Category: Old Dish

I didn’t think I’d read such an editorial in the newspaper that has become ground central for appeasement. But here it is in the Guardian, exhibiting solidarity with the United States and admiration for the American people. In the end, people get it. Our best weapons against appeasement are the terrorists themselves.

MORE BELLOC: I have some qualms reprinting Hillaire Belloc. He was a complicated fellow, a bigot, a genius of a writer (A.N. Wilson wrote a memorable and sadly out-of-print biography of him), and an anti-semite of spectacular proportions. He was also fiercely intelligent. Here’s an extract from his 1938 book, “The Great Heresies.” Worth a re-read: “May not Islam rise again? In a sense the question is already answered because Islam has never departed. It still commands the fixed loyalty and unquestioning adhesion of all the millions between the Atlantic and the Indus and further afield throughout scattered communities of further Asia. But I ask the question in the sense: ‘Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world which will shake the dominion of Europeans – still nominally Christian – and reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization?’ The future always comes as a surprise but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing in the future is the return of Islam. Since religion is at the root of all political movements and changes and since we have here a very great religion physically paralysed, but morally intensely alive, we are in the presence of an unstable equilibrium which cannot remain permanently unstable.”

Zogby just did a poll which has barely been reported in the media. I wonder why. I guess these considerations seem petty and I’ll get another blizzard of hate mail for noting it. But Zogby is one of the best pollsters we have; and he’s no conservative. His poll found that when voters were asked who they would prefer to be president in a crisis like this one, they prefer Bush to Clinton by 72 to 20 percent. Now of course this reflects a natural rally-round-our prez attitude. But its margin is striking, no? I’ve also been struck anecdotally by how many liberal friends of mine have quietly noted that at times like these, they are half-glad the Republicans are in office. Me too. Except, today at least, for Dennis Hastert.

WOOLSEY ON CLINTON: “The other, less generous possibility is that the Clinton administration was engaged here in its trademark behavior of focusing first and foremost on spin, expectation-adjustment, and short-term public relations, and deriving policy therefrom. If you assume that all terrorism flows from loose networks and not state action, then you will usually be able to find at least someone who was involved in a terrorist attack to convict. You can then claim success, get some good press and avoid confronting a state. The alternative approach–a thorough search for any state actor–presents two PR risks, neither attractive. If you find no state actor, there might be the appearance of an investigative failure. If, on the other hand, you find that a state was involved, you might then risk confrontation, even conflict, and possibly body bags on the evening news.”- James Woolsey, the Wall Street Journal today. Woolsey takes Bush I to task too. His broader argument about what kind of evidence we need to convict a state of sponsoring terrorism strikes me as an important one.

LETTERS: Maggie Gallagher replies.

“Michael Eisner decides, ‘I can’t make a movie about Martin Luther King, Jr.-they’ll be rioting at the gates of Disneyland!’ That’s bullshit! But that’s what the new world order is. They control culture, they control ideas. And I think the revolt of September 11th was about ‘Fuck you! Fuck your order-‘ … The studios bought television stations. Why? Why did the telecommunications bill get passed at midnight, a hidden bill at midnight? The Arabs have a point! They’re going to be joined by the people who objected in Seattle, and the usual ten per cent who are against everything, and it’s going to be, like, twenty-five per cent of this country that’s against the new world order.” – Oliver Stone, as captured in this week’s New Yorker. Funny, but I haven’t heard bin Laden rail against Michael Eisner yet.

I took no prisoners. Here’s an audio transcript of our often testy exchange.

SEPTEMBER 11: A reader notices a passage in Hillaire Belloc’s “Heresies” from 1936. He is speaking about the lifting of the Turkish siege of Vienna: “Vienna, as we saw, was almost taken and only saved by the Christian army under the command of the King of Poland on a date that ought to be among the most famous in history — September 11, 1683.” Maybe that date is no accident.

