The Dish

John Gross has a particularly acute piece in the current New Criterion about the baleful influence of the pomo left in the BBC, Britain’s once great institution of objective journalism. I was unaware of the following quote from a columnist in the Guardian but it says a lot about both the incoherence and malevolence of many on the hard left: “The smile on the face of the suicide bomber has as much to do with true humour and laughter as the rictus incantation “Have a nice day” in the supermarket checkout. Both are debased forms of totalitarianism.” Clever? In a way, I suppose. Depraved? Absolutely. And these are people in Blair’s coalition. No wonder he looks exhausted.

There’s a fascinating new interview with OBL on the web. I found a few things apposite. First off, he’s completely incoherent. His responses to the questions about the Islamic legitimacy of killing innocent civilians are all over the place. First it is illegitimate; then it isn’t. In the end, it seems it’s ok to kill civilians if they live in a democracy and you disagree with the policies of their government. Because they vote for these policies, they’re fair game. This is a pretty convenient pretext for someone who believes in Islamic theocracy as the only rightful form of government (and only Afghanistan fits the bill). Then there’s OBL’s appeal to Berkeley: “I ask the American people to force their government to give up anti-Muslim policies. The American people had risen against their government’s war in Vietnam. They must do the same today. The American people should stop the massacre of Muslims by their government.” That’s you he’s asking for help from, Congresswoman Lee. Then there’s this interesting exchange:

“HM: Some Western media claim that you are trying to acquire chemical and nuclear weapons. How much truth is there in such reports?

OBL: I heard the speech of American President Bush yesterday (Oct 7). He was scaring the European countries that Osama wanted to attack with weapons of mass destruction. I wish to declare that if America used chemical or nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as deterrent.

HM: Where did you get these weapons from ?

OBL: Go to the next question.”

Now why would this question be the only one he won’t answer?

“The terrorist who mailed anthrax-tainted letters is probably a man, something of a loner with scientific ability who ”lacks the personal skills necessary to confront others” face to face, the FBI said Friday in a fresh plea for the public’s help in solving the baffling case. The culprit ”did not select his victims randomly,” the FBI said in a three-page, carefully hedged assessment issued more than one month after the disease first surfaced. He ‘may hold grudges for a long time, vowing that he will get even with ‘them,’ one day.'” – Associated Press.

AHEM: Of course, the other op-ed page that’s a must-read is the Wall Street Journal. Sorry, Max!

BLOCK THAT METAPHOR: “Is America the Titanic and Pakistan the iceberg we’re about to hit, while we’re searching for Osama bin Laden in the fog of Afghanistan? Or is Pakistan the Titanic, its president, Pervez Musharraf, the captain, America the only passengers and Afghanistan the iceberg we’re about to hit?” – Tom “Dear Yassir” Friedman, New York Times. Or are the allies the deckchairs near the swimming pool and CNN the life-rafts?

WHAT PLANET IS HE ON DEPT.: “The [Washington Post] Op-Ed page does feature some alternative voices, like David Broder, E.J. Dionne Jr. and Michael Kinsley, but they tend to focus on domestic affairs and in any case are no match for the Stentorian Seven. As a result, the page seems stale and one-dimensional, offering much less diversity of opinion than, say, the New York Times Op-Ed page.” – Michael Massing, The Nation. Massing believes that Rich, Dowd, Lewis, Herbert, Krugman, Friedman represent diversity! Let’s say that at least the Washington Post op-ed page might conceivably have had more than one token Bush-voter last fall. And Massing, of course, has got things exactly wrong. The only op-ed page worth reading these days is the Washington Post’s. Until the Times actually embraces real diversity (rather than gender-racial posturing), that will remain the case.

NEVER TRUST CONTENT FROM QUETTA: An interestingly honest piece from a Pakistani journalist in Quetta suggests things haven’t changed much in foreign reporting since Evelyn Waugh wrote “Scoop.” We should be particularly wary of generalizations about the mood of Afghans. How on earth does anyone know? As for misery, I’m sure it exists, as it has done from some time. But here’s some perspective: “After having faced years of strife, falling of bombs and missiles is a routine matter for common Afghans. There is no fear or harassment. Besides, for many, bombs, whether intact or after explosions, are the only source of livelihood. When the missiles were hitting the suburbs of Kandahar and smokes emitted with a heavy sound, locals started fighting with each other to get the shell of missiles and bombs. Sale of scrap is the only way there to earn some money. A ton of scrap sells for Rs 125 – as the rupee is a valid currency — and a truck load of debris, scattered when mountains are torn apart by US bombs, sells for Rs 1,300. It is big business for some in times of bad wars.”

