The Dish

Perceptive blogger analysis of how the Times, while being ostensibly even-handed, tips the scales against Fortuyn’s political identity.

DREHER ON FORTUYN: Excellent column by Rod Dreher on the meaning of Fortuyn’s assassination. I’m amazed at how obtuse much of the media is being about this story. In my view, in the context of European politics, the European debates about immigration, multiculturalism, the EU, free speech, and terrorism, this event is truly profound. Why is this story therefore being buried in the major papers? Because it flies against the preconceptions of most American editors, who don’t seem to have a clue about what’s really happening over there? OKay, guys, here’s a pull-quote from Dreher for you:

A woman who answered the phone at Fortuyn campaign headquarters last night said things were too chaotic there, and that no one would be able to speak to the foreign press until today. Through her tears, she said, “It’s unbelievable that someone gets killed only for saying what they believe.”

Get it now?

As I feared and suspected, the murder of Fortuyn appears, according to Dutch police, to have come from the far left. So this is quite possibly an assassination of an openly gay man by the extreme left, because he held contrarian but completely defensible views. The vicious rhetoric spouted against him by leftist, liberal and even moderate politicians and journalists no doubt contributed to this outcome. I guess I see this a little personally. But no one should doubt that the far left, just as much as the far right, is now among the most intolerant forces in our society. They do everything they can to shut down the views of others, marginalize, blacklist or simply intimidate them. When all else fails, something like this horrific murder happens. I wonder how many leading European liberals, who are so quick to draw connections between speech and action when it comes to traditional hate-crimes, will now ponder whether their own rhetorical extremism has to be tempered somewhat. Here’s a classic of the genre, from the comment section on the BBC website:

Anyone deserving the name libertarian does not restrict people’s liberty to live where they want. It’s good to see people taking direct action against the far right. If Hitler or Mussolini had been killed in the twenties, when they were still ‘respectable’ and adored by such UK papers as the Daily Mail, who knows how many lives would have been saved?
Matt, a libertarian socialist, UK

Charming, huh? And what many leftist activists actually believe.

AN EMAIL FROM HOLLAND: One among many, but this time from a very different perspective:

A very good thing to dedicate some space on andrewsullivan.com to the news regarding the assassination of Pim Fortuyn. My thanks.
One important point which has not been made is that Pim, as a debater, was a man who opened himself completely, making himself maximally vulnerable to attacks (during a political debate or during interviews)
It is, even when writing from the Netherlands, difficult to describe the feelings this assassination has released. Most – well thinking – people are against his views, but have great admiration for the way he represents his views and the greatest respect for his drive and his dedication.
This is what makes him very very different in our view from e.g. JFK, we were promised a completely new, honest and open way of politics – in a Dutch fashion of course. Which has now been replaced by a great uncertainty about the honesty & effectiveness of the upcoming elections. The removal of this hope has released a sadness which is difficult to describe, but felt by his opponents and his followers alike. This was a man without personal defences. Who – in my opinion – deserves more attention to his honesty and drive than to his (often) misunderstood (extreme) right wing ideas.

The situation in the Netherlands is so fraught right now that any prediction is risky. But doesn’t it make sense that the murder of Pim Fortuyn could propel his party and its allies to even bigger gains than were deemed possible yesterday? For an anti-crime figure to be gunned down in the street, after the government refused to give him adequate police protection, is hardly a reason to vote for the failed old politicians. The London Times’ Michael Gove has the best analysis I’ve read so far. Check it out. An important passage:

Fortuyn and his allies developed a critique of the establishment notably different from those pioneered by the politicians with whom he has been compared, Jörg Haider and Jean-Marie Le Pen. Fortuyn was uncompromisingly neo-liberal. An advocate of laxer rules on euthanasia, greater drugs liberalisation, more use of the private sector in healthcare and tax cuts, he was very far from Le Pen’s hearthland politics of Vichyiste nostalgia. He may have been a “cultural protectionist” like Le Pen. But the culture he wished to protect was the Dutch libertarianism so familiar to many Britons from their weekends in Amsterdam, so congenial to him as a gay man, and so threatened, he claimed, by the incursions of Islam.

Amen. Fortuyn was not a threat to liberalism. His assassination is. What Fortuyn dared to say is that Islam itself, when converted into a political agenda, is a direct threat to the values and tolerance that are the signal achievements of the West. This is not racism; it is a cultural fact. Islam deserves respect as a great religion, but its attitudes toward women, toward homosexuals, toward the freedoms and privacy and social experimentation that are one of the guiding triumphs of Western culture, is a danger to liberal democracy and a free society. Fortuyn was brave enough to say this. One way to respect his legacy and defy the violence that felled him is to follow his example and keep stating what we know to be true.

