Category: Old Dish

So it seems that the sins of the United States’ past make it impossible to judge the massacre of September 11, according to our 42d president. Americans’ treatment of blacks and native Americans renders unequivocal moral judgment impossible. I must say that even I found Clinton’s comments yesterday truly shocking. I always thought he was a charlatan, but often a clear-headed one. This speech suggests he has imbibed any amount of leftist nonsense. But the truly revealing fact is that he calls upon America to be introspective, to look into ourselves for the causes of this massacre. Do you think that, since September 11, he has even for a second asked the same of himself? And I don’t mean as a prelude to launching a spin campaign to defend his legacy. I’m speaking of his negligence of our intelligence services, his contempt for foreign policy, his early betrayal of Bosnian Muslims (recently made much of by bin Laden), his deeply counterproductive missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan, his allowing bin Laden to escape in 1996, and on and on. If any American deserves any guilt for laying the groundwork for September 11, Bill Clinton’s name must come at the top of most lists. How fitting that he should seek to deflect this fact by casting aspersions on the country whose highest office he besmirched and disgraced.

When I mentioned a while back that the New York City firemen’s friar, Mychal Judge, was a gay man, some of you asked me for evidence. Here’s a poignant piece on the man, partly prompted by my posting about him a while back, in the current New York Magazine. Prepare to be surprised and inspired.

THE WAGES OF RELATIVISM: The terrorist-supporter Robert Fisk asks the following question in today’s Independent: “If the US attacks were an assault on “civilization”, why shouldn’t Muslims regard the Afghanistan attack as a war on Islam?” The answer is obvious. The 9/11 massacre was an act designed exclusively to kill thousands of innocent civilians in the name of some perverted fanaticism. The bombing of Afghanistan is a) an act of self-defense against these murderers; b) designed to avoid civilian casualties as far as is humanly possible; c) aimed not at Islam, whose adherents the United States has rescued and defended in its three most recent international interventions, but at a terrorist state based upon an extreme version of Islam. These facts are not obscure. They are bleeding obvious. Fisk’s deliberate avoidance of them speaks volumes. The rest of Fisk’s piece – his description of Walter Isaacson’s memo to instill some balance in CNN’s reporting as “shameful,” “unethical,” “disgraceful”; his preference for the press in the Pakistani dictatorship over the New York Times; and so on – is a sign that he has actually lost it. Reading him a while back, one was aware of a kind of visceral hatred of Israel, but not a full-bore support for murder, terrorism and any murderous ideology as long as it came wrapped in p.c. Third Worldism. I guess Fisk has decided to go down with the ship. Good riddance.

BODY HAIR AND ALLAH: Well, I asked for it. This looks like a pretty definitive answer to the question. Yes, there’s some sort of religious duty to shave body hair – including your privates. There’s a forty-day maximum hair-growing limit. It applies to women too. Here’s another online guide to the bizarre physical requirements for Muslims, including groin hair. I know we should be respectful of the traditions of religious cultures, but this strikes me as really weird. But then, compared to mutilating the penises of infants, I guess it’s pretty harmless.

You respond to Grover Norquist; defend Bret Schundler; worry about the war.

One of the smug claims of some multilateralists in the wake of 9/11 was that it showed the necessity of the U.S. being part of a network of multilateral institutions. I was waiting for someone to puncture that canard at some point, and it’s hard to beat Anne Applebaum’s piece in the current Slate in that regard. She points out how the only critical players in the current conflict are old-fashioned nation-states, forging a mix of bilateral and multilateral ties to advance their own self-interest. What role does the EU have at moments like this? Nada. Ditto all the hyper-ventilation about a joint European force. How about the U.N.? As usual, useful window-dressing for the purposes of various nation-states. I’m sure Slate’s resident internationalist Bob Wright has something to say about this. I’m equally sure he will.

HAIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW: David Skinner of the Weekly Standard has an odd little essay on manliness. I have no idea what he’s trying to say (see if you can figure it out), but I share his interest in one truly weird aspect of the 9/11 suicide killers’ preparation for their deed. Mohammed Atta and his buddy shaved unnecessary body hair, we are told. There is nothing in Islamic law or custom to mandate this. (I’m also not quite sure what ‘unnecessary’ means in this context. Do we give a pass to hairy legs? Armpits?) Maybe they were concerned that any protruding chest hair would make them seem more swarthy, therefore more Middle Eastern, therefore more suspicious. But that seems a long shot. I think the best explanation is a kind of neurosis. I’m not going to endorse the National Enquirer’s belief that the men were gay, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to see many of these young, conflicted, sexually repressed, homophile murderers as having sexual issues. And one way people deal with these kinds of conflicts is by odd, obsessional behavior – frantic cleansing of hands and feet, manic tidiness, avoiding cracks in the sidewalk, and so on. Getting completely obsessed with body-hair – a notoriously uncontrollable feature of one’s body – seems in this ball-park. The hairless aesthetic – pioneered by gay men in the 1990s – has a market niche, of course. (It’s an aesthetic I have never even remotely understood. Why, if you want to be attractive as a man, would you want to mimic the body of a woman? Beats me. And the razor burn is a nightmare.) But I doubt that Atta was making a fashion statement. These people were simply disturbed. At least that’s the best I can come up with. Any better ideas out there?

PATENTS AND BIOWARFARE: Here’s a timely and important rebuff to demagogues like Charles Schumer and Naderite Jamie Love. Ron Daniels shows in the latest Reason magazine how important private pharmaceutical research is for protection against biowarfare. You think the Feds came up with Cipro? Gutting the profitability of drug companies during this bio-terrorist crisis is a precise recipe for ensuring we do not survive the next one.

Check out this profile in the Boston Globe of a New Yorker Muslim, the grandson of Pakistani immigrants, who followed the last game in the World Series from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and who has no qualms about killing American soldiers were he to meet them in Afghanistan. The Globe’s piece is absurdly deferential, even fawning, which is no surprise, I suppose. This traitor – a word the Globe could never use – “has a teddy-bear face and a ready smile.” But even the Globe is forced to concede that this is a new type of American – someone who, even after being born here of American parents, can jettison his loyalty to country at the drop of a hat. And this after a massacre of thousands of New Yorkers! I’m beginning to think Daniel Pipes is truly onto something.

“Putin’s government had warned the Clinton administration about bin Laden last June, saying the Saudi dissident’s camps in Afghanistan were supplying Islamic militants to fight in the breakaway republic of Chechnya. But Russian officials said the Americans showed little interest in the warning. ‘We certainly were counting on a more active cooperation in combating international terrorism,’ Putin told Walters.” – from ABC News’ interview with the Russian president.

“Hypocrisy is the only word to describe people who live in British freedom, yet support systems of thought which deny that freedom, or Britain, must be defended. Liberalism is betrayed by other people who put the comfort of immigrant minorities before the insistence on an irreducible list of British civic values: democracy, mutual tolerance, equality of liberty, the rule of law.” – Hugo Young, in yesterday’s Guardian.

Another encouraging sign is that in four out of five initiatives in which gay equality was on the table, voters came out in favor of inclusion. In three votes in Michigan, an American Family Association bid to exclude gays permanently from any civil rights recognition in Traverse City, Kalamazoo, and Huntington Woods, was soundly beaten. In Miami Beach, once home to Anita Bryant’s crusade, another initiative to give partnership benefits to city employees succeeded. Only in Houston was a partnership measure defeated – but by a very close call in a very conservative city. More evidence that Republicans need to look at these results and think about where their party is headed. Among the more promising signs, of course, is the nascent candidacy for California’s governorship of Dick Riordan. If the Californian Republican Party, long destroyed by far rightists, cannot get behind Riordan, then they fully deserve the ignominy and failure they have been courting for years.

