"A Connecticut Taliban in Bloomberg's Court?," by Robert Dreyfuss in The Nation, May 3:

It may be that the Pakistan-based Taliban, the Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP), has quietly established a Connecticut franchise while we weren't looking. That's possible. But it seems far more likely to me that the perpetrator of the bungled Times Square bomb plot was either a lone wolf or a member of some squirrely branch of the Tea Party, anti-government far right. Which actually exists in Connecticut, where, it seems, the car's licence plates were stolen. [...]

Sensible analysts of the event point out, convincingly, that no branch of the Taliban, whether in Afghanistan or Pakistan, has demonstrated either the intention or the capability of striking in such as fashion. And the fact that the suspect, videotaped, is a white male in his 40s, hasn't deterred our vast team of terrorism talking heads from describing the operation as part of the jihad. Of course, it could be that some offshoot of the jihadist movement recruited a white bread American to do its bidding, and it could be that the man shown in the videotape is not the culprit at all.

But, as in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, when self-appointed experts blamed Muslims only to find out that it was a Gulf war veteran named Tim who did it, there has once again been an unseemly rush to judgment.

The Wall Street Journal is already editorialising in favour of stepped up racial profiling to catch evil doers, even though - in this case - such profiling would have more profitably sought out the editors of the Journal, who are mostly white men in their 40s...

Did Dreyfuss retract all this politically correct twaddle, and apologize? Why, of course not. Cornered into admitting that the perpetrator, he takes refuge in Faisal Shahzad's apparent incompetence. Hope your luck holds on that score, Dreyfuss.

This article is reprinted from City Journal.

Liberal reformers, who might once have wished to extend the realm of liberty, now wish to restrict it in the name of compulsory political virtue.

There was a perfect recent illustration of this in Britain. An evangelical Christian couple, the Wilkinsons, ran a bed-and-breakfast business in a place called Cookham. They refused a middle-aged homosexual couple, Michael Black and John Morgan, accommodation because they believed that homosexuality was wrong; it is condemned in the Bible.

The spurned couple said that they felt like lepers; moreover, they felt that their legal rights, enshrined in the Equality Act of 2006, which makes it illegal to discriminate in the provision of services on the grounds of “sexual orientation,” had been infringed, and they complained to the police. As yet, no prosecution has followed. But shortly afterward a senior politician, Christopher Grayling, who might be a minister in the next government if David Cameron wins the forthcoming election, said that he thought that the owners of bed-and-breakfasts ought to be allowed to refuse homosexual couples if they so wished.

From the furious denunciation that Grayling’s remarks attracted, you might have thought that he had advocated medieval punishments for homosexuals. Instead, he was merely pointing out that the law as it stands is tyrannical, and that in a free society not everyone will make the same moral judgments. It is a necessary condition of freedom that private citizens should be allowed to treat with, or to refuse to treat with, whomever they choose, on any grounds that they choose, including those that strike others as repellent. Freedom is freedom, not the means by which everyone comes to precisely the same conclusion and conducts himself in precisely the same way.

The depressing, and perhaps sinister, aspect of the public commentary on the case is how largely it has ignored the question of freedom. For liberals, it seems, any trampling on freedom or individual conscience is now justified if it conduces to an end of which they approve. Thus liberalism turns into its opposite, illiberalism.

Messrs. Black and Morgan, who said they felt like lepers and went to the police as a result, condemned themselves out of their own mouths. They said that they had been together for decades, and that this was the first time they had ever experienced what they called “homophobia.” Not only does this suggest that the Equality Act was not, even on the false assumptions of liberals, necessary, but it means that anyone more mature than they would simply have found somewhere else to stay for the night.

Moreover, to waste police time on such a matter in a country with the highest crime rate in the Western world is nothing short of scandalous, a manifestation of the worst kind of inflamed egotism.

Theodore Dalrymple, a physician, is a contributing editor of City Journal and the Dietrich Weismann Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. His most recent book is The New Vichy Syndrome.

BAGHDAD--A top aide to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki warned that violence would erupt across the majority Shiite country should the Sunni-heavy alliance led by Ayad Allawi win the parliamentary election held earlier this month.

Tensions are rising in response to preliminary vote totals from the March 7 election that indicate a neck-and-neck race between Mr. Maliki's political coalition and the bloc led by Mr. Allawi in an election seen as a barometer of stability in the fragile democracy.

Final results are due to be released Friday, and Shiites are nervous that they could lose their brief lock on power...

"US says it is open to nuke deal with Pakistan," by Chidanand Rajghatta for the Times of India, March 22:

WASHINGTON: Amid reports of massive 16-20 hour power outages across Pakistan causing public unrest, the Barack Obama administration has indicated it is open to Islamabad's plea for a civilian nuclear deal akin to the US-India agreement, notwithstanding continued disquiet about Pakistan's bonafides on the nuclear front.

The first indication of a possible policy shift by US, which had till now rejected Pakistan's entreaties for a nuclear deal, came in an interview the US ambassador to Islamabad, Anne Patterson, gave to a Pakistani-American journal in which she said the two sides were going to have "working level talks" on the subject during a strategic dialogue on March 24.

Patterson confirmed the claim of her Pakistani counterpart in Washington Hussain Haqqani, which were initially denied, that the two sides had had some initial discussions on the subject. Acknowledging that earlier US "non-proliferation concerns were quite severe", she said attitudes in Washington were changing.

"I think we are beginning to pass those and this is a scenario that we are going to explore," she told a LA-based Pakistani journal.

