Steyn is honest enough to admit that when he was first asked to contribute to Wilders’ new book, his initial reaction was to say no. The main reason for this is the potentially high cost of being associated with a man who lives with constant death threats.

Yet, after taking a stroll in the woods, Mark Steyn felt ashamed at the ease with which he was caving in to the enemies of freedom, and decided to accept the offer after all. He recalled how the Canadian Islamic Congress boasted that their attempts by legal aggression to silence Steyn’s critical writings about Islam had cost his magazine substantial sums, and thereby attained their “strategic objective” of increasing the cost of publishing anti-Islamic material.

In the case of Geert Wilders, that cost is not merely limited to money. Despite being an elected Member of Parliament in what used to be one of Europe’s freest and most tolerant countries, he is regularly vilified by Western mass media. When trying to enter Britain, a nation that once was a champion of liberty, he was detained by plainclothes border guards on arrival at London’s Heathrow airport in February 2009 and deported from the country.

The democratic Dutch MP had been invited to the House of Lords, where Baroness Cox and Lord Pearson wanted to show his 17-minute Islam-critical film Fitna. The Home Office refused him entry on the grounds he “would threaten community security and therefore public security,” not because he threatened to use violence, but because Muslims might use it.

Lord Ahmed from the Labour Party, Britain’s first Muslim member of the House of Lords, the upper house of the British Parliament, pledged to bring a 10,000 strong force of angry Muslims to lay siege to Parliament. A spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain claimed that Wilders has been an open and relentless preacher of “hate.” At the same time, London has become a notorious intentional center for Islamic militants, who spew hate on a daily basis.

Geert Wilders accused the Labour government of Prime Minister Gordon Brown of being “the biggest bunch of cowards in Europe.” He was later allowed entry to the UK, however. He was also put on trial in the Netherlands accused of criminally insulting religious and ethnic groups. Wilders was eventually found not guilty in 2011, but the entire process took several years.

As Mark Steyn puts it, “He is under round-the-clock guard because of explicit threats to murder him by Muslim extremists. Yet he’s the one who gets put on trial for incitement. In twenty-first century Amsterdam, you’re free to smoke marijuana and pick out a half-naked sex partner from the front window of her shop. But you can be put on trial for holding the wrong opinion about a bloke who died in the seventh century. And, although Mr. Wilders was eventually acquitted by his kangaroo court, the determination to place him beyond the pale is unceasing: ‘The far-right anti-immigration party of Geert Wilders’ (the Financial Times)… ‘Far-right leader Geert Wilders’ (the Guardian)… ‘Extreme right anti-Islam politician Geert Wilders’ (AFP) is ‘at the fringes of mainstream politics’ (Time). Mr. Wilders is so far out on the far-right extreme fringe that his party is the third biggest in parliament.”

Maybe those who are out on the fringe are the ones who think that disliking Islam is “far-right.”

Yet it’s not just Wilders himself who is being attacked in this fashion. Those who dare to meet him or support some of his views could find themselves attacked by the mass media and the political elites in a comparable manner. Cory Bernardi, born and raised in Adelaide and currently representing the state of South Australia for the Liberal Party in the Australian Senate, in 2011 came under fire not only from members of other parties but also from his own — allegedly conservative — party when he wanted to facilitate a trip to Australia by Wilders.

Editor’s note: John Stossel will be speaking about his new book in a Freedom Center event at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills on Monday, April 23. Click here for details.

In his television specials and in books like Myths, Lies and Downright Stupidity: Get Out the Shovel – Why Everything You Know is Wrong and Give Me a Break: How I Exposed Hucksters, Cheats, and Scam Artists and Became the Scourge of the Liberal Media, reporter John Stossel has built an award-winning reputation as a tenacious debunker of commonly-held assumptions, and as a thorn in the side of business-as-usual bureaucrats. Now, as a welcome antidote to President Obama’s “Yes, we can!” big-government campaign mantra, comes Stossel’s latest book, No They Can’t: Why Government Fails But Individuals Succeed.

The libertarian Stossel hosts his own show and a series of specials on the Fox Business Network, and appears frequently on other Fox News shows. His consumer reporting has made him a nineteen-time Emmy winner and a five-time honoree for excellence by the National Press Club. Those familiar with Stossel’s laidback, plainspoken, eminently reasonable TV persona (and who isn’t?) will find it in full evidence here in No They Can’t as well.

The book’s thirteen chapters are devoted to a wide range of the biggest issues facing our government today, such as health care, the war on drugs, education, military spending, and the “budget insanity.” Stossel points out that our instinct is to believe that government can and should step in and resolve such problems. In a rhetorical device which he returns to frequently throughout the book, he posits “What Intuition Tempts Us to Believe: When there’s a problem, government should act.” He answers that with “What Reality Taught Me: Individuals should act, not government.”

Other examples of What Intuition Tempts Us to Believe: “If we just elect the right politicians, we can reinvent government and balance its books.” “Individuals are selfish, so we need government to ‘level the playing field’ and make life ‘fair.’” “The Food Police want to help us make better choices.” “It’s nice for people to have their say, but some speech is so hateful and offensive that we must limit it.” “Education is too important to be left to the uncertainty of market competition.” Chapter by chapter, Stossel systematically lays out his case for why these assumptions and many, many more about our government’s problem-solving capabilities are wrong on all counts, and why the truth is actually counter-intuitive.

The overarching, “most socially destructive” assumption of all, writes Stossel, is “the intuitively appealing belief that when there is a problem, government action is the best way to solve it.” For him, “Good government has to mean less government.” One would think that this sentiment would put Stossel squarely in the Tea Party camp. But he believes that even many Tea Party activists don’t want to cut the big government tether entirely (“61% of Tea Party sympathizers believe free trade has hurt the United States,” for example). And he notes that even Tea Party politician favorites can’t be trusted once they’re in office.

Now celebrating its tenth anniversary, Silicon Valley Reads is a program that encourages everyone in northern California’s Santa Clara County “to read the same book, at the same time, and talk about it.” If you think this sounds like a program ripe for abuse by progressives in our educational system promoting groupthink about a social agenda, go to the head of the class.

The program is presented by the Santa Clara County Office of Education, Santa Clara County Library and the San Jose Public Library Foundation, with funding from foundations, nonprofits, corporations, and private donors. Each year it offers several dozen free public events at libraries, schools, and other community locations. Speakers and panels, a film festival, book discussion groups, essay contests, teen book groups and children’s story times are all part of a concerted effort to focus the community on a given theme. According to their website,

between 4,000-5,000 individuals attend these events and thousands more read the featured books on their own, for high school and college assignments, and with their book clubs…

And of course, no progressive indoctrination is complete unless it targets children:

Silicon Valley Reads has also recommended companion books for children with themes similar to the featured book for adults. This allows families to read together and to discuss contemporary issues and themes.

The themes of past book selections have included illegal immigration, WWII Japanese internment, racism, and censorship. Now we come to the theme for 2012, kicking off on January 25: “Muslim and American – Two Perspectives.” If you suspect that the program will consist of the usual disinformation about Islam and whitewashing of its darker aspects, then you get a gold star.

One of the program’s two book selections is The Muslim Next Door, sporting the cutesy subtitle The Qur’an, the Media, and That Veil Thing and a disarming cover photo of author Sumbul Ali-Karamali smiling warmly. As she writes on the program’s website,

I hope this is only one step in many that will serve to erase misconceptions and build intercultural understanding.

In the ten-year span since 9/11, more non-Muslims than ever before have undertaken to learn about the Religion of Peace and are alarmed and disgusted by the totalitarianism, misogyny, violence, supremacism, and Jew-hatred that are evident in the foundational texts of Islam, in the pronouncements of its most respected imams, and in the behavior of its fundamentalist adherents around the world. And yet Muslims still insist that we’re laboring under ignorance and misconceptions; that our irrational fear, racism and cultural myopia are the problem; that if we just unquestioningly accept the vapidity of interfaith dialogue and the soothing reassurances of such non-threatening, Westernized apologists as the ones featured in Silicon Valley Reads, we’ll finally understand that worldwide jihad and all-encompassing sharia are nothing to fear.

The other book selection is The Butterfly Mosque: A Young American Woman’s Journey to Love and Islam by G. Willow Wilson, a Muslim convert who struggled to come to grips with “that veil thing” and ended by proclaiming that a woman in the Middle East “is far less free than a woman in the West, but far more appreciated.” The book comes with a front cover blurb by the rock star of academic apologists for Islamic supremacism, Reza Aslan. Ms. Wilson writes on the Silicon Valley Reads site that

the topic of Islam is loaded with emotional and political baggage, and only through open and honest communication can Muslims and non-Muslims come to a better understanding of one another.

I couldn’t agree more. Indeed Islam is loaded with emotional and political baggage, and I hope that, in the spirit of that “open and honest communication,” she will openly and honestly acknowledge the reasons why.

The 2012 Silicon Valley Reads program also features a panel discussion called “Paranoid Politics – Islamophobia, McCarthyism and the Yellow Peril,” described thusly:

Muslims are not the first group in America to be targeted by paranoid people who are afraid and looking for someone to blame. This will cover three periods in U.S. history when groups who are “different” – Muslims since 9/11, Jews during the McCarthy Communist witch hunts, and Asians during World War II – were persecuted in politics and the media.

Of course, American Muslims are not being targeted, and non-Muslims outraged about sharia and jihad are not “paranoid people looking for someone to blame.” Any reasonable person who follows the news is justifiably concerned about Islam not because Muslims are “different” but because Muslim fundamentalists have openly declared war on Western civilization and are waging global jihad, including on our own soil. Real-world Islamic terrorism and creeping sharia are the issues, not the phantom red herring “Islamophobia.”

Apparently a better relationship between Democrats and Republicans is in the eye of the beholder. One day after his State of the Union speech, where he told Americans that genuine reform can’t happen unless we “end the notion that the two parties must be locked in a perpetual campaign of mutual destruction; that politics is about clinging to rigid ideologies instead of building consensus around common sense ideas,” president Barack Obama had what might be charitably described as a less than cordial encounter with Arizona’s Republican governor, Jan Brewer.

“He was a little thin-skinned,” Brewer said during a later interview on local radio station News/Talk 92.3 KTAR. “I was a bit taken aback by his stance and his attitude [on the tarmac],” she added. noting that Obama walked away from her “[as] I was trying to make a point that I thought that my book was right and correct.” The book in question is “Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politicos to Secure America’s Border,” about Brewer’s approach to dealing with Arizona’s illegal alien problem. According to the governor, the president was “a little disturbed” regarding her description of a previous meeting between the two in the Oval Office on June 3rd, 2010.

