The Shoe Frenzy

The New York Times has voluminous documentation of Iraqis' reactions to the shoe frenzy.

Of Davis and Double Standards

A reader who cloaks him/herself in anonymity writes of my posting "Angela Davis, Moral Idiot":

Is your intention to delegitimize the black liberation struggles of the 60s/70s, or is it to emphasize the failures and injustices of the Soviet government?

I would hope that you aren't suggesting much of a relationship. I would be interested to hear that relationship argued, though. It would certainly be a stretch to base much on a single quote of unverifiable attribution, especially given that the quote is sufficiently contradicted by a lifetime of the professor's writings and lectures. You might inquire into Davis' general stance on incarceration.

My intentions are manifold, but they do not include delegitimizing black liberation. There is no inherent link between black liberation and Soviet oppression, obviously. Insofar as that movement advocated racial separatism and courted dictators like Fidel Castro, it delegitimized itself. To be morally consistent on the two points, one would have supported black liberation, if understood as legal equality of the races, and opposed Soviet tyranny. Though he is not the object of faddish adulation on the left (like Davis is), Bayard Rustin is a chief example of moral consistency, having been a civil rights pioneer and a socialist while managing not to fawn over the Soviet Union. He organized the March on Washington in 1963, just one of his many credits in a lifetime of fighting for human rights, and, though now dead, I wish his story was more appreciated, especially by those who fetishize fellow-travellers.

I have in fact inquired into "Davis' general stance on incarceration," which is why I find her views on arbitrary imprisonment of political dissidents in Warsaw Pact countries to be so ironic and so devastating to her own cause, or at least her own credibility. (Really, how could the irony of a woman who wants to abolish prisons in a democratic country while glibly endorsing the jailing of political activists in a dictatorship escape even the most obtuse of minds?)

Her indignation at racial oppression in this country became hysteria, and this led her to be willfully blind to the enslavement of several hundred million people in the Eastern Bloc. Such a glaring moral blind spot should, I think, cause us to regard her political proclamations with vigilant dubiety.

The Beginning of the End for the British in Iraq

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown was in Baghdad today to approve his government's deal with Iraq to withdraw nearly all its forces from the country by mid-2009. You can read more about it here.

Of all the coalition partners except the United States, the British troop contingent has been the largest. It is to their great credit that they did not cravenly flee after the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London the way the Spanish did after the 3/11 bombings in Madrid. The "special relationship" endures.

Price-Distorting Agricultural Subsidies We Can Believe In

President-elect Barack Obama has chosen former Iowa Governor Tom Vilsack as his Secretary of Agriculture. It's a victory for useless ethanol production and exorbitant welfare for agribusiness. Too bad; this department really needed change, as Michael Pollan pointed out.

Angela Davis, Moral Idiot

Perhaps the definitive icon of black liberation (separatism/supremacy) in the 1960s and 1970s was Angela Davis. The details of her life, which is not yet over, are easily accessible, but I thought one particular story merits study. It was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident and author of The Gulag Archipelago, who told it in a speech to the AFL-CIO on July 9, 1975:

There's a certain woman here named Angela Davis. I don't know if you are familiar with her in this country, but in our country, literally, for an entire year, we heard of nothing at all except Angela Davis. There was only Angela Davis in the whole world and she was suffering. We had our ears stuffed with Angela Davis. Little children in school were told to sign petitions in defense of Angela Davis. Little boys and girls, eight and nine years old, were asked to do this. She was set free, as you know. Although she didn't have too difficult a time in this country's jails, she came to recuperate in Soviet resorts. Some Soviet dissidents--but more important, a group of Czech dissidents--addressed an appeal to her: "Comrade Davis, you were in prison. You know how unpleasant it is to sit in prison, especially when you consider yourself innocent. You have such great authority now. Could you help our Czech prisoners? Could you stand up for those people in Czechoslovakia who are being persecuted by the state?" Angela Davis answered: "They deserve what they get. Let them remain in prison." That is the face of Communism. That is the heart of Communism for you.

If you know anything about the ideological battles of the 20th century, I needn't comment further, and certainly not to not how widely shared this sentiment was on the left.

The Measure of Our Culture

One of the headlines of tonight's On the Record with Greta van Susteren: "SHARON OSBORNE ACCUSED OF ATTACKING REALITY SHOW CONTESTANT." What a sad indication of our culture's voyeuristic celebrity obsession. Greta should be wearing a striped vest and selling tickets to the merry-go-round at the mall, not hosting a television show. Pity.

The Anti-Hero

The last two films lionizing Ernesto Guevara, 2004's The Motorcycle Diaries and the upcoming four-hour Che, have occasioned passionate and eloquent denunciations by two great writers of Anglo-American liberalism. Paul Berman, whose intellectual histories of the generation of May '68 are legend, illuminated Che's despotic side in Slate. British writer Johann Hari wrote recently for The Huffington Post of the ignorance and insidiousness of the cult surrounding the man most commonly seen as a T-shirt silhouette. Read both of these pieces; historical integrity depends on it.

Of Muslim Insanity and the Obligation Not to Capitulate

It is now a fact of life in the West to be confronted with increasingly sweeping and deranged demands by Muslims, both immigrant and native-born. Last year there was the installation of basins for foot-washing at the University of Michigan at Dearborn after Muslim students requested them for pre-prayer ablution. When criticized, the foot-bath lobby hilariously said the sinks were for all students, not just Muslims, as if Lutherans, Jews, and agnostics will find any use for them.

The latest Muslim challenge to the West's long-established constitutional traditions occurred recently in Britain. A blind man, Alun Elder-Brown, was denied entry to a restaurant because he was accompanied by his guide dog, Finn, which offended the Muslim owners. It was a terrible ordeal for him:

Mr. Elder-Brown was taking his girlfriend out to celebrate her birthday with her five year-old daughter last week when he was told he would have to leave his dog, Finn, tied up outside. He showed a card issued by the Institute of Environmental Health Officers certifying he and his dog were allowed into any premises but an argument ensued and the owners threatened to call the police if he did not leave.

"It was humiliating and degrading, especially as there were a lot of people around me," he said. "I was made to feel like a piece of dirt. They told me I couldn't come in because it was against their religious beliefs to have a dog in the restaurant. "They then said I could leave Finn tied up outside. I stayed calm but when they threatened to call police I left." He added: "It was horrible. It put a dampener on the whole celebration."

It is important to note that the restaurateurs' action was illegal under the Disability Discrimination Act, and, though one of them apologized, they should still be prosecuted for violating the rights of the blind. Sadly this is not an isolated incident in Britain. In October 2006 The Daily Mail reported:

A Muslim minicab driver refused to take a blind passenger because her guide dog was "unclean".

Abdul Rasheed Majekodumni told Jane Vernon she could not get into his car with the dog because of his religion.

Islamic tradition warns Muslims against contact with dogs because they are seen as impure.

