The Dish

Fascinating and devastating piece in the London Spectator on the Wahhabi Islamic sect that is responsible for the crazed intolerance fostered by bin Laden. It’s not Islam, properly speaking; its hostility is directed as much to Islamic traditionalists as the West. It’s a purist form of Islam that seems to have particular resonance among a few of the displaced and confused Muslims living in the West. And it is based in and funded by Saudi Arabia. As well as getting a grip on the terrorist networks in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere, the administration should surely have a word with its friends among the Saudi leadership. This sect must be exposed, countered, defunded, and defeated. They are in Stephen Schwartz’s words, “Islamofascists.”

I was heartened but not surprised that the military has now lifted its ban on openly gay service members for the foreseeable future. When push comes to shove, we need everyone. They are not gay soldiers; they are American soldiers. In the same vein, the extraordinary Father Mychal Judge, the hero to the firefighters among whom he died last week, is not a gay hero. He is a hero. Similarly Mark Bingham, a burly 6′ 5″ rugby player, who almost certainly participated in the bravery on a plane destined for Washington that ended up in a field in Pennsylvania. He wasn’t a gay passenger, he was just a citizen with more courage than most. At this moment, identity shouldn’t matter – whether racial, sexual, religious or whatever. But we will perhaps remember at some point that these brave gay men and women were and are a part of this ordeal. They always were, but now, with our more open society, we can see them in the light of day. If and when we thank these gay service members for their service in defending freedom, perhaps we will find it within ourselves not to treat them with contempt when they return, by throwing them out of their service simply because of the gender of whom they love. And perhaps the rugby players and jocks will take a minute to remember Mark Bingham, a national hero who was also gay, and reassess some attitudes toward gay men and women in sports. Perhaps they will also readjust some prejudice that still sees gay men as weak, ineffectual or cowardly. Nothing could be further from the truth. And when the Church celebrates a man like Father Mychal, a gay man who was loved in a surpassingly male and masculine world, perhaps they will also ask themselves to rethink the pain and heartache and cruelty they have inflicted on so many gay men and women, people who have served the Church as deeply as anyone in history. Now is not the time to engage in the politics of identity; but it is a time to keep our eyes and hearts open, and to observe what we are seeing in this war, and ensure that what we remember leads to a fairer, juster society when this conflict ends, if not before.

HITCH RISES TO THE OCCASION: Not everyone on the left has been craven. My magazine, The New Republic, had a splendid editorial last week. And in the Independent, the house-organ of appeasement in Britain, Christopher Hitchens has a thoughtful and moving piece. He grasps what some other liberals haven’t: that the murderers of September 11 “are not even “terrorists” so much as nihilists: at war with the very idea of modernity and the related practices of pluralism and toleration.” I particularly liked this paragraph: “American society cannot be destroyed even by the most horrifying nihilist attacks. It can outlast or absorb practically anything … Last week, an entire population withstood an attempted rape and murder of its core and identity. It did so while the President was off the radar screen. But everyone, in an important sense, knew what to do, as well as what not to do. The whole point of a multinational democracy is that it should be able to run on its own power. In other words, if short-term foolishness can be minimized at home and abroad, then people will surely appreciate that, in the words of an old slogan worn out by repetition, the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Amen, Hitch. Amen.

According to the German radio station, Norddeutscher Rundfunk, the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen called the WTC assault “the greatest work of art imaginable for the whole cosmos.” According to a tape transcript, he went on: “Minds achieving something in an act that we couldn’t even dream of in music, people rehearsing like mad for ten years, preparing fanatically for a concert, and then dying, just imagine what happened there. You have people who are that focused on a performance and then 5,000 people are dispatched into the afterlife, in a single moment. I couldn’t do that. By comparison, we composers are nothing. Artists, too, sometimes try to go beyond the limits of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we open ourselves to another world.” When a journalist asked him whether crime and art were interchangeable, Stockhausen remarked, “It’s a crime because those involved didn’t consent. They didn’t come to the ‘concert.’ That’s obvious. And no one announced that they risked losing their lives. What happened in spiritual terms, the leap out of security, out of what is usually taken for granted, out of life, that sometimes happens to a small extent in art, too, otherwise art is nothing.” Life is a cabaret, old chum.

MORE PERTINENT ORWELL: “In so far as it hampers the British war effort, British pacifism is on the side of the Nazis, and German pacifism, if it exists, is on the side of Britain and the USSR. Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi.” – from a review of Alex Comfort’s book No Such Liberty: “No, Not One,” Adelphi, Oct. 1941. The same, I think, can be said for the enclaves of leftist decadence celebrated among this country’s universities and elites, in response to the act of war prepetrated by men who hold many of the beliefs the Nazis proudly held.