At a press conference after that meeting, she described their talk as “very cordial, very very cordial.” Yet as one watches the video of that presser, one gets the impression that Ms. Brewer is carefully measuring her words. Apparently she was. In a review of the book published by the Arizona Republic, Brewer reportedly described the get-together as “one that started with some chitchat,” she writes. “But after a few minutes, the president’s tone got serious–and condescending.” She further noted that Mr. Obama “has repeatedly made fun of those of us who want to see the law enforced, saying we want a ‘moat’ with ‘alligators’ in it around our country. The reason he has resorted to these failed attempts at humor, I think, is that he supports a policy that is fundamentally undemocratic, and he knows it.”

Thus, what should have been a routine exchange of greetings between a visiting president and a state governor got testy. Brewer offered Obama a letter, which she later said was an invitation to sit down with her to discuss Arizona’s economic “comeback” and to join her for a tour of the U.S.-Mexican border. A brief exchange followed with Brewer pointing her finger at the president, and Mr. Obama apparently walking away before the Governor could finish what she was saying. A White House official seemingly confirmed Brewer’s account of the incident. “The governor handed the president a letter and said she was inviting him to meet with her,” the official noted. “The president said he’d be glad to meet with her again, but did note that after their last meeting, a cordial discussion in the Oval Office, the governor inaccurately described the meeting in her book. The president looks forward to continuing taking steps to help Arizona’s economy grow.”

This media-orchestrated kerfuffle obscures the larger political picture, one that was also addressed by the president in the State of the Union speech. “I believe as strongly as ever that we should take on illegal immigration,” said Mr. Obama. “That’s why my Administration has put more boots on the border than ever before. That’s why there are fewer illegal crossings than when I took office. The opponents of action are out of excuses. We should be working on comprehensive immigration reform right now.”

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David Horowitz’s book A Point in Time is at root an exposé on the nature of Time, that double-edged sword which, by obliterating all in its path, highlights the precious from the superfluous in our lives.

In structure, the book consists of Horowitz’s reflections — from his childhood and father to his deceased daughter and own mortality — not unlike the approach of Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius, whom the author quotes at length and has apparently learned much from (and a better instructor can scarcely be found).

But this is not an abstract or theoretical book; Horowitz often begins with the mundane and concludes with the profound.  So chapters starting with anecdotes concerning his pets progressively develop into philosophical reflections.  Nor does Horowitz merely quote the great men; he participates in and synthesizes their thoughts, showing their applicability to modern times.

For instance, the stoic emperor asserts that things outside us “do not touch the soul, for they are external and immovable; our perturbations come only from our opinion of them, which is within” — words to be echoed well over a millennium later by Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “Nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so.”  Horowitz simplifies: “You cannot alter the world, so do not make yourself miserable trying.”

Considering that the author has spent a great deal of his career as an activist, his musings — all of which lead to the inevitable conclusion that our lives are but a tiny speck in the spectrum of time, soon to be forgotten — make his reflections especially poignant; for here we have a man whose profession wholly revolves around “making changes” coming to the realization that “[t]his is nature’s way, to come and go.  Let it go.”  He even confesses to wondering whether, “knowing what I do now [i.e., the temporalness of life,] I would have been able to go forward at all.”

To continue reading this article, click here.

“America can wage war against us, the West can torment us, it doesn’t matter: the world has my Green Book,” Muammar Gaddafi held in a 1979 interview. “All we need to defend ourselves is The Green Book.” More than three decades later, Qaddafi remains a pariah—and his Green Book is as irrelevant as it was the day he proclaimed its importance. He boasted then that “my Green Book has resolved man’s problems.” In fact, fidelity to it has multiplied Libya’s problems.

Penned in 1975, The Green Book reads as Qaddafi’s imitation of Mao’s Little Red Book, updated for the ’70s and tailored for the Muslim world. Whereas Black Panthers far from China peddled Mao’s Little Red Book long after it was written, Qaddafi’s little green book has transcended neither Libya’s borders nor its Marx-on-the-march, mid-seventies publication date. Children still study The Green Book in Libyan schools. Elsewhere, the slim volume is read rarely—and only then as a curiosity.

The second month into a NATO campaign that hoped to oust the Libyan strongman in days, it’s clear that Westerners don’t understand Muammar Qaddafi. Reading his Green Book is a good place to start. Though it isn’t particularly germane to the world, the work sheds light on the personality that has repeatedly drawn the ire of the world.

Unlike Osama bin Laden, whose religious-laced rants leave secular Westerners perplexed, Qaddafi speaks our language. Ruling in a region overflowing with mullahs, monarchs, and murderers, Qaddafi curiously looked West, instead of around him, for inspiration in lording over Libya.

The Green Book’s opening pages offer a half-clever critique of Western democracy. In a parliamentary system, when 51 percent captures the legislative body, then “49 per cent of the electorate is ruled by an instrument of government they did not vote for,” Qaddafi points out. “Plebiscites are a fraud against democracy,” he subsequently writes. “Those who vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ do not, in fact, express their free will but, rather, are silenced by the modern conception of democracy as they are not allowed to say more than ‘yes’ or ‘no.’”

For several pages, Qaddafi adeptly highlights the shortcomings of various aspects of Western democracy. The crescendo of criticism grows, and the reader anxiously awaits the punchline—and quite a joke it is. “Popular conferences are the only means to achieve popular democracy,” Qaddafi, presumably straight-faced, asserts. “Any system of government contrary to this method, the method of Popular Conferences, is undemocratic.” After all that buildup a letdown naturally followed. All of the pointed-out drawbacks of Western-style governance appear more glaringly in the proposed “Popular Conferences.” This sophist’s lapse in logic could only emanate from an emperor whose votaries are afraid to tell him that he wears no clothes.

The opening sections rationalize the few controlling the many by demeaning the governmental systems where the many possess a check on the few. The control-freak mentality that inspires The Green Book’s advocacy of one-man rule—called “Popular Conferences”—also inspires its section on economics. There, the state is as all-powerful as it is in the political realm.

In the new modern, moderate, secular, democratic Egypt of the Arab Spring, Muslims in Qena are enraged and protesting because a Christian governor has been appointed for them. It was yet another indication that the Egypt that will emerge from this season of revolution and upheaval is much more likely to be an Islamic state than a secular democracy, no matter how much the mainstream media fantasizes about the latter.

The protests have been vehement, if not violent. Reuters reported Sunday that “thousands rallied outside the governor’s office in Qena and prevented employees from entering, blocked highways leading to the town and sat on a railway line into the province demanding that the appointment of Emad Mikhail be reversed.” A local resident added: “They started out by camping at the local government’s office. Then they set up a tent on the railroad tracks. They also tried to block the road and stopped buses to separate men and women passengers.” And “tensions were so high that the local Christian residents had to stay inside and couldn’t go to church to celebrate Palm Sunday.”

Reuters suggested that the protesters were angry about government corruption, claiming  that the protesters were outraged because the last Christian governor in the area “left a negative impression of Christian officials,” but AP let the cat out of the bag on Monday when it noted that “many” of the protesters were “from the ultraconservative Salafi trend of Islam.”

For the mainstream media, one is “ultraconservative” for adhering to Islamic law and wanting to impose it on others, and likewise “ultraconservative” for resisting the imposition of that law. But anyway, why would “ultraconservative” Islamic supremacists be outraged over a Christian governor? Because Islamic law forbids non-Muslims to hold authority over Muslims. This is in accord with the Qur’anic command that Muslims fight the People of the Book – the Qur’an’s term for primarily Jews and Christians, until they “feel themselves subdued” (9:29).

In Chicago politics, there’s an old term for the publicly subsidized pay-offs and positions meted out to the corruptocrats’ friends and special interests: boodle.

In the age of Obama, Hope and Change is all about the boodle. So it was with the stimulus. And the massive national service expansion. And the health care bill. And the financial reform bill. And the blossoming job-trading scandals engulfing the White House.

There’s always been an ageless, interdependent relationship between Windy City politicos and “goo-goos” (the cynical Chicago term for good government reformers). Chicago-style “reform” has always entailed the redistribution of wealth and power under the guise of public service. And it has inevitably led to more corruption.

In March 2010, this column first took note of allegations by Democrats Joe Sestak and Andrew Romanoff that the White House had offered them jobs in exchange for dropping their respective bids against Obama-favored incumbent Sens. Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania and Michael Bennet in Colorado. White House legal counsel Bob “The Fixer” Bauer’s attempt to bury questions about the Sestak affair with a Memorial Day weekend document dump failed. So has the attempt to make Rahm Emanuel-enlisted former president Bill Clinton the sole scapegoat.

Bauer’s memo mentions “efforts” (plural, not singular) to woo Sestak. But the White House refuses to divulge what offers besides Clinton’s were extended to Sestak. Moreover, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs has now denied that Team Obama was involved in the one Clinton offer that has been publicized — an unpaid appointment on an intelligence board for which Sestak was ineligible.

After months of silence, Romanoff finally stepped forward last week to acknowledge that the White House had dangled several positions before him, too. He released e-mails detailing not one, not two, but three different paid positions offered by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina — whose boss, Emanuel, was subpoenaed this week by impeached former Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich of Illinois to testify in his Senate pay-for-play corruption trial.

So, can I say “I told you so” now?

In July 2009, when “Culture of Corruption” was first released, liberal critics scoffed:

How could you possibly write a 400-page book about Barack Obama’s rotten administration when he’s only been in office six months?!

When I proceeded to rattle off case after case of Chicago-style back-scratching, transparency-trampling and crooked special interest-dealing in the new White House, liberal critics such as “The View’s” Joy Behar interjected:

B-b-b-but what about Bush? Why don’t you write a book about Bush? Wha-’bout-Bush? Wha-’bout-Bush? Wha-’bout-Bush?

When I pointed out that I had reported extensively on cronyism in the Bush era (see Harriet Miers, FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security), and when I further pointed out that while the Bush-bashing market overflowed, there remained a massive vacuum of critical analysis of Obama, liberal critics sputtered:

So what? Doesn’t every administration have corruption?

When I patiently explained that no other administration in modern American history had set itself up as loftily as the Hope and Change reformers had done, or when I cited endless examples of Obama’s broken promises on everything from lobbyists to transparency to Washington business as usual, liberal critics changed the subject again:

RACIST FASCIST EVIL FOX NEWS RIGHT-WING HATE MONGER!

Two major job-trading scandals plus the start of the Blago trial this past week — on top of a year’s worth of uninhibited White House wheeling and dealing, broken transparency pledges, Justice Department stonewalling and brass knuckle-bullying of political opponents — have finally turned the once-derided thesis of my book “Culture of Corruption” into conventional wisdom.

Obama sold America a Chicago-tainted bill of goods. A nation of slow learners is finally figuring it out.

Michelle Malkin is the author of “Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies” (Regnery 2010). Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com

Israel celebrated “Jerusalem Day” last week, which commemorates the 1967 reunification of the city following the Six Day War.  The celebrations and speeches were especially poignant in view of the Obama Administration’s decree that Israel must cease building in Jerusalem.

