Stromata Blog

How to Throw Freedom Away

This has been the kind of week that pessimists love. The Cartoon Jihad rumbled on. Terrorists in Iraq came the nearest yet to igniting a genuine civil war. Disruption of oil exports from Saudi-controlled Arabia was narrowly averted. Liberals and the media, aided by knee-jerking right-wingers, ambushed the White House over approval of what should have been a routine business deal. According to at least one poll, the public now prefers to put Democrats in charge of national security. Bill Buckley declared that the American mission in Iraq has failed.

Though the tide can shift abruptly, right now it is running strongly toward a new American isolationism: washing our hands of Iraq, treating the entire Moslem world as an enemy, and hunkering down inside our own borders. After much tergiversation, that has effectively become the policy of the Democratic Party. Through a strange convergence, it also is suddenly attractive to what may be a large segment of the Right.

What would that strategy mean? The clearest lesson of the week’s events is that the fanatics in the Islamic world are full of confidence. The hope behind the isolationist impulse is that, if we leave them alone, they won’t bother us. That might make a shred of sense if they were war weary and desperate, longing to bring hostilities to an end. But when they have seen Western governments cowering at their protests, Western leaders pledging to stamp out criticism of Islam and Western commentators suggesting that the mightiest army in world history should resign itself to impotence, why should they be downhearted? Their hostility does not arise from recent events and will not be assuaged by our attempts at a unilateral cease fire.

Instead, American retreat will embolden them further. The rejection of the Dubai Ports World deal, a near certainty in light of the present state of public opinion (despite sensible arguments by the Wall Street Journal and others), will show that rulers who have cooperated with America cannot count on American support. Al-Qa’eda would be quite pleased to slink out of Iraq, where it has no hope of winning a standup war against the Shia majority, and take control of Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Qatar, after which it will be in a position to topple the faltering Saudi oligarchy and continue into Egypt.

The strongest force holding Islamofascism in check in the Middle East today is fear of the United States and Israel, compared to which the enemy commands no significant power. The most that Zarqawi and his ilk can do is terrorize civilians and pray that Allah will move the infidels to run away without have been compelled. Should that happen, the calculus changes. With America gone and Israel deterred by a nuclear-armed Iran, zealots for a new Caliphate will be the strongest horse still in the race. Their regional triumph could be astonishingly swift, and their ambitions will certainly extend far beyond Riyadh and Cairo.

America will then face an indefinite future of terrorist threats. Though of low intensity, that will be the worst species of warfare, in which we will be on a perpetual defensive, trying to guard every vulnerable point in our 3.7 million square miles of territory, penetrable through over 5,000 miles of lightly patrolled border and scores of sea and airports. Inevitably, the defense will occasionally fail, and every failure will inspire further tightening. Ultimately, we will face a stark choice between safety and freedom – or, rather, between unfree safety and unfree insecurity, for there will be no possibility of returning to the casual libertarianism that we now enjoy.

My fond desire is for a restoration of the freedom of my youth, when one could board a plane without passing through metal detectors or cross the Canadian border with only a credit card for ID. Then we were safe and free. To be so again, we shall have to defeat the legions of terrorism and tyranny, not encourage them to believe that they can defeat us.

Not Smoking Is Harzardous to Your Pension Plan

The Daily Telegraph has, I suspect, “sexed up” its report on a Hewitt Associates study of the effect of Britain’s coming smoking ban on pension costs.

Hewitt Associates, a human resources group, said the ban, which is expected to encourage around 600,000 of the nation’s 13m smokers to quit, will substantially increase people’s life expectancy and therefore their pension costs.

Figures compiled by the company show an average improvement of just one year in life expectancy will increase the average deficit of the FTSE 100’s pension funds by £15 billion to £20 billion.

And the increase in annual pension costs could reduce profit before tax for the FTSE 100 companies by around £1 billion a year. . . .

Kevin Wesbroom, a Hewitt Associates pensions consultant, said: “The numbers do highlight just how sensitive profit and loss charges, deficits and hence cash funding requirements are to assumptions made about future morality rates.

“Companies and Trustees that are responsible for defined benefit schemes need to recognise that this announcement is likely to affect the company’s financial statements as well as how their schemes are funded.”

An overall one-year life expectancy increase from a five percent reduction in the smoking population is implausibly huge, but the general point is a good one. Smokers are, on the whole, an economic boon. Harvard Law School Professor Kip Viscusi’s empirical studies make that claim unarguable. For example,

To be sure, smokers do incur higher medical costs—about five cents per pack in Massachusetts in the mid-1990s. Yet, because smokers have a shorter life expectancy than nonsmokers, smokers incur a cost of 11 cents per pack less in nursing home costs and nine cents per pack less in pension costs. On balance, smokers incur about 14 cents less per pack in costs paid by Massachusetts, while contributing an additional 51 cents per pack in excise taxes.

That doesn’t mean that we ought to encourage people to light up, but it does suggest that the smoking habit harms only its victims, not society at large. Why, then, is there such fervor to stamp it out?

My theory is that mankind labors under an Iron Law of Puritanism. The quantity of busybody interference in other men’s lives is a constant. It can be redirected but not diminished. Since society no longer feels inclined to discourage adultery, promiscuity, homosexuality, pornography, vulgarity, public indecency, etc.,the impulse to control others’ lives has migrated to a minor personal pleasure. Once tobacco is stamped out, I wonder what the next target will be.

First they came for the smokers, but I didn’t complain, because I don’t smoke. . . .

But what did it matter? My pension plan was broke, and I couldn’t afford to go on living.

Shakespeare Supports Denmark!

Instapundit carried this photo from the pro-Danish demonstration today in Washington, D.C.:

BTW, if you can’t write Hamlet, another way to show your backing for the Danes is to make plans to attend next year’s European Science Fiction Convention, which will be held in Copenhagen, September 21–23, 2007. Those who find the 2007 Worldcon in Japan too expensive or culturally forbidding may also want to consider this alternative. Of course, it’s possible to go to both.

Further reading: Christopher Hitchens, “Stand Up for Denmark!”
William J. Bennett & Alan M. Dershowitz, “A Failure of the Press” (the oddest op-ed couple yet)
Andrew Steven Harris, “Under Siege”
Jim Geraghty, “Liberal bloggers AWOL on the Danish cartoon controversy” (except when they blame Bush for it, natch)
Henrik Bering, “CBS Does Denmark” (Guess whose side the Rathergate Network is on)
George Neumayr, “Europeans: New People of the Pact”

Return of the Nativist

The two groups that the pre-Civil War “Know-Nothings” most hated were immigrants and Roman Catholics. Not all contemporary immigration restrictionists continue that tradition. There are reasonable men in their ranks who make rational (albeit IMHO mistaken) arguments for closing the U.S. to most newcomers. Then there are those like Donald Collins, a board member of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (“reform” here being a synonym for abolition), writing in the Pittsburgh Tribune:

Despite the new pope’s encyclical disclaimer about trying to influence public policy, Rome and these bishops have been hard at work trying to shape U.S. public policy for decades. And, to a large degree, they have succeeded. Let me illustrate.

We now have five male Catholic justices on the U.S. Supreme Court. Most Catholics, particularly women, with whom I talk are highly displeased with this concentration of power and the likely rightward course of women's rights under the new alignment. . . .

Those who occupy chairs in the citadels of religiosity are naturally covetous [sic] of the “true faith” they embrace – not because it represents the truth but because it represents temporal power of the most useful kind. That, for example, the world’s richest institution, the combined resources and property of the Catholic Church, exposes the obvious basis for its biases on contraception, abortion and male-only priests as a means of flock control – particularly over women but also in a much broader sense over the American body politic. [Try diagramming that last sentence.]

The one question that was not raised at the Alito hearings was whether he felt that the activities of his church were legal under current statutes.

On Nov. 20, 1975, the American Catholic bishops issued their Pastoral Plan for Pro-Life Activities. This plan is a superbly detailed blueprint of the bishops’ strategy for infiltrating and manipulating the American democratic process at national, state and local levels. It called for the creation of a national political machine controlled by the bishops. In large measure, this machine has, dragging along its unwitting evangelical brethren, taken over the Republican Party.

Colgate University political science professor Timothy Byrnes calls it the most “focused and aggressive political leadership” ever exerted by the American Catholic hierarchy. So much for respect for the American constitutional principle of separation of church and state. [emphasis added]

Mr. Collins’s innuendos are slightly quaint, rather like reading a less literate Paul Blanshard. As John J. Miller observes,

Infiltrating and manipulating? Because Catholics have decided to promote pro-life causes through conventional politics? I don’t particularly care for the agenda of the Collins’s Federation for American Immigration Reform, but I wouldn’t accuse it of trying to subvert our country’s democracy because it pursues a political agenda in Washington. But I might accuse its leaders of coming dangerously close to trafficking in anti-Catholic bigotry.

Is Immigration Policy in the Bible?

Now and then modernist Christians drag the Bible into political debates. I’m not sure why they expect anybody to be impressed by the opinions of dead, white advocates of patriarchy. Certainly, they don’t turn to such sources for religious enlightenment. They seem to have the peculiar idea that, while the evangelists knew nothing worth knowing about God, they can furnish useful guidance on, say, immigration policy.

