The Dish

Here’s a picture of two parents whose 19 year-old daughter was just murdered by Islamists. This story from the Sydney Morning Herald makes for more gut-wrenching reading:

At 2pm yesterday, Craig Salvatori put his two young daughters on a plane at Bali airport, telling them he had to stay “to look for mummy”. Three hours later he found her body in a morgue. Kathy, who would have turned 38 yesterday, was barely recognisable, except for some jewellery, her body so badly charred, her blonde hair blackened… The president of the Maroubra Lions rugby league club, John Costa, said seven families had immediate members missing. “We look like we’ve lost five mothers, a father and two children … missing this long after the event, it’s not looking good.”

Read the story. This is Australia’s September 11. Meanwhile, we’re told to debate whether we should go to war. This isn’t war? (Found via Tim Blair, who is must-reading right now.)

THE CASE FOR WAR: Thank God (and Marty Peretz, Roger Hertog and Michael Steinhardt) for the New Republic. No I’m not just sucking up. The maintenance of a robust domestic liberalism with foreign policy toughness and moralism is a public service. I say this as someone who dissents from some of their redistributionist economic policy. In this tradition, Jon Chait – one of the magazine’s most impassioned opponents of George Bush’s domestic agenda – seems to me to have nailed a couple of vital weaknesses in the liberal case against war. First, the notion that this war is somehow uniquely unilateralist or threatening to international law. On the contrary, Chait argues:

The more persuasive justification for war is that Iraq has violated a series of U.N. resolutions requiring its disarmament and compliance with weapons inspections. Yes, lots of countries violate U.N. resolutions. What makes Iraq’s violation a casus belli is that it agreed to disarm as a condition of ending the Gulf war. War with Iraq does not require trashing international law. Just the opposite: Sustaining international law is central to its very rationale.

Put like that, it’s obvious. Besides, do you recall all these internationalists getting uptight about the bombing of Kosovo, done despite no U.N. approval? But Chait’s better point is the way in which Bush’s threat of force has made inspections more rather than less viable:

If forced to choose between tough inspections and nothing, the allies have shown they prefer nothing. If forced to choose between tough inspections and unilateral war, it now looks as though they will choose inspections. Had Bush foresworn unilateral action, as liberals have implored, the prospects for the tough U.N. inspections they now urge would be nonexistent.

I wish Jon hadn’t engaged in some gratuitous Bush-bashing in the piece. But maybe it’s as well he did. He proves that you can be a Bush-hater and still support the war. Would that more liberals had the courage to overlook their dislike of the president and get to the point.

ANTI-WAR MOMENTUM?: What to believe – Evelyn Nieves’ breathless, Rainesian poem to resistance in the Washington Post; or this more sober account from the Chicago Tribune? One obvious point, noticed by Glenn Reynolds, is that the Post piece relies entirely on the anti-war movement’s own assessment of its numbers and strength.

MUST-READ: Alas, it’s not online, but Jeffrey Goldberg’s report on Hezbollah in the current New Yorker is yet another superb piece of reporting from him. It left me with an even grimmer feeling in my stomach than usual: and certainly the expectation that a new war in Lebanon will likely soon follow war on Iraq. I think what Jeffrey has seen with his own eyes – which is what has led him to take a robust pro-war stance – is the emergence of another Nazi-like ideology in the Middle East. Here’s how he puts it in the online interview on the New Yorker site:

[S]omething new is happening in the Arab world-namely, the melding of Arab nationalist-based anti-Zionism, anti-Jewish rhetoric from the Koran, and, most disturbingly, the antique anti-Semitic beliefs and conspiracy theories of European Fascism. Add Holocaust denial, which is also becoming popular in the Arab world, and you have a dangerous new ideology, an ideology that Hezbollah, despite its assertions that it has nothing against Jews as Jews, propounds quite vigorously.

Reading the article, I’m even more convinced that these fanatics interpret any weakness or conciliation on the part of the West as an invitation for more terror. That’s why they have to be defeated. And sooner rather than later.

NEED A SMOKE? Here’s a place where it’s still legal.

