The Dish

Their craven response to the Madrid massacre deserved a riposte. So I fisked ’em.

A great editorial in the Jerusalem Post implores Europeans not to pretend they are not at war:

For a while, many here [in Israel] thought the terrorists could be either manipulated by Western negotiators or persuaded by Arab leaders to lay down their arms, provided their grievances were heard and some of their demands heeded.
Israel has since learned that terrorism cannot be beaten by satisfying “grievances.” America, which until 9/11 was also plagued by the denial syndrome, has since launched a global war on fundamentalist terrorism and Middle East autocracy. Europe, however, has not joined America’s ideological cause, and that goes even for Britain, which is Washington’s closest EU ally.
Now, some Spaniards can be expected to blame themselves for their own victimization. If Spain had not joined the war on Iraq, they will say, it would not have been attacked. We cannot but implore Spain to avoid that kind of thinking; we’ve been through all that and can now confidently say that Spain was targeted not for anything it did or failed to do, but for what it is, namely a country that embraces and offers all the freedoms that Muslim fundamentalism detests.

Amen. But it will perhaps take more atrocities for Europeans to acknowledge something that they have proudly built is under threat. History has not ended. Islamism does not seek to integrate itself into Europe. It seeks the abolition of Europe as a democratic, peaceful, pluralist place. And America must understand that this war cannot be lost in Europe either. We need a real and vigorous effort to reunite Europe and the U.S. against this danger. Alas, we just lost one leader, Jose Maria Aznar, who understood that need, and Blair may be next.

AL QAEDA’S GAME PLAN: And here’s a chilling piece of evidence of how pre-meditated this entire atrocity was. Back in December, the plans were in place:

CNN also has obtained a document posted on an Internet message board analysts believe is used by al Qaeda and its sympathizers that spells out the terrorist group’s plan to separate Spain from the U.S.-led coalition on Iraq.
The strategy spelled out in the document, posted last December on the Internet, calls for using terrorist attacks to drive Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar’s Partido Popular from power and replace it with the Socialists.
That was expected to drive a wedge between Washington and Madrid and result in the withdrawal of Spanish military forces from Iraq.
“We think the Spanish government will not stand more than two blows, or three at the most, before it will be forced to withdraw because of the public pressure on it,” the al Qaeda document says.
“If its forces remain after these blows, the victory of the Socialist Party will be almost guaranteed – and the withdrawal of Spanish forces will be on its campaign manifesto.”

Now why would al Qaeda want the disintegration of the transition in Iraq? Because they understand how that transition is the most formidable blow to their hopes of transforming the entire Middle East. When clever anti-war types insist there is not and never has been any connection between the fight for democracy in Iraq and the war against terror, they are thinking in terms of legalities and technicalities – not strategy. The only way to meaningfully defang Islamist terror is to transform the region. If we don’t, we will simply be putting out small fires for ever, instead of dealing with root causes. The root cause is the lack of democracy in the region, which gives these religious fanatics the oxygen they need. Al Qaeda understand the stakes. So must we. Iraq is the battlefield. We cannot, must not, falter. In fact, we must ramp up the pressure. Alone, if needs be.