For Jews, Jerusalem is, has been, and always will be the symbol and the heart and soul of their national identity.  Jerusalem is mentioned almost 900 times in the Bible (767 in the King James Version and not a single mention of the city in the Koran) including Psalms (“If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning” – Psalm 137:5) and in the Passover Haggadah with the words “Next Year in Jerusalem” concluding the Passover service.  Through pilgrimages and prayers, Jews have demonstrated their love and yearning for Jerusalem for more than two millennia.  Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement, is derived from Zion, another name for Jerusalem.

King David made Jerusalem his capital in 1000 BCE and unified the nation around it.  The city became the political and spiritual center of Jewish life, with the Temple at its heart.  But it took one of King David descendants, King Josiah, crowned 2650 years ago, to fortify the Jewish nation with a memory of Jerusalem that has kept the Jewish people united together during the Babylonian exile and beyond.

At the age of twenty, King Josiah understood that the assimilation of Jews into the idol-worshipping cultures that surrounded them might doom his kingdom and his people. He, therefore, enacted religious and political reforms aimed at establishing a unified national and religious worship.

The struggle between Jewish particularism and universalism is as long as Jewish history itself.  On one side, there were those who sought to assimilate into the neighboring (or prevailing) culture and on the other side, there were those who were dedicated to preserving the Jewish particularistic nature. We all know the story of Hanukkah and the Maccabean revolt against Greek rule and their agents from within. It was King Josiah, whose father King Amon was an idol-worshipper, who helped to create a Zion-oriented, national and religious Jewish particularism.

Following King Solomon’s death, the unified kingdom of Israel split up.  The Kingdom of Israel turned its back on Jerusalem and adopted the idol-worshipping universalist culture of the surrounding lands.  It did not survive.  Conversely, the Kingdom of Judea, with Jerusalem as its capital, survived for almost a century-and-a-half thereafter.  Josiah’s particularistic Jewish kingdom prepared the Judeans and future generations against ultimate defeat and exile by rededicating the lost Book of Deuteronomy to the people.

Josiah’s revolutionary actions were based on shifting the focus of religious worship from the physical domain (sacrifices) to the spiritual domain with the reading of the Torah.  Josiah did in his time what Martin Luther did in 16^th century Europe.  By removing the exclusivity of the priests (in sacrifices) and the scribes, who read for the entire community, the common people were now compelled to learn how to read, altering their role as passive participants.

The Book – The Torah, which maintained a unitary focus on Zion, had a centralizing impact on Judaism.  Whereas sacrifices could be made at any place and for all “gods” or sovereigns, Josiah provided the Jews with a particularistic culture that is eternal and accessible to all the people.   Josiah was in a sense fulfilling Moses’ command in the Book of Deuteronomy 31:19, “Now therefore write ye this song for you, and teach it to the Children of Israel: put it in their mouths, that this song may be a witness for me against the Children of Israel.”

Josiah’s great achievement is in facilitating the rise of the synagogue as a replacement for the destroyed Jerusalem Temple.  The practice of reading from the Torah began with Josiah and continues to this day among all Jews. King Josiah was greatly aided and strengthened by the Prophet Jeremiah who preached during his reign.  Jeremiah tied together the notion that worshipping God in the City of David (Jerusalem) and the freedom from foreign oppressors the city afforded them, are connected by an unbreakable chain.  It was an essential Zionist message.

The full extent and meaning of Josiah’s revolution is seen with the returnees from the Babylonian exile, Ezra and Nehemiah.  While they were dedicated to the rebuilding of the Second Temple, they understood that the essence of public worship was concentrated in public prayer.  Ezra stood on top of a wooden platform and opened the book while the masses of Jews rose to their feet; he read from the Torah and translated it to the masses (many of whom had lapsed in their practice of Judaism in the absence of strong Jewish leadership following the general expulsion to Babylon.)

The sacrificial alters (used by Jews and idol-worshippers alike) were replaced by a new institution, namely the synagogue, where Jews assembled for worship without the sole orchestration of priests who came from Aaron’s lineage (Moses’ brother). Instead, they were led by scribes from all walks of life and from any tribe.

Josiah’s contribution to Judaism and Zionism is in having forged an intellectual revolution based on three elements: Concentrating the kingdom (nation) around Jerusalem or Zion, from which all spirituality emanates; abolishing the foreign idol-worshipping and foreign cultural influences that erode the national and religious strength; and transferring the centrality of religious worship from the physical (sacrifices of animals) to a spiritual and intellectual worship.

Modern celebrations of Jerusalem serve a two-fold purpose: to remember that 2000 CE Jerusalem marked its 3000 birthday and 2010 marked the 43^rd anniversary of the reunification of city.

The Obama administration’s attempted imposition of a building halt in Jerusalem and his anticipated division of the city is once again pitting universalist Jews (those who seek to be accepted and liked by the world) against particularistic Jews, (who see Jerusalem as the heart and soul of Jewish sovereignty and faith).  The Netanyahu government is currently in the midst of a debate on the building freeze.  In Prime Minister Netanyahu’s “Jerusalem Day” speech he vowed never to allow the division of Jerusalem. It remains to be seen, however, whether Netanyahu will follow the particularistic actions of King Josiah or succumb to the universalist culture and accept Obama’s foreign idols.

United Nations Just Condemned “Acts” Which Caused Flotilla Deaths

Once, Jews were persecuted because they had no ancestral home — and no army, navy, or air force. Now, Jews, both in Israel and around the world, are persecuted precisely because they have an ancestral home which dares to defend its citizens from deadly harm. This Jew-hatred refuses to die. And, Jewish-American, Jewish-European, and Israeli leaders have refused to recognize that the contemporary war against the Jews is bigger, and the consequences graver, than ever before in history, and that this war is primarily being fought—and won or lost — through propaganda and the manipulation of ideas. Leftist progressives and journalists in the West have joined forces with Islamists, and with the United Nations and human rights groups in propagating Big Lies against the small Jewish state.

I first wrote about this in 2001-2002 and published a book on the subject in 2003:The New Anti-Semitism. It made no difference. Jewish-American leaders pooh-pooed the book, or paid no attention to it. Many insisted that “right wing Christians” were the most dangerous Jew-haters. I disagreed then and I disagree now. Since then, many Jewish-American intellectuals have insisted that such “alarmism” should not be encouraged, that things have been “worse in the past” and that matters are not “that bad” now.

Oh, speak for yourself — but dare not speak for Israel. And, do not think that Israel’s fate is not your fate too, as well as the fate of Western civilization. And, it gives me no pleasure that, seven years later, more and more American Jewish organization leaders are beginning to sound as I once did. The unfunded and poorly funded grassroots groups are way ahead of the Fat Cats.

Here’s what we are up against. Palestinian terrorists call themselves “freedom fighters;” Turkish terrorists call themselves “humanitarians.” When propagandists appropriate and misuse language, reality is blurred, confusion reigns. When the “good people” label (Israeli) “self defense” as “aggression” — and this includes feminists who should know more about the importance of self-defense — one despairs, or at least hopes that serious people, including leaders, will see through the deception and set matters right. Failing that, one experiences vertigo.

Some Jewish-Americans believe that Israel only has itself to blame. And so they blame Israel before anyone else can do so—as if the Islamist mobs would spare such Righteous Jewish Exceptions from the kind of collective lynch mob-like fury that is currently taking place world-wide against Israel and that specifically took place on the Turkish boat Mavi Marmara.

No matter what the intellectuals say, the Jews are on the move again. They are leaving Europe, where they were born and emigrating to Israel or to the United States and Canada.

Read the rest at Pajamas Media

[This article is reprinted from the National Observer.]

One of the great unresolved questions of recent history is why so many members of the Western left have become so besotted with, and apologetic for, ruthless totalitarian regimes. There have always been Western leftists who have idolised brutal regimes — be it the Soviet Union, communist Cuba or Islamist Iran —and preferred them to their own countries in the free and prosperous West.

Others have documented this phenomenon, such as Paul Hollander in various classic works, including Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, 1928-78 (1981) and Anti-Americanism (1995).

Here, in his recent book United in Hate, Jamie Glazov makes an attempt at exploring and explaining the Left’s love affair with terror and tyranny.

Glazov is very well qualified to do so, and not only because he has a PhD in history, specialising in US and Russian foreign policy. His personal story contributes much to this book. His parents were Soviet dissidents who fought against communist tyranny and oppression.

They managed to escape to the US in 1972. Their initial taste of glorious freedom was soon soured when they learned that there were Western academics and intellectuals who actually hated them and the message they had to share. These Western apologists for Soviet murder and genocide wanted nothing to do with the Glazovs, and sought to denounce and demonise them in the strongest terms.

Read the rest at FPM

[This article is reprinted from the National Observer.]

One of the great unresolved questions of recent history is why so many members of the Western left have become so besotted with, and apologetic for, ruthless totalitarian regimes. There have always been Western leftists who have idolised brutal regimes — be it the Soviet Union, communist Cuba or Islamist Iran —and preferred them to their own countries in the free and prosperous West.

Others have documented this phenomenon, such as Paul Hollander in various classic works, including Political Pilgrims: Travels of Western Intellectuals to the Soviet Union, China and Cuba, 1928-78 (1981) and Anti-Americanism (1995).

Here, in his recent book United in Hate, Jamie Glazov makes an attempt at exploring and explaining the Left’s love affair with terror and tyranny.

Glazov is very well qualified to do so, and not only because he has a PhD in history, specialising in US and Russian foreign policy. His personal story contributes much to this book. His parents were Soviet dissidents who fought against communist tyranny and oppression.

They managed to escape to the US in 1972. Their initial taste of glorious freedom was soon soured when they learned that there were Western academics and intellectuals who actually hated them and the message they had to share. These Western apologists for Soviet murder and genocide wanted nothing to do with the Glazovs, and sought to denounce and demonise them in the strongest terms.

Back in the Soviet Union they had risked their lives to campaign for the millions who were being tortured and killed in the Gulag slave labour camps and psychiatric hospitals simply because of their political and religious beliefs. Yet in America they were being viciously attacked by an intelligentsia that loathed America while idolising communist barbarism.

It was a shock the young Glazov never really recovered from, and here he seeks to assess and understand this most bizarre feature of Western life. And with the onset of militant Islam, he sees the whole scenario again being played out before his eyes.

The first half of this important book covers the earlier cases of Western fascination with, and blindness to, totalitarian nightmare states. The Soviet Union, Castro’s Cuba and Mao’s China were all objects of wide-eyed leftist veneration and adoration.

Glazov reminds us of the words of the US ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph Davies, uttered during the height of Stalin’s murder of millions. He waxed eloquent in his love of Stalin with these words: Stalin’s “brown eye is exceedingly wise and gentle. A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him.”

French writer Jean-Paul Sartre could say this about another murderous thug, Fidel Castro: “Castro is at the same time the island, the men, the cattle and the earth. He is the whole island.” And Father Daniel Berrigan, another longstanding apologist for tyrants, could say this of Hanoi’s prime minister Pham Van Dong: he is an individual “in whom complexity dwells: … a face of great intelligence, and yet also of great reserves of compassion …”

Or consider the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who after capturing power in 1979 managed to carry out 8,000 political executions in the following three years. They made the nation a place of torture, repression and dictatorship. Yet plenty of Western leftists fell at their feet in worship.