Another top US official, Af-Pak envoy Richard Holbrooke, was a little more circumspect. "We're going to listen carefully to whatever the Pakistanis say," he replied, when asked about Islamabad's demand for a civilian nuclear deal....

Intimations of a change in US policy came even as new reports emerged about the extent and scope of government-backed Pakistani nuclear proliferation in a book by former weapons inspector and non-proliferation activist David Albright. Successive US administrations, in an effort to absolve Islamabad and save it from embarrassment from past misdemeanors, have suggested that the country's nuclear mastermind A Q Khan acted on his own without permission from the Pakistani government or the military, but this assessment is strongly challenged by the non-proliferation community....

The idea that Pakistan deserves its own nuclear deal to overcome a trust deficit with the United States was first proposed by Georgetown University academic Christine Fair. "More so than conventional weapons or large sums of cash, a conditions-based civilian nuclear deal may be able to diminish Pakistani fears of US intentions while allowing Washington to leverage these gains for greater Pakistani cooperation on nuclear proliferation and terrorism," Fair argued in a newspaper article earlier this year....

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Yesterday morning, I had an encounter on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. with Julia Tarver Mason — a lawyer who represents several accused terrorists.

I found that Ms. Mason is more willing to speak with terrorists then reporters.

My interest in Ms. Mason began two nights ago, when I read the investigative piece by Debra Burlingame and Thomas Joscelyn in the Wall Street Journal regarding 400 American lawyers from high priced law firms who have “volunteered” their time to personally wage “lawfare” on behalf of enemy combatants held at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. One of the premier firms involved is Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, which boasted in 2007: “Paul, Weiss achieves more victories for Guantanamo detainees.” Ms. Julia Tarver Mason is a partner in the firm.

In 2006, Mason was banned from Guantanamo Bay by the base commander and the U.S. Department of Justice for secretly passing on anti-American propaganda and operational detention details to her “client.”

This client was Majeed Abdullah Al Joudi. Al Joudi, a Saudi member of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, was captured in Afghanistan in 2001. In 2004, it was disclosed at his combat status review tribunal that he was “was captured with al-Qaeda surveillance evasion reports and after-action reports.”

The anti-American propaganda Mason secretly passed on to Mr. Al Joudi was a slick, inflammatory 18-page color brochure — written entirely in Arabic — that slammed American detention policy as “that of anti-Arab, anti-Islamic, and other racist abuse.” It was filled with pictures of masked, bound, and kneeling prisoners, and according to the Wall Street Journal, “included pictures of what appeared to be detainee operations in Iraq.”

Ms. Mason had been secretly sending incendiary materials to her client through a system called “legal mail,” which is supposed to be strictly legal correspondence between a lawyer and the enemy combatant. According to Burlingame and Joscelyn, a 2004 protective order by federal Judge Joyce Hens Green forbids the lawyers to give out any information on political news, current events, or the names of U.S. government personnel.

Ms. Mason and her other Paul, Weiss lawyers were banned by Major General Jay W. Hood, then commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo. General Hood said — in a sworn affidavit submitted to the D.C. District Court, obtained by Burlingame and Joscelyn under the Freedom of Information Act — that the pamphlet aided and abetted the terrorists there:

The very nature of this document gives tremendous moral support to those who would strike out against our country.

…

It is not a factual report.

…

[Photos] were staged, inflammatory photos from Iraq [with] provocative story captions.

To continue reading this article, click here.

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What started as a trial against Geert Wilders for alleged Islamophobia has nearly turned into its opposite: a historical case about the message of the Quran. The Amsterdam court trying the controversial Dutch politician is now preoccupied with the question of whether this book, sacred to more than a billion believers, can be compared to one of the most vile publications in the history of Western civilization—Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.” What could possibly go wrong?

In his writing and speeches, Mr. Wilders has found these two works to be similar in terms of their anti-Semitism and incitement to hatred, and has thus called for a publishing ban on the Quran similar to the one in place for “Mein Kampf.” This is what triggered Mr. Wilders’s prosecution for discriminatory and insulting remarks against Muslims and Islam. The Dutch politician, though, denies having insulted Muslims. He insists his focus is on radical Islam and the Quran, which he considers to be not only a religious text but also a political pamphlet encouraging Muslims to discriminate against and, if necessary, kill Jews, Christians, apostates and other unbelievers. That’s why Mr. Wilders claims the right to criticize and condemn Islam.

Following complaints brought by mostly Muslim and radical leftist activists, Amsterdam’s district attorney in 2008 at first found no legal basis for prosecuting Mr. Wilders. Prosecutors were forced to change course only after an activist appeals court last year ordered Mr. Wilders’s prosecution—basically condemning the politician before any trial could even begin and before Mr. Wilders had a chance to defend himself. The court’s unusual intervention illustrates the Dutch confusion about the conflict between two essential rights: the right to free speech and the right to protection from discrimination.

[This article is reprinted from City Journal]

A Cracking of the Heart, by David Horowitz (Regnery, 256 pp., $24.95)

Making Toast, by Roger Rosenblatt (Ecco, 176 pp., $21.99)

Making Toast and A Cracking of the Heart recall, and celebrate, daughters who perished in the prime of their lives. King Lear’s tragic speech—“Thou’lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never!”—as he mourns over the body of Cordelia is no more poignant than the quiet, understated recollections of Roger Rosenblatt thinking about Amy or of David Horowitz remembering Sarah.

