The Dish

This is why, when he’s on, no-one beats Mike Kinsley for making you smile in exactly the right way:

Though hardly scientific, this tended to confirm my suspicion that people like buying books more than they like reading them. And of course, in the famous formulation (credited to Gloria Steinem, among others), writers don’t like writing-they like having written. They like having written under the impression that this means they will be read. The whole book thing is thus based on mutual misunderstanding.

In France, the major publisher, Flammarion, has just published a children’s book called “Dreaming of Palestine.” According to the paper, Proche-Orient, the book is, in effect,

under the guise of fiction based on real events, a lethal provocation to hatred, violence and jihad against Israelis and Jews. A book, that in the French social-political context, can only encourage anti-Semitic acts.

Not content with fostering hatred of Jews among the childern of the Arab world, the campaign is now spreading to Europe.

ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH II: “Osama’s” reference to Benjamin Franklin passed me by, I have to say. It turns out it was a reference to a very old and hoary anti-Semitic chestnut – that Benjamin Franklin allegedly warned Americans about Jewish immigrants at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Here’s the ADL’s take on that particular story. How depressing that these kinds of paranoid conspiracy tales, which were once the province of Europe, have now been taken up by an Arab world that lived with Jews for centuries without this kind of pathology.

AN ISRAELI VICTIM: A reader corrects another slander:

While reading your Daily Dish just now, I noted the oft-repeated statement that no Israelis (it used to be no Jews) died in the Sept. 11 attacks. As a matter of fact, the first person killed, on the first plane, before it hit the North Tower, was an Israeli civilian, male. He stood up to the hijackers and was stabbed, as was reported by the flight attendant during her call. Investigators later matched his name to his seat number.

CHIRAC ON THE BALL: The leader of that great and lustrous power, la France, caught goofing off at the NATO summit.

The Observer in London yesterday published what they argue is a new letter from Osama bin Laden. It emerged on a website previously used by al Qaeda to communicate messages and is being circulated on the web and among British Islamists. The Observer hedges its bets by saying that “although there is no way to confirm the authenticity of the letter beyond all doubt, senior Arab journalists in the Middle Eastern media believe the letter is from bin Laden. ‘It is an extraordinary glimpse into his mind,’ one told The Observer.” Who knows? But in some respects, the authenticity of the letter as Osama is less interesting than the fact that even if produced by another Islamist figure or entity, it conveys a very lucid account of what the enemy believes. The “Letter To America” is part Islamist pep-talk, part warning. The author is fighting for the imposition of Islamic law throughout the world. At one point, he addresses America directly:

What are we calling you to, and what do we want from you?
(1) The first thing that we are calling you to is Islam.
(a) The religion of the Unification of God; of freedom from associating partners with Him, and rejection of this; of complete love of Him, the Exalted; of complete submission to His Laws; and of the discarding of all the opinions, orders, theories and religions which contradict with the religion He sent down to His Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). Islam is the religion of all the prophets, and makes no distinction between them – peace be upon them all.

Complete submission to Sharia law. Got that? He is therefore fighting any constitutional arrangement anywhere that provides for freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, separation of Church and state or indeed anything that is not approved by a clerical elite. So that’s why they have such an issue with the Constitution of the United States.

SEIN KAMPF: But the other obvious facet of this letter is its Hitlerian anti-Semitism. Palestine is the first issue raised:

The creation and continuation of Israel is one of the greatest crimes, and you are the leaders of its criminals… The creation of Israel is a crime which must be erased. Each and every person whose hands have become polluted in the contribution towards this crime must pay its price, and pay for it heavily.

He means American citizens who, by virtue of living in a democracy, are held personally accountable for the actions of their government in every respect. (I wonder if this means that subjects of Islamic tyrannies are protected from terrorism.) But, of course, America is but a cipher for the real power-brokers. Drum roll, please:

Your law is the law of the rich and wealthy people, who hold sway in their political parties, and fund their election campaigns with their gifts. Behind them stand the Jews, who control your policies, media and economy.

