Stromata Blog

A Shakespearean Note

The University of Illinois Press has published an on-line version of one of the classics of Shakespearean scholarship, T. W. Baldwin’s William Shakespere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke (1944), a copious description of the curriculum and pedagogical methods of the kind of grammar school that the future playwright attended. The work is interesting for three reasons: first, as a reminder of how much less we demand of pupils than our ancestors did; second, as an aperçu into Elizabethan culture; and, finally, as disproof of the notion that a lad from a country town, lacking a university education, could not possibly have acquired the literary skills needed by a master of the English language. As Baldwin says in his conclusion,

The grammar school gave the linguistic basis of grammar, rhetoric, and logic. The university perfected the logic, together with some rhetoric and made the application to the professions of physic, law, and divinity. The universities were professional schools.

If William Shakspere had the grammar school training of his day – or its equivalent – he had as good a formal literary training as had any of his contemporaries. At least, no miracles are required to account for such knowledge and techniques from the classics as he exhibits. Stratford grammar school will furnish all that is required. The miracle lies elsewhere; it is the world-old miracle of genius.

Kudos to the Illini for making this publication freely available to the world.

Clouds of Immigration

Thinking about immigration seems to cloud many minds. Certainly it clouded those of the organizers of last weekend’s protests against immigration restrictions. Televised images of massed Mexican flags did more for the nativist cause than a hundred speeches by Tom Tancredo, as witness libertarian Instapundit’s reaction: “I’ve generally favored open immigration, but I find myself feeling less and less that way in the face of mass rallies by illegal immigrants like this one. . . . I think that these marches just made passage of strict immigration laws much more likely.”

It’s quite possible, of course, that the self-anointed leaders of the “Latino movement” wouldn’t mind getting the opposite of what they say they want. Their political power would melt away if their “constituents” assimilated, and a harsh U.S. crackdown on immigration would do much to hinder assimilation.

Also doing the pro-immigration cause no good are spokesmen who try to turn the issue into a religious question. I noted a particularly absurd example a while ago. Now Hillary Clinton echoes it, declaring that a House-passed border enforcement bill “would literally criminalize the Good Samaritan and probably even Jesus himself”. That kind of pseudo-pious rhetoric may appeal to New Age syncretists but can only irritate Christians who take the Bible seriously and prefer not to see it trivialized for political purposes.

Well, I’m not much bothered when leftists act counterproductively. Alas, the immigration cloud also overshadows minds on the Right. It is more than a little startling to see Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, quoting favorably this passage from Loony Left former economist Paul Krugman:

Because Mexican immigrants have much less education than the average U.S. worker, they increase the supply of less-skilled labor, driving down the wages of the worst-paid Americans. The most authoritative recent study of this effect, by George Borjas and Lawrence Katz of Harvard, estimates that U.S. high school dropouts would earn as much as 8 percent more if it weren't for Mexican immigration.

That's why it’s intellectually dishonest to say, as President Bush does, that immigrants do “jobs that Americans will not do.” The willingness of Americans to do a job depends on how much that job pays – and the reason some jobs pay too little to attract native-born Americans is competition from poorly paid immigrants.

But Krugman is the one who is “intellectually dishonest” here – “dishonest”, because he is certainly in possession of all of the pertinent facts and enough economic knowledge to analyze them. The President, if he were wrong, would merely be mistaken, not dishonest. And he is not mistaken.

According to the figure most widely tossed about by restrictionists, about 11 million illegal aliens live in the United States. I’ve seen no statistics on how many hold jobs, but their circumstances are such that nonworking relatives and the unemployed are likely to be a small minority of the total. Let’s estimate that 8 million of them work. If they vanished, what would happen to their positions?

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were, as of February 2006, 7.2 million unemployed Americans. The vast majority are frictionally unemployed and will, within a relatively short period, be hired for existing jobs. A better measure of how many could replace illegal workers is the number of long-term unemployed (over 26 weeks), which is 1.4 million (some of whom are simply unemployable owing to personal habits or complete lack of useful skills). Another possible source of additional labor is “discouraged workers”, estimated at c. 400,000. Higher wages could also attract some nonworkers into the labor force or encourage current jobholders to moonlight. All in all, though, finding 8 million new job holders looks like an insuperable challenge at any price.

Nor would any price be paid. A great many low-skill jobs exist solely because inexpensive labor can be found. Rather than increase wages, employers will do without. Beyond a certain point, they must do without if they are going to earn a profit.

Hence, if immigrant laborers vanished, 8 million natives would not spring up to harvest crops, roof houses, cook hamburgers, rake leaves, watch babies, clean homes, etc. Rather, many of those jobs would disappear, and the remainder would cost more. Both of those results would leave the country poorer. We would lose several million workers’ worth of goods and services, and all of us except the lucky beneficiaries of a tighter labor market would suffer a diminution of purchasing power.

One can imagine circumstances in which a sacrifice of national wealth would be worth it. Many restrictionists argue that American culture is imperiled by the alien influx. I don’t believe that – not when these aliens are, in an overwhelming majority, Christians sharing the heritage of the West and already half-Americanized by Yankee television – but am willing to listen to rational argument. They don’t strengthen their case, though, by offering semi-socialist analyses of the economic effect of their proposed policies. Governmental interference with free markets is never painless. I hope that, in their less clouded moments, conservative restrictionists are able to recognize that truth and take it into account.

Abramoff of Hollywood

Did you know that Jack Abramoff, currently awaiting sentencing for an array of crooked political and business dealings, wrote and produced a motion picture? Oh, you saw Red Scorpion? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It grossed $40 million – respectable for 1989 – so somebody saw it, and readers of this blog likely fall into the target demographic.

Okay, did you know that Abramoff at one time wanted to put out a book on “The Making of Red Scorpion”? Unless you’ve already read the brand new issue of The Weekly Standard, I doubt it. He went so far as to interview a potential ghostwriter, Mark Hemingway, who recounts the experience in “My Dinner With Jack”.

There was, it seems, quite a story behind what looked like a routine action-adventure flick. The idea for a movie depicting the alliance of a disillusioned Soviet agent and an idealistic African anti-communist to thwart a Red takeover of the latter’s country came to Abramoff during a rather weird international conference of right-wing guerilla groups held in Jamba, Angola, then controlled by Jonas Savimbi’s Union for the Total Independence of Angola. Following up after his college graduation, he signed Dolph Lundgren to star, raised a few million dollars, lost that financing when Swaziland revoked permission to film, then found a few million more and succeeded in completing the picture in less than peaceful Southwest Africa (now Namibia).

They had star trouble. Lundgren was wildly erratic on the set. Abramoff and the other producers felt physically intimidated by the onetime karate champ. Lundgren spent his downtime carousing up a storm in Johannesburg, and he did not want his girlfriend back home to find out. It became the producers’ responsibility to keep him out of the South African tabloids. (For bonus points, Abramoff casually let it drop that the girl back home whose delicate sensibilities Lundgren sought to protect was none other than Paula Barbieri, the Playboy Playmate who moved on to dating O.J. Simpson, only to break up with him the day Nicole Brown was murdered.)

Then there was the problem of the film’s other star – the authentic African bushman they had cast in a pivotal role. In Jack’s opinion, he’s the best actor in the film. Most people who’ve seen the film agree. Regopstaan, the very spry 95-year-old bushman, agreed to do the film only if his entourage, er, tribe was allowed to follow him around. Then there was the small matter of payment. Regopstaan’s terms included the condition that the producers find him a wife. By this point in my evening with Abramoff, I was expending all my energy keeping my jaw off the floor, so I never did hear how that particular problem was solved. But I trust Jack found a way.

Presumably. We’ll probably never know what it was, for Abramoff decided soon afterward that he was too busy to proceed with the book project. On the other hand, “he’s going to have a lot of time on his hands in prison, and,” Hemingway ends hopefully, “I hope he still has my résumé”.

There is, in a way, a sad side to this tale. Red Scorpion made a substantial profit, which Abramoff used to capitalize his nascent lobbying firm. If the film had failed, he might be laboring at Heritage or AEI or Cato, still be the energetic idealist who impressed so many conservative leaders back in the 80’s. Alternatively, if he had been greedy then, he would have doubled down on another movie. After a few projects, he would either have blown his wad or become settled in the business. Maybe he would have been at this year’s Oscar ceremony, laughing at the anti-Bush jokes.

I must, of course, end any post about the deplorable Mr. Abramoff with my favorite quote concerning his operations, from OpinionJournal Political Diary (only $3.95 a month, delivered daily to your inbox):

“Jack as a Republican would often direct contributions to Republicans because he liked them, they were friends or he agreed with their positions that had nothing to do with his clients,” says one Abramoff friend. “But if Jack steered campaign cash to a Democrat you can bet that he wanted something in return for it.”