BOOK CLUB: My take on Bjorn Lomborg’s dense, but largely persuasive book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” is now posted. Over to you. A week of debate will follow.

SATEL’S STRAW MAN?: “Every physician I have known in this hotbed of political correctness (Manhattan) begins her/his admission note mentioning the race of the patient immediately following their age. We were all taught in medical school that certain groups are at risk for certain conditions (i.e. smokers and lung cancer; old people and Alzheimer’s; women with multiple partners and cervical cancer, etc.), and considering this is not age discrimination, lifestyle discrimination, or discrimination against smokers. By using the term “Racial Profiling” and setting up the “Politically Correct” medical establishment as a strawman, it certainly is not surprising that Dr. Satel had an easy time making herself appear to be enlightened.” – this and an obit of Peter Bauer, emotional intimacy, and John Rawls – all on the Letters Page.

‘REACTIONARY’ FORTUYN: Check out this Guardian profile of Pim Fortuyn. The Euro-left keeps describing him as a ‘reactionary.’ This profile says: “He succeeded in blending liberal and reactionary ideas in a quite unique fashion.” Now scour the piece for anything that could be called ‘reactionary.’ It’s this kind of condescending blindness that gave Fortuyn an opening. Check out this passage from the New York Times today:

During a recent interview, Mr. Fortuyn talked freely on a wide range of subjects, including his homosexuality, the ingrained bureaucracy, the liberal Dutch social policies dealing with abortion, same-sex marriages and tolerance of soft-drugs, and the need to denounce the self-satisfied political class. During the interview he was asked why he was so critical of Muslim immigrants. He said he found it shameful that foreign Islamic clergy here used offensive language against gays in this country, and that Muslim men tried to impose medieval rural customs in the Netherlands. “How can you respect a culture if the woman has to walk several steps behind her man, has to stay in the kitchen and keep her mouth shut,” he said.

I couldn’t agree more. We’re often asked by some Islamists to respect others’ cultures, even when we find much in them to be dismayed by. Fair enough. But is it too much to ask that they also respect ours? Especially when they live in the West?

KRUGMAN NAILS IT: For once, I agree with him. The shameless, unjustified, vast hand-out to rich corporate farmers – that’s money taken from you and me, guys – is one of the worst fiscal decisions to come out of Washington in the last couple of years. It’s corporate welfare, backed by greedy Democrats and a spineless president, who recently seems like the kind of guy who never saw a big government spending bill he didn’t want to sign. Krugman is also sharp about divorce and illegitimacy and crime rates in the “heartland.” And no, I haven’t gone completely nuts. The evidence for Middle America’s dependency on the public teat is irrefutable.

SONTAG AWARD NOMINEE: “Ariel Sharon has arrived in Washington, carrying with him The Arafat Dossier – a 91-page report allegedly documenting the Palestinian leader’s intimate involvement in “terrorism” against Israel. For good measure, the dossier accuses all the usual suspects of helping Yasser Arafat in his terrorism: Iran, Iraq, Syria and Hizbullah, plus – interestingly – Saudi Arabia, the European Union and even elements in the United States. Whether the documents actually prove any of these things is beside the point; the point is to generate headlines in the US that will excite Republican Congressmen of the sort who last week proposed the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.” – Brian Whitaker, the Guardian (where else?), May 6.

CHRIS PATTEN’S BLATHER: There are few more condescending, Eurocratic, arrogant fools among European elites than one Chris Patten. A former Tory, he now clings to the Conservative Party as a way to win further unelected office in the Brussels bureaucracy. His piece today in the Washington Post, designed to answer George Will’s recent column bemoaning the rise of European anti-Semitism, is chock full of prejudices. There’s the sad attempt to argue that America was soft on Nazism because Joe Kennedy once was. And there’s the belittling of anti-Semitic violence in Europe by the canard that it is balanced by anti-Islamic agitation. He also has the gall to associate himself with a democratic Europe, while he represents the least democratic institution on the continent, the European Commission, and is in the vanguard of further stripping democracy from the elected governments of EU member states. He seems appalled by the idea that the same Europe that gave us the Holocaust should now be seen as anti-Zionist or in some way hostile to Israel. Who does he think he’s kidding? Visceral loathing for Israel permeates the entire European establishment of which
he is an integral part. He brings up the issue of private American financial support for the IRA. He’s right that such support is vile. But the American government never sent millions of dollars direct to the IRA to foment terrorism against Britain. Yet the EU funnels vast sums to Yassir Arafat’s terrorist organizations, with no checks, no standards, no accountability. That money is used to kill Jews. And Chris Patten helps dispense it. And that’s largely all you need to know.