Ms. Vernon said:

"This experience was very upsetting. . . . I was tired and cold and just wanted to get home but this driver made me feel like I was a second-class citizen, like I didn't count at all. . . . The owner of the minicab firm, Niven Sinclair, was also very insensitive, telling me that what had happened to me wasn't really very important, and I should have more respect for other people's culture. They have shown very little respect for my rights as a disabled person and have never once offered me an apology."

Worryingly, similar incidents in Minnesota were reported last year by The Washington Post:

A large number of taxi drivers in the area of the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport are Muslim Somali immigrants. Many say they feel the faith's ban on alcohol consumption includes transporting anyone carrying it.

Some also have refused to transport dogs, both pets and guide dogs, saying they are unclean.

Gratifyingly, the airport authorities imposed strict penalties on drivers who refused to pick up blind or alcohol-carrying passengers. (Is it tangential to mention that "Muslim Somali immigrants" find guide dogs and booze repugnant while their homeland, according to UNICEF, has a female genital mutilation "prevalence of about 95 percent. . . and [it] is primarily performed on girls between the ages of four and 11"?)

The ability of the blind and of disabled people in general to live fulfilling, normal lives is one of the great, compassionate advances in our history. Public accommodation and legal protection for them is essential and is not to be compromised, especially to mollify some insane medieval religious tenet. We must hold the line on our civilization's accomplishments. One doesn't have to be a soothsayer to see that challenges to the equality of the sexes are upcoming on the roster of Muslim demands. We have an obligation not to capitulate.

Suggested Reading

I insist you visit the website of the journal Democratiya and pore over the new issue. It is a cornucopia of intellectual and ideological delights. It is so good I will say this: when we have won the argument against the pacifists, relativists, and defeatists, the nails for the coffin will come from Democratiya.

Book Titles That Never Made It

Salman Rushdie was at the 92nd Street Y in New York two years ago to read from Shalimar the Clown. Before he began, he revealed a merry game he sometimes plays: thinking of book titles that never made it. Among them were Toby Dick, A Farewell to Weapons, The Big Gatsby, For Whom the Bell Rings, Mr. Zhivago, Hitch-22, The Goulash Archipelago, and Light in July. Can you think of any others? (Yes, this is a ruse to determine if anyone is still reading.)

The Shoe Narrative

The endlessly vapid, diversionary, and childish coverage of the disaffected Iraqi journalist who flung his shoes at President Bush during a press conference in Baghdad is noteworthy only because the media has proven again it loves melodramatic anecdotes that can be superimposed upon a geopolitical situation to "prove" a preconceived bias. By showing the video exhaustively and with garrulous commentary, the media is trying to magnify its importance and use it to construct a narrative of two parts: (1.) the acts of the Iraqi journalist are those of righteous indignation against his oppressor (by extension the oppressor of the Arab world), (2.) George W. Bush (by extension the United States), who deserved to be the recipient of an expression of rage in a Middle Eastern fashion because he (we) destroyed Iraq, and the powerful are always deserving of humiliation, comeuppance, overthrow, etc.

In short, never underestimate the ability of the media to squeeze geostrategic insight out of a meaningless moment of mania.

The Job of the Writer

The writer's first job is not to have opinions but to tell the truth . . . and refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation. Literature is the house of nuance and contrariness against the voices of simplification. The job of the writer is to make it harder to believe the mental despoilers. The job of the writer is to make us see the world as it is, full of many different claims and parts and experiences.

Susan Sontag, "The Conscience of Words," delivered May 9, 2000 upon receiving the Jerusalem Prize

Didion Returns to the Silver Screen

Joan Didion, whose screenwriting credits with her late husband John Gregory Dunne include The Panic in Needle Park (1971), True Confessions (1981), and Up Close and Personal (1996), will return to film with a script about the late Washington Post editor Katharine Graham. Laura Linney is set to play Ms. Graham, whose tenure included Woodward and Bernstein's breaking of the Watergate scandal.

One Person to Exclude from the Conversation

As the Republican Party and the conservative movement reconstitute themselves, hopefully with drastic reform and modernization and an acknowledgment of demographic changes, there is one person who should play no role in the discussion: Ron Paul. Though he raised millions of dollars on the internet, he wasn't well-received by voters in the Republican primaries. Furthermore, his orbit came to include adherents to various conspiracy theories about 9/11, world government, and a NAFTA superhighway. If Dr. Paul is not marginalized in the conservative conversation it will represent a repudiation of the tough work William F. Buckley Jr. did in ostracizing the Objectivists and the John Birch Society, or as he recalled it: "You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks." In case anyone forgot, here is something I wrote earlier this year about an association I regard as extremely revelatory about Dr. Paul's sordid beliefs:

By now you will have read that during the past thirty years various newsletters bearing the name of Texas Congressman and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul have promulgated racism and paranoia. While the titles have changed—Ron Paul’s Freedom Report, Ron Paul Political Report, Ron Paul’s Survival Report—the themes have not. The newsletters espouse bigotry of the kind that comports perfectly with his xenophobic, isolationist ideology. This is no cosmopolitan libertarian, as many antiwar liberals have been duped into believing. Ron Paul is a sinister extremist.

Having first appeared in the late 1970s, the newsletters were published without bylines, but “Ron Paul” was cited several times as the editor or publisher (or both). Contained therein are his views on why the Watts riots in 1992 ended: “it came time for the blacks to pick up their welfare checks”; his suggestions to black activists who wanted to rename New York City after Martin Luther King Jr.: “Rapetown,” “Welfaria,” or “Zooville”; his take on the holiday honoring the slain leader: “Hate Whitey Day”; and his assessment of the end of apartheid in South Africa: the “destruction of civilization.” The newsletters also opined on the Louisiana senatorial bid of David Duke, a former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, advising readers that their challenge was to take the “message of Duke, and enclose it in a more consistent package of freedom.” A speech he delivered at a neo-Confederate conference in 1996, an announcement for which read “We’ll explore what causes [secession] and how to promote it,” rounds out the primordial racial views propagated by Dr. Paul’s communiqués.

Predictably Dr. Paul’s bigotries are not confined to racism. He indulges in an array of paranoia and hatred, from calling Israel “an aggressive, national socialist state” (a vile statement considering “national socialism” and “Nazi” are synonymous) to entertaining the notion that the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was “a setup by the Israeli Mossad.” Other conspiracies the newsletters give voice to include that the Waco shootout was a way for Bill Clinton to have his former bodyguards murdered and that David Rockefeller and fascist bankers were behind the Panama Canal Treaty. It should be obvious that what informs these newsletters is not enlightenment or empiricism but vague insinuations about Jewish bankers and shady global elites.

As these damning revelations about Dr. Paul’s lunatic past have come to light there have been laughable explanations from his campaign. One of his staffers said Dr. Paul wrote some of the articles but “Most of the incendiary stuff, no.” This is implausible and silly and belied by Dr. Paul himself, who in 1996 admitted authorship but complained the media had taken his racist statements “out of context.” The denials are complicated by the fact that, throughout the years, the newsletters have been written in the first person while referring to Dr. Paul’s personal life. There can be little doubt Dr. Paul wrote or approved of the newsletters.