So far, Abramoff has been found guilty only of cheating his clients and business associates. Whether he bought favors from legislators is still up in the air, so it may be that the Democrats who benefited from contributions that he directed their way (such as Harry Reid) are innocent victims of guilt by association. We shall no doubt find out eventually. Meanwhile, Abramoff the movie mogul is a fascinating image. I do hope that he still has Mark Hemingway’s résumé on file.

Not Just a Baseball Hero

Until today, all that I knew about Geoff Blum was that he was a utility infielder whose pinch hit home run in the 14th inning won game three of the World Series for the White Sox last year. Via Matthew Hoy, I’ve now learned that he deserves to be honored for a different, more difficult form of heroism. Fifteen months ago,

Kory Blum was approximately 12 weeks into a three-fetus pregnancy. Complications had arisen. The couple was confronted with a scenario: Eliminate the twin fetuses, or risk losing not only the twins, but the third fetus that had shown up in the latest fuzzy picture.

Even if the three survived, the risk of severe brain damage was real – so real, [Geoff] Blum said, that the medical data tilted toward eliminating the twin fetuses by lethal injection. . . .

Blum said that for three days he and his wife shed tears and stared at the ceiling in their home as they pondered the news.

“It was tough in the sense of trying to make a decision on whose life to keep,” Blum said yesterday. “On the other hand, it's an easy decision. We knew we wanted all three of them.”

There would be no fretting over what might come, he said.

“As soon as we made the decision to go through it, we were 100 percent all the way – nothing in the back of our minds, not at all,” he said.

“What's life if it's easy? What's the point of that?”

On May 3, Kory gave birth to three healthy girls: twins Ava and Audrey, followed by Kayla. They joined oldest daughter Mia Lea, born in 2003. . . .

“Thank God we made the decision we made,” Blum said. “We couldn't imagine them not being with us.”

There is no need, I think, to point a moral or adorn the tale.

Quote of the Day

Jonah Goldberg:

According to the Pentagon’s definitive postmortem on the invasion, some of which was leaked to the New York Times, even many Iraqi generals were stunned to discover that Hussein didn’t have WMDs. Hussein practiced a strategy that one Republican Guard commander called “deterrence by doubt,” in which he hoped to bluff the world into believing he had WMDs in order to deter Iran and keep his rep as an Arab strongman with serious mojo.

And that’s the point [Helen] Thomas et al don’t want to understand. For reasons that still baffle me, the WMD threat — never the sole reason to invade Iraq — not only became the only argument, it became a thoroughly legalistic one, as if foreign policy has rules of evidence and procedural due process. After 9/11, that kind of foreign policy by lawyers looked ridiculous, and rightly so.

The fact that Hussein turned out to be bluffing about WMDs isn’t a mark against Bush’s decision. If you’re a cop and a man pulls out a gun and points it at you, you’re within your rights to shoot him, particularly if the man in question is a known criminal who’s shot people before. If it turns out afterward that the gun wasn’t loaded, that’s not the cop’s fault.

That Iraqi WMD’s, particularly chemical weapons, were simply a bluff remains less than a certainty. What is not at all uncertain is that the Bush Administration’s worries about the capabilities of a hostile dictatorship with extensive ties to terrorists were based on the best possible evaluation of the available evidence. Only fools can think that we should have given Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt. Alas, fools are ubiquitous in the ranks of the Deaniac Democratic Party and the elite media.

What Kind of God Can Be Humiliated?

Years and years ago, a friend took her six-year-old son to see Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, silliest of all the movies in that franchise. She was proud of him when he noticed the glaring flaw in the plot and whispered, “Why does God need a starship?” several minutes before Captain Kirk came to the same realization.

Now we have farce repeating as tragedy. In Afghanistan, a Christian is on trial for the “crime” of apostasizing from Islam. He has yet to be convicted, much less sentenced, but the prosecutor made worldwide headlines by stating that the death penalty was a possible outcome. The country’s constitution guarantees freedom of religion, and President Karzai has reportedly promised that the man will not be executed. It is also possible that the courts will decide sua sponte that conversion to Christianity is not a punishable offense.

Evidently, some Moslem fanatics have their own doubts about how stringently shari’a will be enforced by the incumbent regime. Netscape News reports (via TKS),

Senior Muslim clerics demanded Thursday that an Afghan man on trial for converting from Islam to Christianity be executed, warning that if the government caves in to Western pressure and frees him, they will incite people to “pull him into pieces.” . . .

“Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die,” said cleric Abdul Raoulf, who is considered a moderate and was jailed three times for opposing the Taliban before the hard-line regime was ousted in 2001.

I’m no expert on Islamic theology. Do Moslems in fact believe that any human action can “humiliate” God or that He is affected by our petty insults? The Christian view is that each of us insults God every day by our sins, yet He remains steadfastly loving and forgiving. Is it possible that Abdul Rahman, the man on trial here, found that concept of the Lord of Creation more believable than Abdul Raoulf’s petty, spiteful deity?

If Abdul Rahman suffers for his faith, that will be a black mark against Afghanistan, but he will scarcely be unique. Christians are persecuted, up to and including being killed, daily around the world – sometimes by free lance Islamofascists, as in Nigeria and Indonesia, sometimes by governments of varying religious and ideological persuasions, as in Sudan, mainland China and Saudi-controlled Arabia. This particular act of persecution is assured of the attention of the elite media, not because it is exceptionally outrageous but because the persecutors are friends of America. Oh, well, it’s nice that they don’t always portray Christians as villains.

Adrift in Illinois

The malaise that afflicts the Republican Party nationally isn’t noticeable here in Illinois – because the state GOP is in such dreadful condition that nothing could make it worse. The party that a decade ago held almost all statewide offices and majorities in both houses of the legislature now limps along, happy to retain its gerrymandered quota of Congressional seats and dominate a diminishing number of downstate counties. The last two Republican governors left office under ethical clouds after single terms. The most recent is currently on trial for corruption. Whether or not the jury finds him guilty of personal wrongdoing, there’s no doubt that, for most Illinoisans, the Party of Lincoln is the Party of Sleazy Incoherence.

Yesterday’s primary will do nothing to alter that perception. Judy Baar Topinka, the last significant elected official in the cadre that has controlled the state Republican Party since Jim Thompson’s heyday, won the gubernatorial nomination with an unimpressive 38 percent of the vote in a four-way race. Turnout in the primary was 125,000 below the Democrats, despite the fact that the incumbent governor, Rod Blagojevich, faced only token opposition. His first term has been thoroughly unimpressive, but no one seriously thinks that he faces a stiff challenge from Mrs. Topinka. Given a choice, the Republican electorate chose to drift.

The surest sign of the party’s sluggish surrender to inertia was the fourth place showing of well-funded, well-qualified, Chicago Tribune-endorsed Ron Gidwitz. If, as the Thompson-Edgar-Kjellander-Topinka Establishment keeps telling us, Republicans need dynamic moderates, here was the man. But the Establishment closed ranks around one of its own tired nabobs. Mr. Gidwitz finished fourth, with less than 11 percent of the vote. Together, he and Mrs. Topinka, the “centrists”, were outpolled by two unabashed conservatives, Jim Oberweis and Bill Brady. Unfortunately for the conservative cause, Mr. Oberweis is a foot-in-mouth disease sufferer and Mr. Brady a little known, underfunded state senator. A candidate who combined the former’s cash with the latter’s talent would have been formidable. As matters stand, their showing merely confirms the winner’s weakness.

The TEKT philosophy is, in brief, that Republicans can win in Illinois by stifling the party’s right-of-center base and directing their appeal toward the feminist, socially liberal, “fiscally conservative” (but not opposed to any actual spending or taxes) soccer moms of political urban legend. Their rationale for persisting in this continually unsuccessful strategy is that strident rightists in the Alan Keyes or Jim Oberweis mold can’t win in Illinois. Which is true, but they can’t win anywhere else either (leaving aside a few counties in Utah and South Dakota). Yet right-of-center Republicans almost everywhere else manage to do better than Illinois mugwumps.

The last several election cycles have demonstrated, throughout the country, that a political party can’t be competitive without a core of enthusiastic voters. That isn’t a sufficient condition, but it is a necessary one. In Illinois, a state that is culturally and fiscally far from left-wing (consider how many conservative and moderate Democrats there are downstate), it’s preposterous for a party to try to coalesce around soccer moms. It’s even worse to do so under a leadership that is popularly identified, fairly or not, with pervasive corruption.

The last, best hope for Illinois Republicans is that, while candidate Topinka crashes and burns, sensible conservatives will emerge further down the ticket and then will be able to move into the void following her humiliating defeat. If that doesn’t happen, future elections in this state will look much like those in Belarus.