I learn from the usually reliable Rex Wockner that Dutch “[p]olice said they captured the suspected gunman, a ‘white man of Dutch nationality.’ He has refused to make a statement and his identity is unknown.” If this is a hit-job from the left, things could get really, really ugly in Europe. And some news reports indicate it already has.

Not very. Because he believed that large numbers of unassimilated immigrants, especially Islamic ones, could destabilize Dutch society, the mainstream media often talked of him as far-right. But he wanted current immigrants to stay and adopt national customs; his party had ethnic minority candidates; he was openly gay; he wanted smaller, more efficient government. He was no more “far-right” than Silvio Berlusconi or Iain Duncan-Smith. He was an admirer of Euroskeptic Margaret Thatcher. With regard to tackling the Brussels bureaucracy, he once said, “I will borrow that handbag from Margaret Thatcher, bang on the table and say I want my money back.” A man after my own heart, and as I assimilate the news of his death, my mood darkens. The world is not an easy place to espouse the mixture of ideas and views Fortuyn did. He did so with aplomb and humor. He was defiantly and proudly gay, but his appeal was far broader than that, and by reaching out to the center and right, he did much to help the integration of gay men and women into mainstream European politics. In this he was an ally, even an icon of sorts. And it’s chilling to think that this combination of ideas – if poised to reach political power – could be grist for assassination. In Holland, of all places. The enemies of liberalism are many – on the far right, the far left, and the Islamist fundamentalist orbit. For these reasons, Fortuyn should be hailed as another martyr for gay visibility, along with Harvey Milk. But what’s the betting that the gay left won’t go near this story? Here’s hoping they will.

Horrifying news from the Netherlands. Pim Fortuyn, a brash, brave, outspoken libertarian-conservative gay man, has been killed by an assassin. I don’t agree with everything he stood for, but his ability to speak about issues others shy away from – like the sexist, homophobic bigotry of many Islamofascists and their supporters – was admirable. As an openly gay man proud to represent conservatism, he was a commendable figure, part of a new wave of gay voices threatening to both right and left. I have no idea who killed him. It could be a crank, or a radical leftist, or an Islamist terrorist, or a homophobic rightist, who knows. All that we do know now is that democracy has been attacked in Holland. And that a brave man, who dared to repesent a fresh combination of ideas and identities, is dead. May he rest in peace.

While the administration puts the final touches to another pointless gab-fest on the Middle East, our enemies regroup. We’re supposed to be shocked that Israel is now producing documentary evidence of Arafat’s direct link to the terrorist mass-murder of Israeli civilians. Forgive my comparative equanimity. Anyone truly shocked at proof that the Palestinian Authority has direct links to Iraq, Iran and Syria, and is a de facto terrorist organization needs help. Some of these issues can be challenged, but some cannot. Here’s one aspect no one can surely dispute:

Several of the [PA] documents are requests to Arafat for funding from local officials of his Fatah movement or one of its armed wings, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades. One such request was made in April last year on behalf of 15 men, including five who Israel says took part in shooting attacks against Israelis near the West Bank town of Tulkarm, and one who helped kill two Israeli border guards last September. The request, from a local Fatah official, is for $2,000 for each of the men. Arafat authorized $800 for each, and signed the order, according to the documents. Palestinians had previously maintained the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades was more or less autonomous from Arafat and his top aides.

“More or less autonomous.” Lovely phrase that. The Washington Post also reports that

Israel offered other documents as evidence that Arafat’s top officials were actively involved in procuring mortars, artillery shells and antitank weapons, all of which are barred to the Palestinians. Under agreements with Israel, Arafat’s Palestinian Authority is allowed a limited number of sidearms and assault rifles but no heavy weapons.

Duh. My own view is that Arafat is a terrorist, a liar and impossible to deal with. But if dealing with him for a while can keep the other Arab despots quiet while we prepare to take out Saddam, I’m not so much of a purist to complain. I just hope to God no one in the Bush administration believes a word the guy says. Meanwhile, Time helpfully reminds us that time is running out if we hope to prevent an Iraqi use of weapons of mass destruction in the coming war. And Warren Buffett makes the obvious point that a nuclear dirty bomb exploding in New York or D.C. is a virtual certainty. I think he’s wrong in one respect. If we really want to stop such an eventuality, we can. If we keep dithering about Iraq, the “virtual” part of the certainty disappears.