We learn from Dave Kopel, that a Presbyterian Church (USA) spokesman recently declared that her denominational hierarchy’s opposition to strict immigration enforcement “is based on the scripture passage Matthew 25, verses 31-46, which talks about nations being judged, in part, by how they treat strangers”. She added,

Joseph and Mary had to flee persecution. Jesus was not born in his home community. Jesus and his family perhaps would have been locked up with a strict border approach to immigration.

I’m no immigration restrictionist, but this line of argument suggests that the Presbyterian spokeswoman, the delightfully named Elenora Giddings-Ivory, hasn’t done a lot of Bible reading lately.

Matthew 25:31–46 is Christ’s well known parable of His separation of the sheep from the goats at the Last Judgement, a text that all Christians should ponder frequently but not one that “talks about nations being judged”. The Judgement is individual and moral, not collective and political. The sheep placed on Our Lord’s right hand are commended for welcoming strangers, among other good deeds. It is a long stretch to infer that God condemns the enforcement of rules for crossing international boundaries.

The parallel between Christ’s parents and illegal aliens is downright silly. Mr. Kopel points out that Mary and Joseph weren’t trying to sneak into another country in violation of the law. Rather, they were exemplars of civil obedience:

Why were they traveling? Not so that Joseph could live someplace illegally as an “undocumented worker,” but for the opposite reason. They were going to Bethlehem to comply with the Empire-wide tax and census decree issued by Augustus Caesar. Joseph, being from the House of David, had to go to David’s city because “everyone went to his own town to register.” . . .

[O]ne of the symbolic points made by the story is that Joseph and his very pregnant spouse went far out of the way (literally) to comply with a government tax and census law. . . . Whatever you want to say about Joseph the carpenter, you have to admit that he did everything possible to make sure that he was not an “undocumented worker.”

The flight into Egypt came later, and refugees in analogous circumstances are not “locked up” under American law.

Under current U.S. immigration law, the Joseph/Mary/Jesus family would have been entitled to asylum in the United States because they would have been able to prove that they could not return to their home country “because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.” 8 U.S.C.§1101(a)(42)(A). (U.S. immigration officers and the reviewing court might not have credited Joseph’s fear of persecution, which was based on a dream. But hypothetically, the family could have called the Magi as witnesses, who could attest to Herod’s obsession with Jesus, and called other witnesses who could have testified about the Massacre of the Innocents that Herod had perpetrated in Israel.)

Miss Gidding-Ivory’s misreadings presumably spring largely from ignorance. Perhaps she has glanced through the Cliff’s Notes on Matthew and Luke. But they also hint at the frivolity of the modernist approach to Scripture. Like some of the less reasonable fundamentalists, her ilk sees the Bible as a collage of “proof texts”, ready to be snipped from their context and applied to support the user’s favored positions. The difference, of course, is that the fundies believe that they are quoting God’s veritable Word. What’s an up-to-date Presbyterian’s excuse?

Addendum: Let me elevate the following, attributed by the commenter to SF fan Taras Wolansky, to the main text of this post:

It occurs to me that liberals are to the Constitution what an ivory hunter is to a jungle god, in one of those old stories: he doesn’t believe in the god himself, but the natives do, and so he hides behind the statue of the god and gives the natives orders through a speaking trumpet.

The al-Askareyya Atrocity

If Danish cartoons are “disrespectful”, what can one say about the destruction of the golden dome of the al-Askareyya Shrine, resting place of the 10th and 11th Shi’ite imams and one of the holiest sites in the former Abbasid capital, Samarra? Yet this outrageous insult to Islam was carried out not by infidels but by self-proclaimed jihad warriors supposedly fighting in the name of Allah!

The vandals’ evident purpose was to incite civil war among Iraqis. It was the third attack this week on a conspicuous Shi’ite target. Reports are now coming in of violence against Sunni clerics and mosques, despite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani’s call for mourning instead of retaliation. Inevitably, some Shi’ite hotheads won’t listen to words of peace, but it’s also more than a little likely that many of the “retaliatory” actions are also the work of al-Qa’eda and other terrorists, who hope to rally Iraq’s Sunni minority to their cause through fake persecution. That would be a mere extension of the tactics of the agitators who contrived phony drawings of Mohammed when the real ones weren’t inflammatory enough.

This atrocity exposes the cynicism and unbelief at the heart of Islamofascism. Men devoted to religion rather than power would, at the very least, not destroy the holy places of their own faith. As was so often the case in Europe’s Wars of Religion, ostentatious piety is a tool for gathering foot soldiers and a cover for purely secular ambitions. Osama bin-Laden and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi dream of lording it over a pan-Moslem despotism. Should they or some future terror master succeed, faithful Moslems will be among their slaves.

I wonder whether the leaders of the National Council of Churches, so zealous in slandering America, will meditate on who carries out barbaric deeds like these and who expends blood and treasure to stop them.

Addendum: Iraq the Model has a report from Baghdad on Iraqi reactions. I hope that the blogosphere will now calm down about the far-fetched threat posed by Dubai World Ports and pay attention to an event that deserves a blogstorm.

The National Council of Slander and Lies

Last weekend, the leaders of the National Council of Churches regaled the Assembly of the World Council of Churches with an open letter so shrill and irrational that one doubts the sanity of whoever drafted it. One cannot doubt their hatred for their countrymen, which imbues such paragraphs as this one:

[W]e acknowledge as well that we are citizens of a nation that has done much in these years to endanger the human family and to abuse the creation. Following the terrorist attacks you sent “living letters” inviting us into a deeper solidarity with those who suffer daily from violence around the world. But our country responded by seeking to reclaim a privileged and secure place in the world, raining down terror on the truly vulnerable among our global neighbors. Our leaders turned a deaf ear to the voices of church leaders throughout our nation and the world, entering into imperial projects that seek to dominate and control for the sake of our own national interests. Nations have been demonized and God has been enlisted in national agendas that are nothing short of idolatrous. We lament with special anguish the war in Iraq, launched in deception and violating global norms of justice and human rights. We mourn all who have died or been injured in this war; we acknowledge with shame abuses carried out in our name; we confess that we have failed to raise a prophetic voice loud enough and persistent enough to deter our leaders from this path of preemptive war. Lord, have mercy.

Disgracefully, this declaration of solidarity with the 9/11 terrorists, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein was read to the delegates by an Orthodox priest, Fr. Leonid Kishkovsky, the “chief ecumenical officer” of the Orthodox Church in America.

Alan Wisdom, interim president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, says all that needs saying:

This penitence is false. These church leaders are not confessing their own sins; they are trying to confess the sins of George W. Bush, who never asked them to perform that service for him. Nor did the members of their own churches ask them to make this kind of statement on their behalf. This letter is a blatant political abuse of the sacred Christian rite of confession.

Five days before its blasphemous mockery of the sacrament of penitence, the NCC took a nuanced view of the famous Danish cartoons:

We stand in solidarity with North American Islamic Organizations who have exercised disciplined restraint and advocated diplomacy and education. These organizations include the Islamic Society of North America, Council for American Islamic Relations, Muslim Public Affairs Council, Islamic Circle of North America and the ASMA Society.

We strongly affirm the freedom of the press, but are deeply disturbed by the inability of the press to understand and respect the sensitivities of religious people. In the context of a widespread and growing Islamophobia in both Europe and the United States, the offense is not only an affront to deeply held religious convictions, but an irresponsible case of cultural stereotyping. We applaud the Norwegian press for its courage to offer an apology to the world-wide Muslim community and lift up their example for others to follow.

The next paragraph did condemn violence while “strongly affirm[ing] the right of Muslim people to protest”, but there was no passion to the condemnation. The contrasting emotional levels send a clear message: Murder and arson may be bad things, but, so far as the soi-disant spokesmen for American Christianity are concerned, their own country is by far the greater evil.

Last August, the Antiochian Orthodox Archdiocese of North America withdrew from the NCC. The wisdom of that decision is now manifest. May the rest of the Orthodox hierarchy swiftly follow Antioch’s lead. Kyrie eleison.

Further reading: Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse, “NCC Exit Poll”

Storm in the Ports

As is so often the case these days, the irony is thick enough to cut. People who denounced the post-9/11 detention of Arabs living in this country illegally, tried to prevent renewal of the Patriot Act, instantly concluded that eavesdropping on al-Qa’eda’s phone calls and e-mail violates the law, and routinely condemn American “Islamophobia” are now in a frenzy about the rather speculative danger that the acquisition of Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company (the “P&O” of the British Empire’s zenith) by Dubai World Ports poses a threat to national security.

When figures like Hillary Clinton, Jon Corzine and the ultra-leftist mayor of Baltimore profess fear that the Sultan of Dubai, DWP’s owner, will allow terrorists to infiltrate the six U.S. ports that the P&O manages, it’s obvious that they are simply playing the game of reviling every Bush Administration action. If our government had exerted pressure in behalf of the rival bidder, the Singapore-owned PSA International Ptd., the same folks would have screamed about anti-Moslem “profiling” and collaboration with an authoritarian regime.