The Hugo Season Begins

Word has just arrived, via the Interaction mailing list, of the 2006 Hugo Award nominees. An official announcement will, I’m told, appear on the L.A. Con IV Web site RSN. (I hope that I’m not guilty of breach of the Fannish Espionage Act.)

I’m particularly pleased to see that my friend John Hertz made the ballot for “Best Fan Writer”. For reasons why I think that John in a good choice, vide my review of his zine Vanamonde. He is, I realize, an underdog against the co-favorites, perennial winner David Langford (who also has a topnotch entry in “Best Related Book”) and up-and-coming Cheryl Morgan, who came close to ending the Langford string last year.

In the other categories, I’ve read or seen some of the nominees but not all, so I’ll forbear comment. My biggest disappointment is that Thud!, IMHO Terry Pratchett’s best novel since Pyramids, wasn’t nominated. Least surprising nominations, aside from the usuals in the Artist, Editor, etc. categories, are Connie Willis’ “Inside Job”, featured in my “Recent Fiction” sidebar on the left, Serenity and John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War, which Famous Fannish Bookseller Larry Smith literally forced into my hands.

The “Best Interactive Videogame” category, which L.A. Con created as a one-off for this convention, didn’t attract very many nominations (to my complete non-surprise, though I tried to help by consulting 20-something friends and making the nominations that they recommended) and was dropped from the ballot. In a way that’s a pity, since familiarity with high-tech weapons systems instilled by hours of pointing, clicking and shooting in Quake, Doom, etc. is reportedly one of our soldiers’ big edges in Iraq.

In the “Best Dramatic Presentation, Short Form”, “Best Professional Artist” and “Best New Writer” (Campbell Award) categories, ties resulted in more than five nominees.

The complete list of nominees appears in the continuation.

Welsh Dhimmis

From the Daily Telegraph:

An Anglican archdeadon resigned as editor of the official Church in Wales magazine yesterday after reprinting a cartoon caricaturing the Prophet Mohammed from the French newspaper France Soir.

The Ven Meurig Llwyd Williams, the Archdeacon of Bangor, quit after the Archbishop of Wales, Dr Barry Morgan, apologised to the Muslim Council of Wales.

Dr Morgan also appealed to the 500 subscribers to the Welsh language magazine Y Llan – meaning “Church” - to return all copies to be pulped.

He said publishing the cartoon, to illustrate an article about the shared ancestry of Christianity and Islam, was “a gross error of judgment”.

I suppose that the offending image was one of the famous Danish cartoons, which France Soir reprinted (after which the editor was fired).

Under the “treaties” between Moslem potentates and their Christian dhimmis, churches were allowed to function, so long as they did nothing to offend Islamic sensibilities. It seems that the same conditions are now observed in Wales, and the Moslems didn’t even have to conquer it.

Voting in Chicago: New Style, Old Substance

This morning I made the futile gesture of casting a vote in the Illinois Republican primary. The State GOP has spent years destroying itself and has as much chance of winning an honest election as the opposition in Belarus does of winning a dishonest one. Not that we’re going to have to worry about an honest election, if my impressions of the new ballot system are at all correct.

I knew when I entered the polling place that a new, “high-tech” method of voting was waiting for me, but I hadn’t bothered to learn any details. I was presented with a sheet the size of, if not a bedspread, at least a large pillow: very big type and lots of white space, very disproportionate to the two contested Republican races in my precinct. I lugged it to an uncurtained stand, where, using a “special marker” that looked like it had been bought at Office Depot, I marked “X” next to my choices. I may as well tell you that they were Bill Brady for governor and Steve Rauschenberger for lieutenant governor. Any possibility of secrecy vanished when I started toward the vote-checking apparatus and was informed that an election judge had to initial my ballot first. Given its layout, there was no way that she could avoid seeing how it was marked. In fact, I noticed her eyes glancing over it (probably wondering how such a rarity as a Republican in the lavender Lakeview neighborhood would vote). That doesn’t matter in this case, but it would matter if I were a bribed elector and she a party functionary checking to make sure that I’d kept my promises.

The paper was then fed through the apparatus to ensure that I hadn’t under- or over-voted. Optionally, I could place another sheet on top so that my choices wouldn’t be visible to bystanders. Optionally. Here was the third opportunity, after the unshielded booth and the election judge’s roving eye, for my vote to be disclosed to whoever might have an interest.

Once upon a time, the secret ballot was regarded as both a foundation stone of democracy and a prophylactic against fraud. Now it isn’t even a consideration. Given that the new system is to be used in Cook County, I don’t think it cynical to suggest that the omission was not accidental, though I do wonder why, in view of the decrepit state of their opposition, the Democrats are going to the trouble to fix a sure thing.

Woodrow Wilson’s Iraq?

Three years after the beginning of the Iraqi campaign, the chief preoccupation of pundits seems to explaining “what went wrong”. That there is a failure to explain is either presumed at the outset or derived from a comparison of Iraq today against not the realistic alternatives to the present situation but a fantasy picture of success. The enemy didn’t fold up or run away. Terrorists continue to set off bombs in parts of the country. The local politicians don’t get along very well. Hence, all the mal-pensants have concluded, either military action against the Ba’athist regime was a misguided idea, or it has been carried out ineptly.

A favorite accusation by those who once supported the campaign but would now like to turn away is that the United States has committed a fundamental strategic error: We made the establishment of a democratic government in Iraq an overriding priority and, in doing so, placed “Wilsonian idealism” above practical goals. From that blunder flows the resilience of the terrorists and the continuing hostility among ethnic groups. If only we had been wise enough to . . . .

But the sentence is not often completed. The critique rests on the premise that fostering democracy displaced other actions that would have been more efficacious in creating a harmonious Iraq. Rarely do we hear what those other actions might have been, so let’s reflect on what strategic choices were available after Coalition troops reached Baghdad and the Saddamites retreated to their spider holes.

1. We might have done what the “To-Hell-With-Them Hawks” now advocate in retrospect: Leave as soon as the Ba’athists were toppled, leaving it to the indigenes to reassemble the pieces.

2. Having ousted the Ba’athists, we might have invited neighboring countries to keep the peace, again taking no significant part in setting up a new government and removing our troops in short order.

3. We might have followed the course reputedly favored by some in the Pentagon before the war began: Install a government of our choosing, and make free elections a long-term goal, to be undertaken only after Iraq (or perhaps the entire Middle East) was pacified.

4. We might have allowed the Iraqis to form an interim government with little interference (as we in fact did), then postponed elections, as John Kerry and many other Democrats advocated during 2004.

5. We might have imitated the imperial powers of old, ruling Iraq directly as a quasi-colony, much as the United Nations has done in Bosnia and Kosova.

I can’t think of any other options. Would any of those listed have worked better than hurrying Iraq toward democratic self-government? Which would have discouraged foreign and domestic terrorists or reconciled Shi’ites, Sunnis and Kurds?

God never tells us what might have been, but it doesn’t seem challenging to work it out for ourselves.

Strategy 1 would have laid the groundwork for a real, brutal civil war, in which a Shi’ite dictatorship would have slaughtered Sunnis by the thousands and invaded Kurd-controlled enclaves. Looming over the scene would have been the threat or actuality of foreign intervention: by Syria in support of Ba’athist remnants, by Iran in support of pro-Tehran Shi’ites, by Turkey against the Kurds.

Strategy 2 is the same, except with interventionist forces on the ground from the beginning. It is scarcely plausible that Arab troops, almost universally badly trained and worse led, would have conducted as competent a counterinsurgency campaign as the American-led Coalition. Nor would their desire or ability to train Iraqi forces have been high. The best that one could anticipate would be a slightly less bloody level of civil strife than the all-out war of Strategy 1.

Strategies 3 and 4, which are identical concepts save for the identity of the rulers, would be promising if, but only if, an imposed government could solve problems that an elected one can’t. At some times and places, that may be the case. Here and now, it is magical thinking. Why should the indefinite postponement of democracy lead the Ba’athist holdouts or al-Qa’eda to refrain from attacking? Would unelected leaders enjoy greater popular backing than elected ones? Is democracy somehow an incitement to terrorism?

Finally, Strategy 5 was never possible, much though it fits the left-wing stereotype of “war for oil” and “the American Empire”. Had it been tried, we would doubtless have many more soldiers in Iraq and face much fiercer opposition (yes, that can be imagined) at home and abroad.

