We've always known that the media played favorites in its news and opinion pieces, but this is even more glaring an example than even we'd expect to see. We saw the following piece by Tom Gross at NationalReviewOnline:
Congratulations Hamas: Getting an opinion piece into the NY Times and Washington Post on the same day is unprecedented [Tom Gross]
While Hamas was still executing people in Gaza last week, including civilians, the New York Times, Washington Post, and the NY Times-owned International Herald Tribune all rushed to promote the propaganda of one of the world's most murderous terrorist groups.
Getting an opinion piece into the Times and the Post on the same day is unprecedented.
Congratulations Hamas!
Even Reuters acknowledges the achievement.
Hamas scores publicity coup in U.S.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Shunned by the U.S. government as a terrorist organization, the Islamist group Hamas scored a publicity coup this week by defending its policies in Gaza with opinion pieces in two of the country's most influential newspapers on the same day.
The New York Times and The Washington Post gave space to Ahmed Yousef, a senior Hamas figure, on Wednesday to argue that the United States should not interfere in Gaza, where Hamas took control after six days of bloody fighting against Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah fighters.
Yousef is senior political adviser to Ismail Haniyeh, who became Palestinian prime minister after elections last year. He is now contesting his dismissal by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who formed a new government in the West Bank after Hamas took over Gaza.
[Gross continues]: Hamas leaders rarely have access to major U.S. media to express their views unfiltered, and getting an opinion piece into the Times and the Post on the same day appeared unprecedented.
Here is what the New York Times and the Washington Post didn’t put on their editorial page. This is what Ha'aretz reports this weekend:
Hamas was not using a random hit list. Every Hamas patrol carried with it a laptop containing a list of Fatah operatives in Gaza, and an identity number and a star appeared next to each name. A red star meant the operative was to be executed and a blue one meant he was to be shot in the legs - a special, cruel tactic developed by Hamas, in which the shot is fired from the back of the knee so that the kneecap is shattered when the bullet exits the other side. A black star signaled arrest, and no star meant that the Fatah member was to be beaten and released. Hamas patrols took the list with them to hospitals, where they searched for wounded Fatah officials, some of whom they beat up and some of whom they abducted.
Aside from assassinating Fatah officials, Hamas also killed innocent Palestinians, with the intention of deterring the large clans from confronting the organization. Thus it was that 10 days ago, after an hours-long gun battle that ended with Hamas overpowering the Bakr clan from the Shati refugee camp - known as a large, well-armed and dangerous family that supports Fatah - the Hamas military wing removed all the family members from their compound and lined them up against a wall. Militants selected a 14-year-old girl, two women aged 19 and 75, and two elderly men, and shot them to death in cold blood to send a message to all the armed clans of Gaza.
Reuters banished the word "terrorist" from its style book in 2001 in favor of less judgmental terms from its correspondents when they write about murderous or suicidal jihadists. For Reuters to notice that an outfit like Hamas is getting special treatment from the Establishment press speaks volumes.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Friday, June 22, 2007
Jimmy Carter Is Not Great, (With Apologies to Christopher Hitchens)
Former US President Jimmy Carter’s latest attack from foreign soil against the Bush administration was made this week in Ireland, where he proclaimed falsely, in addition to stupidly, that the Bush administration’s “refusal to accept the 2006 election victory of Hamas was ‘criminal.’” ("Carter: Stop favoring Fatah over Hamas").
Exercising the universal party perk enjoyed by all Democrats, Carter was free to make allegations of criminal wrongdoing without bothering about the customary meaning of the term “criminal,” which is that someone broke a law. Nowadays if you're a Democrat, anything you don't like in politics ipso facto qualifies as a “crime.” (You know how this works. AG Gonzales fires 8 at-will attorneys, so that’s a crime; Scooter Libby remembers a conversation with Tim Russert differently than Russert does, so that’s a crime; the US Congress authorizes the President to go to war in Iraq, and when he does so, that’s a crime.)
Strangely enough, Egypt has undertaken the exact same kind of isolating efforts against Hamas that the Bush administration did, to the point of calling a regional summit for next week (a summit to include Israel, no less), attempting to boost Mahmoud Abbas, and isolate Hamas, for substantially the same reasons:
“More than seeking peace with Israel, Egypt and other U.S. Arab allies are seeking to prevent the new power of Islamic radicals in Gaza from strengthening fundamentalists on their own soil. They also fear Gaza will become a stronghold for Iranian influence on their doorsteps." (“Egypt fights militancy at home with summit to isolate Hamas”),
We will wait to see if Carter extends his indictment of criminality to Egypt. Perhaps he can accuse Egypt, as he accused Tony Blair, of being "loyal, blind, apparently subservient" to the United States. ("Abominable. Blind. Subservient. Ex-President Carter lambasts Blair for support").
The US action that Carter denounces as “criminal” was that
“Far from encouraging Hamas's move into parliamentary politics…the US and Israel, with European Union acquiescence, has sought to subvert the outcome” of that election “by shunning Hamas and helping Abbas to keep the reins of political and military power.”
Carter’s comments ignore completely the intervening event that swung the US, Israel, the EU, and now even Egypt, into feverish efforts to prop up Fatah, namely, Hamas’s armed coup of last week, a coup that was followed immediately by Hamas’s cold-blooded executions of many of their political foes, and establishment of an Islamic state in Gaza. Even Carter, were he man enough to grapple with actual facts rather than his delusional worldview, should be able to recognize that shooting Fatah fighters in their legs is not a traditional parliamentary procedure--even in the Middle East.
Nor does Hamas's violence say much for the genuineness of Hamas’s desire to “move into parliamentary politics,” if they would exploit their superior arms, discipline, and cunning to vanquish their own partners in the now-dissolved unity government.
Carter conflates the US’s perfectly consistent foreign-policy decision after the 2006 elections--to deny support and aid to a known terrorist entity--with this week’s post-coup response to try to salvage Abbas’s government as the lesser of the two evils with whom, sooner or later, Israel and the rest of us are going to have to try to deal.
Only an act of (criminal?) obtuseness by Carter could prevent him betraying any awareness of Hamas’s own belligerent decision to violently seize one-party control and “subvert the outcome” of last year’s parliamentary election by means of a bloody coup. Carter has always been able to render invisible what he didn't want to see.
That, or he continues to show how he scorns mere earthly evidences in favor of the Inner Light that has always guided him.
Carter’s dangerousness is not that he holds a strict moral vision to which he always strives to measure up, but that he holds a strict moral vision that he thinks he reached long ago--reached it easily, in fact-- and has been impatiently missionizing the rest of us ever since.
Carter’s presidency was typified by this puritanical refusal to besmirch his immaculate self through any truckling with political uncleanness, preferring to scold the rest of the world from the high vantage point of his “absolute” commitment to “human rights.” To those who remember the Carter years, they weren't distinguished by any actual advance of human rights, and in fact saw them in serious retreat. But he was always true to the principles of his superior moral agenda, even if it was a disaster for the country and the world.
That’s what enabled him to sell out the Shah, (and along with him Iran, and what little was left of America’s post-Vietnam honor), and yet remain completely unable to understand the Ayatollah Khomenini and his fanatical Islamic revolution. He thought he could work with Muslims, sensing in the Iranian fanatics a similar 100% commitment to Higher Things.
In a 2004 article in the New York Post, ("America Can’t Do a Thing”), Amir Taheri described how even Khomeini couldn't believe Carter’s impotence in the wake of Iran's seizing of our embassy personnel:
According to his late son Ahmad, who had been asked to coordinate with the embassy-raiders, the ayatollah feared "thunder and lightning" from Washington. But what came, instead, was a series of bland statements by Carter and his aides pleading for the release of the hostages on humanitarian grounds.
Carter's envoy to the United Nations, a certain Andrew Young, described Khomeini as "a 20th-century saint," and begged the ayatollah to show "magnanimity and compassion."
Carter went further by sending a letter to Khomeini.
Written in longhand, it was an appeal from "one believer to a man of God."
Carter really thought he was on Khomeini’s wavelength, just one spiritual powerhouse to another.
Comments Taheri: “Carter's syrupy prose must have amused Khomeini, who preferred a minimalist style with such phrases as "we shall cut off America's hands."
And Carter's sense of his own rightness hasn't ever wavered from his last day in office until now. If anything, he has grown more certain of his message, of his absolute moral power, of his prophetic mission, even while growing more and more bitter at being outshined by such clear moral inferiors as Ronald Reagan and the hated George W. Bush.
It is this unteachable moral certainty, mixed with gall, that explains the petulant absurdities that come forth, as Christopher Hitchens has trenchantly observed, “Almost always, when former President Jimmy Carter opens his big, smug mouth.” (“Peanut envy”).
As a matter of fact, Hitchens’s recent attacks on religious belief makes use of Jimmy Carter as a handy exhibit--too handy, by far. To be sure I still have more in common with Carter’s religious views than Hitchens’s nasty atheism, but the latter really puts his finger on how Carter’s self-righteous certainties make him so shameless in his public comments. Describing how Carter not only messed things up in Iran, Iraq, and just about every place else in the ‘70s, while at the same time digging us into many of the same holes we're still in, Hitchens says:
If I had done such a thing, I would take very good care to be modest when discussions of Middle Eastern crises came up. But here's the thing about self-righteous, born-again demagogues: Nothing they ever do, or did, can be attributed to anything but the very highest motives.
Here is a man who, in his latest book on the Israel-Palestine crisis, has found the elusive key to the problem. The mistake of Israel, he tells us (and tells us that he told the Israeli leadership) is to have moved away from God and the prophets and toward secularism. If you ever feel like a good laugh, just tell yourself that things would improve if only the Israeli government would be more Orthodox. Jimmy Carter will then turn his vacantly pious glare on you, as if to say that you just don't understand what it is to have a personal savior.