And then there’s this spectacular medievalism:

You are the nation that permits Usury, which has been forbidden by all the religions. Yet you build your economy and investments on Usury. As a result of this, in all its different forms and guises, the Jews have taken control of your economy, through which they have then taken control of your media, and now control all aspects of your life making you their servants and achieving their aims at your expense; precisely what Benjamin Franklin warned you against.

As a kicker, there’s this assertion: “The people of Palestine are pure Arabs and original Semites.” So we have a policy designed to provide living space for “pure Arabs,” while exterminating the Jews. Hitler should sue these guys for plagiarism.

KULTURKAMPF: And then there’s the indictment of America on the grounds already laid out by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. We are a moral sewer. Sexual freedom, in particular, is anathema, as it is anathema to most political authoritarians. The way in which free human beings can explore their lives and identities in the private realm of sexual interaction is always threatening to tyrants. Orwell saw the attempt to kill love and sex as central to the totalitarian experiment. The Islamists are no exception. They make our religious scolds look like New Age therapists. What they would do to women who live sexual lives of their own choosing or gay men who do not live in fear or shame is obvious: we would be exterminated. Got that? That’s why it’s simply incredible to me that socially liberal Americans do not find this war to be of paramount concern. The theocratic right can at least agree with some of what bin Laden says. The following, for example, could easily have been said by Pat Robertson:

Who can forget your President Clinton’s immoral acts committed in the official Oval office? After that you did not even bring him to account, other than that he ‘made a mistake’, after which everything passed with no punishment. Is there a worse kind of event for which your name will go down in history and remembered by nations?… You are a nation that practices the trade of sex in all its forms, directly and indirectly. Giant corporations and establishments are established on this, under the name of art, entertainment, tourism and freedom, and other deceptive names you attribute to it… And because of all this, you have been described in history as a nation that spreads diseases that were unknown to man in the past. Go ahead and boast to the nations of man, that you brought them AIDS as a Satanic American Invention.

If a domestic member of the Christian right had said this, the Left would be all over them. But when Islamists say it, we look the other way.

KILLING FORTUYN: We now know the motive. It wasn’t animal rights. It was opposition to Pim Fortuyn’s criticism of unassimilated Islamic immigrants. It was an assassination made possible by the fusion of the multi-culti left and the medieval religious right – a fusion that threatens the very future of a free and democratic Europe.

SAN FRANCISCO VALUES: “I would argue that all cultures and civilizations need a force of change, liberalism, and a force of stability, conservatism, to continue to grow. We San Franciscans are innovators in the world of business, culture and yes politics. Like any experimental lab some of the things we create fail to work in the practical day-to-day world. However every country needs such places where new ideas are tested and the edges of personal freedom and social accountability are explored. A San Francisco Democrat” is not a pejorative phrase to me. My “San Francisco values” are not those of the knee-jerk far left, they are of innovation, social and political creativity and personal freedom. I hope Nancy Pelosi will instill some of those ideas in the Democratic party.” – this, the case against Ahnold, why “eagles” are inadequate, and more on the Letters Page.

CAMPUS ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: “Eighty-one countries are represented among the dead and missing in the September 11 disaster. So far, not one Israeli citizen has been listed among the victims. Is it possible that the complex of buildings housing the global center of international business, banking and commerce contained no Israeli citizens on September 11, on a working day morning? … Under these circumstances the probability that the Israeli Mossad learned of the September 11 attack prior to September 11 looms large The fact that no Israeli citizen was a vict
im of the Towers’ disaster and the report that Israeli citizens were forewarned looms even larger. This probability diminishes the charge of direct Israeli responsibility for the attack and the racist assumption that Arabs are not intelligent enough or clever enough or technically equipped enough to have executed the very intricate plan with such accuracy. But this probability does raise the very serious question that if the Israeli Mossad knew of the plan and considered it serious enough to warn Israeli citizens to stay away from the Towers on September 11, why were U.S. officials not informed? Or, were they?” – David Graham Du Bois, professor of Afro-American studies at UMass, Amherst. Via Bill Herbert. Hey, Harvard’s English Department! Give that guy a job!

