Fourteen years ago in his breakout performance as an arrogant young genius in the movie Good Will Hunting, actor Matt Damon’s character sneered at his Boston psychiatrist for “surrounding yourself with all the wrong f**kin’ books. You wanna read a real history book, read Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States. That book’ll f**kin’ knock you on your ass.”

That was from a script Damon himself had written (with fellow actor Ben Affleck, with Oscar-winning rewrite assistance from famed screenwriter William Goldman). It reflected Damon’s own real-life admiration for self-proclaimed radical historian Howard Zinn, whom he is still actively promoting today, almost two years to the day after Zinn’s death.

Damon went on to co-produce a documentary entitled “The People Speak,” based on A People’s History and Voices of a People’s History of the United States, which Zinn co-edited with anti-war-on-terror socialist Anthony Arnove. Other Hollywood folk like Josh Brolin, Marisa Tomei, Morgan Freeman, Viggo Mortensen, Rosario Dawson, and Kerry Washington lent their star power to it for a History Channel premiere back in 2009.

On January 31^st, actor/activist Damon lent his name and voice to a live performance in Chicago called “The People Speak, Live!” Composed of songs and dramatic readings based on the actual words of, as the organizers put it, “rebels, dissenters, and visionaries from America’s past,” the show was part of an ongoing program to promote Zinn’s subversive work.

Zinn was arguably the most popular proponent of the “history from below” school of historiography, which explores past events from the perspective of everyday people as opposed to the “Great Men” theory, which actor Brolin, another Zinn devotee, calls mere “propaganda.” Zinn’s 1980 book A People’s History of the United States, one of the best-selling history books of all time thanks partly to the influence of pop culture powerhouses like Damon, Brolin, and the rock group Pearl Jam, is a litany of oppression and exploitation on the part of America’s white ruling class, a “raggedly conceived Marxist caricature” of American history, as David Horowitz calls it in his Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left.

Zinn’s book is as ubiquitous in high school and university classrooms as sexual tension. His website proudly asserts that “no other radical historian has reached so many hearts and minds.” Well certainly, no other has darkened as many young hearts toward America and clouded as many young minds with utter disdain for facts and objectivity. Like his fellow academic cult figure Noam Chomsky and President Obama’s former associate and likely ghostwriter, unrepentant-terrorist-turned-radical-educator William Ayers, Zinn’s world view is powered by a relentless and hateful leftist fantasy: that the American government is and always has been racist, oppressive, warmongering, and ruthlessly exploitative, and that it must be subverted. And that subversion begins in classrooms all across America.

When Russia joined China this weekend in vetoing a U.S.-backed resolution calling for  Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to step down, it was more than a gambit to protect a fellow authoritarian regime and a lucrative market for Russian arms. The lifeline to Assad also was an attempt to boost Vladimir’s Putin’s flagging domestic popularity by casting Russia as a major player in world affairs and a defiant rival to the United States.

Considering that Putin has spent the past decade stamping out Russia’s fledgling democratic reforms and consolidating his control over Russian politics, one might think that he wouldn’t need to engage in such crudely symbolic politicking. But stung by the rebuff of the December 4 elections, when his United Russia failed to win a decisive parliamentary majority despite rigging the results, and apparently shaken by the growing disaffection of urban middle-class Russians, who have poured out in record numbers to take part in anti-Putin demonstrations, Putin has sought to shore up his tarnished domestic standing by resorting to the familiar tactic of anti-American incitement.

If recent developments are any guide, anti-Americanism will feature centrally ahead of the March 4 presidential election, which is intended to restore Putin to the presidency. Russia’s state-run television networks, having caused a sensation by providing surprisingly balanced coverage of the recent anti-Putin demonstrations, have again fallen into line by cranking up the dial on anti-American programming. Last week, for instance, Russia’s leading government channel aired “A Bridge Over the Abyss,” a documentary film that, according to the Wall Street Journal, depicts Putin as Russia’s savior following the fall of the Soviet Union while the U.S. and the West are portrayed as villains trying to impose their will on Russians. Putin, who was interviewed for the documentary, complains about these “foreign” bullies. ”It seems to me our [foreign] partners don’t want allies, they want vassals,” Putin says in the film. “They want to direct things, but Russia doesn’t work that way.”

This self-serving narrative dovetails neatly with Putin’s version of a Russia put-upon by hostile foreign forces. Yet it’s hard to argue that outside influences are to blame for Putin’s political woes when much of the opposition comes from inside Russia. Since the December 4 elections, there have been three massive anti-Putin demonstrations, each of which has provided an opportunity for Russians to protest the government’s rank corruption and to demand a “Russia Without Putin.” The latest of these took place this past weekend and reportedly involved some 120,000 people, who braved Moscow’s arctic temperatures to make their voices heard. While the government expected the demonstrations to peter out with the approach of winter, the organizers of this weekend’s protests claimed that this was largest turnout yet. Bone-chilling cold or not, the demonstrators will not simply disappear.

Confronted with such impressive evidence of internal discontent, Putin has tried to play the anti-American card. Ever since he accused Hillary Clinton of sending “a signal” to demonstrators to oppose the December election results, the government has ratcheted up the conspiracy theory of foreign manipulation. Thus the government has made a concerted effort to smear the new American ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, as an agent of American subversion who is personally supporting the Russian opposition movement. Russian television has gotten in on the act, most recently when it screened a documentary called “Foreigners Will Help Them.” The documentary purports to show secret video of Russia’s opposition leaders receiving instruction from U.S. officials. Most brazenly, Russia’s top investigative agency, the Investigative Committee, has claimed that the widespread video evidence of fraud and ballot stuffing during the parliamentary elections was actually faked by American saboteurs – a claim that is hard to square with credible accounts of 140 percent turnout in some regions during the recent elections and findings such as the one from a local electoral commission that discovered 6,000 “dead souls” on the ballot.

Anti-Americanism is, of course, as European as Apfelstrudel.  But over the last few years it’s rollercoastered like the stock market.  The invasion of Iraq sent it skyrocketing.  It was muted somewhat by the election of a black man as President of the United States.  (That Americans, whom Europeans are taught to think of as incurable racists, had done such a thing rendered some veteran America-bashers temporarily mute.)  But European anti-Americanism has never entirely gone away, and the troubles America has been through of late have been the occasion for much Schadenfreude, especially given that they’ve provided a pleasant distraction from Europe’s own even more formidable problems.

Still, it wasn’t until I ran across an article the other day in the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet that I realized European anti-Americanism, thanks to Urinegate, is once again in full bloom.  The article, written by somebody named Asbjørn Svarstad, begins by noting that the American soldiers who filmed themselves urinating on dead Taliban members may not be the first GIs to have behaved in such a manner.  “American commandos who were dropped over Snåsa [in northern Norway] toward the end of World War II,” writes Asbjørn Svarstad, “are suspected of having displayed the same kind of contempt for their enemies.”

The main character in Svarstad’s story is none other than William Colby, who would later become head of the CIA but who back in 1945 was a 24-year-old major in charge of the Norwegian Special Operation Group (NORSO) under the command of the OSS.  NORSO, which sounds rather like Brad Pitt’s unit in Inglourious Basterds, consisted of Norwegian-Americans and Norwegians who were operating behind enemy lines on a mission called Operation RYPE.  On May 2, 1945, Colby’s men, who were stationed at a farm called Gjevsjøen, were discovered by five German soldiers, whom they quickly dispatched.  According to Svarstad, local Norwegians – and here’s the meat of the story – later claimed that they were then invited by the Americans to urinate on the Germans’ corpses.