German writer Günter Grass, who was shown a “prison” which the Sandinistas wanted political pilgrims to see — not the actual prisons where inmates were beaten, starved, tortured and killed — came back with euphoric exhilaration: “The humane way in which sentences are carried out!”, he gushed, along with other sentimental mush.

Of course, the Soviets had done just the same with the Gulag decades earlier, to fool gullible Westerners who came over for a look. Western left-wingers were just as ignorant and easily deceived in the 1930s or ’50s as they were in the ’80s.

And they still are. The second half of this book looks at Islamic terrorism, and its Western apologists. There are plenty of leftists in the West who are convinced that Islamic terrorism either does not exist, or is all America’s fault.

Again, Glazov offers plenty of examples. The September 11 atrocity provides plenty of quotes. Norman Mailer called the suicide-hijackers “brilliant.” He excused the attack by saying, “Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel which consequently had to be destroyed.”

Susan Sontag assured us that the terrorist attack was the result of “specific American alliances and actions.” Film-maker Oliver Stone affirmed that 9/11 was a “revolt” and said the ensuing Palestinian celebrations were comparable to those seen in the French and Russian revolutions.

Christian leader Tony Campolo could argue that 9/11 was a legitimate response to the medieval Crusades. German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen described the 9/11 attacks as “the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos.” On and on the apologists for terror and tyranny go. And then there is the inherent anti-Semitism in so much of this as well.

For many left-wingers, Israel is always the enemy, and the Muslim and Arab populations can do no wrong. Consider the remarks of Mike Wallace concerning Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the annihilation of Israel: “He’s an impressive fellow this guy. He really is. He’s obviously smart as hell. … You’ll find him an interesting man.”

These leftists offered more support for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein than they did for George W. Bush. Film-maker Michael Moore denounced the US while extolling the terrorists: “The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not ‘insurgents’ or ‘terrorists’ or ‘The Enemy.’ They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow — and they will win.”

Glazov devotes a chapter to seeking to examine the psychological makeup of these leftists whose romance with tyranny and terror seems so hard to fathom. They are alienated from their own homelands, although seldom realise it. They espouse a secular religion, a secular utopian vision which speaks much of humanity but is happy to see individual humans crushed in the attempt to create their coercive utopia.

The West-hating Left seems to be a permanent feature of modern Western life. Now that the communist revolution has lost its momentum, other causes must be found. The Islamist cause nicely does the trick. The same enemies are there, such as America, freedom and affluence.

As this book reminds us, we really have two enemies to contend with: murderous totalitarian ideologies of every stripe, and their Western leftist support base. It is an insidious alliance of which we all must be aware. This book does a fine job of making that very clear indeed.

Bill Muehlenberg is a commentator on contemporary issues, and lectures on ethics and philosophy. His website, CultureWatch is at: www.billmuehlenberg.com.

To order a copy of United in Hate, click here.

On May 7, 2010, UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES) and the Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies co-sponsored the lecture, “Rethinking Arab Women as ‘Subjects.’” The talk was delivered by Suad Joseph, a Lebanese-born professor of anthropology and women’s studies at UC Davis, and president-elect of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), the principal professional organization for scholars of the region. Joseph, who has co-edited a book with CNES director Susan Slyomovics, is considered a pioneer in the field of Middle East women’s studies, accolades which—as is, sadly, often the case—translates into apologetics for the oppression of Middle Eastern women.

Joseph announced she was perturbed about the title of her lecture; she couldn’t decide whether “Arab” was an appropriate term to use for identification purposes. Yet, she contradicted herself (and followed the Arabist practice of her discipline) by referring to the Middle East exclusively as the “Arab world” and by questioning the identities of Jews, Assyrians, Chaldeans, and other distinctive, regional minorities. She wondered why these groups perceive themselves as separate from Arabs when the answer is readily apparent both in the distinctive histories of theses peoples and in their persecution at the hands of Arab Muslim majorities. The very term “Arab”—often used arbitrarily to describe anything Middle Eastern—is loaded with a perilous and extreme nationalism that has made ethnic minorities such as Mizrahi Jews and Assyrians victims of the majority.

Joseph questioned, and at times denounced, studies examining the status quo of women in the Middle East. She argued that the representation of Arab women as subjects is a “problematic category and necessary one,” and that there is serious fault with characterizations—particularly in Western research and media—of Arab women as the victims of patriarchy, culture, politics, and religion. Instead, Joseph contended, notions of self are changing and malleable.

Predictably for contemporary Middle East studies, Joseph paid tribute to Edward Said’s deeply flawed book Orientalism, which helps explain her rejection of any implied Western superiority regarding women’s rights. In asserting that Westerners shouldn’t assume women in the Middle East wish to imitate secular, Westernized women, she encapsulated the ideology widespread on college campuses: multiculturalism, a form of cultural relativism that denies the ability to judge non-Western cultures on their merits, and which, in practice, judges all non-Western cultures as superior. She made no reference to universal human rights or to the possible reasons for rising Arab immigration to secular European nations and to North America.

Joseph asserted that Arab women are the “most relationship-driven” of any with which she has worked. She described Americans, in contrast, as less “relationship-driven” and American women as having fewer expectations than their Arab counterparts. Joseph offered no factual evidence for either of these preposterous claims. Given the grave circumstances under which many Arab women live, one would think it is they who are forced to have fewer expectations and not, as Joseph contended, Western women.

Incredibly, Joseph theorized that Arab women want to be claimed by men, and therefore have no objection to being subjects of a patriarchal and theocratic society in which their individual rights are abridged. The audience, which appeared to consist mostly of Center for Near Eastern Studies and Women’s Studies faculty, nodded their heads in agreement with this troubling statement. In fact, those gathered reacted favorably to the lecture overall and asked no challenging questions of the speaker. Overwhelming (if understated) evidence of the systematic and institutionalized abuse of Middle Eastern women didn’t seem to factor into the equation.

In many regions of the Middle East, the basic standing of women and the attitude of men towards them are pre-modern. Were this not so, there would be no honor killings, female genital mutilation, child marriage, or legitimized wife-beating. Moreover, the West should consider the disturbing social implications for its societies as these barbaric customs are imported through Muslim immigration.

If I may end on a personal note: As a woman of Middle Eastern origin, the situation of women in the Middle East has always fascinated and troubled me. Although I come from a very traditional Middle Eastern family—albeit Jewish—the women in my family have always been empowered and independent. Therefore, I find it extremely difficult to come to terms with the theory that Middle Eastern women are a different breed who welcome abuse for some twisted concept of maintaining a “relationship-driven” society.

If one believes, as I do, in fundamental human rights, there are moral principles that define our basic freedoms. Middle Eastern women’s rights activists such as Shirin Ebadi and Ayaan Hirsi Ali do not excuse the misogynistic and theocratic elements in their native countries. Instead, they demand freedom, even in the face of their abusers and of Western apologists.

Unfortunately, Joseph’s lecture belongs in the latter category, demonstrating yet again that Middle Eastern women who seek intellectual and moral support from Western professors of Middle East studies will come away disappointed.

Reut Cohen is a journalist, researcher, and the publisher of ReutRCohen.com. She wrote this article for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum.

NewsRealBlog: Do you see a double standard on the part of Muslim students at Universities?

Jyette Klausen: In the UK I have been concerned that non-Muslims students have so willingly absorbed the lesson preached by the radicals that Islam “forbids” this and that, and everyone who disagrees is Islamophobic.

NRB: Do you have any examples of this?

Klausen: When I showed the Danish cartoons during a talk at a UK university, a few non-Muslim students came up afterwards and said ‘We are surprised you showed those images that are so offensive to Muslims without first asking permission from the audience.” Meanwhile, the one Muslim student in the audience laughed his head off. “I am a Marxist,” he explained, “go on, insult religion. It is all, you know, “opium for the people.

NRB: Are you referring to all Muslim students?

Klausen: The secular Muslims are religious but not politicized. They are often the first in the line of fire from the radicals.

NRB: Do you think western countries have an equal attitude toward all religions?

Klausen: In Western Europe there is a lot of reaching out by Mayors to the Muslim communities and not as much to Christians and Jews. There is not an equity approach to the different faiths. I am in the process of writing a book on this.

NRB: Do you see a lot of Muslims speaking out against the Islamic extremists?

Klausen: In the UK there was leading Muslims who defended the extremists and made excuses for them. Today, in America, people are falling off the radar because they are Muslim Americans. I don’t think radicalized Americans are lone terrorists but I consider them volunteers of a movement.

NRB: Can you summarize what happened with your book, The Cartoons that Shook the World?

Klausen: Yale’s chief legal counsel told me that they had decided to remove the illustrations of Mohammed from my book because they were concerned about America’s interests abroad. I was told if Yale published those illustrations it would cause riots in Pakistan, Muslims would be offended, and that I should be afraid of my own life because defacing Mohammed is a death penalty offense in Pakistan.

NRB: What was your reaction?

Klausen: I thought it ridiculous to make the Pakistan standard our legal standard. This person in Yale took it upon herself to internalize Pakistani sensitivities. I think it is very dangerous that we are doing this to ourselves.

NRB: What would you suggest to the Universities that have a double standard?

Klausen: We must push back against this in a big way. People should speak out against these threats and prosecute them. I was hoping people would come to their senses but at this point I am disappointed.

NRB: You pointed out in one of your books that Mohammed is depicted on the United States Supreme Court building. Can you comment?

Klausen: It was not considered blasphemes. A fatwa from a learned authority in Mecca made a ruling. The fatwa said that this was a respectful depiction of the prophet as a statesman, as a lawmaker, and that Muslims should be proud that a Christian state in its highest court would recognize the contribution of the prophet to Western law and its own history.

NRB: Do you think the extremists would agree?

Klausen: No. They are against anything that is a public symbol. They go against anything with high symbolic value.

NRB: What books are you currently working on?

Klausen: I am working on a study on the development of Western Jihadists starting in 1999. The other book in the works is on the Christian-Islamic controversy.

NRB: What do you think is happening in American Universities?

Klausen: The primary concern is the mad unraveling of our own standards and our unwillingness to stand up. A right is no good if you don’t use it.

You couldn't fault either one for having their hearts in the right place. They both know that women are mistreated terribly in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world. But they insisted on talking about the "Greater Middle East," which, listeners were to gather, extended all the way from Egypt to Afghanistan. The only reason for such a curious, and untraditional, way of referring to such a wide swath of the world is to avoid the identifying marker of "Islam." So what really connects such countries as Egypt and Iraq and Afghanistan is not that they are part of some new construct, "the Greater Middle East," but that they are part of the world of Islam.