NEW YORK TIMES CORRECTION WATCH: Another beaut yesterday:

The Slough Journal article yesterday, about Princess Anne’s guilty plea to charges of having lost control of her dog, which bit two children, misstated the timing of what historians say was the most recent previous criminal conviction of a senior member of the royal family. In that case, Charles I was beheaded in 1649 – after the English Civil War, not on the eve of it.

If Charles I had been beheaded before the Civil War, wouldn’t that have made the war a little, er, superfluous? Again: high-school history.

GAY ROBOTS: There’s an epidemic.

BIAS AT THE BBC: Yep, there’s a whole blog now devoted to scrutinizing the Beeb’s bias. Enjoy!

How do you prevent the victims of child abuse from telling their stories? By giving them hush money. That’s what the Cathiolic Church did in England. The Times of London reports that

The Times has obtained a copy of the agreement that victims had to sign before they were compensated and a leading lawyer said last night: “This is a gagging clause and it would have been taken as such.” Some of the agreements relate to the time when Cardinal Murphy O’Connor was Bishop of Arundel and Brighton. Father Hill [a pedophile] was employed as a priest at Gatwick.

First abuse. Then bribes for silence. This church is dying – from the inside out.

THE TIMES VERSUS ISRAEL: I pointed out in my New York Sun and Washington Times column today that a New York Times story yesterday reported the capital of Israel as Tel Aviv. Here’s the official correction:

An article yesterday about a man accused of having tried to hijack an El Al plane en route to Istanbul from Tel Aviv on Sunday referred incorrectly to Tel Aviv. It is not the capital of Israel; Jerusalem is.

Two things to note. If the Times’ editors need to, they can make a correction within a day. So why do they delay for weeks sometimes on factual matters that are just as simple? Second: how did someone make this mistake? This isn’t very sophisticated fact-checking. There are two explanations: the Times doesn’t even have basic reporting skills any more or ideological aversion to Israel was a part of the problem. Or both. And to think this was once the paper of record.

KRUGMAN’S NEW LOW: If you want a good example of the sheer partisan degeneracy that now marks Paul Krugman’s New York Times columns, check out today’s. It’s about the rise of nepotism in America’s political system. It’s a worthwhile point, and one I’ve made myself on several occasions. But Krugman manages to make it an entirely partisan issue. Every example of nepotism he gives is Republican or conservative, implying a seamless connnection between family favors and his increasingly unhinged idea that America is now in the grip of a brutal plutocracy. He doesn’t mention Al Gore or Nancy Pelosi, for example, two of the most prominent Democrats whose families were already in the business. Not to mention the Browns of California. When it comes to obvious examples of liberal aristocrats – the Kennedys, the Roosevelts, the Sulzbergers – he lets them off the hook because they’re, er, liberals. The brown-nosing of Sulzberger was particularly egregious. For Krugman, it seems, non-liberal aristocrats are by definition repulsive, since all non-liberals are by definition selfish and cruel and heartless. If you don’t believe that the government should be the primary means for helping others, you’re immoral. This guy used to have a brain. Now he only seems to have bile.

Washington’s City Paper just put the following images on its cover: one of John Allen Muhammad, the Washington sniper-terrorist, and Prince William County prosecutor Paul Ebert, who’s in charge of the case. The headline? “Alleged Killer, Proven Killer.” Guess who’s the “proven killer”? And this in the city Muhammad terrorized. Every time you think parts of the left couldn’t get any more depraved, they go and do something like this.

Two headlines from the Washington Post today:

“Gore: Bush Loses Terror Focus
2000 Rival Says Focus on Iraq Aided GOP but Not Nation”

“U.S. Identifies Captured Al Qaeda Official
Suspected Head of USS Cole Bombing Caught Earlier This Month”

Still got that winning touch, hasn’t he?

