The Dish

A must-read piece from Amir Taheri. Money quote:

A reporter who spent last weekend in Clichy and its neighboring towns of Bondy, Aulnay-sous-Bois and Bobigny heard a single overarching message: The French authorities should keep out.

“All we demand is to be left alone,” said Mouloud Dahmani, one of the local “emirs” engaged in negotiations to persuade the French to withdraw the police and allow a committee of sheiks, mostly from the Muslim Brotherhood, to negotiate an end to the hostilities.

President Jacques Chirac and Premier de Villepin are especially sore because they had believed that their opposition to the toppling of Saddam Hussein in 2003 would give France a heroic image in the Muslim community.

That illusion has now been shattered – and the Chirac administration, already passing through a deepening political crisis, appears to be clueless about how to cope with what the Parisian daily France Soir has called a “ticking time bomb.”

It is now clear that a good portion of France’s Muslims not only refuse to assimilate into “the superior French culture,” but firmly believe that Islam offers the highest forms of life to which all mankind should aspire.

This is still a religious war: of fundamentalism versus secularism. And Chirac is discovering that no amount of appeasement can stave it off.

Ryan Lizza gets it right in seeing McClellan’s anger at being lied to by Karl Rove and Scooter Libby, and now having to lose credibility on their behalf. Hey, but if you work for Blackberry Machiavellis and alleged perjurers … what do you expect? JPod concurs, but, of course, takes the side of the liars. Hey, that’s what it takes to be a Republican these days.

If you’re still mystified by vice-president Cheney’s adamant refusal to allow a ban on “cruel, inhumane and degrading” treatment of detainees, this story might help you out. Colin Powell’s former top aide, Lawrence Wilkerson, claims that there is a direct paper trail from Cheney’s office directing abuse and torture in Iraq:

“The secretary of defense under cover of the vice president’s office,” Wilkerson said, “regardless of the president having put out this memo” – “they began to authorize procedures within the armed forces that led to what we’ve seen.” He said the directives contradicted a 2002 order by President George W. Bush for the U.S. military to abide by the Geneva conventions against torture.

There was a visible audit trail from the vice president’s office through the secretary of defense, down to the commanders in the field,” authorizing practices that led to the abuse of detainees, Wilkerson said. The directives were “in carefully couched terms,” Wilkerson conceded, but said they had the effect of loosening the reins on U.S. troops, leading to many cases of prisoner abuse, including at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, that were contrary to the Geneva Conventions.

“If you are a military man, you know that you just don’t do these sorts of things,” Wilkerson said, because troops will take advantage, or feel so pressured to obtain information that “they have to do what they have to do to get it.” He said that Powell had assigned him to investigate the matter after reports emerged in the media about U.S. troops abusing detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. Both men had formerly served in the U.S. military.

Wilkerson also called David Addington, the vice president’s lawyer, “a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions.

This argument backs up Brigadier General Karpinski’s assertions that there were clear directives out of Rumsfeld’s office directing abuse of detainees for intelligence purposes. Her account has back up from others in the military, currently too leery to go public. If we begin to get some of them to talk on the record, we could find evidence of profound deception on the part of the Cheney cabal to hide authorized torture on their watch. This is not over yet.

That’s the proportion of Americans in a new poll who strongly disapprove of president Bush’s performance. The strongly approve number is 20 percent. 58 percent doubt his honesty. We’re approaching Carter-land.

I think she’s accusing him of covering for his Cheney-compromised wife.

Another haven for tolerance is attacked by young Muslim fanatics.

“As you know, Jane Fonda, Sean Penn, Warren Beatty, et al are not filmmakers, they are celebrities. They do not speak for the independent film community. I’m an independent filmmaker, and let me tell you I am horrified by the Van Gogh story. It is as disturbing as it gets. He made a short film about a Muslim woman, and he gets brutally murdered for it? I can’t wrap my head around it. I shot a movie with a crew of five in the projects of the South Bronx, and somehow I was not in that kind of danger.

I wish those Hollywood bloviators were not considered representatives of the creative community. They are funded by the studios, meaning they are funded by corporations, just like the people on the right they criticize. So you’re hearing it, right now, from a filmmaker living in Hollywood: the Theo Van Gogh murder is a horror, an outrage, and a sin against mankind.”

Two interesting developments. In Iran, the nut-job Islamo-fascist president may be provoking a split in the ruling elite. By recalling dozens of ambassadors, and calling for the annihilation of Israel, Ahmadinejad may be creating a new crisis of legitimacy. Money quote:

Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, two former reformist presidents, are openly critical of his policies. On Sunday, Mr Khatami accused the new leader of “using fascist values and principles in the name of Islam to criticise liberalism”. Mohammad Atrianfar, a close Rafsanjani ally, yesterday called the sackings a big diplomatic mistake. “The President does not understand that he should proceed with caution,” he said.

When a former Iranian president calls the current one a “fascist” in the press, we have a small sliver of progress. Meanwhile, in Iraq, we have a clear sign that the Shia and Kurdish factions are reaching out to disaffected Sunnis in the military. Keep the diplomacy up, Zalmay. And Syria’s regime is on the brink … Our enemies can make mistakes too. And that is one small piece of hope.

It lasted 65 million years. Slime molds have all the fun.

“What separates homosexuals and lesbians from every other minority group is that they are born and raised within the bosom of the majority. Unlike Latino or Jewish or black communities, where parents and grandparents and siblings pass on cultural norms to children in their most formative stages, each generation of gay men and lesbians grows up being taught the heterosexual norms and culture of their home environments or absorbing what passes for their gay identity from the broader culture as a whole. Each shift in mainstream culture is therefore magnified exponentially in the next generation of gay children. To give the most powerful example: A gay child born today will grow up knowing that, in many parts of the world and in parts of the United States, gay couples can get married just as their parents did. From the very beginning of their gay lives, in other words, they will have internalized a sense of normality, of human potential, of self-worth – something that my generation never had and that previous generations would have found unimaginable. That shift in consciousness is as profound as it is irreversible.” – from “The End of Gay Culture,” just posted opposite. You can her an NPR audio interview with me on the essay here.