But it is Islam, and the possibilities for change within Islam, that is nonetheless the topic that both women were addressing. And they seemed to think, in slightly different ways, that to identify Islam as the problem is itself a problem. Or perhaps we should avoid the word "problem" altogether, because such a word, to many Americans, implies that there exists a solution. But in this case there is no solution to the mistreatment of women in Islam, only here and there some amelioration, with the permanent threat of backsliding into the full-fledged Holy Law of Islam, or Shari'a, which is never good for women. The word that one might prefer to "solution" is that the texts and tenets of Islam explain, that is, constitute not a problem to be solved but rather the explanation for the mistreatment of Muslim women by Muslim men according to the ideal Muslim Holy Law, that is, the Shari'a, and the man-made laws that ideally try to approximate it or take as their guide.

I had heard Isobel Coleman previously on NPR ("Fresh Air," January 25, 2010) and remembered how she had recognized that things were very bad for women in Muslim countries but that she also was offering the hope that within Islam itself there was room for hope and change because, you see, of its variousness (impliedly "so un-monolithic"), with its four schools of Sunni jurisprudence, and ample welcoming room for differing interpretations of things. Why, it sounded as if Islam could simply be turned this way and that, that it was a big tent, and one could make of it what one wished. She said that there was "room for selective interpretation" - I was glad that the word "selective" was in there, but unhappy that she did not explain why she deliberately included that modifier, and did not explain in what ways those four schools of Sunni jurisprudence mattered when it came to the treatment of women. For if she had done so, her listeners would have understood just how little difference there is between those "four schools" of Sunni jurisprudence, and would have seen just how little room there was for "selective interpretation" when it came to the treatment of, the rights of, women.

And she also said that the situation was "fluid and evolving." But what did this mean? Did it mean that Islam itself was "fluid" and "evolving"? If so, it is doing so in a way that none, I think, of the celebrated apostates - Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish, Ibn Warraq, Magdi Allam - that is, those who were born into and raised within Islam, and having come to the West and enjoyed a sufficient degree of mental freedom, and freedom from physical fear, as to have decided to leave Islam altogether - have publicly or privately recognized. They think, they steadily and sturdily maintain, that the problems and failures and miseries of the Muslim states and peoples are a direct result of Islam itself. And they do not see that situation within Islam that is "fluid" and "evolving" that Isobel Coleman referred to when she spoke to Terry Gross back in late January.

But let's get back to the program I listened to on NPR the other day. Sakena Yacoobi was on. She was describing the problems of women in Afghanistan. She has found that women who learn to read can then read the Qur'an in their own language, and once they do that, she says, they are able to find the texts that support the "empowerment" - the word wasn't used, but the meaning was that associated with that rebarbative word - of women. Of course there are verses that are more and verses that are less hostile to women in the Qur'an. But Sakeena Yacoobi, and Isobel Coleman too, seem to think that women, reading the Qur'an, selecting out the verses that they think can be made to support a more decent treatment of them, are not going against the texts. Yet one of the things they did not mention is that the earlier, milder verses are, whenever they seem to be contradicted by later, harsher verses (some call these the Meccan and Medinan verses), it is the earlier verses that, according to the doctrine of naskh, or abrogation, must give way.

I noticed that at no time did Sakeena Yacoobi, or Isobel Coleman, offer a single verse from the Qur'an, or story recording the words and acts of Muhammad from any of the authoritative collections of Hadith, of the sort that could be used to transform - we're all in the business of "transformative" change these days, aren't we? - the role and status of women in Islam. There are many verses in the Qur'an, and many stories in the Hadith, that support what non-Muslims would regard as the mistreatment of women. In those countries where the Shari'a is most closely followed - Saudi Arabia, Iran, Pakistan, Sudan, and now Somalia -- women are most limited. They are subject to the strictest dress codes (and punishments for violating those codes are meted out by the religious police and the Islamic courts). They are required to be accompanied by a male relative, and in Saudi Arabia, the country with a legal code closest to the Shari'a, women cannot even drive.

But Sakeena Yacoobi is seemingly unaware that her entire effort depends on the existence of a powerful Infidel army that protects her. She thinks that she is transforming the Islamic world because here and there, with foreign money and foreign support, she is able to convince humble Afghan women that yes, the Qur'an is - here and there, in her highly selective reading - on their side, and manages to convince men that in some cases it is okay, for example, for women to work. It may not be hard to convince them that the Qur'an and Hadith sanction this because of Muhammad's first wife, famously a businesswoman (and always invoked by those who want to defend Islam from charges that it limits the possibilities for women), given that Afghan men no doubt would like women to provide that extra income.

The problem is that so much depends on the continued presence of the American and NATO troops, because in the end, the textual authority remains what it has been for 1350 years, that is, promoting a view of women that does not permit them anything like equality. Even though the legal equality that women now enjoy in the West was not always observed, even though it has been fashioned over the past two hundred years, there was always in posse, and in social understandings, a much greater role for, and higher status for, and better treatment of, women in the Western world than in Islamic societies. And the textual authority that supported the mistreatment of women in the West was never like what it is in Islam. You can simply go to www.faithfreedom.org to find a list of Qur'anic passages and Hadith from Bukhari and Muslim that support the unequal treatment of women, clearly and unambiguously, while those who, like Sakena Yacoobi, attempt to convince Muslim women in Afghanistan that there is textual authority for "re-thinking" the role of women in Islam are working against the texts, against the grain, and have to every day exercise their skills, the Muslim equivalent of Jesuitical casuistry, in order to convince Muslim women and, especially, their menfolk, that such and such is sanctioned by Islam.

Sakeena Yacoobi made some remarkable statements, statements that reflect not a truth about Islam but rather, the wishful thinking of someone who is convinced that the only way to change the fate of Muslim women is to convince them that the authority for freer, less constrained, less onerous lives, already exists within Islam itself and, over the past 1350 years, has simply not been paid sufficient attention, presumably because "the men" have done all the interpreting. I both read the transcript and listened to the tape, because I thought that Sakena Yacoobi's very voice, its modulation, its loudness, would reveal something. I do not think I am wrong in suggesting that there is an underlying insistence, at times almost subdued hysteria, when she insists, so very strongly, that there is nothing wrong with Islam, that Islam is just fine, that the only problem is in getting the right interpretation accepted as if, over a very long period, and especially in the first decades of the twentieth century, there was not such a push. Here, for example, is what Sakena Yacoobi, who refuses to admit that there might just be a very big problem with Islam that is not to be overcome, is heard saying at one point:

"...and as Isobel said, we are not just telling them to read Quran. We teach them how to read Quran then interpretation and to understand that. And what does Quran says? Quran is all about right, about democracy, about justice, about equality, about advancement. That is the way that Quran teaches us if we really understand that. If we don't understand and we read in Arabic, we will not be accomplishing anything and we just, like, follow whatever they said to us. And when they want to abuse us and submissive women in Afghanistan, the way that they abuse them so they listen in whatever they say, they listen to them and that was the way it went."

As for Islam being all about "equality" - what in god's name can she be talking about? Equality of men and women, when a man can marry four women but a woman only one man? When a man can triple-talaq his way out of any marriage, even apparently being able to fax home his triple-talaq message for it to be valid? When male heirs inherit more than female ones? Where the blood-money payable for a murder is twice as large for a male victim than for a female? When the Qur'an itself gives instructions on how, and how hard, to beat a wife? When the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man? When, where there is accusation of rape, a woman must have four male witnesses? Where, when a woman is raped, or perhaps even just looked at, her family - in order to protect the honor of the menfolk -- it is she who is in danger of being killed by her own father, or brothers, or uncles, or all of them put together?

Or is Sakena Yacoobi perhaps referring to the "equality" between Muslims and non-Muslims, which of course does not exist, for in Muslim societies non-Muslims generally lead lives of constant humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity, whether or not the Jizyah is formally exacted? Just look at the Copts in Egypt, or the Chaldeans and Assyrians in Iraq, or even the once-powerful Christians in Lebanon, still trying to hold on, or the Christians in Syria who owe their reasonable treatment, such as it is, not to any benevolence on the part of hostile Sunni Muslims, but to the protection that an Alawite dictatorship offers them, out of calculations of self-interest. And while the Christians also suffer in Pakistan, and Bangladesh, and Indonesia and Malaysia, so too do the Hindus, the Buddhists, and the Confucians who may exist in one or more of those countries. The only Muslim-dominated countries where there is something approaching "equality" in the legal sense is in some of the former Central Asian republics, where during Soviet rule Islam was subject to the same anti-religion campaign as was seen elsewhere, and it had its effect in weakening the hold of Islam on the minds of men. And there is one more country where there is legal equality for non-Muslims, but where they are still made to feel, and ever more so, that they exist as non-Muslims not by right but by sufferance, and that is Turkey. And the reason that non-Muslims, and Muslim women, have it better in Turkey, have a kind of equality, is due entirely to the war made on Islam, undeclared but clear, that was waged in the 1920s and 1930s by Ataturk.

I won't go into the rest of the absurd claims made for Islam by Sakina Yacoobi. We all understand her situation and sympathize, and wish her well. But that sympathy and well-wishing must not become acceptance of her own misrepresentations of Islam, and still worse would be any parroting of them to others. She may be fighting for women's rights, but she herself has been affected by Islam, and apparently never permitted herself the mental freedom that Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Wafa Sultan and Nonie Darwish took advantage of, to arrive at their unsparing analysis of Islam and its effects on its adherents. Or perhaps, since she spends so much of her time trying to convince Afghan women and their menfolk that the Qur'an actually is a great defender and promoter of women's rights, she has come to partly believe her own presentation. On NPR the other day she forgot that she was now addressing an audience that did not have to have Islam described, falsely, as the Afghan women (and men) she works with do. She forgot she was now addressing an audience that did not have to be, for laudable goals, misled with such statements as "Qur'an is all about right, about democracy, about justice, about equality, about advancement."

And the same kind of thing, I'm afraid, can be found in the work - to judge by what she has said on NPR and the précis of her latest book at her website -- of Isobel Coleman. Once a McKinsey consultant and then, for two years, the CEO of a health-services company, Isobel Coleman somehow gave that up to become a student of women in Islam. No doubt her highly presentable soignée appearance worked its customary magic, and the right degrees (Princeton, then a Marshall Scholar), and the self-assurance that sometimes comes just a bit too easily with them, allowed her to end up at the Council of Foreign Relations as head of their "Women and Foreign Policy" program. Much in evidence in her list of interests are things having their day in the sun: microcredit, the "empowering" of Muslim women, that sort of thing. Nothing wrong with those interests. We'd all like, I suppose, to disburse microcredit hither and possibly yon, and also to "empower" (forgive the quotation marks; I can't stand the word, so I'm using it but insisting that I've never laid eyes on that word in my life) Muslim women if, in so doing, we improve the chances for non-Muslims in Muslim countries, and for that matter, for non-Muslims in non-Muslim countries.