Yet there are more serious critics: Senator Majority Leader Frist, Governors Pataki and Erlich, a bevy of Republican legislators and, it appears, the great majority of right-of-center commentators. The moment could hardly be less auspicious, coming at what Jim Geraghty calls a “tipping point in the Clash of Civilizations”, when –

More and more, we’re seeing commentators conclude that they’ve had it with Islam. They’re tired of hearing that the violent voices are a marginal minority, that the vast majority of Muslims disagree, that we shouldn’t let the actions and words of the Islamists to define the entire faith and that our differences can be resolved by greater “sensitivity” on the part of the West.

As the OpinionJournal Political Diary (which you can read first hand for only $3.95 a month) observes,

Once again the Bush team is taking heat for a decision that is controversial in part because the administration mishandled the public relations behind it. The decision to allow a Dubai company to acquire a British company that has contracts to manage six U.S. ports has provided politicians of both parties with an opportunity to engage in cheap political demagoguery. . . ..

On first glance, it’s understandable why there would be concern. . . .But the simple fact is that transferring management of the ports would do little to change their security status. The Coast Guard and U.S. Customs would still be responsible for protecting the facilities. U.S. longshoremen would still make up the workforce unloading container ships. The management of Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Co, the acquired British company, would remain what it is now: completely international.

One can argue, indeed, that Dubai’s ownership will improve security. Should discreet pressure on P&O’s owner ever become necessary, it can be exerted readily on a ruler who has supported our side in the War on Terror and is himself a prime target of the Islamofascists. It’s not obvious that the government of Singapore would be easier to handle. Also worth pondering is the fact that –

Had PSA won P&O, it would have created a dominant ports company that on many international trade routes would have controlled both access points – loading and unloading – for container-shipping firms. [Wall Street Journal, 2/11/06, p. 4; sorry, no link]

That kind of quasi-monopoly strikes me as a security risk in and of itself. By contrast, Dubai’s successful takeover “will ensure that the global container-shipping industry remains competitive with four large players controlling ports in different parts of the world.” [ibid.]

It’s surprising that the Administration wasn’t prepared to make the case for Dubai as soon as the P&O deal was announced. I suppose that the President and his aides are so familiar with the day-to-day cooperation that we have received from Dubai and its partners in the United Arab Emirates that they didn’t think about how the transaction looks to outsiders.

The President didn’t help at all by invoking multiculturalist clichés: “I want those who are questioning it to step up and explain why all of a sudden a Middle Eastern company is held to a different standard than a Great British company.” That’s really, really easy to figure out, as Mr. Bush knows perfectly well. For a starter, two of the 9/11 hijackers came from the UAE, none from Great Britain.

Having been wrong-footed at the start and with little hope that the elite media will offer a balanced picture, the Administration has little realistic prospect of reversing the anti-Dubai momentum. The only practicable exit will, I imagine, be an arrangement that insulates P&O’s owner from involvement in port management. Since the sultan’s only interest lies in the return on his investment, a compromise should be possible. It shouldn’t, however, have been necessary.

Addendum: NeverYetMelted has a great tongue-in-cheek interpretation of the White House’s strategy:

But suppose the administration had played it the other way. Michael Chertoff, head of Homeland Security, holds a press conference denouncing the sale, and calls for Congressional action to overturn the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) rubberstamp approval of the British sale. The next day’s editorials in the Times and Washington Post denounce the anti-Islamic bigotry of the Bush Administration, noting that Dubai is, in fact, a US ally in the War on Terror, that the port terminals were previously foreign-owned, and that the only other bidder was a Singapore company. Democrat leaders in Congress attack the administration in press conferences held at mosques.

By acquiescing compliantly to the deal, Rove has put Crusading fire into the democrat opposition’s belly, and persuaded prominent leaders of the Congressional left to march in Michelle Malkin’s parade.

Any day now, Karl is going to get Bush to announce his intention to outlaw coercive interrogations of Islamic terrorists, and we are going to see Hillary Clinton acting like Jack Bauer, promising personally to make every single one of the rascals talk.

Quote of the Day

Mark Steyn:

Fortunately, the Washington Post had that wise old bird David Ignatius to put it in the proper historical context: “This incident,” he mused, “reminds me a bit of Sen. Edward Kennedy’s delay in informing Massachusetts authorities about his role in the fatal automobile accident at Chappaquiddick in 1969.”

Hmm. Let’s see. On the one hand, the guy leaves the gal at the bottom of the river struggling for breath pressed up against the window in some small air pocket while he pulls himself out of the briny, staggers home, sleeps it off and saunters in to inform the cops the following day that, oh yeah, there was some broad down there. And, on the other hand, the guy calls 911, has the other fellow taken to the hospital, lets the sheriff know promptly but neglects to fax David Gregory’s make-up girl!

One can only hope others agree with Ignatius’ insightful analogy, and that the reprehensible Cheney will be hounded from public life the way Kennedy was all those years ago. One would hate to think folks would just let it slide and three decades from now this Cheney guy will be sitting on some committee picking Supreme Court justices and whatnot.

Further reading: Herbert E. Meyer, “What If Dick Cheney Hadn’t Stiffed the Press?”
Dateline: Hollywood, “Leno, Stewart Implicated in New White House Corruption Scandal” (which really ought to bring this kerfuffle to its overdue finis)

Bumper Stickers of the Future

Though I didn’t notice it at the time, a well-written blog called Bookworm Room recently ran a contest for new conservative slogans (thanx to The American Thinker). My favorites among the winners:

Bush spied, terrorists died.
Democrats – a 40 year war on poverty and still no exit strategy
I stubbed my toe. Impeach Bush!
Keep your socialism out of my paycheck!
It takes a conservative to feed a liberal.

My all-time favorite conservative slogan remains, of course, the old reliable, “Don’t let them immanentize the eschaton!”

Larry Summers and the Reputation of Harvard

According to the Wall Street Journal [link probably for subscribers only], the Harvard Corporation is considering whether it should fire politely request the resignation of the university’s president, Lawrence H. Summers, before the faculty adopts a motion of “no confidence” in him at the end of this month, apparently a foregone conclusion. The arts and sciences faculty voted that way last year.

The Journal’s anonymous sources say that the members of the Corporation “have become increasingly concerned that continued faculty discontent with Mr. Summers, a former U.S. treasury secretary, is hurting the university”. As evidence, they cite a decline in the percentage of alumni making donations.

That reasoning strikes me as exactly right – up to a point, Lord Corporation. I have no doubt that many alums are annoyed, but more with the faculty than the president. The most widely publicized objection to Mr. Summers is that he doesn’t subordinate scientific inquiry to political correctness. Maybe the university’s graduates see no reason to subsidize the gang of anti-intellectual poltroons who now dominate teaching at Harvard.

I realize that tenured professors, unlike university presidents, can’t be dismissed, but getting rid of Mr. Summers won’t solve the fundamental problem that this internal conflict reveals. If a Yalie may offer a friendly suggestion (and, yes, I know that Old Eli has its problems, too), the Harvard Corporation should defend the president and encourage professors who can’t bear the thought of working under someone who is only a moderate leftist to migrate elsewhere. The academic world has a surplus of Ph.D.’s and a distinct shortage of men willing to stand up to Ph.D. follies.

Worth Rioting Over!

Though I’ve spent my adult life north of the Mason-Dixon line, my Crimson Tide credentials are pretty solid: I was born in Tuscaloosa, my grandfather was a professor there, my great-uncle coached the baseball team for many years, and my mother and my sister Katie, as well as various cousins, uncles and aunts are alums. With that background, I was enraged by this blasphemy:

Riots broke out across the University of Alabama campus and the state itself today following reports that the M Zone’s Danish affiliate – Den M Distrikt – posted cartoons showing former University of Alabama football Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant wearing an Auburn hat and another showing him drawn into the infamously cheesy “Dogs Playing Poker” painting. The cartoons were first published way back after the 2000 season. But officials speculate they were not noticed at the time because Crimson Tide fans were too busy trying to figure out how the hell to get rid of Mike DuBose before he ruined their program.

In Alabama and other parts of the south, images or caricatures of “Bear” Bryant that depict the legendary coach as anything but a deity on par with God Almighty are considered blasphemous and highly offensive to Crimson Tide fans, akin to saying, “I don’t get what the big deal is with NASCAR.”

The site that reported this shocking story also republished the infidel images, provoking the University’s Sigma Chi chapter to issue a fatwa against it and the other perpetrators of this assault on Alabaman values.

I join my fellow Sigs in denouncing this deplorable abuse of Free Speech and demand that the State of Alabama both execute those responsible for this hate crime and enact laws to prevent any repetition.

Roll, Tide!

What the Cartoon Jihadists Want

It has become clear that the assault on Jylland-Posten’s famous cartoons was whipped up by Islamofascists to whom the quaint term “outside agitators” can legitimately be applied. They traveled through the Middle East spreading their message of hatred and also, since the real drawings were not offensive by any reasonable standard, fabricated others. To put it bluntly, they blasphemed the prophet whom they profess to honor, in order to deceive their fellow Moslems. Their machinations led to dozens of killings (almost all of Moslems) and millions of dollars of property damage. In the eyes of God, they are no better than murderers and vandals. What do they hope to accomplish by their crimes?

