews, as it did mine:
On April 2, Donald Rumsfeld announced that Saddam Hussein had instituted a $25,000 payment for suicide bombers. How should the civilized world regard this gruesome form of terror and Saddam’s peculiar subsidy for it? We are familiar with murders committed by hired killers acting for the mafia. These are horrible crimes, but the persons ordering the murders try to remain anonymous in order to avoid arrest and trial. Saddam, on the other hand, has advertised his support for the suicide bombers and the fact that he ordered their actions, secure in the knowledge that he won’t be prosecuted for this. Moreover, people are not killed one at a time; the idea is rather “the more, the merrier.” The innocent victims are killed only because of their race, religion or political opinions. The suicide bombers have introduced a new weapon – cheap and easily transported – into the business of terrorism. And without a doubt, it will spread around the world, not only to promote the political aims of various extremist groups, but also as a way for tens and hundreds of mentally disturbed persons to solve their problems. Anyone – tacitly sympathizing with the suicide-terrorists – who thinks that this new weapon of murder-on-command can be kept localized is mistaken. If there is no attempt to fight back against them, very soon the suicide bombers’ attacks will spread beyond Jerusalem. Their bombs will explode on the Champs-Elysees, on Red Square, on Broadway, on Picadilly, and on the streets of Peking, Cairo, Baghdad, and Damascus, depending on who orders and pays for the explosion and what are his goals. And the suicide squads may use weapons more dangerous and destructive than bombs strapped to their waists … Sudden death will become an everyday occurence, and fear will be omnipresent. The idea that some states will be exempt from the plague is an illusion. You won’t escape being eaten by an alligator even if you feed your neighbors to him one-by-one. Those who hailed the 1938 Munich agreement in hopes that it would secure peace learned this much too late. They helped bring on World War II. … Either terrorism, nourished by anti-semitism, anti-Americanism, and the ambitions of some politicians, will win, or our common human reason will defeat it. No third way can be found!
THE PUBLIC GETS IT: More and more, Americans see Israel’s struggle against the Palestinian terrorist insurgency as no different from our own struggle against al Qaeda. Sharon wins! This is what the president believes in his gut. He should stick with his instincts. The American people are morally, strategically and logically right.
A VICTIM OF THE LARGER STRUGGLE AGAINST TERROR: My coverage of the bad coverage of Pim Fortuyn’s murder has led to a flurry of emails from Europe and around the world. Most from Europe write in to say that the Euro-press has been as bad as the American for the most part. One email stood out. It’s from a Belgian diplomat assigned to the Netherlands. Here’s his take on Fortuyn’s rise: Fortuyn was a baby boomer of the 1960s – a counter-cultural liberal who took a stand against Islamist intolerance. (My mind brings to the fore people like Christopher Hitchens, Salman Rushdie or even Camille P.) The cataclyst for Fortuyn’s sudden rise was a single television show. Over to the diplomat:
On a sunday late February an across the board selection of imams and social leaders of the muslim society in Holland were interviewed on prime time national television. The country was a few weeks before country-wide local elections, so all the opinions had to be known, and definitely the ones of the immigrants and the foreigners in the country… I had just returned to Brussels from a weekend with the parents in the countryside and had tuned into one of the Dutch TV channels. The journalists did an excellent job and no questions were left out. But, I could not believe my ears when I was listening to their answers: on the family (“The man is master and lord”), on women (“They have to serve”), on democracy and human rights (“This is not part of the Koran nor of the Sharia and alien to our cultural beliefs, though we will not fight it when in a foreign country”) and in the end on Fortuyn and gay men… (“Worse than pigs,” they barely refrained from saying “ready to be slaughtered”). The strange thing was that the reaction in the studio was silence and even next day, little in the media about it… even the authorities did not react, except the Justice Minister who said: “freedom of speech”. However there was one who came forward, namely Fortuyn, who was also interviewed and who dared to say: “This is a backward culture and values we cannot share.” Then came the outcry from the others, he was forced out of this new protest party and branded by the politically correct in the Netherlands, as racist and fascist. He withstood the storm, put up his own party and barely two weeks later at the local elections won a landslide 36% of the votes in his hometown Rotterdam, coming ahead of everybody else and that from zero.
In other words, the key element in Fortuyn’s rise to power was his opposition to Islamism and the fascist tendencies within it. He was a victim of the deeper struggle against religious fundamentalism. He was no saint. He was at times a vulgar populist. But he was not only not a fascist; he was one of the few willing to stand up against it.
THE PUBLIC VERSUS PROFESSIONAL “SCIENCE”: “To quote the email from the person with the B.S. in “Environmental Horticulture,” the one who wrote,
“I must point out that the only positive press from this book comes from non-scientists, those who don’t know how to analyze his arguments and references, or those with a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. There are many frustrated people in the sciences who are shaking their heads at the amount of time that must be wasted defending their work against his poorly analyzed arguments.”
I would answer that there are many frustrated people in the “real world” who have been “shaking their heads” for decades over the amount of time that we have to defend our livelihoods against the poorly analyzed directions of academics. We have our degrees in business, economics, law, or engineering, and have to participate in an actual market that will reward or penalize our efforts based on merit. At the same time, the scientific community (at least the large organizations) spew poorly researched, obviously biased, and hopelessly naive “studies” and “press releases” directing government to put “reasonable” restrictions on how the rest of us live. The media, looking for any frightful story (like 25% of liquor consumed by minors?), gladly trumpet the latest to a frightened public.” After an email last week from a scientist complaining about the need to waste time by answering public criticism of professional research, I got an avalanche of emails. Today’s book club discussionreprints an edited selection. Thie pixels are aglow.
