Month: August 2006

And then a Hezbollah Katyusha rocket arrived. Don’t miss Michael Totten’s latest first-hand reporting from Israel and Lebanon – here. And don’t forget to donate to one of the best blog-reporters out there.

He’s moving into the Tarantino-Action-Puppet genre.

What other conclusion can be reached after Byron Calame’s column in the NYT this morning? Money quote:

Internal discussions about drafts of the article had been "dragging on for weeks" before the Nov. 2 election, Mr. Keller acknowledged. That process had included talks with the Bush administration. He said a fresh draft was the subject of internal deliberations "less than a week" before the election.

"The climactic discussion about whether to publish was right on the eve of the election," Mr. Keller said. The pre-election discussions included Jill Abramson, a managing editor; Philip Taubman, the chief of the Washington bureau; Rebecca Corbett, the editor handling the story, and often Mr. Risen. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., the publisher, was briefed, but Mr. Keller said the final decision to hold the story was his …

So why did the Dec. 16 article say The Times had "delayed publication for a year," specifically ruling out the possibility that the story had been held prior to the Nov. 2 election? "It was probably inelegant wording," Mr. Keller said, who added later, "I don’t know what was in my head at the time."

Were the wording and the sensitivity of the election-day timing issue discussed internally? "I don‚Äôt remember," Mr. Keller said in an interview. He does remember discussing that ‘I wanted to own up to holding it." And The Times does deserve credit for disclosing that it had held the story.

It was more than inelegant, however, to report flatly that the delay had lasted "a year.’ Characterizing it as "more than a year," as Mr. Keller and others later did, would have been technically accurate. But that phrase would have represented a fuzziness that Times readers shouldn‚Äô’t have to put up with when a hotly contested presidential election is involved.

"Inelegant wording?" We have a new – and rather Upper East Side – euphemism for a lie. The executive editor deliberately misled his readers to save himself from their ire. His original decision might have been defensible. His subsequent dissembling isn’t.

"Kerry, who ran against Bush, was supported by homosexuals and nudists. But it was Bush who won [the elections], because he is Christian, right-wing, tenacious, and unyielding. In other words, the religious overcame the perverted. So we cannot blame all Americans and Westerners," – Dr. Yousuf Al-Qaradhawi, from an Al-Jazeera interview, in close solidarity with Karl Rove. (Hat tip: Petrelis.)

Hatch’s Harbor, the end of Cape Cod, this evening.

A reader remonstrates:

You are right, Islam has a problem right now and your description of it as "ressentiment, but with God re-attached" is perfect. However, I don’t think it’s helpful to dismiss a supportive Muslim who is concerned about his faith and culture being painted with a broad brush. The exchange has re-clarified (I keep reaching this conclusion and keep forgetting it) for me that this cancer is a problem that can only be excised by Islam itself – we can’t win this struggle, but we can lose it. This conclusion, of course, leaves me with the question of our role in Islam’s internal struggle. It reminded me of a parable that’s attributed to Native Americans. (I’m not sure if this attribution is accurate.)

When asked about spirituality, a Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner:

"Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time."

When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, "The one I feed."

In terms of our actions, so little is clear in this struggle. However, I suspect that our most helpful role is to find ways to feed the good dog and starve the bad dog. I fear that your post, while making an important point, was written in a way that starves the good dog and may feed the bad dog. Not to say that we can’t be critical of elements within Islam, but we can’t get sucked into forgetting that worldwide, a tiny fraction of Muslims will actively support violence. The rest oppose it, are too scared to oppose it, or are on the fence. They are barraged with messages that we will never respect them, understand them or help them in any lasting and meaningful way. You and Tony Blair are correct – we have to win this by living our values, not using them as justification for imposing them world-wide and suspending them at home. This is why, even though I consider myself liberal, I oppose any redeployment out of Iraq that would widely be perceived as abandonment.

I hope my postings did not conflate all Muslims into the bad category. I am sorry if they unintentionally did. My intent was the opposite: to clarify the sickness that is there and encourage the healthy within the Muslim world to combat it. The problem is, in part, however, the touchiness of the healthy. They shouldn’t immediately suspect every Western criticism of Islamism and Wahhabism of being criticism of Islam as a whole. 

"You cannot lead an entire nation to war promising victory, produce humiliating defeat and remain in power," – Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit on domestic criticism of president George W. Bush Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

"The outrage of so many outraged people outrages me. On the scales of world opinion, some Muslim corpses are light as a feather, and others weigh tonnes. Two measures, two weights. The daily terrorist attacks on civilians in Baghdad, killing 50 people or more, are checked off in reports under the heading of miscellaneous, while the bomb that took 28 lives in Qana is denounced as a crime against humanity. Only a few intellectuals like Bernard-Henri L√©vy or Magdi Allam, chief editor of the Corriere della Sera, find this surprising. Why do the 200,000 slaughtered Muslims of Darfur not arouse even half a quarter of the fury caused by 200-times fewer dead in Lebanon? Must we deduce that Muslims killed by other Muslims don’t count – whether in the eyes of Muslim authorities or viewed through the bad conscience of the west?" – Andre Glucksman, in an article first published in Le Figaro.

You might call this prep-hop. Or Abercrombie and hos. But urban style just reached the Hamptons/Kennebunkport set.

Here’s a little insight into the atmosphere in parts of D.C. Being away for a month and a half, I have to say it’s pleasant not to be assaulted intermittently by homophobic and racist slurs. Here’s a classic recent D.C anecdote from Frank Ahrens in today’s Washington Post:

Walking up Connecticut Avenue through Dupont Circle one night recently, I spotted a sidewalk saxophonist. Amid his free-form meanderings, I picked out some Brubeck. The busker was a black man, and looked about my age.

I was about to say something friendly to him about "Take Five" as I approached, but he beat me to the punch. He locked eyes with me, stopped playing and said, "After 42 years in this life, I learned one thing: White people suck!"

It’s rare to be confronted with such unprovoked, in-your-face malice, at least for a white guy. I was stunned and kept walking. But I was so angered, so offended, that I shot back — without really thinking — "[Expletive] you!"

"You can’t," he yelled after me, as I walked away, "you gay [expletive]!"

The punch-line, of course, is that Brubeck is white. In DC, as gentrification intensifies, my own inner-city neighborhood has become noticeably less friendly. I’ve lived on the same street corner as a major drug gang for fourteen years. They usually leave me alone, but in the last year or so, the mutterings of "faggot" as I walk my dogs each day have grown more common. Older African-American teens drag kids away from any interaction with me and the beagles. At a recent neighborhood meeating, one resident told the assembled throng (I heard this from someone who lives in my building) declared: "We don’t want any more white people here." I was sitting on a bus a couple years’ back and heard two black men talk about the problem with "faggots" in their neighborhood. "I can smell ’em," one said to the other, and cast a sideways look in my direction. Local black pastors have recently given sermons denouncing "faggots" in exactly that language, and remain in the mayor’s good graces. I should add: I couldn’t care less about the "faggot" remarks. Yes, they grate, and my other half finds them more distressing. As long as they don’t touch me, they’re welcome to their prejudice. It’s their loss, not mine. It’s just a shame that, once again, insecure male heterosexuals find the need to bolster their own fragile self-esteem by denigrating fags. One day, they’ll grow up and be, well, men.