Category: Old Dish

Judith Miller is a great and courageous journalist. In the current circumstances, when she is clearly a target for terrorist attack, her candor is truly remarkable. Here’s her terrific interchange with Dana Suyyagh from the al Jazeera cable network on Larry King last night:

“MILLER: Do you call a people who blow themselves up on the West
Bank and in Gaza and in Israel martyrs, because that’s another thing we
have heard about your network?

SUYYAGH: Yes, we do. We do. Only since…

MILLER: And do you think that’s objective or…

SUYYAGH: Yes.

MILLER: And do you think that’s objective reporting? Did you call the
people who blew the Twin Towers up martyrs?

SUYYAGH: No. We never called them martyrs. That is an act of terror.
We go with international opinion on that one, yes.

MILLER: I see…

SUYYAGH: The West Bank is a different issue altogether.

MILLER: So terrorists who kill people, civilians in Israel, are martyrs, and terrorists who kill Americans are terrorists? Is that your news standard?

SUYYAGH: I’m sorry I didn’t hear the last sentence.

MILLER: I said is that your news standard — to distinguish between the
people who kill Americans and people who kill Israelis — one are martyrs
and the other is terrorists?

SUYYAGH: No. We have a standing policy that people who are martyrs
are people who give themselves for a cause.

What happened in New York and Washington, we believe, was causeless.”

The reason I bring this up is because it truly does reflect a hatred of Israel and of Jews in general that is so embedded in the region that we almost don’t notice it. Killing Americans is wrong. Killing Israelis is an act of martyrdom. And this is a moderate voice! Yes, some Arabs and Muslims may object to some Israeli policies in the West Bank. That may give them a cause. But the murder of innocent civilians is not martyrdom, even if the killer dies in the process. It’s mass murder outside of any moral rules of conventional war. If it isn’t terrorism, nothing is. But Larry King will happily give time and space to an individual who celebrates the difference on American cable television. Good for Miller for penetrating through this moral fog.

I read today that a Newsweek poll in Pakistan found that 48 percent of Pakistanis believe that Israel was behind the September 11 massacre. Reports from around the Middle East also show this to be a widespread belief among Arabs and Muslims. It is also echoed by the defeatist factions on the far left and the far right in this country. Prince Alaweed responded yesterday to Rudy Giuliani’s heroic return of the Saudi prince’s blood money in these words: “The whole issue is that I spoke about their position [on the Middle East conflict] and they didn’t like it because there are Jewish pressures and they were afraid of them.” This quote was to the newspaper Okaz, according to the New York Post. Alaweed knew exactly how to explain the affront to his native audience. There is only one word for this sickness and it is anti-Semitism. Somehow, we have not yet named the psychosis that affects large numbers of Muslims. It has nothing whatsoever to do with Israel’s policies toward the Palestinians, whatever Tony Blair naively believes. The overwhelming majority of Arab Muslims do not want an accommodation with Israel. They want its obliteration and the expulsion or murder of every Jew that lives there. This anti-Semitism is openly fostered and fomented by many of the “moderate” Arab regimes we are now busy cozying up to. It is widely believed across the Muslim world – from the Philippines to Morocco to the denizens of our own native Muslim, Mr. Farrakhan. One of our greatest mistakes in the past few years has been to avoid calling this what it is: a sickness that only half a century ago was responsible for the greatest crime in the history of mankind. Why, one wonders, have no Western leaders confronted this ugly truth and condemned it? Why hasn’t the Pope? The rhetoric of bin Laden is not simply fundamentalist. In its structure and paranoia, it is not so different from the doctrines propagated by Hitler. These bin Laden-supporting Muslims want non-Muslims expelled from a wide swathe of Arab territory. They want Lebensraum, and the primary victim of such Lebensraum will once again be the Jews. Israel may not be the first cause cited by bin Laden but it surely is a critical one. It seems to me that our squeamishness in naming and recognizing this phenomenon is blunting our ability to confront it. Once again, we are faced with an expansionist, terrorist ideology that uses the demonization of Jews as one of its major rallying cries. What more do we need to know?