If Hitchens had limited his infidel attacks to Carter and other similarly puffed-up jackasses, one could almost sympathize with his antipathy to any god who would send such sorry examples through the Earth as his prophets. Unfortunately, no doubt a bit carried away himself with the sound of his own English, Hitchens feels he has to attack even Mother Teresa.
At any rate, since Carter got himself de-selected by a fed-up electorate in 1980, he has continued pressing on the upward way to his personal Zion, in his own mind at any rate, achieving status as probably the second-holiest, and first most obnoxious, of the mystics of the Christian Left, following closely behind Bill Moyers. (Moyers’s wins out thanks to the miraculous gall he showed by going, practically straight from working as LBJ’s press secretary during Vietnam to permanent fixturedom at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, where he has been indoctrinating PBS viewers ever since. Salon.com calls him the “conscience of American journalism.” (“The Salon Interview: Bill Moyers”) Gag me!)
Bush is going to get a mountain of criticism for throwing support behind Abbas and Fatah as “moderates,” when Arafat’s Fatah has never been anything but a gang of terrorists and thieves. I expect Bush figured the only alternative was to wash our hands of the tatters of Palestinian government all together, and let Israel have civil wars across two borders, and refugees fleeing over from noth east and west.
But I long ago figured out that the mark of being grown up is not the ability always to choose the absolute good over the obviously evil, but to choose between evils when no good choice presents itself--and then live with the consequences. Bush has been proving his manhood that way for seven years. And whenever something doesn't work out, he doesn't accuse Americans of suffering from malaise, or wag his finger from a high horse.
Carter never had any such fetters against which to struggle. Carter never had to grow up. He always found the choices stark and obvious, and he could sleep nights as long as he selected the right one, consequences be damned.
Now, as he flies from one peace confab to another, we all get to hear how he grows more prophetic and outspoken as he ages (though not more correct, because that would suggest he had ever been wrong). His utter lack of capacity to be wrong is where his authority comes from, and his self-confidence.
For criticizing the retiring Tony Blair on the BBC, calling him "loyal, blind, apparently subservient," Hitchens addresses Carter thus:
Show us your peanut envy. Heap insults on a guest in Washington: a thrice-elected prime minister who was the first and strongest ally of the United States on the most awful day in its recent history. A man who was prepared to risk his own career to be counted as a friend. A man who was warning against the Taliban, against Slobodan Milosevic, and against Saddam Hussein when George Bush was only the governor of Texas. Leaders like that deserve a little respect even when they are wrong—but don't expect any generosity or courtesy from the purse-mouthed preacher man from Plains, who just purely knows he was right all along, and who, when that fails, can always point to the numberless godly victories that he won over the forces of evil.
I think it is going to be Carter's smallness that determines his legacy in the end. He'll need two libraries: one to document the dismal record of his years in the White House, and one to memorialize his insufferable prattling in the years after. Even the simple things of the office that he could have preserved at no cost he was unable to keep intact, like the custom that ex-presidents don't criticize sitting ones, or that prominent Americans don't attack US foreign policy from foreign soil.
Not enough that he failed as President, (a difficult job for much better men than him), why does he have to keep reminding us of why we were so glad to see him out of office? (Full disclosure, I voted for him, twice. But I was still glad to see him go. Every sinner has a past, as Bill Bennett likes to quote).
Exercising the universal party perk enjoyed by all Democrats, Carter was free to make allegations of criminal wrongdoing without bothering about the customary meaning of the term “criminal,” which is that someone broke a law. Nowadays if you're a Democrat, anything you don't like in politics ipso facto qualifies as a “crime.” (You know how this works. AG Gonzales fires 8 at-will attorneys, so that’s a crime; Scooter Libby remembers a conversation with Tim Russert differently than Russert does, so that’s a crime; the US Congress authorizes the President to go to war in Iraq, and when he does so, that’s a crime.)
Strangely enough, Egypt has undertaken the exact same kind of isolating efforts against Hamas that the Bush administration did, to the point of calling a regional summit for next week (a summit to include Israel, no less), attempting to boost Mahmoud Abbas, and isolate Hamas, for substantially the same reasons:
“More than seeking peace with Israel, Egypt and other U.S. Arab allies are seeking to prevent the new power of Islamic radicals in Gaza from strengthening fundamentalists on their own soil. They also fear Gaza will become a stronghold for Iranian influence on their doorsteps." (“Egypt fights militancy at home with summit to isolate Hamas”),
We will wait to see if Carter extends his indictment of criminality to Egypt. Perhaps he can accuse Egypt, as he accused Tony Blair, of being "loyal, blind, apparently subservient" to the United States. ("Abominable. Blind. Subservient. Ex-President Carter lambasts Blair for support").
The US action that Carter denounces as “criminal” was that
“Far from encouraging Hamas's move into parliamentary politics…the US and Israel, with European Union acquiescence, has sought to subvert the outcome” of that election “by shunning Hamas and helping Abbas to keep the reins of political and military power.”
Carter’s comments ignore completely the intervening event that swung the US, Israel, the EU, and now even Egypt, into feverish efforts to prop up Fatah, namely, Hamas’s armed coup of last week, a coup that was followed immediately by Hamas’s cold-blooded executions of many of their political foes, and establishment of an Islamic state in Gaza. Even Carter, were he man enough to grapple with actual facts rather than his delusional worldview, should be able to recognize that shooting Fatah fighters in their legs is not a traditional parliamentary procedure--even in the Middle East.
Nor does Hamas's violence say much for the genuineness of Hamas’s desire to “move into parliamentary politics,” if they would exploit their superior arms, discipline, and cunning to vanquish their own partners in the now-dissolved unity government.
Carter conflates the US’s perfectly consistent foreign-policy decision after the 2006 elections--to deny support and aid to a known terrorist entity--with this week’s post-coup response to try to salvage Abbas’s government as the lesser of the two evils with whom, sooner or later, Israel and the rest of us are going to have to try to deal.
Only an act of (criminal?) obtuseness by Carter could prevent him betraying any awareness of Hamas’s own belligerent decision to violently seize one-party control and “subvert the outcome” of last year’s parliamentary election by means of a bloody coup. Carter has always been able to render invisible what he didn't want to see.
That, or he continues to show how he scorns mere earthly evidences in favor of the Inner Light that has always guided him.
Carter’s dangerousness is not that he holds a strict moral vision to which he always strives to measure up, but that he holds a strict moral vision that he thinks he reached long ago--reached it easily, in fact-- and has been impatiently missionizing the rest of us ever since.
Carter’s presidency was typified by this puritanical refusal to besmirch his immaculate self through any truckling with political uncleanness, preferring to scold the rest of the world from the high vantage point of his “absolute” commitment to “human rights.” To those who remember the Carter years, they weren't distinguished by any actual advance of human rights, and in fact saw them in serious retreat. But he was always true to the principles of his superior moral agenda, even if it was a disaster for the country and the world.
That’s what enabled him to sell out the Shah, (and along with him Iran, and what little was left of America’s post-Vietnam honor), and yet remain completely unable to understand the Ayatollah Khomenini and his fanatical Islamic revolution. He thought he could work with Muslims, sensing in the Iranian fanatics a similar 100% commitment to Higher Things.
In a 2004 article in the New York Post, ("America Can’t Do a Thing”), Amir Taheri described how even Khomeini couldn't believe Carter’s impotence in the wake of Iran's seizing of our embassy personnel:
According to his late son Ahmad, who had been asked to coordinate with the embassy-raiders, the ayatollah feared "thunder and lightning" from Washington. But what came, instead, was a series of bland statements by Carter and his aides pleading for the release of the hostages on humanitarian grounds.
Carter's envoy to the United Nations, a certain Andrew Young, described Khomeini as "a 20th-century saint," and begged the ayatollah to show "magnanimity and compassion."
Carter went further by sending a letter to Khomeini.
Written in longhand, it was an appeal from "one believer to a man of God."
Carter really thought he was on Khomeini’s wavelength, just one spiritual powerhouse to another.
Comments Taheri: “Carter's syrupy prose must have amused Khomeini, who preferred a minimalist style with such phrases as "we shall cut off America's hands."
And Carter's sense of his own rightness hasn't ever wavered from his last day in office until now. If anything, he has grown more certain of his message, of his absolute moral power, of his prophetic mission, even while growing more and more bitter at being outshined by such clear moral inferiors as Ronald Reagan and the hated George W. Bush.
It is this unteachable moral certainty, mixed with gall, that explains the petulant absurdities that come forth, as Christopher Hitchens has trenchantly observed, “Almost always, when former President Jimmy Carter opens his big, smug mouth.” (“Peanut envy”).
As a matter of fact, Hitchens’s recent attacks on religious belief makes use of Jimmy Carter as a handy exhibit--too handy, by far. To be sure I still have more in common with Carter’s religious views than Hitchens’s nasty atheism, but the latter really puts his finger on how Carter’s self-righteous certainties make him so shameless in his public comments. Describing how Carter not only messed things up in Iran, Iraq, and just about every place else in the ‘70s, while at the same time digging us into many of the same holes we're still in, Hitchens says:
If I had done such a thing, I would take very good care to be modest when discussions of Middle Eastern crises came up. But here's the thing about self-righteous, born-again demagogues: Nothing they ever do, or did, can be attributed to anything but the very highest motives.
