The Dish

That’s the bumper sticker long affixed to Hesham Hadyat’s front door – put there again the day of the killing (and then removed). He was angry that Old Glory was being flown from the apartment window above him after September 11. Employees say he was virulently anti-Israel. He went to LAX with the intent of killing – and somehow he missed the Delta counter and ended up at El Al. And we’re supposed to think that “so far we have no indication of any type of prejudice against any particular organization or nationality.” What planet are these FBI denialists on? It’s irrelevant whether Hadyat was connected to official terrorist groups. In fact, if he is unconnected, his Jew-killing is more troubling. He is simply responding to the hate that the Arab and Muslim world has been stoking against Jews for decades. He needed no official instruction to tell him to kill Jews and Israelis. He wasn’t poor: he was a prosperous immigrant who drove a Mercedes. The only instruction he needed was affixed to his door: “Read Koran.” Why should we be surprised when, under the current circumstances and stoked by the new anti-Semitism from the Arab world and Europe, Hadyat took the Koran’s injunction to kill Jews literally? And when is our government and p.c. media going to recognize we have a problem here? Can you imagine if a white supremacist had shown up at an African airline counter and killed blacks? Would anyone be “puzzled” about the motive?

When I saw the headline in the New York Times – “Bush Slashing Aid For E.P.A. Clean-Up …” from Bush-hater Katharine Seelye, I barely read the article. I’m not alone in skipping through these Raines-sponsored DNC-written press releases recycled as news. I should have been more diligent. Slate’s Jack Shafer has the goods on Seelye’s distortions. Jack nails it cold. It’s yet more devastating evidence of why the Times simply cannot be trusted any more. (Correction. Too many July 4 cocktails: I first wrote that Elizabeth Bumiller wrote the story. I get my Bush-haters muddled up. Sorry.)

I’ll be writing a column. Yay! And it’s so frigging hot. But have a good one. I for one will celebrate one single thing: that since September 11, terrorists have been unable to attack any Americans on American soil. Just because the success is measured by what hasn’t happened rather than by what has, doesn’t mean it isn’t real. We have endured. We will prevail.

RAINES WATCH: Every single letter to the New York Times today on school vouchers was anti-voucher. Sure, they’re responding to Milton Friedman. But did no one agree with him? Many contain obvious fallacies.

THE TOLERANT FAR LEFT: When all else fails, vandalize.

IT’S NOT THE CRIME, IT’S THE COVER-UP: Open question to Chris Mooney of the American Prospect. When your magazine told the Columbia Journalism Review that your monthly unique visitors were 450,000, what month were you referring to? And what is your latest version of the traffic in that month? Meanwhile, Mickey piles on …

THE ARAB ON THE ISRAELI TEAM: Want a reminder of the difference between Israel and her Arab neighbors? How many Jews are on the national soccer teams of the Arab countries? Meet Walid Bder, the Arab on Israel’s. And it’s so unremarkable, no one really notices.

A DIFFERENT PLEDGE: This is the pledge of allegiance, a University of Texas professor thinks ought to replace the current one. If you don’t want to ruin your July 4, don’t read on:

I pledge allegiance to all the ordinary people around the world,
to the laid off Enron workers and the WorldCom workers
the maquiladora workers
and the sweatshop workers from New York to Indonesia,
who labor not under God but under the heel of multinational corporations; I pledge allegiance
to the people of Iraq,
Palestine and Afghanistan,
and to their struggles to survive and resist
slavery to corporate greed,
brutal wars against their families,
and the economic and environmental ruin wrought by global capitalism; I pledge allegiance
to building a better world
where human needs are met
and with real liberty, equality and justice for all.

Paid for by Texas tax-payers.

HOW EMBARRASSING IS BOB HERBERT? Today’s column is barely worthy of a high-school newspaper – the tired analogy (to Pig Pen, a Charlie Brown character! Our Bob is so hip!), the facile ideology, the false premise (that on most measurable indicators, the environment is getting much worse, rather than better), the lugubrious sanctimony. And someone with this level of argumentation is granted the most precious real estate in American journalism.