Jim Geraghty, who has the perspective that comes from residing in a predominantly Moslem country, paints part of the picture:

And now back to our bad news, and signs that the Danish cartoons have ignited a chain reaction that will result in all-out conflict between the West and the Muslim world over their insistence that Muhammad cannot be mocked, ever, and our insistence that freedom of speech includes the insulting, the insensitive, the controversial and the blasphemous. . . .

After 9/11, “if X happens, then the terrorists have won” became a cliche. In this case it might be extraordinarily accurate to say, “If you conclude that Islam cannot coexist with Western values, then the terrorists have won.” . . .

A little less speculative is the question of how Westerners’ souring views on Islam affect our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Bush administration’s goal of bringing democracy and liberty to the Middle East. It’s hard to sell that idealistic mission to the American people when a surprisingly large chunk of your base sees the Muslim world as an irredeemable mass of hatred and violence.

As Geraghty notes, the elite news media are playing into the cartoon jihadists’ hands:

[T]he media (with notable exceptions) has proven itself to be worse than useless in covering the news; they have made an effort to make these cartoons seem unimaginably, unprintably taboo (instead of letting readers decide this for themselves) and they have covered up the degree to which threats and intimidation are repressing free discussion of ideas in non-Muslim countries. That is the story.

Deliberately arousing Western hostility might seem like a suicidal strategy. In a War Between Civilizations, the West, with gigantic advantages in men, money, technology and military skill, could crush even a united House of Islam – probably without going onto full war footing. Some of the jihadists may be insane enough to ignore the disparity of forces, but others are wholly rational. As Cliff May of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies spells out, they plan to conquer without fighting a real war:

Muslim demonstrators have been torching embassies, stoning churches and threatening mass murder – to protest cartoons characterizing Muslims as violent extremists.

They have been burning flags and stomping on crosses and Stars of David – to express their outrage at those who say they are intolerant.

The damage these demonstrators are doing to the image of Islam is incalculable, far beyond what any poison-penned cartoonist could accomplish. So why are they doing it?

Machiavelli provided the answer more than 500 years ago. For those who would rule, he said, it is better “to be feared than loved.”

By now, all but the most self-deluded among us recognize that Militant Islamists are waging a War Against the West, a deadly jihad against Christians, Jews, Hindus and moderate Muslims. These religiously inspired fascists have no interest in being loved by “infidels.” They do, however, want to inspire fear – and they do want to rule.

The international intifada that has erupted – ostensibly in response to 12 cartoons first published in a Danish newspaper in September – is merely the Militant Islamists’ latest tactic. The charge most frequently leveled against the protestors is hypocrisy. How can they be up in arms over a few cartoons lampooning Muslims when, in many Muslim societies, Jews and Christians are routinely characterized in the most vicious terms and images? But that misses the point.

The Militant Islamists are not demanding equality. They are demanding superiority. They are Muslim supremacists – deological heirs to those who, in the 20th century, fought for Aryan supremacy and white supremacy.

Yousef Al-Qaradhawi – leader of the European Council for Fatwa and Research and president of the International Association of Muslim Scholars – is seen by some as the “hidden hand” behind the protests. He has candidly declared: “Islam will return to Europe as the conqueror.”

And because so many in the Western political elite loathe their own civilization while indulging in a sentimental romance with “oppressed peoples of the Third World”, this tactic succeeds. Bruce Bawer (no permalink), a homosexual cultural critic self-exiled from the United States, who has come to appreciate our country from an unusual vantage point, records the craven conduct of the governments of Norway and Sweden:

[O]n February 10, in Oslo, came a dramatic capitulation that seemed a classic case of sharia in action. For days, Velbjørn Selbekk, editor of the tiny Christian periodical Magazinet – the first publication to reprint the now-famous Muhammed cartoons from the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten – had firmly resisted pressure by Muslim extremists (who made death threats) and by the Norwegian establishment (which urged him to give in). But then, on that morning – the day before a planned mass demonstration against the cartoons – Norway’s Minister of Labor and Social Inclusion, Bjarne Håkon Hanssen, hastily called a press conference at a major government office building in Oslo.

There, to the astonishment of his supporters, Selbekk issued an abject apology for reprinting the cartoons. At his side, accepting his act of contrition on behalf of 46 Muslim organizations and asking that all threats now be withdrawn, was Mohammed Hamdan, head of Norway’s Islamic Council. In attendance were members of the Norwegian cabinet and the largest assemblage of imams in Norway's history. It was a picture right out of a sharia courtroom: the dhimmi prostrating himself before the Muslim leader, and the leader pardoning him – and, for good measure, declaring Selbekk to be henceforth under his protection, as if it were he, Hamdan, and not the Norwegian police, that held in his hands the security of citizens in Norway. . . .

On Tuesday, as if Norway hadn’t already been disgraced enough, an official Norwegian delegation met in Qatar with Muslim leader Yusuf al Qaradawi (who has defended suicide bombers and the murder of Jewish women and children) and implored him to accept Selbekk’s apology for the cartoons. Lucky them: he did. “To meet Yusuf al-Qaradawi under the present circumstances,” the Norwegian-Iraqi writer Walid al-Kubaisi told Aftenposten yesterday, “is tantamount to granting extreme Islamists and defenders of terror a right of joint consultation regarding how Norway should be governed.” Yep.

Then again, at least Norway had its brief, shining moment of resistance. Not Sweden. Among the European leaders who have insisted firmly in recent days that their nations enjoyed free speech – only to insist even more firmly that that right must be exercised “responsibly” – was Swedish foreign minister Laila Freivalds, who, responding on February 9 to a Muhammed cartoon in the newspaper of the right-wing Swedish Democratic Party, didn’t just call for “responsibility” but enforced it, sending the Security Police to close down the party website. “It is frightful,” she sniffed, “that a small group of Swedish extremists can expose Swedes to a clear danger” – as if it were the Swedish Democrats, and not Islamic extremists, who were threatening violence. Lately, many Europeans have sought to explain to enraged Muslims that democratic states cannot silence the free expression of ideas; Freivalds appeared determined to show that in Sweden, at least, this is no longer the case.

To find further examples, public and private, is depressingly easy. Here in Illinois, the Daily Illini, the student newspaper of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, had its own “brief, shining moment of resistance”. It reprinted the Danish cartoons. Then came the retreat into dhimmitude. The editor responsible for the action was suspended, and the paper ran an apologetic editorial.

In my law school days, I was the Daily Illini’s token conservative columnist (in fact, just about its only columnist to the right of Che Guevara). When I saw that it had defied the Islamofascists, I was rather proud of it and thought of writing a congratulatory post. Just as well that I didn’t get around to it.

The consequence of these surrenders is not merely the damage done to freedom of speech and the press by concessions to Islamofascist demands. In yielding to our enemies, we make them look like Osama bin-Laden’s “strong horses” and thus help them attract new followers. To a great many on the Western Left, the first priority is demonizing George W. Bush. Hence, they are reluctant to resist even the most repulsive of those who oppose him. Enlisting those allies – “the enemies of my enemy” – and leveraging their displays of dhimmitude into an upsurge of Islamofascist power are what the Cartoon Jihad is ultimately all about.

Further reading: David Warren, “The Test”
James Lewis, “The Discreet Charm of the Danish Cartoons”
Dennis Prager, “American News Media: Little Courage and Little Honesty”
Joseph Tartakovsky, “Islamic Chauvinism and the Mohammed Cartoons”
Paul Belien & Filip van Laenen, “Muslims Create Islamophobes, Then Want Islamophobes Punished” (signs that resistance is not utterly dead)
Abraham H. Miller, “From Cartoons to Chaos”
Diana West, “Cartoon Network”
Vasko Kohlmayer, “Appeasement Unto Death”

Hillary’s Cheney Moment

A little over four years ago, as today’s OpinionJournal Political Diary (just $3.95 a month for delivery to your own inbox) recalls, a van carrying Senator Hillary Clinton ran down a police officer, leaving him hospitalized with a shoulder injury (but, thankfully, nothing worse).

The incident occurred a month after 9/11 when concerns about terrorists and airports were at their height. Police officer Ernest Dymond was one of three officers guarding the gateway to the airport when a Ford van carrying Mrs. Clinton and her entourage rolled towards them at 35 mph.

Mr. Dymond tried to stop the vehicle, first by shouting at it to stop and then by banging on its side while it dragged him before stopping some 300 feet past the checkpoint. The officer injured his shoulder in the process and had to check in to a local hospital.

“I didn’t know if we had a terrorist,” Officer Dymond said of the van’s Secret Service driver. Local law enforcement officials chalked the incident up to a misunderstanding, and ordered Mr. Dymond not to give further interviews. But before the cone of silence descended on him, Mr. Dymond told NewsMax.com that he was disappointed that neither Senator Clinton nor anyone from her office bothered to talk to him, ask if he was all right or apologize.

Despite that remarkable lapse in manners, media interest in the van incident was almost non-existent, covered only briefly in the New York Post and Washington Times. Perhaps that’s because in the case of Senator Clinton, she chose not to communicate with a mere injured police officer, while Vice President Cheney’s mistake was in injuring the feelings of the entire White House press corps.