Here is a man who, in his latest book on the Israel-Palestine crisis, has found the elusive key to the problem. The mistake of Israel, he tells us (and tells us that he told the Israeli leadership) is to have moved away from God and the prophets and toward secularism. If you ever feel like a good laugh, just tell yourself that things would improve if only the Israeli government would be more Orthodox. Jimmy Carter will then turn his vacantly pious glare on you, as if to say that you just don't understand what it is to have a personal savior.
If Hitchens had limited his infidel attacks to Carter and other similarly puffed-up jackasses, one could almost sympathize with his antipathy to any god who would send such sorry examples through the Earth as his prophets. Unfortunately, no doubt a bit carried away himself with the sound of his own English, Hitchens feels he has to attack even Mother Teresa.
At any rate, since Carter got himself de-selected by a fed-up electorate in 1980, he has continued pressing on the upward way to his personal Zion, in his own mind at any rate, achieving status as probably the second-holiest, and first most obnoxious, of the mystics of the Christian Left, following closely behind Bill Moyers. (Moyers’s wins out thanks to the miraculous gall he showed by going, practically straight from working as LBJ’s press secretary during Vietnam to permanent fixturedom at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, where he has been indoctrinating PBS viewers ever since. Salon.com calls him the “conscience of American journalism.” (“The Salon Interview: Bill Moyers”) Gag me!)
Bush is going to get a mountain of criticism for throwing support behind Abbas and Fatah as “moderates,” when Arafat’s Fatah has never been anything but a gang of terrorists and thieves. I expect Bush figured the only alternative was to wash our hands of the tatters of Palestinian government all together, and let Israel have civil wars across two borders, and refugees fleeing over from noth east and west.
But I long ago figured out that the mark of being grown up is not the ability always to choose the absolute good over the obviously evil, but to choose between evils when no good choice presents itself--and then live with the consequences. Bush has been proving his manhood that way for seven years. And whenever something doesn't work out, he doesn't accuse Americans of suffering from malaise, or wag his finger from a high horse.
Carter never had any such fetters against which to struggle. Carter never had to grow up. He always found the choices stark and obvious, and he could sleep nights as long as he selected the right one, consequences be damned.
Now, as he flies from one peace confab to another, we all get to hear how he grows more prophetic and outspoken as he ages (though not more correct, because that would suggest he had ever been wrong). His utter lack of capacity to be wrong is where his authority comes from, and his self-confidence.
For criticizing the retiring Tony Blair on the BBC, calling him "loyal, blind, apparently subservient," Hitchens addresses Carter thus:
Show us your peanut envy. Heap insults on a guest in Washington: a thrice-elected prime minister who was the first and strongest ally of the United States on the most awful day in its recent history. A man who was prepared to risk his own career to be counted as a friend. A man who was warning against the Taliban, against Slobodan Milosevic, and against Saddam Hussein when George Bush was only the governor of Texas. Leaders like that deserve a little respect even when they are wrong—but don't expect any generosity or courtesy from the purse-mouthed preacher man from Plains, who just purely knows he was right all along, and who, when that fails, can always point to the numberless godly victories that he won over the forces of evil.
I think it is going to be Carter's smallness that determines his legacy in the end. He'll need two libraries: one to document the dismal record of his years in the White House, and one to memorialize his insufferable prattling in the years after. Even the simple things of the office that he could have preserved at no cost he was unable to keep intact, like the custom that ex-presidents don't criticize sitting ones, or that prominent Americans don't attack US foreign policy from foreign soil.
Not enough that he failed as President, (a difficult job for much better men than him), why does he have to keep reminding us of why we were so glad to see him out of office? (Full disclosure, I voted for him, twice. But I was still glad to see him go. Every sinner has a past, as Bill Bennett likes to quote).
Tuesday, June 19, 2007
The ACLU's Non-Aggression Pact with CAIR
Dawud Walid, Executive Director of CAIR-Michigan, was making the rounds yesterday to WJR, the Detroit News, (“Muslims won't fund footbaths”), and on his own blog. (“Regarding funding of the "footbaths"). He was explaining the ACLU’s position on publicly-funded Muslim foot baths at UM-Dearborn.
Speaking to the Detroit News, he said that at one point CAIR “’was concerned a public outcry would cause the university to back down from the project.
"’If the ACLU had decided to take legal action against the UM-Dearborn, we probably would have called for the university to raise the funds privately, just so that the UM-Dearborn wouldn't have to go through the trouble of having to defend its position against the ACLU,’ Walid said.”
This awfully curious comment raises several other questions for me.
First off, what’s CAIR got to do with any of this? Terry Gallagher, flak catcher for UM-Dearborn on this issue, told Debbie Schlussel that “the foot baths are the result of 'years of ongoing negotiations with the Muslim Student Association.'" In other words, the proposed foot baths are supposed to be a “reasonable accommodation” provided in response to requests for same by actual UM-Dearborn students. The MSA, a shady organization with links to the Muslim Brotherhood, is at least on its face a national student organization with a chapter at UM-Dearborn. But now it is turning out (and we’re all shocked, shocked) that CAIR is the outfit taking ownership for this whole thing. Ever since this received any press in early June, Dawud Walid has been doing almost all the talking.
Which only leads to our next question: Why does Dawud Walid and CAIR-Michigan presume to speak, not for the MSA and the Muslim students at UM-Dearborn, but for “the Muslim community” in its entirety? In addressing a secondary issue of whether or not area Muslims, instead of taxpayers, should be paying for the foot baths, Mr. Walid says on his blog (“Regarding funding of the "footbaths"), quote:
“The Muslim community has not stated that it would not fund the foot washing area. It would if need be.
“Since the school's position is that this is a public safety issue, which is not promoting one religion over others and that civil rights lawyers, Muslim and Non-Muslims, have informed us that the 'footbaths' being built with student activity fees is not unconstitutional, the need to privately fund the 'footbaths' does not appear to be incumbent.”
In spite of last week’s embarrassing revelations that CAIR has dwindled 90% down to only 1,700 paying members, CAIR still doesn't hesitate to speak for the entire Muslim community. (1,700 is CAIR's nation-wide membership, by the way. We don’t even know how few actually belong in Michigan, besides Dawud Walid). No matter. He seems to think there’s enough to entitle him to speak for all Muslims.
Our next question is, Why is it that Mr. Walid, CAIR, and “the Muslim community,” are all so confident of the legality of their demands for foot baths, simply because the ACLU says so? Isn’t it the American judicial system that makes determinations over whether a given action is constitutional or not?
Yes, indeed, but that’s only if someone files a legal action and forces the point, which is not always as easy as it sounds. And as far as Mr. Walid, the MSA, and CAIR seem to be concerned, the only potential party in this country who ever gets to file suits torpedoing other people's religious expressions or accommodations is the ACLU--and for some odd reason they aren’t interested in this one. In fact, their commentary on the matter has been laughable. Kary Moss, director of the Detroit branch of the ACLU, sloughed off the whole question of the foot baths by claiming the ACLU views "it as an attempt to deal with a problem, not an attempt to make it easier for Muslims to pray."
There really isn't any question any more that this is all intended to make it easier for Muslims to pray; Dawud Walid, Tarek Baydoun, and every other advocate of the idea wittingly or unwittingly admits as much every time they comment on the subject.
But it's wondrous to see how the eagle-eyed defenders of the First Amendment at the ACLU can overlook an 800-pound gorilla if they simply choose to "view it as...a problem," rather than "view it...as an attempt to make it easier for Muslims to pray." Imagine if they chose to view intelligent design in public schools as an "attempt to deal with a problem" of inconsistencies within classical Darwinian evolution. You know: intelligent design's not a religious thing, it's an education thing.
For all that, one of Ms. Moss's colleagues in keeping religion out of public space, Hal Downs from the Michigan chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, disagrees with Kary Moss on the legality of the foot baths, telling the Detroit News that the Muslim advocates for the foot baths have "got a problem, because it's public money they're using to pay for this."
Which is only common sense, now, isn't it?
Except that neither CAIR, nor the MSA, nor even UM-Dearborn gives a damn if this is constitutional or not. Their only concern has ever been whether or not, all things considered, they can just get away with it.
All things considered, that is, meaning a University decision made in the shadows without public comment, a compliant press playing see-no-evil, and the most potent civil-rights advocacy group neutralized in advance by a non-aggression pact with CAIR, motivated by who-knows-what collateral advantage the ACLU hopes to obtain in return.
The proof of it is when Mr. Walid admits to the Detroit News:
"If the ACLU had decided to take legal action against the UM-Dearborn, we probably would have called for the university to raise the funds privately, just so that the UM-Dearborn wouldn't have to go through the trouble of having to defend its position against the ACLU.”
In effect saying, "if the ACLU isn’t going to drag us into court on this one, we couldn’t care less who else doesn’t like it."
Are you starting to get the feeling this whole thing has been rigged? Are you starting to feel taken advantage of? (Those questions are for you reading this, not for Dawud Walid).
Still I've got one more for him. The whole point of national CAIR, allegedly, is to “advocate for justice and mutual understanding,” and CAIR-Michigan states its mission is to "promote...the image of Muslims."
So the question is, How is forcing unwilling taxpayers to fund Islamic foot baths going to contribute to mutual understanding and promoting a favorable image of Muslims?
Mr. Walid never claims that the Islamic community, hundreds of thousands strong in this area, and by no means, in the aggregate, impoverished, is too poor to take on this expense themselves. Instead, he just says they're only going to pay for the UM foot baths if they have to. And they will only have to if they can’t get the public to pay the bill for them; and that's going to happen, for all practical purposes, only if the ACLU fights them on this. To wit, Mr. Walid says:
“Since the school's position is that this is a public safety issue, which is not promoting one religion over others and that civil rights lawyers, Muslim and Non-Muslims, have informed us that the 'footbaths' being built with student activity fees is not unconstitutional, the need to privately fund the 'footbaths' does not appear to be incumbent.”
