The Dish

This time in Hawaii. Somehow, I’m not surprised any more.

Richard Goldstein eulogizes one of the founders of the gay rights movement today in the Times. The theme of his op-ed is how we need to get better acquainted with gay history, a very worthy cause. But Goldstein, of course, is not a reliable guide. His op-ed today, for example, ignores some obviously vital facts about Harry Hay. Goldstein calls Hay “a Marxist who proudly called himself a sissy.” True enough. But Hay was more than a Marxist; he was a proud Communist, who defended the Soviet Union’s murderous dictatorship till his dying days. As the Times obituary pointed out, Hay maintained his allegiance to Communism, even after the homophobic Communist Party kicked him out. In fact, even recently, he declared that he lamented the demise of the Soviet Union. He was also a supporter of the sexual abuse of children, fervently supporting the vile organization, NAMBLA, and lobbying to make it a part of the gay rights movement. (Both Goldstein and the Times obit have erased this part of Hay’s life as well.) These facts are simply part of the historical record, and should surely be included in any eulogy of the man. But like the Stalinists themselves, Goldstein simply air-brushes these facts from history. Why? Isn’t Goldstein proud of the fact that Hay was a Communist? If he isn’t, why does he euphemize it? If he is, shouldn’t this be a part of his assessment? Again, try the counterfactual: if Hay had been a member of the Nazi Party in the 1930s, and if he had refused to renounce his support of Nazism right up to his death, if he had said recently that he lamented the passing of the Nazi state, wouldn’t this have been the lead sentence of any obituary? And if he’d been a Nazi supporter of child-abuse, would the Times have even dreamed of running an op-ed eulogizing his death and omitting these facts? Of course not. And people wonder why Orwell still matters.

The coverage of the sniper attacks is getting comical. Especially, of course, in the hyper-p.c. New York Times. The reporting is still there, mercifully. But the tippy-toeing around the bleeding obvious is just hilarious. We now know, for example, that the Chevy Caprice was sighted, noted and suspected by cops, a total of eleven times before the alleged murderers were detained. On three occasions, the cops actually talked to the sniper and his accomplice. The reasons for not detaining or further questioining Muhammad and Malvo given by the New York Times are:

Federal, state and local officials all said there was nothing in the database to suggest that the car had been stolen or that Mr. Muhammad, one of its owners, was wanted for any crime. As a result, the officers had no reason to detain Mr. Muhammad or Mr. Malvo. Investigators also said that officers were so focused on seeking white vans and trucks that it was easy to overlook the old Caprice.

That’s fair enough. But isn’t there something missing? A senior police official has already told the Washington Post that the race of the men was a factor in letting them go. Shouldn’t this at least be investigated or even mentioned in the Times story? If the cops are now denying that they used racial profiling, that’s important. If they confirm it, that’s also important. So why won’t the Times even mention this question, let alone report on it? I think it qualifies as news that’s unfit to provide their readers. In liberal journalism today, some questions simply cannot be asked, let alone answered.

A HATE CRIME: Ditto the story by Dean Murphy, about Muhammad’s shooting of a synagogue. Remember the hue and cry over alleged white racist church burnings which turned out to be a complete crock? In most cases, the Times will call someone sneezing a hate crime if any racial or religious motivation is involved. but when a black muslim is involved, you have to tread very, very carefully. The evidence, however, is mounting:

The shooting at Temple Beth El also raises the question of whether the men, if they did the shooting, were motivated at least in part by religious intolerance. Rabbi Glickman said he was reluctant to characterize the shooting here as a hate crime, but he was troubled by Mr. Muhammad’s association with the Nation of Islam, whose leadership has been accused of anti-Semitism.
A former friend of Mr. Muhammad and Mr. Malvo in Bellingham, Wash., where the two men were known to have stayed this year, said Mr. Muhammad sometimes spoke disparagingly about Christians and Jews. The friend, Harjeet Singh, suggested that it was perhaps not coincidental that none of the victims in the sniper attacks were obviously Muslim, for example women wearing traditional head scarves.
“In his mind, even black people were no good if they stood with whites or Christians,” said the friend, Mr. Singh, a Sikh from India, who added that Mr. Muhammad always greeted him with a traditional Muslim salutation in Arabic.

