Month: October 2002

“Orwell learned, at Eton and in the colonial police, that the worst offense was to ‘let down the side’, or to be indiscreet in front of the servants or the natives, or to manifest any form of disloyalty. Thus, he was inured to the spurious appeals of group-think while still a Tory. Obviously, he wasn’t going to listen, later on, to the same public-school or regimental trash when it was uttered in party-line form by some Communist hack. I don’t think that this observation has been made before.” – from the Book Club Page. Your first batch of emails will be posted this afternoon.

Somehow I knew more of this would emerge. The Associated Press is reporting that “Muhammad also is linked to a shooting last spring at a Tacoma synagogue in which no one was injured, Tacoma police said.” So he was a terrorist, a Muslim, a member of the fanatical anti-Semitic group the Nation of Islam and someone who shot up a synagogue. Who’d have thought it? As I’ve been saying for days now, connect the dots… Because the mainstream media will do all they can to avoid it.

IN DEFENSE OF PUTIN: Maybe he’ll stop prevaricating on the Security Council now, especially since the weapons inspectors have put themselves behind the U.S-U.K. position. The loss of civilian life in the Moscow theater is, of course, a terrible event. But Putin’s gut instinct – to fight the terrorists with all the means at his disposal – was and is the right one. We don’t yet know the type of gas used, and clearly something went badly, badly wrong. But the idea of using such a device to stun and paralyze hostage-taking terrorists is not a crazy one. This is a war, guys. Above all, it must be stressed that the people really responsible for these civilian deaths are the terrorists themselves. And their global reach is widening. We’ve had outbreaks of terrorism in Bali, Jordan, Moscow and Washington, D.C. in the last couple of weeks. Every single one has some kind of Islamic extremist connection. Although the nuances differ, and the groups may not be identical and the specific motives diverse, Islamism is the thread that connects them all.

THE ANTIDOTE TO MSN: Yep, the parodies were inevitable.

THE NATION’S SMEAR ATTEMPT: I don’t think I’ve read such a thorough demolition of a hatchet job in a very long time. It’s about the Nation’s Jon Wiener’s attempt to smear critics of the work of “historian” Michael Bellesiles. If you’ve been following this controversy, this is a must-read.

CAMPUS ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: This from Friday’s Yale Daily News:

In a mind-boggling act of vandalism, the posterboard memorial to 14 Israelis killed in a car bomb explosion displayed during a Yale Friends of Israel vigil Tuesday night was torn and scattered across the lawn early the next morning.
This is not a sign that dissent has devolved to graffiti on campus – that was last week’s defamation of an anti-divestment petition in the Law School. This is not a political objection to the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians gone awry – that was the removal of most of the signs advertising former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s visit two weeks ago.
This is anti-Semitism. Plain and simple.

Amen. But how deeply disturbing that anyone on a campus today, let alone one the most distinguished in the country, would behave in this manner. How depraved have we become?

LEFTWING NEGATIVISM WATCH: Check out Salon’s Michelle Goldberg on the anti-war rally in D.C. Goldberg is more than wobbly about the war but she is at least prepared to wrestle with the fact that refusing to disarm Saddam means sustaining a vicious dictator in power. She saw little such intellectual honesty in the crowds:

[I]t was hard to find a coherent ethical worldview to back that [anti-war] position up, save for a kind of masochistic isolationism. At its worst, the lack of a clear message gave way to moral emptiness, demonstrated in sickening exchanges between the handful of pro-war Iraqi dissidents who held their own rally near the Washington Monument and the antiwar marchers who responded to their tales of murder, torture and oppression with glib slogans and, occasionally, outright mockery.

That’s what some on the left are now reduced to: mocking people whose relatives were murdered in a gulag.

CHIRAC’S GAME: A terrific piece blasting Chirac in the Times of London. The best line is as follows:

The notion that a struggle with Iraq represents some sort of “distraction” from the War on Terror is almost comical. It is like asserting that the search for a cure for cancer diverts energy from the search for perfect cosmetic surgery.