Pediatrician Amy Elizabeth Rosenblatt Solomon was happily married to Harris Solomon, a surgeon. Both had burgeoning practices in Bethesda, Maryland. They were the parents of three appealing children, the oldest five, the youngest barely out of infancy. The Doctors Solomon enjoyed busy, altruistic lives with few shadows—until an afternoon in December 2007, when Amy stepped onto a treadmill and began her daily exercise. She collapsed in mid-run. An autopsy attributed her sudden death to “an anomalous right coronary artery.” All her life, that vessel had fed Amy’s heart from the wrong side. She could have died at any time. It was perhaps a miracle that she reached the age of 38.

But in the midst of profound tragedy, her father is in no mood to speak of miracles. Instead, he charts the maternal grandparents’ relocation to the Solomons’ house in Bethesda, and the time that follows. Ginny Rosenblatt becomes a surrogate mother to the grandchildren, while Roger shuttles back and forth from his teaching post at Stony Brook University on Long Island. “Road rage was a danger those early weeks,” he remembers. “I picked fights with store clerks for no reason. I lost my temper with a student who phoned me too frequently about her work. I seethed at those who spoke of Amy’s death in the clichés of modern usage, such as ‘passing’ and ‘closure.’ I cursed God.”

On a dank morning in New York, Ginny calls from Maryland with some disturbing news. Last night the youngest grandchild inquired, “When is Mommy coming home?” He had not asked that question before. “All this time,” Roger wonders, “has he been thinking she was simply away? Ginny says Harris told him Mommy is dead and is not coming home, and in the morning James seemed fine. Immediately after we hang up, a friend calls. He asks where I am. I tell him I have to look around to be sure. He thinks I’m joking.”

The Rosenblatts never come to terms with the loss of their child; no anguished parent does. But they do come to cherish the dailiness of ordinary family life—the making of breakfast; the putting on of costumes for a Halloween party; the easy banter between the young and their elders:

‘Here’s a riddle,’ says Jess. ‘A man came over on Friday, stayed two days, and went home on Friday. How is this possible?’

‘Friday is a horse,’ I tell her.

‘Right,’ she says. ‘Here’s another riddle. Three men fell off a boat into the water. Only two of them got their hair wet. How is that possible?’

‘Friday is a horse,’ I tell her.

‘Right,’ she says.

Throughout this short, radiant book, Amy keeps reappearing, recalled by her parents, her brothers, her children, her patients. A fund is set up in her memory at the NYU School of Medicine, and monetary contributions flow in. With them come reminiscences of an inspired and caring doctor. “The distance of death reveals Amy’s stature to me,” writes her father. “My daughter mattered to the histories of others. Knowing that did not prevent my eyes from welling up for no apparent reason at Ledo’s Pizza the other day. But it is something.” It is, in fact, miraculous.

David Horowitz’s memoir begins: “The reflections of a mourner are a relentless accounting, and there is no bottom line.” The bookkeeping began early in March 2008, with a phone call: his 44-year-old daughter Sarah had died alone in her San Francisco apartment. Horowitz, his ex-wife, and their surviving children gather to examine a life cut short.

Sarah, they recollect, had not been an ordinary child. A victim of Turner syndrome, she suffered from diminished spatial perception (which meant that she could never drive), debilitating arthritis, and encroaching deafness. Yet she excelled in college and graduate school, always refusing to don the garment of self-pity. Indeed, she went out of her way to offer ecumenical aid to the needy. “Despite the enormous difficulties Sarah faced getting anywhere,” recalls her father, she “traveled to far-away places to offer help—to El Salvador to build homes for poor Catholics, and half way across the globe to Uganda to live in a mud floor hut without electricity or running water, to teach the impoverished children of the Abayudaya, a tribe of African Jews. On another mission, she went to India to the slums of Mumbai to seek help for sexually abused Hindu girls.”

Sarah wrote essays, and, in recent years, tried her hand at fiction. The excerpts in A Cracking of the Heart show that she inherited some writing genes from her father. What she did not inherit was his political outlook. Over the years, Horowitz, the son of Communists, became famous for recounting his voyage from the redoubts of the New Left to the ranks of the Right. Sarah took a divergent path. En route, she accomplished what many thought impossible: she taught David to be tolerant of those who didn’t share his views. In turn, he gave her what she acknowledged as a “two-fold legacy.” Though she embraced radical causes, she refused to join groups that flew the banner of political correctness. “I have always felt driven to pursue justice,” Sarah declared, “but am wary of ideology and partisan politics.”

In a bitter irony, Horowitz notes that a day before her own demise, Sarah spoke to a friend about the death of a loved one. After the loss, she advised, “Pay attention to the ways in which your relationship continues.” The fathers of two gifted, accomplished daughters have, consciously and unconsciously, taken those words to heart.

Between them, the authors have written more than 40 books. Those familiar with Rosenblatt’s witty essays, plays, novels, and nonfiction know that he has a liberal bent. Those who read Horowitz are aware of his conservative proclivities. No matter. As different as they are in temperament and philosophy, they are united in grief and in another way: their memoirs luminously commemorate the departed while they enrich the reader.

Stefan Kanfer, a contributing editor of City Journal and a former editor of Time, is the author, most recently, of a biography of Marlon Brando, Somebody.

[To order a copy of A Cracking of the Heart, click here.]