It may be true that President Bush and his advisors are attached to democracy as a form of government and would have demanded it in Iraq without regard to its merits. They may indeed deserve the “Wilsonian” label. Yet their strategy happens to have coincided with the coldly realistic choice. The most promising route to a peaceful, anti-terrorist Iraq was the establishment of a freely elected government. That could occur only if the United States and its allies insisted that elections be held without waiting for an unattainable level of readiness and provided the force needed to suppress terrorist interference. (Does anyone remember that the terrorists were determined to disrupt all three elections and flopped every time? That’s what “failure” looks like in the MSM looking glass.) There was no reason to expect that democracy would cure all the ills of Iraqi society, but the ills that we see today are of lesser magnitude than the near-certain outcome of the various nondemocratic choices that were open to us.

My own view is that democracy is not a panacea. In the modern world, it has one major advantage over other polities: Democratic elections are the most widely accepted criterion of legitimacy. Their chief rival, unhappily, is conformity to Islamic dogma. It seems to me that the cause of Western civilization in general, and America in particular, is best served by promoting the former and avoiding giving encouragement to the latter. If the critics of the Bush Administration have a better idea, if they wish to argue that the world is ready for a renascence of the Divine Right of Kings, for instance, I’ll be happy to listen to what they say. It isn’t enough, however, to shout “Woodrow! Wilson!” as if attaching a symbolic epithet to the present policy proved it wrong.

A Disgrace to Lawyers

Gail Heriot at The Right Coast has been following an episode that ought to embarrass and outrage every lawyer in America (Part I, Part II, Part III). Ropes & Gray, a leading Boston law firm, had been engaged by Catholic Charities of Massachusetts to assist it in seeking an exemption from a state law that forced it either to take actions that it regarded as immoral or cease providing adoption services. The firm then abandoned the engagement under pressure from Harvard Law School students who didn’t agree with the Roman Catholic Church’s moral views. Had the firm persisted in representing Catholic Charities, it ran the risk of interference with its recruitment efforts at Harvard. So, to serve its own convenience, it fired its client.

It’s easy to think of a parallel. Suppose that, during the Jim Crow era, a prominent law firm had been hired to represent a civil rights organization and had then been threatened with retaliation by segregationists. What would we think of it, if it had chosen to give in to the threats? I’m sure that there would be general agreement that, once a lawyer has undertaken to represent a client, it is unethical to quit simply because doing so is in the lawyer’s, as opposed to the client’s, interest.

Ropes & Gray will not, I suppose, suffer any adverse consequences from its breach of legal ethics and generally despicable spinelessness. But, were I their client, I would ask myself a couple of questions: Do I have any enemies? If Ropes & Gray will buckle under to a bunch of thuggish law students, what other pressures will it be unable to endure?

Homintern types at HLS and elsewhere may become more ambitious after this success. If a trivial effort intimidated a major law firm, what might not be accomplished by a concerted drive to blacklist “homophobes” and cut them off from the legal profession? That could, of course, lead to clashes with our society’s other militant pressure group, Islamofascists – whose opinion of homosexuality is not exactly benign. It might be fun to watch the fireworks, but it would be better if all of us resolved not to yield to proto-totalitarians.

Briefly Noted

Smallpox and measles: Nature’s cure for American Indians’ ecocide (via Cronaca).

AIntellect translation at a Chinese restaurant (via NeverYetMelted).

EUrocrats worry more about the dangers of lit candles than dictatorship in Belarus (via Andrew Stuttaford).

Carrying sports grudges too far, even if the grudge is against a Democrat (via Power Line).

Where’s Judas?

Last Sunday the Daily Mail, a British tabloid with a circulation that makes American newspapers envious, ran a long article [sorry, I don’t have a link] on a “Gospel of Judas”, which the National Geographic Society will unveil to the world in early April. Since then, a majority of the visits to this site have stemmed from Google searches for information about this document, which I discussed briefly in the past (7/11/04 and 1/5/06). National Geographic, which will be pushing television specials and books just in time for the Easter viewing and shopping season, is to be commended on its marketing acumen. On the other hand, no one will ever again be able to regard it as a serious scholarly enterprise. It has sold its birthright for a mess of pottage (or perhaps, worse yet, for a pot of New Age message).

The new “gospel” is a 4th or 5th Century Coptic manuscript, discovered in Egypt in the 1970’s and sold to a dealer in illicit antiquities, from whom it made its way circuitously into the hands of a Swiss foundation. The Swiss formed a joint venture with the National Geographic Society to translate and, more important, exploit the economic potential of the work. The Mail quotes James M. Robinson, eminent for his studies of early gnosticism:

National Geographic acquired these rights after the Swiss owners of the manuscript finally realised they could not sell the actual object because it had been illegally smuggled out of Egypt.

National Geographic took the bait because they saw an opportunity to cause a sensation by coming out right around Easter and right before the Da Vinci Code movie with something that the pre-publicity implies is a new gospel from the New Testament, when in fact it is a copy of a book originally written well over 100 years after the death of Christ.

From the bits that have been leaked so far, it is a reasonable guess that “Judas” is a work described by St. Irenaeus in his Refutation of All Heresies (c. 180 A.D.). If so, its discovery is of considerable interest to specialists in early Christianity. It appears to emanate from one of the many groups that welded the person of Jesus to fantastical cosmological ideas. Most of what we know about them comes from their orthodox opponents, such as Irenaeus. An account of their doctrines from the inside is a valuable addition to historical knowledge.

Once upon a time, the National Geographic Society would have been content with that, but a sober account of a 2nd Century pseudepigraphion wouldn’t make much money (just as Professor Robinson’s forthcoming study is unlikely to be a best seller). Hence, “Judas” has been tarted up and made to look like a harlot who, in the word’s of the Mail headline writer, “could threaten the very basis of Christian teaching”.

Well, no. We already knew that some early semi-Christians taught that Judas was the hero of the Gospel story, carrying out his betrayal at Christ’s behest. Related sects went further, making the serpent in the Garden of Eden the servant of the True God, conceived as the enemy of the lesser deity who created the material world and was worshiped by the Jews. These concepts weren’t credible in the 2nd Century, which is why they died out, and gain nothing merely because one of their proponents’ compositions has survived to the present day.

It will be interesting, for those of us who are interested in such matters, to learn how the writer of the “Gospel of Judas” perceived the cosmos and where his teachings fit into the fragmentary skein of gnostic and early heretical ideas. Conceivably, there is information that will shed light on the strains of primitive Christianity ancestral to the Church of today. Therefore, I’m glad that these 26 pages of Coptic have belatedly come to light. Nonetheless, one is tempted to say that, by subordinating scholarship to opportunistic money making and giving the public a distorted picture of what it has found, both the owners of the manuscript and the National Geographic Society have played a role in relation to the “Gospel of Judas” not unanalogous to that of the real Judas in relation to Our Lord.

Update (4/8/06): The text of the new “gospel” has now been made public. FWIW, you can read my initial analysis here.

Knowing Who Your Friends Are

Bookworm Room, just relocated from Blogspot to WordPress, links to a most interesting item by Tom Gross, writing in Mideast Dispatch:

Wrongly believing that the British government colluded with Israel on Tuesday [to seize convicted terrorists about to be released from prison by the Palestinian Authority], Palestinian militants attacked many British targets. Among these, the offices of the British Council were burned down, and an HSBC bank was ransacked. . . . Armed gunmen also raided the offices of the German TV station ARD, shooting in the air. But what is interesting is that the BBC is housed in the same building as ARD in Gaza, and yet the Palestinian militant groups – who are much better organized and more sophisticated in their choice of targets than some in the media would have us believe – deliberately did not enter the BBC offices.

It seems that even on a day of widespread attacks on western targets in Gaza and the West Bank, the Palestinian gunmen know who their friends are.

Conservatives frequently complain that MSM journalists are overly eager to portray themselves as disinterested neutrals in the War on Terror. How I wish that they really were neutral. That would be a great improvement from the anti-Islamofascist point of view.

The Opinions of [Human]kind

Although she said little that she hasn’t said before, Justice Ginsburg’s recent speech to South African lawyers, expatiating on her own country’s need to catch up with foreign jurisprudence, is a kind of “timeless” effusion; that is, it exhibits a certain species of liberal mindset in its unabashed arrogance, without any blurring of harsh edges. The theme must have been particularly pleasing to an audience inclined to think poorly of the United States: America is a land beset by racists and authoritarians, where it takes unusual courage for brave progressives to speak out. Nonetheless, there are a few enlightened souls – happily including a slender majority of the Supreme Court – who look abroad for liberating wisdom. If all goes well, the reactionaries will be thwarted, and a deplorably backward land will become more like Europe and South Africa.