RACE AND BIOLOGY: Terrific little piece by my friend Sally Satel in the New York Times magazine yesterday. (And yes, that stunning photo is really her. She’s way cute – and I say that with some objectivity.) Sally has the temerity to point out that there are actually some small, crude genetic markers that can be used to make rough and ready medical inferences about individuals depending on their race. Here’s what I found most illuminating:

What does it really mean, though, to say that 99.9 percent of our content is the same? In practical terms it means that the DNA of any two people will differ in one out of every 1,000 nucleotides, the building blocks of individual genes. With more than three billion nucleotides in the human genome, about three million nucleotides will differ among individuals. This is hardly a small change; after all, mutation of a single one can cause the gene within which it is embedded to produce an altered protein or enzyme. It may seem counterintuitive, but the 0.1 percent of human genetic variation is a medically meaningful fact.

Now, of course, almost all of us are mixture of races (and may that continue and intensify). And of course as a matter of moral and political equality, race should be utterly irrelevant. But that doesn’t mean that biological racial differences do not exist or cannot exist. That is simply an empirical question, to be empirically resolved, if useful (as it undoubtedly is in medicine). Alas, there are many forces and individuals that simply refuse even to look at data, evidence or even engage in a simple dialogue about these matters. All the more reason why Sally should be commended for speaking such sense – despite the ferocious hostility of some “liberals.” It shouldn’t take courage to say the obvious, but, alas, under today’s p.c. conditions, it sometimes does.

THE INDEPENDENT’S “REPORTING”: London’s Independent newspaper, as you might imagine, has been having a field day in the West Bank. Massacres, war crimes, you name it, were obviously being committed by the evil Israelis. Phil Reeves, a Fisk wannabe, sent home this despatch upon arriving in Jenin:

A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed. …The sweet and ghastly reek of rotting human bodies is everywhere, evidence that it is a human tomb. The people, who spent days hiding in basements crowded into single rooms as the rockets pounded in, say there are hundreds of corpses, entombed beneath the dust, under a field of debris, criss-crossed with tank and bulldozer treadmarks.

He went on:

A quiet, sad-looking young man called Kamal Anis led us across the wasteland, littered now with detritus of what were once households, foam rubber, torn clothes, shoes, tin cans, children’s toys. He suddenly stopped. This was a mass grave, he said, pointing… A few days ago, we might not have believed Kamal Anis. But the descriptions given by the many other refugees who escaped from Jenin camp were understated, not, as many feared and Israel encouraged us to believe, exaggerations. Their stories had not prepared me for what I saw yesterday. I believe them now.

What a difference a week or so makes. In a subsequent piece in which Reeves details the lamentable attempt by the Israelis to defend their actions in Jenin, he bemoans the fact that the Israelis’ p.r.

efforts have been greatly helped by the Palestinian leadership, who instantly, and without proof, declared that a massacre had occurred in which as many as 500 died. Palestinian human-rights groups made matters worse by churning out wild, and clearly untrue, stories.

And the Independent made matters even still worse by uncritically reprinting such stories as news.

EVERYONE’S A CRITIC, PART DEUX: This has become too hilarious. The show started out with two brutal pans among the reviewers, one of whom actually advised his readers in a fit of pique (he had to wait in line for the bathroom) that there was “nothing in this production worth your time,” and that my performance was “one-note.” Two more followed. The Washington Blade’s reviewer wrote this weekend, “Regarding the repartee, Andrew Sullivan’s Benedick comes off more querulous than rapier. It’s in conveying the complexities of Benedick’s emotional journey that Sullivan is most impressive.” The Blade’s view of the entire show was that “most of the cast is very fine,” and that the production “honors the classic script, while being inventive and alive. Though not a thigh-slapping production, it’s fresh and delivered in high style.” The Washington Times gave us three out of fo
ur stars, calling the production “entertaining, outrageous and energetically acted… While others slink from the stage through trapdoors, Mr. Sullivan’s every step as Benedick is an act of power. He struts the stage like a stalking cat… Beatrice, drawn to Benedick’s sturdiness by her own inherent strength of character, is a treat. The sparks between these two are what shine most brightly in this play.” Now we’ve definitely gotten a lot better with more runs and I think we’re now doing the show as we should. But these reviews were written by reviewers who all came either to the same performance or on the same weekend. The joys of subjectivity. Next up: the Washington Post.