One of Svarstad’s sources is Norwegian journalist Ola Flyum, whom he describes as an authority on how northern Norway experienced World War II.  Flyum’s verdict on the NORSO episode is as follows: “This kind of behavior says a great deal about the way in which the Americans conducted themselves.  The Norwegians were shaken.  Such a culture was unknown to them.  I see many reasons to examine whether this was a war crime.”

Yes, you read that right.  The local Norwegians had lived for five years under the Nazis, who had come to subdue and tyrannize them, to execute troublemakers and cart Jews off to their deaths.  But, if Flyum is to be believed, the real trauma for these folks was being invited by their American liberators to relieve themselves on the bodies of their oppressors.

Interesting.  And even more interesting are the reader comments on Svarstad’s article, which the last time I checked totaled no fewer than 645. Let me emphasize that several readers, to their credit, sought to provide a degree of perspective by bringing up such small details as, ahem, the Nazi death camps.  But the overall tone of the comments was set by those who agreed heartily with the implicit message of the article: namely, that Americans are by nature more uncouth – and more prone to violence, war crimes, torture, and abuse of civilians – than anybody else, including the Nazis.

“Most of the Germans,” insisted one reader, “followed the rules and fought a civilized war.”  Another  agreed, saying that America “is way worse then Nazi Germany ever was.”   A third asserted that during the Vietnam War, the US, that “sanctimonious and arrogant s*** country,” had outdone Hitler.  A  couple of readers cited the Allied bombing of Dresden as proof that America and the western Allies were at least as bad as the Nazis; one recalled having “seen videos from WWII of P51 planes mowing down German farmers in May 1945.” Several readers insisted that it wasn’t the Western Allies that whupped the Nazis and freed Norway, but the Soviets: “America would have been a**-f***ed in a one-on-one against Nazi Germany.”

What a disappointment – and yet nothing could have been less surprising. The first season of the Golden Globe-nominated, Showtime series Homeland came to a close last Sunday in a finale that drew mixed reactions from fans and set a record for the highest-rated finale for a freshman series in Showtime’s history. But more importantly, it confirmed that Hollywood is still not ready to take an unequivocal, pro-American stand against our jihadist enemy.

(Warning: MAJOR SPOILERS ahead)

For those who haven’t been following, the show centers on a Marine named Brody (actor Damian Lewis), missing and presumed dead in Iraq since 2003, who is discovered alive, rescued and brought home to suburban Washington D.C. to a lot of CIA self-congratulation and media fanfare. Not only does he become “a poster boy for the war,” as skeptical counterterrorism analyst Carrie (actress Claire Danes​) calls him, he’s even urged by the Vice President to run for political office. But Carrie has reason to believe that Brody has been “turned” traitor and is a sleeper agent involved in an imminent terrorist attack.

She suspects correctly. Although the series toyed briefly with the idea that Brody is nothing more than the victim of Carrie’s increasing bi-polar paranoia, he was indeed working with the terrorist mastermind Abu Nazir (Navid Negahban) to take down the Vice President and Secretary of Defense in a suicide bombing. But the shrapnel-packed suicide vest fails him in the final episode, which ends with Brody pitching the idea to Abu Nazir that perhaps he can best serve their cause not by killing the Vice President, who has announced his candidacy for the Presidency, but rather by influencing public policy through him.

I wrote about “Homeland” before on FrontPage Magazine, at the beginning of the show’s season, when I expressed skepticism about how the show would depict the ill-named “war on terror.” My doubts were based on interview snippets with the producers, who hinted at the usual Hollywood moral equivalence and aversion to patriotism. But I was encouraged that the show at least didn’t shy away from portraying Islamic terrorists as the bad guys, and after seeing the complexity and ambiguity of the first couple of episodes, I was just optimistic enough to conclude that it would be necessary to see how the season played out in order to judge the series fully.

Well, now that time has come, and the verdict is in. As gripping and well-acted as the series was on plenty of occasions, the finale laid bare its disheartening true colors when the real reason for Brody’s attempted terror attack became clear.

The motivation for Abu Nazir’s murderous plan? While Brody was still a prisoner of Nazir, our Vice President had ordered a covert drone strike on a school harboring Nazir, killing 82 children – among them, Nazir’s youngest son. The VP then ordered any trace of the operation wiped clean– except for a heavily redacted document that somehow slipped through the cracks and made its way to heroine Claire Danes’ mentor Saul (Mandy Patinkin.)  Then video surfaced of the VP ordering the strike despite being made aware of the presence of schoolchildren. Screw it, he says, we can’t be held responsible if the cowardly Abu Nazir chooses to shield himself among innocent children. So he, the CIA Director, and the Secretary of Defense determine that “the collateral damage count” of the attack is “within the acceptable matrix parameters” and the strike goes forward. Nazir vows vengeance against the principles involved, with Brody as his weapon.

The disclaimer “we support our troops” has practically become obligatory for proclamations of opposition to U.S. wars. But a Boston law professor felt compelled to declare to students and colleagues that he supports neither the wars nor the troops fighting them.

Michael Avery, a professor of law at Suffolk University Law School, responded to an online solicitation for support for care packages for overseas servicemen by labeling them killers undeserving of sympathy.

“I think it is shameful that it is perceived as legitimate to solicit in an academic institution for support for men and women who have gone overseas to kill other human beings,” Avery professed in an email sent on the eve of the Marine Corps’ birthday and two days before Veterans Day. “I understand that there is a residual sympathy for service members, perhaps engendered by support for troops in World War II, or perhaps from when there was a draft and people with few resources to resist were involuntarily sent to battle. That sympathy is not particularly rational in today’s world, however.”

In the five-paragraph mass email, Avery also counseled students, faculty, and administrators “to be more mindful of what message we are sending as a school” and questioned the presence of an enormous American flag in a campus atrium. “Why do we continue to have this oversized flag in our lobby?”

“Perhaps some of my colleagues will consider this to be an inappropriate political statement,” the law professor continued. “But of course the solicitation email was a political statement, although cast as support for student activities. The politics of that solicitation are that war is legitimate, perhaps inevitable, and that patriotic Americans should get behind our troops.”

Avery, a recipient of the since-discontinued bachelor of laws degree at Yale University whose education included a late-’60s stint at the University of Moscow, has been active in left-wing causes for more than four decades. He is a past president of the National Lawyers Guild, and his resume boasts of work at the ACLU Foundation and Yale University’s Political Justice Workshop.

Launched a month ago in Lower Manhattan, the “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) movement has since spread to more than 140 cities nationwide while winning the hearts of leftists everywhere, most significantly in the Democratic Party‘s mainstream. By now, many Americans have seen some of the photos and film footage of OWS demonstrators spewing anti-Semitic diatribes; shutting down traffic in busy urban areas; engaging in public nudity, copulation, defecation, and illegal drug use; and defacing their environs with colossal mounds of trash that are utterly incongruous with the protesters’ professed concern for responsible environmental stewardship. But beyond their penchant for the bizarre and the odious, what exactly animates the OWSers in New York, Los Angeles, and everywhere in between?

While they have been widely described as a motley crew without a unifying agenda, the OWSers are in fact bound together by a strongly anti-capitalist worldview that characterizes America as a “ruthless,” materialistic society where the chief objective is to “always minimize costs and maximize profits”; where “lives are commodities to be bought and sold on the open market”; and where “the economic transaction has become the dominant way of relating to the culture and artifacts of human civilization.” The “deep spiritual sickness” that necessarily results from this repugnant philosophy of perpetual economic “growth for the sake of growth,” says OWS, has caused “vast deprivation, oppression and despoliation … to cover the world.” OWS’s prescribed remedy is to replace the foregoing arrangement “with a society of cooperation and community” – i.e., a socialist economy. Thus it is not at all surprising that the Communist Party USA, the International Socialist Organization, the Peace and Freedom Party, and the Democratic Socialists of America have all embraced OWS and its objectives.

