Category: Old Dish

Here’s that Swedish Osama pic – in color. Check out the pink car – a Chrysler imperial, I think. The web is great, innit?

Here’s a good one from the BBC. It’s Osama at Oxford, again in 1970s mode. Notice how awkward he is next to the babe. She has her arm around him, he has twisted his body to avoid any physical contact. Everyone keeps asking me: do you think he’s gay? The answer is surely irrelevant: gay or straight, he has clear issues with women. Wouldn’t you if your mother was a concubine?

Here’s a teenage pic of Osama with his huge family on vacation in Sweden. Look how normal it all looks, how bourgeois, how American. Osama is standing, the last but one on the right. It’s hard to see from this link, but he’s actually wearing flaired blue jeans and a rather fetching powder-green rib-sweater. I guess the 1970s wrought their own form of fashion terror on all of us. Then there’s this Mary Anne Weaver gem, unaccountably buried in the New Yorker web-archives. Enjoy.

“And British commandos are there now and they’re trying to work out a different way of operating. The British want to go in big. Set up a firebase in the middle of Taliban territory and saying, hey, we’re here, come and get us.” – Sy Hersh on CNN last night.

One of the oddities of the saturation coverage of the last few weeks has been a remarkable lack of real data on what kind of person Osama bin Laden actually is. He has become a cipher rather than a human being. I want to know more about his family, how he was brought up, how he came to be such a borderline personality, what’s with his silly outfits, and so on. I’ve seen almost no pictures of him as a child, yet he called his mommy to warn her of his upcoming massacre. (Which reminds me: why hasn’t she been arrested for advance knowledge of a mass murder without warning the authorities and the world? Wasn’t she in Paris at the time? Can we extradite her?) The only recent piece I found interesting was a humor column by Giles Coren, where he likens Osama to upper-class British ne’er-do-wells who compensate for their massive privilege by smoking pot and going left-wing at college. In Britain they’re known as trust-fund Rastafarians, or “trustafarians.” I remember at Oxford how revolting I thought these people were. Isn’t this a good propaganda point in our campaign to win over world opinion – that this man is wealthy and privileged beyond most people’s imaginings and is about as authentic a man of the downtrodden masses as Donald Trump? But my main point is that we need to understand Osama, stripped of his murderous pieties. We’ve been subjected to endless pointless profiles of dumb-ass movie actors for years. Can’t we drum up one to bring bin Laden down to earth?

STEM CELLS WITHOUT BABIES?: A head-spinning piece in today’s New York Times about the possibility of chemically “tricking” a human egg into believing it has been fertilized, in order to create stem-cells in embryos that could not become developed human life. I’m not sure I understand the full science of this, but it’s certainly intriguing. It’s definitely another reason to be circumspect toward the argument that traditional stem-cell research, which inevitably involves the destruction of potential human life, is the only way to go. The term for this still-experimental process is “parthenogenesis,” based on the Greek for virgin birth. The article, alas, is a little confusing because it both says that these embryos cannot become new life, and yet later argues that in the future, difficulties might be overcome to pioneer whole new avenues of human reproduction through parthenogenesis. Go figure. Some feminists might be intrigued to find that, “Stem cells derived from male parthenotes tend to turn into muscle cells, while stem cells from female parthenotes turned more often into brain and nerve cells.” Brawn and brains again.

LETTERS: Grover Norquist blows a gasket.

CHOMSKY LIES AGAIN: A devastating take-down of Noam Chomsky’s latest anti-American screed can be found on the highly useful website, Spinsanity. Chomsky’s use of the term “silent genocide” to refer to the allies’ war methods is typically depraved.

CONTRA HOWARD: Last week, I pixeled my own dissection of Michael Howard’s (I don’t respect peerage and refuse to call people Sir Anything) view that the U.S. should never have declared a “war” against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Here are two very cogent responses as well – from the estimable Robert Harris and my friend Anne McElvoy, a beleaguered woman of sense at the Independent in London. I particularly enjoyed Anne’s description of Howard’s “pre-emptive, multi-purpose defeatism.” Here’s an extract: “The historian Michael Howard argues that we are in a no-win situation towards Mr. Bin Laden, who would have either a platform for global propaganda if he is brought to justice, or be a martyr if killed. I cannot share this pre-emptive, multi-purpose defeatism. A martyred bin Laden or a bin Laden incanting his message from the dock somewhere is infinitely preferable to a Mr. bin Laden still in charge of an organisation training suicide bombers to fly into tall buildings.”