Not incumbent? How about this for an alternative to not incumbent: it is incumbent for PR that the Muslim community doesn't once again stick its finger in the eye of the nonMuslim community CAIR and the rest are always claiming they want to build bridges to. Wouldn't it be a damned sight better for the Muslim community--the same community Mr. Walid and his cohorts at CAIR are endlessly telling us is so misunderstood and unappreciated by America’s nonMuslims--to at least offer to take this on themselves?
But in the end, they won't bother. This was never about building bridges or promoting image. It's about gaining one victory at a time. It's about jihad, inch by inch.
And the arithmetic is all on their side.
One unaccountable public official
minus
one watchful press
minus
zealous legal scrutiny
equals
you and me paying somone else's freight bills to Paradise.
And that's just how easy it is to turn an 800-pound gorilla into a problem solved.
Speaking to the Detroit News, he said that at one point CAIR “’was concerned a public outcry would cause the university to back down from the project.
"’If the ACLU had decided to take legal action against the UM-Dearborn, we probably would have called for the university to raise the funds privately, just so that the UM-Dearborn wouldn't have to go through the trouble of having to defend its position against the ACLU,’ Walid said.”
This awfully curious comment raises several other questions for me.
First off, what’s CAIR got to do with any of this? Terry Gallagher, flak catcher for UM-Dearborn on this issue, told Debbie Schlussel that “the foot baths are the result of 'years of ongoing negotiations with the Muslim Student Association.'" In other words, the proposed foot baths are supposed to be a “reasonable accommodation” provided in response to requests for same by actual UM-Dearborn students. The MSA, a shady organization with links to the Muslim Brotherhood, is at least on its face a national student organization with a chapter at UM-Dearborn. But now it is turning out (and we’re all shocked, shocked) that CAIR is the outfit taking ownership for this whole thing. Ever since this received any press in early June, Dawud Walid has been doing almost all the talking.
Which only leads to our next question: Why does Dawud Walid and CAIR-Michigan presume to speak, not for the MSA and the Muslim students at UM-Dearborn, but for “the Muslim community” in its entirety? In addressing a secondary issue of whether or not area Muslims, instead of taxpayers, should be paying for the foot baths, Mr. Walid says on his blog (“Regarding funding of the "footbaths"), quote:
“The Muslim community has not stated that it would not fund the foot washing area. It would if need be.
“Since the school's position is that this is a public safety issue, which is not promoting one religion over others and that civil rights lawyers, Muslim and Non-Muslims, have informed us that the 'footbaths' being built with student activity fees is not unconstitutional, the need to privately fund the 'footbaths' does not appear to be incumbent.”
In spite of last week’s embarrassing revelations that CAIR has dwindled 90% down to only 1,700 paying members, CAIR still doesn't hesitate to speak for the entire Muslim community. (1,700 is CAIR's nation-wide membership, by the way. We don’t even know how few actually belong in Michigan, besides Dawud Walid). No matter. He seems to think there’s enough to entitle him to speak for all Muslims.
Our next question is, Why is it that Mr. Walid, CAIR, and “the Muslim community,” are all so confident of the legality of their demands for foot baths, simply because the ACLU says so? Isn’t it the American judicial system that makes determinations over whether a given action is constitutional or not?
Yes, indeed, but that’s only if someone files a legal action and forces the point, which is not always as easy as it sounds. And as far as Mr. Walid, the MSA, and CAIR seem to be concerned, the only potential party in this country who ever gets to file suits torpedoing other people's religious expressions or accommodations is the ACLU--and for some odd reason they aren’t interested in this one. In fact, their commentary on the matter has been laughable. Kary Moss, director of the Detroit branch of the ACLU, sloughed off the whole question of the foot baths by claiming the ACLU views "it as an attempt to deal with a problem, not an attempt to make it easier for Muslims to pray."
There really isn't any question any more that this is all intended to make it easier for Muslims to pray; Dawud Walid, Tarek Baydoun, and every other advocate of the idea wittingly or unwittingly admits as much every time they comment on the subject.
But it's wondrous to see how the eagle-eyed defenders of the First Amendment at the ACLU can overlook an 800-pound gorilla if they simply choose to "view it as...a problem," rather than "view it...as an attempt to make it easier for Muslims to pray." Imagine if they chose to view intelligent design in public schools as an "attempt to deal with a problem" of inconsistencies within classical Darwinian evolution. You know: intelligent design's not a religious thing, it's an education thing.
For all that, one of Ms. Moss's colleagues in keeping religion out of public space, Hal Downs from the Michigan chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, disagrees with Kary Moss on the legality of the foot baths, telling the Detroit News that the Muslim advocates for the foot baths have "got a problem, because it's public money they're using to pay for this."
Which is only common sense, now, isn't it?
Except that neither CAIR, nor the MSA, nor even UM-Dearborn gives a damn if this is constitutional or not. Their only concern has ever been whether or not, all things considered, they can just get away with it.
All things considered, that is, meaning a University decision made in the shadows without public comment, a compliant press playing see-no-evil, and the most potent civil-rights advocacy group neutralized in advance by a non-aggression pact with CAIR, motivated by who-knows-what collateral advantage the ACLU hopes to obtain in return.
The proof of it is when Mr. Walid admits to the Detroit News:
"If the ACLU had decided to take legal action against the UM-Dearborn, we probably would have called for the university to raise the funds privately, just so that the UM-Dearborn wouldn't have to go through the trouble of having to defend its position against the ACLU.”
In effect saying, "if the ACLU isn’t going to drag us into court on this one, we couldn’t care less who else doesn’t like it."
Are you starting to get the feeling this whole thing has been rigged? Are you starting to feel taken advantage of? (Those questions are for you reading this, not for Dawud Walid).
Still I've got one more for him. The whole point of national CAIR, allegedly, is to “advocate for justice and mutual understanding,” and CAIR-Michigan states its mission is to "promote...the image of Muslims."
So the question is, How is forcing unwilling taxpayers to fund Islamic foot baths going to contribute to mutual understanding and promoting a favorable image of Muslims?
Mr. Walid never claims that the Islamic community, hundreds of thousands strong in this area, and by no means, in the aggregate, impoverished, is too poor to take on this expense themselves. Instead, he just says they're only going to pay for the UM foot baths if they have to. And they will only have to if they can’t get the public to pay the bill for them; and that's going to happen, for all practical purposes, only if the ACLU fights them on this. To wit, Mr. Walid says:
“Since the school's position is that this is a public safety issue, which is not promoting one religion over others and that civil rights lawyers, Muslim and Non-Muslims, have informed us that the 'footbaths' being built with student activity fees is not unconstitutional, the need to privately fund the 'footbaths' does not appear to be incumbent.”
Not incumbent? How about this for an alternative to not incumbent: it is incumbent for PR that the Muslim community doesn't once again stick its finger in the eye of the nonMuslim community CAIR and the rest are always claiming they want to build bridges to. Wouldn't it be a damned sight better for the Muslim community--the same community Mr. Walid and his cohorts at CAIR are endlessly telling us is so misunderstood and unappreciated by America’s nonMuslims--to at least offer to take this on themselves?
But in the end, they won't bother. This was never about building bridges or promoting image. It's about gaining one victory at a time. It's about jihad, inch by inch.
And the arithmetic is all on their side.
One unaccountable public official
minus
one watchful press
minus
zealous legal scrutiny
equals
you and me paying somone else's freight bills to Paradise.
And that's just how easy it is to turn an 800-pound gorilla into a problem solved.
Saturday, June 16, 2007
Islam in Miniature
The Spirit stood among the graves, and pointed down to One. He advanced towards it trembling. The Phantom was exactly as it had been, but he dreaded that he saw new meaning in its solemn shape.
"Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point," said Scrooge, "answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?"
--Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Didn't conventional wisdom always hold that everything that’s wrong in the Middle East stems from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and (formerly) the Gaza strip?
Which was always nonsense, of course. The Arab Middle East’s biggest problem is not Israeli occupation, but Islam.
Friday’s CNSNews reports the following (“Gaza Residents Anticipate an Islamic Future”):
After days of violence, the Gaza Strip was quiet on Friday as citizens there awakened to a new Islamic reality.One Gaza resident said that while he and his family are physically fine, they feel "terrible" because they don't know what the future holds."Hamas militants are behaving politely," said an economist who asked not to be named.
Since Thursday night, people have been allowed to go out, he said. Hamas members allowed Gazans to visit a prison formerly controlled by the Fatah faction, showing them the jail cells and implements of torture in an effort to paint themselves as the good guys, the man said.Hamas has vowed to bring strict Islamic law to the Gaza Strip.
Remember: the ousted Fatah party was formed as the political sock-puppet of Yasser Arafat’s terrorist P.L.O. Overnight, the corrupt Palestinian Authority that Fatah inherited from its founder, and which it continued to administer in imitation of Arafat’s thieving, murderous, obstructionist, and duplicitous style, is now the clearly more moderate of the two feuding terrorist groups.
“Moderate” in this context is a purely relative term. Fatah was always more secular than Hamas, and when backed into a corner was finally willing to say it recognized Israel’s right to exist (not say it and mean it, of course, just say it); but even that was too much for Hamas. Fatah's failings are why Hamas feels so little compunction in making war against Fatah and executing their former partners in a unity government.