OWSers, casting themselves as the victimized “99%” of the population who “will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the [wealthiest] 1%,” advocate the imposition of a “Robin Hood Tax” on most goods and services, with the aim of using its generated revenues (taken mostly from “the rich”) to fund social-welfare programs for “the poor.” Among those joining the “one-percenters” in denouncing America’s purportedly contemptible “millionaires and billionaires” are filmmaker Michael Moore, actress Susan Sarandon, actor Alec Baldwin, film star Jane Fonda, activist Yoko Ono, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons, Marxist professor Cornel West, New York councilman Charles Barron, socialist radical Frances Fox Piven, TV personality Keith Olbermann, congressman John Lewis, congressman Charles Rangel, financier George Soros, labor leader Richard Trumka, former U.S. senator Russ Feingold, entertainer Roseanne Barr, left-wing preacher Jim Wallis, congresswoman Nancy Pelosi, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee director Robby Mook, and revolutionary communist Van Jones. Notably, most of these self-proclaimed champions-of-the-oppressed are themselves millionaires and billionaires. And yet another very wealthy man – President Obama – has likewise praised the OWS protesters for “giving voice to a more broad-based frustration about how our financial system works.”

We knew this was coming. No American victory in this day and age, not even the long-overdue death of terror mastermind Osama bin Laden, is safe from political hijacking by the useful idiots of the Left.  Within hours of hearing the good news, left-wing Daily Beast flunky Peter Beinart took to the keyboard to declare that the War on Terror is finally over.

Wow, what a relief! So that means Iran’s nuclear program is kaput? Er, no. Well, maybe it means the UN Security Council has stopped playing nice with Middle Eastern thug regimes. Wait, that didn’t happen, either. I know – peace between Israel and the Palestinians is finally in sight! Nope, try again. Um, then maybe anti-American sentiment among Muslim populations is waning? Uh-uh.

If none of that’s the case, then what does Beinart mean?

I don’t mean that there is no threat of further jihadist attack. In the short term, the threat may even rise. I don’t mean that we should abandon all efforts at tracking terrorist cells. Of course not. But the war on terror was a way of seeing the world, explicitly modeled on World War II and the Cold War. It suggested that the struggle against “radical Islam” or “Islamofascism” or “Islamic terrorism” should be the overarching goal of American foreign policy, the prism through which we see the world […] It made East Asia an afterthought during a critical period in China’s rise; it allowed all manner of dictators to sell their repression in Washington, just as they had during the Cold War; it facilitated America’s descent into torture; it wildly exaggerated the ideological appeal of a jihadist-Salafist movement whose vision of society most Muslims find revolting.

Bin Laden’s death is an opportunity to lay the war on terror to rest as well. Although President Obama avoids the phrase, its assumptions still drive our war in Afghanistan, a crushingly expensive adventure in nation building in a desperately poor country whose powerful neighbor wants us to fail. Those assumptions fuel anti-Muslim racism in the United States, where large swaths of the Republican Party have decided they are at risk of living under Sharia law. And they blind us to the differences among Islamist movements, allowing Glenn Beck and company to depict Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood as al Qaeda’s farm team.

Instead, we can now take on real problems, like debt and China. Because Barack Obama has been such a crusader on those issues so far.

I’m struggling to decide what the most contemptible part of this screed is. Is it the insane implication that Obama taking one problem less seriously will lead to him taking the others more seriously, despite his manifest unseriousness towards both? The way he relies on his own past smears of conservatives as Islamophobes to prop up his latest thesis? Where he casually says, oh by the way, the Cold War was no big deal either?

I don’t know what the sleaziest element is, but it’s easy to see which one is the most dangerous:

The war on terror is over; Al Qaeda lost.

This has perhaps been no greater point of contention between hawks and doves since the September 11 attacks: is the War on Terror simply an effort to destroy the terrorist organization under whose banner 9/11 was carried out, or is it a larger struggle against the broader ideological movement of which al Qaeda was but one part?

I hate to break it to you, but despite the loss of their leader, al Qaeda has by no means been neutered, and either way, they’re far from the only Islamofascist game in town. Extremists have won a string of governments throughout the Middle East, and in particular, NRB’s Moshe Phillips notes that Hamas is still kicking. Indeed, learning where bin Laden was hiding—right under the noses of our Pakistani “allies”—should be enough to illustrate why it’s a bit early to herald a new era of U.S.-Mideast relations.

Then again, it’s not as if any of the above would change Peter Beinart’s mind—recall that according to him, the War on Terror has never been a war. Whether Osama bin Laden’s relaxing in a compound or sleeping with the fishes means nothing to him; he’d be saying it’s time to pack up regardless. In that sense, his entire column is a farce—bin Laden’s death is just the latest pretext of seriousness he’s using to whine, “are we there yet?”

Once upon a time, superheroes were a source of comfort and escape from the difficulties and ugliness of real life. While real-life recession and terrorism aren’t likely to meet any tidy resolutions soon, we can always count on Batman to solve the Riddler’s latest puzzle just in time, or Spider-Man to save the damsel in distress (well, usually).

Somewhere along the line, though, it was decided that our heroes had to grapple with real-world issues. When done sparingly and handled well, this can elevate the genre, such as Harry Osborn’s battle with drugs or 2008’s brilliant The Dark Knight. But more often than not, such efforts these days instead result in train wrecks of heavy-handed political proselytizing and moral confusion.

Such is the case with the latest development in DC Comics’ Action Comics #900, in which Superman decides he has to renounce his U.S. citizenship:

In it, Superman consults with the President’s national security advisor, who is incensed that Superman appeared in Tehran to non-violently support the protesters demonstrating against the Iranian regime, no doubt an analogue for the recent real-life protests in the Middle East. However, since Superman is viewed as an American icon in the DC Universe as well as our own, the Iranian government has construed his actions as the will of the American President, and indeed, an act of war.

Superman replies that it was foolish to think that his actions would not reflect politically on the American government, and that he therefore plans to renounce his American citizenship at the United Nations the next day — and to continue working as a superhero from a more global than national perspective. From a “realistic” standpoint it makes sense; it would indeed be impossible for a nigh-omnipotent being ideologically aligned with America to intercede against injustice beyond American borders without creating enormous political fallout for the U.S. government.

First, it’s interesting to note that the story’s starting dispute comes dangerously close to a damning indictment of Barack Obama for not taking a stronger stand on the Iranian protests of summer 2009, which is surprising coming from an iconic cultural mainstay and a major entertainment company. And while John Hawkins is right to note that there are certain practical difficulties with throwing someone as powerful as Superman into geopolitical situations, I can see definite story potential in exploring the tension between Superman’s no-nonsense moral clarity and the empty suits on Capitol Hill.

But renouncing his citizenship? That goes far beyond distancing himself from any particular policy or administration. As an alien raised on a Kansas farm who grows up to fight for truth, justice, and the American way both as a superhero and as a newspaper reporter, Superman’s American identity and values have always been central to the character. That’s not to say he should be a pawn of the government, or that he should never save the day overseas, but it does mean he can’t simply switch who he is at will.

At the heart of this concept seems to be a recurring leftist inability to distinguish a nation’s citizens from her government. Superman’s not a government agent; he doesn’t need to be a “global citizen” to act independently of Uncle Sam.

Gutting his patriotism isn’t the only way the Man of Steel has been badly mishandled in recent years; remember when 2006’s lukewarm Superman Returns had him impregnate Lois Lane, then leave the planet for years? It makes you wonder: who do we turn to when our heroes are the ones who need saving?