Isobel Coleman does not repeat the nonsense that Sakina Yacoobi offered, but she has come to the same conclusion that perhaps explains Sakina Yacoobi's statements. That is, she thinks it is simply impossible to make progress in improving the lot of women except within the religious framework, that is, by accepting Islam, by doing nothing to undercut Islam, and by playing some variant on the game of Let's Pretend that Sakina Yacoobi plays, where we are all expected to believe that Islam is now, at long last, after 1350 years, going to change. We must pretend this at a time when Muslim states have been the recipients (since 1973 alone) of some thirteen trillion dollars in oil wealth, and are prepared to pocket, in the next decade or two, another thirteen trillion. We must pretend this at a time when millions of Muslims have been allowed to settle deep within the countries of Western Europe, to claim every benefit - free medical care, free education, free or heavily subsidized housing. And at the same time they conduct in every one of these countries aggressive campaigns of Da'wa, often targeting the psychically and economically marginal (as prisoners, who often belong to both categories), and making demands for changes in the social arrangements and understandings, and in the legal and political institutions, of the countries they live in, deep behind what they themselves are taught to regard as enemy lines. The time when the "reformers" of Islam or, more exactly, those who within the Islamic world wished to constrain Islam, actually had influence was in the early twentieth century, when Muslims were obviously backward, obviously weak. But now that backwardness is not so obvious, because of the torrents of trillions of dollars that keep on flowing, not because of any effort on the part of any Muslims, not because they have at long last managed to create modern economies (the richest oil states have still not been able to do that, and there is no sign that they will be able), but because of an accident of geology. But that money can buy a lot, can provide the veneer of an advanced state, can allow people to pretend that Islam is not an economic failure (because of the hatred of bid'a, or innovation, and the inshallah-fatalism that discourages great and sustained effort).

Isobel Coleman mentioned to the NPR interviewer, more than once, the word "Ijtihad." That word refers to the "interpretation" of the Qur'an and Hadith. In the case of the hadith, the labor of the muhaddithin was devoted to collecting, and then assigning, based on a study of the chain of transmission or isnad-chain, the likely level of "authenticity" of each Hadith recorded. There are several authoritative collections, and the two most respected muhaddithin are Bukhari and Muslim. This work had to be done by Qur'anic commentators and jurisconsults in the early centuries of Islam, for there had to be a clear shared understanding of what the Qur'an's passages meant, and what the work as a whole meant. One way to do this was to use the Sunnah - consisting of the Hadith and Sira - as a kind of gloss to the Qur'an. Of course many of the Hadith must surely have been spun from the contents of the Qur'an, so there was a certain circularity to this. And where there were passages in the Qur'an that contradicted other passages, a principle of interpretation - abrogation or naskh - required that the earlier passage be ignored, as having been overruled by the later, and always harsher one.

In order to find out a bit more than was on the NPR program about Coleman's new book, I went to her website. And I saw that book has received three endorsements from people whose names you might well recognize, famous people, therefore people whose praise may carry weight with a certain audience. But I'll come back to those endorsements later.

Here is what I found at her website, that describes her just-published book:

Over the centuries and throughout the world, women have struggled for equality and basic rights. Their challenge in the Middle East has been intensified by the rise of a political Islam that too often condemns women's empowerment as Western cultural imperialism or, worse, anti-Islamic. In Paradise Beneath Her Feet, Isobel Coleman shows how Muslim women and men are fighting back with progressive interpretations of Islam to support women's rights in a growing movement of Islamic feminism.

In this timely book, Coleman journeys through the strategic crescent of the greater Middle East--Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan--to reveal how activists are working within the tenets of Islam to create economic, political, and educational opportunities for women. Coleman argues that these efforts are critical to bridging the conflict between those championing reform and those seeking to oppress women in the name of religious tradition. Success will bring greater stability and prosperity to the Middle East and stands to transform the region.

Coleman highlights a number of Muslim men and women who are among the most influential Islamic feminist thinkers, and brilliantly illuminates the on-the-ground experiences of women who are driving change: Sakena Yacoobi, an Afghan educator, runs more than forty women's centers across Afghanistan, providing hundreds of thousands of women with literacy and health classes and teaching them about their rights within Islam. Madawi al-Hassoon, a successful businesswoman, is challenging conservative conventions to break new ground for Saudi professional women. Salama al-Khafaji, a devout dentist-turned-politician, relies on moderate interpretations of Islam to promote opportunities for women in Iraq's religiously charged environment. These quiet revolutionaries are using Islamic feminism to change the terms of religious debate, to fight for women's rights within Islam instead of against it.

There is no mistaking that women and women's issues are very much on the front lines of a war that is taking place between advocates of innovation, tolerance, and plurality and those who use violence to reject modernity in Muslim communities around the world. Ultimately, Paradise Beneath Her Feet offers a message of hope: Change is happening--and more often than not, it is being led by women.

Just look at what Coleman offers. She shows us "how Muslim women and men are fighting back with progressive interpretations of Islam to support women's rights." What "progressive interpretation" is that? Based on what passages in the Qur'an, and which Hadith, and ignoring how many other passages in the Qur'an, and how many other Hadith? Does Coleman really think that in Egypt, where women now lack the easygoing and relaxed ways that they enjoyed even under Nasser, and certainly under the ancient regime and before that under Lord Cromer's dispensation, a "progressive interpretation of Islam" is winning? Does she think that it is "winning" anywhere in North Africa? What about the Sudan? How about Saudi Arabia? Is a "progressive interpretation" of Islam what made Kemalism able to constrain Islam in Turkey? And in any case, is there not now in Turkey obvious backsliding, away from Kemalism and the constraints on Islam, right back to what Erdogan rightly says is Islam, not a non-existent "moderate Islam" that is a figment of Western imaginations? In Iraq, are women now freer, or less free, than they were under Saddam Hussein? Saddam Hussein sensed rightly that his worst enemies were in the Shi'a mosques, and so used the shallow "secularism" of Ba'athism to disguise what had always been a Sunni despotism, but this one offering possibilities for Shia, and Kurds, and even Christians, though in tiny numbers, if they adhered formally to Ba'athism and thus helped participate in that disguise.

But the book seems to suggest that great and wonderful things are happening everywhere. It's one of those books that no doubt, in the fashion of Tom Friedman or the equally execrable Nicholas Kristof, provides little vignettes - possibly a chapter each -- to a handful of women "transforming the Greater Middle East." She travels through that "strategic crescent" of lands and shows "how activists are working within the tenets of Islam to create economic, political, and educational opportunities for women." Well, you may think it unfair of me because I have not read the book, and am relying on her appearances on NPR, and what I have picked up at her own website, where the detailed description of the book is to be found. But I don't have to read it. It is not possible to "work within the tents of Islam" to "create economic, political and educational opportunities for women," because for 1350 years there have been people in Islam trying to do that, and it is not conceivable that all of a sudden, a few brave thinkers have come along and figured out exactly what can be teased out of the Qur'an and Hadith and the example of Muhammad in the Sira. What has changed is simply that the Muslims are now so threatening and so disturbing, that the Western world is engaging in wishful thinking instead of clearly and soberly analyzing the threat, instead of listening to any of the many articulate apostates (Ibn Warraq, Magdi Allam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Nonie Darwish and others who may not be as famous or even wish to be named), instead of consulting the great Western scholars of Islam, including Joseph Schacht and C. Snouck Hurgronje and Henri Lammens and Samuel Zwemer, and St. Clair Tisdall and many others. All of them wrote about a subject, Islam, that has not changed, so their work remains as relevant and piercing and useful as ever. They all wrote before the Age of the Great Inhibition set in, which means they do not offer the usual apologetics we have come to expect from both non-Muslims - those assorted espositos and armstrongs - and Brave Young Reformers of Islam who are nothing of the kind - the assorted khaled-el-fadls or reza-aslans - but merely slightly more plausible and smooth apologists.

Coleman is described in this as arguing that "these efforts [of these Muslim women working within Islam] are critical to bridging the conflict between those championing reform and those seeking to oppress women in the name of religious tradition. Success will bring greater stability and prosperity to the Middle East and stands to transform the region."

Note that phrase: "seeking to oppress women in the name of religious tradition." That's a strange phrase. They do not "seek to oppress women" in Muslim lands, following not "a religious tradition" which is a diluting, or a distancing, way of describing the texts and tenets of Islam. For a "tradition" is something that can be changed, or dropped. But Islam is a belief-system that takes as the immutable and uncreated and literal word of God what is in the Qur'an. It will not, dares not, tamper with the Hadith, either with their contents or with their assigned rank as to "authenticity." It certainly cannot at this stage start fiddling with the details of the life of Muhammad - the Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil. There is no possibility, among the vast and primitive masses of Muslims, to change their understanding at Islam.

Isobel Coleman's Holding-Out-Hope-Through-Jesuitical-Casuistry is no doubt practiced, with results not quite as impressive, and the meaning of which are not quite understood, by that handful of brave Muslim women such as Sakena Yacoobi who constitute the "examples" of hope and change that Isobel Coleman writes about. But it is actually worrisome, in a way many good, nice, kind people, including Isobel Coleman and Sakena Yacoobi, may not understand. For it is a false promise that one can rely on finding - like W. C. Fields who when asked why he was reading the Bible said he was "looking for loopholes" - a phrase here, or a detail there, in the Qur'an, Hadith, Sira, and somehow persuade more than a handful of women eager to be persuaded. And they are even able to conduct this effort in "redefining Islam" only so long as the American army remains to protect those who, like Sakena Yacoobi, are engaged in this mission.

The people we must worry about, care about, help to inform, help to properly alarm, about the instruments of Jihad - the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, demographic conquest - are ourselves, the non-Muslims of this world, and especially the imperiled peoples of Western Europe. For it is these people, the advanced non-Muslims, who have so much to lose. Think of a Europe becoming steadily Islamized, steadily yielding to demands to change its legal and political institutions, its educational system, its social arrangements and understandings, its practice of art and science, its solicitude for the individual and distrust of collectivism, its natural revulsion toward the Total Belief-System of Islam. The losses will be general to the Western world.

In Iraq the messianic sentimentalism of the Bush Administration led to folly, the folly of believing that one could bring "freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" in the Middle East. It is now understood that Bush and his policy advisers had no real understanding of Islam, and certainly no grasp of the sectarian and ethnic fissures that exist in Iraq and can be exploited not to make the Middle East "a better place" but, rather, to divide and demoralize the Camp of Islam, and not only in Iraq but in countries where, for example, the Sunnis and the Shi'a may be affected by conflicts between their co-religionists inside Iraq.