The nominal thesis of the speech was that judges should regard the laws of other nations as an authoritative source for interpreting their own country’s constitution and statutes. Broadly speaking, Justice Ginsburg would like to see a single, worldwide set of standards governing the fundamental rights of citizens, with variations only in matters of secondary importance. Thus, for example, every legal system should allow the same broad freedom to choose one’s own “lifestyle”, impose the same range of punishments for crimes and grant the same rights to those accused of hostile activities.

The Justice also believes that one virtue of the American system (very nearly the only virtue, it seems) is that our Constitution empowers the courts to ascertain “the opinions of humankind” – she makes a point of correcting Thomas Jefferson’s male chauvinist word choice – and read them into the Constitutional text. Hence, it is now “cruel and unusual” to execute the 17-year-old ringleader in an atrocious murder, whatever the men at the Philadelphia Convention might have thought.

Engaging the details of the argument is difficult, for Justice Ginsburg chooses to debate almost wholly on an ad hominem level. The Founding Fathers (or should that be “Parents”?) are invoked as predecessors in showing “a decent respect for the opinions of [human]kind”. From their desire to convince others of the rightness of their cause, we are to extrapolate that they wished their new nation to follow the path marked out by – er, that would be England, France, Spain, Prussia, Russia and the Holy Roman Empire, wouldn’t it?

Anyway, we can be sure that Justice Ginsburg’s views are right, because the contrary position is held by apologists for slavery, precursors to Hitler, and Congressional extremists who have inspired death threats against the Justice herself.

Aside from this lining up of heroes and villains, the sole reason presented for paying attention to foreign law is the anodyne truism that we ought to “learn what we can from the experience and good thinking foreign sources may convey”. Which is unarguable but rarely pertinent. When a British judge construes the European Convention on Human Rights and the United Kingdom’s Human Rights Act, he doesn’t purport to be commenting on the meaning of the Constitution of the United States. Foreigners who have written about American institutions – Alexis de Tocqueville and James Bryce, for instance – may provide useful grist for the judicial mill, but Lord Bingham is as far afield as Lord Bryce’s book on imperial Germany.

Perhaps a stronger case can be made than Justice Ginsburg’s, but I wonder whether the advocates of harmonizing law around the world have thought through the implications of their position. Outside marginal areas, mostly involving sex, drugs and capital punishment, the United States gives the government less authority and individuals greater liberty than any other nation. The harmonizers have, I’m sure, ingenious excuses for overlooking the planet’s host of illiberal despotisms when they gauge what “humankind” thinks, but they doubtless include Scandinavia among, as Justice Ginsburg puts it, “legal systems with values and a commitment to democracy similar to our own”.

Consider, then, that, when a Swedish Web site belonging to a minor political party posted the famous Danish “Mohammed” cartoons, the government summarily, without so much as a hearing, shut it down. The President of the United States could not do that.

It shouldn’t be necessary to recite a long litany demonstrating that the freedoms protected by our First Amendment receive limited reverence elsewhere and that the other nine articles of the Bill of Rights are equally idiosyncratic. Trial by jury is all but extinct in the rest of the world (in civil cases, it scarcely ever existed); the concept of probable cause for police searches and seizures is weak; the rights of the accused in criminal trials fall well short of our standards of due process; expropriation of property without adequate consideration is commonplace.

It’s ironic that Justice Ginsburg laments the Supreme Court’s refusal to grant free speech rights for an organization in India that receives U.S. government funds. Those rights would exceed what the recipient possesses under its own country’s constitution.

If our courts were to take to heart the sentiment of Judge Patricia Wald, quoted approvingly by Justice Ginsburg, that foreign case law furnishes “common denominators of basic fairness governing relationships between the governors and the governed”, the overall result would be a severe contraction of liberty. Homosexuals might be free to “marry”, but no one would be free to argue publicly that homosexuality is detrimental to human happiness. Convicted murderers would not be executed, but men accused of any crime would lose the right to trial by a jury of their peers. Marijuana would be sold legally, but local governments would be able to impose cartel-like rules to stifle competition among grocery and clothing stores.

It’s easy to survey the rest of “humankind”, pick out the opinions that one likes and ignore the remainder, but principled proponents of Justice Ginsburg’s approach need to explain how one determines which opinions are entitled to “decent respect” and which are the same dross as those of our homegrown mossbacks. Until and unless they do that, I see no reason to abandon our local perceptions of right and wrong just because they disagree with what prevails elsewhere. It’s possible, after all, that we are the ones who are in the right.

Truly Odd Searches

Someone whose agenda is unfathomable found this site today by googling for “mcjob” and “pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism”. This is the only place on the Web where both words appear.

Ben Franklin on Liberty and Safety

Ever since President Bush responded to 9/11 by declaring war on terrorism rather than appointing a special prosecutor to investigate Osama bin-Laden, those who would have preferred the latter option have become fond of quoting Benjamin Franklin’s words, inscribed with a slight alteration on the stairwell of the Statue of Liberty, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

That is a ringing expression of idealism, somewhat above the practical tone of Poor Richard’s Almanac, and instantly appeals to our bravery; to our vanity, too. Others may make compromises to save their lives, but we are intrepid in the face of danger. Not a jot or tittle of our freedoms will we give up, merely to avert another few thousand or tens of thousand murders.

But would the aphorist have agreed with this contemporary application of his principle? Franklin wrote those words in 1755, during a bitter dispute between the Pennsylvania Assembly, of which he was the principal spokesman, and the colonial governor over how to pay for defense against Indian invasion. The “essential liberty” at stake was the Assembly’s asserted right to tax lands belonging to the colony’s proprietor, Thomas Penn. Interestingly, the legislators finally settled for “temporary safety”; they acquiesced in Penn’s view of his rights in return for a one-time payment of £5,000 (which the local authorities then had to pry out of landowners who owed quit rents to the proprietor).

I doubt that one can find a single instance where, when the public safety was in jeopardy, Dr. Franklin chose to sacrifice it to liberty. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” was another Franklin motto. During the War for Independence, he certainly had no regard for the life, liberty or property of dissidents from the rebel cause.

I can offer an instance from my family history. My ancestor George Veal was a Virginia gentleman, owner of a Tidewater estate, vestryman of his church and pillar of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Unlike many of his neighbors, he was not eager to break the bonds between America and England. For that backwardness, he was imprisoned and his lands confiscated. He died in confinement, during a British attack on the city where he was held.

There’s little likelihood that Ben Franklin ever heard of George Veal’s misfortunes, none that he would have sympathized if he had. He never expressed regret over the fate of the tens of thousands of loyalists whose lives and goods were taken from them or who abandoned everything to seek refuge in Canada.

In the eyes of the colonial rebels, from whom our own government descends and whose side I therefore must take, pace my unfortunate forebear, the essential liberty at stake was self-government, which was worth a short-term surrender of secondary rights. Once independence was attained, the separate States and ultimately the Nation as a whole adopted constitutions that protected personal freedom and property to a degree unprecedented in human history. The temporary sacrifice of liberty gave both liberty and safety a more solid and permanent basis.

We have had the same experience in all of our subsequent major wars. Freedom contracts momentarily so that it can be preserved against an immediate threat and then expands post bellum. During the Civil War, President Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and arrested pro-secession members of the Maryland Legislature. The World Wars saw censorship, punishment of anti-war opinion, trials of civilians by military tribunals, and, most notoriously, the internment of over 100,000 citizens of Japanese descent. The courts did nothing effective to thwart these infringements. The suspension of habeas corpus was declared unconstitutional after the war was safely over. World War I suppression of dissent and the World War II trials and internments were upheld by the Supreme Court.

According to the “liberty vs. safety” cliché, wartime repression ought to have killed off freedom in this country. That was not the case. When peace came, libertarian normalcy returned. I can’t think of a single measure inimical to liberty that was adopted in war and continued after the restoration of peace. The partial exceptions are tax increases and government controls over the economy, which typically recede, but rarely to their pre-war levels. Those are not, however, the sort of intrusions on essential liberty that bother the typical uncritical quoter of Franklin’s maxim. They linger, in fact, because progressives tend to think that they are good ideas.

The moral of history is that it is best to fight wars vigorously and win them as speedily and decisively as possible. The cost of the current war, in terms of treasure or freedom, has been extraordinarily low, for which we ought to be grateful. If we are unwilling to pay any cost at all, however, the conflict will never end, and we may then discover that a perpetual struggle will leave us permanently impoverished and unfree.

Happy St. Patrick’s Green Day Lucky Lunch!

Last year I wrote a few words about Patrick of Ireland, a great Orthodox saint. Nothing has changed since then – and why should things change with saints? – so I won’t repeat myself.