“Before you can even talk of world reconstruction, or even peace, you have got to eliminate Hitler, which means bringing into being a dynamic not necessarily the same as that of the Nazis, but probably quite as unacceptable to “enlightened” and hedonistic people. What has kept England on its feet during the past year? In part, no doubt, some vague idea about a better future, but chiefly the atavistic emotion of patriotism, the ingrained feeling of the English-speaking peoples that they are superior to foreigners. For the last twenty years the main object of English left-wing intellectuals has been to break this feeling down, and if they had succeeded, we might be watching the S.S. men patrolling the London streets at the moment … The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions–racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war–which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.” – George Orwell, “Wells, Hitler, and the World State.”

Out of fairness, here’s an actual full transcript of Clinton’s remarks to Georgetown. In context, the remarks aren’t as inflammatory as they first appear. They are merely platitudinous and, in some passages, thoroughly ill-advised rather than outrageous. It’s clear that he believes that America has been responsible for terrorism itself – and he absurdly equates civilian hate crimes with terrorism. He gives no history of terrorism except that committed by Americans or Christians. Here’s a critical passage: “Indeed, in the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple mound. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the Temple mound, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees. I can tell you that that story is still being told to today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it.” I’m not quite sure what he means by this, but the context is perilously close to saying we deserve to pay for ancient horrors committed by people roughly from the same gene pool as ourselves. Huh? And this in a context that is arguing – against much history – that terrorism has never worked. Still, it’s not equivalent to saying that America asked for the 9/11 massacre, as I implied from what I now see was an appallingly slanted piece in the Washington Times. The speech is interminable of course. It has almost an internal contradiction in every paragraph. But it’s not Noam Chomsky. For that, we should give thanks.

SHUGER ON HERSH: Here’s a useful and highly convincing take-down of Sy Hersh’s overblown account of an alleged Special Forces screw-up in the current New Yorker, by Scott Shuger of Slate. Shuger has military experience and a very sharp and fair mind. Worth a read.

LETTERS: I really shouldn’t have brought up the subject of body hair, should I?

CENSORSHIP MADE MEANINGLESS: My friend Norah Vincent writes an unfortunately bizarre column in the Los Angeles Times, arguing that a university professor who is fired after voicing idiotic views about the war has suffered from censorship. Ditto poor Bill Maher, if his dreadfully strained show, Politically Incorrect, goes under after advertiser flight. Personally, I’m no fan of colleges firing professors for their idiotic views (who’d be left?); or of activists launching boycott campaigns to kill off television shows (like Dr Laura); or even patriotic attempts to actually fire (rather than roast) some individuals on the government payroll because of their stupidity or malevolence. But this is still not censorship. Censorship is when the government forbids the expression of certain views, period. It is the punishment of opinion by force. Everything else is the rough-and-tumble of public debate, in which equal measures of glory and ignominy are part of the process. If the public raises an outcry about the unremitting left-wing bias of NPR, and forces it to change its tune, it’s still not censorship. If an editor fires a columnist for endorsing the wrong presidential candidate, it’s tough, but not censorship. If the NEA is forced by public pressure not to fund a hedgehog-turd-on-a-rosary as art, it’s still not censorship. Losing your job is always tough. But it’s not censorship. I thought Norah was sensible on this kind of thing. I say: let’s do all we can to ensure that people with whom we disagree are exposed and criticized. Let debate ensue. But please: no whining about censors.

So it seems that the sins of the United States’ past make it impossible to judge the massacre of September 11, according to our 42d president. Americans’ treatment of blacks and native Americans renders unequivocal moral judgment impossible. I must say that even I found Clinton’s comments yesterday truly shocking. I always thought he was a charlatan, but often a clear-headed one. This speech suggests he has imbibed any amount of leftist nonsense. But the truly revealing fact is that he calls upon America to be introspective, to look into ourselves for the causes of this massacre. Do you think that, since September 11, he has even for a second asked the same of himself? And I don’t mean as a prelude to launching a spin campaign to defend his legacy. I’m speaking of his negligence of our intelligence services, his contempt for foreign policy, his early betrayal of Bosnian Muslims (recently made much of by bin Laden), his deeply counterproductive missile strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan, his allowing bin Laden to escape in 1996, and on and on. If any American deserves any guilt for laying the groundwork for September 11, Bill Clinton’s name must come at the top of most lists. How fitting that he should seek to deflect this fact by casting aspersions on the country whose highest office he besmirched and disgraced.

When I mentioned a while back that the New York City firemen’s friar, Mychal Judge, was a gay man, some of you asked me for evidence. Here’s a poignant piece on the man, partly prompted by my posting about him a while back, in the current New York Magazine. Prepare to be surprised and inspired.