“[T]here is a minority of intellectual pacifists whose real though unadmitted motive appears to be hatred of western democracy and admiration of totalitarianism. Pacifist propaganda usually boils down to saying that one side is as bad as the other, but if one looks closely at the writings of younger intellectual pacifists, one finds that they do not by any means express impartial disapproval but are directed almost entirely against Britain and the United States. Moreover they do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries.” -George Orwell, “Notes on Nationalism,” 1945.

I hadn’t received Tim Noah’s email yesterday when I wrote “RETRACT WHAT?” below. It got lost in cyberspace. He re-sent me it this morning. I retract nothing, since the point I thought he was trying to make is simply untrue. I have absolutely nothing against the countless patriots in the blue zone, as my tribute to New Yorkers and the rest of the essay shows. I was talking about a few intellectuals and their cohorts who clearly do feel ambivalence about America fighting and winning this war. But these broad categories of “blue” and “red zones” can be misleading and unhelpful. I won’t use this shorthand again. Ditto the shorthand of “fifth column.” I have no reason to believe that even those sharp critics of this war would actually aid and abet the enemy in any more tangible ways than they have done already. And that dissent is part of what we’re fighting for. By fifth column, I meant simply their ambivalence about the outcome of a war on which I believe the future of liberty hangs. Again, I retract nothing. But I am sorry that one sentence was not written more clearly to dispel any and all such doubts about its meaning. Writing 6,000 words under deadline in the heat of war can lead to occasional sentences whose meaning is open to misinterpretation.

Just when you thought the nihilism of some Western pundits couldn’t get any worse, I came across this amazing “question” by ABC News’ John Miller. It’s buried in a PBS Frontline interview with Bin Laden from 1998. The salient question is for some reason not placed in bold in the transcript, like all the other questions, as if PBS and ABC are embarrassed by it, but it’s clear that the question is Miller’s. It follows a long diatribe by bin Laden which, with respect to the Jewish people, can only be described as indistinguishable from Hitler (see “BIN LADEN’S MEIN KAMPF” below). Now here’s the coup de grace: “MILLER: In America, we have a figure from history from 1897 named Teddy Roosevelt. He was a wealthy man, who grew up in a privileged situation and who fought on the front lines. He put together his own men – hand chose them – and went to battle. You are like the Middle East version of Teddy Roosevelt.” I guess we should be grateful Miller didn’t compare this twisted maniac with George Washington.

BIN LADEN’S MEIN KAMPF: One of the amazing things about the far left’s embrace of the anti-American ideology of some in the Middle East is their willful blindness about what these fanatics actually believe in. Susan Sontag, for example, is a Jew. Does she honestly believe that America is responsible for more evil than a bunch of Muslim fanatics who would gas her in a second if they could? Could any gay person seriously argue for appeasement of people who would execute them on the spot if they lived under their rule? Could any serious feminist not believe in opposing fanatics who would eviscerate the slightest shred of freedom for women? I just don’t get it. Liberals of all people should be the most serious about fighting this scourge. Is their hatred of America that deep? As to bin Laden’s vicious anti-Semitism, check the PBS interview out. Here are my choice excerpts from the Goebbels of Afghanistan: “The enmity between us and the Jews goes far back in time and is deep rooted. There is no question that war between the two of us is inevitable … The leaders in America and in other countries as well have fallen victim to Jewish Zionist blackmail … Once again, I have to stress the necessity of focusing on the Americans and the Jews for they represent the spearhead with which the members of our religion have been slaughtered. Any effort directed against America and the Jews yields positive and direct results – Allah willing … We do not have to differentiate between military or civilian. As far as we are concerned, they are all targets, and this is what the fatwah says … We believe that this administration represents Israel inside America. Take the sensitive ministries such as the Ministry of Exterior and the Ministry of Defense and the CIA, you will find that the Jews have the upper hand in them.” This isn’t like Nazism. In its pathological, paranoid hatred of the Jews, it is Nazism. And these guys want to appease it again?