What we are witnessing in this tiny strip of geography is what happens when a “moderate” Islamic terror organization comes up against a better funded, more ruthless, and more fanatically Islamic terror organization: the formation of an Islamic terror state.
Moderates always lose against fanatics with Iranian bankrollers.
Gazans may be sorry now they voted for Hamas, but this is exactly what they asked for when they voted for it, and now it is too late for regrets. Hamas promised Gazans both a destroyed Israel and a return to Sharia totalitarianism. Hamas is never going to achieve the first promise, but is already delivering on the second one. According to the CNS report, Hamas militants for now are being polite to the Gazans, but:
Arab affairs expert, Dr. Mordechai Kedar from the BESA Center for Strategic Studies near Tel Aviv, said he expects the situation in the Gaza Strip to worsen.In the beginning, Hamas may stabilize the situation but then support for the fundamentalists will decrease, Kedar said -- when Hamas starts closing down restaurants and cafes after sunset, for example.
And worse than that, I’m sure, if the example Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and other Islamic states tell us anything.
Defenders of Israel have long criticized as fatuous the “peace plan” approach to the Palestinians. To us it it was self-evident that creation of a Palestinian state that does not recognize Israel’s right to exist would mean a terror state on Israel’s doorstep--a state that will not only threatens Israel’s existence, but will further destabilize the Middle East, risking even European and American national security.
We are now watching this come true in tiny Gaza.
Critics of international jihadism have also insisted that the litany of Islamic complaints--chief amongst them the perpetual complaints about Palestinians' mistreatment at the hands of Israel--have never been anything more than useful excuses for a well-documented and perfectly transparent religious goal of imposing Islam on the unbelieving world, and the subjugation of the Christian civilization of the West.
We can see this war in a microcosm in nearly every armed conflict on the globe today, in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Kosovo, and on and on.
But in Gaza we can see the conflict with the fog of phony claims of injustice and the complex factors of religious demographics and dverse populations swept out of the way. This was Muslims murdering Muslims. The Hamas coup cannot fairly be blamed on Israel, nor on the Iraq war, nor on the plight of the Palestinians, nor on the persecution of Muslims by neighboring infidels. Hamas had to sweep Fatah out of the way in order to achieve its two irreducible objects: the destruction of Israel, and the creation of a Sharia state in alliance with the militant ummah throughout the world.
Hamas and its likeminded jihadist armies couldn't care less about creating a Palestinian state for the sake of the Palestinians. The only states that matters are Islamic states whose military and economic resources can be turned to the service of the borderless Islamic nation. Political entities are useful only insofar as they enable a more effective jihad against those in the House of War.
When demonstrators in Dearborn last week called for unity amongst Iraqis, Lebanese, and Palestinians, they spoke on behalf of the Islamic nation, the believers, the ummah. They were voicing their hopes for more and more of what is happening in Gaza right now. They want an Islamic theocracy for the Palestinians, just as they want one for the Lebanese for the Iraqis, and sooner or later for the whole world.
If there is a silver lining in this, albeit a blood-stained silver lining, it is that what we see now in this tiny, tortured microcosm on the Mediterranean is a simplified model of the struggle of Islam against the world, stripped of all the social, political, and historical complications we must sort through elsewhere in our tangles with Islam, especially with Iraq and Iran. In Gaza there can be no confusion about root causes.
We know now that Hamas’s first principle is not the liberation of Palestinians from Israeli occupation (there is no occupation), nor the formation of a just state based on a democratic model (they could have cooperated with Fatah), nor obtaining ecomomic and social advancement for Gaza’s people (Hamas knows full well Gaza will be more starved and isolated from the world than ever after this).
No, Hamas’s first principle is Allah demands imposition of Islam by force, setting up an Islamic state, and confining all within it under Sharia law. And such is the nature of its logic of force, so ferocious and all-demanding, that even after having won electoral success and significant representation in a unity party, Hamas still had to stage a bloody coup to eliminate even its only moderate partners, the merely secular crooks and terrorists of Arafat’s Fatah.
The ideologically blinkered will always find reasons to blame this on Israel, on George W. Bush, on the West, but it is very clear that Gaza today is the effect of the cause of Islamic radicalism. By no means is it exceptional. The situation of Gaza will not require mounds of sociological, political, or anthropological analysis on the order of Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Even being mindful of the risks of oversimplification, this is irreducibly simple. In Gaza a jihadist army took over, and imposed an Islamic state.
Gazans a year ago may not have anticipated waking up on June 14th under a new Taliban, but are any of the rest of us really surprised that, given the opportunity to prevail through armed force, Hamas would impose just this kind of religious rule? Was this unexpected? Was it something that none of us ever imagined?
You know the answer. There is nothing that just happened in Gaza that didn’t happen already in recent times in Algeria, in Afghanistan under the Taliban, in Iran under the ayatollahs, or that is not being attempted in southern Lebanon or Sadr City, or isn't now on the drawing board for London, Paris, or Your Town, USA, if we don't learn from this and watch out.
Like Scrooge’s being taken to witness his own wake, a vision of what may come to pass, but not what must come to pass, Gaza this week is a premonition of the future vouchsafed to the West. Jihadism is opportunistic, warlike, and single-minded. It does not mix with moderation. It therefore needs to be treated accordingly.
If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, we have a chance to stop the insanity in our own policies, even if we can do little for the insanity that Gaza has now become. We don’t have to continue trying to palliate Islamic fanaticism with diplomatic niceties, money, and tolerance of warlike trespasses, meanwhile expecting a different result. We don’t have to keep forcing Israel to work towards the impossible goal of a two-state solution that will lead to nothing more than permanent war against Israel.
The fall of Gaza is a tragedy that can serve as a warning if we let it. The warning is that this is Islam. This is what jihadists are fighting for. This is what they will settle for.
But if Scrooge can learn, why can't we?
"Am I that man who lay upon the bed?" he cried, upon his knees.
The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.
"No, Spirit! Oh no, no!"
The finger still was there.
"Spirit!" he cried, tight clutching at its robe, "hear me. I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope?"
For the first time the hand appeared to shake.
"Good Spirit," he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: "Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life."
The kind hand trembled.
"Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point," said Scrooge, "answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?"
--Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Didn't conventional wisdom always hold that everything that’s wrong in the Middle East stems from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and (formerly) the Gaza strip?
Which was always nonsense, of course. The Arab Middle East’s biggest problem is not Israeli occupation, but Islam.
Friday’s CNSNews reports the following (“Gaza Residents Anticipate an Islamic Future”):
After days of violence, the Gaza Strip was quiet on Friday as citizens there awakened to a new Islamic reality.One Gaza resident said that while he and his family are physically fine, they feel "terrible" because they don't know what the future holds."Hamas militants are behaving politely," said an economist who asked not to be named.
Since Thursday night, people have been allowed to go out, he said. Hamas members allowed Gazans to visit a prison formerly controlled by the Fatah faction, showing them the jail cells and implements of torture in an effort to paint themselves as the good guys, the man said.Hamas has vowed to bring strict Islamic law to the Gaza Strip.
Remember: the ousted Fatah party was formed as the political sock-puppet of Yasser Arafat’s terrorist P.L.O. Overnight, the corrupt Palestinian Authority that Fatah inherited from its founder, and which it continued to administer in imitation of Arafat’s thieving, murderous, obstructionist, and duplicitous style, is now the clearly more moderate of the two feuding terrorist groups.
“Moderate” in this context is a purely relative term. Fatah was always more secular than Hamas, and when backed into a corner was finally willing to say it recognized Israel’s right to exist (not say it and mean it, of course, just say it); but even that was too much for Hamas. Fatah's failings are why Hamas feels so little compunction in making war against Fatah and executing their former partners in a unity government.
What we are witnessing in this tiny strip of geography is what happens when a “moderate” Islamic terror organization comes up against a better funded, more ruthless, and more fanatically Islamic terror organization: the formation of an Islamic terror state.
Moderates always lose against fanatics with Iranian bankrollers.
Gazans may be sorry now they voted for Hamas, but this is exactly what they asked for when they voted for it, and now it is too late for regrets. Hamas promised Gazans both a destroyed Israel and a return to Sharia totalitarianism. Hamas is never going to achieve the first promise, but is already delivering on the second one. According to the CNS report, Hamas militants for now are being polite to the Gazans, but:
Arab affairs expert, Dr. Mordechai Kedar from the BESA Center for Strategic Studies near Tel Aviv, said he expects the situation in the Gaza Strip to worsen.In the beginning, Hamas may stabilize the situation but then support for the fundamentalists will decrease, Kedar said -- when Hamas starts closing down restaurants and cafes after sunset, for example.
And worse than that, I’m sure, if the example Saudi Arabia, Iran, Algeria, and other Islamic states tell us anything.
Defenders of Israel have long criticized as fatuous the “peace plan” approach to the Palestinians. To us it it was self-evident that creation of a Palestinian state that does not recognize Israel’s right to exist would mean a terror state on Israel’s doorstep--a state that will not only threatens Israel’s existence, but will further destabilize the Middle East, risking even European and American national security.
We are now watching this come true in tiny Gaza.
Critics of international jihadism have also insisted that the litany of Islamic complaints--chief amongst them the perpetual complaints about Palestinians' mistreatment at the hands of Israel--have never been anything more than useful excuses for a well-documented and perfectly transparent religious goal of imposing Islam on the unbelieving world, and the subjugation of the Christian civilization of the West.
We can see this war in a microcosm in nearly every armed conflict on the globe today, in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Sudan, Somalia, Pakistan, Indonesia, Kosovo, and on and on.