I wonder what Glenda Gilmore thinks when she absorbs the fact that her nativist, isolationist “Blame-America-First” ideology now has a new magazine. And it’s edited by Pat Buchanan! Ron Radosh has a typically astute piece in Alex Star’s Ideas Section at the Boston Globe on the new red-brown coalition. Of course, the critical glue uniting far left and right these days is anti-Semitism. My favorite moment in “The American Conservative” is Pat Buchanan’s support for what he calls Albert M. Nixon. I think the Gore-Nixon comparison is closer than others might think. But then I’ve long loathed Nixon.

If you were the p.r. spokesman for al Qaeda, what would you have to say about the Bali massacre? I think you’d say it was payback for Australians’ support for president Bush’s war on terror. Funny, that’s just what Robert Fisk has just written. Fisk goes on to warn the Brits that they’re next, among others, if they don’t stop backing Bush:

Our support for the United States – an infinitely closer alliance than any support from France – makes Britain the most likely candidate for attack after the US. Then there are the small, more vulnerable nations that give quiet assistance to the American military; Belgium, which hosts Nato HQ; Canada, whose special forces have also been operating in Afghanistan; Ireland, which allows US military aircraft to refuel at Shannon.

Dear Osama. Don’t forget to murder the Irish. They’ve been nice to the Great Satan. (I found this excrescence via Tim Blair’s superb blog from Australia. Don’t miss it in the coming days.) This turn in Fisk’s argument was perhaps inevitable. Fisk bemoaned the massacre of September 11, but now that the West has responded, he will interpret every terrorist attack as self-defense on their part, and every ally of the United States as a sucker for more punishment. He’ll express sadness. And after every new atrocity, he’ll say he told us so.

I’ve been to Bali, with my old friend Max Kennedy, almost fifteen years ago. It’s a blessed little place – about as quiet and secluded and out of it as any place on earth. A mixture of Hindu culture, ancient animism, stoners from Australia, and skinny, pale Euro-hikers, it was a little bohemia all its own. Now these monsters have struck again, incinerating innocents in their murderous religious rage. There is no good here. And although Mike Kinsley will scoff at me for saying it, there is much evil. The target is not accidental. Having fun, mixing cultures, partying till dawn are all wonderful human activities that these dour murderers loathe. They hope that by targeting the “sinful,” they might even be excused by less extreme Muslims. The only good news is that Indonesia may now better understand what it’s up against; and the full inclusion of a moderate Muslim country against these Islamofascists will help greatly. The Brits and Australians, who were again among the dead, have already been spectacular in the war on terror. But perhaps now that more Germans have been murdered, Chancellor Schroder will rethink his hostility to confronting Saddam and his terrorist allies.

THE ANTI-WAR SPIN: Yes, the spin from the anti-war crowd will be that this event means we have to forget about pressuring Saddam. We’re losing “focus,” they’ll cry. Hooey. The administration has been urging Indonesia to crack down for months. Even the Guardian conceded this morning that “there was no immediate evidence that the Bush administration’s current concentration on Iraq had diminished its efforts against al-Qaida and its supporters in Indonesia. During a visit to Jakarta in August, the US secretary of state, Colin Powell, announced the renewal of US military assistance, a $50m package over three years.” More may well be needed. In fact, I think the “focus on al Qaeda” argument gets it exactly the wrong way round. It’s partly because we’re aiming at Iraq that the Islamists will try to wrest our attention away. They tried in Israel in the spring. They will throw more at us in the coming weeks and months. They know that a nuclear Iraq could be their safe and inviolable haven for decades in waging a terror war on the West; and they therefore understand the long-term stakes in the next few months. So, mercifully, does president Bush.

A FATHER’S LAMENT: The chicken-hawk argument – this time a defensible form, from the Palestinian father of a boy who killed himself under the influence of the terrorist death cult. It’s not an easy piece to read:

I ask, on my behalf and on behalf of every father and mother informed that their son has blown himself up: ‘By what right do these leaders send the young people, even young boys in the flower of their youth, to their deaths?’ Who gave them religious or any other legitimacy to tempt our children and urge them to their deaths?”
Yes, I say ‘death,’ not ‘martyrdom.’ Changing and beautifying the term, or paying a few thousand dollars to the family of the young man who has gone and will never return, does not ease the shock or alter the irrevocable end. The sums of money [paid] to the martyrs’ families cause pain more than they heal; they make the families feel that they are being rewarded for the lives of their children.
Do the children’s lives have a price? Has death become the only way to restore the rights and liberate the land? And if this be the case, why doesn’t a single one of all the sheikhs who compete amongst themselves in issuing fiery religious rulings, send his son?