When is the left pleased with a character who’s known for fighting for “Truth, Justice & The American Way”? When that character has forsaken that fight.

There is now a trend of American comic book icons being de-Americanized in order to make them more palatable to a foreign — even anti-American — audience. In some foreign markets, Marvel studios is leaving the name “Captain America” off of the title of the upcoming film starring the patriotic superhero, and even the director of the film has made comments designed to placate non-American audiences.

The left was also pleased when Batman recruited a Muslim as his French counterpart, in a storyline that ignores the very reason we even began talking about Islam on a large scale, 9/11.

Superman was created and published by Americans. He crash-landed in America, was raised by Americans, lives in America, works in America, is married to an American. But D.C. Comics has just made him renounce his U.S. Citizenship. I keep reading about how Superman belongs to all of us. Well, my Superman would Never quit America. He might be critical of a particular policy of the American government, but he would never stop fighting for Truth, Justice & The American Way.

Notably absent from major leftist news media, including the NewYork Times, is any reference to the 66th Anniversary of D-Day.

Last year, the Times gave President Obama a full-page spread entitled “Obama Hails D-Day Heroes at Normandy after he refused to visit Normandy last spring and risk offsetting the “balance” of the G20 Summit during his first overseas trip.

This year, nothing. Not even from conservative FOX News.

What gives?

Has America taken on the “no nation above any other” worldview of the Obama Administration and relegated World War II and the Holocaust to the dusty bookshelves of history, to be redefined by revisionists and the leftist media in the years to come?

In an era of increasing anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, where jihad is officially condoned as “legitimate,” we need to be persistent about remembering the sacrifices of World War II and the “man-caused disaster” traditionally known as the  Holocaust.

We need to always remember D-Day, lest we become like Helen Thomas, a revisionist who removed the quote “Without an informed people, there can be no democracy…” from her website last night that originally sat beneath her apology for her anti-Semitic rant.

Ignoring D-Day is tantamount to keeping the people uninformed while snuffing out the light of true democracy and replacing  it with socialism and tyranny.

It is through knowing our history that successive generations of Americans can embrace their duty to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States — the world’s true bulwark of democracy.

Phew! Now I feel so much better about my extorted tax dollars being wasted on leftwing propaganda, Israel bashing and anti-Americanism! (Not to mention masturbatory “investigations.”)

Remember that media bias “study” being conducted by (and, ever so conveniently, about) the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation I told you about a while back?

Seems the results are already in, and the CBC’s conclusions are, er, fascinating:

Stephen Harper’s chief election strategist deliberately used the CBC complaints process and “paranoia-tinged” language to raise money for the Conservatives and to “overwhelm” and “intimidate” the office, the public broadcaster’s ombudsman says in a report that completely exonerates EKOS pollster Frank Graves.

Mr. Graves is one of four national pollsters who provide semi-regular surveys to the public broadcaster. He recently touched off a firestorm after he was quoted in a Globe and Mail column  suggesting Michael Ignatieff and his Liberals launch a “culture war” against the Tories.  (…)

If Mr. Graves is guilty of anything, the ombudsman says, it is being too open in explaining his data – so open, in fact, that if he were actually working for the Liberals they would probably fire him for blabbing about strategy.

“Ordinary citizens might not know this, but anyone who has worked in the ‘hot house’ of Ottawa politics would know that pollsters are much in love with their data and many will expound on it to virtually anyone, unless, of course, the pollster were working for a party. They would then keep that data very close,” Mr. Carlin says.

In other words: “We can’t believe you crazy, stupid conservatives made us answer our damn phones to deal with your crazy, stupid questions and complaints. What do you think we’re running here? An impartial ombud’s office or something?! Go back to paying our salaries in obedient silence, plebians!”

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Joseph Yeager, the author of the new book, Intellectual Assault: Academic Anti-Americanism and the Distortion of 9/11. He holds a Ph.D. in medieval Russian history from the University of Missouri. He is a member of the National Association of Scholars’ Argus Project, a watchdog group which keeps an eye on excesses and abuses in academia.

FP: Joseph Yeager, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

What inspired you to write your book?

Yeager: I was inspired by curiosity, Jamie, and a certain knowing suspicion.

Soon after 9/11 the professors and academic administrators began making their presence felt among the commentariat. Their sudden ubiquity was due partially to the media which understandably solicited opinions from experts about the tragedy, but it was also due to the egomania of a people who believe they are smarter than everybody else and thus deserve to be heard.

And what I heard was frankly quite disgusting. I’m sure your remember it well: America was to blame for 9/11; the terrorists and the society from which they sprang were actually righteous victims of American aggression; America is actually a terrorist state, so by what right may we punish the Taliban and al-Qaeda, ad nauseum.

These outrageous statements from the academics filled me with a desire to see if such views were outliers which received an airing precisely because they were so odious, or if they were the coin of the academic realm. As I suspected, and as my book makes clear, the academic anti-Americanism we witnessed after 9/11 is closer to being the rule than the exception on America’s campuses.

FP: So what is the prevalence of anti-Americanism in academia?

Yeager: For my book I did in-depth research on every single college and university website in American academia. I printed literally thousands of documents containing opinions about 9/11 from the faculty and administration. And while I did encounter a handful of academics who expressed sensible views about 9/11, and a fair share of others whose views might be characterized as cautiously critical of the terrorists and the Islamo-Arab world, the undoubted preponderance of opinion was that the United States was at fault and that the people of the Islamo-Arab world were victims meriting sympathy. The contours of this anti-Americanism are far more multifaceted than that statement suggests, but it does get to the heart of the matter. And based upon my research I suspect that perhaps two thirds of the academics, particularly in the humanities and social sciences, are basically anti-American.

FP: Does academic anti-Americanism vary significantly from state to state, region to region?

Yeager: Very little, Jamie. As I point out in my book, academia should be thought of as an anti-American archipelago. College and university campuses are essentially islands of Leftist radicalism in a great ocean of moderation and common sense. Moreover, these islands are closely linked to one another by a shared culture that is transmitted to future professors and administrators during their undergraduate and especially graduate years. Newly minted Ph.D.s go thither to California and Maine, Florida and Washington, Missouri and Wyoming, and they reinforce and replicate the anti-Americanism and Leftism they’ve swallowed throughout their years as students. Consequently, a tenured professor at Princeton will have far more in common with an instructor at Northern Arizona than he will with a pizza maker in Trenton; the Vice Provost at South Alabama will share more with the President of Stanford than he will with a physician in Birmingham. The surrounding political culture really has very little effect on the mental world of the university.

FP: How is 9/11 a lens through which we can understand academic anti-Americanism?

Yeager: The 9/11 attacks are so important for understanding academia precisely because they put the professors on the defensive for a change. Hence, the terrorists were constituents of academia. They were non-white, they were not Christians or Jews, they were from Third World nations and they were from parts of the globe that are comparatively impoverished, even if the actual terrorists themselves were anything but poor.

And these constituents of academia managed to unite American citizens, at least temporarily, in a conviction that the terrorists were evil and that they and their supporters had to be destroyed by military force. The academics were of course, aghast. How could Americans be so filled with hate? How could they rebel against pet academic nostrums such as “conflict resolution” and out-and-out pacifism? Did they not learn anything from the Vietnam War?

But most interestingly I believe the academics felt that the very notion of “diversity” was under siege. The terrorists were in no uncertain terms exemplars of diversity. And suddenly Americans were turning a gimlet eye on Islam and the Islamo-Arab world. They were also questioning the wisdom of easily acquired student visas, and open-door immigration policies.