[This article is reprinted from City Journal]

On the evening of November 9, 1989, the wall of shame was breached. The next morning, I took off for Berlin; shortly afterward, I experienced the Velvet Revolution in Prague, and finally the fall of Ceauşescu in Bucharest. The year 1990 opened joyfully for the human race. But I was struck by the difference in the emotions felt in the East and in the West. Representative of the West was Francis Fukuyama and his idea, which caused a sensation, that history had just come to an end. But those in the East realized that this was far from the case. Less than a month before the Berlin Wall fell, I had given a speech in front of Chancellor Helmut Kohl and the cream of the Federal Republic of Germany in honor of Czech dissident Václav Havel, who was receiving the Frankfurt Book Fair’s prestigious Peace Prize while still a prisoner in his own country. I entitled the speech “To Leave Communism Is to Enter History”—the view of those emerging from behind the Iron Curtain.

The West’s confusion arose because it wasn’t prepared for such a fundamental unsettling of postwar geopolitics. During four decades of ideological confrontation, theoreticians and journalists had argued about how a society should move from capitalism to socialism. There was no research on the opposite question—that is, on the transition from socialism to capitalism—apart from a few inconclusive studies, most notably in Poland, concerning the possibility of introducing some elements of the free market into a Communist society. As the philosopher Josep Ramoneda has observed, the whole world—Communists, anti-Communists, and those in between—took it as given that the Soviet Union and its satellites could not “return” to capitalism. So when, during the Velvet Revolution, demonstrators posed exactly this question—How can we go from socialism to capitalism?—there was no ready answer.

As Western intellectuals watched Berlin in November 1989, they reconsidered their long belief that the world was fated to be Communist—but retained their belief in fate. Providence had at last spoken, chance was abolished, the terrible parenthesis of the twentieth century had closed. Forgotten, erased, transcended, surpassed were 1914–1989, the bloodiest and cruelest 75 years of the human adventure to date. Tocquevilleans rediscovered the ineluctable movement of universal democracy; Saint-Simonians passed on to ecologists the promise that the administration of things would replace the government of men; Hegelians like Fukuyama celebrated the End of History and of history’s wars; Social Democrats promised that understanding among peoples would grow. We were entering the peaceful, postmodern Promised Land, where great heroes, great dangers, great peoples, and great goals would all disappear, as Jean-François Lyotard, author of The Postmodern Condition, notoriously argued. The end of the Cold War plunged the “free world,” as it had been called, into a boundless euphoria. Western Europe immediately eliminated its military budgets, while Washington announced a “new world order.”

The other Europe, just emancipated from Moscow’s domination, did not share this optimism. The peoples extricating themselves from totalitarian despotism were at the same time rejoining history as freely choosing agents.

And they found before them two possible futures. One is symbolized today by Havel and Lech Walesa, Charter 77 and Poland’s Solidarity; the other by Slobodan Milošević and Vladimir Putin.

Czechs and Serbs faced the same post-1989 challenges as they confronted the dismantling of Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia. In Prague, widespread poverty and corruption tempted the antitotalitarian dissidents whom the Velvet Revolution brought to power to choose repression rather than democracy. Their ultimate decision, though, was decisive: freedom would be the highest priority. Slovakia and the Czech Republic separated without conflict, and in the end, both entered the European Union. In Belgrade, by contrast, a sly and corrupt Communist bureaucrat seized power. Milošević forged an alliance of various forces of repression against the contagion of liberty. While he set aside Marxist ideology, he preserved its coercive methods. Wars and waves of ethnic cleansing ravaged Yugoslavia from 1991 to 1999. Milošević proved ready to spill blood in order to regain lost territories, and he ended up in The Hague, facing charges of crimes against humanity.

Ecstatic Westerners dreamed that the period of totalitarian cruelty was over, as if former Soviet bureaucrats could somehow emerge as new men, despite 70 years of brainwashing, or as if the chaos of radically nationalist dictatorships would easily resolve itself. But no great political savior awaited, Havel argued; Czechs were left to their own responsibilities, to “the power of the powerless,” to what the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka, who inspired Havel, called the “solidarity of the shaken”—of those, that is, shaken by totalitarian regimes and devoted to opposing them.

More recently, we have seen this solidarity in the democratic uprisings in Georgia in 2003 and in Ukraine in 2004, which should have drawn the attention of those who remained deaf through 12 years and 200,000 deaths in the martyrdom of Chechnya. In Ukraine, President Putin intervened shamelessly in the affairs of a state whose independence he refused to recognize. In Georgia, he sent in the tanks. Responding to the international press, Putin denounced the peaceful uprisings that swept away post-Soviet puppets in Tbilisi and Kiev as “permanent revolution” and “its dangerous disorders.” Thus he defamed a liberating uprising of long duration, one that started in the blood of East Berlin in 1953; continued in Poznań and Budapest in 1956, in Russia with the dissidence of the sixties, in Prague in 1968, and in the struggle of Solidarity in the 1980s; and was crowned by the fall of the Berlin Wall.

It is an uprising that in Poland brought together Catholics and freethinkers, at odds for more than a century, who together founded Solidarity. In Russia, moderns like Andrey Sakharov and traditional believers like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn worked side by side. In Prague and Bratislava, university professors, instead of teaching the official lies, chose to be window washers or furnace repairmen, and Charter 77 brought together the Left and the Right, skeptics and the religious. Antitotalitarianism cultivates its own convictions, without sectarianism; dissidence does not attempt to replace the official dogma with another one but instead introduces an intellectual revolution that precedes—and that alone makes possible—the social and political changes that will remake the map of Europe.