Take that, Al Gore.

VIDAL, BUSH, AND FDR: How adolescent is Gore Vidal? It is, of course, obscene that his opposition to the war on terror should now invoke the loopiest of conspiracy theories. But it is also completely predictable. This is his M.O. He has long believed, for example, that FDR was aware of Pearl Harbor ahead of time. His loopy, paranoid hatred of the American government isn’t therefore restricted to Republicans. He’s one of those literary dinosaurs whose audience is composed mainly of foreign America-haters, Guardian-readers and writers who puff his stature up in order to enjoy the alleged “shock” of his remarks even more. But these remarks aren’t shocking. They’re stale, exhausted, paranoid, bitter cliches. The only appropriate thing to do with regard to Vidal at this point is: ignore him. (For my review of Vidal’s most recent novel, where he accuses FDR of treason, click here.)

MICKEY’S CHALLENGE: My friend Mickey Kaus called on his readers last week to flush out my alleged “hypocrisy” on the matter of racial profiling. He now tells me the pickings turned out to be slim. I once criticized the New York Times for not reporting on a study that showed that racial profiling in New Jersey was based on valid statistical inferences. And that’s about it. My point in that instance was that newspapers shouldn’t be protecting their readers from the facts of race and crime for political reasons. My position on the broader matter of racial profiling is a little tortured, I confess. I think I’d be a fool not to acknowledge that in certain crimes, for example, racial disparities abound. That’s simply an empirical and statistical matter. Ditto the fact that most Islamist terrorists are not, by and large, over 60, female and a member of a religious order. At the same time, I feel pretty horrified by the notion of the state using its police power to detain or arrest (or let go) someone on the grounds of race. I think the government should be as color-blind as it possibly can. That’s why I’m against affirmative action. It seems a little difficult – although not impossible – to be against affirmative action and in favor of racial profiling by the cops. But I’m against both. It’s not hard to see why. If I were black and suspected in this way, I’d be mad as hell. And my basic solidarity has to go with those law-abiding African-American citizens who are subjected to this kind of scrutiny day after day. It saps the very democratic basis of the republic. It’s humiliating, enraging and wrong. In fact, the inference of possible guilt on the grounds merely of skin color is ab
out as close as you can get to a definition of injustice. So is it crazy to believe that racial profiling may be statistically valid but not morally defensible? I hope not, although I concede that as a practical matter it’s not always that easy.
P.S.: In the Washington terror-sniper case, there wasn’t even a statistical basis for the profiling. It was statistically invalid and morally wrong.
P.P.S. In the case of a credible eye-witness report of a suspect’s race, my objections are obviously diluted.
P.P.P.S.: Even if I were guilty as charged, the word “hypocrisy” would still not be applicable. I’m not saying one thing and doing another, which is what hypocrisy is. The right word for what I’m charged with is inconsistency. But I hope I’ve been able to explain that I’m also reasonably consistent on this. I say “reasonably” because no writer or honest person is always and everywhere consistent. But you can try and apply basic principles (of, say, color-blindness) as far as possible.

The Book Club conversation begins.

BELAFONTE, BIGOT: The reverse racism of some on the Left – and others’ acquiescence.

Just in case you might have thought that extreme Islamism might be worth looking into as a possible motive for the Washington sniper terrorist, the Boston Globe gets out in front.

Is there anything more annoying/creepy/ugly than the MSN campaign with that guy who looks like Jeff Goldblum from the remake of “The Fly”? Did they coincide it with Halloween on purpose?

Another Democratic Senate candidate uses anti-gay rhetoric to score political points. Democrat Alex Sanders had this to say in a spirited debate:

Sanders said Graham was the one running a TV endorsement from Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City.
“He’s an ultra-liberal,” Sanders said. “His wife kicked him out and he moved in with two gay men and a Shih Tzu. Is that South Carolina values? I don’t think so.”