The two accidents are different, of course, but the key distinction, from the elite media’s point of view, is obvious: One involved a man they despise, the other a woman for whom they persistently cover up.

This afternoon, the Vice President will give an interview to Fox News, as oracles like National Review recommend. I can already write tomorrow’s New York Times and WaPo headlines: “Cheney Interview Leaves Many Unanswered Questions: VP Uses Friendly Forum In Attempt to Defuse Crisis Over Shooting”, and so on. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page has captured the absurdity of the coverage of “Cheney’s Coverup”. Mockery, alas, will not silence people who have no desire to report the news in good faith.

Åland Fights Back!

Through a quirk of history, the autonomous region of the Åland Islands (“Ahvenanmaa” in Finnish) enjoys the right, enshrined in the constitution of Finland, to veto treaties entered into by the government in Helsinki. For reasons explained by the Daily Telegraph, that oddity may help preserve the European Union from the misbegotten Giscard Constitution.

Voters in France and the Netherlands rejected the Constitution last year, but you know how much democracy counts with EU bureaucrats. Plans are afoot to revive the document and enact it without the consent of the governed. It is the Eurocrats’ misfortune that the Ålands have been victims of Brussels’ drive for socialist uniformity.

The islanders’ revolt has been brewing for some time. First, this community of Swedish-speaking Finns lost the right to fish at sea with traditional nets.

Then Ålanders saw their beloved spring duck hunting virtually abolished. To the Alanders’ final outrage, local laws on consuming “snus” or Swedish chewing tobacco, are about to be quashed by the European Court of Justice. . . .

Snus, a form of chewing tobacco, has been outlawed by EU fiat in every nation except Sweden, which secured a special opt-out as a condition of its joining the EU, and in every region – except Åland.

The Commission recently took Finland to court to quash Åland’s snus law. But Finland has no power to change that law. Finland does not control laws covering health in Åland; Åland does.

Åland is not allowed to defend its law before the justices in Luxembourg because the court recognises only nations. So the court is set to convict and fine Åland, without allowing the island’s government to plead its case.

For some reason, unfathomable to the Brussels way of thinking, the Ålanders are upset by this form of due process of law, so they are now threatening to prevent Finland from ratifying the proposed Constitution, which would kill it again.

It would be optimistic to think that the Lords of Europa will bow to a few thousand duck hunting, tobacco chewing fishermen. If necessary, I’m sure, the EU will override the Finnish Constitution for the sake of its own. Still, it is heartening to see resistance. Maybe America should offer aid to these European dissidents. I had never before heard of snus but will defend to the death the right of the people of Åland to chew it!

Further reading: Chresten Anderson, “Finnish Island Wants to Leave EU” (the article that attracted the Telegraph to this genuine David vs. Goliath story)

A Very Strange Kerfuffle

Though I lived and worked inside the Beltway for almost ten years, there are times when the mentalité of the political commentariat, Left and Right, is as indecipherable to me as a page of Sanskrit. The swelling uproar over Vice President Cheney’s accidental wounding of a fellow hunter is one of those times.

National Review editorializes that Mr. Cheney “should make a public appearance on the matter” to “express his regret and explain in his own words what happened”. Otherwise, the Bush Administration risks grave political damage. Well, it probably does, if every chatterer in Washington and New York devotes the next several weeks to declaring that political damage has been suffered. But does NR’s prescription make political or – dare I use the word? – moral sense?

Leaving aside the fact that apologies are due to Harry Whittington and his family, not to the general public, we all know, based on past performance, that no expression of contrition by the Vice President will satisfy his media critics. A Washington Post reporter who mocks him by donning faux hunting garb for a television appearance isn’t going to say, “He’s sorry, and that’s that.”

“Explaining in his own words what happened” raises a more delicate point. As a gentleman, the Vice President cannot describe the incident in a way that casts blame on a 78-year-old friend who is lying in the hospital and has suffered a heart attack (of the kind detectable only if one happens to be hooked up to hospital equipment, but no happy experience nonetheless). Therefore, he can only criticize himself or try to exculpate everyone. The latter seems to me to very likely be the truth, but an accident recollected in tranquility always has to be somebody’s fault. Asserting that no one was negligent will draw only sneers from the pundits.

The normally sensible John Podhoretz posed a question today whose answer has different implications from what he supposes: “If, during his vice presidency, Al Gore had gone out hunting, had shot someone during the hunt, and had failed to make the incident public for 18 hours, what would conservatives have said and thought?”

If Al Gore had acted exactly like Dick Cheney, I don’t know the answer. On the other hand, I’m quite certain that Gore’s conduct would have been very different. Within minutes, his spinners would have been telling the media that it was entirely the victim’s fault, and that version would have been relayed uncritically around the world. There would have been no thought for the other man’s pride and honor, and the VP’s first hospital visit would have been accompanied by every TV camera within 50 miles. As for the 18 hour interval, that would have been devoted to a war room exercise à la Lewinsky.

Speaking of that tawdry affair, weren’t the media instructing us then that private conduct has no bearing on fitness for high office? There the private conduct consisted of adultery and perjury. Here it is, at worst, an instant’s inattention on the part of a man who has been hunting and shooting for decades without any previous mishap.

Well, nothing that I write will influence the commentariat. But, if this is the sort of “scandal” that makes or breaks Presidencies, our country has sunk to such a depth of frivolity that we have no prospect of surviving in a dangerous world. In that case, we should all start learning Arabic and getting ready to pay the jizya tax, for Robert Ferrigno’s future is crossing the horizon.

Dick Cheney’s Birdshot: A Wee Bit of Perspective

Maybe I’m just a hopeless shill for the Bushitler, but it does seem to me that Bill Clinton’s habitual cheating at golf is a better marker of character than Vice President Cheney’s involvement in a freak hunting accident. (I won’t bother to expatiate on Ted Kennedy and delays in telling the public about untoward incidents.) Actually, I suppose that the whole kerfuffle is another Karl Rove ploy, aimed at getting the White House press corps to ignore Iran, Hurricane Katrina and other such matters in favor of a searching inquisition into who knew what about a non-life-threatening mishap and when they knew it – with the side benefit of making at least one reporter look like a narcissistic idiot.

Addendum: For sensible comments by an experienced hunter and gun user, vide Never Yet Melted.

If They’re Going To Be Offended Anyway. . . .

The Volokh Conspiracy reports on an instance of Moslem “feelings” so tender that one begins to think that there’s no way to mollify them, or reason to try. The Akron Beacon-Journal printed a cartoon making fun of CNN’s method of showing the dread Danish drawings and was assailed by self-proclaimed Moslem leaders.

[O]n Feb. 5, the Akron paper published a Bok cartoon depicting a pixilated picture of Muhammad on CNN. A couple in the cartoon said, “Well, no wonder Muslims are upset. Muhammad looks like he's on acid.” . . .

[O]n Friday afternoon, there was a demonstration outside of the newspaper’s East Exchange Street building.

At Friday’s news conference at the Islamic Society of Akron & Kent in Cuyahoga Falls, the speakers were passionate.

A.R. Abdoulkarim, Amir of the Akron Masjid, applauded newspapers that decided against running the cartoons, but condemned those who did. The Beacon Journal, he said, was in a class of its own.

“They take the prize for being the most ill-intended, irresponsible property group,” he said. “Allah curses and condemns them and every Muslim in this community should curse and condemn them.”

Julia A. Shearson, director of Ohio’s Council of American-Islamic Relations, said they want the Beacon Journal to apologize for running the “unethical” cartoon . . . .

Muslim leaders said Bok’s cartoon was disrespectful because the prophet should not have been depicted in such a way. In fact, they said, there are no pictures or statues of Muhammad because he should not be confused with God.

The last sentence is presumably a reporter’s garble; else, he has encountered a very peculiar form of Islamic theology. Be that as it may, there is a point at which one must give up trying to be exquisitely polite to people who are determined to take offense and who show no compunction about hurling crude insults at Christianity and Judaism. Therefore, let me dedicate to all Moslems who believe that disagreement with Islam is or ought to be a capital offense this hymn, written by the gentle, humane brothers John and Charles Wesley in 1780:

The smoke of the infernal cave,
Which half the Christian world o'erspread
Disperse, Thou heavenly Light, and save
The souls by that Impostor led,
That Arab-chief, as Satan bold,
Who quite destroyed Thy Asian fold.

O might the blood of sprinkling cry
For those who spurn the sprinkled blood!
Assert Thy glorious Deity,
Stretch out Thine arm, Thou Triune God.
The Unitarian fiend expel,
And chase his doctrine back to hell.

We may as well be scimitared for a forthrightly antagonistic song as for an innocuous image.

