The Dish

A reader writes:

I couldn’t agree more with Caitlin Flanagan’s assessment of the Democratic Party, and even more so with her take on the pundits of the far left (Barbara Ehrenrich drives me ’round the bend). I am firm in my faith and go to church every Sunday with my family (at an Episcopal church where our priest is gay and has a partner.)  My husband works and pays the bills. (Math is not my thing. I mow the lawn and make repairs around the house.) I left a career that I loved to stay at home with our daughter and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it (even the school volunteering part, a little). I’ve never voted Republican and probably never will. And sometimes it feels as though neither party claims the likes of us.

A vile human being. I oppose the death penalty, but if I had to make an exception, it would be him. That said, I wasn’t on the jury, didn’t hear all the evidence, and the system gives them the power to decide such a sentence. The silver lining is that we do not make this monster a martyr. The rule of law was followed; our society allows even this murderous religious fanatic due process. In that sense, Moussaoui got this wrong as he has gotten everything else wrong. He lost. America won. And the fight against him and his allies continues.

Thanks for your emails on the Cole-Hitchens fight. The deeper argument is whether we should take Ahmadinejad’s threats in any way seriously. Last month, Ahmadinejad said the following:

"Like it or not, the Zionist regime is heading toward annihilation. The Zionist regime is a rotten, dried tree that will be eliminated by one storm." … He did not say how this would be achieved, but insisted to the audience of at least 900 people: "Believe that Palestine will be freed soon."

We are told that Ahmadinejad has no power. What about the organizer of Iran’s latest war-game, Mohammad Ebrahim Dehghani, a top commander in Iran’s Revolutionary Guards? How about Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the runner-up to Ahmadinejad in the rigged Iranian elections of 2005? He was Iran’s president from 1989 – 1997. According to Wiki, he

is currently the Chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council, that resolves legislative issues between the Parliament and the Council of Guardians and advises the supreme leader on matters of national policy.

In 2001, at the height of his powers, Rafsanjani made the following remarks in a speech to fellow Islamists:

"If a day comes when the world of Islam is duly equipped with the arms Israel has in possession, the strategy of colonialism would face a stalemate because application of an atomic bomb would not leave any thing in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world."

We are told not to take any of this seriously. And the Tehran theocrats may well be bluffing about their current and future capacity. I don’t think we should take the bait they are currently offering us, and react excessively to their provocations. I certainly don’t favor pre-emptive military action at this point. But that the mullahs would nuke Israel if they could seems to me well within the bounds of possibility. How many genocidal dictators in history do we need to ignore or explain away before we take them at their word?

(Photo: Irna/AFP/Getty Images).

A reader writes:

Your point [about the rule of law] is well taken, and I would imagine a Sir Thomas More of modern sensibilities would likely agree with you. But I am not sure he is the shining example of opposition to torture via abuse of executive authority. I have great respect for the man (and the movie), and have affection for him due in no small part due to his vicious enforcement of law, but certainly there is someone less famous for brutal torture techniques that you could invoke to oppose brutal torture techniques.

"The Democrats made a huge tactical error a few decades ago. In the middle of doing the great work of the ’60s – civil rights, women’s liberation, gay inclusion – we decided to stigmatize the white male. The union dues – paying, churchgoing, beer-drinking family man got nothing but ridicule and venom from us. So he dumped us. And he took the wife and kids with him.
And now here we are, living in a country with a political and economic agenda we deplore, losing election after election and wondering why.
It’s the contempt, stupid," – the wonderful Caitlin Flanagan, Time.

Last week, a long time Democratic activist, Paul Yandura, criticized the pusillanimous way in which the Democratic party takes gay money and then fails to exercize even minimal courage in standing up and defending gay equality and dignity. According to the Washington Blade, Howard Dean responded by firing Yandura’s domestic partner, Donald Hitchcock, from his position as DNC gay outreach adviser. Paul and Donald are friends of mine, for the record. And Dean denies any connection between the two events. But I don’t buy it. I don’t trust Dean for a second. He’s an angry, petty man, whose support for gay people has always been transparently opportunistic. Yandura’s criticism of the Democrats is dead-on, especially with respect to the Clintons. He deserves support from gay Dems and Republicans in our shared struggle for civil equality and simple moral courage.

Fareed Zakaria believes the murderous religious fanatic is getting desperate. I agree. The Iraq war, for all its manifest failures in execution, and perhaps because of them, has had an unintended consequence. By revealing how al Qaeda and its surrogates have no qualms about killing far more Muslims than Americans or Jews, it has helped wean ordinary Muslims and Arabs off the Wahhabist kool-aid. Zarqawi may prove to be his own worst enemy. Here’s hoping.

The hijacking of the Republican party by Christianists and big government spenders is the subject of a blog discussion over at Cato Unbound. Frum, Bartlett, Boaz, Salam, and Douthat contribute. Enjoy the completely depressing debate. Ryan Sager tackles Frum’s lame defense here.