This was too much for academia to stand. Believing their diversity ox was being gored, the professors and administrators sallied forth to defend the bearers of diversity and to attack Americans as rubes and racists. They even constructed a totally fallacious backlash by common Americans against Muslims and Arab-Americans where none existed. Rather than mass pogroms against these minorities, there were very isolated hate crimes which quickly petered out. My book deals with these issues in some depth.

FP: What is the biggest problem in US higher education?

Yeager: Believe it or not, Leftist propagandizing in the classroom, and even overt discrimination against conservatives on campus are not the biggest problems. Far more significant is the relatively subtle but ceaseless skewing of virtually every field in the social sciences and humanities to the left.

Because these fields are so ideologically unbalanced, so lacking in views emanating from anywhere on the political spectrum other than the far left, there is an inevitable drift of scholarship leftward. Liberal and Leftist assumptions about scholarly issues and problems, liberal and Leftist points of departure and ways of looking at the world are never even questioned. Indeed, the research questions which serve as the basis of scholarly projects almost inevitably stem from a liberal/Left foundation.

And how could they not? There are simply not enough centrists and conservatives in academia to even illuminate the liberal/Left bias, let alone to raise a din that would inspire greater self awareness among the majority scholars.

What results is a lifeless intellectual universe where poor scholarship is produced and indeed, the distinction between scholarship and propaganda is blurred. American students are thus getting a pathetic excuse for an education, and are paying ever more for this woeful product.

FP: So what can be done about all of this?

Yeager: As long as Americans are essentially apathetic about what goes on in academia the problem will only worsen. American citizens must recognize the seriousness of this situation and they must do something about it. And make no mistake, they have the power to make a difference.

Money, as always and everywhere, is the lifeblood of academia. Cut off the money supply and the academic power brokers will take notice and make changes. Concerned citizens should write their state representatives demanding accountability in academia on pain of voting for challengers should the incumbents not apply the heat. Alumni should cease donating money to their alma maters and make clear why they are no longer giving. Small businesses and corporations could help the cause as well by no longer requiring college degrees for work that can be done by high school graduates. The use of bachelor’s degrees as a winnowing device simply funnels a steady supply of students (and money) to the very people who would like to see this country crash and burn. The professors and administrators don’t much care for Americans; why should we continue to provision their sumptuous gravy train, with no strings attached?

FP: Joseph Yeager, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

Skyrocketing to the top of the prime-ministerial polls, sleek-but-shallow Brit politician Nicholas Clegg apparently misses Saddam.  And Clegg’s not alone in the resurgent dictators’ fan club.

The shiny young face of the UK’s usually lagging third party, the Liberal Democrats, Clegg may upend British politics in the May 6 elections.  One key to his stunning rise has been his dismissal of the “special relationship” with the US as out of date and worthless.

President Obama’s cool with that, but it’s hard to see who would respect a decoupled-from-Washington UK in the morning.  Anti-Americanism plays well in Britain, though.  (What, no Obama effect?).

Anti-Americanism is the first refuge of the scoundrel.

Still, the real danger from Nick Clegg isn’t that he’s going to change everything, but that, behind the campaign flash, he’s the most ideologically backward party leader Britain’s seen since the 1970s.  He damns Cold-War thinking, even as he wallows in it.

And Clegg isn’t alone.  Around the world, bright-young-thing politicians are turning back the clock.  While fashionably damning nukes, they embrace the worst practices of the past with enthusiasm.

To wit: Clegg made a very public point of calling the intervention in Iraq “illegal.”  To the likes of Clegg (a perfect name for a Dickensian villain), it was legal for Saddam to torture, rape and massacre his own countrymen—under the bloody notion that whatever happens within a country’s borders is that state’s business alone.

Of course, Clegg and Co. also overlook Saddam’s two wars of aggression against neighboring states, while averting their polished gazes from the budding democracy in Iraq.  Clegg’s point is just that “America is bad.”  It’s lazy, destructive—but effective—politics.

Does Clegg truly believe that Saddam deserved to remain in power?  Or that the world would be a better place if he still ruled?

At 43, Clegg’s even younger than our own new-model president.  But the two men have in common a heartbreaking (and bone-breaking) sympathy for murderous dictatorships–as long as the dictator’s roots are on the left.

The immoral notion that a strongman can seize power, then do anything he wants to his countrymen with impunity because his state’s borders are sacrosanct—what I’ve called “the sovereignty con”–has excused immeasurable suffering.

President Bush, for all his practical errors, grasped that a genocidal dictator’s claims of sovereignty are bogus, that the only true legitimacy comes from the will of the people.

Bush did a great thing inexcusably badly in Iraq.  Still, for a few years, dictators shaped up.  In the end, though, a critical new ideal—that dictators can be held accountable for their inhumanity—was discredited by incompetence on the ground and the stunning bias of the media—whose propagandists, once suckled by Saddam, would sacrifice the lives of others to “get Bush.”

The Bush-haters won (Congratulations!  Why not visit a few mass graves on your next eco-friendly vacation?).  Now we’re back in the old, monstrous tradition of tolerating dictators.

The establishment media are fine with that.  When a journalist of authentic conscience, such as the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl, does get into print with a column describing “Daniel Ortega’s Sandinista thugocracy” in Nicaragua, he gets a grand total of six column inches.

Where’s the outrage, either from our elected leaders, or from wannabes such as Clegg, or from the media over Hugo Chavez’s destruction of Venezuela’s once-proud democracy?  At this month’s Nuclear Vanity Summit in D.C., Obama literally embraced Argentina’s corrupt and scheming President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner.

Clegg’s pure white-bread, but Obama would be the perfect man to take on African dictators, such as Zimbabwe’s barbarous Robert Mugabe.  And what has our president done for human rights in Africa?  Nothing.

This convenient, murderous belief that what happens in Country X stays in Country X condemns billions of human beings to political slavery and, too often, to death.  It means that we continue to pretend that Afghanistan and Somalia are an actual countries, or that the brutal oppression in Eritrea is nobody’s business but that of the country’s dictatorship.  Or that Tehran’s butchers have every right to gun down, imprison, rape and torture protesters.

Well, Nick Clegg, who has an unexpected shot at becoming Britain’s next prime minister, may miss Saddam.  But Iraqis don’t.

As for the US, it seems that the only borders we don’t regard as sacred are our own.

PESHAWAR, Pakistan - An Islamist politician whose party lost several members in a suicide attack blamed Pakistan's alliance with the U.S. for the violence and urged Islamabad on Tuesday to break ranks in the war on terror.

The comments showed the depth of anti-Americanism in Pakistan, whose support Washington considers key to stabilizing neighboring Afghanistan. In the past three days, attacks in Pakistan have killed some 74 people in a new wave of violence....

"It is because we have brought America's war to our own country," Sirajul Haq, a provincial party leader, said Tuesday in Peshawar after attending funerals for some of the victims. "Still, there is time to end this alliance with America" to avoid more bloodshed....

In the aftermath of last month’s diplomatic ruckus—Israeli bureaucrats referred, with Vice-President Biden in town, to building apartments for Jews in East Jerusalem; the Obama administration took severe umbrage; the Palestinians pulled out of the nascent proximity talks—things, at this moment, remain stuck. Does that mean no progress toward the administration’s cherished goal of a Palestinian state, and frustration all around?

Not necessarily. Moshe Elad, a columnist for Israel’s largest daily Yediot Aharonot, notes that the Palestinian Authority’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, and prime minister, Salaam Fayyad, have been talking about unilaterally declaring such a state in 2011—and that while “in the past, such statements would anger the Americans…this time around, even if we heard a response from the White House or the State Department, it was rather meek.”