I’m glad that Bret Schundler, whom I once admired, and Mark Earley, whom I never had much time for, went down to defeat yesterday. Both used the ancient, divisive tactics of bigotry, especially gay-baiting, to score political points against their opponents. Schundler’s campaign spread unofficial smears about McGreevey’s private life, favored banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest, and tried hard to pander to the fundamentalist right. Earley campaigned hard early on for “Virginia values” rather than “Vermont values,” hoping to ride homophobia to victory. Both Schundler and Earley were hurt by internal GOP bickering, also fostered by right-wing purists in the party. Schundler’s early acquiescence to the religious right and his idiotic attacks on rescue workers in the wake of September 11 swamped his otherwise appealing low-tax message. Both got what they deserved against centrist candidates. Mark Warner’s campaign was particularly effective. He found a way to reassure conservative Virginians that his own entrepreneurial background insulated him from traditional liberalism, while rallying suburbanites and some rural voters to an inclusive message. I hope the national Republican party understands the message from these failed campaigns. Negativism, divisiveness, hard-right social conservatism, and reflexive hostility to all government are themes that don’t work any more. Give ’em up – or keep losing.

ORTEGA TROUNCED: In what is now a footnote in world history, Daniel Ortega failed for the third time to win a democratic election in Nicaragua last Sunday. The margin of victory for his opponent, Enrique Bolanos, was much wider than expected, proving once again that Communists rarely if ever win actual democratic elections. Bolanos is no saint and has his work cut out – but his victory is yet another sign that Nicaraguans, unlike the Western left, have no illusions about the Sandinista experiment in tyranny. Speaking of illusions, check out this piece from last week’s Guardian, predicting an Ortega win. It was written by one Isobel Hilton, who is also an analyst for the BBC, a once-great news organization now increasingly in the grip of left-wing propagandists.

OSAMA’S MESSAGE: Here’s the BBC’s translation of Osama bin Laden’s latest screed, which I haven’t seen anywhere in the American press. Nothing that remarkable except the attempt to exploit president Bush’s unfortunate gaffe with the word “crusade,” and a breath-taking attempt to portray the West’s intervention in the Balkans as somehow anti-Muslim. I’m glad bin Laden smeared Kofi Annan. It can only help harden world opinion against the pious multi-millionaire. I have to say, though, that bin Laden’s reflexive hatred of the U.N. makes him sound at times like one of the black helicopter crowd in the U.S. More ironies, I suppose.

UNDERSTANDING ECSTASY: I’ve long been a believer that the recreational drug, Ecstasy, may well have therapeutic qualities for all sorts of disorders, from Parkinson’s to depression. There have been many anecdotal examples of exactly such effects. It’s very good news, then, that the FDA has finally given the go-ahead for a tiny trial to explore the drug’s potential for alleviating post-traumatic stress. One of the many paternalist insanities of our prohibition on recreational soft drug-use is that it has barred important medical research avenues from being pursued. It has also barred further private and public research to refine the drug for recreational use – to rid it of some side-effects, to hone it to more nuanced and specific results, and generally to employ it for what the Founders of this country once called “the pursuit of happiness.” I don’t buy the argument that research into Ecstasy must only be restricted to medicinal purposes. Just because some forms of subjective happiness might come in a tube, a pill, or a bud, doesn’t mean that the government has a right to prohibit them. So let the research for cures begin. And let the research for better, cleaner, safer highs not be so far behind.

“It probably still takes a country like America two years to recognize, fully, that we are in a war–even given the attacks on our own soil, in two of our greatest cities. If CNN’s reporters run out of ways to introduce context for the war America has undertaken, they can always air tape of the New York City memorial Mr. Isaacson spoke of.
There they would find, after the crowd had nearly all departed, the stony-eyed boy of 17 or so, still holding his father’s picture up to be seen–a sword in the air. They would find the moment recorded by one of CNN’s own reporters, who talked to one of the bereaved families wandering dazed around the ruins, and, like a lot of others here, clutching face masks they hardly bothered to wear. Why had she come here today to this difficult place, correspondent Gary Tuchman asked the woman whose husband was one of the Aon employees killed September 11.
She had to be here, came the swift, agonized answer. “I had to breathe the air–I had to fill my lungs up with him,” she told the reporter in that wasteland filled with mourners. In this place a news director could find enough context for several decades.” – Dorothy Rabinowitz’s beautiful rebuke to the David Westins and Wolf Blitzers of this world.