And doesn’t he know that Rudy has also worn a dress? That’s not the way we do business in Montana, I mean, South Carolina. Again, this isn’t the worst thing in the world. It’s cheap, not vile. But if a Republican had said it, there would be hell to pay.

Sadly, it was mobbed. The hall was far too small to accommodate the crowds and many were turned away. I can’t believe NYU doesn’t have a larger hall than one that sits a couple hundred at most. But once it got under way, the event was great. Hitch was splendid – half after-dinner jokester, half passionate moralist. He made one point in particular that resonated. On the way there, we were confronted with protestors with “No War On Iraq” posters. Hitch noticed the Orwellian resonance of this slogan. The slogan, strictly speaking, is a lie, one of many promoted by the anti-war left and right. There is no possibility of a war with “Iraq.” Half the country – inhabited by the Kurds and Shia Muslims is already protected from Saddam’s murderous designs by British and American air-power. The remaining rump is not a country as such; it’s a population terrorized by a police state run by a sadistic maniac. We are not therefore at war with the country or people of Iraq; and by equating Saddam with Iraq, these so-called “peace-protestors” are de facto parties to his vile propaganda, the notion that Iraq is Saddam and Saddam is Iraq. That lie was recently displayed in the humiliating spectacle of grown human beings not simply being required to vote for Saddam, as Hitch observed, but actually to dance in the streets to celebrate him, to humiliate themselves out of terror. This disgusting spectacle wasn’t like “1984.” It was “1984.” And this is what the anti-war movement now finds itself defending. I watched part of the anti-war rally in DC on C-SPAN this weekend. Not a single speaker even addressed the evil in Baghdad. In their attempt to derail any attempt to disarm Saddam, and in their facile equation of Saddam with Iraq, they show the empty, bitter center of their alleged morality. (Check in later today for the first installment of my email chat with Hitch on his new book, “Why Orwell Matters,” on the Book Club page. We both hope you’ll join in as soon as you feel like it.)

MUST-READ: One of the books that first persuaded me I should write a book about the politics of homosexuality was Shelby Steele’s “The Content of Our Character.” He’s written much since, but I don’t think I’ve read anything of his as searingly beautiful and unflinching as his current piece in Harper’s. It’s amazing that it appears in that magazine, which has become a largely unread litany of bitter leftism under Lewis Lapham’s dyspeptic leadership. But Steele’s essay truly is a must-read. Steele shows brilliantly how the goal of black liberation – liberation toward an individuality unsullied by the poison of racism – has transformed itself into a humiliating attachment to black victimization and failure. The piece shocks the reader with its honesty. At one point, fo example, Steele recounts an exchange shown on C-SPAN between a black student and Ward Connerly at a Harvard debate. The student is withering toward Connerly’s anti-race preference message, and he is naturally supported by his peers and the Harvard establishment. This is Steele’s reflection on the young black student, insisting on the permanent oppression of his race:

[C]onsider what this Harvard student is called upon by his racial identity to argue in the year 2002. All that is creative and imaginative in him must be rallied to argue the essential weakness of his own people. Only their weakness justifies the racial preferences they receive decades after any trace of anti-black racism in college admissions. The young man must not show faith in the power of his people to overcome against any odds; he must show faith in their inability to overcome without help. As Mr. Connerly points to far less racism and far more freedom and opportunity for blacks, the young man must find a way, against all the mounting facts, to argue that black Americans cannot compete without preferences. If his own forebears seized freedom in a long and arduous struggle for civil rights, he must argue that his own generation is unable to compete on paper-and-pencil standadized tests.