This revolution has not ended, which is why the Kremlin does not appreciate insurrections in Georgia and Ukraine. Europe’s new frontier is at stake on the uncertain terrain of history, and the alternatives are still these: Havel and Milošević.

André Glucksmann is a French philosopher. His story was translated by Alexis Cornel.

From Accuracy in Academia:

In Boston, an English professor is trying to sell his class on society’s collective guilt when said students are already believers in personal responsibility. “We must encourage students to access the antagonist class positions of texts in order to demonstrate how the oppositional voices contained in them identify evidence of class struggle,” Christopher Craig writes in the December 2009 issue of Radical Teacher, “a socialist, feminist and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching.” “Through this critical process, we can show how the values and interests of the dominant class are not universal but repressive, intended to keep the power relations between the ruling and working class one-sided.”

“For most of us, learning to read texts this way helps us to see through the ruling class ideology that exists in everything from literature to the nightly news.” Craig teaches at Emmanuel College, a Catholic institution of higher learning.

“Hence, our ability to grasp and practice this kind of criticism provides us and our students with the tools necessary to understand literature from a class-based perspective and to acknowledge the ideological forces that attempt to shape our lives,” Craig argues.

Radical Teacher is published by the board of trustees of the University of Illinois.

“They had been encouraged to understand homelessness, unemployment, and crime, for example, as the result of various levels of personal responsibility or just bad luck,” Craig writes of his students. Craig teaches a course on the Political Novel.

“They are respectful, hard working and open-minded,” Craig writes of his students. “But their liberalism is rooted strongly in the idea of American individualism.”

“They see helping the homeless as an opportunity to integrate people back into an economic system where possibility flourishes. One needs only to learn the skills necessary for success.”

As you may have guessed, Craig has a problem with this view. “Most of them have not considered thoroughly how political policies contribute to creating inequitable conditions,” Craig states. “They correctly link the horrific consequences of Hurricane Katrina to the Bush administration’s failure to respond (pro)actively to the catastrophe, for instance.”

Read the rest at Accuracy in Academia

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It’s official. Britain’s premier medical journal Lancet has been completely Palestinianized. It no longer bears any relationship to the first-rate scientific journal it once was. Perhaps Lancet is no longer a standard-bearer but has become a follower in the global movement in which standards have plunged, biases have soared, and Big Lies now pass for top-of-the-line academic, scientific work.

The post-colonial academy is itself thoroughly colonized by the false and dangerous ideas of Edward Said (please read my dear friend Ibn Warraq’s most excellent book Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said’s Orientalism). However, I once believed that Said’s paranoid perspective had primarily infected and indoctrinated only the social sciences, humanities, and Middle East Studies. We now see his malign influence at work in a new article, just out today, by professors who work at the Department of Medicine at Harvard University; the Division of Epidemiology and Community Health at Minnesota University’s School of Public Health; The Boston University School of Medicine; the School of Nursing at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey; and at the School of Social Work and Social Welfare at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University.

Their study is titled: “Association between exposure to political violence and intimate-partner violence in the occupied Palestinian territory: a cross-sectional study.” And yes, they have found that Palestinian husbands are more violent towards Palestinian wives as a function of the Israeli “occupation”—and that the violence increases significantly when the husbands are “directly” as opposed to “indirectly” exposed to political violence.

I believe that Arab and Muslim men, including Palestinian men, are indeed violent towards Arab and Muslim women. I also believe that war-related stress, including poverty, usually increases “intimate partner violence,” aka male domestic violence. But beyond that, how does one evaluate this study?

First, let’s follow the money. This study was funded by the Palestinian National Authority as well as by the Core Funding Group at the University of Minnesota. The Palestinian Authority is not a disinterested party. But even worse: The data was collected by the Palestinian Central Bureau. These are the people who told the world that Israeli soldiers shot young Mohammed al-Dura, committed a massacre in Jenin, and purposely attacked Palestinian civilians (who just happened to be jihadists dressed in civilian clothing or hostage-civilians behind whom the jihadists hid).

Second, let’s note that the study has a political goal which trumps any objective academic or feminist goal. (These researchers claim to have a “feminist” perspective). In my view, this study wishes to present Palestinian men as victims, even when those men are battering their wives. And, it wishes to present Palestinian cultural barbarism, which includes severe child abuse, as also related to the alleged Israeli occupation.

To continue reading this article, click here.

"Al Qaeda Threatens New Strikes," by Margaret Coker and Chip Cummins in the Wall Street Journal, January 18 (thanks to Jeffrey Imm):

Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula issued fresh threats Monday against the U.S. and its Mideast allies, promising to retaliate against a surge of strikes launched in the past month against its leaders and safe havens in Yemen.

The terrorist group also denied statements made by Yemeni authorities late last week that six of al Qaeda's senior leaders in the country, including the man identified as the leader of the group's military operations, had been killed in an air strike.

"The Yemeni government has been making many false claims ... against the Mujahedeen leaders in the Arabian Peninsula. The latest of these claims is that it killed six of them," the group said, according to a statement posted online on Islamist Web sites. "We assure our Muslim nation that none of the mujahedeen were killed in that unjust and insidious raid; rather, some brothers were slightly wounded."...

In its statement issued Monday, al Qaeda warned that it was ready to retaliate against that surge, and it urged other Yemenis to help it fight "the infidels and their agent helpers."

"The duty of our Muslim nation is to declare jihad against the infidels and their agent helpers, not only on the ground, but in the sea and air as well as their Crusader warships in the Gulf of Aden," according to the statement. "As they declared it to be an open war on the people of Islam, we must declare an open war against [them]."...