In Afghanistan, I'm afraid, it is these "empowerers" of women who offer a different kind of not-quite-so-messianic sentimentalism. They believe that somehow, on a large scale, they will be able to persuade men to change their understanding of Islam. But the American army stands there to guard these efforts. And Afghan women have a non-Arab identity that does help work against, rather than reinforce, as the Arab identity does, the level of unswerving and unquestioning attachment to Islam. The same is true, though at the moment the Islamic regime makes that hard to descry, in Iran. But in the Middle East and North Africa (save for the Berbers), the appeal to a "different" Islam that others have suddenly discovered, have teased out through Jesuitical casuistry, will not work. Muslim clerics have a highly developed system, and they know, everyone knows, the texts. They are not going to be pushovers for the likes of Sakena Yacoobi, and will not give the time of day to a non-Muslim like Isobel Coleman who helps to promote such efforts not so much through her intellectual grasp of Islam and the problem of Islam but, I suspect, because she is charming, attractive, soignée. That's not nearly enough.

Imagine, if you will, Ataturk, back in the 1920s, when the Ottoman Empire had collapsed and he could use, could exploit, the perilous plight of Turkey to his advantage, could rally those who, like him, could be persuaded to see that the problem in Turkey was Islam itself, and Islam itself had to be constrained. Now imagine that in, say, England or France, there had been those who had wanted to, and had extended, every sort of financial and other assistance to Turkey, to make sure it did not become a "failed state." And then what would have happened? The Turks would have been saved from the total collapse that gave Ataturk his chance, and they would have continued with an Islam unconstrained and untamed. But it was the systematic constraints that Ataturk put on Islam as a political and social force that allowed Turkey to develop as it has, to create a secular class that has made possible, in Turkey, the creation of an environment, for those who have been able to take advantage of it, that makes some Turks able to inhabit the same mental and moral universe, more or less, as Western non-Muslim man. The problem in Turkey is that only about one-quarter of the population became so secular; the rest did not. And it is those rest who are now, in their support of Erdogan (at least among the Sunni Muslims if not so strongly among the Alevis), allowing the regime to undo the various knots that Ataturk had so carefully tied on the box labeled "Islam."

Again and again I have suggested that the Western world has to grasp the danger that Islam, and a jihad promoted through the Money Weapon, Da'wa, and demographic conquest, presents deep within Western Europe. Those who promise that they can "reform" Islam, beginning with the "empowerment" of women, may get all kinds of naively enthusiastic attention and support, but they help to distract, and to hold out false hopes for change that is far less impressive, and far more tenuous, than their publicists would have you believe. One cannot change the texts and tenets of Islam, nor the understanding of Islam among the Muslim masses. But one can find ways to weaken, to divide and demoralize, the Camp of Islam. And among the ways to weaken and demoralize that Camp of Islam, along with permitting, instead of preventing, the pre-existing fissures and resentments (ethnic, sectarian, and economic) to develop, is for Westerners to understand, fully, all the ways in which the political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures of the peoples and polities of Islam area result of Islam itself, and what it encourages, and what it discourages.

That is the way to do it. I have kept presenting this position, in all sorts and conditions of argufying, for many years. I have yet to hear the welcome echo. But any minute now, I'm sure I will.

Oh, I almost forgot. About those three endorsements of Isobel Coleman's book, "Paradise Beneath Their Feet," the ones you can find at her website.

The first comes from Brave Young American Muslim Reformer Reza Aslan, about whom you can find more here. He's an apologist for Islam, though not necessarily a cunning and evil one. Having grown up in America, in secular surroundings, he may simply be unable to grasp Islam's hold on the minds of Muslim in societies suffused with Islam. But his shtick, his way of earning a living, is to be that American Muslim Who Explains (and Justifies, and Holds Out Hope For) Islam, and yes, it's fine, really, you can wait until after the lecture to give me the check.

And the second one comes from Nicholas Kristof, that Times columnist who, always wearing his heart on his sleeve, goes around the world and reports on human misery, and somehow would have us believe that he, Nicholas Kristof, is a particularly good and kind and concerned man. He's done quite well in this racket, and he's never shown any interest in, or knowledge of, Islam. For all of his reporting from Darfur, he never once discussed how Islam is, and always has been, a vehicle for Arab supremacism. He's a reporter who can never make sense of the things he reports, and does not every try to. And his greatest failure is certainly in his reporting from Muslim-dominated lands, where he never touches the subject of Islam.

And the third endorser of Isobel Coleman? Well, the third endorser is not only more intelligent than either Kristof or Aslan, but also more attractive. Still, I suspect that she, in her Josephine-Bakerish collecting of children, and her desire to support do-good "projects" hither and yon, is simply being fashionable. And what could be more fashionable than helping those projects which she has been told help to Empower Woman In Islam, and Isobel Coleman's book "gives voice" to the women engaged in such projects. But I don't think - do you? - that among the accomplishments of this particular endorser has been a deep reading and re-reading and thorough assimilation not only of the texts of Islam, but of the history of Islamic conquest and studies of both Islam and those conquests, over 1350 years, by Western historians. But you be the judge. The name of that third enthusiastic blurber for Isobel Coleman's "Paradise Beneath Their Feet: How Women Are Transforming The Middle East" is that great expert on Islam, someone who can give Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Wafa Sultan and Magdi Allam and Joseph Schacht a run for their money any day: Angelina Jolie.

The Only Thing Worth Dying For:
How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan
By Eric Behm
Harper, $25.99, 375pp.
Review by David Forsmark

If you Google “Karzai” and “corruption,” you are given somewhere around 6,650,000 results.  In fact, when you Google the name “Karzai,” Google’s autocomplete function gives you “Karzai corruption” as the 4^th choice.

But you can complete the search parameter for “Karzai courage” without Google’s autocomplete ever kicking in– even when you get as far as, “Karzai courag.”  And the search results tend to be either articles that encourage the President of Afghanistan to show some, or are at least 5 years old.

But as Eric Behm’s terrific new book, The Only Thing Worth Dying For: How Eleven Green Berets Forged a New Afghanistan, illustrates, the warriors of the Special Forces A-Team ODA 574 would offer a completely different assessment.

It’s also hard to find a good word from President Obama about Afghanistan’s President Hamid Karzai.  Before his visit this week, the Administration treated Karzai with the contempt they usually reserved for right of center Israeli Prime Ministers.   But while Hillary Clinton had kind words for the Afghan leader, Obama, in the words of ABC’s Jake Tapper, delivered his smiles through “clenched teeth.”

Obama’s media microphone have picked up the refrain, using words like “puppet” and acting as though Karzai played no role in the liberation of his country other than acting as our surrogate after we did all the hard work.  Chris Matthews, (ever on the lookout for the Vietnam or Watergate comparisons which are the touchstone of his life) recently compared Karzai to South Vietnamese President Diem.

I wonder if any of the cavalier commentators have a clue that Hamid Karzai went into the Kandahar region solo– while the Northern Alliance and Special Forces A-Teams waged war in the north– to rally tribes and towns against the Taliban.  Or that Karzai put himself in such danger that Delta Force had to rescue him; and later assured victory in the south and probably headed off a civil war in Afghanistan by going back with an 11-man Special Forces team and routing the Taliban while uniting the tribes to the liberation cause.

More importantly, I wonder if Barack Obama knows it.

Behm does a nice job with the warrior camaraderie of the Special Forces Team in the book’s subtitle; but the central relationship in The Only Thing Worth Dying For is between Hamid Karzai and Army Captain Jason Amerine, commander of OD-574.  Together, they form an almost (but not quite) Washington and Lafayette team, as Karzai rallies the populace and Amerine calls in the heavy firepower.

Unfortunately, thanks to the success of the Horse Soldiers in the North, the same Army brass who had to be cajoled– if not tricked– into letting the Special Forces handle the war in Afghanistan, decided it was time to get involved and share in the glory.

Just as victory was almost in hand, Amerine was saddled with a dozen rear-echolon types who arrived in camp, outnumbering the members of OD-574, themselves.  The Pentagon was nervous at just how much the War in Afghanistan in general– and the effort concerned with Karzai who was on track to be the next leader of Afghanistan in particular– was being managed by captains and non-coms.

All the while assuring Amerine that he still had control over the operation on the ground, the brass couldn’t resist taking their own turn at calling in air strikes, while the frustrated Amerine tried to decide if it was worth the trouble—or even possible—to reign them in.

The devastating result, however, gives new insight into why Hamid Karzai might have a particular aversion to collateral damage and misguided airstrikes.

The book also puts the Karzai presidency in context.  By showing the fragility of the alliance among the tribes, and the light touch required from Karzai to make it happen, one can’t help think that the very qualities that the Obama Administration is ripping Karzai for today are what make a central government in Afghanistan—for all its admitted weakness– even remotely possible.

Karzai was selected by the international community and a coalition of Afghans precisely because of his light touch, along with his credibility on the ground.   A heavy-handed effort at “reform” is likely to not only fail, but lead to a splintering of the coalition, if not outright rebellion in the wild outlying regions.  One could argue that Karzai has been exactly what we needed him to be, rather than what utopian perfectionists pretend he should be.

Some might perceive some irony in the title, as the heavy price paid by OD-574 was not caused by the enemy.  The press and politicians seem to treat “friendly fire” casualties as somehow more of a waste than a noble sacrifice.  But professional soldiers know they are an inevitable part of the chaos of combat—no matter how avoidable they seem in hindsight.  Behm—and the Green Berets—appropriately honor their dead in the same way they would had they been killed in a massive Taliban counter-attack.

Victor Davis Hanson regularly writes that one of the great strengths of the United States military is the ability of the soldier on the ground to make combat decisions.  A Special Forces master sergeant has more authority to call in an airstrike, for instance, than a Russian full bird colonel.  The Only Thing Worth Dying For offers a prime example of that attribute—and a cautionary tale of what happens when the warriors on the scene are not given enough autonomy.

The Only Thing Worth Dying For is not as action-packed as Horse Soldiers, or Kill bin Laden, nor is it as controversial as Jawbreaker; but it stands with those three fine books as a must read for anyone who wants to understand the war in Afghanistan.

Best of all, it’s also a terrific story of valiant men at arms, and exceedingly well told.

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.

Egyptian writers have condemned a call by a group of Islamic lawyers for the classic book Arabian Nights to be banned because it is "obscene".

The group, Lawyers Without Shackles, filed a complaint with Egypt's prosecutor general after the collection of folk tales was republished.

They called for the new edition to be pulped and the stories to be banned.

But the country's writers union has said it will fight the group in the courts if they try to proceed.

'Like the Taliban'

"I was shocked at the offensive phrases it contains," Ayman Abdul Hakim of Lawyers Without Shackles was quoted by the TV station Al Arabiya.

They catalogued several references to sex in the book and said they were "calls to sin".

But Writers' Union spokesman said the lawyers were behaving "like the Taliban".

"Those who want to destroy our heritage are taking the same path as the Taliban when they destroyed Buddha's statues," Mohammed Salmawy told the news agency AFP, referring to the destruction of the giant sculptures of Buddha in Bamiyan.

The books publishers, the state-run General Organisation Cultures Palaces, said the republishing had been very popular and the print run had sold out.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Harvey Klehr, Andrew Mellon Professor of Politics and History at Emory University. He is the author of the new book, The Communist Experience in America: A Political and Social History.