But in Gaza we can see the conflict with the fog of phony claims of injustice and the complex factors of religious demographics and dverse populations swept out of the way. This was Muslims murdering Muslims. The Hamas coup cannot fairly be blamed on Israel, nor on the Iraq war, nor on the plight of the Palestinians, nor on the persecution of Muslims by neighboring infidels. Hamas had to sweep Fatah out of the way in order to achieve its two irreducible objects: the destruction of Israel, and the creation of a Sharia state in alliance with the militant ummah throughout the world.
Hamas and its likeminded jihadist armies couldn't care less about creating a Palestinian state for the sake of the Palestinians. The only states that matters are Islamic states whose military and economic resources can be turned to the service of the borderless Islamic nation. Political entities are useful only insofar as they enable a more effective jihad against those in the House of War.
When demonstrators in Dearborn last week called for unity amongst Iraqis, Lebanese, and Palestinians, they spoke on behalf of the Islamic nation, the believers, the ummah. They were voicing their hopes for more and more of what is happening in Gaza right now. They want an Islamic theocracy for the Palestinians, just as they want one for the Lebanese for the Iraqis, and sooner or later for the whole world.
If there is a silver lining in this, albeit a blood-stained silver lining, it is that what we see now in this tiny, tortured microcosm on the Mediterranean is a simplified model of the struggle of Islam against the world, stripped of all the social, political, and historical complications we must sort through elsewhere in our tangles with Islam, especially with Iraq and Iran. In Gaza there can be no confusion about root causes.
We know now that Hamas’s first principle is not the liberation of Palestinians from Israeli occupation (there is no occupation), nor the formation of a just state based on a democratic model (they could have cooperated with Fatah), nor obtaining ecomomic and social advancement for Gaza’s people (Hamas knows full well Gaza will be more starved and isolated from the world than ever after this).
No, Hamas’s first principle is Allah demands imposition of Islam by force, setting up an Islamic state, and confining all within it under Sharia law. And such is the nature of its logic of force, so ferocious and all-demanding, that even after having won electoral success and significant representation in a unity party, Hamas still had to stage a bloody coup to eliminate even its only moderate partners, the merely secular crooks and terrorists of Arafat’s Fatah.
The ideologically blinkered will always find reasons to blame this on Israel, on George W. Bush, on the West, but it is very clear that Gaza today is the effect of the cause of Islamic radicalism. By no means is it exceptional. The situation of Gaza will not require mounds of sociological, political, or anthropological analysis on the order of Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. Even being mindful of the risks of oversimplification, this is irreducibly simple. In Gaza a jihadist army took over, and imposed an Islamic state.
Gazans a year ago may not have anticipated waking up on June 14th under a new Taliban, but are any of the rest of us really surprised that, given the opportunity to prevail through armed force, Hamas would impose just this kind of religious rule? Was this unexpected? Was it something that none of us ever imagined?
You know the answer. There is nothing that just happened in Gaza that didn’t happen already in recent times in Algeria, in Afghanistan under the Taliban, in Iran under the ayatollahs, or that is not being attempted in southern Lebanon or Sadr City, or isn't now on the drawing board for London, Paris, or Your Town, USA, if we don't learn from this and watch out.
Like Scrooge’s being taken to witness his own wake, a vision of what may come to pass, but not what must come to pass, Gaza this week is a premonition of the future vouchsafed to the West. Jihadism is opportunistic, warlike, and single-minded. It does not mix with moderation. It therefore needs to be treated accordingly.
If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, we have a chance to stop the insanity in our own policies, even if we can do little for the insanity that Gaza has now become. We don’t have to continue trying to palliate Islamic fanaticism with diplomatic niceties, money, and tolerance of warlike trespasses, meanwhile expecting a different result. We don’t have to keep forcing Israel to work towards the impossible goal of a two-state solution that will lead to nothing more than permanent war against Israel.
The fall of Gaza is a tragedy that can serve as a warning if we let it. The warning is that this is Islam. This is what jihadists are fighting for. This is what they will settle for.
But if Scrooge can learn, why can't we?
"Am I that man who lay upon the bed?" he cried, upon his knees.
The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.
"No, Spirit! Oh no, no!"
The finger still was there.
"Spirit!" he cried, tight clutching at its robe, "hear me. I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope?"
For the first time the hand appeared to shake.
"Good Spirit," he pursued, as down upon the ground he fell before it: "Your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life."
The kind hand trembled.
NYT on a Nuclear Armed Iran: 'Oh, Yes, That's Interesting.'
I guess the New York Times hasn’t got a dog in this fight.
The Times reports today on what it calls a debate behind the scenes at the White House between those who favor the diplomatic approach to reining in Iran’s nuclear program, and those who think military strikes are a better idea. (“Iran Strategy Stirs Debate at White House”)
The article offers this telling assessment of the recent trouble-making by Iran:
“Even beyond its nuclear program, Iran is emerging as an increasing source of trouble for the Bush administration by inflaming the insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and in Gaza, where it has provided military and financial support to the militant Islamic group Hamas, which now controls the Gaza Strip.”
Now has it occurred to anyone at the NYT that when Iran finally succeeds in toppling the government in Lebanon, or when it has helped re-establish the Taliban in Afghanistan, when it has finished helping to reduce Gaza to a Sharia prison, when it has facilitated the leveling of more mosques and provided more IEDs to murder GIs in Iraq, and then when it has finally obtained nuclear weapons to use against Israel and share with terrorists bent on destroying Americans, that it will be more than a source of trouble only to the Bush administration?
The Times seems marvelously disinterested by the whole mullahs-with-nukes scenario, while at the same time endlessly fascinated with the political Sturm und Drang inside the Bush White House.
In today's article the Times tries painting a picture of infighting between Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and her folks on the pro-diplomacy side, versus “the few remaining hawks inside the administration,” namely Dick Cheney and his guys. Cheney’s faction, the Times reports, “are pressing for greater consideration of military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.”
Well, let’s hope so. At a moment when there is so much bad news on nearly every front, I’m thankful somebody, somewhere, is still discussing hawkish options at policy meetings that don't open with shouts of "Death to America!"
And why should the Times find it noteworthy that there’s lively debate amongst the President’s counselors as they weigh the benefits between historically feckless diplomacy and the grave choice for war? If in the end we do strike Iran, you can just bet the NYT will be complaining that there “was no debate” leading up to the action, just as they mistakenly insist now that there was no debate before the Iraq war. Or, in the alternative, whatever his decision is, Bush later will be accused of having failed to listen to those on the other side. ("I do solemnly swear that I will protect and defend, and listen to, the views of those on the other side").
This kind of story also is meant to illustrate the leftist myth that George W. Bush is “isolated” behind an impenetrable barrier filtering out realities facing all the rest of us, realities painfully obvious to the sardonic Left. (You know: global warming, universal health care, America regaining popularity with all the really cool kids at the UN).
Not only can the Times count the rise of a nuclear armed and belligerent theocracy in Iran as nothing more than “an increasing source of trouble for the Bush administration,” the Left never tires of portraying how the “so-called” war on terror was never anything more than Bush’s paranoid invention, anyway, cooked up only to achieve the nefarious ends that caused him to seize power in 2000. Iraq is always “Bush’s war.” Al Qaeda latest moves are thwarting Bush. Hamas's takeover is a blow against Bush's efforts at peace in the region.
And to highlight this isolation, the Times says Secretary Rice’s pro-diplomacy corps “appear to be winning so far,” while Dick Cheney and his side, “the few remaining hawks inside the administration,” seem to be dwindling.
Of course, the President himself is inside the administration, and whether or not he turns out to be a hawk regarding Iran, he has already shown himself a hawk in the fight against jihad, and he still is the one who consistently refuses to remove the military option for Iran from the table.
Nor are the hawks limited to the few remaining in Dick Cheney’s posse. Joe Lieberman, hardly a Cheneyite, recently has been quite outspoken on the subject of Iran, saying two weeks ago on Face the Nation:
"We can tell them we want them to stop that, but if there's any hope of the Iranians living according to the international rule of law and stopping, for instance, their nuclear weapons development, we can't just talk to them," Lieberman said. "If they don't play by the rules, we've got to use our force, and to me that would include taking military action to stop them from doing what they're doing." (“Lieberman: Bomb Iran If It Doesn't Stop”).
Lieberman even favors a military strike into Iran on the sole basis of their involvement in attacks on US soldiers in Iraq:
"I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq," Mr. Lieberman said. "And to me, that would include a strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers." (“Lieberman Favors Military Hit on Iran”).
As I said before, I’m gratified to read that military options against Iran are being debated in the White House, even if, as the Times gloats, the diplomacy side seems to be winning for the moment. The fact that discussions are happening at all means military-strike options are being presented to the President, and that those arguing for continued diplomacy have to do it with ticking wristwatches held up to their noses by opponents.
As has become quite obvious since 9/11, the Left’s obtuseness on the reality of global jihad is an incurable affliction. Until the Bush administration leaves office in 18 months or so, defeats and victories in the war against jihadism abroad will serve no other purpose than to point up the failures of Bush’s foreign policy, and domestic events in the fight against attacks at home will be used only for outlining Bush’s totalitarian usurpations of power. Bush will continue to be portrayed as out of touch with reality, “reality” being defined rather liberally by the likes of Al Gore.
Yet it is the Left that dandles and plays with the harsh realities upon which it reports daily with a clueless innocence, like the toddler curiously peering down the barrel of its father’s loaded handgun.
How else could people write anything like the following:
In the year since Ms. Rice announced the new strategy for the United States to join forces with Europe, Russia and China to press Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment activities, Iran has installed more than a thousand centrifuges to enrich uranium. The International Atomic Energy Agency predicts that 8,000 or so could be spinning by the end of the year, if Iran surmounts its technical problems.