You’ve probably read lots of articles in the American Prospect, bemoaning big CEOs fiddling numbers, inflating profits, engaging in all sorts of creative accounting. Well, Bob Kuttner’s online magazine should know. In the Columbia Journalism Review, they claimed 450,000 unique visitors a month. Amazing traffic. Eric Alterman, always alert to factual accuracy, pointed out that this showed the hegemony of the Left on the web. Well, after the equivalent of a blogger SEC investigation, they’ve finally released their amended report. Their actual unique visitors for June was 161,025 – a little over a third of their previous claim. In classic fashion, they don’t admit their error; they don’t apologize; they barely explain; they release the news the day before July 4. More spin. And I thought Chris Mooney was a straight-up kind of guy. These guys fibbed about something as basic as their web stats. And you’re going to trust them on the economy?

Funny how this crops up all the time. A gay mafia has taken over the Church. A gay mafia has taken over Hollywood. A gay mafia – the “homocons” – have hijacked the gay movement. We may not have institutionalized anti-Semitism in the culture, but every aspect of the old anti-Semitism is being recycled – only this time, it’s about gays. Scapegoats for right, left and the merely paranoid. Who said homosexuals don’t perform a useful social function?

THE SURVEY: It’s back up. Don’t all go at once or you’ll crash it again. But let me know if you find anything interesting.

INSULARITY AND PSYCHOSIS: I hope you saw Barbara Crossette’s account of a new Arab study of Arab decline in the Times yesterday. To me the most staggering facts were: “The number of Arabs is expected to grow to between 410 million and 459 million by 2020 [from 280 million today].” And: “In the 1,000 years since the reign of the Caliph Mamoun, it concludes, the Arabs have translated as many books as Spain translates in just one year.” So we have a new, massive generation of people, largely sealed off from outside cultural forces and fed a steady stream of extremist, anti-Semitics and anti-Western hate literature. I have a feeling that our current war could be just the beginning.

THE PLEDGE: “Every pundit, politician and op-ed page in America has blasted the pledge decision, but they all (yourself included) ignore the salient point – is the pledge constitutional? The timing may be rotten and there may not be many interest groups out there to be appeased, but it’s hard to see how the words “under God”, intentionally added by to the original pledge by congress in the 50s, could not be unconstitutional. If we feel so strongly as a nation that the pledge should include those words, let’s pass an amendment – it only takes 2/3 of us. Why is it that Republicans (and Democrats running for cover) can’t be bothered to look beyond the emotional impact to the underlying facts and call a rose a rose? Don’t you agree that the ruling’s detractors couldn’t be bothered to examine the prima facie question before responding with their usual outrage over all things “un-American”? I continue, with each passing day, to lose a little bit more of my long-frayed faith in the American way.” – this, several gay debate reviews, dissent on corporate corruption, and much more on the best Letters Page on the web.

RAINES WATCH I: How weird is it that the CEO of the New York Times publishes an attack on McCain-Fengold – in the Washington Post? And his byline includes the caveat, “The views here are his own”? Is even the CEO of the place denied a platform in his own paper, if his views don’t coincide with Howell Raines’? Suddenly I don’t feel so bad.

ISLAM, CLASS, AND WOMEN: I don’t know where to begin with this story, about a Pakistani girl gang-raped as punishment for her brother’s flirtation with a girl not from his social class. But we might begin by reaffirming that Stanley Fish is wrong. There can be universal reasonable standards that say some things are wrong, period. This is one of them.