What’s new this year is that St. Patrick’s Day has become the occasion for the reductio ad absurdam of wall-between-church-and-state overreaching. As reported by The Right Coast:

My friend Bob Gaglione of the Gaglione Law Group here in San Diego reports that his daughter, who is Vice President of her school’s student council, was helping to plan a St. Patrick’s Day Carnival for the students. She and her fellow members of the council were told by the school’s administration that the name “St. Patrick” could not be used in the event’s name. It’s against school rules – too religious, you see. They therefore worked hard to find an acceptable alternative name for their lunchtime event and came up with one – “Green Day.” . . .

The latest word is that the event has now been moved to March 31, and that yet another name has been selected – Lucky Lunch. All I can say is this: Patrick, if you’re listening to all this foolishness, I hope you have a sense of humor.

Historically, Celtic saints tended to be of the wither-the-fig-tree-to-teach-it-respect-for-God’s-servants variety, but I don’t believe that there are any well-sourced tales of such conduct on Patrick’s part. He is probably chuckling and hoisting the heavenly equivalent of a tankard of stout.

The Right Coast doesn’t tell us why “Green Day” was replaced by “Lucky Lunch”. Perhaps, unlikely though it sounds, the school administrators read Tim Blair, who has ferreted out Jesus’ campaign appearances for the Australian Green Party.

A Real Threat to American Seaports

Now that the Congresscritters have warded off the dangers supposedly arising from the ownership of a British port terminal operator by a generally cooperative Arab government, will their sensitivity to threats to shipping extend any further? OpinionJournal Political Diary (which you could read for yourself for just $3.95 a month) notes that our nation’s ports have been infiltrated by men who wouldn’t scruple to take money from Osama bin-Laden or any other enemy of the United States:

Just last year, the Justice Department filed a RICO suit charging that the 65,000-member International Longshoremen’s Association is a “vehicle for organized crime.”

The 400-page civil complaint was filed under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and bluntly charges that “for decades the waterfront has been the setting for corruption and violence stemming from organized crime’s influence over labor unions operating there, including the ILA and its affiliated locals, as well as port-related businesses.” An Associated Press review of the complaint concluded that “America already has a fifth column, of sorts, at work on its dock: gangsters who have made the piers friendly territory for drug smugglers and cargo thieves.”

The AP quoted New York State Senator Michael Balboni, chairman of the state Senate’s Homeland Security Committee, as saying that the issue has real national security implications. “Do we really think that terrorists aren’t going to exploit this situation?” Joseph King, a former Customs Service agent who now teaches criminal justice at New York University, agrees. “Instead of bringing in 50 kilograms of heroin, what would stop them from bringing in five kilograms of plutonium?” . . .

Mob influence over the ports is so taken for granted that it even became a topic of discussion in one “Sopranos” episode, in which fictional boss Tony Soprano bemoaned the inadequacies of port security that he knew about as a potential threat to his own children.

I spoke with Rep. Peter King, the Long Island Republican who led the charge against the Dubai port deal, in a green room at CNN last week. He agreed that union corruption and mob influence are genuine national security concerns and “should be looked into.” Somehow I doubt that most of the members who whooped up public hysteria over Dubai’s management of port terminals will show quite the same zeal when it comes to cleaning up the waterfront of criminal elements who by their very nature have proven they are willing to be bought.

For all of those who shrilly opposed the Dubai Ports World deal, this ought to be the threshold test of seriousness about security issues: Will they support ending the monopoly exercised by the corrupt and dangerous ILA? Or do they put the interests of union bosses – even when those bosses are Gambinos and Genoveses – above salus populi? A right-to-work law for longshoremen might or might not be a good idea in peacetime; in the midst of a war against terrorists, it is elementary common sense. I fear, though, that OpinionJournal was right to head its item, “Congress Is More Steiger Than Brando”.

A Good Deed, But Not Oliver’s

Taliban analog though he was, Oliver Cromwell has long been credited with one good deed: the readmission of Jews to England, which he is supposed to have authorized in 1656. Their expulsion had been decreed in 1290, and since then only a minuscule number, estimated at no more than 200, had lived covertly in the kingdom. According to the now traditional account, the Lord Protector responded favorably to lobbying by Menasseh ben Israel, a Dutch Jewish leader. One historian, Cecil Roth, fixed the exact date, June 25, 1656, of “the decision authorising Jewish public worship in England, after a lapse of 366 years”. The 350th anniversary of this event is being marked this year by a number of exhibitions and festivities.

If “Commemorating a Myth”, an essay in the March issue of History Today, is well-founded, the basis for these celebrations is imaginary. According to Eliane Glaser, a BBC Radio researcher, the Jewish pleas were real, but the government’s only reaction was to sponsor a conference in December 1655, at which theologians of the eccentric species favored by the Commonwealth debated such issues as whether the readmission of the Jews would hasten the Second Coming of Christ.

In the end, though, the Whitehall conference failed to reach a verdict. According to one account, ‘The Preachers kept pelting one another so furiously, with Texts of Scripture, and spent so much Time thumbing through their Bibles for Proofs, and wiping their Spectacles, that the Debates continued for four Days; though very little was said on the Question of the Jews’ resettlement.’ The theologians were more interested in their scholastic arguments about biblical chronology than in welcoming the Jewish people, and their indecision eventually won the day. Although the conference ended inconclusively, it got a lot of attention; there were even rumours that the Jews were plotting to take over St. Paul’s Cathedral and use it as a synagogue. But it seemed that the decision-makers found it hard to take the prospect of Jewish immigration seriously.

There is not the slightest surviving evidence that Cromwell ever did anything for the benefit of the Jews. The June 25th date for his alleged decision in their favor was inferred from a truly absurd argumentum ad silentium: Two pages are missing from the Council of State minutes for that day, which could have contained a favorable reply to the Jewish petitions. Or not.

Cromwell’s reputation as a philo-Semite, Miss Glaser argues, was an invention of his Whig admirers, inspired largely by the notion that, since 17th Century Protestant divines devoted much attention to the Old Testament, they must have sympathized with the Hebrews’ contemporary descendants.

Christian enthusiasm for Jewish knowledge did not necessarily lead to toleration of the Jewish people. Christians were interested in Judaism because it was a useful resource in the theological and political arguments they were having with other Christians. Puritans drew parallels between themselves and Old Testament Israelites because that enabled them to claim a direct link to original, apostolic Christianity, in contrast to the corrupt, insufficiently reformed church. . . . But this identification didn’t necessarily result in philosemitism; the Puritan William Prynne made great use of Jewish ideas in his tracts and pamphlets, but he also wrote a two-volume diatribe against the readmission of the Jews. . . .

If any single man deserves the credit for making it possible for Jews to live openly in England again, it was Charles II. Early in his reign, a synagogue opened in London, a sign of an increasing, though still unlawful, Jewish presence.

Christian merchants and their representatives appealed to the king to punish or expel the Jews, but each time he refused. Significantly, it was Charles, not Cromwell, who was the first to declare, explicitly, that the Jews should be left alone. . . . The first historian of Jews in England, D’Blossiers Tovey, wrote in 1738 that ‘King Charles the second must justly be considered as their Introducer’.

I have one caveat about this interesting article: The author does work for the BBC and patently shares that organization’s deplorable attitudes. As one might expect, she thinks that last year’s terrorist attacks in London were evidence of British intolerance toward religious minorities, so she may think that, by debunking Cromwell, she is debunking Britain. Happily, she is actually praising the Stuart Restoration, which was far more British in its essence than the Puritan tyrant.

Dubai Lemonade

Any action that Congress takes with near unanimity is presumptively foolish. The presumption can be overcome, as with the renewal of the Patriot Act, though in that case the foolishness peeks through in a number of provisions that reflect bureaucratic wish lists rather than genuine evaluation of the best response to the terrorist threat. (One of the best reasons for pressing forward to win the War on Terror quickly is so that we can repeal the laws the were needed to win it.)

The House Appropriations Committee’s vote to kill the Dubai Ports World deal – 62–2 with only jolly free trader Jim Kolbe and Beltway oddity James Moran opposed – displays near unanimity without any redeeming security value. It’s unarguable that the Bush Administration’s tardy effort to calm critics has failed utterly. That is no feather in the cap of either the White House or the Congresscritters. Edmund Burke said, “Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” By that standard, today’s Representatives owe a great deal that they have not paid.

Still, we have this lemon. What can be done with it?

The position that DPW cannot safely be permitted to operate terminals in U.S. ports implies four premises about public safety in wartime.

1. Religion, ethnicity and associations with terrorists raise strong suspicions about one’s loyalty to the cause of civilization in the War on Terror. The principal charge against the government of Dubai is that it was (like almost all other Middle Eastern governments) complaisant about al-Qa’eda before 9/11 and maintains indirect and attenuated links to this day. (The crown prince is also a big fan of Bill Clinton, but we won’t hold that against his country.)

