Category: The Dish

I’ve been trying hard to be encouraged recently by news of a decline in suicide bombings, the new safety of the airport road, and splits between Sunni Arabs and al Qaeda. That makes the following pieces of news so unnerving. The last time I had a serious sit down with a "senior administration official" to discuss Iraq, SAO told me that I should focus less on deaths of civilians, which are very hard to prevent, and worry more about attacks on infrastructure, which were now going to be stopped in earnest. But the latest data show that we’re still at pre-war levels on any number of fronts, and that the insurgency is essentialy succeeding in stopping the Iraq economy from recovering. We also discover that insurgent attacks, broadly analyzed, are still near their post-invasion peaks; and our approach to intelligence at Gitmo has succeeded in putting dozens on hunger-strike, which now requires us to engage in unsavory methods of force-feeding. To recap: reconstruction money down the toilet, insurgency still strong, detainee policy both brutal, damaging and ineffective.

If your instinct is to defend the administration, ask yourself this: did you really believe when we invaded that three years later, we still wouldn’t be delivering as much electricity as Saddam did? Maybe Powerline can spin this, but I don’t see how. Hewitt, maybe? Instapundit? Surely someone’s up to the job.

Ah, yes, the good old days. Do not click this link if you’re squeamish, or think that laughing while you die of AIDS is inappropriate. It’s my recollection that many who kicked it in the plague years were among the funniest and most mordant people ever. But this piece of nostalgia, resurrected by Boozhy, took me by surprise. Oh, the innocence of 1982.

Here’s a great series of cartoons from around the world on the attempts to suppress the work of other cartoonists. It’s a perfect response to the bullies and fanatics who, I might add, are also busy intimidating other Muslims who are more relaxed about these things. If you want to see what the New York Times won’t allow you to see, click here. Let freedom reign – despite the best efforts of the mainstream media.

A reader wonders if the West will continue to be able to publish Dante:

"In the discussion over Islam, cartoons, and religious intolerance, has anyone chimed in about Dante?  Or have the fanatics already boarded buses and planes for Italy?

In any case, in Canto 28, Page 237, line 30, Mohammed must spend eternity tearing himself apart, for that is his punishment in Hell.   

Consistent with medieval Christian thinking, in which the Muslim world was viewed as a hostile usurper, Dante depicts both Mohammed and his cousin and son-in-law Ali as sowers of religious divisiveness. Dante creates a vicious composite portrait of the two holy men, with Mohammed’s body split from groin to chin and Ali’s face cleft from top to bottom."

Berlusconi needs to offer an apology, no? Or will the mobs now descend on Rome?

Jpod makes a good point. The real reason that many mainstream papers will not publish any of the Danish cartoons is that the owners and editors feel rightly responsible for the safety of their employees. A decision to publish puts a lot of people at risk for their lives. An individual blogger may feel free to put herself at risk, but an editor and publisher have broader responsibilities. I just wish the MSM were honest about this and confessed that they are making a decision based on legitimate fear of violence against them. That would clarify things, at least. If the NYT can publish "Piss-Christ" and the Virgin Mary made out of dung, then it cannot logically claim to be a paper dedicated to respecting religious sensitivity. It respects religious sensitivity when the religious threaten violence. And this stance therefore rewards the violence. Where am I wrong here?

"Not a good day to be blonde in Beirut," – a British woman, caught up in the anti-Western rioting in Lebanon. What I love is the distinction made by Islamist mobs. It’s ok to attack an innocent Dane, because he happens to share the same nationality as a newspaper editor, but not an innocent Brit. They’re taking lessons in logic from the New York Times.

Check out the BBC’s website treatment of the respective histories of Christianity and Islam. A former BBC CEO noticed something. There’s one obvious difference between them. The people who wrote up the history of Islam are far more deferential to religious sentiment. Since when does the BBC insist on writing "peace be upon him" after every reference to the Prophet Muhammad? They demonstrate no such piety when discussing Judaism or Christianity. And this is one element that will at some point have to be tackled: Christianity has been reshaped and challenged by scholarly revisionism with respect to the books that became the Bible. We know far more now than we used to about how the Gospels were written, what influenced them, their cultural context, their political objectives, and so on. There is much less scholarship, especially in Islamic countries, about the origins of the Koran. We need more scholarship. And for that, we need less fear, and … freedom. (Hat tip: Andrew.)

"It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong," – G. K. Chesterton.

An interesting perspective.

It’s fascinating, isn’t it, how this war has so often come down to what we are and are not allowed to see. We were not allowed to see (for long) the video deaths of those who jumped out of the World Trade Center. We were not allowed to see the coffins of soldiers arriving back in the U.S. We are still not allowed to see the most revealing photographs of what really happened at Abu Ghraib (the case is still tied up in appeals). We were not allowed to see the beheading of Nick Berg. And now we are not allowed to see the cartoons that are being used by Islamists for another round of violent intimidation of free societies.

And then, of course, there is what makes this war different. The web has made it possible to see almost all of this, if you look hard enough. Only the government-withheld Abu Ghraib pics are actually out of view for most people – and, even then, some have been kept back by editors, who see their job as preventing the flow of information, rather than enabling it. And so we have two media now in the world. We have the mainstream media whose job is increasingly not actually to disseminate information but to act as a moral steward, to become an arbiter of sensitivity and good taste. And it’s up to places like Wikipedia or the blogosphere to disseminate actual facts, images and informed opinions. Obviously, I don’t see the need to publish everything. And editorial judgment counts. But we are approaching a time when the MSM may have that as precisely its role – not as a source of informaton, but as an arbiter of social etiquette and good judgment. The NYT as Miss Manners.