CNN THANKS A MURDERER: In an interview with a man representing a group that openly claims responsibility for killing an Israeli cabinet minister, the interviewer, Leon Harris, concludes with the following words:
“HARRIS: Mr. Rabah Mihanna, thank you very much for your time…
MIHANNA: Thank you.
HARRIS: … this morning and for your insight and your side of the story.”
This is disgusting. It’s disgusting even to have such a person on the air, let alone to treat him with respect. It is even more disgusting that CNN is now cooperating with al Qaeda’s propaganda program by submitting six questions to bin Laden. Can you imagine them in 1940? Mr Goebbels, thank you so much for your insight …

Here’s an interview with the Imam of New York’s Islamic Cultural Center. He has since left New York and is residing in Egypt. Here is one of the leading Muslim leaders in the United States. These are some of his comments: “You see these people (i.e. the Jews) all the time, everywhere, disseminating corruption, heresy, homosexuality, alcoholism, and drugs. [Because of them] there are strip clubs, homosexuals, and lesbians everywhere. They do this to impose their hegemony and colonialism on the world. Now, they are riding on the back of the world powers. These people always seek out the superpower of the generation and develop coexistence with it. Before this, they rode on the back of England and on the back of the French empire. After that, they rode on the back of Germany. But Hitler annihilated them because they betrayed him and violated their contract with him.” The rest of the interview, which continues to propagate the psychotic notion that Jews were behind the September 11 massacre contains even worse passages. This isn’t like Nazism. It is the direct Muslim equivalent of Nazism. And like Nazism, it cannot be appeased.

The sophisticated form of anthrax delivered to Tom Daschle’s office forces us to ask a simple question. What are these people trying to do? I think they’re testing the waters. They want to know how we will respond to what is still a minor biological threat, as a softener to a major biological threat in the coming weeks. They must be encouraged by the panic-mongering of the tabloids, Hollywood and hoaxsters. They must also be encouraged by the fact that some elements in the administration already seem to be saying we need to keep our coalition together rather than destroy the many-headed enemy. So the terrorists are pondering their next move. The chilling aspect of the news in the New York Times today is that the terrorists clearly have access to the kind of anthrax that could be used against large numbers of civilians. My hopes yesterday that this was a minor attack seem absurdly naxefve in retrospect. So they are warning us and testing us. At this point, it seems to me that a refusal to extend the war to Iraq is not even an option. We have to extend it to Iraq. It is by far the most likely source of this weapon; it is clearly willing to use such weapons in the future; and no war against terrorism of this kind can be won without dealing decisively with the Iraqi threat. We no longer have any choice in the matter. Slowly, incrementally, a Rubicon has been crossed. The terrorists have launched a biological weapon against the United States. They have therefore made biological warfare thinkable and thus repeatable. We once had a doctrine that such a Rubicon would be answered with a nuclear response. We backed down on that threat in the Gulf War but Saddam didn’t dare use biological weapons then. Someone has dared to use them now. Our response must be as grave as this new threat. I know that this means that this conflict is deepening and widening beyond its initial phony stage. But what choice do we have? Inaction in the face of biological warfare is an invitation for more in a world where that is now thinkable. Appropriate response will no doubt inflame an already inflamed region, as people seek solace through the usual ideological fire. Either way the war will grow and I feel nothing but dread in my heart. But we didn’t seek this conflict. It has sought us. If we do not wage war now, we may have to wage an even bloodier war in the very near future. These are bleak choices, but what else do we have?

LETTERS: In defense of Maggie Gallagher, Stanley Fish’s reading list, etc.

MCCAIN’S CLARITY: Take a moment to read John McCain’s extraordinary speech October 9 to the U.S. Naval Academy. It’s as good a speech about this war as one can imagine – and its greatness lies in McCain’s intuitive sense that we are now in a truly epic struggle, and one that will truly test the limits of our faith and our endurance. I’m sure he’s right, and he is also on the mark about the importance of ruthlessness. Even now, we are squeamish about minor civilian casualties; even now, voices quibbling, worrying, panicking are urging us to down-size the war, avoid a direct confrontation, buy off peace or placate the enemy with palliatives. That might have worked ten years ago. It’s quite clear it won’t work now. As McCain clearly says, “Our goal is to vanquish terrorism, not reduce it, not change its operations, not temporarily subdue it, but vanquish it. All other concerns are secondary. It is a difficult, demanding task we have undertaken. We must expect and prepare for our enemies to strike us again before they are vanquished. Some of this war will be fought at home. And the casualties that we will suffer may again include civilians. We must keep our nerve at all costs. We should use no more force than necessary, but no less than necessary. Fighting this war in half measures will only give our enemies time and opportunity to strike us again. We must change and change permanently the mindset of terrorists, those who give them sanctuary and support, and those parts of Islamic populations who believe the terrorist conceit that they will ultimately prevail in a conflict with the West, that America has not the stomach to wage a relentless, long term, and, at times, ruthless war to destroy them.” Yes, that is the message. We must destroy them.