MORE ON FORTUYN’S KILLER: Good piece in my British home, the Sunday Times (reg. req.), on the man, who killed Dutch politician, Pim Fortuyn. As I have mentioned, a previously unsolved murder of an environmental official is being tied to van der Graaf – and one of the links is that both that murder and Fortuyn’s were accomplished by point-blank gun-shots with rare 9mm silver-tip hollow-point bullets. Van der Graaf was questioned about that killing at the time. There’s more:
Documents found on the hard disk of a computer seized from his home also point to a possible link with arson attacks in November 1999 on a plant in Milheeze, a few miles to the south, that produces feed for minks, and a series of incidents at a local poultry farm that started in 1995 … A police search of van der Graaf’s home turned up plans of Fortuyn’s house and the homes of three other prospective MPs on his party’s list, including Jim Janssen van Raay, a prominent former Christian Democrat MEP. All three have been given 24-hour protection.
This is enviro-terrorism. It’s far more dangerous than anything Fortuyn argued for. But what’s the betting that Europe’s social-democratic elites will take it on?
UBI CARITAS: Some superb pieces this weekend about the crisis in the Catholic Church. Frank Bruni’s beautiful exploration of the subject in the New York Times Magazine shouldn’t be missed. Nor should this arresting piece in the Washington Post about the large number of priests there who have wives, girlfriends or companions. As is often the case in dysfunctional hierarchies (the Church, the military, etc.), the only thing worse than breaking these rules is being honest about it. Father Marinero told his parishioners about his love affairs, they understood, and he still functions as a de facto priest, even though he has been stripped of formal authority. “The important thing about loving God is not that you’re celibate,” he tells Mary Jordan. “The important thing is that you dedicate your life to God, whether you have 10 kids or you are celibate.” I’m sure he’s right. I know a priest whom I wrote about in my book, “Love Undetectable.” He was loved by his parishioners, did a fantastic job, but eventually cracked under the pressure of being gay and being celibate. For him, it wasn’t just the lack of sex and intimacy; it was the cognitive dissonance between who he was and what the Church was even willing to discuss or understand. He quit. But he is still a priest in every sense of tthe word. He reaches out to people; he listens; he pastors. That’s just his calling; and watching it in action is a joy. I cannot say how much it grieves me to see my own Church lose so many wonderful priests because the weight of these laws seems to outweigh the imperative of actually doing God’s work in the world we now live in. I hope our current trauma will enable us to rethink whether such structures as celibacy are now actually inhibiting what God wants rather than enabling it. But the hierarchy seems intent on not even listening.
LABEL WATCH: This from the New York Times Magazine (sniff): “…[Bernie Mac’s] tone was several shades streetier and more explosive than anything Bill Cosby could imagine. He began by saying, ‘When a kid gets 1 years old, I believe you got the right to hit ’em in the throat or stomach.’ He then raged about the fecklessness of under-age mothers. His fury was so comically operatic, however, that Mac managed to share a stark, neocon vision of black life without alienating his audience.” So it’s neoconservative to endorse physically abusing children?
LIBERALISM AND ISLAM: I don’t buy this somewhat Borkian view of how modern liberalism has made the West vulnerable to Islam, but it makes for a stimulating read. Bracing even. Here’s the conclusion:
Liberalism has to be rescued from the clutches of the libertarians, in order to defend liberal democracy from militant Islam on the one hand and the racist Right on the other. Fortuyn was never going to be the answer. He was part of the problem. But in exposing the hypocrisy and confusion of false liberalism, he did us all a service.
What interesting ideological times we live in.
THOSE UNRELIABLE BLOGS: I’ve been whacked lately a little for a few minor but swiftly corrected errors on my website. We all make mistakes. But some of the correctors point to bloggery as a more error-prone medium than the bigger media. Here’s a correction in Sunday’s New York Times, sent to me by an eagle-eyed reader. It speaks for itself:
An article on April 21 about Florida’s place in the national culture referred incorrectly to the standoff between Branch Davidians and the F.B.I. in Waco, Tex., which occurred during the tenure of Janet Reno as attorney general of the United States and is getting new attention in light of her campaign for the Florida governorship. The investigation of the standoff led by former Senator John Danforth was independent, not Congressional. According to the Danforth report, the Branch Davidians were responsible for the fire inside their compound; it was not started by the F.B.I. The number of Branch Davidians who died was about 80, not 75, including more than 20 children, not 25. The previous office held by Reno was state attorney for Dade County, Fla., not state attorney general. The article also misidentified the first family of Hispanic origin to live in the Florida governor’s mansion. It was that of Bob Martinez, not Jeb Bush. The article also referred incorrectly to a swamp in Florida. It is Okefenokee; Atchafalaya (not Atchalafaya) is in Louisiana.
And I don’t have fact-checkers.
LIBERAL INTOLERANCE WATCH: Not Howell Raines this time, but a course at Berkeley whose description in the catalog warns: “conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections.” Why not just other colleges?
WAS FORTUYN A VAMPIRE?: The BBC makes him look like one. By the way, some of you wrote in to say that I’m wrong to defend Fortuyn as someone who was not anti-immigration. He was anti-immigration, you argue, but not anti-immigrant. Fair enough, especially since I said he opposed further immigration. But, strictly speaking, his party still stands for some newcomers – 10,000 a year rather than 40,000 – and its main concern is their integration into Dutch society.
ANOTHER FAR-RIGHT EXTREMIST: Time for the New York Times, the Guardian and the BBC to decry this statement from a leading “far right” politician, arguing that Muslim immigrants need to be integrated better in order to guard against Islamo-fascist threats. That politician is Peter Hain, Blair’s minister for Europe, and a founder of the 1970s Anti-Nazi League and a longtime campaigner against apartheid. Never mind. Just as well he’s not gay or Dutch.
The Dish 