Hmmm. I wonder what his motivation was. Any idea? I particularly like the p.c. description of the Nation of Islam, a virulently anti-Semitic organization in every respect. According to the Times, only the Nation of Islam’s “leadership has been accused of anti-Semitism.” Notice the weasel words. There is no doubt whatever that the leadership of the Nation of Islam is anti-Semitic. None. Out of bizarre political correctness, the Times is even now – as it did in the 1930s – refusing to report on anti-Semitism candidly, clearly and relevantly. They should be ashamed.

It seems to me completely possible that president Bush will have to make a critical decision in the next week or so on the U.N. and Iraq. Colin Powell said yesterday with respect to the ongoing diplomacy: “We’re getting close to a point where we’ll have to see whether or not we can bridge these remaining differences in the very near future. I don’t want to give you days or a week, but it certainly isn’t much longer than that.” That time-line places the president’s announcement of a U.N. decision and the U.S. response smack bang in line with the Congressional elections. The timing isn’t Bush’s fault. Russia and France are the culprits for dragging their feet for so long. But think of two possible scenarios: the U.S. secures a diplomatic victory and gets U.N. support for its Iraq strategy or the president tells the country we’re going to put together the kind of non-U.N.-sponsored coalition that made the Kosovo intervention possible. Either way, it’s huge news. I’d say it could be enough to swing the election. If Bush gives the U.N. till Friday and the war news dominates the weekend, then we’ll have a highly volatile final day or two. This may not happen of course. But in some ways, I think Bush ought to wrap this up before November 5. The war on terror is a critical issue in the country – I’d argue far and away the most critical issue right now – and the voters should know what the executive branch plans before they vote for the legislature. Maybe it will help Republicans. Maybe it will strengthen the argument for divided government, in order to temper a White House going to war. But either way, any decision will knock everything else out of the news cycle. Won’t it?

TRASH PICK-UP: Check out The New Republic’s cover-story this week on the tawdry British exports now transforming American culture. It’s written by a tawdry British export … well, I thought I’d say it before Eric Alterman does.

YESTERDAY’S LILEKS: A corker. Not only does he praise the Pet Shop Boys, whose last album, Release, is firmly embedded in my iPod as a lyrical Xanax, but he burrows in on arguably the worst presidential candidate in recent memory, Walter Mondale. My fave passage:

In doing some research for today’s Mondale column, I reread his speech at the 1984 Democratic convention. Here’s a real time-capsule moment for you: ‘When we speak of change, the words are Gary Hart’s. When we speak of hope, the fire is Jesse Jackson’s. When we speak of caring, the spirit is Ted Kennedy’s. When we speak of the future, the message is Geraldine Ferraro.’ Well, at least one out of four didn’t cheat on his wife. What a snapshot of 1984: a time when Gary Hart was the 845th blurry photocopy of JFK to be handed around, when Jesse Jackson was regarded as a bulwark of righteous enlightenment instead of a self-aggrandizing shakedown artist; when Ted Kennedy was a big pickled Care Bear, and Geraldine Ferraro was the future, not a footnote-to-be. I was a hardcore Democrat at the time, and I remember watching the speech and thinking: we are going to lose. We are going to lose 51 states. Puerto Rico will demand statehood just for the chance not to vote for this guy.

And I keep remembering Dana Carvey’s SNL sketch on the guy. Wellstone’s death is indeed a tragedy. But why compound it by voting for this misguided relic?

“DEAR LENIN,
(I never thought I would end up addressing an email in this manner…)
Nice to meet a fellow buff. Orwell more than once said that he doubted things in the USSR would have been much better if Trotsky had won over Stalin, but he did have a slight sympathy with the Left Opposition and a close friendship with some of its intellectual diaspora, and would never have thought of the accusation “Trotskyist” as a damning one. He had, I think, the same ambivalence about Lenin that you indicate…” Hitchens spars with readers in the latest Book Club installment. Don’t miss it.