Palestinians, Elad reports, have been setting aside their traditional anti-Americanism and “taking pleasure in feeling that ‘America is with us’”; and are “coordinating with the Americans the building of infrastructure across the West Bank as preparation for economic independence and detachment from Israel’s hold.” Elad goes on to ask “What will Israel’s position be in respect to the long list of guests invited to the ceremony that will seek to land in Ben-Gurion Airport?”—that is, if and when the Palestinians declare their state next year and invite many of the world’s dignitaries to honor the event.

Yaakov Katz, military correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, describes Israel as “extremely worried” about the prospect “because it may lead to a third intifada, during which Israel would be fighting a 20,000-strong militia”—much of which would be American-trained. As Katz explains,

Five battalions of 500 soldiers each and trained by US security coordinator Lt.-Gen. Keith Dayton in Jordan have already deployed throughout the West Bank alongside seven regional battalions.

By 2011, another five battalions will have undergone training. Fayyad’s plan is to then dismantle the regional battalions and expand the Dayton-trained battalions to close to 1,000 soldiers each, bringing the total number to around 10,000. Add the police and the presidential guard and the number of armed PA security officers comes out to around 20,000.

The Palestinians would still then have to face the fact that about 300,000 Israelis live in settlements in the West Bank. “The solution—an official PA decision to launch a violent terror campaign branded around the world as a war for freedom.”

Or, in another scenario, Fayyad goes to the UN Security Council to get his state recognized; with the Europeans, Russians, and Chinese likely to assent, the question mark is the United States.

Traditionally the U.S. has vetoed anti-Israeli resolutions in the Security Council, and also has upheld the principle of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations as the way to resolve the dispute. But given what is now known about President Obama’s identification with Palestinian goals, delegitimization of any Israeli presence in the West Bank and even East Jerusalem, contemptuous treatment of Israel’s prime minister, and hurried timetable for Palestinian statehood—augmented by General Dayton’s activities that started under President Bush—Israelis can no longer be confident of U.S. backing in such a situation.

Some say these fears are exaggerated because Abbas and Fayyad lack sufficient Palestinian support. While Abbas’s Fatah movement (with which Fayyad, while not a member, is effectively aligned) is thought likely to defeat Hamas in this summer’s municipal elections, Fatah is itself deeply divided with its young guard scorning Abbas and Fayyad as weaklings—to the point that even a civil war is not ruled out.

Israel, though—as if not already pressured enough by the Hamas, Hezbollah and, ultimately, Iranian threats—has to take all scenarios into account, and now would be the time to start emphasizing to friends in the U.S. the dangers posed by a Palestinian state. True, in his speech at Bar-Ilan University last June, Prime Minister Netanyahu said he could accept such a state as the outcome of negotiations if it, in turn, was genuinely accepting of Israel and effectively demilitarized.

Clearly, a unilaterally declared Palestinian state would be neither. It would be bristling with hatred instilled by the seventeen years of hate-education enabled by the “peace process,” and with largely American-provided forces that would only grow as further weapons, trainers, and fighters flowed in from the Arab and Muslim world.

We wrote Destructive Generation in the mid-Eighties because of the way that Sixties radicalism was continuing to influence how America thought and felt twenty years after the fact. Today, another twenty years further on, the Sixties is still the undead decade. Far from being yesterday’s news, as it should be, it is still the white sound of our intellectual life, decanting its poisonous old wine into new bottles, fomenting our culture wars, and picking the scabs off the angry social wounds that have been with us now for a generation. A new edition of this book, which some commentators have been kind enough to refer to as a “classic,” seems entirely appropriate.

How deeply are we still haunted by this radical decade and all its clanking ghosts? Consider the 2004 elections, when America seemed to be time-warped in a grotesque Sixties encore. The country was once again involved in a controversial war. Radical armies of the night—less puissant, perhaps, than those forty years earlier, but more open in their anti-Americanism—were in the streets again. The old Marxoid vulgarities about American policy being dominated by American economic interests had returned with a new and stricter formulation: No Blood for Oil. The flip side of the Sixties Left’s heroization of tyrants such as Mao and Ho Chi Minh had reappeared in the assertions that George W. Bush represented a greater danger to humanity than the genocidal Saddam Hussein. Sixties veterans such as Noam Chomsky recycled the intellectual nihilism of the prior era when they charged that 9/11 was just payback for America’s historical crimes. Sixties wannabes such as Michael Moore rediscovered the moral imbecility of the era when they compared Iraqi beheaders to the Minutemen of the American Revolution.

But it was when the Democrats’ presidential nominee, John Kerry, mounted the podium at his party’s convention, gave a military salute and announced that he was “reporting for duty” that the Sixties suddenly went from subtext to text. At this moment, the past was not only prologue to the present, it was the present. Attempting through a clumsy gestural politics to be both for and against the war, having the cake of the Sixties without having to eat it, Kerry discovered that Vietnam, far from being forgotten or assimilated or having acquired a settled meaning, was still a toxic subject. His political bipolarism on the issue led the country into another quagmire—this time about the meaning of the war and service in it and about patriotism itself. As Kerry’s campaign devolved into an invisible referendum on the Sixties, the question became less whether he should be judged as a war hero or an antiwar hero than whether America, in its past and present, was a good or a blameworthy country, not only in its efforts in Vietnam, but in the burdens it had undertaken in Iraq. Blue states versus Red states was presented by the media as a new phenomenon, but in fact it was just the latest incarnation of a struggle that had been going on for forty years. The postmortem on the Kerry campaign was simple and brief: it was the Sixties, stupid!

– from the 2006 edition of Destructive Generation, co-written with Peter Collier

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Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), an avid socialist who nearly destroyed Cleveland as that city’s mayor, has caved in to pressure from President Obama, Glenn Beck noted on his TV show. Given Kucinich’s track record of anti-Americanism, it shouldn’t be all that surprising that the lawmaker who had been a firm “no” vote on ObamaCare succumbed to arm-twisting.

And if those who place bets at the predictions exchange Intrade are to be believed, as I write this blog post ObamaCare has a 65.5% chance of being imposed on Americans before June 30.

Think about that for a moment.

The American republic, which has survived the Whiskey Rebellion, the Alien and Sedition Acts crisis, the War of 1812, the Civil War, Woodrow Wilson, the First World War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt and his New Deal, the Korean War, Lyndon Johnson and his pricey, useless Great Society, the Watergate Scandal, the Vietnam War and the anti-American terrorism of the so-called peace movement, the Cold War, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks, will in a sense cease to exist after almost 234 years. (Forgive me if I left out any key events.)

And the destructive impact of the nuclear bomb that is ObamaCare will be a thousandfold greater if the so-called Slaughter Solution is ultimately used by the Democratic majority in the House.

If ObamaCare is enacted through the Slaughter Solution will America become in effect a dictatorship? Time will tell.

Note that I do not use the word dictatorship lightly but what else is one to call a government that in the face of overwhelming intense public opposition is hellbent on forcing the Mother of All Programs, an Enabling Act that will give President Obama and his apparatchiks control over virtually every aspect of our lives, through Congress without even bothering to take an actual vote on the legislation, which I might add, the public has yet to actually see. (Perhaps “soft tyranny,” a term used frequently by radio show host Mark Levin is a better description of what America is on the verge of becoming.)

ObamaCare enacted in itself would be bad enough but ObamaCare enacted by means of the Slaughter Solution would be intolerable. The healthcare takeover would be viewed by the public as illegitimate.

Who knows what might follow.