MOVE OVER, CHOMSKY: “Since September 11 my imam has extended Friday prayers with a special supplication reserved for times of affliction, imploring God to annihilate Islam’s enemies, to “rock the ground underneath their feet” … Operation Enduring Freedom is in fact a war against liberty, a war against those Muslims who cling to the hope that, just like their counterparts in the west, they too will one day be able to determine and direct their own fate. Ever since independence, Muslim societies from Marakesh to Mindanao have had their aspirations for self-rule repressed by western-backed elites and dictators.” – Faisal Bodi, calling for the defeat of his own country in a war against fundamentalist Islam, in – where else? – the Guardian.

I’m indebted to Jeffrey Isaac of the American Prospect for noticing the following sentences in a recent book by Noam Chomsky, A New Generation Draws the Line: Kosovo, East Timor and the Standards of the West. Chomsky, with a moral relativism straight out of Stanley Fish’s playbook, argues that there is no difference between the actions of NATO countries attempting to stop the genocide in Bosnia and terrorists seeking their own violent solution to various problems. And he makes a crazy logical leap to assert that Britain and the U.S. are as responsible for the oppression in East Timor as the rulers in Jakarta. Then this obscenity: “If proponents of the “repetition of Bosnia” thesis intend it seriously, they should certainly have been calling for the bombing of Jakarta – indeed Washington and London – in early 1999 so as not to allow in East Timor a repetition of the crimes that Indonesia, the U.S., and the UK, had perpetrated there for a quarter-century. And when the new generation of leaders [i.e. Clinton and Blair] refused to pursue this honorable course, they should have been leading honest citizens to do so themselves, perhaps joining the Bin Laden network. These conclusions follow straightforwardly, if we assume that the thesis is intended as something more than apologetics for state violence.” Thus the nihilism that fuels Chomsky and Fish and others leads inexorably to a call for individuals to join the bin Laden network and bomb Washington and London. Chomsky wrote this before September 11. In the wake of the fact that terrorists took his cynical, rhetorical advice and actually killed thousands of people in Washington and New York, is it too much to ask that Chomsky take responsibility for his words, disown them, and apologize?

I’ll be debating the “war among the intellectuals” with Katha Pollitt tonight on NPR’s Special Coverage of the war, broadcast from WBUR in Boston, from 8 – 9 pm EST tonight.

Maggie Gallagher sympathizes with Islam over contemporary American culture for the following reasons: “Islam remains a successful civilization because it fulfills the two minimum functions any culture must: It channels intense social energy of individuals into the two great sacrifices of self: war and babies. The children in Islamic societies suffer, and the women even more. But though individuals suffer, the family system itself works. The society perpetuates itself. It even finds new adherents in our country, primarily among those who have suffered most deeply from our current sexual disorder, African-Americans.” Thus the far right’s loathing of recreational, non-procreative sex (a major achievement of a free society in my book) leads her into a qualified defense of Muslim abuse of women and of children (girls are ignored, boys are routinely sodomized by adult males), and of a militarism which is truly primitive. Once again, the Fundamentalist American right seems as conflicted about this war as the postmodern left. How clarifying this conflict is becoming.

“While we loudly and consistently condemn Israel for its ill treatment of Palestinians we are silent when Muslim regimes abuse the rights of Muslims and slaughter thousands of them. Remember Saddam and his use of chemical weapons against Muslims (Kurds)?. Remember Pakistani army’s excesses against Muslims (Bengalis)?. Remember the Mujahideen of Afghanistan and their mutual slaughter? Have we ever condemned them for their excesses? Have we demanded international intervention or retribution against them? Do you know how the Saudis treat their minority Shiis? Have we protested the violation of their rights? But we all are eager to condemn Israel; not because we care for rights and lives of the Palestinians, we don’t. We condemn Israel because we hate “them”.” Couldn’t put it better myself. Check out the rest of Muqtedar Khan’s brave and interesting essay on the position of America’s Muslims today.

FEAR ITSELF: If you haven’t already, check out my latest column on Americans’ difficulty with stoicism opposite.