MY SPECIAL RIGHTS: “Indeed, Mr. Sullivan, I am sure you do not like to hear this, but you get the attention you get because you are a gay conservative. If you were a liberal, you would have to compete with many other thinkers, many of whom write better than you, are more intelligent than you are, and produce work that is much deeper than reflexive support for the Bush administration that you pass off as work.” A reader objects to my objection to Harry Belafonte, why the Dems don’t gay-bait, why the anti-war movement is right to single out Israel, and other viewpoints on the Letters Page, edited by Reihan Salam.

“Orwell learned, at Eton and in the colonial police, that the worst offense was to ‘let down the side’, or to be indiscreet in front of the servants or the natives, or to manifest any form of disloyalty. Thus, he was inured to the spurious appeals of group-think while still a Tory. Obviously, he wasn’t going to listen, later on, to the same public-school or regimental trash when it was uttered in party-line form by some Communist hack. I don’t think that this observation has been made before.” – from the Book Club Page. Your first batch of emails will be posted this afternoon.

Somehow I knew more of this would emerge. The Associated Press is reporting that “Muhammad also is linked to a shooting last spring at a Tacoma synagogue in which no one was injured, Tacoma police said.” So he was a terrorist, a Muslim, a member of the fanatical anti-Semitic group the Nation of Islam and someone who shot up a synagogue. Who’d have thought it? As I’ve been saying for days now, connect the dots… Because the mainstream media will do all they can to avoid it.

IN DEFENSE OF PUTIN: Maybe he’ll stop prevaricating on the Security Council now, especially since the weapons inspectors have put themselves behind the U.S-U.K. position. The loss of civilian life in the Moscow theater is, of course, a terrible event. But Putin’s gut instinct – to fight the terrorists with all the means at his disposal – was and is the right one. We don’t yet know the type of gas used, and clearly something went badly, badly wrong. But the idea of using such a device to stun and paralyze hostage-taking terrorists is not a crazy one. This is a war, guys. Above all, it must be stressed that the people really responsible for these civilian deaths are the terrorists themselves. And their global reach is widening. We’ve had outbreaks of terrorism in Bali, Jordan, Moscow and Washington, D.C. in the last couple of weeks. Every single one has some kind of Islamic extremist connection. Although the nuances differ, and the groups may not be identical and the specific motives diverse, Islamism is the thread that connects them all.

THE ANTIDOTE TO MSN: Yep, the parodies were inevitable.

THE NATION’S SMEAR ATTEMPT: I don’t think I’ve read such a thorough demolition of a hatchet job in a very long time. It’s about the Nation’s Jon Wiener’s attempt to smear critics of the work of “historian” Michael Bellesiles. If you’ve been following this controversy, this is a must-read.

CAMPUS ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: This from Friday’s Yale Daily News:

In a mind-boggling act of vandalism, the posterboard memorial to 14 Israelis killed in a car bomb explosion displayed during a Yale Friends of Israel vigil Tuesday night was torn and scattered across the lawn early the next morning.
This is not a sign that dissent has devolved to graffiti on campus – that was last week’s defamation of an anti-divestment petition in the Law School. This is not a political objection to the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians gone awry – that was the removal of most of the signs advertising former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s visit two weeks ago.
This is anti-Semitism. Plain and simple.

Amen. But how deeply disturbing that anyone on a campus today, let alone one the most distinguished in the country, would behave in this manner. How depraved have we become?

LEFTWING NEGATIVISM WATCH: Check out Salon’s Michelle Goldberg on the anti-war rally in D.C. Goldberg is more than wobbly about the war but she is at least prepared to wrestle with the fact that refusing to disarm Saddam means sustaining a vicious dictator in power. She saw little such intellectual honesty in the crowds:

[I]t was hard to find a coherent ethical worldview to back that [anti-war] position up, save for a kind of masochistic isolationism. At its worst, the lack of a clear message gave way to moral emptiness, demonstrated in sickening exchanges between the handful of pro-war Iraqi dissidents who held their own rally near the Washington Monument and the antiwar marchers who responded to their tales of murder, torture and oppression with glib slogans and, occasionally, outright mockery.

That’s what some on the left are now reduced to: mocking people whose relatives were murdered in a gulag.

CHIRAC’S GAME: A terrific piece blasting Chirac in the Times of London. The best line is as follows:

The notion that a struggle with Iraq represents some sort of “distraction” from the War on Terror is almost comical. It is like asserting that the search for a cure for cancer diverts energy from the search for perfect cosmetic surgery.