And to be fair, after the Colonels' coup that toppled fat Farouk and the ancien regime, and then Nasser rid himself of Colonel Naguib and the others and became the Supreme Leader, and decided to seize the property of the many different "non-Egyptian" Egyptians, some of whom were the descendants of families that had lived in Egypt and contributed, for centuries, to the economy, it wasn't only Jews who suffered, but Greeks, and Italians (few may recall that the poets Cavafy and Ungaretti were both born in Alexandria), and others too of those sometimes described in old books as "Levantines" of indeterminate origin. The Egyptian government seized the property of all of these hundreds of thousands of people, accumulated in some cases over the centuries. We can all see how the Egyptian economy started to flourish as soon as those awful "foreigners" were out of the way.

The idea for this synagogue renewal should be obvious: the Egyptian government wanted to pretend that it really was not quite the fomenter of antisemitism (and, not unrelated, anti-Americanism) in its vigilantly monitored media, that it is. It wanted to get some good press, and it wanted as well to do something that might attract tourists. What better idea than to fix up, after centuries of neglect, the synagogue associated with Maimonides, court physician during the Fatimid Dynasty, the one associated with the Kurd Saladin.

Two people are mentioned by name in the article: Farouk Hosny and Zahi Hawass. Both deserve a little attention.

As to Farouk Hosny, Egypt's Minister of Culture, what do we know? We know that for quite a while Farouk Hosny had been dreaming and scheming to become the head of UNESCO. He and the Egyptian government organized a campaign on his behalf. The fact that he had a long record of saying all kinds of "insane" things about Jews and Israel, and that this would-be head of UNESCO proudly declared that if he found any books by an Israeli in Egypt he would personally burn them, did not endear him to many, though the Arab and Muslim bloc stayed resolutely behind him. So he made much of the fact that he was a supporter of this repair-and-refresh-the-synagogue project. Could such a person harbor anti-Jewish sentiments, have said those things that were attributed to him, if he supported this synagogue project? In the simple-minded view of Farouk Hosny and his handlers and promoters, why of course not. What better and cheaper way to win friends and influence people, and to show that all that other stuff he was caught saying and writing didn't amount to a hill of beans, because...well, because of the synagogue he was grandly willing to allow to be repaired. Perfect camouflage for his long record of "nearly insane" statements.

Among those statements is the one he made in May 2008, in answer to a Muslim Brotherhood member of Parliament questioning cultural ties (what ties?) to Israel. Farouk Hosny said, "I'd burn Israeli books myself if I found any in libraries in Egypt." He had invited Roger Garaudy, formerly a stout Stalinist but latterly a convert to Islam with a line in Holocaust denial, to speak in Cairo. When this, and much more, came out, what did Farouk Hosny do? Oh, he hemmed, and he hawed, and he explained, and he explained away. But even the Anti-Defamation League, not exactly famous for being aggressive under its current management, declared that Farouk Hosny "has a long record of stymieing cultural relations with Israel, promoting censorship in Egypt, and making harsh anti-Israel and anti-Jewish statements." In 2001, Farouk Hosny had described Israeli culture and "inhuman" and even before that, in 1997, said that "the Israelis do not stop claiming that they built the [Egyptian] pyramids... This proves that Israel has no history or civilization..."

This was the man who on July 30, 2007, was nominated by the government of Egypt to succeed Koichiro Matsuura as Director-General of UNESCO.

A campaign led by Claude Lanzmann and Elie Wiesel was joined by many others; they said that a victory for Farouk Hosny "would be an obvious provocation so transparently contrary to the proclaimed ideals of the UN that UNESCO would not recover." And it was not they alone. Reporters Without Borders said that "this minister of Hosni Mubarak has been one of the main actors of censorship in Egypt, unfailingly trying to control press freedom as well as citizens' freedom of information." It's of note that his exploitation of the synagogue business, to burnish his credentials, or rather to forge his credentials, as someone who was not merely one more smilingly sinister antisemitic "minister of culture," was seen through even by a reporter for The New York Times, Michael Slackman, who in a report in September 2009 explained:

Egypt has slowly, quietly been working to restore its synagogues for several years. It has completed two projects and plans to restore about eight more. But because of the perception on the street -- the anger toward Israel and the deep, widespread anti-Semitism -- the government initially insisted that its activities remain secret.

So why the sudden public display of affection for Egypt's Jewish past?

Politics. Not street politics, but global politics.

Egypt's minister of culture, Farouk Hosny, wants to be the next director general of Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. In the context of this conservative Islamic society, Mr. Hosny, 71, is quite liberal, running afoul of Islamists when he criticized the popularity of women wearing head scarves, for example.

But to appease -- or please -- his local constituency, he said in 2008 he would burn any Israeli book found in the nation's premier library in Alexandria. He has apologized, but that has done little to end attacks on his candidacy to lead an organization dedicated to promoting cultural diversity.

So his subordinates sped up the restoration process. After a year of study, the work began in June. They pitched a blue tent, and held a news conference -- two, in fact -- right inside the old synagogue around the corner from Mr. Badr's shop. Mr. Badr said that was when he realized that the building with no roof and cemented-over windows was a synagogue.

In the West, Farouk Hosny fooled few, and his candidacy was defeated, and a Bulgarian lady elected in his stead. Here is how the Egyptian press reacted, characteristically, to this defeat:

"America, Europe and the Jewish lobby brought down Farouk Hosni," read a headline in an independent daily newspaper, Al Masry Al Yom. The foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, criticized "international Judaism and Western powers" in a television interview. Mr. Hosny himself helped stoke those sentiments, saying, "There was a group of the world's Jews who had a major influence in the elections who were a serious threat to Egypt taking this position." [...]

"He did not take an anti-normalization stand until the end," said Hossam el-Hamalawy, an independent Egyptian blogger and journalist. "The moment he lost he came back and started saying some of the most foul anti-Semitic statements against the Jews, confirming what the West had said about him."

Mr. Hosny lost his bid for Unesco, but tried to turn that into a victory at home, returning as a victim, and for the state-run media a hero. The charges of a Western, Jewish-Zionist conspiracy may have been amplified by a government eager to limit its embarrassment after having staked its credibility on Mr. Hosny.

So even The New York Times took note of how Farouk Hosny's sudden interest in this synagogue business seemed to coincide exactly with the period of the run-up to the election of a new head for UNESCO. But Farouk Hosny ultimately lost to a Bulgarian, and his enthusiasm for the project was not quite as it had been before. However, after a period of nursing his considerable amour-propre back to life, by blaming you-know-who, he decided once again to support completion of the synagogue as a way to.... Well, to attract tourists, to attract money, and to show the West just how advanced and tolerant and wonderful he, and Egypt, are, just in case there's an opening in some international agency for something to do with "culture." He's not stupid.

And then there's the other fellow. You know him. It's Zahi Hawass. He's the publicity-hound, the man always trying to squeeze the last bit of gold from museums and museum-goers when he grandly deigns to lend some mummies, or even the gold and other artifacts discovered by Howard Carter in the tomb of Tutankhamen. He's an entrepreneur, and a schemer, someone eager to wring the last bit of money from any exhibit using Egyptian artifacts. The Cairo Museum, so Western Egyptologists have told me, is not at all like museums in the West; its museological standards are low. The Museum itself was started by a Frenchman, Mariette, and until the day before yesterday, everything in it was supplied by Western - chiefly English - archeologists. I was told it is more like a warehouse than a museum, with things stored helter-skelter.

But Zahi Hawass appears frequently on the world stage, and no one who knows the real situation - that is these Egyptologists - dares to openly discuss him and the quality of his stewardship, because they need continuous access to Egypt and its antiquities, and can't cross him. I know of at least one academic Egyptologist who gave it up, because she could not stand the working environment in Egypt, the being constantly being squeezed for money, from the baksheesh-boys to the Egyptians higher up, and she has moved her interest further down the Nile, beyond the fourth or fifth or sixth cataract, and become, so I've heard, an expert on ancient Ethiopia. In a sense, she had a cataract operation, when the scales fell from her eyes.