Steele doesn’t mince words – because he sees how a powerful faction of liberalism, the central meaning of which should be about freedom, has become indistinguishable in some quarters from a reactionary and racist ideology that is the biggest obstacle to the advancement of African-American equality and progress today.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE: “An illuminating piece on [Paul] Wolfowitz, ‘The Sunshine Warrior’ by Bill Keller … gave a sympathetic view of [Wolfowitz’s] belief that the assertion of American power can turn Iraq into a democracy and help transform the entire Middle East. I was moved by his optimism, as I read, but I kept thinking of one thing: Vietnam. Here, as in Vietnam, the advocates are sure that American power can prevail – and sure that the result will be a happy one. But here, as in Vietnam, so many things could go wrong. Iraq is a large, modern, heavily urbanized country. If we bomb it apart, are we going to be wise enough to put it back together? Have Mr. Wolfowitz and his fellow sunshine warriors calculated the effects of an American war on feelings among Arabs and other Muslims? What would follow Saddam? The nature of a post-Saddam government in Iraq is a crucial concern for Iran, Turkey, Syria, and others; but the Bush administration has shown no sign of having an answer to that question.” – Anthony Lewis, the current New York Review of Books.

“If all this means what it says – war [with Iraq] – then George Bush is taking his country and the world into a tragedy of appalling dimensions. It would be a war with enormous casualties and with destabilizing effects beyond calculation… Listening to the President talk to the Marines, one might think that a war with Iraq would be quick and easy. Mr. Bush might have been giving a pep talk before a game. But it would almost certainly not be quick or easy. And not beneficently simple in its results. A war with Iraq could devastate a huge area of the Middle East. It could arouse many Arabs, even those critical of Saddam Hussein, against the United States.” – Anthony Lewis, November 23, 1990, The New York Times.

MELISSA RULES: A small but wonderful landmark in last night’s game. I thought Melissa Etheridge’s rendition of the national anthem was superb. I felt proud as a gay man that an open lesbian sang so beautifully and powerfully at the final game of the World Series. A simple, undemonstrative moment of actual integration. May more follow.

EMAIL OF THE DAY:

As a former daily newspaper reporter, I am struck that everything we thought we knew about the Washington “sniper” was wrong:
1. He was not an “angry white male” or “right-wing gun nut.”
2. He was not acting alone.
3. He was not using a “white box truck.”
4. He was not in a “white van with ladder racks on top.”
5. He was not “watching television coverage and reacting to it” since he was living in his car.
6. He was not a “delivery guy familiar with the area who knows all the back alleys and escape routes.”
7. He was not a guy “going to work each day like a normal person” and killing in his “off hours.”
8. His choice of the Washington, D.C., area as his killing ground was not coincidental. He had to cross a continent to get there.

In New York today, I just heard of Senator Wellstone’s death, and that of his wife, daughter and colleagues. I disagreed with a huge amount of what he believed in, but he was one of the most sincere, passionate and genuine people in American politics today. This is terrible news for all of us who value diversity of opinion and liveliness of debate in a democratic society. May he and all who died with him rest in peace.

BELAFONTE, BIGOT: Check out my latest piece in Salon.

SUSPECTED OF TERRORISM: Read this piece from the Bellingham Herald. The dots may be getting connected.

Of course, the first thing to say is that the news yesterday about the capture of the sniper and his accomplice was wonderful. My hometown can breathe a sigh of relief. And our hearts go out to the victims, their families and friends and to those many, many others who have been terrified day in day out. But it also seems to me important to ask the hard questions about what this event meant and means. Reading the newspapers in the early hours, I’m a little stunned. I’m aware that we still don’t know much about the precise motives of the sniper killer and his accomplice. But we do know the following: he was a convert to Islam, he changed his name recently, he harbored “strong anti-American feelings and had publicly praised the terrorist attacks of September 11,” he actively supported the Nation of Islam, and the New Jersey plates for the car were bought on the first anniversary of September 11, immediately after which a bomb scare emptied the DMV building. Call me crazy, but isn’t that a striking series of coincidences? To read the papers this morning is like looking at several massive dots with no-one daring to connect them. So allow me. It seems to me that this guy is clearly a disturbed and dangerous person, period. Perhaps he was simply a bad guy and a criminal. But, as I wrote a while back, the attacks were clearly not the usual pattern of a serial killer or a conventional sniper. Here’s what I posited eleven days ago in the Dish –

“[W]hat the D.C. sniper is now doing is terrorism. I don’t mean he’s a member of any specific group necessarily or even a person who might call himself a terrorist. I mean someone – a criminal – whose goal, whose purpose, is purely terror. I can see no other pattern to the shootings.”