FISH RISES TO THE BAIT: Post-modernist Stanley Fish doesn’t believe that relativism prevents us from condemning terrorism or indeed Islamo-fascism. “If by relativism one means a cast of mind that renders you unable to prefer your own convictions to those of your adversary, then relativism could hardly end because it never began,” he argues. “Our convictions are by definition preferred; that’s what makes them our convictions. Relativizing them is neither an option nor a danger. But if by relativism one means the practice of putting yourself in your adversary’s shoes, not in order to wear them as your own but in order to have some understanding (far short of approval) of why someone else might want to wear them, then relativism will not and should not end, because it is simply another name for serious thought.” Well, if relativism is simply a synonym for serious thought, of course it doesn’t prevent us from making moral judgments. Many, many of us who regard this war as a moral necessity have indeed attempted to understand the arguments of the enemy and have found them for the most part repugnant and evil. But this is a semantic dodge. What relativism forbids is being able to state that something is actually evil as an objective truth. It’s just our conception of truth. And our truth is no more objectively valid than bin Laden’s truth, or Pol Pot’s or Stalin’s. So we fight this war simply as a function of our own will to power. Think about this for a minute and you realize that it’s a version of “my country, right or wrong,” a belief divorced from any attempt to subject ourselves and our enemy to neutral judgment or inspection. Jingoism from the left! And it’s this lazy jingoism, this worship of power for its own solipsistic sake, that led great philosophers like Heidegger to embrace the Nazis. It’s also this philosophical lassitude that leads Western “intellectuals” into the moral dead-end which this crisis has exposed like a flash-light and from which they are belatedly trying to rescue themselves. Fish’s op-ed is a worthy attempt to do just that. But he still doesn’t get it, does he?

ANTHRAX HYSTERIA: I feel a bit bad, as I was one of the first to say that biological warfare was clearly the next phase of the attack. But the current wave of anthrax hysteria is getting absurd. Don’t get me wrong. Only the F.B.I. could have taken this long to recognize this wave of attacks as an obvious coordinated act of terrorism. According to the New York Times today, they’re beginning to contemplate the possibility. Way to go, guys! I also believe we need far more government action to get a smallpox vaccine developed and distributed, and a far more proactive policy with regard to Iraq’s intent to use chemical and biological weapons against the U.S. and Israel. But beneath all this, there’s a silver lining to the latest attack. If this is the best they’ve got, it’s truly pathetic. I always thought that bin Laden must have planned a second strike to back up his first one. I cannot believe he wouldn’t have launched it by now if he could. Perhaps intelligence and law enforcement here and in Europe have stymied larger attacks. Perhaps anthrax is a horrifying intro to worse horrors. But if not, we have reason to be glad. This wave could kill at most a handful of people. It’s a truly puny weapon. Its main purpose (which is why the terrorists have targeted media types) is to spread chaos and alarm, which we are in danger of letting them get away with. Looked at objectively, the campaign is risible. One thing we have to guard against, I think, is over-estimating the enemy. Look how swiftly we have crippled the Taliban regime. It’s only our own caution that is preventing their complete collapse. With this biological attack, we have incurred very very few casualties and have been given a classic casus belli for extending the war. Advantage: America. So buck up and stop the freak-outs.

KINGSOLVER’S GAFFE: In the piece of drivel I linked to yesterday by Barbara Kingsolver, the following sentences appeared: “I would like us to sign the Kyoto agreement today, and reduce our fossil-fuel emissions with legislation that will ease us into safer, less gluttonous, sensibly reorganized lives. If this were the face we showed the world, and the model we helped bring about elsewhere, I expect we could get along with a military budget the size of Iceland’s.” A reader helpfully points out that Iceland has no defense budget whatsoever. Its entire defense structure is provided by the United States, and has been since 1951. Always nice to see the arguments of peaceniks not just exposed but demolished.

MATH: It never was my strong point. The proportion of the American population killed on September 11 was not 0.02 percent, but 0.002 percent. Actually, the correct number strengthens my point about the tiny risk of being killed by terrorists.

I guess we’ve all been having some nervous attacks about this war. My own amount to a nagging fear that the administration is not as serious as it says it is and that Americans may get faint-hearted when the going gets tougher. The president’s constant reiteration of the importance of this war and his crystal-clear moral understanding of the stakes involved have more than allayed my worries on the former front. I’m also cheered by Time Magazine’s poll, showing increasing support for military action, rising levels of approval for the president’s conduct, and only mild panic about anthrax. “Seventy-one percent of those polled October 12th favor the use of U.S. ground troops versus the 64 percent who favored the idea on September 27th,” reports Time. Better still, over half of Americans support ground troops even if it means 1000 casualties. A full third are happy to see ground troop action, even if it means 10,000 casualties. So long, Vietnam Syndrome, I hope. The only thing as heart-warming as these numbers is the heart-burn they are giving Barbara Kingsolver.