NOT JUST IRAQ: Some readers have written me to criticize my argument that al Qaeda is striking back at our allies in Iraq because they see how dangerous to them the transition to democracy in Iraq could be. Some argue that the war against Saddam has nothing to do with the war on terror and that al Qaeda is using it as a new way to win recruits and divide the West. But this misunderstands al Qaeda’s basic philosophy. What they object to is any Western or infidel influence in traditionally Muslim lands. They want those lands not just Judenrein but purged of any non-Muslims and even those Muslims who dissent from Wahhabist orthodoxy. They do not and have never needed the war in Iraq to justify their terror in pursuit of these aims. They killed long before the Iraq war. Their objection is to our intervention at all. And part of that agenda is our intervention in Afghanistan. After all, that was their safe harbor. Those who blame the war in Iraq for this counter-attack must also logically blame the war in Afghanistan. Should we not have waged that, since it would only embolden the enemy? In other words, all of Europe was at risk long before the Iraq war. And the Germans and Brits and Italians and many others now in Afghanistan are reason enough for more attacks in Europe. Al Qaeda not only resents any impurity in their homelands, they also long for more Lebensraum. They long to regain Andalusia, something bin Laden himself referred to not long after 9/11. What the Europeans refuse to understand is that there is no proximate cause for this violence. It is structural; it is aimed at the very existence of other faiths; it wishes to purge the entire Muslim world of infidels (which means the annihilation of the Jews), and eventually to reconquer Europe. You can no more negotiate with these people than you could negotiate with Hitler. And by negotiation, I don’t just mean direct talks. I mean attempts to placate by occasional withdrawal of troops from, say, Iraq or Afghanistan, or withdrawal of troops from Saudi Arabia or abandonment of Israel. All such tactical shifts are regarded purely as weakness. They are invitations for more massacres. How many more will die in London and Rome and Berlin and Paris before the old continent fights to defend itself?

Here’s a list of political contributions from various New York Times reporters and staff. I thought there was a policy against this?

THE FIRE-FIGHTERS WERE REAL: Wonkette debunks the latest anti-Bush lie.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “I was struck by the comment of a Spaniard in Charles Sennot’s Boston Globe piece on the Spanish elections. He quoted a voter who was disturbed by the way Aznar had manipulated information and public opinion, accusing him of lying about the threat posed by Iraq. He said that these tactics reminded him of the ones the dictator Franco used to use.
It reminded me that most of the publics in countries with fascist pasts–Spain, Germany, Italy–rejected the way the Iraq war was gotten up by Bush and his European partners. They sniffed something wrong with the manipulation that was clearly employed. They had been sensitized to such techniques by their suffering under fascism in the past.
And, it strikes me that the techniques that they minded so much are those of the Neoconservatives. What does that say about the latter? Maybe they don’t deserve Leo Strauss as an intellectual ancestor. Maybe their real genealogy is rather more sordid.” – Juan Cole, insinuating that neoconservatives are actually the inheritors of fascism.

Romano Prodi, the chief of the European Commission, puts it as bluntly as anyone: “It is clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists,” Prodi said. “Terrorism is infinitely more powerful than a year ago.” This is classic appeasement. And it’s also demonstrably untrue. Al Qaeda has been seriously weakened since 9/11, thanks almost entirely to those countries, especially the U.S., that chose to confront it. But it seems clear to me that the trend in Europe is now either appeasement of terror or active alliance with it. It is hard to view the results in Spain as anything but a choice between Bush and al Qaeda. Al Qaeda won.

Dan Drezner notices an important point in a Businessweek piece about low job growth:

No one doubts that [outsourcing] is having an impact — though exactly how strong is hard to say since good numbers are unavailable. While some put the number higher, Forrester Research Inc. estimates that of the 2.7 million jobs lost in the last three years, only 300,000 have been from outsourcing.

And that’s the high end of most estimates. The truth is that techno-driven productivity gains have now spread from manufacturing to service industries.

Here’s Donald Sensing’s digression into the bleeding obvious in the Wall Street Journal today. It’s the same point I was making at greater length in my essay, “We’re All Sodomites Now.” It’s particularly apposite to Stanley Kurtz’s baseless assertion that same-sex marriage causes modernity’s transformation of marriage, rather than being a result of it. Money quote:

Sex, childbearing and marriage now have no necessary connection to one another, because the biological connection between sex and childbearing is controllable. The fundamental basis for marriage has thus been technologically obviated. Pair that development with rampant, easy divorce without social stigma, and talk in 2004 of “saving marriage” is pretty specious. There’s little there left to save. Men and women today who have successful, enduring marriages till death do them part do so in spite of society, not because of it.
If society has abandoned regulating heterosexual conduct of men and women, what right does it have to regulate homosexual conduct, including the regulation of their legal and property relationship with one another to mirror exactly that of hetero, married couples?
I believe that this state of affairs is contrary to the will of God. But traditionalists, especially Christian traditionalists (in whose ranks I include myself) need to get a clue about what has really been going on and face the fact that same-sex marriage, if it comes about, will not cause the degeneration of the institution of marriage; it is the result of it.