THE WAGES OF RELATIVISM: The terrorist-supporter Robert Fisk asks the following question in today’s Independent: “If the US attacks were an assault on “civilization”, why shouldn’t Muslims regard the Afghanistan attack as a war on Islam?” The answer is obvious. The 9/11 massacre was an act designed exclusively to kill thousands of innocent civilians in the name of some perverted fanaticism. The bombing of Afghanistan is a) an act of self-defense against these murderers; b) designed to avoid civilian casualties as far as is humanly possible; c) aimed not at Islam, whose adherents the United States has rescued and defended in its three most recent international interventions, but at a terrorist state based upon an extreme version of Islam. These facts are not obscure. They are bleeding obvious. Fisk’s deliberate avoidance of them speaks volumes. The rest of Fisk’s piece – his description of Walter Isaacson’s memo to instill some balance in CNN’s reporting as “shameful,” “unethical,” “disgraceful”; his preference for the press in the Pakistani dictatorship over the New York Times; and so on – is a sign that he has actually lost it. Reading him a while back, one was aware of a kind of visceral hatred of Israel, but not a full-bore support for murder, terrorism and any murderous ideology as long as it came wrapped in p.c. Third Worldism. I guess Fisk has decided to go down with the ship. Good riddance.

BODY HAIR AND ALLAH: Well, I asked for it. This looks like a pretty definitive answer to the question. Yes, there’s some sort of religious duty to shave body hair – including your privates. There’s a forty-day maximum hair-growing limit. It applies to women too. Here’s another online guide to the bizarre physical requirements for Muslims, including groin hair. I know we should be respectful of the traditions of religious cultures, but this strikes me as really weird. But then, compared to mutilating the penises of infants, I guess it’s pretty harmless.

You respond to Grover Norquist; defend Bret Schundler; worry about the war.

One of the smug claims of some multilateralists in the wake of 9/11 was that it showed the necessity of the U.S. being part of a network of multilateral institutions. I was waiting for someone to puncture that canard at some point, and it’s hard to beat Anne Applebaum’s piece in the current Slate in that regard. She points out how the only critical players in the current conflict are old-fashioned nation-states, forging a mix of bilateral and multilateral ties to advance their own self-interest. What role does the EU have at moments like this? Nada. Ditto all the hyper-ventilation about a joint European force. How about the U.N.? As usual, useful window-dressing for the purposes of various nation-states. I’m sure Slate’s resident internationalist Bob Wright has something to say about this. I’m equally sure he will.

HAIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW: David Skinner of the Weekly Standard has an odd little essay on manliness. I have no idea what he’s trying to say (see if you can figure it out), but I share his interest in one truly weird aspect of the 9/11 suicide killers’ preparation for their deed. Mohammed Atta and his buddy shaved unnecessary body hair, we are told. There is nothing in Islamic law or custom to mandate this. (I’m also not quite sure what ‘unnecessary’ means in this context. Do we give a pass to hairy legs? Armpits?) Maybe they were concerned that any protruding chest hair would make them seem more swarthy, therefore more Middle Eastern, therefore more suspicious. But that seems a long shot. I think the best explanation is a kind of neurosis. I’m not going to endorse the National Enquirer’s belief that the men were gay, but I don’t think it’s a stretch to see many of these young, conflicted, sexually repressed, homophile murderers as having sexual issues. And one way people deal with these kinds of conflicts is by odd, obsessional behavior – frantic cleansing of hands and feet, manic tidiness, avoiding cracks in the sidewalk, and so on. Getting completely obsessed with body-hair – a notoriously uncontrollable feature of one’s body – seems in this ball-park. The hairless aesthetic – pioneered by gay men in the 1990s – has a market niche, of course. (It’s an aesthetic I have never even remotely understood. Why, if you want to be attractive as a man, would you want to mimic the body of a woman? Beats me. And the razor burn is a nightmare.) But I doubt that Atta was making a fashion statement. These people were simply disturbed. At least that’s the best I can come up with. Any better ideas out there?

PATENTS AND BIOWARFARE: Here’s a timely and important rebuff to demagogues like Charles Schumer and Naderite Jamie Love. Ron Daniels shows in the latest Reason magazine how important private pharmaceutical research is for protection against biowarfare. You think the Feds came up with Cipro? Gutting the profitability of drug companies during this bio-terrorist crisis is a precise recipe for ensuring we do not survive the next one.

Check out this profile in the Boston Globe of a New Yorker Muslim, the grandson of Pakistani immigrants, who followed the last game in the World Series from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, and who has no qualms about killing American soldiers were he to meet them in Afghanistan. The Globe’s piece is absurdly deferential, even fawning, which is no surprise, I suppose. This traitor – a word the Globe could never use – “has a teddy-bear face and a ready smile.” But even the Globe is forced to concede that this is a new type of American – someone who, even after being born here of American parents, can jettison his loyalty to country at the drop of a hat. And this after a massacre of thousands of New Yorkers! I’m beginning to think Daniel Pipes is truly onto something.