IRAQ AGAIN: No-one seems to know whether Iraq is involved in the anthrax outbreaks. But here’s what we do know. According to Jane’s Defense Weekly, “It is known that Iraq obtained anthrax cultures, for example — quite legally — from the American Type Culture Centre (ATCC) in the 1980s at a time when the West tacitly supported the regime. No questions were asked.” And someone’s been leaking to the Guardian that some in the administration suspect an Iraqi link. I don’t trust everything in the Guardian’s story, but the possibility of some state sponsorship of this operation has to be considered. The Wall Street Journal has an eminently sensible editorial making this point today. It seems to me this doesn’t have to lead to a conventional war against Iraq. But couldn’t it lead to a war-like inspection regime for Saddam’s biological and chemical warfare plants? As one reader has suggested, why couldn’t we cite our suspicions about biological warfare to demand immediate access to Saddam’s suspicious bio-cehmical installations? If he refuses, why not destroy them from the air? Give him 48 hours notice and then annihilate them, rather as Israel did to prevent his earlier attempt at nuclear capability. It would be better if we could get hard evidence. But even without it, it’s justifiable. In my view, it’s self-defense. Do we have to wait for the worst to happen in a major U.S. city before we take action?

Q & A: Who said the following: “We Americans have every right to be bitterly angry against the terrorists. But we also must go one step beyond our anger, for when something goes terribly wrong in an individual’s life or even in the life of a nation; it is time for introspection. We must courageously ask ourselves what we might have done that has made us vulnerable to such ferocious attacks. That kind of thinking sometimes takes courage.” Edward Said? Susan Sontag? Alice Walker? Nah. It’s our old friend, David Duke. And who says there isn’t a political realignment?

LETTERS: From a former attack pilot on bomb-messages, white-washing Islam, nasty atheists, etc.

RUDY’S GOOD CALL: Rudy Giuliani’s disgusted return of Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal blood money donation to New York City is another sign of his sanity. It’s clearer than ever that the extremist Wahhabist form of Islam that fuels Osama bin Laden’s terror has been aided, abetted, and appeased by the Saudis for years. They haven’t given us their bases; they haven’t shut down bin Laden’s finances; the prince even voiced a belief that the United States played a part in inviting the attacks. The Saudis’ only purpose right now is to prevent Wahhabist forces taking over their satrapy completely and providing a fig-leaf for further U.S. action. Why we need to suck up to them beyond that defeats me. They are a central part of this problem, and they refuse to be an active part of the solution. In fact, a firm sign of our seriousness might help bring about a better outcome in the succession struggle now underway in the Saudi royal family. A further sign of Rudy’s justified outrage is the response of Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. McKinney sucks up to bin Talal by criticizing Israel and then not-so-subtly makes a pitch for some of the money for her own causes. McKinney watchers have known her to be biased against Jews for years, but this piece of opportunism is breath-taking even for her.

QUOTE OF THE DAY:
“DOC HOLLIDAY: What do you want, Wyatt?
WYATT EARP: Just to live a normal life.
DOC HOLLIDAY: There is no normal life, there’s just life.”

– Kevin Jarre, Screenplay for “Tombstone” (1993).

KUMBAYA WATCH: The Unitarian Universalists have managed to put together a war aim: write to Barbara Lee to tell her how much you support her. I prefer the peacenik approach outlined in this amusing web-cartoon (be aware you need a macromedia plug-in).

FAGS AND ATHEISTS: Some of you have taken issue with my statement that I trust an atheist more than a religious fundamentalist in matters of politics. I should have been clearer that I meant this in the context of American domestic politics at this particular time. Stalin wasn’t a nice fellow and he sure was an atheist. Point taken. As for writing “fags” on missiles, I’m aware that this kind of bravado is not exactly absent among the manly culture beloved of Peggy Noonan et al. If it didn’t also lead to the murder of American soldiers in their beds, and the vicious waste of resources of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” I’d be less squeamish. And I’m not reassured by the notion that “fags” doesn’t simply refer to homosexuals but to any low-lifes. Stand in a gay man’s shoes for a second and you’ll see why. In the last resort, it’s hardly good propaganda to photograph this obscenity and send it around the world. Not exactly on message. I might also point out that no-one’s tougher on fags than the people we’re attacking. And part of the reason we’re attacking is a defense of freedom which includes a defense of the freedom of sexual minorities. The military’s message is about as appropriate as a bomb dropped on Berlin during the Second World War with, “Screw You, Kikes,” written on it.