Wrenching. There is and will be a silent majority of Palestinians and Arabs who will eventually turn against their manipulative despots and terrorist mob-bosses. Iraq will be the first opportunity to prove this. Others will surely follow.

FRIEDMAN’S PANDERING: Just what was Tom Friedman trying to say yesterday? Here’s his peroration: “Frankly, I don’t want to hear another word about Iraq right now. I want to hear that my president and my Congress are taking the real steps needed in this country – starting with sane gun control and sane economic policy – to stop this slide into over here becoming like over there.” Huh? Has he suddenly morphed into Bill O’Reilly? Does Friedman really think that gun control would have stopped the DC sniper – a man so skilled he could easily have gotten a license in any state, and killed in a state, Maryland, with some of the strictest gun laws in the country? Does he really think we should stop discussing Iraq? And what does he mean by a “sane” economic policy? This is just populist grandstanding. That’s the thing with Tom’s columns. He makes so much sense and then he plays to the Upper East Side choir. How disappointing.

THE MIRROR CRACKS: Remember the British tabloid that runs John Pilger on the cover, lionizes Bill Clinton and has largely given itself over to an anti-American anti-war agenda? The good news is that the Daily Mirror has seen its circulation drop 6.2 percent since last September, while its chief rival, Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun has seen a gain of 4.7 percent. The anti-war left makes a lot of noise, but that doesn’t mean it’s all that popular. Even in Europe. Even on the left.

THE CASE AGAINST WAR: It could spoil Mary McGrory’s Venice vacations. No, this column is not a parody.

THE GILMORE AWARD: I didn’t invent it, but Erin O’Connor did.

ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: Reading through the Yale Daily News can be a truly eye-opening experience. An article by a freshman concerned about rising anti-Semitism in the world and on campus prompted some responses I honestly thought I’d never read on a college website. Yes, I know all sorts of loonies can log on and post things on a free-floating comment board, and there’s no way to know who’s behind some of the comments. But who would be reading the Yale Daily News so closely in the first place? Anyway, make your own mind up by clicking on the comment section. Here’s one response from a Lissa Russo:

I recently attended a forum focusing on the Israeli/Palestinian issue. Both sides made very valid points but there was a moment of heated exchange when the pro-Israel side initiated the “anti-semite” slur and completely ended it for me. I am sick and tired of Jewish people always smearing those that merely disagree with their views as “evil”. I never thought I’d say this but alot of what the so-called “white supremacists” are saying are proving to be more accurate than I feel comfortable admitting.

Agreement with white supremacists? At Yale? Then there’s this:

I guess so many people are anti-semitic because the charge *anti-semitism* has been used so often it’s no longer considered as horrid as it once was – I mean, even Billy Graham wasn’t safe! I think *anti-semitism* isn’t so much a term for *people who hate Jews* as much as it’s come to mean *someone whom Jews hate*.

Nice touch that. Then this:

… [E]very d
ay, more of the world is made aware of JEWISH manipulation of politics, money markets and media and deflecting criticism by shrilling about ‘anti- Semitism’ is beginning to get old. We see how influential Jews have gotten the mere criticism of the so-called ‘Holocaust’ turned into a felony crime in Europe. We see how the politician who merely HINTS at easing foreign aid to Israel losing all hope of re-election. Every nation that opens its doors to Jews invariably finds themselves wracked with a tribe that works tirelessly to legitimize homosexuality, race-mixing, the importation of Third World immigrants and similar filth inherent in the Jewish agenda. And as usual, when discovered they run behind their Star of David and screech that we don’t like them because of their RELIGION!!! HAH!! It’s not working anymore, James!

These are posted on the Yale Daily news site. They should be. They tell us what’s out there – even at the most elite universities. or perhaps I should say especially at the most elite universities.