2. The burden of dispelling suspicion lies on the suspect, not the accusers. In this case, Dubai could not carry its burden by furnishing a major base to American armed forces and cooperating from the beginning in the Container Security Initiative, which shows just how heavily the presumption of guilt weighs against the accused.

3. Unless refuted (and there may be little opportunity for refutation; vide the next point), suspicion justifies interference with normal expectations of fair treatment. In peacetime, no one would defend taking longstanding commercial operations out of Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Company’s hands, at considerable cost to the company, simply because a new owner could not prove its bona fides beyond a reasonable doubt. During a war, the risk of harming innocent parties receives much less weight.

4. Similarly, procedural regularity is at a discount. The Appropriations Committee has taken action before completion of administrative review and shows no interest in what that process might reveal.

Though I believe that they are being misapplied in this instance, those principles do not seem unreasonable when we are fighting enemies who routinely violate the laws of war and depend primarily on murdering civilians and destroying private property to gain their ends. Right-wing opponents of the deal assuredly agree. By joining in the outcry against DPW, indeed rushing to the vanguard, leading Democrats have acquiesced in that logic. Or are they going to tell us afterwards that they were merely doing the bidding of the International Longshoremen’s Association? (BTW, terrorists who want to infiltrate our ports can do so more cheaply and effectively by spreading money around the notoriously corrupt ILA than by purchasing British shipping lines at a premium over market capitalization.)

The DPW principles shed light on many war-related controversies. The NSA’s warrantless wiretaps are an excellent example. Contact with al-Qa’eda certainly raises suspicions that furnish good grounds for ignoring expectations of privacy and due process. Somebody in this country may have innocent reasons for telephoning or e-mailing known terrorists, but that possibility is a lot less substantial than the likelihood that the government of Dubai is sincere about assisting in the War on Terror.

Maybe Hillary Clinton et al. will pursue the corollaries of their reasoning on this issue. If they don’t, we will have firm proof that their approach to national security is fundamentally frivolous.

The First Day of Great Lent

Last year, I created a Lenten Weblog, to which I conscientiously contributed every day from Clean Monday (that’s today) through Lazarus Saturday. This year I doubt that I will have the persistence for such an enterprise, but I’ll try to post occasional thoughts on topics of a suitably Lenten character.

This morning, I took up St. John Climacus’ The Ladder of Divine Ascent, traditional seasonal reading for Orthodox Christians. A passage in translator Colm Luibheid’s preface strikes me as worthy of attention:

[T]here is one feature of the unrelaxed severity and discipline of early monastic life that certainly ought to be adverted to . . . ; namely, the undeniable correlation between hardship and an intense marshaling of inner, and frequently unsuspected, resources. Words cannot really encompass what happens here. But the fact seems well established. In the evidence of the Gulag Archipelago, in the testimony of men like Solzhenitsyn, Tertz, Panin, and Shifrin, in the records of the tidal wave of misery let loose by German Nazism, there is a persistent and humbling proof of the capacity of individuals, trapped amid the worst conditions of deprivation, to unlock an inner dynamism, which often is manifested as a commanding faith in God and which must never be confused with the understandable motive of escapism. It has happened too often in twentieth-century experience to be trivialized or explained away; and somewhere within it lies a common bond with the ordeals, voluntarily undertaken, and the achievements of the first monks of the Church. Sharp differences of time and circumstance do not alter the shared character of the early saint and that prisoner of our day who has climbed beyond gross suffering and oppression to arrive at a level of richness beyond all common imagining.

Don’t we see the opposite phenomenon, too? Men who live soft, comfortable lives, as most of us in the Western world do, flinch from mild hardship. It may not be necessary to look any further for an explanation of the cowardice of our elites in the face of terrorism. Instead of an “intense marshaling of inner, and frequently unsuspected, resources”, we see the dissipation of resources that lie readily at hand. Thus the European Union’s Justice and Security Commissioner avers, “The press will give the Muslim world the message: We are aware of the consequences of exercising the right of free expression. We can and we are ready to self-regulate that right.”

In other words, this civilized European statesman does not have to be shut up in the Gulag or tortured by Islamofascists; his morale breaks under the threat of rowdy gangs of Moslem youths.

Perhaps civilization is inherently temporary and self-limiting. Men toil to construct the edifice. Tantae molis erat romanam condere gentem imperiumque. Then, the labor done, they grow unwilling to undergo the strain of defending their achievements; so they stand listlessly aside as barbarians burn them down. Facilis est descensus.

Dhimmis in the Headlights

Our Islamofascist enemies haven’t made a secret of either their strategy in Iraq or their intended follow-up to a victory there. The strategy is to continue murdering civilians and causing mayhem until America gives up and goes home. No one in the al-Qa’eda leadership is mad enough to fantasize that their forces can inflict more than pinprick damage on the world’s most powerful army. From a conventional military point of view, they are barely fighting. But they believe that they don’t have to do anything but attack soft targets and wait; the infidels are too timorous and decadent to endure sustained low-intensity conflict.

The post-victory pursuit plans have also been telegraphed: Once the Moslem world sees that America can’t protect non-Islamofascist governments, the way will be open to civil war throughout the House of Islam, the end result of which will be the elimination of all rulers who have collaborated to any degree with the West and their replacement by imams of the bin-Laden/Zawahiri/Zarqawi breed. An ideologically unified Islam will then use the twin leverage of oil and terrorism to subdue the infidel realms.

Even among opponents of the Iraqi campaign – leaving aside the loonies who liken Abu Musab al-Zarqawi to George Washington – there are not many who would dispute this sketch of the enemy’s point of view. Yet an increasing number, including a few from the right of center, have come either to advocate or to accept passively unilateral American withdrawal from Iraq, letting the terrorists to proclaim victory and go advance on their next targets.

The excuse is that recent events in Iraq demonstrate that the country’s ethnic groups won’t cooperate, making it impossible to have a genuinely democratic government. Hence, we may as well leave the wogs to slaughter one another. Cliff May has summarized why the “plague on all their houses” position is sheer folly:

There was never any guarantee that we would succeed in helping decent Iraqis create a decent society. I do think it would be a stunning defeat if we were to leave Iraq with Abu Musab al-Zarqawi still alive and al-Qa’eda in Iraq still a force to be reckoned with. Other defeats would almost certainly follow in other places (Pakistan? Lebanon? Jordan? Afghanistan? If not, why not?)

Meanwhile, Democrats offer no credible alternative to the administration’s policies. Most Democrats, like most Europeans, are in denial over the very fact that we’re in a serious war against a very dangerous enemy.

They want to fight Bush and Republicans – because Bush and Republicans they can maybe beat.

They don’t want to fight Islamic Fascism because they don’t have a clue as to how they would go about taking on such a foe while simultaneously keeping everyone happy at the UN and Human Rights Watch and the NYT and the Daily Kos and CAIR and . . .

Precisely. After withdrawal from Iraq, American military power will not be a credible counter to Islamofascism anywhere. Some countries may be able, through stubborn brutality, to ward off the offensive on their own. Others are sitting sultans in a shooting gallery.

Our choices will be either (i) to hunker down within our own borders, piling on security precautions until our lives are incessantly overshadowed by metal detectors, identity cards, spy cameras and wiretaps, or (ii) to re-intervene in the Middle East and prove, through a long, bloody series of campaigns, that we are not a paper giaour.

Maybe we’ll get lucky, though what passes for “luck” may be pretty appalling. Secular fascists, as in Egypt, may arise to crush the religious variety. Or the aspirants to the Islamofascist caliphate may devour each other, along with vast numbers of innocents. Or a demented Iranian mullarchy may set off a nuclear war that will reduce the region to a radioactive wasteland. In the aftermath, we will be safe – and proud of it?

The path to neutering Islamofascism and averting the dire consequences of its flourishing is simple and even relatively easy: The enemy relies on our acting according to its script. If we refuse, its only source of strength – the image of being the “strong horse” – will evaporate. That lesson may take a few years to sink in, or the internal collapse may be abrupt, as the half-hearted choose the better part of valor. All that the West needs right now is the spirit of Winston Churchill. Alas, we have very few Churchills and a plethora of dhimmis paralyzed by the headlights of the onrushing train.

Cricket: The Next Field of Conflict?

Hmm, can it be a coincidence that, just one day after the Daily Telegraph reported that communist Cuba, wanting “to emphasise their Caribbean status and tempt the younger generation away from the Yankee-influenced baseball diamond” has launched a Commission of Rescue and Development of Cricket in Cuba, President Bush took turns at batting and bowling during his visit to Pakistan?

The sport was popular in Cuba before the communist takeover. Sides from other Caribbean countries toured the island regularly. Then, as the president of the new Cuban commission delicately puts it, Cubans became “busy”.