Dr. Paul’s presidential campaign is essentially an artifice composed of two parts. His public proclamations titillate faddish young leftists and libertarians and generate huge fundraising, but with code words and in lesser venues he underhandedly massages reactionary crackpots and conspiracy theorists. It makes perfect sense that the “Ron Paul Revolution” is rife with the creepy dunderheads who accept the “inside job” interpretation of the attacks of September 11, 2001. Now that Dr. Paul’s reprehensible prejudices have been brought to light, I think the naïve liberals who have thrown in with this small-minded chauvinist owe themselves and everyone else an explanation.

"The Spanish Civil War of Our Time"

I beg your pardon if my postings have taken on a genocidal tinge lately, but it is an important subject. So allow me to recapitulate one of the worst failures of nerve of the nineties: the siege of Sarajevo and the genocide of Bosnian Muslims by ethnic Serbs either led or encouraged by Slobodan Milosevic; and one of the great heroes of that era: Susan Sontag, whose hazardous sojourns in that terrorized city were her attempt to bear witness and raise awareness. While there she also helped out in her own way, directing a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, which has since been lionized (Christopher Hitchens, Paul Berman) and lambasted (Roger Kimball, Jean Beaudrillard). In a 2000 interview she said:

Look, I did not go to Sarajevo in order to stage Waiting for Godot. I would have had to have been insane to do such a thing. I went to Sarajevo because my son, a journalist who had begun covering the war, suggested that I make such a trip. While there for the first time in April 1993, I told people I would like to come back and work in the besieged city. When asked what I could do, I said: I can type, I can do elementary hospital tasks, I can teach English, I know how to make films and direct plays. "Oh," they said, "do a play. There are so many actors here with nothing to do." And the choice of doing Godot was made in consultation with the theater community in Sarajevo. ...

My visit wasn't intended to be a political intervention. If anything my impulse was moral, rather than political. I'd have been happy simply to help some patients get into a wheelchair. I made a commitment at the risk of my life, under a situation of extreme discomfort and mortal danger. Bombs went off, bullets flew past my head.... There was no food, no electricity, no running water, no mail, no telephone day after day, week after week, month after month.

John Burns, who recently finished up as The New York Times chief Baghdad correspondent, wrote about Sontag in 1993:

"Sarajevo is the Spanish Civil War of our time, but the difference in response is amazing," she said. "In 1937, people like Ernest Hemingway and Andre Malraux and George Orwell and Simone Weil rushed to Spain, although it was incredibly dangerous. Simone Weil got terrible burns and George Orwell got shot, but they didn't see the danger as a reason not to go. They went as an act of solidarity, and from that act grew some of the finest literature of their time.

After her first trip here, Ms. Sontag said, she talked with other well-known writers and producers in Europe and the United States who expressed surprise that she had been willing to risk her life.

"But I don't think the fact that Sarajevo is dangerous is really the reason," she said. "I think there is an underlying reason that is deeper and more disturbing, and it is the difference between 1937 and 1993. I think there has been a failure of conscience on the part of writers and intellectuals in the Western world.

"It's not Godot I am waiting for," she said. "Like most of the people in Sarajevo, I am waiting for Clinton."

Ms. Sontag discussed the vacuity and tepidity of the response to the crisis by Western intellectuals in a 1993 interview with a Bosnian magazine:

It is certainly a duty to bear witness in writing and in other forms, to what is going on here. But I don’t fool myself about what most writers are. Most writers are conformists; most writers are servants of the state or some dominant ideology. And some writers are vicious propagandists for evil ideas, like Mr. [Edouard] Limonov, who was up on the hills, shooting down at you, as we know from this film footage. So, one mustn’t idealize writers; I mean, there are, as they say in French, "Il ya les uns et les autres." There are some people like that and there are other people. And even if I think to myself, suppose I could pick up the phone and call Günther Grass, or call Milan Kundera, or Umberto Eco, or any of these world-famous writers like I am, and I know these people—we’re not close friends, but I know these people socially and I have their telephone numbers. If I were to pick up the phone and say, “Come to Sarajevo,” I don’t know if they would come. And—even if they came—I do not know that they would not disappoint you. ...

I’m so old that I know everybody. No, to take an example, Kurt Vonnegut wouldn’t come. When I told my writer friends in New York about my intent—that I was coming—everyone said that I was crazy, it’s very dangerous. Well, of course it’s dangerous, but I said, that’s like telling me the North Pole is cold! Of course I know it’s dangerous. That’s not a reason not to go. ... There is an enormous depoliticization of the Western intelligentsia, the Western writers, the writers of Western Europe and North America. ...[A]ll of these people are just sitting in their huge, rich apartments and going out to the country on the weekends and living their private lives. I mean, that is the truth. I’m sorry to disillusion you, but they don’t involve themselves in any political action in the United States; much less do they think to go abroad and do something serious. These people have nothing to do with anything serious. It’s very, very disillusioning, and I’m sorry to say it. But they don’t care; they don’t have a conscience; they don’t think of the writer as a witness of conscience.

If only Ms. Sontag were alive today to use her eloquence and celebrity on behalf of people who find themselves isolated and abandoned, like the Bosnians fifteen years ago.

MANIFESTO: Together facing the new totalitarianism

Without a too inflated sense of self-importance, I should like to associate this blog with a declaration drafted in early 2006 in response to the cross-continental spasms of vandalism, murder, and sabotage that followed several cartoons of Mohammed in a Danish newspaper. In full:

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism.

We, writers, journalists, intellectuals, call for resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values for all.

Recent events, prompted by the publication of drawings of Muhammad in European newspapers, have revealed the necessity of the struggle for these universal values.

This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the ideological field.

It is not a clash of civilisations nor an antagonism between West and East that we are witnessing, but a global struggle that confronts democrats and theocrats.

Like all totalitarian ideologies, Islamism is nurtured by fear and frustration.

Preachers of hatred play on these feelings to build the forces with which they can impose a world where liberty is crushed and inequality reigns.

But we say this, loud and clear: nothing, not even despair, justifies choosing darkness, totalitarianism and hatred.

Islamism is a reactionary ideology that kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present.

Its victory can only lead to a world of injustice and domination: men over women, fundamentalists over others.

On the contrary, we must ensure access to universal rights for the oppressed or those discriminated against.

We reject the "cultural relativism" which implies an acceptance that men and women of Muslim culture are deprived of the right to equality, freedom and secularism in the name of the respect for certain cultures and traditions.

We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of "Islamophobia", a wretched concept that confuses criticism of Islam as a religion and stigmatisation of those who believe in it.

We defend the universality of the freedom of expression, so that a critical spirit can exist in every continent, towards each and every maltreatment and dogma. We appeal to democrats and free spirits in every country that our century may be one of light and not dark.