Check out the new pieces opposite, on progress against terrorism and the extra-special relationship.

For some reason, my mood lifted this weekend. After the horror of September 11, the emotional exhaustion that followed, the anthrax anxiety, the war jitters, it felt as if some kind of rhythm was coming back to the country. There is still weirdness in the air – so many helicopters always above here in D.C., the delayed mail, and so on. But I also feel secure that most Americans now know we’re in this for a while, and are prepared to put up with more terror and a long and unpredictable war. I’ve begun to block out the defeatism of some of the elite. But I also realize – and this may sound odd coming from a journalist whose job it is to be skeptical – that I deeply believe that this president can see this through. I don’t think he’s going to let us down. This may sound even odder, but I honestly feel, in an odd way, that he was meant for this. At mass today, the Gospel was about Zacchaeus, the tax collector, climbing into a sycamore tree to catch a look at Jesus. This unpopular and unlikely figure was the man Jesus chose to stay with that night in Jericho. The priest said the lesson was that anyone can be called – anyone. I’m a religious person, so forgive me for saying I find something strangely comforting in the oddity of Bush, such an unprepossessing figure, being the man for this hour. I really do believe that this is an epic battle between good and evil, and that in such battles, the least predictable people are often called to serve. In Blair, Bush and Putin – the key leaders of the three key powers in this conflict – we have three religious and highly unusual allies. The revelation of the religious bonding between Bush and Putin by Peggy Noonan doesn’t surprise me in this respect. No, this is not a holy war, or a battle between Christianity and Islam. But it is a profound moral battle, and we are lucky or blessed to have men of faith conducting it. That’s what has lifted my spirits, I guess. Call it something I haven’t felt in politics for a very long time: trust.

MORE WORRYING NEWS FROM BRITAIN: My own newspaper in Britain, the Sunday Times, just commissioned a big poll of British Muslims that is more reliable than the radio poll I mentioned last week. A stunning 96 percent want an end to the campaign in Afghanistan; and a full 68 percent said it was more important to them that they were Muslim rather than British. It seems to me that what my other boss Marty Peretz has been saying for years – that many Muslim immigrants in recent years simply do not have allegiance to their new country – is palpably true. This isn’t true of all of them – some 14 percent in the Sunday Times poll said they were British before they were Muslims. And it shouldn’t justify any intolerance or discrimination toward Muslim Americans. But it’s disturbing nonetheless. Taken together with Daniel Pipes’ latest, excellent contribution to this debate, we have a real problem on our hands. One recalls that the exception to religious toleration in John Locke’s famous letter was with regard to Catholics. He believed that at that time in England’s fraught history, some Catholics owed political allegiance to a foreign power, and therefore didn’t merit religious toleration. As an English Catholic of the twentieth century, I found such views abhorrent. In a country where terrorism had recently been associated with Catholicism (the November 5 Gunpowder plot), it wasn’t quite so outlandish. Locke’s basic point was that religious toleration doesn’t mean toleration of groups whose political loyalty is questionable or outright treacherous. I think his point still stands. And it will soon raise dark and difficult questions that Islamism as a political entity will have to answer.

LETTERS: My clothes; NPR’s politics; Islam’s texts; and Rorty’s evasions.