RAINES WATCH II: Check out the p.c. nonsense even in the New York Times’ sports pages. I noted yesterday the telling story of the Pakistani shunned by his own country’s authorities because he played with a Jew. The Times wants to tell us that Americans would behave just as appallingly: “It is no difficult task, then, to ridicule the complaining Pakistanis, but it is also fair to wonder if Americans who still prefer patriotic fervor to “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” would have cheered one of their own teaming with an Afghan last fall, or how the Israeli public, which has taken no issue this time, would respond to Hadad and a Palestinian of choice.” Excuse me. Weren’t we liberating the Afghans last fall? And I know of no evidence that Israelis would feel that way about a sporting event. This is just p.c. boilerplate to avoid criticism of a state and a culture that’s anti-Semitic to its core. And excusing or ignoring anti-Semitism is now, sadly, part of the New York Times’ ethos.

ANTI-SEMITISM WATCH: A new allegedly anti-Semitic novel from a Holocaust skeptic sells out in one day in Germany. It sold 50,000 copies. I don’t think they were all Muslim immigrants.

HER GAY CAT: Just one of those wacko websites I send your way every now and again.

HIS FISHY TOILET: And here’s another!

“On the eve of our great national birthday party and in the aftermath of Sept. 11, when millions of us turned to God and prayed for forgiveness of individual and corporate sins and asked for His protection against future attacks, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has inflicted on this nation what many will conclude is a greater injury than that caused by the terrorists.” – Cal Thomas, Washington Times.

CEO GREED: I’m with Gregg Easterbrook on pursuing the malfeasant CEOs who have essentially robbed shareholders while paying themselves exorbitant sums. Those of us who believe in free markets as the least worst way of organizing economies should be particularly incensed at this duplicity and larceny. But one reason for some restraint on the hype is precisely because so many liberals want to use these crimes as a rationale for enhancing government power over the economy, returning to the failed redistributionism and dirigisme of the past, and junking much of the free market gains of the last two decades. Gregg also fails to talk about bubble psychology as an essential context for these crimes. Such psychology excuses nothing. But it does help us understand why the last two years were particularly bad. On a minor note, am I the only one to object to setnences like the following: “Has conservatism reached the point that any development that transfers money to white male CEOs is deemed acceptable?” Why the “white male” interpolation? It’s factually accurate in the vast number of cases, but their gender and race is surely irrelevant to these CEO crimes. Can you imagine the New Republic publishing a similar phrase about “black males” in the context of, say, urban crime? Silly question.

THIS GUY’S SHIT DOESN’T STINK: In fact, it’s art. And worth more per ounce than gold. I kid you not. At least the artist, who died young, had a sense of irony about it. He wrote a friend, “I should like all artists to sell their fingerprints, or else stage competitions to see who can draw the longest line or sell their shit in tins. If collectors really want something intimate, really personal to the artist, there’s the artist’s own shit. That is really his.”

FISH’S REAL AGENDA: Here’s a good trip through a few of Stanley Fish’s more troubling statements. Here’s his defense of free speech:

‘Free Speech’ is just the name we give to verbal behavior that serves the substantive agendas we wish to advance…. Free speech, in short, is not an independent value but a political prize, and if that prize has been captured by a politics opposed to yours, it can no longer be invoked in ways that further your purposes, for it is now an obstacle to those purposes…. [S]o long as so-called free speech principles have been fashioned by your enemy . . . , contest their relevance to the issue at hand; but if you manage to refashion them in line with your purposes, urge them with a vengeance.

Now I know what Richard Goldstein has been reading.

RAINES WATCH: Even I was a little taken aback by the headline on Darcey Frey’s New York Times Magazine piece this weekend. It was: “The Bush administration is setting its oil-hungry sights on pristine wilderness areas beyond the Arctic refuge, some in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains.” Well, I guess they’re not even pretending any more.

DISTINGUISHING CHARACTERISTICS: The weirdest use of the “What Would Jesus Do?” vulgarity just surfaced. And some thought minor abuse was just a Catholic problem.

STRAIGHT GUYS IN DENIAL: According to the Associated Press’s John Solomon, retiring Senator Fred Thompson is a real hottie. “Divorced since the mid-1980s,” Solomon wrotes, “Thompson has been one of Washington’s most eligible bachelors.” Check out the photo of the 59-year-old with his 35 year-old bride. What’s the betting that John Solomon is straight too?