AT THE BARBER’S: Brent Staples gets the “Barber Shop” controversy exactly right.

SOUTH DAKOTA SHENANIGANS: Josh Marshall doesn’t think the Taylor ad was homophobic; and he doesn’t think that the Democrats are up to no good in South Dakota. “Absent more evidence of anything really widespread,” Josh writes, “this looks to me like a Republican effort to snuff out or throw a wet blanket over the Democrats’ effort to register a lot of new voters. They have a long history of this.” I guess he hasn’t read about the forging of voter registration cards yet. Democrats wouldn’t do anything like that, would they? They’re the good guys.

THE SAINTLY INQUISITOR: “Escriva’s motto was ‘compelle intrare’: ‘force them to enter’. In my experience, and in the experience of many others, that might just as appropriately be translated as ‘trick ’em into joining’ – and, in some cases, ‘terrify ’em into staying’. He and his followers believe that they are forcing people to be saved, pursuing the highest of motives with all the means at their disposal.” – a man who nearly got sucked into Opus Dei recounts his experiences.

Not even an apology if people perceived it to be anti-gay, the usual formula for an embarrassed pol. Put this together with the gay groups’ insouciance, and you’ve just given Republicans carte blanche to gay-bait opponents at any opportunity. Still not a peep from the far-left National Gay Lesbian Task Force or from GLAAD, the gay thought-police. I just found a first edition of “Animal Farm.” Never felt more relevant.

EMAIL OF THE DAY: Worth passing along, I think:

Just a short note of thanks. Christopher Hitchens’ unswerving dedication to his conscience reinvigorated my own sense of purpose, long dormant through disillusionment. Thanks for honoring, if not the specifics of his stand, the courage he displayed in severing ties with The Nation. I served as a weapons specialist, of sorts, in the US Navy during Desert Storm/Shield. At the time, I truly believed in what we were doing; it seemed we could only be right. Then, as we returned to the States, and the post-deployment culture shock only further alienated us from our families and friends, we found, to our horror, that the war effort wasn’t so monolithically supported as we’d thought. We’d had no clue that, while we were fighting, and some of our friends were dying, others picketed and rallied against us. At least it seemed they were against us. It was our blood, wasn’t it? I first heard the phrase, “Blood for oil,” after I’d already served my time in the Gulf. And as attrition and time chipped away my certainty, I began to lose that spark of patriotism that had been my impetus for serving my country at all. The last three years of my six year enlistment were hell. I didn’t have anything to prop me up when things got hairy. America, and especially American politicians, just didn’t seem worth dying for. I didn’t want to bleed for oil anymore. I received my Honorable discharge in 1996. I’m sure my supervisors, not the same men who knew me during the Gulf War, breathed a deep sigh of relief and wrote me off as another one-hitch loser. Fine by me. I started a business. I raised a family. I stayed away from politics. Then came September, 11th 2001. Fanatical men shattered what small buffer of ignorant bliss I’d managed to maintain around myself and my family. Men no different than those we’d fought and beaten ten years earlier. And I once again felt I had to do something. I’m now in the hiring pools for both the Federal Air Marshal program and the Transportation Safety Administration’s Airport Security Screener. That’s my stand, and people like Hitchens remind me why I took it then, and why I do it now. Thanks.

GLENDA RESPONDS:

Dear Mr. Sullivan, I am delighted to accept the Sontag Award. I have disagreed with you since you were a boy wonder. In fact, I cancelled my subscription to The New Republic when you hijacked it, and I have watched your downwardly mobile career path with interest. Are you a U.S. citizen yet? Thank you for bringing a small part of my essay to a larger audience. Glenda Gilmore

Charming, isn’t she? Meanwhile, check out the website where her vacuous essay was first printed. Click on the link to the responses. They’re amazing. My favorite is as below:

Daily Dish Readers: Welcome to American Studies at Yale—check your brain at the door Posted at: 10/12/02 5:18:29 AM Posted by: HGS Dissident (as entered by poster)