ARAFAT ADOPTS JIHAD: Here’s a revealing passage from a recent speech by Yassir Arafat, good friend of Tony Blair’s, invoking Jihad, quoting the Koran, and deploying Islamic rhetoric to rally Palestinians: “My brothers, you represent this principle, and the strong foundations of this people, who struggled and waged Jihad; I have great hope in you and in your heroes, because we believe that we have in us the firm, solid, reliable, and sound principle [Qaida]… I say these words so all will hear them, from Sharon to Netanyahu, to the last of the [listeners] in America, Japan, Indonesia, South Africa, Russia, in the North and in the South: ‘The Palestinian people will determine its victory whether anyone agrees or not’; ‘they see this as far [from coming about], while we see it as soon to come, and we have patience’ [Koran], ‘and they shall enter the mosque, as they entered it the first time’ [Koran]. Allah will not break his promise, Allah will not break his promise … Out of our commitment to Allah, to the homeland, and to the Christian and Muslim holy places over which we are custodians, we shall conclude the journey, we shall conclude the journey, we shall conclude the journey…”

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “I venture to say that what is bad in the candid friend is simply that he is not candid. He is keeping something back — his own gloomy pleasure in saying unpleasant things. He has a secret desire to hurt, not merely to help. This is certainly, I think, what makes a certain sort of anti-patriot irritating to healthy citizens. I do not speak (of course) of the anti-patriotism which only irritates feverish stockbrokers and gushing actresses; that is only patriotism speaking plainly. A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it. But there is an anti-patriot who honestly angers honest men, and the explanation of him is, I think, what I have suggested: he is the uncandid candid friend; the man who says, ‘I am sorry to say we are ruined,’ and is not sorry at all. And he may be said, without rhetoric, to be a traitor; for he is using that ugly knowledge which has allowed him to strengthen the army, to discourage people from joining it… The evil of the pessimist is, then, not that he chastises gods and men, but that he does not love what he chastises — he has not this primary and supernatural loyalty to things.” – G. K. Chesterton, “Orthodoxy.”

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “9/11 and its sequelae [sic] have definitely rehabilitated such traditional masculine values as physical courage, upper-body strength, toughness, resolve. The WTC attack is men vs. men–firefighters v. fanatics. (It would seem positively ungrateful to ask why, in a city half black and brown, the “heroes” were still mostly white, and, for that matter, still mostly male.)” – Katha Pollitt, The Nation. Note that she cannot use the word heroes without placing it in quotation marks.

MATH AND ME: As regular readers know, I can’t do math. The numbers in the item below are a function of a) my stupidity and b) the weird arrangement of data on our new server, which I misread. Anyway, the site is now attracting traffic at a rate of 360,000 unique visitors and 640,000 visits a month. Amazing, but not quite as amazing
as I first calculated. I’m sorry I screwed up.

Our traffic is rising so fast the last week in October seemed almost a different universe from the first week in October. Thanks for all your help in spreading the word. If you extrapolate from the last seven days (which weren’t affected by some weird, unique event), we are now averaging well over 1 million monthly visits from around 650,000 unique visitors. That’s more than triple our traffic in August, which was still our biggest month since we started. We still haven’t figured out a good way to convert this into a viable economic model – although your donation dollars have let us get a new server (just in time!) and a new design with features you’ve been clamoring for for a while (I know, I know, but it’s coming). But, as far as I’m concerned, it’s a labor of love and if I have to do it for free for ever, I’ll keep at it. (By “we,” I’m not referring to some long lost royal ancestry, but me and my best buddy Robert Cameron at Fantascope who is largely responsible for everything but the writing.) But something tells me we’ll find a kind patron or mega-sponsor soon and we’re talking to lots of people all the time. Anyway, thanks for your dedication and querulous, constant feedback.

Now a major newspaper in Pakistan has received an anthrax package. No doubt it’s from some pro-life extremists in Utah. It will be very interesting to see what examination of the package reveals about its origin and whether it is connected to the American attacks. But guess what? Karachi is playing down the anthrax threat! According to a report last week in Pakistan’s News International, “Requesting anonymity a senior ministry of health official in Karachi confirmed that Aga Khan hospital has reported the first case of anthrax in Pakistan and the matter has been referred to top federal authorities in Islamabad who were considering the pros and cons of making a public disclosure about the advent of anthrax in the country.” Hmmm. More evidence that Karachi and Washington may well have serious information about the anthrax that they are keeping to themselves until the appropriate moment. I have no proof of this, and I could be wrong, but there’s an awful lot of circumstantial evidence.