“It’s also true that Clinton’s association with the boom years – and the way in which they clearly helped many middle class Americans – has deflected a coherent left-wing attack on the legacy of the 1990s. After the crash of 1987, the Democrats and liberals made every effort to portray the 1980s as a decade of greed, fomented by selfish Republicans. But that is politically much harder to do with the 1990s. It was an era when the Democrats finally managed to persuade Americans that they could manage the economy. Today, the Democrats don’t have any deep incentive to alter that perception. That’s why they want to link the current corporate excess with a Republican administration – a strategy undermined solely by the facts.” For more of this article, just posted, click here.

Peter Berkowitz has taken up the cudgels against Stanley Fish. His basic argument is that Fish’s claim that post-modernism simply means taking into account different views of the world is extremely disingenuous. If that’s all the pomos want, what’s the big deal? But of course, that isn’t really the post-modern claim. The claim is that there is no such thing as truth, that all truths are equivalent, that believing one over another is essentially arbitrary or a function of power relations. Or, as Peter puts it:

[T]he guiding theme of postmodernism is that objectivity, especially in morals, is a sham–in other words, precisely the definition Fish was disavowing in the Times. Postmodernists take their lead from Nietzsche’s famous aphorism in Beyond Good and Evil, “There are no moral phenomena at all, but only a moral interpretation of phenomena.” They draw inspiration and sustenance from the many books of the French theorist Michel Foucault, who held that the quest for truth in the study of history is wrongheaded–that, instead, one should seek to grasp “how effects of truth are produced within discourses which in themselves are neither true nor false.” And they (the postmodernists) consider as one of their outstanding contemporaries Judith Butler, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, who asserts that “power pervades the very conceptual apparatus that seeks to negotiate its terms, including the subject position of the critic”; that “there is no ontologically intact reflexivity to the subject which is then placed within a cultural context”; and that “agency is always and only a political prerogative.”

This, of course, is also the objection to my politics of homosexuality. For pomos, homosexuality is not a stable part of the human condition, no more than liberal politics is an eternal answer to the vicissitudes of unruly human nature. All these phenomena are merely a function of social construction, of the concatenation of power and meaning that is all that passes for truth in our world. The only important thing to do is to redefine the meaning of this phenomenon in subversive ways – undermining the fight against evil by equating terrorism with democracy, making something eternal in human nature “queer”. In this sense, the battle against terror and the fight for civil rights are closely connected. They are both struggles in defense of human reason and morality against nihilism and brute force. And they require re-fighting in every generation. This generation, in particular, has its work cut out.

GOOD NEWS IN THE WAR I: We’re quietly building up the Qatar base. It’s increasingly clear that Qatar is the beginning of the end for our Saudi connection. And with any luck, the beginning of the end for Saddam as well.

GOOD NEWS IN THE WAR II: The Bush-Putin relationship, the most important right now in global politics, is beginning to pay more dividends. In the end, of course, it’s about oil. Another slow maneuver away from the Saudis.

THE BELL-RINGER OF NOTRE DAME: The term “hunchback” is now verboten. It could offend those with the condition known as “scoliosis.” So a British Theater company has changed the name of its upcoming production, despite the fact that the entire story is about how someone overcomes the handicap of being stigmatized. How can you overcome a stigma when it’s already been removed? Oh never mind.

THOSE TOLERANT MUSLIM STATES: In an inspiring move, a Pakistani player, Aisamul Haq Qureshi, teamed up with an Israeli to play tennis doubles at Wimbledon. The team did well – with the Pakistani doing better in a major tennis tournament than any of his countrymen before him. His Israeli partner had the right attitude: “I didn’t even think about Qureshi being a Muslim until I went home and found out it was big news in Israel, that a Jew was playing with a Muslim,” he said. “I just thought of him as another tennis player, a human being. Maybe if we get far here we’ll do some good because people will see Muslims and Jews can be friends.” Qureshi was similarly non-political. But what was his country’s official response? “Although he is playing in his private capacity, we officially condemn his playing with an Israeli player and an explanation has been sought from him,” Pakistan Sports Board director Brigadier Saulat Abbas told the BBC. “Since Pakistan has no links with Israel, Qureshi may face a ban.” Now say after me: Islam means peace.