"They declared it to be an open war on the people of Islam"? Somehow I missed that declaration.

“Let’s do things the way the Israelis do.” That’s the latest buzzword in airline security. It’s nice to hear the Israelis being praised for something, but if we don’t understand what the Israelis do, we’re just going to be adding another layer of bureaucracy to an already overloaded system

CNN spent an hour interviewing Isaac Yeffet, former head of El Al security, for example, and all it came away with is that the Israelis interview everyone on line while they’re waiting to go through security, that the security personnel speak at least two languages, and that the system costs a lot of money. (Hey, let’s order up a lot of Rosetta Stones!) According to the Wall Street Journal, “the secret to [the Israelis'] successful airport security is not labor-intensive checkpoints, but a screening system that is frowned upon in many other countries: ethnic profiling.”

via The American Spectator : Doing Security the Israeli Way.

[This article is reprinted from City Journal]

Yesterday, a friend sent me a link to an article entitled “Eurabian Follies” on the website of the journal Foreign Policy. The author, Justin Vaïsse, took to task several authors, including me, who have warned in recent years of the Islamization of Europe. Vaïsse countered these authors’ mountains of hard facts with a big helping of the usual supercilious sneering. His thesis: Europe is chugging along just fine; Islam poses no real challenge to the continent’s freedom and prosperity; after all, the “experts” say so. Never mind the draining of European welfare systems by Muslim families, the explosion in rapes and gay-bashings and Jew-baitings, the proliferation of honor killings and forced marriages and no-go zones; never mind the murders of Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh by fanatics who objected to those men’s positions on Islam; never mind the threats directed at critics of Islam, such as Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Robert Redeker, which have obliged them to live in hiding or with round-the-clock bodyguards.

The timing of Vaïsse’s article was unfortunate—for him, anyway: it appeared around the time of the Christmas Day terrorist attack on Detroit-bound Northwest Flight 253 and the New Year’s Day assassination attempt on Kurt Westergaard, creator of the famous Mohammed-in-a-bomb-turban cartoon published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. (Only a bathroom that had been converted to a panic room in Westergaard’s house saved the artist from an axe-wielding Islamist maniac.) Let’s not even mention the over 1,000 cars torched in French cities on New Year’s Eve, which is becoming an annual tradition among that nation’s Muslim youth.

As it happened, I received the link to Vaïsse’s article on the same day that I discovered that my dear friend Hege Storhaug had once, like Westergaard, been a target of violence, apparently because of her criticism of Islam. Hege is a former journalist and longtime women’s rights activist in Oslo whose concern about the treatment of women and girls in Muslim communities made her a pioneering critic of Islam in Norway. Time and again she has taken extraordinary personal risks to stand up for females who are confined to their homes, who are denied educations and careers, and who are the victims (or potential victims) of honor killing, genital mutilation, forced marriage, and sundry forms of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

In 2006, her book But the Greatest of All Is Freedom: On the Consequences of Immigration became a huge—and controversial—best-seller in Norway. At the time, Hege lived in a neighborhood called Kampen, a part of Oslo that brings to mind the Haight-Ashbury or East Village of the 1960s. Hege notes that after her book began to sell big—and draw harsh media attacks—her neighborhood was papered over with posters featuring a photo of her with an X drawn over her face, along with the slogan NO TO RACISTS IN KAMPEN. Then one day—as Hege revealed in a powerful account posted yesterday on the website of Human Rights Service, the small foundation where she works—one or more people broke into her home, beat her, and left her bruised and unconscious in a pool of blood on the floor. Nothing was stolen. The date was January 1, 2007—three years to the day before the attempted murder of Westergaard.

At first, Hege kept the crime secret, for fear that publicizing it would discourage other critics of Islam from speaking out. Not until a month later did she report the brutal event to the police, and then only after a lawyer friend had secured a guarantee that the report would not be made public. But the steady rise in Muslim violence in Europe, culminating in the Westergaard attack, helped changed her mind about publicly revealing the assault. She also wanted to underscore the fact that many in the media—people like Vaïsse, I might add—were by their see-no-evil approach to the subject encouraging physical attacks on people like her and Westergaard. This state of affairs, she felt, needed to be addressed publicly and its real-world consequences made clear.

The fact is that for years Hege has been the target of a ruthless, tireless, and breathlessly mendacious campaign of criticism by the far-left Norwegian media. She’s become Public Enemy Number One among not only radical Muslims but also Communists, socialists (whose numbers in Norway’s capital are not insignificant), and what Hege calls “organized anti-racists.” These are members of Scandinavia’s many government-funded organizations who claim to be liberal opponents of racism but are in fact largely concerned with defending even the most illiberal aspects of immigrant cultures. Indeed, Hege doesn’t believe that her assailants were Muslims; she suspects that they were far leftists of the sort who proliferate in neighborhoods like Kampen and who have made common cause with European Islamists. Hege is also convinced—as am I—that the media’s concerted effort to identify her as a racist and Islamophobe influenced her attackers. This is not difficult to believe: it was, after all, the Dutch media’s demonization of Fortuyn that helped put him in an early grave instead of in his country’s prime ministership.

