The Dish

But it could be. This is true. Well, as true as anything in the British tabloids can be. A janitor mistook a modern art exhibit for trash and cleaned it up and put it in the trash can. It was worth $8000. “As soon as I clapped eyes on it I sighed because there was so much mess,” the janitor comments. “I didn’t think for a second that it was a work of art – it didn’t look much like art to me. So I cleared it all into bin-bags and dumped it.”

Now, it’s official. The Syrian Defense Minister has endorsed the notion that Israel was responsible for the World Trade Center massacre. Another unreliable poll in Lebanon finds a plurality believing it. Abraham Foxman has called on president Bush to debunk this rumor. I agree, but in these circumstances, an American denial would merely prove the rumor to these crazy paranoiacs. Nor should we be surprised. The man making this statement previously wrote a pamphlet called “The Matzah of Zion,” whose arguments were summed up in the mainstream Egyptian newspaper al Ahram thus: “The bestial drive to knead Passover matzahs with the blood of non-Jews is [confirmed] in the records of the Palestinian police where there are many recorded cases of the bodies of Arab children who had disappeared being found, torn to pieces without a single drop of blood. The most reasonable explanation is that the blood was taken to be kneaded into the dough of extremist Jews to be used in matzahs to be devoured during Passover.” Yes, folks. This is the blood libel. And this text will shortly become a movie. The justification? According to the invaluable Middle East Media and Research Institute, “The producer stated that the primary goal of the film is ‘to respond to all of the Zionist films distributed by the American film industry, which is backed by the Zionist propaganda apparatus. Among these films is Schindler’s List, which supports the idea of the Jews’ right to the land of Palestine.'” We need to be clear here. We are dealing with the moral equivalent of Nazis. And these people now have a seat on the U.N. Security Council and are being considered possible allies in the war against terrorism. Who on earth are we kidding?

David Talbot’s interview with Susan Sontag, conducted, so far as I can tell, on his knees, starts with a preposterous amount of throat clearing and excuse making and silly swipes at alleged “censorship.” These pampered journalists, who have never seen a moment of real censorship in their lives, and who have marginalized conservative voices for their entire careers in their own organs and field of influence, take the occasion of the massacre of thousands of their fellow citizens to worry about themselves – and preen self-righteously at the same time. Then there’s the sheer pretentiousness of it all. I’m particularly fond of Talbot’s use of the word “texts” to discuss Sontag’s works. (I’m not the first weblogger to notice this). Not books; not pieces; not articles; not essays – but “texts.” Ooooh. That must mean she’s a real intellectual. The silver lining is that Sontag has now stated her belief in the notion that we are indeed confronting a jihad and that there can be no compromise with these murderers. But the rest of the interview completely belies this view. Item one: if there is no negotiating with these killers, what do we do? According to Sontag, we don’t bomb. The Taliban soldiers are just “a lot of kids.” We don’t even drop food packages, which, in her eyes, are a cover for an unholy war. In fact, you can read this interview again to see whether she has any practical recommendations for our response, and you will come up empty. Like Katha Pollitt, she has absolutely nothing to say, except that we all need to read the latest “text” by Stanley Hoffmann in the New York Review of Books. I’m sorry, but this is self-parody. Her only practical recommendations are that we should stop military action against the Taliban and urge a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. Gee, that will terrify the terrorists. They won’t dare murder us again after that. She dismisses out of hand the notion that the anthrax attacks could be the work of al Qaeda. She refers to them as “what I think are 99 percent certain to be just domestic copycat crazies on their own war path.” Why does she have such certainty? No reason given. When you’re that brilliant, why bother with reasons? She further complains that the media has “censored” pictures of grisly horror at the WTC site because it would demoralize the people. Is she kidding? Pictures of severed hands and tangled limbs would not demoralize this country. It would enrage this country. If such pictures have been held back, it is out of respect for the dead and their families, and precisely in order to restrain possible anger. That piece of loopy judgment alone should tell us all we need to know about what planet Sontag is living on. Throughout it all, she denigrates the Brits for their support of the United States and calls president Bush “ridiculous.” No, Ms Sontag. It is you who are ridiculous.