Further reading: “The Future We’re Headed For”
Tom Gross, “Drawing a Line Under Hypocrisy”
National Review Online, “Symposium: The Clash to End All Clashes?”
Daniel Pipes, “Cartoons and Islamic Imperialism”
Amir Taheri, “Bonfire of the Pieties”
Mark Steyn, “Toon-Deaf Europe Is Taking the Wrong Stand”
Olivier Guitta, “The Cartoon Jihad”
Stephen Schwartz, “Muhammad Caricatured”
Per Nyholm, “Man pisser på os” (English translation)
Paul Belien, “Jihad Against Danish Newspaper” (with numerous links to prior news coverage)
Gateway Pundit, “Snubbed! Danish PM Shuns Radical Muslims, Meets with Moderates” (the good news about Moslem attitudes)
Hjörtur Gudmundsson, “More and More Moderate Moslems Speak Out in Denmark” (more good news)

Jottings from Capricon

This weekend I’m at Capricon, the second oldest of the three big Chicago area science fiction conventions. It started as a bitter rival to Windycon. When I first became active in Chicago fandom, the two concomms barely spoke to one another and at one time were pushing competing Chicago Worldcon bids. That was, however, a long, long time ago. This weekend, I saw the treasurer of Windycon’s parent organization working on Capricon’s art show. There are still two distinct groups, but they are now more complementary than competitive.

This year’s author GoH is something of a coup: Peter S. Beagle, author of the legendary fantasy The Last Unicorn, who rarely appears at mainline SF cons. I chatted a while with his business manager, who says that Mr. Beagle’s financial condition is parlous, largely owing to a messy dispute over royalties from the animated version of The Last Unicorn. While I’m in no position to judge the legal rights and wrongs, I will say that anyone who hasn’t read the small but superb Beagle oeuvre ought to click over to Amazon right now and buy a book or three.

Friday evening the Chicago in 2008 Worldcon bid committee met to put itself on an official footing by holding its first corporate meeting and electing officers. Dave McCarty, the bidcomm chairman, was picked as chairman of the prospective convention. Jill Eastlake was elected president of the parent corporation. The other corporate directors are Dina Krause, Dave McCarty, Helen Montgomery, Ron Oakes, Marah Searle-Kovacevic and Alex von Thorn. Helen will be secretary, and for my sins I will continue to serve as treasurer. The officer/director slate has a non-parochial cast: Jill is, of course, a well-known Boston fan, Marah lives in Toronto, and Alex is currently a Virginia resident.

Otherwise, this wasn’t the place for fannish political news. The only bid party was Chicago’s. It and Columbus in 2008 had the lone bid tables. None of that is a surprise, as Capricon has never been a major stop on the bidding circuit. Next weekend comes its opposite, Boskone, where it should be possible to get a read on the state of the various Worldcon races. Of greatest interest is the status of the Denver in 2008 bid, which conventional wisdom sees as running neck and neck with Chicago.

Once upon a time, I was a regular at convention art auctions. Then, one day, I stared at my closet full of unhung paintings and prints, decided that there was no point in stocking a small art gallery for the enjoyment of my heirs, and quit auctions cold turkey. The Capricon art show was, however, good enough to lure me back. The show’s highlight was an exhibit of a couple of dozen Kelly Freas paintings and drawings from the collection of Alex and Phyllis Eisenstein, including the originals of several Astounding covers that I remember from my youth. The regular show was likewise splendid, with quite a number of first-rate pieces by artists whose names I didn’t recognize. If the convention keeps up this quality for a few years, it will become an important venue for SF and fantasy art. Moreover, it succeeded in the teeth of a complete crash of its database software six weeks before the con. The program had to be rebuilt from the ground up and reportedly worked flawlessly – a true cybernetic miracle. What’s more, the art show director was, according to herself, a novice. That I count as lesser evidence of a miracle; it may simply show the advantage of not having learned bad habits.

At the auction, I avoided paintings (there’s still that closet) but won two ceramic works by Peri Charlifu, a Colorado artist who has never previously, to the best of my knowledge, exhibited at a Chicago convention. He is so little known here that auctioneer Bob Passovoy thought he was female. Judging by his sales – and the “Best Pro Art” award that he received – Chicago fans will see more of him in the future.

Imaginary Shakespeares

Though I pay quite a lot of attention to aberrant Shakespeare authorship theories, I can’t read everything that issues from prolific anti-Stratfordian pens. So I’m glad that David Propson, writing in the February issue of The New Criterion has spared me the trouble of slogging through the 600-plus pages of Mark Anderson’s Shakespeare By Another Name. From what I had seen of Mr. Anderson’s work (e. g., his collaboration in Roger Stritmatter’s badly flawed dissertation), I had no expectation that the book would repay the time spent reading it. Mr. Propson demonstrates that I was right.

More recently, the beast [Shakespearean pseudo-scholarship] has birthed a faddish preference for Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, as true author of the works. . . . God willing, Mark Anderson’s infuriating new biography of the Earl may put an end to that. Tendentious and speculative, it is the preposterous apotheosis of the Oxfordian case.

Judging a Book by Its Title

There is, we learn from the Daily Telegraph, a Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year. That’s book titles, not Canadian cabinet positions. Past winners include Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers (1994) and last year’s Bombproof Your Horse. The 2006 nominees are –

• People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It
• Bullying and Sexual Harrassment: A Practical Handbook
• Rhino Horn Stockpile Management: Minimum Standards and Best Practices from East and Southern Africa
• Ancient Starch Research
• Soil Nailing: Best Practice Guidance
• Nessus, Snort and Ethereal Power Tools

Happy reading!

Update (3/2/06): And the winner is People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead. The publisher says that it welcomes the publicity and is considering following up with titles such as People Who Don’t Know They’re Stupid, which will be able to find many examples among the sufferers from Bush Derangement Syndrome.

A Good Reason to Hate Yahoo

The reason why I hate Yahoo is that one of its search engines (“yahooseeker”, so far as I can determine) periodically invades this site and pointlessly grabs dozens or hundreds of pages. Today, for instance, it spent 7 hours, 53 minutes and 49 seconds downloading 451 pages. If my readership ever reaches even modest levels, I will have to pay surcharges for that bandwidth consumption, and it is, at the very least, a symptom of technical incompetence.

I’ve commented on this Yahooliganism before. The company refuses to acknowledge that any problem exists, and the only solution that works is to shut out all search engines, which I don’t want to do. Yahooseeker ignores robots.txt files directed at it alone. So I feel that my hatred of Yahoo is fully justified.

On the other hand, one doesn’t like to harbor idiosyncratic loathings based solely on personal affronts. Therefore, I am almost relieved to discover that Yahoo engages in deplorable conduct with much more serious consequences than stealing resources from my ISP; to wit,

Reporters Without Borders today condemned the US firm Yahoo! for handing over data on one of its users in China which enabled the authorities there to send him to prison for eight years, the second such case that has come to light in recent months. . . .

It said it had discovered that Yahoo! customer and cyberdissident Li Zhi had been given his eight-year prison sentence in December 2003 based on electronic records provided by Yahoo. “How many more cases are we going to find?” it asked.

“We were sure the case of Shi Tao, who was jailed for 10 years last April on the basis of Yahoo-supplied data, was not the only one. Now we know Yahoo works regularly and efficiently with the Chinese police.

“The firm says it simply responds to requests from the authorities for data without ever knowing what it will be used for. But this argument no longer holds water. Yahoo certainly knew it was helping to arrest political dissidents and journalists, not just ordinary criminals. . . .

Li, a 35-year-old ex-civil servant from the southwestern province of Dazhou, [was] sentenced on December 10, 2003 to eight years in prison for “inciting subversion.” He had been arrested the previous August after he criticized in online discussion groups and articles the corruption of local officials.

Local sources said Yahoo! Hong Kong’s cooperation with the police was also mentioned in the court’s verdict on Li.

Perhaps some Yahoo manager got a bonus for winning this official recognition of his employer’s civic activities.

High-Minded Distortion

To a great extent, I sympathize with the reluctance of major newspapers and television networks to reproduce the Danish cartoons that so upset a select subset of Moslems. Their employees haven’t volunteered for combat. The prudent course is to avoid giving Islamofascists an excuse to kill or maim them.

The doyennes of the media have, however, taken a different line. Their decision to withhold information from their readers and viewers doesn’t stem from fear. Oh, no, it represents high-minded respect for the dignity of Islam. NRO’s Media Blog has rounded up a sample of editorial justifications, such as this one from CBS:

At CBS News, the decision was made not to run the cartoons. “We could explain it, so we didn’t need to show it,” says Linda Mason, CBS News senior vice president, standards and special projects, who compares the decision to one not to show dead soldiers. “Any rendering of Muhammad is an insult to Muslims, and desecration is even worse,” she says, adding that the decision was made out of a desire not to unnecessarily offend, not because of the demonstrations or “out of fear of retribution.”

On CBSNews.com, a photo appeared featuring a man holding a newspaper that contained an image of the cartoon. Mike Sims, director of news and operations at CBSNews.com, quickly ordered it taken off the site. “You could not read the cartoon, but I even thought [what was there] was too much,” he says. “I think we’ve proven we can tell the story without offending Muslims.”

I’m willing to take CBS News at its word: that it isn’t afraid that its employees will be shot, stabbed or bombed. Unhappily, its lofty motives lead to a serious distortion of the news. To call these drawings an “insult” or a “desecration” leaves the impression that they are vile images that would offend a reasonable adherent of Islam. Yet the fact is that they aren’t.