Take that, Al Gore.

VIDAL, BUSH, AND FDR: How adolescent is Gore Vidal? It is, of course, obscene that his opposition to the war on terror should now invoke the loopiest of conspiracy theories. But it is also completely predictable. This is his M.O. He has long believed, for example, that FDR was aware of Pearl Harbor ahead of time. His loopy, paranoid hatred of the American government isn’t therefore restricted to Republicans. He’s one of those literary dinosaurs whose audience is composed mainly of foreign America-haters, Guardian-readers and writers who puff his stature up in order to enjoy the alleged “shock” of his remarks even more. But these remarks aren’t shocking. They’re stale, exhausted, paranoid, bitter cliches. The only appropriate thing to do with regard to Vidal at this point is: ignore him. (For my review of Vidal’s most recent novel, where he accuses FDR of treason, click here.)

MICKEY’S CHALLENGE: My friend Mickey Kaus called on his readers last week to flush out my alleged “hypocrisy” on the matter of racial profiling. He now tells me the pickings turned out to be slim. I once criticized the New York Times for not reporting on a study that showed that racial profiling in New Jersey was based on valid statistical inferences. And that’s about it. My point in that instance was that newspapers shouldn’t be protecting their readers from the facts of race and crime for political reasons. My position on the broader matter of racial profiling is a little tortured, I confess. I think I’d be a fool not to acknowledge that in certain crimes, for example, racial disparities abound. That’s simply an empirical and statistical matter. Ditto the fact that most Islamist terrorists are not, by and large, over 60, female and a member of a religious order. At the same time, I feel pretty horrified by the notion of the state using its police power to detain or arrest (or let go) someone on the grounds of race. I think the government should be as color-blind as it possibly can. That’s why I’m against affirmative action. It seems a little difficult – although not impossible – to be against affirmative action and in favor of racial profiling by the cops. But I’m against both. It’s not hard to see why. If I were black and suspected in this way, I’d be mad as hell. And my basic solidarity has to go with those law-abiding African-American citizens who are subjected to this kind of scrutiny day after day. It saps the very democratic basis of the republic. It’s humiliating, enraging and wrong. In fact, the inference of possible guilt on the grounds merely of skin color is ab
out as close as you can get to a definition of injustice. So is it crazy to believe that racial profiling may be statistically valid but not morally defensible? I hope not, although I concede that as a practical matter it’s not always that easy.
P.S.: In the Washington terror-sniper case, there wasn’t even a statistical basis for the profiling. It was statistically invalid and morally wrong.
P.P.S. In the case of a credible eye-witness report of a suspect’s race, my objections are obviously diluted.
P.P.P.S.: Even if I were guilty as charged, the word “hypocrisy” would still not be applicable. I’m not saying one thing and doing another, which is what hypocrisy is. The right word for what I’m charged with is inconsistency. But I hope I’ve been able to explain that I’m also reasonably consistent on this. I say “reasonably” because no writer or honest person is always and everywhere consistent. But you can try and apply basic principles (of, say, color-blindness) as far as possible.

The Book Club conversation begins.

BELAFONTE, BIGOT: The reverse racism of some on the Left – and others’ acquiescence.

Just in case you might have thought that extreme Islamism might be worth looking into as a possible motive for the Washington sniper terrorist, the Boston Globe gets out in front.

Is there anything more annoying/creepy/ugly than the MSN campaign with that guy who looks like Jeff Goldblum from the remake of “The Fly”? Did they coincide it with Halloween on purpose?

Another Democratic Senate candidate uses anti-gay rhetoric to score political points. Democrat Alex Sanders had this to say in a spirited debate:

Sanders said Graham was the one running a TV endorsement from Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York City.
“He’s an ultra-liberal,” Sanders said. “His wife kicked him out and he moved in with two gay men and a Shih Tzu. Is that South Carolina values? I don’t think so.”

And doesn’t he know that Rudy has also worn a dress? That’s not the way we do business in Montana, I mean, South Carolina. Again, this isn’t the worst thing in the world. It’s cheap, not vile. But if a Republican had said it, there would be hell to pay.