In her Monday post, Hege suggested that if all the influential newspapers in Europe had published the Danish cartoons, “it would have been much more difficult to build up the increasingly brutal climate we see now all over Europe: the fact that people are not just the subjects of attacks, and of attempted murder, but are denied virtually all personal freedom in their daily lives, so that Westergaard cannot set foot outside his home without the police on his heels, just as Robert Redeker is living underground in the homeland of Voltaire.” And she asked: “Will Europe manage to set its foot down strongly enough . . . that there will be no doubt that the continent never will give up its founding values? Or will the commentariat and political elite continue to give way, inch by inch . . . ?” Any of us, she warned, can end up a Kurt Westergaard if we dare to speak our minds. But don’t tell that to the “experts” at Foreign Policy.

Bruce Bawer is the author of Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom. He blogs at brucebawer.com. ]]> http://frontpagemag.com/2010/01/07/while-europe-sneered-by-bruce-bawer/feed/ 79 http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/12/imam-tied-to-fort-hood-and-flight-253-jihadists-wrote-in-october-that-yemen-would-soon-be-a-big-play.html http://www.jihadwatch.org/2009/12/imam-tied-to-fort-hood-and-flight-253-jihadists-wrote-in-october-that-yemen-would-soon-be-a-big-play.html#comments Thu, 31 Dec 2009 02:48:03 +0000 Robert "And when this new front of Jihad starts in Yemen it might become the single most important front of Jihad in the world." "U.S. Probes Cleric's Tie to Jetliner Bomb Plot," by Evan Perez, Margaret Coker, and Siobhan Gorman for the Wall Street Journal, December 31 (thanks to Maxwell):

WASHINGTON -- Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical American-born Yemeni cleric who has surfaced in multiple terror probes, is emerging as a central part of the Christmas Day airline bomber investigation, as authorities focus attention on a network of extremists in Yemen who may have helped radicalize the young Nigerian accused in the failed plot. [...]

Mr. Awlaki has rocketed to prominence this year because of his role as Internet-based spiritual guide aiding the radicalization of a new generation of Islamist extremists.

Mr. Awlaki was in contact with an Army psychiatrist charged in a shooting spree last month at Fort Hood Army base in Texas.

Mr. Awlaki was among the targets in recent attacks by Yemeni security forces, with U.S. support, against al Qaeda operations in Yemen. Family members have dismissed initial reports that he was killed and his whereabouts are unknown.

Part of Mr. Awlaki's appeal, say U.S. officials and terrorism experts, is his ability to act as a bridge between the predominantly Arab leaders of al Qaeda and willing potential jihadists in the West.

He preached at a mosque in Northern Virginia until 2002, when he left the U.S. to spend time building a following in the U.K., before returning to Yemen in 2004.

He has communicated with potential recruits through Internet Web sites and social-networking sites such as Facebook.

On his own blog, Mr. Awlaki wrote in October that Yemen was about to become a key player in global jihad. "And when this new front of Jihad starts in Yemen it might become the single most important front of Jihad in the world."...

Visit Wall Street Journal

President Barack Obama has been in office nearly one year, making it two since my late daughter Sarah trudged through a freezing winter in Iowa to help him win the nomination. According to a Gallup poll conducted on the anniversary of the presidential vote, only 28% of Americans still believe that Mr. Obama will be “able to heal political divisions in the country.” A year ago, 54% felt he would be able to do so.

When I read those figures I can’t help thinking about Sarah. For the two of us reflected the country’s political divisions in our own relationship—a case familiar to many American families. As a conservative and an active participant in political conflicts, I am acutely aware of how difficult it is, despite best intentions, to change the tone in the midst of debate, and how many otherwise thoughtful people can be swept up in its lower passions.

Despite our political differences—and the painful distances and predictable frustrations they created—Sarah and I ultimately came to the point where we were able to avoid the rancors of these public imbroglios. By the time she was overtaken by medical complications that derived from a birth defect, and which made efforts like her Iowa campaign extraordinarily difficult, we were quite close. Sarah and I were able to be respectful not only of the fact that we had such differences, but of the reasons why we had them. After her death in March 2008, I decided to write a memoir of her remarkable life, and to include the story of our estrangement and reunion in the hopes it might be helpful to others facing similar divisions.

To continue reading this article, click here.

[Editor's note: This article is reprinted from City Journal]

As the United States prepares to try Nidal Malik Hasan for 13 counts of murder and 32 counts of attempted murder at Fort Hood last month, few question the suspect’s guilt, but many disagree about his motives. Yet the evidence is now conclusive: the Fort Hood massacre was an act of Islamic terror. Before his shooting spree, Hasan told colleagues that non-Muslims were infidels condemned to hell and that they should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats. Hasan traded 18 e-mails with Anwar al-Awlaki, an al-Qaida recruiter. On the morning of the massacre, he gave his neighbor a Koran as he was departing for the base, telling her that he was going to do “good work for God.” Wearing Pakistani garb, Hasan shouted “Allahu akbar” as he began firing at U.S. troops.

Despite the plentiful evidence, however, leftists refuse to accept Hasan’s Islamic inspiration. We’ve heard the rationalizations: Hasan was a nut; the stresses of serving in the military drove him crazy; he experienced anti-Islamic discrimination; anyone is capable of “losing it” under such stressful conditions; and so on. These reflexive denials are a logical continuation of the Left’s long tradition of denying the evil of our totalitarian enemies—or, when forced to acknowledge them, blaming them on the United States. This was the pattern throughout the Cold War, and it’s continued during the War on Terror.

When it’s proven beyond reasonable doubt that jihadism was in fact Hasan’s motive, here’s a prediction: leftists will either fall into apathetic silence or respond that it was American racism, oppression, and Islamophobia that forced Hasan’s hand. To recognize the evil of Nidal Hasan and his ideology, to admit the existence of pernicious enemies, is to concede that there are societies, cultures, and systems that are much more unjust than ours. This is an untenable step for leftists to take, because it means acknowledging that there is something superior about our civilization that’s worth saving and defending.