They were moving around. Cricket died out. The last game we have scorecards for was in 1974, between two small local sides. After that, it only existed in one town in the south called Baraguá, where they would play a game once a year . . .

The government-sponsored revival is largely motivated, I suspect, by the calculation that there won’t be any embarrassing defections of cricket players to Yankee teams. President Bush’s calculation in giving visibility to the sport is doubtless more subtle: Either Americans will begin paying attention to it, leading to high-paying contracts and another frustration for Fidel, or BDS sufferers will be torn between reflexive loathing for all things touched by the Greatest Satan and sycophantic admiration for their Cuban supremo. It isn’t nice to add to their miseries, but how can one resist?

Further reading: For those who are interested, I once reviewed a pair of books on “Baseball’s Elder Brother”.

Quote of the Day: The Dubai Ports World Deal

From OpinionJournal Political Diary, quoting a letter from Idan Ofer, head of Israel’s largest shipping company, Zim Integrated Shipping Services Limited, to Senator Hillary Clinton:

As an Israeli company, security is of the utmost importance to us, and we require rigorous security measures from terminal operators in every country in which we operate, but especially in Arab countries, and we are very comfortable calling at D.P. World’s Dubai ports. During our long association with D.P. World, we have not experienced a single security issue in these ports, or in any of the terminals operated by D.P. World.

Does anyone imagine that Senator Clinton, seen a few years ago embracing Yasser Arafat’s wife, cares what some Israeli thinks about terrorism?

Supreme Court Thank-You Notes

So now the media are suspiciously scrutinizing the courtesy notes that Justice Samuel Alito sent to various backers of his nomination to the Court. One went to the controversial James Dobson, and the usual hysteriacs construe it as pledge of allegiance to Dobson’s not always level-headed Focus on the Family organization.

Well, what about Justice Alito’s colleagues? A few years ago, liberal hero John Paul Stevens penned a rather effusive thank you to Paul Streitz, author of Oxford: Son of Queen Elizabeth I, the second nuttiest book ever written about the “controversy” over the authorship of Shakespeare’s works. (Look here for a review of the first nuttiest.) Mr. Streitz’s thesis is that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford (1550–1604), not only secretly ghosted Shakespeare’s plays and poems but was Queen Elizabeth’s illegitimate son, as well as the father of another of her bastards. He was supposed to become King after her death but was cheated out of the throne, after which he faked his own demise and retired to the Isle of Man, where he translated the King James Bible.

Justice Stevens called this feat of scholarship “a most interesting and impressive piece of work”, from which he “learned a great deal” and which “provide[s] strong additional evidence supporting the Oxfordian position on the authorship issue”.

There’s nothing especially political about Mr. Streitz’s screed, leaving aside his call for deposing the House of Windsor in favor of a descendant of the Oxford earls, but does it increase your sense of comfort to know that his opinions are viewed favorably by a man who holds one-ninth of the votes on our nation’s highest court? Should not the media find that at least as fascinating as a conservative Justice’s routine courtesy?

Oh, the Tooth Bone’s Connected to the Womb Bone

No doubt this report has solid scientific underpinning, but I confess to bafflement at what the cause and effect can be:

Pregnant women with chronic gum disease during their second trimester may be up to seven times more likely to deliver prematurely, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Dental Association. However, premature births declined by as much as 84% among women who received treatments for gum disease before the 35th week of pregnancy, researchers reported in the Journal of Periodontology.

These findings are being taken seriously, it seems, by the insurance industry. A Mercer consultant –

advises employers to instruct expectant mothers on managing their oral health. Those at greatest risk may need cleanings every three months, she says. Insurers are beginning to heed that message. In April, Blue Shield of California will launch a small group dental benefit that allows pregnant women to receive additional periodontal treatments and maintenance. Likewise, Cigna recently introduced a new plan to cover periodontal scaling and a gum disease treatment during pregnancy.

Well, okay, anything to lessen the risk to unborn babies, but I’d really like to know how gingivitis migrates from the gums to the uterus.

The Yale Taliban and the Western Civil War

When Yale University’s director of undergraduate admissions received an application from a 27-year-old fourth grade graduate, who also happened to be the former second foreign secretary of Afghanistan’s ousted Taliban despotism, he didn’t worry about offending Old Eli’s feminist, homosexual or secularist “stakeholders”. His primary concern was that Yale might lose a “foreigner of Rahmatullah’s caliber” to Harvard.

That Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi is now a “special student” in a non-degree program at my alma mater doesn’t throw me into a tizzy. I’m just grateful that he wasn’t offered a teaching post, perhaps assisting with Mr. Woodwell’s popular “Terrorism: Past, Present and Future” course. Still, the fact that a major university was eager to furnish a place to a man who once rationalized the policies of a brutal, reactionary regime is rather astonishing at first glance. The admissions office might not reject out of hand an otherwise well-qualified applicant who happened to have shilled for, say, Ian Smith’s Rhodesia, but we can be certain that it wouldn’t mind his being whisked away by some other institution. Needless to say, it wouldn’t stretch academic standards on his behalf.

That a Taliban apologist gets favored treatment can be attributed plausibly to only one fact: that he worked for the enemies of George W. Bush. To an Ivy League liberal, that makes him an enemy of the Great Enemy and thus a friend, however tarnished his credentials, to the bien-pensant intelligentsia. Sure, the Taliban denied women the right to earn a living or go to school, outlawed homosexuality, killed thousands of dissidents, destroyed art treasures and granted a safe haven to Osama bin-Laden. What does that matter next to their transcendent virtue, that they, like Saddam Hussein, were victims of George W. Bush?

For those who doubt that the West is engaged in not only in an external war against Islamofascism but also in a civil war between those who seek to preserve Western civilization and those whose loathing of our culture leads them to ally with its enemies, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi stands as a refutation of fatuous optimism. The only question is whether the internal struggle will remain mostly nonviolent, a “cold war” within the West, or will one day turn bloody.

Further reading: Chip Brown, “The Freshman”
John Fund, “Jihadi Turns Bulldog”
James Kirchick, “Ex-Taliban Can Learn from Yale Experience”:

The administration believes Yale is lucky to have Hashemi. According to the New York Times, Yale had “another foreigner of Rahmatullah’s caliber apply for special-student status.” Said former Dean of Admissions Richard Shaw, “We lost him to Harvard. I don’t want that to happen again.” Who was the applicant? A member of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath party? A protege of Robert Mugabe’s?

Don’t expect a word of protest from our feminist and gay groups, who now have in their midst a live remnant of one of the most misogynistic and homophobic regimes ever. They’re busy hunting bogeymen like frat parties and single-sex bathrooms. The answer Hashemi gave five years ago when asked about the lack of women’s rights in Afghanistan, “American women don’t have the right not to find images of themselves in swimsuits on the side of a bus,” is the sort of sophistry likely to curry favor among Yale’s feminist activists, who make every effort to paint American society as chauvinistic while refraining from criticizing non-Western cultures. To do so would be “cultural imperialism,” and we cannot have that at an enlightened place like Yale.

I personally want to know whether Hashemi supports the flattening of homosexuals via brick walls, which was one of the ways the Taliban dealt with gay men. Having written a newspaper column for nearly my entire time at Yale, I suspect some of my peers would like to see me flattened by a wall, but I doubt any of them served a regime that carried out such a practice as official policy.

Purportedly, Hashemi is here so we can learn from him. Shaw, who gushed that his interview with Hashemi “was one of the most interesting I’ve ever had,” told the Times, “this is a person to be reckoned with and who could educate us about the world.” We should welcome Hashemi, in hopes that American pluralism – eating in a kosher dining hall, taking classes alongside girls and gays – will help him liberalize his homeland. Rahmatullah Hashemi has much more to learn from Americans and Yale than we do from him.

Getting What We Pay For

Complaints about the high cost of health care in the United States are routine. Everybody knows, with “everybody’s” invincible assurance, that the reason is some combination of greed, inefficiency and market failure. There is, however, an alternative explanation. An item in OpinionJournal Political Diary (a mere $3.95 a month) has this quote from an OECD study:

Survey data suggest that there are very low waiting times for elective surgery in the U.S. . . [T]he percentage of the respondents in need of elective coronary bypass who had been waiting for more than three months was 0% in U.S., 18.2% in Sweden, 46.7% in Canada, and 88.9% in the United Kingdom.

Getting a service fast is often more expensive than getting it slowly, whether it is plumbing or heart surgery. The American system is very good at fast delivery. I wonder whether the advocates of a “single payer” alternative or other forms of socialized medicine would be comfortable going in front of the electorate to praise long waiting times to see a surgeon.