WHAT COURAGE REALLY MEANS: “However, if the loftiness of spirit that reveals itself amid danger and toil [i.e. courage] is empty of justice, if it fights not for the common safety but for its own advantages, it is a vice. It is not merely unvirtuous; it is rather a savagery which repels all civilized feeling. Therefore the Stoics define courage well when they call it the virtue which fights on behalf of fairness. For that reason no one has won praise who has pursued the glory of courage by treachery and cunning; for nothing can be honorable from which justice is absent.” — Cicero, “On Duties” Bk. I, 62. I guess Susan “morally neutral” Sontag hasn’t brushed up on her classics for a while.

WAGING WAR AND PEACE: Here’s an editorial from the Boston Globe which beautifully captures the complete incoherence of what one might call the Talbot position, which is that we should wage war and peace at the same time. The Globe seems to believe that there is no moral difference between the collateral, unintended killing of civilians by forces acting in self-defense and the deliberate, intended massacre of civilians as an act of terrorist warfare. The inference is that unless America can fight a war with no civilian casualties on the other side, then the war is unjust or “unacceptable.” Taken to its conclusion, this is completely equivalent to saying that only a perfect war can ever be waged, which is to say that no war can be waged. It’s defeatism under the guise of moralism. And it is as immoral as it is incoherent.

One of the most interesting stories of the last few days was one by Elaine Sciolino for the New York Times. It recounts how the United States is actually scuppering a French effort to win Security Council condemnation of the anthrax attacks in New York and Washington. The Bush administration allegedly wants no such condemnation, since they apparently do not believe that a foreign source was behind the biological warfare launched on the U.S. “Let’s assume this was the work of a bunch of right-wing nuts or a Unabomber kind of thing,” one “senior administration official” told the Times. “That would make it a domestic criminal matter. The Security Council just has no legitimate role in this.” Another anonymous official tells Sciolino: “I’m not going to deny that there were two schools of thought on this.” Hmmm. Now ask yourself: what conceivable harm would it do to have the U.N. condemn this even if it turns out to be a domestic crackpot? I can’t see any problem at all – unless you’re a black helicopter type who doesn’t think the U.N. should have anything to do with any domestic matters in America. So what to make of the administration’s reluctance? Here’s my take: the White House completely believes that the anthrax attack is the work of al Qaeda via Iraq. They may even have evidence. But they don’t want to be forced into the awkward situation of having to respond to such a blatant act of state-sponsored biological warfare yet. With the Afghan war just starting, the last thing they want to tackle is the possibility of nuclear response against Iraq. So they are just batting this issue away, ignoring it, pretending it isn’t here for now. Have you noticed how completely silent the president has been about this? That’s my theory anyway. Give the administration a few months and then the evidence will suddenly be found. But at a time of their choosing.

GROVER’S BUDDIES: Frank Foer does an effective job of showing how Grover Norquist’s attempt to bring Muslim Americans into the Republican fold has become a nightmare. Several of the new members of the Republican coalition turn out to be Hamas and Hezbollah supporters – and Norquist was partly responsible for the fact that the president invited several Muslim extremists into the White House for a photo-op (as first reported by Jake Tapper). I completely understand why Republicans might want to bring new ethnic groups into their big tent. But pure ethnic pandering, without careful inspection of the views or principles of some of the key figures you’re courting, is a recipe for disaster. The Dems have their Sharptons and Jacksons. The Republicans have their Falwells and Dobsons. But a bunch of Jew-hating terrorist-sympathizers seems another dimension of misfortune to visit upon the Bushies. Hey, Grover. Stick to the gays in future. And make sure they don’t meet the Muslims.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: “While the noble man lives in trust and openness with himself, the man of ressentiment is neither upright nor naive nor honest and straightforward with himself. His soul squints; his spirit loves hiding places, secret paths and back doors, everything covert entices him as his world, his security, his refreshment; he understands how to keep silent, how not to forget, how to wait… this plant blooms best today among anarchists and anti-Semites – where it has always bloomed, in hidden places, like the violent, though with a different odor.” – Friedrich Nietzsche on the Osama bin Ladens of his day, “Genealogy of Morals,” First and Second Essays, Sections 10 and 11.

ROSIE LOVES BUSH: And this was news?