Those hard numbers are at the core of the debate within the administration over whether Mr. Bush should warn Iran’s leaders that he will not allow them to get beyond some yet-undefined milestones, leaving the implication that a military strike on the country’s facilities is still an option.
Why are “those hard numbers” only the core of a debate within the Bush administration, rather than the core of a worldwide debate amongst all the nations soon to share the peril of the Iranian threat? Or at least a debate within the New York Times, for crying out loud?
Why? Because terrorism is Bush’s problem, not ours. Because the Left has more important problems, like lowering the planet’s temperature, and making sure oil companies don't make too much money.
It has been too rarely pointed out since 9/11 that the West’s war against jihad is a defensive war, and we are the defenders--fighting to stave off Islamists who first declared war on us. In fact, have declared war on us repeatedly, from the 8th century to the 16th century and Vienna and right on down to Beirut and bin Laden and Ahmadinejad.
After January 2009, that “so-called” war on terror will no longer be Bush’s war. It will either be our war, belonging to all of us, or it will belong only to, and be decided only by, those who first declared it on us.
The Times reports today on what it calls a debate behind the scenes at the White House between those who favor the diplomatic approach to reining in Iran’s nuclear program, and those who think military strikes are a better idea. (“Iran Strategy Stirs Debate at White House”)
The article offers this telling assessment of the recent trouble-making by Iran:
“Even beyond its nuclear program, Iran is emerging as an increasing source of trouble for the Bush administration by inflaming the insurgencies in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon and in Gaza, where it has provided military and financial support to the militant Islamic group Hamas, which now controls the Gaza Strip.”
Now has it occurred to anyone at the NYT that when Iran finally succeeds in toppling the government in Lebanon, or when it has helped re-establish the Taliban in Afghanistan, when it has finished helping to reduce Gaza to a Sharia prison, when it has facilitated the leveling of more mosques and provided more IEDs to murder GIs in Iraq, and then when it has finally obtained nuclear weapons to use against Israel and share with terrorists bent on destroying Americans, that it will be more than a source of trouble only to the Bush administration?
The Times seems marvelously disinterested by the whole mullahs-with-nukes scenario, while at the same time endlessly fascinated with the political Sturm und Drang inside the Bush White House.
In today's article the Times tries painting a picture of infighting between Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and her folks on the pro-diplomacy side, versus “the few remaining hawks inside the administration,” namely Dick Cheney and his guys. Cheney’s faction, the Times reports, “are pressing for greater consideration of military strikes against Iranian nuclear facilities.”
Well, let’s hope so. At a moment when there is so much bad news on nearly every front, I’m thankful somebody, somewhere, is still discussing hawkish options at policy meetings that don't open with shouts of "Death to America!"
And why should the Times find it noteworthy that there’s lively debate amongst the President’s counselors as they weigh the benefits between historically feckless diplomacy and the grave choice for war? If in the end we do strike Iran, you can just bet the NYT will be complaining that there “was no debate” leading up to the action, just as they mistakenly insist now that there was no debate before the Iraq war. Or, in the alternative, whatever his decision is, Bush later will be accused of having failed to listen to those on the other side. ("I do solemnly swear that I will protect and defend, and listen to, the views of those on the other side").
This kind of story also is meant to illustrate the leftist myth that George W. Bush is “isolated” behind an impenetrable barrier filtering out realities facing all the rest of us, realities painfully obvious to the sardonic Left. (You know: global warming, universal health care, America regaining popularity with all the really cool kids at the UN).
Not only can the Times count the rise of a nuclear armed and belligerent theocracy in Iran as nothing more than “an increasing source of trouble for the Bush administration,” the Left never tires of portraying how the “so-called” war on terror was never anything more than Bush’s paranoid invention, anyway, cooked up only to achieve the nefarious ends that caused him to seize power in 2000. Iraq is always “Bush’s war.” Al Qaeda latest moves are thwarting Bush. Hamas's takeover is a blow against Bush's efforts at peace in the region.
And to highlight this isolation, the Times says Secretary Rice’s pro-diplomacy corps “appear to be winning so far,” while Dick Cheney and his side, “the few remaining hawks inside the administration,” seem to be dwindling.
Of course, the President himself is inside the administration, and whether or not he turns out to be a hawk regarding Iran, he has already shown himself a hawk in the fight against jihad, and he still is the one who consistently refuses to remove the military option for Iran from the table.
Nor are the hawks limited to the few remaining in Dick Cheney’s posse. Joe Lieberman, hardly a Cheneyite, recently has been quite outspoken on the subject of Iran, saying two weeks ago on Face the Nation:
"We can tell them we want them to stop that, but if there's any hope of the Iranians living according to the international rule of law and stopping, for instance, their nuclear weapons development, we can't just talk to them," Lieberman said. "If they don't play by the rules, we've got to use our force, and to me that would include taking military action to stop them from doing what they're doing." (“Lieberman: Bomb Iran If It Doesn't Stop”).
Lieberman even favors a military strike into Iran on the sole basis of their involvement in attacks on US soldiers in Iraq:
"I think we've got to be prepared to take aggressive military action against the Iranians to stop them from killing Americans in Iraq," Mr. Lieberman said. "And to me, that would include a strike over the border into Iran, where we have good evidence that they have a base at which they are training these people coming back into Iraq to kill our soldiers." (“Lieberman Favors Military Hit on Iran”).
As I said before, I’m gratified to read that military options against Iran are being debated in the White House, even if, as the Times gloats, the diplomacy side seems to be winning for the moment. The fact that discussions are happening at all means military-strike options are being presented to the President, and that those arguing for continued diplomacy have to do it with ticking wristwatches held up to their noses by opponents.
As has become quite obvious since 9/11, the Left’s obtuseness on the reality of global jihad is an incurable affliction. Until the Bush administration leaves office in 18 months or so, defeats and victories in the war against jihadism abroad will serve no other purpose than to point up the failures of Bush’s foreign policy, and domestic events in the fight against attacks at home will be used only for outlining Bush’s totalitarian usurpations of power. Bush will continue to be portrayed as out of touch with reality, “reality” being defined rather liberally by the likes of Al Gore.
Yet it is the Left that dandles and plays with the harsh realities upon which it reports daily with a clueless innocence, like the toddler curiously peering down the barrel of its father’s loaded handgun.
How else could people write anything like the following:
In the year since Ms. Rice announced the new strategy for the United States to join forces with Europe, Russia and China to press Iran to suspend its uranium enrichment activities, Iran has installed more than a thousand centrifuges to enrich uranium. The International Atomic Energy Agency predicts that 8,000 or so could be spinning by the end of the year, if Iran surmounts its technical problems.
Those hard numbers are at the core of the debate within the administration over whether Mr. Bush should warn Iran’s leaders that he will not allow them to get beyond some yet-undefined milestones, leaving the implication that a military strike on the country’s facilities is still an option.
Why are “those hard numbers” only the core of a debate within the Bush administration, rather than the core of a worldwide debate amongst all the nations soon to share the peril of the Iranian threat? Or at least a debate within the New York Times, for crying out loud?
Why? Because terrorism is Bush’s problem, not ours. Because the Left has more important problems, like lowering the planet’s temperature, and making sure oil companies don't make too much money.
It has been too rarely pointed out since 9/11 that the West’s war against jihad is a defensive war, and we are the defenders--fighting to stave off Islamists who first declared war on us. In fact, have declared war on us repeatedly, from the 8th century to the 16th century and Vienna and right on down to Beirut and bin Laden and Ahmadinejad.
After January 2009, that “so-called” war on terror will no longer be Bush’s war. It will either be our war, belonging to all of us, or it will belong only to, and be decided only by, those who first declared it on us.
Friday, June 15, 2007
You Can't Lose By Blaming the Jews
From James Taranto’s June 14 WSJ “Best of the Web Today”:
Palestinian Family Planning
The Boston Globe editorial board looks at the Gaza civil war, and finds it's the fault of the Jews:
The people of Gaza are the true victims of the civil war most of all because the fighting is destroying their future. With the military wing of Hamas poised to seize complete control of Gaza in what Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has rightly called a "coup attempt," Gaza's residents stand to lose whatever hope remained of achieving independence and a decent life in a viable Palestinian state.
The Hamas campaign to eradicate Fatah from Gaza is certainly not the sole cause of Gazans' misery. They long suffered from Israel's suffocating occupation, and then from Ariel Sharon's foolishly unilateral withdrawal in 2005, a move that allowed Hamas to bid for power with the misleading claim that its rockets and suicide bombings had driven Israeli soldiers and settlers out of Gaza.
According to the Globe, Israel is to blame both for its "occupation" and for having ended it--the latter of which "allowed Hamas to bid for power." But "the people of Gaza" are innocent victims. It somehow escapes the Globe's notice that Hamas came to power because Palestinians voted for it. The Globe denies that Palestinians are responsible for their own actions, and thereby dehumanizes them under a pretense of compassion.
The Jerusalem Post, meanwhile, reports on a foiled terror plot:
The Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) said Wednesday that it thwarted a double suicide attack set for Tel Aviv and Netanya last month, orchestrated by Islamic Jihad and meant to be carried out by two Palestinian women, one of them pregnant.
One of the women, Fatma Zak, 39, a mother of eight in her ninth month of pregnancy, has been director of Islamic Jihad's women labor department in Gaza City for the past four years. As part of her job, she was in direct contact with senior terrorists and served as a go-between for women interested in becoming suicide bombers. . . .