FP: Harvey Klehr, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

So what inspired you to write this new book, what is it about and how is it different from other works?

Klehr: This book is actually a compilation of a number of articles that I have written over the past forty years.  Several years ago I was approached by Irving Louis Horowitz, publisher of Transaction Books, who asked me to consider collecting a number of the essays I had written on the issue of communism.  I tried to group them into several areas that illustrate both my own intellectual history and a coherent view of the communist phenomenon. And then I wrote an introductory essay about how I got interested in this topic and how an intellectual career can be shaped by a variety of factors, some of which flow logically from a topic and others which are based on serendipity.  Looking back on my career was fun, although once you reach the point where you are asked to collect a lot of what you have written, there’s also the sense that you are also a bit of a dinosaur.

FP: Can you talk to us a bit about your own intellectual history and journey?

Klehr: In graduate school in the late 1960s I was influenced by Marxism.  The first two published articles in the book explore the ways Marx and Lenin tried to understand America and how the USA might fit the Marxist paradigm for the development of capitalism.  I was really curious about why the Left had done so poorly in America – it’s the only advanced industrial country in which a left-wing movement explicitly committed to socialism never came to power or seriously competed for power.  My doctoral dissertation was on the theory of American exceptionalism.  It led me to an interesting episode in the history of American communism – the moment in 1929 when Joseph Stalin himself presided over a Moscow commission that expelled Jay Lovestone and his followers from the CPUSA for the crime of American exceptionalism.  Lovestone’s group, which included some fascinating people – Lovestone himself later became the fiercely anti-communist advisor on international affairs to George Meany, head of the AFL-CIO, Bert Wolfe became a noted historian of Russia, Will Herberg a prominent conservative theologian – had the support of 90% of the American party, but that meant nothing to Stalin.

That was what got me interested in the history of American communism.  I spent nearly twenty years studying the CPUSA and its relationship to Moscow.  After my first book, a sociological study of the leadership of the CPUSA appeared, Ted Draper, the dean of historians of American communism, approached me and asked me to finish his project on the CPUSA’s history.  That resulted in The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade.  By the early 1990s, I was sick of the topic and through a complicated set of circumstances, went to Moscow to get information for a biography – that I still intend to write – about a colorful character named David Karr.

I arrived in Moscow just a few months after Boris Yeltsin’s foiling of the coup and was fortunate enough to be the first American to get access to the Comintern archives, where I found stunning documentation of the role played by American communists in espionage operations of the USSR.  The archivists did not realize the material was in the files or its significance and I was able to take copies out of the country.  A few years later Yale University Press published The Secret World of American Communism, which I co-authored with John Haynes and Fred Firsov and I had launched myself on a new career as a writer on espionage.  John and I have written several other books, including Venona, Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, and most recently, Spies, The Rise and Fall of the KGB in American with Alexander Vassiliev.

The more I studied communism and the CPUSA, the more conservative I became.  It was fully as responsible as fascism for the most blood-soaked century in human history.  Individual communists were often motivated by the highest ideals and yet they helped to create and perpetuate many of the worst horrors in human history.  Writing about communists meant I also had to contend with many writers and intellectuals who apologized for or excused these atrocities – even as more and more information about them became available.  So, part of my responsibility, as I saw it, was to call them to account, something that Haynes and I did in In Denial and that is also on exhibit in many of the articles in this new book.

FP: Can you talk a bit about your experience in Moscow?

Klehr: My first trip in the spring of 1991 was a real adventure. The coup against Gorbachev had failed and Boris Yeltsin had seized Communist Party property, including the archive that held the records of the Communist International.Gorbachev had opened the archive, knowing that material in it would discredit the Communists. I was the first American, and one of the first Westerners, to use it. Going through the finding aids, I asked to see a variety of material that sounded interesting. I was a bit nervous; I had been writing about American communism for years without access to some of the most sensitive records of the Party and I couldn’t help but think that I would have to go back to the United States and admit that I had been wrong about the dominant role played by the USSR in the CPUSA’s affairs or other issues on which I had debated and argued with other scholars.  Luckily, that was not the case. While the archival materials deeply enriched what people like me had been saying about the CPUSA, they also confirmed virtually all of our arguments.

In many ways the more significant part of my trip was when I started coming across memos and notes signed by a man named Pavel Fitin, whom I had never heard of before.  Many of them were to or from Georgi Dimitrov, head of the Comintern, and asked for information, or provided information, about Americans.  And, they were marked “Top Secret.”  I recognized some of the names as people who had been named by Elizabeth Bentley as Soviet spies.  Since the memos were date in 1943 and 1944, they couldn’t have been in response to her naming them- she didn’t go to the FBI until late 1945.  When I found out that Fitin was the head of foreign espionage for the KGB, I knew that I had uncovered real gold.  I marked all this material – along with lots of other documents- for copying.  That was another adventure; there were no copying machines available to researchers in the archive- you marked what you wanted and when your research stay was over, the staff gave you a microfilm reel containing your material.  When I flew out of Moscow, I had two reels of documents, with many documents labeled top-secret.  It was a surreal experience going through customs with microfilm labeled top secret- a sign of how much the world had changed.

FP: As you state, the Left has a hard time being held accountable in your field. Many of my own colleagues who argued for years about the innocence of the Rosenbergs or Alger Hiss don’t receive the evidence like people who are too concerned about the truth or about the historical record. They end up justifying their guilt (after having argued their innocence) or further denying against all reality or just dismissing everything with deafening silence or scornful ridicule (i.e. historians who had defended Hiss laughed at me for chasing old ghosts. . . historians). There is obviously a deeper agenda at work. What is that agenda?

Klehr: I think that for some people, it’s simply a matter of religious faith.  No empirical evidence will ever persuade them.  For others, their loyalty to the USSR or to its narrative is so strong that they construct Rube Goldberg-like explanations to account for the evidence.  In many cases, where the individuals themselves are or were not communists, admitting what the new evidence shows, would require them to rethink their understanding of America and its history, most notably, the history of the McCarthy era.  To admit that Whittaker Chambers or Elizabeth Bentley told the truth, to admit that Richard Nixon was right about Hiss – they just can’t do it.

FP: How does it work that people motivated by the highest ideals help to create and perpetuate many of the worst horrors in human history?

Klehr: I think, unfortunately, it’s very easy. If your ideals are so wonderful and the only thing standing in the way of realizing them are ignorant and reactionary people, well, they just have to be eliminated –or even sacrificed for the greater good.  If you have persuaded yourself that you know how to end poverty or eliminate racism, why let a bunch of flawed human beings stand in the way?

FP: So what has been the communist experience in America?

Klehr: It’s been a story of brief period of success sandwiched between long eras of failure.  From its origins in 1919 until about 1935, the CPUSA was largely ineffectual.  It occasionally led dramatic strikes or recruited a prominent intellectual, but it remained small and widely despised, in large measure because of its ties to the USSR.

When Soviet foreign policy, reacting to Hitler’s consolidation of rule in Germany, started advocating a popular front against fascism, the CPUSA was able to make itself a significant factor in American life.  Its membership jumped to nearly 100,000 before 1939, its front groups enlisted millions of sympathizers for specific causes, it was a major presence in the CIO, and it achieved a certain respectability.  But all that ended with the Nazi-Soviet Pact.

The Party made recovery during WWII, when the USA and USSR were allies – although we now know that the Party leadership during that period was helping the KGB establish an extraordinarily large stable of spies throughout the American government.  As the Cold War heated up, the CPUSA’s unyielding defense of the interests of the Soviet Union made it a pariah in American society and revelations abut espionage helped to destroy it.  In the mid-1950s most of its remaining loyalists had enough when Khrushchev admitted Stalin’s crimes, the USSR crushed the Hungarian Revolution and revelations of anti-Semitism stunned many of the Party’s Jewish members.  It has been on the margins of American life ever since.

FP: What are you thinking about these days?

Klehr: This summer will be relaxing; for the first time in many years I don’t have a big project to finish.  I will be writing an article on David Karr in an effort to get back to his biography and see if I can start plugging some of the holes in his life that I will have to fill before that project would be feasible.

FP: Harvey Klehr, thank you, it was a pleasure to speak with you.

While the U.S. president has consistently sought dialogue with the Muslim world, he has not put in the same effort to protect oppressed Christians, says Sabatina James, who has lived for the past nine years in fear of being murdered for leaving Islam.

"You (President Obama) are saying these things about the prophet [Muhammad] but why don't you protect [Christians]? You're a Christian and have such influence," James recalls herself asking while watching President Obama's speech in Cairo last year.

"A man of such an influence should definitely speak differently. He should have said that he feels for the people who are living in prison and who may somehow be listening to the speech," James says. "Even if he said something like that it would be good. But he did not even mention it."

James, whose book My Fight for Faith and Freedom is a bestseller in Germany, has moved 16 times since 2001 due to death threats on her life. She is currently living in an unknown location in Europe and spoke to The Christian Post this week using a temporary cell phone that she had to discard afterwards.

Her book chronicles her journey living in Islamic Pakistan as the granddaughter of a mullah to moving to Austria as a young girl and being exposed to western culture. In the harrowing tale, James shares about the physical abuse she endured, her forced engagement to her cousin, her enrollment in a strict Quran school in Pakistan, and how she eventually became a Christian and women's rights activist.

"I have no permanent home, hardly any friends, and little contact with the outside world," James writes in the book's prologue. "I am an Austrian citizen -- and I am very afraid I will not see my next birthday." [...]

The Pakistani convert urges President Obama to say that the United States wants to have a dialogue with Islamic countries but point out that if Muslims are allowed to build mosques in America then Christians should be allowed to build churches and live in safety in Muslim countries.

"But he didn't say a word about it [during the Cairo speech]," James points out. "And that is what I hate about politics. They don't care about the real things that are going on with human rights."

During his speech in Cairo last June, President Obama was careful to show utmost respect to Islam, including praising its tradition of tolerance. He did, however, briefly mention religious freedom.

"People in every country should be free to choose and live their faith based upon the persuasion of the mind and the heart and the soul," Obama said. "The richness of religious diversity must be upheld -- whether it is for Maronites in Lebanon or the Copts in Egypt."

Open Doors USA, a ministry to persecuted Christians, had pointed out after the Cairo speech that President Obama failed to elaborate on the persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt or the plight of minority Christians in other Muslim countries.

This week, a bipartisan government commission also criticized President Obama and his administration's handling of religious freedom in the world. The U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom in its annual report stated that Obama has rarely mentioned religious freedom since his Cairo and Ankara speech last year. The president and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the report stated, have also exchanged the phrase religious freedom for the narrower phrase "freedom of worship."

"I am one of them. I am one of the converts. I am myself living under police protection," James says. "I have a lot of contacts with converts, people who have left Islam and converted to Christianity. They all would say, 'You know, nobody speaks for us.'"...

Indeed.