What you have seen on display here in this article are the consequences of letting race-and-gender airheads infiltrate and then eventually take over a once a stellar department. Can you imagine what it is like for a graduate student like myself, who labored for seven years in a remote part of the world to learn a non-Indo-European language, to find himself under the thumb of parochial know-nothings like Glenda Gilmore? Yale History has unfortunately become the province of such America Studies apparatchiks and their partisan agendas. These so-called scholars are a profoundly petty, unworldly and intellectually average lot. Though they preen themselves with a fashionable thirdworldism, few if any have seriously ventured beyond the confines of comfy academic settings in America and Western Europe. They have risen to where they are by figuring out, way back during their undergraduate days, that honors and riches are available to those who can make themselves adept at uncovering yet more evidence confirming how our dastardly American society at one time in its past failed to live up to the standards of egaliltarian utopianism (that no society from time immemorial has ever lived up to these unrealizable ideals is not up for discussion…). This ongoing activity of unearthing fresh layers of American evil sets the boundaries of their intellectual universe. They are absolutely unable and unwilling to entertain the possibility that there have been or could be non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual perpetrators of violence and oppression.

When they are confronted with scholarship like my own, which concentrates on the imperial history of a non-Western power, their response is either knee-jerk moral equivalence which changes the topic to American crimes against underprivileged groups, or the contrivance of contorted causal chains which attempt to blame anything and everything that goes wrong in any part of the world on Washington or corporate America. They simply will not acknowledge that someone like Saddam or Bin Laden is possible. The only truly bad people on this planet are Christian Conservatives—and oil men. Gilmore’s article is the worst example I have seen yet of this moral and intellectual myopia at Yale.

The news is not all bad however. For the past several semesters I have worked as a teacher’s assistant and, what do you know, but the message is not taking. Most undergrads are savvy enough to have figured out that their profs are people who could not handle life in the real world—and they are simply waiting them out. It comes as a profound shock to these students when, after a few weeks in my section, they discover that I share their contempt for the naive, hyperbolic posturings of the faculty. The fact that Gilmore included in her piece a plea to Yalies to stand up to Bush shows how out of touch many professors are with the student body. Sorry, Glenda, but your students actually approve of the job the president is doing (wish I could say the same for your teaching….). They prefer his sober reckoning with geopolitical realities to your melodramatic verbage. The only way in which this situation resembles your vaunted sixties is that the young people are rebelling against authority—which at today’s Yale means rejecting the nihilistic rantings of tenured hyenas in favor of a level-headed appreciation of America’s security needs.

Get that person a blog!

A TASTE OF SADDAM: John Burns, a superb New York Times reporter, gets the run-around from Saddam:

But whatever Al Furat may be these days, the Iraqis certainly knew that the tour for at least 200 scrambling, sweating reporters would not settle the matter conclusively, and not just because none of the visitors were experts in nuclear physics. The tour left no time to visit all of the dozen or more buildings on the site, and no opportunity to descend into the underground bunkers that appeared to be accessible from steel-sided entranceways with rusting doorways that were dotted about. The result, mostly, was confusion and befuddlement – whether that was the intention of the tour’s organizers in the Ministry of Military Industrialization,
or an inevitability given the complexity of the issue and the chaotic circumstances. What was certain, however, was that tours like these for reporters are unlikely to add very much to the world’s knowledge of what Iraq’s secretive leadership has been up to.

And you think inspectors would fare much better?

DATA: Here are two stills from the ad for those of without internet connections. Judge for yourself. The reach for the guy’s crotch at the end of the ad is particularly subtle.

A useful primer on some of the people behind the “Not In Our Name” anti-war petition.

MORE DIRTY TRICKS: The Dems in South Dakota are vying with the Montanans in sleaze.

Insight magazine has some interesting follow-up on the gay-baiting ad in Montana. It was funded entirely by the national Democrats. The relevant part of an interview with Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Communications Director Tovah Ravitz-Meehan is as follows:

Insight: The ad campaign was $100,000
TRM: I don’t know that. I can find out for you
Insight: I’d be interested in how much of it came from the DSCC.
TRM: I’m certain that all of it did.