THOSE WONDERFUL D.C. COPS: Now they’re being investigated for actually vandalizing the Chandra Levy crime scene. Thanks to Josh Marshall for finding that staggering news in the deep recesses of the Washington Post.

CELIBACY AND TRADITIONAL CATHOLICS: Don’t believe the theocon hype. Even traditional Catholics don’t buy the celibacy arguments for the priesthood. Here’s an email that captures the mood:

So I’m with my in-laws for a few days. My wife’s grandparents were straight off the boat from Italy. These people are all what I think of as “old school Catholics”. As an agnostic-leaning-toward-Catholic, I’m probably the fringe of this group. The rest of them were all raised in Catholic homes during the fifties or earlier. They went to old traditional Catholic schools, and can recite horror stories of nuns with rulers along with the best of them. They formed most of their theological opinions pre-Vatican II, is my guess.

And what was the consensus opinion in this very Catholic group? “Priests should be able to marry.” “That’s a dumb rule.” “It’s not scripture.” And, in a really interesting twist on the old explanation for where the celibacy rule comes from: “It was put in place by one of the corrupt Popes so that when the priests died, the Church would inherit their property.” They’re also united in their scorn for the bishops who were accomplices to pedophilia. So even among this old school Catholic bunch who are otherwise representative of the worst of pre-sixties America (their blatant racism reminds me why conservatives have such a bad name among minorities), there’s a feeling that it’s time for some changes. I hope the Church is paying attention.

I hope so too.

It seems to me that Jeff Rosen gets it about right. The Supreme Court has made the perfectly sane decision that as long as the choice for religious education is the parent’s and not the state’s, then public money can be used for parochial schools. I’m vehemently opposed to more aggressive conservative funding directly for religious institutions, but I see nothing wrong with this. Given the appalling choices that many minority kids in big cities face, it also seems to me a powerful public interest to let them avail themselves of the best education they possibly can. The notion that kids are overwhelmed by the religious atmosphere of parochial schools is equally overblown. I went to a high-school that was state-funded in England, and whose official religion was Anglican. I went to Anglican services every morning, and the school assembly was actually held in the local church. But I can honestly say that nothing helped firm up my Catholicism more. This Supreme decision, especially in contrast with this week’s extremist ruling on the Pledge of Allegiance, strikes me as a very hopeful sign for the future of these issues. And for the hopes of a generation of kids. Now all we have to make sure is there there is an American Catholic church left to provide the education.

SOMEONE BLOGGED THE DEBATE: A relatively fair assessment, although in retrospect, I think I was too defensive and overly paranoid about the audience. And who says I’m “paunchy?” That’s a 32 inch waist, buddy.

“Yes, the “precogs” in Minority Report could see murders before they happened, but the bigger “theme” that Spielberg and the writers seemed to be aiming for was that the murderers-to-be also had a choice. Just like the Palestinians have a choice. And the Islamists. They can choose to sit at at a table and talk, negotiate and bargain (clearly anathema to Arafat), or they can choose to strap explosives to their bodies and violently kill innocent civilians (or fly planes into tall buildings for the same effect). Both may — or may not — produce the desired results, but it is that willingness to choose the more humane method that separates the civilized from the barbaric, the moral from the corrupt.” This, and more dissent on the Pledge of Allegiance and Palestine, an evisceration of Mary Eberstadt’s argument on pedophilia, a comparison between Arafat and Huge Chavez, and Bush’s Middle East speech seen in the Winthrop tradition. All on the smartest letters page on the web.