The notion that his own society is evil and unjust is the bedrock of the leftist’s vision. Wicked capitalists trample on the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden; the leftist appoints himself to rescue these victims. He is a self-styled social redeemer, leading a movement to liberate the masses, even if it results in the destruction of his own society. This political mission provides him with immense moral indignation and, therefore, moral superiority, dispositions from which, in turn, he derives emotional self-gratification. His whole belief system provides him with a sense of belonging; he joins other social redeemers, as well as the victims, real or imagined, who wait for him to break their chains.

Thus, the leftist’s political disposition is a faith that reinforces his personal identity and sense of belonging. Admitting that Hasan is a jihadist would undermine that faith. It would also expose the leftist to potential excommunication from his social community. He’d become politically suspect to his peers, perhaps even accused of becoming a reactionary right-winger. That’s why we will continue to witness more Fort Hood denial from the Left, with all of its irrationality and disregard for human life.

*

To get the whole story on the Left’s Jihad Denial, read Jamie Glazov’s new book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

via Bad Ideas Never Die by Guy Sorman, City Journal 18 December 2009.

Claiming torture is a tactic straight out of the al-Qaeda playbook. "Mumbai Attack Suspect Retracts Confession in Court," by Arlene Chang and Eric Bellman for the Wall Street Journal, December 18 (thanks to Visvas):

MUMBAI -- The Pakistani man captured during the Mumbai terrorist attacks last year retracted his confession Friday, saying he had been framed and tortured.

Mohammed Ajmal Kasab told a special court in Mumbai that he arrived in Mumbai well before the attacks with the aim of starting an acting career. Twenty days before the attacks, he said, he was picked up by the police while looking for a hotel and thrown in jail because he is from Pakistan.

He said it was only during the attacks that he was brought out to take the blame as he resembled one of the attackers photographed attacking commuters at a train station with an AK-47. He said he was then tortured into signing a confession. "I have never seen an AK-47 in my life," the 21-year-old told the court. "I saw it only when the police produced it."

Mr. Kasab's claim is the latest twist in his testimony. He had pleaded not guilty when the trial began early this year, then in July told the court he was guilty.

Mr. Kasab is allegedly the only survivor of 10 suspected gunmen in the attacks, which killed more than 160 people. Mr. Kasab is charged with everything from murder and waging war against India, and could face the death penalty, if convicted.

Mr. Kasab was captured during the 60-hour siege of India's financial capital that began Nov. 26, last year. Police say he admitted during multiple interrogations he was one of 10 gunmen trained in Pakistan who traveled together by sea on the terrorist mission. The assailants shot and killed people at Mumbai's top two five-star hotel complexes, the Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus train station, a Jewish center, a hospital and a restaurant.

Police denied that Mr. Kasab has been framed or tortured. They said they arrested Mr. Kasab in a shootout near Mumbai's Chowpatty Beach. His image has been captured on a surveillance camera at the train station, where he and an accomplice allegedly opened fire with automatic rifles and threw hand grenades, killing commuters.

The public prosecutor in the trial, Ujjwal Nikam, said Mr. Kasab's claims wouldn't change the outcome of the trial. "He is talking rubbish," he said. "His statements today are not going to affect our case in anyway. He is an evil terrorist."...

And one who knows that "war is deceit."

via World Affairs Journal – Feeble Critiques: Capitalism’s Petty Detractors.

Via Conservatives4Palin comes this article at the Wall Street Journal (of all places), about Arizona Senator (and the GOP’s presidential nominee last year) John McCain’s appearance on MSNBC’s “Meet the Press” earlier today. The article is yet another prime example of how the media purposefully distort comments made by conservatives, to manufacture controversies meant to weaken the entire conservative movement.

The WSJ’s Stephen Power writes that McCain first praised his former running mate Sarah Palin, after which he proceeded to insult her by calling her “irrelevant”:

Arizona Sen. John McCain came to the defense of his former GOP running mate Sarah Palin on Sunday. But in doing so, he used an adjective that some might not consider such a compliment.

[...]

“I am entertained every time I see these people attack her and attack her and attack her. She’s irrelevant, but they continue to attack her. I am so proud of her and the work that she is doing,” McCain said.

Irrelevant?

Now, if Power’s summary of the interview was correct, this would undoubtedly be a major controversy. After all, it’s not often that a presidential nominee says that his former number two is of no importance whatsoever.

However, that’s not what happened. As anyone who actually watched “Meet the Press” can testify, McCain was ironic when he called Palin “irrelevant.” Blogger Doug Brady words it rather well when he writes that McCain was clearly joking “about the irony in the fact that the media and liberals say she is irrelevant while at the same time doing everything in their diminishing power to stop her.”

Watch the exchange between “Meet the Press” host David Gregory and Senator McCain:

What’s most shocking about Power’s article is not the distortion itself, but his apparent believe that he will get away with it. Sadly, he’s probably right: when was the last time you saw a major news outlet issue a correction after one of its reporters wrote a dishonest article attacking non-leftists?

Related posts:

1. NewsReal Sunday: McCain Rejects Palin Criticism by Former Campaign Manager
2. MSNBC's Hot Dog Palin Obsession
3. TDB's Tina Brown Explains: Palin's Confidence Based on Ignorance