A MODEST PROPOSAL: So Harvard is going to re-invite the anti-Semitic poet, Tom Paulin, so he can exercize his right to free speech, (while the Law School considers a new code to prevent its own students from speaking freely). And Wellesley, after much trauma, is going to invite anti-Semitic poet, Amiri Baraka, to speak there as well. (The compromise at Wellesley: Baraka won’t be getting an honorarium.) Here’s a suggestion: why don’t the Ivy League colleges pool their resources and organize a special conference entirely for Jew-haters and anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists? All in the cause of free speech, you understand.

THE BBC SPINS FOR HAMAS: Here’s the key paragraph from the BBC’s news story on the latest Hamas terrorist attck, killing many children in a bus bombing:

Hamas, whose immediate aim is to secure an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, has claimed responsibility for the majority of attacks against Israeli targets since the Palestinian uprising against occupation began two years ago.

“Immediate aim?” Since when has Hamas made such fine distinctions? Hamas has one aim: the destruction of the state of Israel, the murder of all Jews, and the establishment of an Islamo-fascist state in Palestine. Why would the BBC seek to soften this reality in the wake of another horrifying attack? Stupid question, I suppose.

HAIRIER THAN THOU: When I first saw the headline, I feared Jonah Goldberg had been at the Jagermeister again. Mercifully, he’s innocent. But this story about a duel over hairy bottoms strikes me as a new low in Maxim culture. Or maybe it’s just the beginning of a new reality television show.

A DUBIOUS ZOGBY POLL: The Human Rights Campaign, the leading gay rights group, has just sponsored a poll to find out how gays voted in the last election. I don’t buy the results. The headline number – the percentage of voters who are gay – seems plausible. At 5 percent of the electorate, it’s at the high range of previous studies, but not excessively so. The breakdown of voting, though, seems highly implausible. HRC, which, despite a few token Republicans on its board, is essentially an extension of the Democratic Party establishment, puts the gay GOP vote this year at a mere 19 percent. This would be an astonishing reversal of recent trends. Every VNS exit poll of the last ten years or so has shown gays’ support for Republican Congressional candidates to be somewhere in the region of 25 to 35 percent. In 2000, it was at its highest – 35 percent – and no election in the 1990s saw a decline in gay GOP support. So why a decline of almost 50 percent in one election? Add to this the fact that clearly there was a GOP swing this time around, and the 19 percent is preposterous on its face. The methodology is probably at fault; the sample size is a mere 412 people – far far fewer than the samples culled from exit polls. I don’t think HRC or Zogby would rig the results. But this poll strikes me as essentially worthless. I wonder how much money HRC poured into it.

ISLAM MEANS PEACE II: Now they’re gunning down missionaries helping pregnant women.

THE CHURCH’S MORAL AUTHORITY: Remind me why I should give a damn what Cardinal Law says about the morality of war against Iraq. Or why I should take him seriously when he says my relationship is an intrinsic evil. Loving another man is forbidden; but abusing children can be overlooked. The Guardian’s Hugo Young put it well:

There are many ironies and contradictions in its position. For most Catholics none will strike with such exquisite and even risible pain as the spectacle of an institution, the Vatican, that has done so much damage over so many years by telling people, on pain of mortal sin, how they should lead their sexual lives, itself now demanding that the sexual perversion of priests should be forgiven and forgotten.

Young forgets. There’s one Catholic morality for the clergy; and another for everyone else.

EMINEM, REALIST: Forget Richard Goldstein’s sad rants. Here’s an article that actually makes some sense to me, in linking Eminem’s success to a broader cultural trend. Crispin Sartwell calls it the “new realism.” He has a point:

That’s what Eminem’s whole career has been: an absolute commitment to parade his demons and his flaws publicly, an absolute determination to say what no one else will say, to tell his own truth.
This entails that what he says is, at times, horrible. And we see his bigotries as well as his creativity, his stupidities and blindness as well as his intense intelligence and courage. Eminem is wrong about homosexuality and wrong about women (though so right about race). But that very wrongness is part of what makes him true, because he says it.
I predict that we have seen almost the last of Britney Spears and Al Gore, and are in for some real moments.

