Category: The Dish

Here’s a challenge to the blogosphere: are there any graphologists out there who can add expertise on the question of who might have forged one of the cartoons? From the calligraphy, it seems someone who is not used to writing English may have penned the words on one of the images. Bottom line: an Islamist may have blasphemed in order to express outrage at others’ alleged blasphemy! Here’s the link. Do your worst.

National Journal has done us all a service with fresh reporting on who is actually detained in Guantanamo Bay, and what happens to them once they’re there. Key pieces here, here, and here. In June of last year, president Bush said "these are people picked up off the battlefield in Afghanistan." At the same time, Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld was even more categorical: "These are people, all of whom were captured on a battlefield." No big surprise that these statements are untrue. Stuart Taylor summarizes the piece thus:

* A high percentage, perhaps the majority, of the 500-odd men now held at Guantanamo were not captured on any battlefield, let alone on "the battlefield in Afghanistan" (as Bush asserted) while "trying to kill American forces" (as McClellan claimed).

* Fewer than 20 percent of the Guantanamo detainees, the best available evidence suggests, have ever been Qaeda members.

* Many scores, and perhaps hundreds, of the detainees were not even Taliban foot soldiers, let alone Qaeda terrorists. They were innocent, wrongly seized noncombatants with no intention of joining the Qaeda campaign to murder Americans.

* The majority were not captured by U.S. forces but rather handed over by reward-seeking Pakistanis and Afghan warlords and by villagers of highly doubtful reliability.

And how have these innocent men been treated? Taylor again:

[D]etainees who had no information – because they had no involvement in or knowledge of terrorism – have been put through "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions" in a systematic effort to break their wills that is "tantamount to torture," the International Committee of the Red Cross complained in a confidential report to the government, excerpts of which The New York Times obtained in November 2004. The Pentagon responded then that Guantanamo was an oasis of "humane" treatment.

As readers are aware, I am no fan of Islamism and support aggressive execution of the war on terror. But I do not believe we should be detaining people without due process, abusing and torturing detainees, and prompting dozens of prisoners to go on hunger-strike because of the complete hopelessness of their situation. As Jon Henke reminds us, we have principles in war-time: no self-censorship to appease religious thugs; no torture or abuse of detainees. You cannot defend freedom while extinguishing it at the same time. I fail to see why this is so hard for so many to appreciate.

A year later, the huge news story hyped for days in the New York Times is still a non-story. That man with "super-HIV" is doing fine; there was never a second case; and you can bet your life the NYT won’t run a story revisiting their hysteria one year on. (Hat tip: Petrelis.)

An interesting exchange. Here’s the right-wing blogosphere’s case:

"What we said was that Newsweek should have corroborated their single source before publishing that rumor, and that reprinting allegations by terrorist detainees of abuse without any corroborating evidence of their truth was highly irresponsible. It’s a far cry from publishing these baseless allegations as fact — and the basis of what turned out to be a non-existent pending report of proven misconduct — and publishing editorial cartoons that express an opinion."

Point taken. But Anne is on the side of the angels in this dispute. And what the right-wing blogosphere avoided in its piling on against the Newsweek Koran story is that, although the actual incident was false and Newsweek deserved a shellacking in that respect, the broader phenomenon was true. The Koran was abused at Gitmo – deliberately, at the beginning. The government’s own investigation found this to be true; and others cite evidence showing that it was much more widespread at one point. Exposing abuse and torture legally sanctioned by the president is not, pace Powerline, "a media assault on the American armed forces." It’s a media defense of the American armed forces, from the policy decisions of their civilian superior; and their fawning followers in the more partisan parts of the blogosphere.

I was going to respond to the email I posted in the wee hours, but decided to wait till the morning. Now I don’t have to. Charles Krauthammer has. Money quote:

"A true Muslim moderate is one who protests desecrations of all faiths. Those who don’t are not moderates but hypocrites, opportunists and agents for the rioters, merely using different means to advance the same goal: to impose upon the West, with its traditions of freedom of speech, a set of taboos that is exclusive to the Islamic faith. These are not defenders of religion but Muslim supremacists trying to force their dictates upon the liberal West.

And these "moderates" are aided and abetted by Western "moderates" who publish pictures of the Virgin Mary covered with elephant dung and celebrate the "Piss Christ" (a crucifix sitting in a jar of urine) as art deserving public subsidy, but who are seized with a sudden religious sensitivity when the subject is Muhammad. "

I have to say that the performance of the British and American media this past week has made me sad to be a journalist. The main objective of those editors has been sensitivity; the last imperative has been giving readers the information we need to understand the world around us. If you want to know why newspapers are struggling, you just found out.

A reader writes:

I have no way to know for sure but I have to believe that the New York Times’ decision to refrain from publishing the cartoons in some way reflects the heroic way the city has put forward its tolerance as the best answer to the mass murder in our midst. You may see it as a sellout, a craven surrender to the intimidation of the extremists, but I prefer to see it as a concession (and a small one at that), one that will empower moderate Muslims, especially in the West, to grasp that we do respect their religion and its teachings of peace and love, even as we confront a dangerous minority’s attempts to use it to spark a civilizational war. 