It’s for these reasons that I find drawing the line at gay couples to be so morally troubling. Enforcing one rule for the majority and another rule for a tiny minority is so gratuitously unfair it runs the risk of being understood as pure prejudice.

It’s a spectacular result for Islamist terrorism, and a chilling portent of Europe’s future. A close election campaign, with Aznar’s party slightly ahead, ended with the Popular Party’s defeat and the socialist opposition winning. It might be argued that the Aznar government’s dogged refusal to admit the obvious quickly enough led people to blame it for a cover-up. But why did they seek to delay assigning the blame on al Qaeda? Because they knew that if al Qaeda were seen to be responsible, the Spanish public would blame Aznar not bin Laden! But there’s the real ironic twist: if the appeasement brigade really do believe that the war to depose Saddam is and was utterly unconnected with the war against al Qaeda, then why on earth would al Qaeda respond by targeting Spain? If the two issues are completely unrelated, why has al Qaeda made the connection? The answer is obvious: the removal of the Taliban and the Saddam dictatorship were two major blows to the cause of Islamist terror. They removed an al Qaeda client state and a potential harbor for terrorists and weapons of mass destruction. So it’s vital that the Islamist mass murderers target those who backed both wars. It makes total sense. And in yesterday’s election victory for the socialists, al Qaeda got even more than it could have dreamed of. It has removed a government intent on fighting terrorism and installed another intent on appeasing it. For good measure, they murdered a couple of hundred infidels. But the truly scary thought is the signal that this will send to other European governments. Britain is obviously next. The appeasement temptation has never been greater; and it looks more likely now that Europe – as so very often in the past – will take the path of least resistance – with far greater bloodshed as a result. I’d also say that it increases the likelihood of a major bloodbath in this country before the November elections. If it worked in Spain, al Qaeda might surmise, why not try it in the U.S.?

GREATER ISLAM: But there’s another obvious reason for the targeting of Spain. It was once in part a Muslim-controlled country. The agenda of bin Laden and other Islamo-fascists is to reconquer those regions in Europe and the former Soviet Empire for a new Islamic Reich. The existence of Israel is obviously the most horrifying because it is in the heart of the Muslim world. But Spain, too, was once a region in an Islamic world, as this piece in the Daily Telegraph explains. In October 2002, according to Debka.com,

al Qaeda began issuing a stream of fatwas designating its main operating theatres in Europe. Spain was on the list, but not the first.
1. Turkey was first. Islamic fundamentalists were constrained to recover the honor and glory of the Ottoman caliphates which were trampled by Christian forces in 1917 in the last days of World War I.
2. Spain followed. There, al Qaeda set Muslims the goal of recovering their lost kingdom in Andalusia.
3. Italy and its capital were third. Muslim fundamentalists view Rome as a world center of heresy because of the Vatican and the Pope.
4. Vienna came next because the advancing Muslim armies were defeated there in 1683 before they could engulf the heart of Europe.

It’s hard for modern Europeans and Americans to credit this kind of kooky, historical vengeance. But it’s precisely this vision that sustains and nourishes the Islamist terror network and their state sponsors in Iran, Syria, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. And that is why the current lull in the terror war is not good news. While we wait and work patiently for democratic progress in Iraq, the enemy is retooling and rethinking.