Here's just a sample of Zahi Hawass to be found here:

Zahi Hawwas, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Council, wrote in Al-Sharq Al-Awsat that the "Jews of Palestine" are murderous by nature: "The concept of killing women, children and elderly people... seems to run in the blood of the Jews of Palestine. [In fact,] it seems to have become part of the false faith of this people, who is tormenting us in our [own] homeland.

"When I speak of the Jewish faith, I do not mean their [original] faith, but the faith that they forged and contaminated with their poison, which is aimed against all of mankind... The only thing that the Jews have learned from history is methods of tyranny and torment - so much so that they have become artists in this field. They have done to the Palestinians what Pharaoh and Sargon [of Akkad] did to the Jews..."

You get the idea. Same old, same very very very old.

Those who keep placing high hopes in Egypt should ask themselves what Egypt has done, over the past 40 years, to fulfill its side of the Camp David Accords. Has Israel been allowed to participate in the Cairo Film Festival? In Book Fairs? In anything at all? Does Egypt encourage Egyptians to visit Israel (as the Israelis so dearly wish), or does it do everything it can to discourage from doing so, and what's still worse, does nothing to prevent those who do go from being subject to all kinds of physical threats for doing so?

Does Mubarak ever visit Israel, as a neighbor with whom he signed a treaty of peace, or has he, over the past forty years, come to Israel only once, for the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, and has refused to come on any other occasion, though invited many times to be an honored guest? Remember, Israel scrupulously fulfilled its side of the bargain; it gave up tangible assets. It gave back to Egypt the entire Sinai (as it had done in 1956, only to see all of the solemn promises Nasser had made to the Great Powers ignored, with the last ones breached in mid-May 1967), together with sixteen billion dollars (in 1979 dollars) of infrastructure, which included roads, and the tourist complex of Sharm el-Sheikh (now a major source of foreign currency for Egypt), and three airfields built by Israel, and oilfields discovered and developed by Israel. And in return all it asked for was that Egypt cease hostile propaganda, and encourage, through tourism, and such things as film and book festivals, a friendlier attitude toward Israel and its people. What happened instead is that the Egyptians refused to allow Israelis to participate in events, attacked Egyptians who wanted a real peace with Israel, refused to allow Egyptian officials save for the Ambassador to visit, much less stay for a while, in Egypt. And in the government-controlled media, the people of Egypt were force-fed a steady of antisemitism, the apotheosis of this being the television series based on "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," that was put on a year or two ago.

Perhaps, with that further information, you will be able to better understand that what is being presented by Egypt, in stopping the celebration of the synagogue's opening, as a justifiable reaction to supposed misdeeds by people cavorting inside the synagogue in unseemly fashion -- what nonsense -- is nothing of the kind. It was to be expected. And of course Egypt feels it can do this with impunity because, at the very same time, the Obama Administration tells the world that Israel is behaving badly, what with letting a project to build apartments in Jerusalem, one that has reached the fourth of seven stages, has deliberately announced in order to "insult" Biden, and then Hillary Clinton, treating Israel like a vassal state, spent nearly an hour on the phone berating Benjamin Netanyahu (I can imagine him gritting his teeth and bearing it).

Just a little more information. Just another angle from which to look at things.

It always helps.

Ian McEwan has insisted that criticising Islam is not racist and blamed left-leaning thinkers for "closing down the debate".

It's not McEwan's first rodeo, either.

The Booker Prize winner said those who claimed judging Muslims was "de facto" racism were playing a "poisonous argument".

McEwan, 61, the best-selling author of novels including Amsterdam, Atonement and Saturday, thought many in the left wrongly took this position because they had an anti-Americanism shared with Islamists.

In an interview with today's Telegraph Magazine, McEwan said: "Chunks of left-of-centre opinion have tried to close down the debate by saying that if you were to criticise Islam as a thought system you are a de facto racist. That is a poisonous argument.

"They do it on the basis that they see an ally in their particular forms of anti-Americanism," he said.

"So these radical Muslims are the shock-troops for the armchair Left who don't want to examine too closely the rest of the package - the homophobia, the misogyny and so on."...

Judged simply by their content, it would be easy to misidentify the speaker who uttered the following quotes:

“The effects of global warming have touched every continent. Drought and deserts are spreading, while from the other floods and hurricanes unseen before the previous decades have now become frequent.”

Al Gore perhaps?

“The world is held hostage by major corporations, which are pushing it to the brink. World politics are not governed by reason but by the force and greed of oil thieves and warmongers and the cruel beasts of capitalism.”

Sounds a lot like something you might read at the Daily Kos.

“We must also stop dealings in the dollar and get rid of it as soon as possible. I know that this has great consequences and grave ramifications, but it is the only means to liberate humanity from slavery and dependence on America.”

That’s got to be George Soros, doesn’t it?

In fact, all three quotes are part of Osama bin Laden’s latest appeal to the world in an audio tape released last week by the Arab news network Al-Jazeera. The idea, no doubt, was to appeal to more “mainstream” anti-Americanism around the world. Those who help sabotage American industry and our economy, in other words, punish the infidels. Perhaps not quite as spectacular as blowing up a CIA outpost, but all contributions are gratefully accepted.

This is not to say that either Al Gore or George Soros are terrorist sympathizers (the jury is out on the Daily Kos). Rather, it’s to observe that radical messages tend to attract radicals. Bin-Laden’s self-serving green activism will resonate with people pre-disposed to distrust America, and alarmists like Gore have created the environment that allows this to occur.

There is much obvious, and laughable, hypocrisy in bin-Laden’s sudden concern for the environment. It was his terrorist organization, after all, that leveled the twin towers, which subsequently created the most horrendous air pollution disaster in the history of New York. If he’s really concerned about the environment, this Islamic warrior might also want to consider how Mother Earth fares in his ancestral home of Saudi Arabia.

The following is an anecdotal story, but one suspects it’s representative of a larger truth. I worked in Saudi Arabia, on and off, between 1996 and 1998, in the Red Sea port city of Yanbu. During my time there, I had occasion to drive up the coastal highway to observe operations at the Yanbu Cement Company, located about seventy kilometers north of Yanbu. (The bin-Laden family was then rumored to have an interest in Yanbu Cement, but I can not confirm it). At the time, Yanbu Cement operated three large kilns, essentially big rotating drums in which the ingredients that go into cement “cook” at high temperature.

In the United States, and in most all of the western world, cement kilns have to utilize pollution control devices to comply with environmental standards. Without such devices, these kilns would emit truly amazing amounts of air pollution. I was therefore shocked to observe a huge, menacing, dirty brown plume that ran for miles through the air above the Red Sea. Approaching Yanbu Cement, the source of that incredible smear on the atmosphere became obvious: none of the kilns at Yanbu Cement were controlled at all. The stacks belched out filthy plumes of soot at a rate that I have never observed then or since in over twenty five years of environmental practice.

This kind of story can be told again and again throughout the developing and third worlds. Those nations are not nearly rigorous about protecting the environment as the west, because environmental controls cost money to install and to operate. Accordingly, if everyone followed bin-Laden’s advice and, using the power of their purses, effectively transferred manufacturing capacity to such nations, the net result would be a far more polluted world.

But, of course, bin-Laden doesn’t really care about the health and welfare of the planet and its inhabitants. He’s just scrambling for talking points that he hopes will resonate with listeners who hate America. Al Gore and his disciples have unwittingly provided him with more ammunition to do so. That doesn’t make Gore a terrorist, but it’s surely further evidence of the unintended consequences that are bound to occur when you abandon science for the sake of a political agenda.