RETRACT WHAT?: Tim Noah of Slate asks me to retract the following sentences from my recent piece for the Sunday Times of London: “The middle part of the country–the great red zone that voted for Bush–is clearly ready for war. The decadent left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead–and may well mount a fifth column.” Noah doesn’t elucidate why this should be retracted, presumably because he doesn’t really know, except that his left-wing friends find it abhorrent. Note what I didn’t say. I didn’t say that the vast majority of Gore voters aren’t patriots or that they don’t support this war as much as anyone else. Later in the piece, I pay particular tribute to New Yorkers, mostly Gore voters, who have shown the world their humanity and courage this past week. The sentence Noah slyly quotes continues: “But by striking at the heart of New York City, the terrorists ensured that at least one deep segment of the country ill-disposed toward a new president is now the most passionate in his defense. Anyone who has ever tried to get one over on a New Yorker knows what I mean. The demons who started this have no idea about the kind of people they have taken on.” I’m sorry but it’s completely clear I am not damning an entire section of the country because of the way they voted. Noah is deliberately distorting my argument. Elsewhere I say, “[Giuliani’s] combination of chutzpah, practicality and deep, deep compassion is the essence of New York City. His troops – the firefighters and cops and medics and volunteers of the city – would make the Londoners of 1940 proud. If New York alone were a nation – and it has almost twice the population of Israel – then this war would already be well under way, and its outcome in no doubt.” So much for damning the blue zone. What I was clearly saying is that some decadent leftists in “enclaves” – not regions – on the coasts are indeed more concerned with what they see as the evil of American power than the evil of terrorism, that their first response was to blame America, and that their second response was to disavow any serious military action. If this was their attitude in the days after 5,000 civilians were killed, what will they say and do when we have to take real risks and incur more civilian casualties weeks and months from now? These people have already openly said they do not support such a war, and will oppose it. Read Sontag and Chomsky and Moore and Alterman and on and on, and you’ll see that I’m not exaggerating. Go to any campus and you’ll find many, many academics saying the same thing. If anything, I’m minimizing their open hatred of the United States. So why should I retract? Noah’s quote is a deliberate smear to obscure my larger point. One of my heroes is George Orwell. I’ve been reading his war journalism these past couple of days as solace. And one thing he never stinted on was calling the purist, defeatist left on their lack of moral seriousness, and their inability to see what any decent person can see at a time like this. I’m no Orwell, but I can try and tell the truth as I see it. And part of that truth is that some are acting as if they would rather America lose this war than win it. So sue me for saying so.

Pat Robertson has now disowned his remarks of last week when he “totally concurred” with Falwell’s comments that God was behind these attacks.

A new low in hatred for America written by a woman called Charlotte Raven in the Guardian. I cite it not because it represents the people of Britain. Raven and her leftist, nihilist cohorts in London’s chattering classes, have no real connection to the people of Britain. But they are sustained by the same decadent beliefs that sustain many of our own chattering elites. For Raven, America in these last few days has been what America has always been: “deeply dumb.” For her, “Like so many of the ideas America is going to war to defend, free speech is a nice thought that hasn’t panned out in practice.” For her, delight at this horror is restricted to “three or four Palestinians.” There is no war; and no real enemy. Bin Laden’s network is just a handful of loons, and their cause, if not their method, is just: “If anti-Americanism has been seized, temporarily, by forces that have done dreadful things in its name, there is no reason for its adherents to retreat from its basic precepts. America is the same country it was before September 11. If you didn’t like it then, there’s no reason why you should have to pretend to now.” That this was written in the wake of this hideous event shows how blind some people’s hatred can be. I reprint it not because it is worth responding to. It is beneath response. But we might as well be aware of the enemy within the West itself – a paralyzing, pseudo-clever, morally nihilist fifth column that will surely ramp up its hatred in the days and months ahead.

BUSH’S FINEST HOUR: Tired of the predictable gripes about our president almost as soon as this crisis started – as if no new evidence were required to damn him? Tired of Rick Berke and Mary McGrory and Le Monde and Michael Moore? Dick Morris gets it right this morning. The comparison with Clinton is particularly sharp.

MOORE AND FALWELL BACKTRACK: I’m glad to see that Jerry Falwell has apologized for his remarks. I notice that Pat Robertson has not. I am appalled that Falwell was invited to the National Cathedral. It will be a mark of president Bush’s commitment to this country that neither Falwell nor Robertson are ever invited to a formal or informal White House function again. They are evil. They even sunk below Farrakhan in their response to this event, and they deserve to be consigned to the same small box of derision that Farrakhan languishes in among decent people. But at least Falwell has responded to the criticism. Not so Michael Moore, the man who wrote the following words on his website on September 11: “Many Families have been devastated tonight. This is just not right. They did not deserve to die. If someone did this to get back at Bush, then they did so by killing thousands of people who DID NOT VOTE for him! Boston, New York, DC and the planes’ destination of California – these where places that voted AGAINST Bush!” It appears he has now deleted that message from his site, http://www.michaelmoore.com. An apology is beyond him. He’s now in Sontag territory.