Signed,

Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Chahla Chafiq
Caroline Fourest
Bernard-Henri Levy
Irshad Manji
Mehdi Mozaffari
Maryam Namazie
Taslima Nasreen
Salman Rushdie
Antoine Sfeir
Philippe Val
Ibn Warraq

There Will Be One Less Indictee in Congress

In a congressional election delayed by Hurricane Gustav, voters in Louisiana elected the first Vietnamese-American, Republican Anh "Joseph" Cao, to Congress and ousted Democrat William Jefferson, the indicted crook who lately used his freezer as storage for $90,000 in cash.

Does the Free Market Corrode Moral Character?

The John Templeton Foundation has been sponsoring a series of Big Questions, in which inquiries into various subjects are explored by a selection of distinguished thinkers. The latest question, posed in the title, is answered by worthy examiners like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Michael Walzer, and Bernard-Henri Lévy. A catalogue of previous questions is available here.

To Belabor the Point About Genocide

I listened earlier today to an interview on Fresh Air, the inimitable public radio show hosted by Terry Gross, with Christiane Amanpour. Few people know she was born in Iran to a British mother and Iranian Christian father and left in 1979 after that wicked ayatollah flew in from France. Anyway, she said something very interesting: one of the reasons intervention in Bosnia was finally achieved was through relentless press coverage, yet Rwanda was not so lucky in part because of the circus of the O.J. Simpson trial. Now of course Mr. Simpson's trial deserved media attention. After all, a psychopathic double murderer purchased a not guilty verdict using high-price, race-baiting attorneys. But it is yet another indictment of our frivolous, fatuous society that we require constant preoccupation with celebrities and their depradations.

About Darfur, in the West there has been unconscionable dithering and a capitulation to Chinese bullying. (China is Sudan's most important patron, extracting its natural resources, shielding it from international condemnation, and even promising to build a new presidential palace for its war criminal leader, who danced mockingly on a public platform after the ICC indicted him for committing genocide.) Mia Farrow has been an unyielding advocate for victims in Darfur, calling the Beijing Olympics the "Genocide Olympics" and convincing Steven Spielberg to sever his ties with the olympics after saying he would go down as the Leni Riefenstahl of the games.

One the most eloquent writers who has taken up the cause of Darfur is Bernard-Henri Lévy, the French intellectual. He and Ms. Farrow gave a presentation in April of this year at the PEN festival in New York chronicling their travels to Darfur and measures that might be taken to stop the atrocities. He cut right through the shame and ridicule of our inaction:

Does what happened in Darfur deserve, if I dare say, the name genocide or not? I know that there is a polemic on this point. Some say that it is a genocide, others say that it is not quite a genocide. There is a sort of discussion similar to the discussion of the sex of the angels in the Middle Ages. What I saw, what I witnessed... makes this sort of discussion completely absurd and frivolous.

Of Genocide and Missing Persons

A reader writes:

And may I point out a gross contradiction in our culture; when a little girl goes missing, or if a woman is killed by her husband, or if a judge is slain, our news networks cover nothing but that story for weeks - towns shut down, candlelight vigils are had, and search parties are formed. This is for one person, one life. If Sudan would get the media coverage of say, Laci Peterson or JonBenet Ramsay it would have been over a long time ago.

If only Sudan could be implicated in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway. Greta van Susteren would be calling for airstrikes, and we would probably get them.

Amanpour Reports

I caught the second half of Christiane Amanpour's two-hour special "Scream Bloody Murder" tonight. In it Ms. Amanpour details several recent genocides, including Saddam Hussein's chemical attacks on Iraqi Kurds in the late 1980s, the Serbian-administered concentration camps in Bosnia in the mid-1990s, the massacre of 800,000 by machete in Rwanda in 1994, and Darfur today. She also interviews several heroes who, during these various bloodbaths, "scream[ed] bloody murder" to get the attention of powerful people who might intervene. These include Richard Holbrooke in Bosnia and James Galbraith in Iraq.

Though I haven't yet watched it in its entirety, it's clear this piece of journalism is of superb quality and immense public worth. (It is unimaginable that the the fraudulent hacks at MSNBC and Fox News would ever air anything as valuable as this. They are content to disgrace journalism with their snarky partisanship.) On the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Americans should learn more about the international legal framework that protects human dignity and legally obligates the US to intervene in cases of its severe breech. This month is also the sixtieth anniversary of the drafting of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which the US in shameful belatedness ratified only in 1986. Even so, having assimilated the convention into American law, our government has thus required itself to prevent and/or punish genocide. (Therefore Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, and Bush should have been impeached for not addressing incidents in, respectively, Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Darfur.)

Susan Sontag, who went to Bosnia in 1993 to bear witness to the unfolding siege and genocide, said in a 1995 interview with Charlie Rose, "'Never again' is true in that the Jews will never again be killed by the Nazis in the 1940s." She was tragically correct that the rallying cry born of the Holocaust has been rendered hollow by inaction. But building public awareness, like CNN did tonight with its unimpeachable report, is essential to preventing future genocides. This is what Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate and human rights campaigner who survived Hitler's extermination camps, was getting at when he said, "Is memory the only answer to the Tragedy itself? But whatever the answer, memory is its most indispensable element."

Notes on the Obama Transition, II

One doesn't need to recapitulate all the appointments President-elect Barack Obama has made so far, but it should be said that his national security team selections augur well for internationalism and interventionism. I say this with especial pleasure because he received the votes of many isolationists, moral relativists, defeatists, masochists, pacifists, and fellow-travellers. Their anguish and incredulity at Mr. Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan will be a pleasure to witness.

Take Joe Biden. During his abbreviated time in the Democratic primaries, he was the most interventionist candidate on the issue of Darfur. In July 2007 he said, "We have to stop talking about it. ... They [Sudan] have forfeited their sovereignty by engaging in genocide. We should impose a no-fly zone if the UN will not move now." He also called for NATO to deploy 2500 troops to crush the janjaweed. (In contrast, the sallow, blithering Bill Richardson advocated waiting around until the génocidaires' job was done. It's a deliverance that this feckless, bumbling dolt won't be in charge of the State Department.)

That job will of course be filled by Hillary Clinton, whose adamantine support for the War on Terror scandalizes the milquetoast wimps who thought they'd finally got rid of her last summer. Mrs. Clinton's views need no further outline, but the woman set to be the ambassador to the United Nations should be better known by the public, and her views offer insight into those of her appointer.

Dr. Susan E. Rice, the assistant secretary of state for African affairs in Bill Clinton's second term, may be the advocate for victims of genocide that humanitarians have been waiting for. (Also noteworthy: Samantha Power, the proponent of intervention, Harvard professor, and author of the Pullitzer Prize-winning A Problem from Hell: America in the Age of Genocide, is serving on the Obama transition team.) Dr. Rice told The Atlantic Monthly in 2001, "I swore to myself that if I ever faced such a crisis again, I would come down on the side of dramatic action, going down in flames if that was required." And in 2006 she wrote,

History demonstrates that there is one language Khartoum understands: the credible threat or use of force. After Sept. 11, 2001, when President Bush issued a warning to states that harbor terrorists, Sudan -- recalling the 1998 U.S. airstrike on Khartoum -- suddenly began cooperating on counterterrorism. It's time to get tough with Sudan again.