By my reckoning, which the reader can check for himself, five contain nothing critical of Islam (one pokes fun at Jyllands-Posten’s “PR stunt”), three present ambiguous or positive views of Mohammed (e. g., calming overexcited followers), two deplore the status of women under sharia law, one expresses fear of Islamofascist retaliation, and one links Islam to terrorist bombings. The range is from favorable to innocuous to critical of specific doctrines or practices associated with Islam. The last group are “offensive” only if disagreement counts as offense.

Do men like Mike Sims of CBSNews.com believe that Islam, uniquely among religions and ideologies, deserves to be shielded from negative commentary? Yes, I suspect that they do. A combination of loathing for the leaders of their own country, muzzy-headed sympathy for “oppressed” non-Westerners and subliminal fear has turned them into dhimmis. Their endorsement of the extremists’ characterization of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, coupled with refusal to let the public see for itself, is strong evidence that, in their hearts, they now serve the Caliph-to-be rather than Western civilization.

Maybe Britain Shouldn’t Have a Conservative Party

Boris Johnson is both a journalistic celebrity and the U.K. Conservative Party’s spokesman on higher education. It is therefore beyond appalling to learn, via Melanie Phillips, that he combines historical illiteracy with moral equivalence:

I was watching Boris Johnson’s BBC2 TV programme The Dream of Rome this evening, marvelling at his re-invention in yet another new guise as telly presenter, when I nearly fell out of my armchair having heard him say that the Christians who martyred themselves for their faith under the Romans were the equivalent of modern Islamic suicide bombers. [emphasis added]

As Miss Phillips goes on to note, there is a modicum of difference between being executed for refusal to renounce Christ and blowing up bystanders in the hopes of frightening the survivors into acquiescing in theocratic tyranny. Yet a highly cultured soi disant “conservative” casually ignores the distinction.

Is it any wonder that the Islamofascists expect to prevail?

Speaking of Respect

Last week Julian Bond, chairman of the NAACP, reportedly spoke rather unrestrainedly to a student audience at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina. He –

delivered a blistering partisan speech . . . equating the Republican Party with the Nazi Party and characterizing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, as tokens.

“The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side,” he charged.

Calling President Bush a liar, Bond told the audience at the historically black institution that this White House’s lies are more serious than the lies of his predecessor's because Clinton's lies didn’t kill people. . . .

He referred to former Attorney General John Ashcroft as J. Edgar Ashcroft. He compared Bush’s judicial nominees to the Taliban.

The source of these lurid quotes is WorldNetDaily, a right-wing site that makes no pretense of being “fair and balanced”, so Mr. Bond’s response had a degree of credibility. An FSU press release (via Best of the Web) quotes him thus:

I didn’t say these things I’m alleged to have said. There is no one in the audience who can say I said them. The reporter from the Fayetteville newspaper did not report I said them. I have denied I said them and refuse to engage in a back and forth about what I did say. This is an irresponsible attack by a right-wing blog – a partisan blog – and these kinds of attacks should be expected and dismissed for what they are.

The release added that school officials had “reviewed a tape of Bond’s speech to verify the alleged comments. Based on the review, it was determined that nowhere during Bond’s speech was reference made to the Nazi Party, nor was the word ‘token’ used.”

Intrigued by the limited scope of that denial, Best of the Web editor James Taranto called FSU’s public relations director, who did not deny the other parts of the WorldNetDaily story (Bush’s “lies” killing people, “J. Edgar Ashcroft”, “Taliban” judicial nominees) and specifically confirmed that Mr. Bond did say, “The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side.” Mr. Taranto doubts that he “meant to equate the GOP to Hindus”.

Politics can be rough-and-tumble, but claims that one’s adversaries want to engage in mass murder – for that is what flying the Nazi flag implies – ought to be far outside the sphere of respectable discourse. For making that comparison, Mr. Bond deserves exile from polite company. That he cravenly lied to cover up the offense is an aggravating factor. He is both conscious of his guilt and unwilling to expiate it by forthrightly admitting that he was wrong.

That the NAACP, long the nation’s most prestigious civil rights organization, has such a man as its leader seriously tarnishes its own reputation. He should be booted out the door instanter. If he isn’t, one can only assume that the organization has no distaste for ideological derangement.

Needless to say, the bien-pensant politicians and journalists who decry harmless cartoons about Mohammed, none of them a tenth as derogatory as likening him to Adolf Hitler, will say nary a discouraging word about Julian Bond. “Respect”, it seems, is a slogan, not a principle.

Update (2/7/06): Brendan Loy, of The Irish Trojan’s Blog, has a more complete report on Mr. Bond’s speech. He finds that WorldNetDaily summarized and paraphrased, but did not distort the NAACP chieftain’s meaning. For example, he didn’t denigrate Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice as “tokens”; instead, he called them “human shields” for the Bush Administration.

The “swastika” quote is interesting. According to the tape (actually an MP3 file – we’re in the 21st Century now), Mr. Bond’s full statement was, “Their [Republicans’] idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side-by-side.” Mr. Loy chews over the question of whether labeling the Nazi emblem “Confederate” makes the implicit accusation less hateful, but the answer is easy to discern. As noted above, Fayetteville State University’s own PR director confirmed the WorldNetDaily’s version of the quote. The insertion of the adjective “Confederate” made no impression on him, and I’m sure that the student audience caught the speaker’s subtext: Republicans are no different from mass murderers. It would be more accurate to say that Julian Bond is no different from the Islamofascist demagogues who pollute political argument with hatred. One hopes that the kids who listened to him in Fayetteville are less gullible than Syrian mobs.

The Church of Tolerance and Islamic Danegeld

In the Western world, Tolerance is close to being a religion. This past week, it has suffered a theological crisis. Do cartoons portraying Mohammed show lack of respect for Islam, thereby violating the creedal principle that all religions are entitled to equal dignity? Or are rioting, burning down embassies and issuing death threats in response to such slights themselves intolerant acts?

The elders of the Church of Tolerance long ago asked and answered those questions in the context of Christianity. What one might term the “Serrano Encyclical” declared that ridiculing Christian piety is appropriate dialogue among belief systems, whereas negative Christian reaction is unacceptable. In fact, governments have an affirmative duty to subsidize anti-Christian artwork; that it offends a large proportion of the taxpayers is a virtue, not a fault.

No Christian extremist tested the resilience of that doctrine by threatening to bomb museums that exhibited “Piss Christ” or assassinate government officials who failed to suppress it. Now a test has arisen in a different quarter. It’s fascinating to observe how the C of T is handling it.

The pertinent facts are these: Last September a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, published twelve Mohammed-themed cartoons, falling into several groups:

• Four that do not show any image of the Moslem prophet: a lineup in which the witness doesn’t recognize any of the suspects as Mohammed, a schoolboy named “Mohammed” writing in Arabic on a blackboard, a semi-abstract drawing of hajib-clad women protesting against Moslem misogyny, and a jibe at the paper’s “PR stunt”.

• Two utterly innocuous caricatures: Mohammed leading a donkey in the desert and a face incorporating the Islamic crescent and star.

• One showing an ambiguous Mohammed figure, sporting either a halo or a pair of horns.

• Two that associate Mohammed with terrorism: In one he wears a turban with a fuse; in the other, he tells suicide bombers to stop, because “We have run out of virgins”.

• One symbolically showing Mohammed as blind to the rights of women.

• Two that rebuke Moslem violence against critics: A cartoonist looks nervously over his shoulder while sketching Mohammed, and the prophet restrains scimitar-waving followers, saying, “Easy, my friends . . . it is only a drawing made by a non-believing Dane”.

In comparison to “Piss Christ”, that is pretty mild stuff but not mild enough to escape censure by the Church of Tolerance. While it has no Pope, Bill Clinton can stand in as a peritus to interpret its decrees. Agence France Presse reports that he was “appalled” by “these totally outrageous cartoons against Islam”, which bid fair to “replace anti-Semitic prejudice with anti-Islamic prejudice”. That seems to be in line with the general perception of bien-pensants throughout the Western world. Government spokesmen around the world have excoriated them. The France-Soir editor who reprinted the cartoons was fired. No newspaper or television network in the United States has yet displayed them. The Boston Globe, while rejecting demands that the cartoonists be punished, opined that –

publishing the cartoons reflects an obtuse refusal to accept the profound meaning for a billion Muslims of Islam’s prohibition against any pictorial representation of the prophet. Depicting Mohammed wearing a turban in the form of a bomb with a sputtering fuse is no less hurtful to most Muslims than Nazi caricatures of Jews or Ku Klux Klan caricatures of blacks are to those victims of intolerance.

Well, I can think of a couple of differences. Moslems claiming to follow the example of Mohammed, and seconded in that claim by Islamic preachers and teachers, really do set off bombs. By contrast, Jewish financiers are not conspiring to take over the world, and black men are no special danger to innocent young white girls. Nor do rabbis or Baptist ministers applaud conspiracy or seduction. Anti-Jewish and anti-Negro caricatures start with prejudice and invent conduct to match it.

The Jyllands-Posten cartoons, to the extent that they are anti-Islamic, denounce actual, not imaginary, conduct. No underlying hatred of Islam inspires them. Moslems are prominently associated with terrorism, oppression of women and censorship, and those practices have been defended by at least some persons who pass themselves off, truly or falsely, as Islamic religious authorities. If Danish cartoonists have gotten the impression that many Moslems hold views antithetical to civilized values, the fault lies not in European bigotry but in the activities of Moslem terrorists and tyrants.