I think that gets at something in the culture right now. We’re tired of phoniness. Eminem, South Park, the blogosphere: they’re real, man.

Another example of sectarian violence by religious extremists in Nigeria. A newspaper dared run a quote that ran afoul of the Islamofascists. So they rioted. Oh yes, and “jihad” means internal, peaceful struggle against temptation. That’s when it doesn’t mean stabbing, burning and dumping other human beings on the streets.
UPDATE: Now fifty are feared dead in the rioting.

What do you do when your emails are better than anything you could write yourself? Shamelessly pilfer them! A readers’ symposium on the whole question of gay-straight male interaction is posted here. From the showers to the bunkers, from women and straight men and gay men – in the military and outside it – the emails came pouring in. Peruse at will.

Could “Eagle” immigrants derail the Democrats? Why Fox News is simply better than CNN, regardless of issues of bias, and more. All on the Letters Page.

The Catholic church has been covering up the abuse of children in Britain as well. Here’s yet another harrowing story about a pedophile priest, protected by those who run the Church. This one is even more distressing because two of this monster’s victims – aged between 10 and 14 – were disabled. One was in a wheelchair and the other had cerebral palsy. This evil just beggars belief. But the men in charge, who knew of this and did nothing, remain protected by the Vatican. Of course they are. At this point, protecting and defending evil seems to be a Church priority. Anything but surrender ecclesiastical power.

THE REAL KURT COBAIN: “I like to make incisions into the belly of infants then fuck the incisions until the child dies.” This is in Kurt Cobain’s diaries. And there’s a lot where that came from. Yes, he was a heroin addict. Yes these are just sexual or other kinds of fantasies. But why did Newsweek bury this? I guess you don’t mess with the image of a cover-worthy pop-idol. That would be journalism.

WANNA SWITCH? A Canadian Mac parody. Loved it.

ANOTHER MOORE LIE? The Canadian government is investigating whether Michael Moore, the leftist hate-monger, fabricated part of his movie, “Bowling for Columbine.” In the movie, Moore buys ammunition from a Wal-Mart in Canada. He just walks in, plonks some cash down and gets bullets. The National Post reports:

David Austin, a spokesman for the Department of Justice, says, “You would have to show some ID … What is unfortunate is there is misinformation out there – not only for viewers who see the movie in Canada but the rest of the world – that it is relatively easy to buy ammunition in Canada, and that is not the case.”

So did Moore edit out that part? Or did Wal-Mart break the law? Moore won’t respond.

END THE BAN: Only W could do this. And he should. The Washington Post – now the most authoritative editorial board in the country – lays it on the line. The Daily Show had a more amusing take on the firing of gay Arab linguists in the military:

Kudos to top Army’s brass for intercepting this axis of fabulousness before it could do any real damage. Yes, we’re in a war on terror. Yes, intelligence is the key to winning this war. Yes, Arabic translating is the key to intelligence. But they’re gay. … They make kissy with their own kind. Is that really the kind of person you want with you in wartime translating situation? Would you really be comfortable side by side with a gay person hunkered down in a fox hole or cubicle, office park, really would you?

Yuk. Who cares about terrorism when we have our own scapegoats to hound?

CAMPUS ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: The Lebanon Daily Star reports on the comments of one Hisham Sharabi, a professor of Arab Culture at Georgetown University. He was speaking at Balamand University. His view: “Jews are getting ready to take control of us and the Americans have entered the region to possess the oil resources and redraw the geopolitical map of the Arab world … However, in the long run, neither the Jews nor Americans will be able to subdue us for we are not (Native Americans).” This anti-American Jew-hater is on the faculty of a major American university. One question: why?