After swift diplomatic consultations, the United States should press for a U.N. resolution that issues Sudan an ultimatum: accept unconditional deployment of the U.N. force within one week or face military consequences. The resolution would authorize enforcement by U.N. member states, collectively or individually. International military pressure would continue until Sudan relented. The United States, preferably with NATO involvement and African political support, would strike Sudanese airfields, aircraft and other military assets. It could blockade Port Sudan, through which Sudan's oil exports flow. Then U.N. troops would deploy -- by force, if necessary, with U.S. and NATO backing.

If the United States fails to gain U.N. support, we should act without it.

Her views on Darfur will coincide at last with US accession to the International Criminal Court, which Mr. Obama has promised to do. The ICC is seeking an arrest warrant for Omar al-Bashir, the slave-driving blood-thirsty tyrant in charge of Sudan, and the US could aid this quest by joining the court.

With Republican Robert Gates at the Pentagon, former Marine and exemplar of the military-industrial complex General James Jones as National Security Advisor, Anthony Lake and Richard Holbrooke as additional possible appointments, and not a single initial opponent of the invasion of Iraq yet chosen for his national security team, Mr. Obama has decisively rejected the postcolonial appeasement politics of a considerable segment of his electorate.

Notes on the Obama Transition, I

If hope was a rhetorical abstraction that defined the Obama brand, then change was a tangible desire that his supporters sought to concretize immediately after his election. In their minds change entailed a decisive repudiation of both President Bush's policies and any Democrats who may have enabled them. It was clear to me after his selection of Joe Biden as his running mate, and clearer now that his cabinet has begun to take form, that Mr. Obama is going to disappoint the minions who thought him more left-wing than he turns out to be. The moderate, establishment hue of his appointments is all one needs to prove this assertion.

It is now also clear who was right and who was wrong about his ideological position. Conservative activists, radio talk show hosts, and Fox News pundits were terribly mistaken to smear him as a radical socialist, though their intellectually bankrupt campaign had little else going for it but crazed scare tactics. Young liberals, who were moved to vote for him due more to style than substance and who I can personally confirm knew little to nothing of his platform (on election night I spoke to several who had no idea of his plans for Afghanistan), were wrong to assume his youth and inexperience implied a radicalism of which they would approve.

It seems the people who adjudged him correctly were the conservatives who crossed ideological lines to endorse him, like Christopher Buckley, Andrew Sullivan, Jeffrey Hart (former National Review editor and Reagan speechwriter), and Mickey Edwards (former Republican congressman and co-founder of the Heritage Foundation) and those who wrote favorably of him, like David Brooks and David Frum. They saw him as a consensus-driven, prudent, nonpartisan, soft liberal, and someone in the mainstream of economic and foreign policy thought. Since the election they have been vindicated by his demeanor, his staff selections, his recantation on imposing a windfall profits tax on oil companies, and his support for Joe Lieberman's continued chairmanship in the Senate.

The far left was also correct about Mr. Obama and are probably unsurprised by his actions since the election. People like Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader (who in a racist tirade called the president-elect an "Uncle Tom") and many writers at The Nation warned Mr. Obama was a neoliberal shill for the financial sector (he far outpaced Mr. McCain in contributions from Wall Street) and was too weak to confront corporate power or the foreign policy establishment. So despite the differing grammar of their assessments and their evaluations of what his centrism and conciliatory disposition mean, the "Obamacons" and the far left seem to have had the most accurate analysis of the man who will soon be president.

Felicitous News

Lieutenant General Lloyd Austin, the second-in-command in Iraq, announced today:

November saw fewer attacks than any month since 2003. We have significantly degraded al-Qaida's ability to plan, to resource and to capitalize on ruthless attacks on the Iraqi people.

People around the world should rejoice that the Iraqi people are finally being delivered from the apocalyptic mayhem of the last few years. We have to thank a combination of new leadership in the Department of Defense, General David Petraeus' visionary counterinsurgency tactics, the surge of 30,000 additional American troops, the Sunni Awakening, and the repudiation and marginalization of Muqtada al-Sadr's gangsterism. These outcomes would have been realized much sooner but for the Bush administration's criminally negligent conduct of the war in its first three years.

As violence has declined democratic impulses in Iraq have germinated. Thomas Friedman in The New York Times reported the following:

Iraq’s highest court told the Iraqi Parliament last Monday that it had no right to strip one of its members of immunity so he could be prosecuted for an alleged crime: visiting Israel for a seminar on counterterrorism. The Iraqi justices said the Sunni lawmaker, Mithal al-Alusi, had committed no crime and told the Parliament to back off.

That’s not all. The Iraqi newspaper Al-Umma al-Iraqiyya carried an open letter signed by 400 Iraqi intellectuals, both Kurdish and Arab, defending Alusi. That takes a lot of courage and a lot of press freedom. I can’t imagine any other Arab country today where independent judges would tell the government it could not prosecute a parliamentarian for visiting Israel — and intellectuals would openly defend him in the press.

Though I don't object to President-elect Barack Obama's plans to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq, since the conditions have improved so drastically and the Iraqi parliament voted overwhelmingly for a plan to do so, I will never forget that Mr. Obama was colosally wrong to oppose the liberation of Iraq and the subsequent troop surge. If it had been up to him Saddam Hussein would not have been arraigned, convicted, and executed on charges of crimes against humanity, the mass graves would never have been unearthed, and the federal democracy now developing in Iraq would have been a hopeless abstraction. I look forward to his accomplishments in other areas of foreign policy, but on this issue history's verdict has already condemned him.

Saxby Sails Back to the Senate

It's official. Clearly the Republicans were motivated by the prospect of a Democratic takeover.

Pardon the Interruption

In my time away from this blog readers have grown louder and more desperate for content as the days passed without it. They were clamoring for an expert analysis of current events and the world in general; without it they felt rudderless and distraught. So please pardon the interruption. We now return to regularly scheduled programming.

Something for the Seniors

Google has archived all of Life's photographs in a searchable database.

Lieberman Prevails

Ha! The Democrats are so milquetoast and pusillanimous that they let Senator Joseph Lieberman keep his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee after he trashed their presidential nominee. Of course I'm glad they are weak and cowardly since I admire Sen. Lieberman's position on Iraq and his independence and his refusal to let that dolt Ned Lamont have the final word in their Connecticut Senate race two years ago. It is also gratifying that the liberal blogosphere was ignored on this issue. Their defeat is America's victory.

Clinton in the Cabinet

A reader writes about the possibility of Senator Hillary Clinton becoming the Secretary of State:

After reading the news today, it seems more apparent than before that this pick is a mistake. I think it's distracting from other transition efforts and causing unnecessary tension among staff members. Politico even reported that the decision was "greeted with ambivalence" by members of the transition team.