THE STRANGEST OF ALLIANCES: It didn’t take long for the activists who loathe the pharmaceutical industry to use the current crisis for their own advantage. Encouraged by Senator Charles Schumer, Jamie Love, of the Naderite Consumer Project on Technology, now has Bayer’s Cipro in his sights. He wants HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson to break Bayer’s patent in order to address what Love sees as an anthrax emergency. “He’s the damn secretary of Health and Human Services,” Love tells Salon’s Anthony York. “He should be trying to protect the American people. He’s just afraid to break the patent. He says that the U.S. will respect the patent right, even if it means endangering public health. That’s a hell of a lot of respect, I must say. He seems to lack a little bit of guts. He’s not lacking any legal authority, but does seem to be missing a bit in the courage department. He’s afraid to say the truth — he doesn’t want to send the wrong signal on the patent issue, even if that means putting people in danger.” A few points. Cipro isn’t the only anti-biotic that can treat anthrax. Plenty of others can as well. If anything, public health experts worry that over-prescribing the great but strong Cipro could accelerate the emergence of an anthrax super-strain that truly would be immune to most anti-biotics. So retaining the patent for Bayer is in no way a real danger to public health. Second, Bayer is ramping up production as fast as it can. It seems to me that Love is engaging in a classic piece of opportunism. He wants to cripple the patent system in general and sees an opportunity to do it now. No doubt he’s sincere, and sees no future threat to research in wrecking pharmaceutical profits. But he’s wrong, and could do far more harm to public health in the short and long term if he succeeds.

POLITESSE: I have heard from some that I was too aggressive in my discussion with Katha Pollitt, even uncivil. I feel bad if I was rude. But I want to make the following point about civility. It’s not everything. Sometimes, it’s corrupting. When thousands of people have been murdered, biological warfare has been launched, and American soldiers are putting their lives on the line, I don’t find cozy twittering about how hilarious it is that a woman had a fight with her daughter about flag-waving to be appropriate. I don’t find condescending disparagement of other people’s patriotism as somehow mindless appropriate. In fact, this kind of denial in the face of this horror strikes me as deeply wrong. It angers me. I reserved my anger for Pollitt’s arguments, not her person. And fierce criticism is not the same as censorship or intimidation. I’ve long enjoyed Katha’s company; have had pleasant encounters with her; and have no reason to doubt that she is a kind and genuine person. But I find her insouciance toward these events and inability to come up with a coherent response to them appalling. At some point, acquiescence in civility is a surrender of moral seriousness. I know many people are having similar confrontations in less formal settings, and they must know what I mean. I’d rather be remembered for losing friends in this conflict than going along to get along, while the threat deepens. Sorry, but it’s the only way I can live with myself.

QUOTE OF THE DAY: “[O]f all the forms of foreign disturbance suffered by Syria in these new days of change, Zionism is the most violent and the most detested by the native population. That hatred may be called ineffective; the Jewish advance is bound to continue so long as there is peace and so long as the English are in undisturbed possession. The Jews bring with them a much higher material civilization, trained scientific experts, a largely increased exploitation of the land, and of all natural resources…. It [Zionism] has behind it what none of the other forces intruding upon the Syrian world can boast — a strong moral motive, not technically religious, but having the force of a religion. The Jewish race as a whole, in spite of certain dissidents, and certainly the Jewish immigrants pouring into Palestine, are inspired by as strong a motive as can move men to action. But this strength alone would not maintain the Jews against the fierce hostility of the Moslem world which surrounds them. That hostility is another moral force with which the future cannot but be filled. We in the West do not appreciate it because we do not hear its expression, we are not witnesses of the gestures nor partner in the conversations which fill the Near East; but if we ignore it we are ignoring something which may change our fate.” – Hillaire Belloc, “The Battle Ground” (1936).

A very helpful primer from Seth Stevenson in Slate on the debate about how violent Islam inherently is. My own view (after an admitted crash-course in the subject) is that violence is one deep strain in Islam, deeper than in Christianity or Judaism. This doesn’t mean that peaceful Islam doesn’t exist; it doesn’t mean that violent Christianity hasn’t existed. It does mean that we ignore the violent tendencies in Islam at our peril, and that the linkage between this violent propensity and fundamentalism and anti-Semitism makes for a truly dangerous ideology. Let’s drop the Oprah nonsense about Islam being Episcopalians in turbans. It’s intellectually flabby and deeply condescending.

LETTERS: A great new batch. Two left-wingers return from Damascus; time to drop all references to Clinton; reviews of the Pollit-Sullivan mud-wrestle; etc.

Here is the best left-wing attack on visceral, knee-jerk anti-Americanism I’ve yet read. Gitlin gets it. And he’s brave to take this canard on.

I didn’t think I’d read such an editorial in the newspaper that has become ground central for appeasement. But here it is in the Guardian, exhibiting solidarity with the United States and admiration for the American people. In the end, people get it. Our best weapons against appeasement are the terrorists themselves.