“The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error
Our only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre –
To be redeemed from fire by fire.”

– Little Gidding, T.S. Eliot, composed in 1941 and published in 1943.

APPEASEMENT WATCH: “Where is the acknowledgment that this was not a “cowardly” attack on “civilization” or “liberty” or “humanity” or “the free world” but an attack on the world’s self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and actions? How many citizens are aware of the ongoing American bombing of Iraq? And if the word “cowardly” is to be used, it might be more aptly applied to those who kill from beyond the range of retaliation, high in the sky, than to those willing to die themselves in order to kill others. In the matter of courage (a morally neutral virtue): whatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter, they were not cowards.” – Susan Sontag, The New Yorker. Where does one begin with this pretentious buffoon? My favorite bit of claptrap is that weird little parenthesis: “courage (a morally neutral virtue)”. Says who? Real courage – not rashness or fanaticism – is anything but morally neutral. It is bravery in pursuit of what is good and noble. Read your Aristotle lately, Susan? Sontag clearly believes that the demons who just killed over 5,000 innocent civilians are more courageous than those American pilots who police northern Iraq in order to prevent another gas-attack by Saddam on his own population. She’s always been pretentious. Now she’s revealed herself as contemptible.

LETTERS: You respond to the war. Looking for God; a new mood in the military; bio-chemical data; why Wright is right; etc.

THE LIMITS OF INTELLIGENCE: Fellow me-ziner Mike Antonucci makes an interesting point about too easily talking about the failure of our intelligence. “Of course it was an intelligence failure,” Antonucci writes. “But we need to be very specific about what part of the system failed. Many experts have blamed this on an overdependence on electronic intelligence gathering at the expense of human intelligence gathering. While these two methods do seem to be out of balance, it is far from certain that spies would have prevented the attacks. Case in point: Two days before the World Trade Center crumbled, Ahmed Shah Massoud, the famous leader of the mujahidin resistance during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, was assassinated. Massoud was the primary military leader of the Northern Alliance, the ongoing rebel opposition to the Taliban, the fundamentalist rulers of Afghanistan. It is fair to assume that Massoud had dozens, if not hundreds, of spies in Kabul to pass critical information to him and his forces. He knew his enemies’ mind, having fought with them for 10 years. He spoke the same language, knew their customs, and had the advantage of close proximity to his sources of information. How was he killed? Two men, posing as television journalists from Morocco and Tunisia, detonated a bomb hidden in a camera. Perhaps bin Laden himself had his agents perform this service for his Taliban benefactors.” Makes sense to me – and is both reassuring and chilling at the same time.

TOMBSTONES REVISITED: “…The objective historian realizes that the twentieth century is in transition to a remarkable new technology and a formidable new environment before we have learned how to handle the old ones. Who’s afraid of the big, bad buildings? Everyone, because there are so many things about gigantism that we just don’t know. The gamble of triumph or tragedy at this scale-and ultimately it is a gamble–demands an extraordinary payoff. The Trade Center towers could be the start of a new skyscraper age or the biggest tombstones in the world.” – Ada Louise Huxtable, “World Trade Center: Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Buildings?” New York Times, May 29, 1966

WHOSE CENSORSHIP?: Who is protesting grotesque Palestinian censorship of Western photographers and journalists? Er, no-one but Jonah Goldberg. The journalists’ crime? Reporting on widespread Palestinian support for killing Jews and Americans. But shhhh. Don’t tell Susan Sontag. She doesn’t want to know.

THE ANGEL IN THE WHIRLWIND: Historians will surely go back to George W. Bush’s Inaugural Address when they deal with his actions as a war president. A reader pointed out the prophetic nature of his remarks – unwitting though they may have been: “Americans are generous and strong and decent, not because we believe in ourselves, but because we hold beliefs beyond ourselves. When this spirit of citizenship is missing, no government program can replace it. When this spirit is present, no wrong can stand against it. After the Declaration of Independence was signed, Virginia statesman John Page wrote to Thomas Jefferson: ‘We know the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong. Do you not think an angel rides in the whirlwind and directs this storm?’ Much time has passed since Jefferson arrived for his inauguration. The years and changes accumulate. But the themes of this day he would know: our nation’s grand story of courage and its simple dream of dignity. We are not this story’s author, who fills time and eternity with his purpose. Yet his purpose is achieved in our duty, and our duty is fulfilled in service to one another. Never tiring, never yielding, never finishing, we renew that purpose today, to make our country more just and generous, to affirm the dignity of our lives and every life.”

Here’s the Hart-Rudman Report on our response to threats from terrorism. We ignored it once. We cannot ignore it any more.