This afternoon I saw a report on MSNBC, detailing the response from American Muslims, how they’ve been proud of our media’s "restraint and dignity" as opposed to what has happened in Europe. We desperately need to enlist these moderate Muslims in our cause — and I don’t think we’re compromising our commitment to freedom of expression by exercising a little respect.

Again, I’m with you on the merits of all your arguments. But my experiences as a New Yorker tell me there may be another way to reach the people who don’t hate us yet but trust us less and less each day."

A reader scoffs at my plantar wart agony:

The injections aren’t the ‘nuclear option’. Penis surgery is. When I was younger – my pre-condom days – I contracted warts on my penis from a girlfriend. I was advised to try the various ointments. Nothing worked. Then I started the practice of periodically going in and having a doctor freeze them off with liquid nitrogen. That would work for a while but I had to keep going back.

One day my regular doctors weren’t there. So this new chap took a look and before I could do anything, he was trying to swirl my ‘johnson’ around in the liquid nitrogen. I said: "what the—!?!?" and he said: "But I had to! You have warts all around the edge of your helmet." Idiot. Those little knobby things weren’t warts. They were part of my anatomy, and are presumably part of the anatomy of all uncircumcised males.

There’s more. I was living in Canada but I moved to England to do postgraduate work in philosophy. One day I went in to see a doctor there – what looked like a small wart had reappeared – and he said he’d found some more … in the urethral canal. I couldn’t tell so I took his word for it, and his word was that I needed surgery. I had the canal scraped out, meaning not only no sex but no erections until everything healed. Try willing yourself to not have an erection in the middle of the night, or whenever. You can imagine how that worked out (about as well as willing oneself to have an erection): ruined sheets, ruined mattress.

So, be glad your warts are where they are, and, er, not somewhere else."

T.M.I.? Not on this blog. And, yes, my foot pain seems much more bearable now.

According to the National Journal’s Murray Waas,

Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been "authorized" by Cheney and other White House "superiors" in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration’s use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.

So some intelligence matters are so important that the administration will not divulge them even to critical members of Congress. But others are leaked to journalists to win a political war. This is a pointed reminder that when the administration says it is withholding information to protect national security, a hefty dose of skepticism is in order. The same goes for their assurance that their wire-tapping has never been abused. Remind me again: at this point, why should we trust them?

The New York Times won’t. Time won’t. CNN won’t. The Washington Post won’t. But a student paper will; and so does Seattle’s alternative paper, "The Stranger." Read Bruce Bawer’s essay as well. Money quote:

[W]hat‚Äôs happening here is that a gang of bullies‚Äîled by a country, Saudi Arabia, where Bibles are forbidden, Christians tortured, Jews routinely labeled ‚Äúapes and pigs‚Äù in the state-controlled media, and apostasy from Islam punished by death‚Äîis trying to compel a tiny democracy to live by its own theocratic rules. To succumb to pressure from this gang would simply be to invite further pressure, and lead to further concessions‚Äînot just by Denmark but by all of democratic Europe. And when they‚Äôve tamed Europe, they‚Äôll come after America.    

After all, the list of Western phenomena that offend the sensibilities of many Muslims is a long one—ranging from religious liberty, sexual equality, and the right of gay people not to have a wall dropped on them, to music, alcohol, dogs, and pork. After a few Danish cartoons, what’s next?

Do we need now to be "sensitive" toward Wahhabist Islam’s treatment of women?

A Danish reader writes:

"Allow me to illustrate what we’re up against here and why the people of Denmark have every right to refuse to tolerate or appease Muslim intolerance. Back in the 1980’s I covered a murder trial for a Copenhagen tabloid. The victim was a woman from a family of Kurdish guest workers newly arrived in Denmark from Turkey. Her crime was to divorce her husband in order to support herself and their children through honest labor. By doing so, she violated the family’s so-called "honor" and enraged her father in-law to the point where he ordered his two youngest sons to revenge this blatant violation of his patriarchal prerogative. Returning home in the early morning hours after a night spent cleaning offices she was set upon by her teenaged brothers in-law who stabbed her repeatedly before leaving her to bleed to death in the street.

Now try to imagine the impact of this horror in Denmark, a country with very low crime rates and also one of – if not the most – advanced countries in the world in terms of equality between the sexes. Danes have a long and proud tradition of tolerating and protecting minorities whether they be religious, sexual or otherwise. When Protestants from the 17th century fled Catholic persecution in – what was then – the Spanish Netherlands, they were welcomed with open arms in Denmark. Jews have practiced their religion freely in Denmark and were so seamlessly integrated into the national fabric that looking the other way and pretending not to notice simply wasn’t an option for their Christian compatriots when the Nazi occupiers came knocking on Jewish doors in 1943. What I’m trying to say here is that Danes have a proven track record of openness, fairness and tolerance. We are however most intolerant towards those who would limit or abolish those freedoms we simply take for granted."

I have to say I am ashamed that the West has not been more forthright in defending the Danes. That idiots like John Kerry and Bill Clinton would call standing up to Islamist intimidation bigotry appalls me. The West has a right to say that all its citizens have an inviolable right to free speech, and that all its female – and gay and Jewish – citizens have a right not to submit to medieval barbarism. Period.