BEING JOHN MALKOVICH: Truly weird outburst from John Malkovich the other day. Asked at a debate at the Cambridge Union whom he’d like to fight to the death, Malkovich named anti-Zionist Scottish MP George Galloway, who never saw an Islamo-fascist terrorist he couldn’t sympathize with, and Robert Fisk, another fervently anti-Israeli fiction writer for the Independent. “I’d rather just shoot them,” Malkovich said. Malkovich, however, is no obvious Americanophile. He lives with his girlfriend and two children in the South of France in order to insulate his offspring from some of the puritanism he sees in American popular culture. Does this mean that Fisk and Galloway are even out of bounds for Francophile Hollywood exiles? Are these Saddam sympathizers so extreme in their pathological hatred of all things Israeli and American that even John Malkovich draws the line? Next up: Joe Conason offers mild criticism of David Brock.

ABSOLUTE ABSOLUTION: Some of you have complained that my whining about the Pope’s decision that people who are remarried Catholics or in committed gay relationships cannot be granted absolution was illogical. Since both post-divorce and gay relationships imply a continued commitment to what the Church regards as “sin,” why should the Church grant absolution to the impenitent? Fair enough. But my sole point was to contrast this with the extraordinary lengths to which the Church went to forgive, absolve. promote, enable, shelter child-abusers – as long as they were priests. The emphasis – and the timing of the subsequent statement – is surely off-base. And I dare say that most serious moral theologians (not to mention simple human beings) would regard the rape of a minor as a somewhat worse offense that a sincere attempt to re-marry after a failed first attempt. Not, apparently the Pope, in whom there is plenty else to admire. Wherein lies the diminution of his moral authority.

BOOK CLUB: I’m sorry to delay, but I need a little more time to finish “The Skeptical Environmentalist.” I’ve lost every weekend this month to the stage. But we’ll start the discussion in earnest tomorrow. Promise.

Now it’s holding hands with terrorists and murderers.

God finally intervenes (after much prodding from Howell Raines).

THE POPE DRAWS A LINE: He won’t say categorically that priests who are child molesters cannot be forgiven. He can forgive the man who attempted to murder him. But remarried divorcees and gays and lesbians in committed relationships are barred from absolution. What a perfect example of what the Catholic Church now stands for, and what this Pope has wrought.

I’m not at all surprised that polls are finding that president Bush’s mind-boggling levels of public support cannot be fully explained by the war effect alone. That model was always too crude. Some leaders will experience an uplift during times of national crisis, but if the public never really respected them, and if the war highlights their weaknesses as much as their stengths, then, as soon as tensions ease, the bubble bursts. Not so with Bush. I think the model here is a different one: what the war did is show Americans what kind of man they elected. His calm, determination, ordinariness, sense of humor and sense of grief, resonated. We bonded. That bond will last and be converted into other things. It does not mean that everyone will agree with his specific policies; but it does mean that his popularity can be used to put extra oomph behind those policies, whatever their popular support. The best analogy is with Margaret Thatcher during the Falklands War. For her entire period in office, she never won an absolute majority of votes, and always had a strong, if divided, opposition. In polls, most Brits disagreed with her on most issues. But they respected her character, her grit, her steel under fire – and it was the war that revealed this more than anything. Bush is not like Thatcher. He’s far more likeable. He is clearly, in my view, what he would call “a good man.” I came to this realization during the campaign – especially compared to his callow rival. The media did their best to cloud this view. The New York Times continues to run an incessant campaign against him – from op-eds to news stories. But this time, the public woke up from their usual (and defensible) preoccupations, took a good, long look for themselves, and liked what they saw. Even Californians. The public looks through ideological litmus tests to, yes, character. And they’re right. That’s why I’m not going to join the chorus of conservative criticism of Bush’s recent Middle East diplomacy. Sorry, I know he’s not a sell-out. I trust him. For me, this underlying trust helps balance out my occasional worries about policy wobbles or tacks. The same goes for many others, I think, far away from the Washington hot-house. And it will last.

CELIBACY IN CONTEXT: John Derbyshire has a splendid and wise piece today about how the broader culture makes priestly celibacy far more difficult today than in ages past. I agree with almost every word. I disagree with his idea that mandatory universal celibacy for priests and homosexuals is a sound idea. Here’s an interesting, brief historical summary of the Church’s history in this regard.

BOTTOMS UP: A Euclid epiphany. Last night, while walking the two beagles, Euclid’s tail actually rose into the air and wagged. That’s a first. It’s been coiled relentlessly underneath her for the last three days. I almost cheered.