This story has taken over the news cycle, and whether or not this 'ambivalence' actually exists, the press will continue reporting it over the next week. As an Obama supporter since early 2007, this is a discouraging first impression of his presidency.

Clearly time has not healed all wounds from the epic Democratic primary, but I noticed the audience on "The Daily Show" applauded enthusiastically when Jon Stewart mentioned Sen. Clinton might become Secretary of State. I think it's a good choice because she has a knowledge of the bureaucracy and of foreign affairs that is rivaled by none, she is universally known and respected, and she has been a longtime advocate for oppressed women in the developing world and for education in Africa. Still, it seems almost self-destructive that President-elect Obama would want her in a position that in terms of its visibility is second only to the President's. Maybe he subscribes to the adage, "Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer."

Hitchens and Beinart on the Clinton Selection

Christopher Hitchens, a writer of unparalleled wit and acumen, and Peter Beinart, the editor-at-large of The New Republic, appeared today on "Hardball with Chris Matthews" to be shouted at by the host and allowed very abbreviated opportunities to answer questions. They weighed in on the prospect of Senator Hillary Clinton becoming the Secretary of State. Hitchens was against; Beinart was for.

A Unified Theory of a Frightful Phenomenon

In all the literature produced since 9/11 on the acquiescence to Islamic fascism by some parts of the Left there have been very few theoretical explanations. Nick Cohen, a British social democrat who was an indefatigable critic of Tony Blair from the Left, put it this way: “The obvious conclusion to draw at the moment is that we are living in a rerun of the 1930s, and the liberal left is once again sucking up to tyranny.” Fleming Rose, the Danish cartoonist whose caricature of Mohammed forced him into hiding and elicited a bloody orgy of sadism and misery, ventured that the Left “somehow view[s] the Koran as a new version of Das Kapital and [they] are willing to ignore everything else.”

These are legitimate statements, and I agree with them, but a more lengthy and studious approach has been needed and has now been proffered. In the British online journal Democratiya, Gabriel Noah Brahm Jr., a visiting professor of American studies at UC-Santa Cruz, has written "The Post-Left: An Archaeology and a Genealogy." It is essential reading for people who doubt the Left has been unwilling to denounce Islamic fascism.

Clinton as Secretary of State

The Guardian is reporting that Senator Hillary Clinton will accept President-elect Barack Obama's offer to become the Secretary of State. He is the least petty politician in recent memory, and his immersion in Doris Kearns Goodwin's book Team of Rivals, about President Abraham Lincoln's cabinet, is evidently affecting his decisions. Now let's see which Republicans he invites to join him.

Rejected

Kelly Shaul, the opinions editor of The Red & Black and a proud ignoramus, has rejected yet another of my submissions. In its stead she printed a series of unrelated fragments and run-ons entitled "Let's leave the Left behind" and a childish column whose titled declared, "Vampires no longer scary, but sensual." I am reminded of what F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Great Gatsby: "There is no confusion like the confusion of a simple mind." What is so awful about it is that everyone but the confused simple mind is aware of it and embarassed by it. The confused, simple-minded Shaul seems not to know what an opinions page in a college newspaper should be or do, yet she is oblivious as her readers feel the shame and ridicule of her work. Shaul should be embarassed, but her obtuseness protects her from reality while the rest of us turn to the opinions page and read with blushed faces and quizzical snickers.

The latest rejection:

Barack Obama punctuated his scintillating victory on Election Day with a stirring speech to 200,000 people at Grant Park in Chicago. I find the following lines his most important: “To those who would tear the world down: we will defeat you. To those who seek peace and security: we support you.” He proclaimed that “a new dawn of American leadership is at hand” and cited the provenance of American strength as “the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.” These are not the fulminations of a radical, as recent letters to this newspaper have warned. To the contrary, President-elect Obama is uniquely equipped to unite the polarities of American foreign policy and forge a doctrine that is credible, idealistic, and responsive to the world’s desire for American engagement.

There is remarkable consistency in American foreign policy from president to president. Support for engagement and trade with China is a consistent bipartisan policy, as is support for the security and integrity of Israel, the preeminence of the NATO alliance, and our military pacts with countries like Japan, South Korea, and Australia. Yet there are polarities in the foreign policy debate at an intellectual level that need not exist and that an Obama presidency can negate. For example, if one supports the war in Iraq it is assumed he opposes munificent aid to Africa or an international convention on climate change. Similarly, if one supports American accession to the International Criminal Court it is assumed he opposes using force to prevent Iran’s nuclearization or confronting Russia on its backslide into authoritarianism. Though these assumptions are widespread, they are also false.

By juxtaposing these dichotomies I mean to point out that a humanitarian foreign policy and an antitotalitarian foreign policy are congruent, not oppositional. Providing medicine to AIDS patients in Africa is just as important as halting the genocide in Darfur and arraigning the Sudanese leadership on charges of crimes against humanity. Destroying the crazed Iranian theocracy is just as important as rendering a just solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and providing for a contiguous Palestinian state. Ending our gratuitous agricultural subsidies so poor farmers in the developing world can turn a profit is just as important as supporting dissidents in Burma, Zimbabwe, Cuba, and North Korea. Ending America’s diplomatic isolation by closing the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and ceasing torture is just as important as demanding equality for women and religious tolerance in the Muslim world and not accepting their self-pitying excuses.

Mr. Obama’s rhetoric calls for a diminution of partisan and ideological fealty. Those on the right and the left should examine their views on foreign policy to see if they really find that solidarity with the exploited and oppressed is in opposition to the forced removal of exploitive, oppressive regimes. I say that an honest assessment of this false dichotomy will be quite illuminating and that it will yield Mr. Obama a mandate for pursuing a foreign policy that is in turns humanitarian and antitotalitarian. American ideals and the world’s approval of them will be better for the fusion, not the exclusion, of these two worthy principles.

The Right-Wing Left-Wing

One of the most important functions of this blog will be my thoroughgoing documentation of the reactions of the Left to Islamic radicalism, which span from blase toleration to obsequious endorsement. The proof of this assertion is manifold and multitudinous. Take the following as a mere introduction:

1. At a 2006 teach-in at UC-Berkeley, post-structuralist philosopher Judith Butler said, "Understanding Hamas and Hizbullah as social movements that are on the global left is important." This, despite what its founder and leader Hassan Nasrallah said to The Washington Post that same year: "I am against any reconciliation with Israel. I do not even recognize the presence of a state that is called 'Israel.'" She then called for boycotts of and divestment from Israel as a means of "resistance."

2. In a paroxysm on his website on April 14, 2004, Michael Moore wrote, "The Iraqis who have risen up against the occupation are not "insurgents" or "terrorists" or "The Enemy." They are the REVOLUTION, the Minutemen, and their numbers will grow -- and they will win." He wrote this knowing the insurgency was led by former members of the Ba'th Party and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a senior associate of Osama bin Laden and the chief of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia.