A stunningly positive assessment of the war on terror from – yes! – the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE I: “Sensible British citizens offer the police support in protecting lives and property. Whether this justifies a thousand body-armoured police with automatic weapons in London’s streets I doubt. Bombs kill and panic the panicky. But they do not undermine civilised society unless that society wants to be undermined. The destructive potential of these bombs is not remotely ‘mass’, nor is the threat comparable with that of the Blitz or nuclear weapons… My doubts over Mr Blair boil down to a question of common sense. His speeches and actions on foreign policy are not those of a wise man or one with any sense of historical judgment. Like Margaret Thatcher, he relies on a small coterie of aides rather than the official machine. But unlike her he cannot engage with that machine intellectually. Anyone with a knowledge of history would not equate Hitler’s threat with that of al-Qaeda. Anyone who respects Western civilisation would not think it ‘in mortal danger’ from gangs of Islamic fanatics.” – Simon Jenkins, in the Spectator, arguing “that Tony Blair’s Sedgefield speech was just another attempt by the Prime Minister to scare us into believing that we are all in mortal danger. We are not.” A day after the article went to press around 200 people were murdered and over a thousand injured in an al Qaeda attack in Madrid.

VON HOFFMAN AWARD NOMINEE II: “Blair and Bush ultimately build their case on their personal intuitions, provoked by the Sept. 11 attacks, that something new had appeared in the world. They both concluded, as Bush was to put it, that they had to “rid the world of evil.” But their argument that Islamic extremism is a “global threat” is indefensible. The Islamists can make spectacular attacks on Britain or the United States, but neither country, nor any of the other democracies, is in the slightest danger of being “engulfed” by terrorism, or shaken from its democratic foundations.
The Islamists are a challenge to Islamic society itself, but a limited one. Their doctrine will run its course, and eventually be rejected by Muslims as a futile strategy for dealing with the modern world.” – William Pfaff, in an article called “Blair overstates the threat of terrorism,” in the International Herald Tribune, the day before the Madrid massacre.

BLIAR: My take on the astonishingly shameless book by the astonishingly shameless Jayson Blair.

THE VICTIMS OF INTOLERANCE: It goes both ways, argues Ted Gup, in the Washington Post yesterday:

Intolerance always has two victims, the object of prejudice and its carrier. Gay men and women have endured ostracism, ridicule and violence. But those who cannot bring themselves to face the notion of homosexuality also have paid dearly. Marriage, not the abstract “institution” so often cited, but the flesh and blood and spiritual variety, has already suffered. Families have torn themselves apart over how and whether to accept a gay child, and husbands and wives, joined in sham unions coerced by society’s unwillingness to accept a person’s true sexual identity, have produced misery and divorce.

This is part of the reason I believe that allowing civil marriage for gays will deeply strengthen family life and the fiber of the country. It will bring families back together and prevent fake marriages and disastrous family structures from being entertained again.

This is a new award that is offered to media interviewers who serve up the most soft-ball, lily-livered, fawning questions to their interviewees. Named after Larry King, who would have given Stalin a bouquet if he could have booked him on the show, the first nominee is my friend Chris Matthews (whose show I often appear on). Here’s his interaction with compulsive liar, traitor and plagiarist, Jayson Blair:

MATTHEWS: Well, let me ask you the two toughest questions. I told you I was going to ask them. I’m going to ask them right now.

Why-you are such a damn good writer, a creative force. You have fluency and life. Anybody who picks — I’m not saying buy this book. I’m saying, look at it in the book store, pick it up and read a couple of pages. It moves. It’s got air. It’s got oxygen, the thing you always look for in a writing. What’s it like to be that creative? You are obviously a guy who can knock out 120,000 words in a month.

BLAIR: I enjoy it.

MATTHEWS: Nobody else can do that.

BLAIR: No, I enjoy it. But like all writers and like all people, I’m insecure, and I was insecure while I was at the Times about how good I was. It really took, you know…

MATTHEWS: You’re up there with Johnny Apple. You’re one of these guys who can do it magically. Do you know that?

BLAIR: But I did not know it. I did not know it until afterwards.

Up there with Johnny Apple. Well, I guess it could be worse. Please send in any brown-nosing from media journalists. Special points for Katie Couric.

The far-lefties at Democratic Underground are debating whether president Bush is responsible for the massacres in Madrid. No, I’m not making that up.