A stunningly positive assessment of the war on terror from – yes! – the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE I: “Sensible British citizens offer the police support in protecting lives and property. Whether this justifies a thousand body-armoured police with automatic weapons in London’s streets I doubt. Bombs kill and panic the panicky. But they do not undermine civilised society unless that society wants to be undermined. The destructive potential of these bombs is not remotely ‘mass’, nor is the threat comparable with that of the Blitz or nuclear weapons… My doubts over Mr Blair boil down to a question of common sense. His speeches and actions on foreign policy are not those of a wise man or one with any sense of historical judgment. Like Margaret Thatcher, he relies on a small coterie of aides rather than the official machine. But unlike her he cannot engage with that machine intellectually. Anyone with a knowledge of history would not equate Hitler’s threat with that of al-Qaeda. Anyone who respects Western civilisation would not think it ‘in mortal danger’ from gangs of Islamic fanatics.” – Simon Jenkins, in the Spectator, arguing “that Tony Blair’s Sedgefield speech was just another attempt by the Prime Minister to scare us into believing that we are all in mortal danger. We are not.” A day after the article went to press around 200 people were murdered and over a thousand injured in an al Qaeda attack in Madrid.
VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE II: “Blair and Bush ultimately build their case on their personal intuitions, provoked by the Sept. 11 attacks, that something new had appeared in the world. They both concluded, as Bush was to put it, that they had to “rid the world of evil.” But their argument that Islamic extremism is a “global threat” is indefensible. The Islamists can make spectacular attacks on Britain or the United States, but neither country, nor any of the other democracies, is in the slightest danger of being “engulfed” by terrorism, or shaken from its democratic foundations.
The Islamists are a challenge to Islamic society itself, but a limited one. Their doctrine will run its course, and eventually be rejected by Muslims as a futile strategy for dealing with the modern world.” – William Pfaff, in an article called “Blair overstates the threat of terrorism,” in the International Herald Tribune, the day before the Madrid massacre.
BLIAR: My take on the astonishingly shameless book by the astonishingly shameless Jayson Blair.
THE VICTIMS OF INTOLERANCE: It goes both ways, argues Ted Gup, in the Washington Post yesterday:
Intolerance always has two victims, the object of prejudice and its carrier. Gay men and women have endured ostracism, ridicule and violence. But those who cannot bring themselves to face the notion of homosexuality also have paid dearly. Marriage, not the abstract “institution” so often cited, but the flesh and blood and spiritual variety, has already suffered. Families have torn themselves apart over how and whether to accept a gay child, and husbands and wives, joined in sham unions coerced by society’s unwillingness to accept a person’s true sexual identity, have produced misery and divorce.
This is part of the reason I believe that allowing civil marriage for gays will deeply strengthen family life and the fiber of the country. It will bring families back together and prevent fake marriages and disastrous family structures from being entertained again.
The Dish 