3. George Galloway, one of the leaders of the antiwar movement in Britain, met Saddam Hussein in 1994 and told him, "I salute your courage, your strength, your indefatigably." In 2003, following the intervention in Iraq, he simultaneously called for British troops to mutiny and for holy war against them. Last year in an interview with GQ he said it would be justified if a suicide bomber assassinated Tony Blair.

These are not new examples, but as the Left continues to advocate on behalf of Islamic radicalism I will be posting it here.

On a Personal Note

I would like to make my Athens, Georgia readers aware that a new coffee shop, Two Story Coffee House, has opened across from Earth Fare in Five Points. It serves its coffee French Press style and has a warm, cozy ambiance. Its hours are Monday through Saturday 7am to midnight.

The Santa Ana

The wildfires currently incinerating large parts of Los Angeles are a result partly of the Santa Ana wind, one of the unique climatic features of Southern California. Joan Didion, a California native and former resident of Los Angeles and Malibu, wrote about the Santa Ana in several of her essays in the 1968 collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. In "Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream," she writes:

The San Bernardino Valley lies only an hour east of Los Angeles by the San Bernardino Freeway but is in certain ways an alien place: not the coastal California of the subtropical twilights and the soft westerlies off the Pacific but a harsher California, haunted by the Mojave just beyond the mountains, devastated by the hot dry Santa Ana wind that comes down through the passes at 100 miles an hour and whines through the eucalyptus windbreaks and works on the nerves. October is the bad month for the wind, the month when breathing is difficult and the hills blaze up spontaneously. There has been no rain since April. Every voice seems a scream. It is the season of suicide and divorce and prickly dread, wherever the wind blows.

In another essay, "Los Angeles Notebook," it is even more bleak and eerie:

For a few days now we will see smoke back in the canyons, and hear sirens in the night. I have neither heard nor read that a Santa Ana is due, but I know it, and almost everyone I have seen today know its too. We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks. I rekindle a waning argument with the telephone company, then cut my losses and lie down, given over to whatever it is in the air. To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.

I recall being told, when I first moved to Los Angeles and was living on an isolated beach, that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew. I could see why. ... The sky had a yellow cast, the kind of light sometimes called "earthquake weather." My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days, and there were no lights at night, and her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he had heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake.

Photograph credit: Jay L. Clendenin, Los Angeles Times

Michael Crichton, R.I.P.

One of the news items lost in the deluge of election coverage was the death of Michael Crichton from cancer at age 66. After the film Jurassic Park came out in 1993 I read the book and also read two of his others, The Lost World and Congo. I tried to get through The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery, and Timeline, but found them boring and suffocated by jargon. Still, he was clearly brilliant, multi-talented, and prolific, and I hope tributes to his career break through the political coverage in the coming days.

Big Tent Party?

Of the many important outcomes of November 4, this is one Republicans should ponder with great seriousness: there will not be a single Republican in the House of Representatives from New England when the new Congress assembles in January. Representative Christopher Shays of Connecticut, whose district in the southwest corner of that state included the New York suburbs and some of the wealthiest towns in the country, lost his bid for a twelfth term. He was a "Rockefeller Republican," a breed that many call dying but seems in fact dead.

The prevailing analysis among Republicans since the election has been that their defeat is attributable (besides to the financial crisis) to their abandonment of conservative principles. I say that the reason there is no longer a delegation of New England Republicans in the House is due to the party's embrace of conservative principles to a degree that moderates are no longer welcome. For Representative Shays and other New England Republicans, returning to their conservative roots is not a winning strategy.

For the first time since the G.O.P.'s early days in 1854 New England is without Republican representation in the House. The historical irony that the region that gave rise to the G.O.P. has now repudiated it must be addressed before additional election-losing ironies begin to appear.

Naipaul on the Clash of Civilizations

In 2005 The New York Times interviewed V. S. Naipaul, the 2001 Nobel laureate in literature. The article's author calls the British writer of Indo-Trinidadian extraction "a prophet of our world-historical moment." Regrettably I have read none of his books, but he did utter some essential truths about the clash of enlightenment and fundamentalism that now predominates our geopolitics:

What is of account, in Naipaul's view, is the larger global political situation -- in particular, the clash between belief and unbelief in postcolonial societies. ''I became very interested in the Islamic question, and thought I would try to understand it from the roots, ask very simple questions and somehow make a narrative of that discovery,'' he said. To what extent, he wondered, had ''people who lock themselves away in belief . . . shut themselves away from the active busy world''? ''To what extent without knowing it'' were they ''parasitic on that world''? And why did they have ''no thinkers to point out to them where their thoughts and their passion had led them''? Far from simple, the questions brought a laserlike focus to a central paradox of today's situation: that some who have benefited from the blessings of the West now seek to destroy it.

In November 2001 Naipaul told an audience of anxious New Yorkers still reeling from the attack on the World Trade Center that they were facing ''a war declared on you by people who passionately want one thing: a green card.'' What happened on Sept. 11 ''was too astonishing. It's one of its kind. It can't happen again,'' he said in our conversation. ''But in the end it has had no effect on the world. It has just been a spectacle, like a bank raid in a western film. They will be caught by the sheriff eventually.'' The bigger issue, he said, is that Western Europe, while built on tolerance, today lacks ''a strong cultural life,'' making it vulnerable to Islamicization. He even went so far as to say that Muslim women shouldn't wear headscarves in the West. ''If you decide to move to another country and to live within its laws you don't express your disregard for the essence of the culture,'' he said. ''It's a form of aggression."

Despite his grim assessment Naipaul believes our victory is inevitable:

And yet, for all his laments, Naipaul is not invested in the notion that Western civilization is in decline. ''That's a romantic idea,'' he said brusquely. ''A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying. . . . It's a university idea. People cook it up at universities and do a lot of lectures about it. It has no substance.'' The ''philosophical diffidence'' of the West, he maintains, will prevail over the ''philosophical shriek'' of those who intend to destroy it.

Gramercy to Mark Vinson for apprising me of this illuminating piece.

The United Nations: "This Monstrous tragicomic scene"

Most people who do not admire Stalinism and genocide believe the UN needs drastic reform and accountability. Here are two brief assessments which belie its morality:

Which brings us to the United Nations--a failing, bloated, corrupt, and unprincipled institution whose very foundations compel it not to act justly. It is functionally the captive of three cynical permanent members of the Security Council and the wild mob of illegitimate states in the General Assembly. The next decade will find us preoccupied with the issue of how democratic societies succeed in this overstructured and overdetermined world disorder.

Martin Pertez, Editor-in-chief, The New Republic

The second is about the World Conference Against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa in 2001:

Zionism was condemned outright as the contemporary form of Nazism and apartheid, but so was "white viciousness", which had caused "one Holocaust after the other in Africa" through human trafficking, slavery and colonialism. Israel should disappear, its politicians should be brought before an international tribunal similar to the one in Nuremberg. Anti-Semitic cartoons were circulated, copies of Mein Kampf and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion were handed out. Beneath a photo of Hitler were the words that Israel would never have existed and the Palestinians would never have had to spill their blood if he had been victorious. A number of delegates were physically threatened, there were calls of "Death to Jews". This farce came to a head when the Sudanese Minister of Justice, Ali Mohamed Osman Yasin, demanded reparations for historical slavery, while in his own country, people were being shamelessly thrown into slavery as he spoke. It was like a cannibal suddenly calling for vegetarianism.