The other detail from the Insight report is interesting: “Ken Miller, chairman of the Montana Republican Party, tells Insight that in fact internal party polls showed Taylor, within the margin of error, in a statistical tie with Baucus as recently as three weeks ago.” That makes more sense to me. Insight repeats the dumb and offensive idea that being called a homosexual is some sort of unforgivable slur. But what was infuriating about this kind of ad is that it doesn’t even do this. It plays on stereotypes and works by insinuation and pandering. In many ways, it’s the cowardice of the ad that makes it all the more reprehensible.

It’s unclear who the perpetrator was, but if he’s connected with Islamism, Europe could begin to experience the fruits of what Pim Fortuyn warned against. The French have just taken a hit too. Paris is already realigning quite solidly with the U.S. against Berlin, and this might accelerate the shift even further. Memo to Europe: wake up. It’s your war too.

ISN’T IT RICH, CTD: Many of Frank Rich’s points about the abdication of the Democrats on matters of war and economics are well taken. The Dems don’t offer any credible alternatives to the Bush administration’s policies right now. But does Rich? Has he proposed a real alternative? He wants no war with Iraq, but has no proposal for dealing with Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, except a blizzard of potshots at John Ashcroft. Sure, he can’t wait to raise taxes. But has he thought for a moment what a big tax hike would do to an economy already beleaguered by soft demand? Rich, like the Democrats, has presented nothing credible as a solution to our problems. He just whines and preens; and then criticizes those who whine and preen. He’s part of the problem, as is his newspaper.

ROMENESKO WATCH, CTD: A reader notices another weird lapse in Jim Romenesko’s coverage of the media:

I’m a regular reader of MediaNews and couldn’t agree more that it is blatantly biased. One story that I was looking for there and never saw was the incident when NRO Columnist Joel Mowbray was briefing detained in July and not allowed to leave the State Department. The incident itself was minor and short, but a federal government agency wouldn’t allow a reporter to leave? Think that would have been big news if he worked for The NY Times? The Washington Post? The Cleveland Free Times (MediaNews loves the liberal alt-weeklies)? It was an especially obvious omission when you look at some of the other stories that are highlighted.
By the way, one of my reasons for reading it is amazement at the self-absorbed and self-righteous attitudes of so many of the writers – especially on the Letters page!! If there is any one place I would recommend someone go to see in action the insulated world of liberal journalism and the egos involved, it’s the MediaNews letters page. Catty; nitpicking; conservative-bashing; anti-business; whining about being underpaid; flailing at anyone who gets off the reservation; jealous of each other’s success; it’s like Melrose place, only less friendly…
I like to read it and remind myself that these are the people who say conservatives are mean and have no sense of humor.

He’s right. Go visit and make up your own mind.

After the news cycle is over and the story has disappeared, the Human Rights Campaign, the biggest gay political group in the country, almost does the right thing. But why isn’t the condemnation of such tactics from executive director Elizabeth Birch’s lips? And why the deference to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s transparent spin? Notice also how HRC doesn’t come out and say that this was a homophobic ad. That might offend their Democratic allies. Here’s the quote:

“HRC deplores any attempt to make a political issue of a candidate’s real or perceived sexual orientation,” said HRC Political Director Winnie Stachelberg. “This type of ad has no place in politics, it is an affront to gay people and we hope we have seen the last of this campaign tactic.”

Notice the weasel word “any attempt,” leaving the possibility open that this ad was a genuine and non-homophobic one. Indeed, this press release artfully gets HRC off the hook, but never takes on the issue at hand: was this or was this not an anti-gay ad. And it provides a way for the DSCC to get its message out there. They’re smart over there. And cowardly.

“It is not enough for Bush to be President of the United States, he must become the Emperor of the World. This unclothed emperor is, as they say in Texas, all hat and no brains. In the years before us, I fear there will be causes worth dying for. There will be tyrants so unstoppable that we will have to fight them to preserve our own freedom. But that is not the case now. Instead of standing up against tyranny, we are bringing it to our own doorstep. We have met the enemy, and it is us.” – Glenda Gilmore, professor of history, Yale University.

UPDATE: From a Texas reader: “‘This unclothed emperor is, as they say in Texas, all hat and no brains.’ We don’t say that. We say: all hat and no cattle. She can’t even quote the average Texan right.”
From another Texas reader: “In Texas, we say, ‘All hat and no ranch.’ Never heard it put that other way. Ever.”