For some reason, the link I posted for this photograph (see “YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK” below) was changed soon after I posted it. Sorry.

But were afraid to ask. One response to terror is information. Here’s some.

Oh, yes, the academics have only started. Here’s an account of Cornel West’s Harvard lecture Wednesday that spliced hip-hop lyrics with calls for reparations. Enjoy.

PAYBACK TIME: It looks like terrorist-appeaser Barbara Lee is going to be challenged for re-election. Too bad her opponent is almost as squishy, but, hey, it’s Oakland. The most important thing is that there is a challenge from the left that will likely focus on Lee’s refusal to counter terrorism with anything more robust than a peace-rally.

A charming inscription on a missile aimed at Afghanistan. Two questions: who allowed this message to be scrawled? Who allowed it to be photographed?

Superb column by Jim Hoagland in the Washington Post today highlighting both Iraq’s continued sponsorship of terrorists and the Clinton administration’s fecklessness in coming to grips with it in the past. The CIA is directly responsible for much of this, which is why it is still a mystery to me how George Tenet has clung to his post. From Bush’s press conference, I gleaned little about the administration’s plans for Iraq, except that Bush is keeping his options open and refusing to pick between the factions in his own administration. My hunch is that there will indeed be action against Iraq, but that it will be covert and we may never know about it. That solves Bush’s political problem, deploys his favorite method of secrecy, and keeps his commitment to a serious war.

WAR AND RELIGION: Some of you emailed me to ask why I had written a while back in an aside that I didn’t think much of David Forte’s “bromides” about Islamic fundamentalism. I hope my piece in the New York Times Magazine helps explain why. Frankie Foer does a good job on Forte in the new TNR. Forte gets his facts wrong, and his views of Islam seem strained through his own (and Bush’s) unfortunate belief that faith – any faith – is somehow better than none. (In my view, atheists are far less politically dangerous than fundamentalists of any stripe.) Forte’s also close to many of the theocons on the right who have done their best to blur the clear distinctions between Church and State that make the United States such a unique experiment in world history. Such theocons have far too much clout, in my view, in the Bush White House, and may be blurring some of our vision in the current conflict with Islamo-fascism. Michael Novak does the same thing in National Review, in an excruciating call to arms for a religious America. No, Mr. Novak. America is politically a secular country. Only civilly is it a deeply religious one. And those two facts are deeply connected. It’s clear that there are some on the religious right – and I don’t blame them – who are rattled by the recent exposure of what fundamentalism can achieve if welded to political power. One small silver lining from Osama bin Laden is to remind us of the evil of the fusion of religion and politics – a fusion that the theocons keep wanting to dilute.

FEAR ITSELF: I suppose the Department of Justice had good reason to warn us all of credible threats of imminent terrorist attacks in the next few days. But I wonder what the true rationale is. Giving this kind of generalized warning scares people in ways the terrorists actively want. And for what? Since there’s been no specific warning about any specific target, there’s not much we can do to prevent it or prepare for it. We know we’re threatened. Vigilance is necessary. But terrifying people about completely amorphous threats seems to me to be more about covering the government’s ass than actually doing any tangible good. I was feeling fine until this evening. And my low-level anxiety tonight is not going to help anyone. In future, the warnings should be specific or none at all.

And you thought I was being paranoid? The key thing to look for is whether there is any Iraqi connection to the Florida anthrax outbreak. If there is, then this war will be expanded, whatever Colin Powell wants. I had my own bio-chemical jitter today. Walking back from NPR, I saw two separate pigeons flailing in distress on the sidewalk, one block apart. A man walking nearby saw me notice and said he had contacted the public health department. Almost certainly nothing – but you don’t realize how unconsciously you’re looking out for things until you see them in front of you. I felt like I was in the opening chapters of Camus’ “La Peste.”

Well, I wanted some humor. A weird story here about how collage posters of bin Laden circulating in the Middle East somehow have Sesame Street’s Bert poking up over Osama’s shoulder. Say it ain’t so, Bert. And have you told Ernie that the relationship is finally over? Next up: Cartman backs Saddam.