What of “the profound meaning for a billion Muslims of Islam’s prohibition against any pictorial representation of the prophet”? That is the excuse for death threats against the makers of innocuous pictures. Leaving aside the interesting questions of whether that prohibition is as “profound” as the Boston Globe imagines and how widely it has been observed in practice, one wonders whether due respect for Islam mandates that Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, secularists, etc. observe Moslem taboos. If so, I await the day when the Globe editorializes that due respect for Christian fundamentalism compels the removal of the offensive teaching of evolution from school curricula.

What the Moslem rioters seek, and what Bill Clinton, the Boston Globe and other apostles of the Church of Tolerance want to give them, is not respect but subservience: Infidels have no right to criticize Islam or to offend the tenderest of Moslem sensibilities. There is no reciprocity, of course. Crude anti-Jewish and anti-Christian propaganda does not merely circulate freely in the House of Islam; it appears in government-sponsored media and official statements.

The declared purpose of Jyllands-Posten’s Mohammed cartooning was to break down “self-censorship”, which is different from politeness and restraint. Its essence is refraining from true statements and fair commentary, out of fear of retaliation. The artist or writer does the censor’s work for him.

The censors whom the Clintons and the Globes would aid and abet are the militants of Islamofascism. To refuse to submit to their dictation is no insult to a great religion. Indeed, it is a sign of genuine, meaningful respect. The cartoon that I have reproduced assumes that the scimitar-wielding fanatics are an immature fringe of Islam. The turban-with-a-bomb image that upsets the Globe assumes that most Moslems do not want their religion identified with mass murder. It is a rebuke, but the sort of rebuke that one addresses to men whom one believes can do better.

In the short run, self-censorship is the easy, seemingly safe course of action. It is a kind of cheap Danegeld: no gold to pay, just a tacit agreement to avoid certain actions. But, like its historical counterpart, it doesn’t work. Next year’s demands are bigger, and eventually comes one that the treasury cannot endure. The only safe choice for the long run is the one that Kipling proclaimed:

We never pay anyone Danegeld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost.

If the friars of the Church of Tolerance wish to do good and promote understanding among religions, let them promote knowledge of the best of Islam, of Averroes and Ferdowsi and Ibn Khaldun and numerous others. By appeasing the Danegeld-seekers, they diminish our own civilization, and Islam as well.

Related posts: What the Cartoon Jihadists Want
If They’re Going To Be Offended Anyway. . . .
High-Minded Distortion

A Glimpse of Islamic America

Robert Ferrigno’s Prayers for the Assassin is, on one level, simply a thriller with futuristic trappings. As is the wont of that genre, we are presented with superhumanly competent heroes and villains, beautiful women, stereotyped sidekicks, a megalomaniacal mastermind plotting to take over the world, a plethora of plot twists, and a conspiracy of intricate cunning that collapses just a trifle too easily. What makes Prayers worth reading is not the disbelief-stretching action (thought that is excitingly portrayed) but the credible picture of an Islamified United States in 2040 A.D., a quarter century after the turning point in the struggle between a decadent West and its self-confident enemies.

The Moslem republic isn’t a pure dystopia. The regime is moderate, with room for suitably discreet modernists and unbelievers. Extremists are noisy but dominate only enclaves like San Francisco (where the skulls of homosexuals decorate the General Masood Bridge). Elsewhere, the “religious police” are limited to harassing self-identified fundamentalists. Democratic government of a kind still exists. Despite America’s loss of its superpower status, its prosperity and a large share of its liberties, there is virtually no sentiment, even among the Christian minority, for a return to the days before the “transition”.

Why not? The pith of the author’s answer, conveyed unmistakably but without overemphasis, is found is a quotation from Simone de Beauvoir cited in his postscript: “One can abolish water, but one cannot abolish thirst.” What undermined the liberal order was its failure, indeed refusal, to accommodate the thirst for God. Although the Islamic victory is precipitated by a spectacular hoax, the reader is led to see that the way had been prepared by cultural success. When post-Christendom offered no more wine, the thirsty lapped up Mohammed’s water. On the other side, resistance to Islam is centered on the secessionist Bible Belt, run by what Andrew Sullivan would call “theocons”.

Of course, a novel isn’t history or sociology, but this one should at least give pause to the facile assumption that secularism is more attractive than faith and therefore is destined to prevail.

Mark Steyn recently published a much-noticed essay arguing that demography makes Europe’s conversion into Eurabia inevitable. The high birth rate of Moslem immigrants is, however, only half the motive force needed for a religious revolution. In the 19th Century, Irish immigrants to England reproduced much more rapidly than Protestant Englishmen. Had that factor alone been decisive, England would be a Roman Catholic country today. It isn’t, because the Irish-born’s children and grandchildren turned Protestant, and Protestantism then withered to a vague sentiment of religiosity.

What secularism prevailed against was a faith that doubted its own affirmations. Before the modernist tide swept through Christendom, gathering force after World War I, secularists were a tiny minority with little persuasive power. They overcame the most shriveled form of Christianity. Their prospects against militant Islam do not look so promising.

In Robert Ferrigno’s fictional future, a disillusioned soldier, a sexy sociologist, a fat Catholic cop and a Jewish computer nerd unravel and defeat a half-century old, world-spanning conspiracy. The tale ends with freedom everywhere sprouting through the cracks in the despotic concrete. In the real future, things may not be so easy.

Update (2/18/06): Hugh Hewitt recently interviewed the author. Here are a couple of notable excerpts:

[T]he premise of the novel is approximately 2010, the United States is in terrible economic straits, the political leadership is weak, there’s lots of dissention in the country, politically and socially, and over a period of time, the regular religious and social institutions are not able to deal with this. There is an increasing funding by Muslims, from Saudi Arabia particularly, building Mosques, doing good deeds, drawing converts, and there is a political and social shift where Islam becomes slowly more prominent, and there are mass conversions . . . .

I was one of the people who thought if 19 guys with box cutters and a rudimentary knowledge of Microsoft [Flight Simulator] can bring down two gigantic skyscrapers, it’s conceivable that we could actually lose. And I never thought we could lose militarily, but I thought when you’re dealing with an enemy who is utterly certain of their purpose, and you have a liberal democracy, in which all points of view sort of thrash it out, there’s a certain weakness inherent in a liberal democracy, in terms of dealing with an enemy that is single-minded. So that was sort of the groundwork for that.

And there’s also a very spiritual aspect to the book that, in my own case, I felt there was sort of a spiritual hunger in myself, and in the nation at large. And I thought the more I studied Islam, it is a faith with all the answers, and that’s very compelling for people. . . . [In France and Germany,] the number one religion people are converting to [is Islam]. And these are German, usually German college educated women, and not converting because they have a boyfriend. Der Spiegel wrote about this about a month ago, and they were surprised. They assumed it would be only women to please a Muslim boyfriend, and it is not the case.

A Peek Into Their Hearts

Suddenly it was as if Bush said “we mustn’t act like clowns,” and the entire Democratic caucus had shown up in multicolor wigs and greasepaint. . . .

There’s no denying that the relatively small-bore agenda that the President laid out last night was a sign of political weakness. But if the scene in the Capitol was any indication, Republicans do still have one thing going for them: They’ll be running against Democrats.

– John Tabin

Let’s imagine that it is January 23, 1996, again. Bill Clinton is delivering his State of the Union address. With a typically Clintonian wag of his head, he declaims, “Congress did not act last year on my proposal to reform the health care system . . . .”

Applause erupts from the Republican side of the House. Newt Gingrich is captured grinning mightily at the camera.

“Yet the rising cost of health care is a problem that is not going away – and with every year we fail to act, the situation gets worse.”

Is there any doubt that, had that imaginary scene actually occurred, it would have gone down as a brilliant Clinton trap for his less adroit adversaries, illustrating to a national audience the GOP’s fixation on political victory over doing the people’s business? I’m surprised that Slick Willie didn’t think of it.

Last night Congressional Democrats cheered full-throatedly at “Congress did not act last year on my proposal to reform Social Security.” The elite media have taken little notice, and a former Carter speech writer, quoted by OpinionJournal Political Diary (sorry – subscribers only, but you can read it yourself for just $3.95/month), thought that it was the President who had blundered.

Mr. Bush shouldn’t have handed Democrats an opportunity to stand and cheer by reminding them that Congress had’t passed his Social Security reform plan. “Whoever wrote that isn’t comfortable right now,” Mr. Fallows concluded.

Oh, I doubt it. Just as I doubt that the White House is sorry that Democrats stayed seated and silent – the junior Senator from New York was seen shaking her head and smiling, as if she had just heard something ridiculously wrong-headed – when the President declared, “If there are people inside our country who are talking with al-Qaeda, we want to know about it – because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again.”

No Democrat – well, there is the California Congresswoman who invited Cindy Sheehan to be her guest at the speech – will say, “We would rather see Social Security heading toward collapse and Osama bin Laden attacking American soil than stoop to cooperate with George W. Bush.” They won’t say that, but last night gave us a peek into their hearts.