So we have a Muslim convert, sympathetic to the murderers of 9/11, terrorizing the nation’s capital, and coming close to shutting its daily life down. I don’t see that it matters whether he was formally a member of al Qaeda or some other group. In fact, it’s more disturbing if he is not.

THE FRUITS OF RACIAL PROFILING: Now imagine the following scenario. A sniper was terrorizing the capital city. Police came across a white guy in a car whom they suspected. They took his name, but they didn’t arrest him, because they were looking for a black man. The guy subsequently went on to kill several more people. Wouldn’t this be the basis for uproar? Wouldn’t the cops involved be fired? Wouldn’t there be a massive investigation into how such racial profiling could have happened? I would think so. But this may have been exactly what happened in this case! According to the Washington Post yesterday, the cops stopped the Chevy Caprice on October 8. Here’s how the Washington Post describes what happened:

The blue Caprice discovered today was believed to have been approached in Baltimore by police who found Muhammad sleeping on Oct. 8, the day after a 13-year-old boy in Bowie was wounded as the eighth victim of the sniper, the sources said. The car was spotted in a parking lot off 28th Street, near the exit ramp to Interstate 83. Muhammad was allowed to go, although his name was put into an information data bank in Baltimore, the sources said. “Everyone was looking for a white car with white people,” said one high-ranking police source. Muhammad and Malvo are black males.

I’m a little suspicious about the wording here: “… was believed to have been approached …” But I see no refutation of this incident in today’s papers. And then there’s the stunning quote: “Everyone was looking for a white car with white people.” Get that? There’s a word for this: racial profiling. It’s wrong in itself but it’s simply astounding that this profiling by the police was also followed by the deaths of several more people. Why isn’t this a scandal? The only reason the cops – not “everyone,” in the weasel words of the “high-ranking police source” – were looking for a white guy was allegedly because only white guys are serial killers or snipers. First off, this is no excuse for racial profiling. Second, we already knew that this was not a typical serial killer or sniper. Thirdly, in the words of the New York Times,

According to a database compiled by James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University and one of the most widely quoted profilers, 55 percent of sniper killers are white.

In other words, the whole notion of racial profiling in this case was hooey in the first place. Even if he had been a typical sniper killer, there was close to a 50 percent chance of his being non-white. And yet the cops let a man go because of his race.

THE P.C. MEDIA: So the question becomes: why aren’t these obvious questions being raised in the major papers this morning? Part of it is legitimate caution in speculating about things we don’t know fully yet. That’s completely defensible. Part of it may be waiting for the shock to wear off. But, as I’ve shown, everything I’ve written here is from the papers themselves. So they’re not disguising or concealing any facts. I think the first reason for the reticence is an understandable reluctance to draw the link between domestic extreme Islam and terrorism. But this possibility is real; we’ve seen American citizens acting as foot-soldiers for al Qaeda; and we’ve seen them act as sympathizers. It may be grim to contemplate it, but these are times to look reality in the face. And I think the second reason for the reticence is that there’s a double-standard in which racial profiling against whites is fine, but racial profiling against blacks is wrong. In my view, any kind of racial profiling is always wrong. And if the cops had not been making reverse racist assumptions in this case, there’s a chance a few more people would be alive today. That alone should be enough for the people responsible for this profiling to be investigated. But somehow, I think they’ll get away with barely any criticism at all. Relief will dispel responsibility. It shouldn’t.

To Michelle Malkin, who was among the first to raise questions about the assumption that the killer was white. (Via Seth Gitell.)