MORE BELLOC: I have some qualms reprinting Hillaire Belloc. He was a complicated fellow, a bigot, a genius of a writer (A.N. Wilson wrote a memorable and sadly out-of-print biography of him), and an anti-semite of spectacular proportions. He was also fiercely intelligent. Here’s an extract from his 1938 book, “The Great Heresies.” Worth a re-read: “May not Islam rise again? In a sense the question is already answered because Islam has never departed. It still commands the fixed loyalty and unquestioning adhesion of all the millions between the Atlantic and the Indus and further afield throughout scattered communities of further Asia. But I ask the question in the sense: ‘Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Mohammedan world which will shake the dominion of Europeans – still nominally Christian – and reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization?’ The future always comes as a surprise but political wisdom consists in attempting at least some partial judgment of what that surprise may be. And for my part I cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing in the future is the return of Islam. Since religion is at the root of all political movements and changes and since we have here a very great religion physically paralysed, but morally intensely alive, we are in the presence of an unstable equilibrium which cannot remain permanently unstable.”

Zogby just did a poll which has barely been reported in the media. I wonder why. I guess these considerations seem petty and I’ll get another blizzard of hate mail for noting it. But Zogby is one of the best pollsters we have; and he’s no conservative. His poll found that when voters were asked who they would prefer to be president in a crisis like this one, they prefer Bush to Clinton by 72 to 20 percent. Now of course this reflects a natural rally-round-our prez attitude. But its margin is striking, no? I’ve also been struck anecdotally by how many liberal friends of mine have quietly noted that at times like these, they are half-glad the Republicans are in office. Me too. Except, today at least, for Dennis Hastert.

WOOLSEY ON CLINTON: “The other, less generous possibility is that the Clinton administration was engaged here in its trademark behavior of focusing first and foremost on spin, expectation-adjustment, and short-term public relations, and deriving policy therefrom. If you assume that all terrorism flows from loose networks and not state action, then you will usually be able to find at least someone who was involved in a terrorist attack to convict. You can then claim success, get some good press and avoid confronting a state. The alternative approach–a thorough search for any state actor–presents two PR risks, neither attractive. If you find no state actor, there might be the appearance of an investigative failure. If, on the other hand, you find that a state was involved, you might then risk confrontation, even conflict, and possibly body bags on the evening news.”- James Woolsey, the Wall Street Journal today. Woolsey takes Bush I to task too. His broader argument about what kind of evidence we need to convict a state of sponsoring terrorism strikes me as an important one.

LETTERS: Maggie Gallagher replies.

“Michael Eisner decides, ‘I can’t make a movie about Martin Luther King, Jr.-they’ll be rioting at the gates of Disneyland!’ That’s bullshit! But that’s what the new world order is. They control culture, they control ideas. And I think the revolt of September 11th was about ‘Fuck you! Fuck your order-‘ … The studios bought television stations. Why? Why did the telecommunications bill get passed at midnight, a hidden bill at midnight? The Arabs have a point! They’re going to be joined by the people who objected in Seattle, and the usual ten per cent who are against everything, and it’s going to be, like, twenty-five per cent of this country that’s against the new world order.” – Oliver Stone, as captured in this week’s New Yorker. Funny, but I haven’t heard bin Laden rail against Michael Eisner yet.

I took no prisoners. Here’s an audio transcript of our often testy exchange.

SEPTEMBER 11: A reader notices a passage in Hillaire Belloc’s “Heresies” from 1936. He is speaking about the lifting of the Turkish siege of Vienna: “Vienna, as we saw, was almost taken and only saved by the Christian army under the command of the King of Poland on a date that ought to be among the most famous in history — September 11, 1683.” Maybe that date is no accident.

CNN THANKS A MURDERER: In an interview with a man representing a group that openly claims responsibility for killing an Israeli cabinet minister, the interviewer, Leon Harris, concludes with the following words:
“HARRIS: Mr. Rabah Mihanna, thank you very much for your time…
MIHANNA: Thank you.
HARRIS: … this morning and for your insight and your side of the story.”
This is disgusting. It’s disgusting even to have such a person on the air, let alone to treat him with respect. It is even more disgusting that CNN is now cooperating with al Qaeda’s propaganda program by submitting six questions to bin Laden. Can you imagine them in 1940? Mr Goebbels, thank you so much for your insight …

Here’s an interview with the Imam of New York’s Islamic Cultural Center. He has since left New York and is residing in Egypt. Here is one of the leading Muslim leaders in the United States. These are some of his comments: “You see these people (i.e. the Jews) all the time, everywhere, disseminating corruption, heresy, homosexuality, alcoholism, and drugs. [Because of them] there are strip clubs, homosexuals, and lesbians everywhere. They do this to impose their hegemony and colonialism on the world. Now, they are riding on the back of the world powers. These people always seek out the superpower of the generation and develop coexistence with it. Before this, they rode on the back of England and on the back of the French empire. After that, they rode on the back of Germany. But Hitler annihilated them because they betrayed him and violated their contract with him.” The rest of the interview, which continues to propagate the psychotic notion that Jews were behind the September 11 massacre contains even worse passages. This isn’t like Nazism. It is the direct Muslim equivalent of Nazism. And like Nazism, it cannot be appeased.