And...

Europe must take a firm stand against this buffoonery: boycott it, plain and simple. Just as Canada has done. Perhaps we should also think about dissolving the Human Rights Commission or only letting truly democratic countries in. It is intolerable that in the year 2008 - like in the thirties - nations which recognize justice, the multi-party state and freedom of expression are being brought before the tribunal of history by the lobbies of fanatics and tyrants.

Pascal Bruckner, French philosopher, writing in Sign and Sight

Crazy and Off Base

Congressman Paul Broun, Republican of Athens, told the following to a radio station in Augusta:

It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force. I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism. That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did. When he’s proposing to have a national security force that’s answering to him, that is as strong as the U.S. military, he’s showing me signs of being Marxist.

This man is a physician, yet his powers of speech and thought apparently operate without consultation. He thinks radical socialism, Marxism, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union are indistinguishable. What a dolt! He should be expelled from the House of Representatives for illiteracy, but alas northeast Georgia voters overwhelmingly reelected him last week. After the shame of Cynthia McKinney, we must suffer it all again with Paul Broun.

Slavoj Zizek and Bernard-Henri Lévy

The former, the "Elvis Presley of cultural theory," and the latter, of whom was once written, "God is dead, but my hair is perfect," engaged in a discussion about the left recently at the New York Public Library. Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher, argues from a more traditional Marxist perspective. BHL, as he is known in France, is more of a liberal internationalist. His denunciation of Marxism in the 1970s occasioned the founding of the Nouvelle Philosophie and the rightward drift of many French intellectuals.

If only discussions like this one were broadcast on television!

The Absurdity of Totalitarianism, Part II

I remembered my trip to China in January 1973 during the tail end of the Cultural Revolution. I became friendly with this woman assigned to be my interpreter. I wasn't very important, so I got this low-level person from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And obviously she was writing a report on me every day. She was a sweet but frightened middle-aged woman who had lost her husband during the Cultural Revolution. I asked her where she was staying. She said she was staying with friends. As it turned out, she was staying in this tiny room, which was more like a closet, in the basement of the hotel. I saw it because I insisted on seeing where she stayed--she wasn't supposed to show it. One day she invited me to go out for a walk, after indicating that the room was bugged. She spoke very slowly in her limping English: "Have... you... read... a... book...called... 19--" When I heard "19" there was a pain in my chest. I knew what she was going to say next: "84." "1984," I repeated, more upset than I wanted to let on. "Yes," she said, smiling. "China just like that."

Susan Sontag, in a July 2000 interview

The Absurdity of Totalitarianism, Part I

"The Solution"

After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had thrown away the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Bertolt Brecht, on the 1953 insurrection in East Berlin

My Innaugural Posting

I have at last resolved to grace the blogosphere with my presence. As my first entry in what I hope will become both an anthology of articles I have published and my hasty responses to the day's news, I present a column which was rejected by The Red & Black. The content of their opinions page tends toward the banal, the parochial, the vulgar, and the uninformed, so it is both an unwelcome venue for me and a natural fit for Zaid Jilani, whose October 6 op-ed I answer in this column. Enjoy.

On Monday Zaid Jilani contended, with ineptitude and moral obtuseness, that United States foreign policy is blameworthy for Islamic terrorism. This is an insidious lie, it makes sense if you are partially but not fully educated on the subject, and it is contradicted by a body of evidence that Mr. Jilani willfully ignored.

Consider this. When the wicked hijackers began arriving in the US to crash planeloads of civilians into gigantic office towers, the following was the case: Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, supported by Bill Clinton, had offered Yasser Arafat 94 percent of the West Bank, all of the Gaza Strip, and a capital in East Jerusalem—the most generous proposal ever extended in the history of that intractable conflict. Chairman Arafat turned it down, refused to make a counter-offer, and the Palestinians are still without a state because of that reptilian rejectionist, not US foreign policy.

Consider also this. In 1975 Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country, invaded East Timor, a tiny Catholic country newly independent from Portugal, and for the next 25 years massacred and starved its people. In 1999 the United Nations sponsored a plebiscite that led to East Timor’s independence, supervised by the Brazilian diplomat Sérgio Vieira de Mello. In 2003 de Mello was dispatched to Iraq as the UN envoy, where he was killed a week later in a suicide truck bomb that took the lives of 21 others and destroyed the UN’s Baghdad headquarters. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, declared he had assassinated de Mello because he had overseen East Timorese independence from Muslim rule.

The former example, along with Osama bin Laden’s opposition to a Palestinian state (he believes all Muslims should live under a theocratic and imperial caliphate), proves the suicide assault on the US seven Septembers ago was motivated not by concern for the Palestinians but by a fascistic ideology. The latter example proves Islamic terrorists will haul their bloody vendettas across continents in order to blow up a respected international civil servant who opposed Muslim tyranny.

There are so many instances that belie Mr. Jilani’s simplistic analysis. These include the 1994 Hezbollah bombing of a Jewish cultural center in Buenos Aires that left 85 dead and 300 injured; the 2007 quadruple suicide bombings by Sunni terrorists of two villages in northern Iraq populated by the Yazidi, a religious minority deemed un-Islamic, which caused such carnage an American general called it “an act of ethnic cleansing… almost genocide;” al-Qaeda’s threat of jihad against Japan for deploying civil engineers to rebuild Iraq and against Denmark because Danish newspapers caricatured the alleged prophet Mohammed; and the conspiracy to destroy India, evidenced by the 1993 stock exchange bombing in Bombay and the 2001 attempt to obliterate its parliament.

The crux of this question is that the fundamental source of Islamic terrorism is the dysfunctional, illiterate, backwards societies from which it comes, whether the repressed, messianic theocracy in Iran (which the US did not create) or the reactionary, medieval Taliban subjugation of Afghanistan (which NATO deposed and replaced with an elected government). In these societies the emancipation of women has not been realized, basic civil liberties are not guaranteed, and the dearth of scientific patents and works of literature indicate an isolated and degraded culture that is as psychologically damaging to its denizens as it destabilizing and threatening to its neighbors. Until there is an abandonment of seventh-century mythology and a reckoning with modernity, the Muslim world will continue to exist as a ruinous, self-pitying incubator of prejudice and paranoia.

That Mr. Jilani should know all this and still blame the US for provoking terrorism and that he should write that the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks was “the opportunity to make peace with these people” (even as survivors were being pulled from the smoldering wreckage and the declaration of jihad innate in that ruthless crime was a fresh scar on world memory) reflects poorly on his character and his mind. To be simultaneously so foolish and so sinister is a unique feat, one that could be pulled off only by a supposed leftist whose principal pleasures are advocating defeatism and apologizing for jihad.