That’s Amnesty International’s conclusion. The full report is here. Read it, if you still doubt the reality. The evidence, I am ashamed and saddened to say, is overwhelming. Whatever else this administration has done, whatever other mistakes it has made, this abandonment of long-standing American honor and decency in the military is an unforgivable offense. It is an attack on the meaning of America by its own president. It must be forever attached to his name and to that of his vice-president. The stain is deep. And it has stained us all.

A major online fight has broken out. I am a good and old friend of one of those involved, so my bias is clear. I should say one thing in Cole’s favor, taking him at his word. I was not aware – and maybe Hitch wasn’t either (I haven’t consulted him today) – that the email quoted was for a strictly private list. I didn’t quote it myself, but I linked. I’m a strong believer in the principle of online privacy, if at all possible, and regret unknowingly violating that rule, and apologize for that inadvertence. Cole, however, trashes whatever high ground he might have sought by accusing Hitch of writing the piece drunk, or, worse, having it ghost-written. By pure coincidence, I was at Hitch’s yesterday as he filed the piece. He was stone-cold sober. And on top form. It is Cole who owes Hitch an apology. Hitch stuck to the issues; Cole got personal.

Moreover, reading Hitch’s piece and Cole’s and a neutral translation of Ahmadinejad’s disputed speech, I cannot help but believe that Cole, as he concedes, got his first take wrong, and then deliberately misled readers in his second version.

There are two matters at issue. The first is the technical question of what "wiping Israel off the map" means. It could mean a bombing, nuking or military invasion; it could mean its simple ceasing to exist, through some kind of violent uprising among Palestinians. But it is hard to see how Israel could be "wiped off the map" without some form of violence against it. Ahmadinejad’s adherence to that part of Islam that foresees the Apocalypse soon destroying Jewish control of Israel does not portend to me some kind of democratic voting process whereby Palestinian Israelis gradually vote the Jewish state out of existence. But even if it did, does any sane person honestly believe that the Jews who then lived under Ahmadinejad’s proposed Islamic theocracy in Palestine would not be murdered or expelled or annihilated? Please. We all know what Ahmadinejad thinks of Jews. He tells us often enough. Later on in the speech, Ahmadinejad menacingly says:

The issue of Palestine is not over at all. It will be over the day a Palestinian government, which belongs to the Palestinian people, comes to power; the day that all refugees return to their homes; a democratic government elected by the people comes to power. Of course those who have come from far away to plunder this land have no right to choose for this nation.
I hope the Palestinian people will remain alert and aware in the same way that they have continued their struggle in the past ten years.
If we get through this brief period successfully, the path of eliminating the occupying regime will be easy and down-hill. [My italics thoughout.]

What does "brief period" mean? And what does "eliminate" mean? It could mean ending the fifty years of Israel’s existence; it could mean the short period of time before the Apocalypse; but I’d say the most plausible explanation is that it refers to the "brief period" before which Iran gets a nuclear bomb. Whatever it means, Ahmadinejad’s desire to end Israel’s existence and establish Islamist rule in Palestine cannot mean anything but the annihilation of the Jews therein. Coles’ semantic point seems to me to crumble upon inspection.

Then there’s the question of the disputed passage. Here is the New York Time’s full translation of the Ahmadinejad speech. The critical passages are rendered as follows:

The establishment of the occupying regime of Qods [Jerusalem] was a major move by the world oppressor [the United States] against the Islamic world. The situation has changed in this historical struggle. Sometimes the Muslims have won and moved forward and the world oppressor was forced to withdraw …
Our dear Imam said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine. Is it possible to create a new front in the heart of an old front. This would be a defeat and whoever accepts the legitimacy of this regime [Israel] has in fact, signed the defeat of the Islamic world. Our dear Imam targeted the heart of the world oppressor in his struggle, meaning the occupying regime. I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world.

Cole’s translation is as follows:

"The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)." Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope – that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah’s government.

It seems to me that Cole is trying to imply that Ahmadinejad is referring solely to the occupation of Jerusalem, and making a metaphysical or metaphorical point rather than an empirical one. But the full text proves definitively otherwise. Ahmadinejad is clearly referring to the "occupation" of the entire land of Israel, not just the West Bank, Gaza or parts or the whole of Jerusalem. He sees it as stretching back 50 years (before Israel controlled all of Jerusalem). He utterly rejects the withdrawal from Gaza or the West Bank as sufficient. And he wants the country wiped off the map – and even erased from the historical record. Cole’s rhetorical sleight of hand strikes me as deliberate deception, an attempt to deny the existence of a real genocidal evil in the world that Cole himself knows exists. Why? You decide. But Cole has exposed himself more brutally than Hitch ever could.