The two women admitted the plot and confessed to being Islamic Jihad operatives. They said they had used Israel's humanitarian policy to acquire entrance permits on a false medical pretext.
One wonders how the Globe editorialists would spin this one. Israeli occupation has made it so difficult for Palestinian women to obtain family planning services that some have resorted to desperate measures to exercise their right to choose.
Palestinian Family Planning
The Boston Globe editorial board looks at the Gaza civil war, and finds it's the fault of the Jews:
The people of Gaza are the true victims of the civil war most of all because the fighting is destroying their future. With the military wing of Hamas poised to seize complete control of Gaza in what Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has rightly called a "coup attempt," Gaza's residents stand to lose whatever hope remained of achieving independence and a decent life in a viable Palestinian state.
The Hamas campaign to eradicate Fatah from Gaza is certainly not the sole cause of Gazans' misery. They long suffered from Israel's suffocating occupation, and then from Ariel Sharon's foolishly unilateral withdrawal in 2005, a move that allowed Hamas to bid for power with the misleading claim that its rockets and suicide bombings had driven Israeli soldiers and settlers out of Gaza.
According to the Globe, Israel is to blame both for its "occupation" and for having ended it--the latter of which "allowed Hamas to bid for power." But "the people of Gaza" are innocent victims. It somehow escapes the Globe's notice that Hamas came to power because Palestinians voted for it. The Globe denies that Palestinians are responsible for their own actions, and thereby dehumanizes them under a pretense of compassion.
The Jerusalem Post, meanwhile, reports on a foiled terror plot:
The Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) said Wednesday that it thwarted a double suicide attack set for Tel Aviv and Netanya last month, orchestrated by Islamic Jihad and meant to be carried out by two Palestinian women, one of them pregnant.
One of the women, Fatma Zak, 39, a mother of eight in her ninth month of pregnancy, has been director of Islamic Jihad's women labor department in Gaza City for the past four years. As part of her job, she was in direct contact with senior terrorists and served as a go-between for women interested in becoming suicide bombers. . . .
The two women admitted the plot and confessed to being Islamic Jihad operatives. They said they had used Israel's humanitarian policy to acquire entrance permits on a false medical pretext.
One wonders how the Globe editorialists would spin this one. Israeli occupation has made it so difficult for Palestinian women to obtain family planning services that some have resorted to desperate measures to exercise their right to choose.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Free Press Discovers a Patriarchy It Approves Of
Niraj Warikoo’s Detroit Free Press feature article on Tuesday about the increase in Muslim women wearing headscarves in metro Detroit (“A return to tradition: More Muslim women in metro Detroit defy stares and prejudice by wearing head scarves”) is more of interest to me for what I expect it will not do, than what I expect it ever will do.
What it will not do, is call down a storm of protest from feminists, defenders of women’s rights nor the usual critics of the injustices endemic in patriarchal society. I will be shocked if there is anything less than a category five hurricane of silence.
According to Mr. Warikoo’s article, the decision by Muslim women to go about in public wearing the hijab “comes with a price”: reactions of “stares and prejudice” from non-Muslims, and the usual tongue-wagging ignoramuses (ignorami) who reportedly cruise Dearborn’s streets endlessly searching for Middle Easterners to jeer at.
Mr. Warikoo quotes one young lady on the price she pays:
“Some "look at us, smirk, stick out their tongues or shout out the window, 'Why do you have that on?' " said Arrwa Mogalli, 29, of Dearborn, who has worn hijab since she was 11. "You have nuns totally covered ... and no one questions it. But when a Muslim does it, we're from outer space."
As a ten-year Dearborn resident and a longtime Catholic, I have a point of difference with Ms. Mogalli on whether she often sees “nuns totally covered” in or around Dearborn, since any such spectacle was swept from every American diocese years before Ms. Mogalli began wearing hijab, or was even born. American nuns now march around waving their “NO WAR” signs in modest J.C. Penney pantsuits, and generally despise veils as reactionary, pre-Vatican II mummery.
But speaking on my own account, the religious sisters who tried to educate me all those years ago still wore habits and uncomfortable veils, and it’s true we did not question it, and I have never questioned the logic of Islamic women wearing veils up until now. The sisters wore their veils for the same reason that Islamic women wear them now (that is, when they're wearing them without compulsion and with a free will, and not under orders from the religious police)--for reasons of female modesty.
But Mr. Warikoo is kidding us if he thinks that the big challenge of Muslim young girls and women wearing hijab is that they have to do it in defiance of curious outsiders.
As he quotes from one Roleen Nawwas, in the theme sentence he sandbags till the end of his story, “the underlying concept [of hijab] is…‘A woman is like a pearl that needs to be hidden.’”
Which of course is a completely revolutionary idea. Or, to go back to my comment about the nuns, it is not revolutionary, but reactionary. The Islamic hijab, and the entire concept of female modesty, no less than the concept that a woman is a priceless thing that must be protected and hidden away, are so nakedly alien and contradictory to western values and ideas about equality and the relationship between the sexes as to be practically a return to the 12th century. Or, what is probably even more upsetting, practically a return to the 1950s.
I wouldn’t know how to begin documenting how enthusiastically the Detroit Free Press, for the forty years or so I’ve been reading it, has championed (under the generic heading of “women’s rights”) things like unrestricted abortion, no-fault divorce, the Equal Rights Amendment, Title IX entitlement for female athletes, compulsory sex education, liberal access to contraceptives for minors, government-subsidized child care, and that whole thing generally known as the “sexual revolution,” and the whole thing that has been called “equality for women.”
At the same time, the Free Press has staunchly opposed any social or legislative scheme that sought, or could even be accused of seeking, to impose “traditional”, regressive ideas about the sexes, the family, marriage, sex, or society on the rest of the masses yearning to breathe free. I've seen the Free Press shown such a consistent antipathy to traditional Catholicism that I have come to believe they have a shadow job title of Anti-Catholic Issues Editor.
Of course the Detroit Free Press was just one of thousands of liberal publications, read by, and responding to millions of like-minded readers through the years. They don't invent this stuff. They just repeat it in their pages. Endlessly. By now we can all recite the prevailing philosophy backwards and forwards.
For instance, we know now that a woman’s social equality with a man is best manifested when she competes with men in the workplace, and is least apparent when she submits herself to “traditional,” “patriarchal,” ideas of home and family that condemn her to remaining only a housewife and mother, in other words, being a loser.
We also have learned that a woman’s sexual equality with a man is best manifested when she is just as free as a man to choose engaging in guilt-free, uncommitted sexual relationships with men (or, for extra credit, other women); a healthy female begins this career no later than her mid-teens, and abstinence and chastity are nothing more than holdovers of stupid repressive religions invented by men to keep women down.
Only on June 8 the Free Press ran an editorial taking the, for them, unremarkable position of opposing abstinence-only sex education. (“Teach sex education for the real world”). And why not? Liberal, sophisticated, unshackled by arbitrary rules and guilt trips, the Free Press understands that young people cannot be expected to abstain from sex, and, when they don’t abstain, there isn't anything wrong with that, except perhaps for the health angle. Only tight-assed fun-killing repressive religious nuts think otherwise. The creeps.
Yet now here we are with a front-page story that takes this whole philosophy and upends it into the nearest trashcan. To wit: “The purpose of hijab: preserving modesty”, “the underlying concept [of hijab] is…‘A woman is like a pearl that needs to be hidden.’” Not only does the point of view uncritically praise the virtues of sexual modesty, but, even worse, it unapologetically endorses female subservience in a traditional stay-at-home role.
It is describing, as the headline boldly claims, and again without a word of apology, a "return to tradition." And we know the term "tradition" itself is dirtier to most liberals than any four-letter word, and that the notion of returning to the past is absolutely verboten to any self-respecting, right-thinking, progressive. One doesn't progress by going backwards, does one?
And just imagine how much more hated he would have been, (if it is possible to imagine he could have been hated more), if Jerry Falwell, in life, had made a public statement that “A woman is like a pearl that needs to be hidden.”
Or imagine if Lawrence Summers, in addition to pointing out to his Harvard professors that innate differences may have explain the fact of fewer female professors in math and science, claimed "it was all good, anyway" because “a woman is like a pearl that needs to be hidden.” (“Summers' remarks on women draw fire”).
Rather than being fired and allowed to drive out of town at the wheel of his own Volvo, Summers would surely have been carried out of town on a rail, after being tarred and feathered, and the Free Press editorial board would have looked on, approving.
The issue of Islam and its treatment of women is a huge one, and I'm not even trying to tackle it here. Suffice it so say that neither traditional sexual roles, nor modesty and chastity, are exclusive to the religion of Islam.
But we do know that, regardless of what I may think about traditional sex roles and modesty symbolized in the hijab or the nakoor, those virtues in much milder form are utterly obnoxious to an entire society full of ordinarily outspoken and indignant feminists, liberals, freethinkers, and progressives of all kinds.
But they won’t speak out. They never do. Not if the women are Muslim, and not if the reactionary force is Islam.
I don't know exactly why this is, whether it is hypocrisy, fear, or a hatred for Islam's enemies that is greater than hatred for the West's heritage. But it is as certain as sunrise that the Left will not decry in Dearborn's headscarves what it despises in a much more light-handed form in America's Christian colleges, churches, and schools.
What it will not do, is call down a storm of protest from feminists, defenders of women’s rights nor the usual critics of the injustices endemic in patriarchal society. I will be shocked if there is anything less than a category five hurricane of silence.
According to Mr. Warikoo’s article, the decision by Muslim women to go about in public wearing the hijab “comes with a price”: reactions of “stares and prejudice” from non-Muslims, and the usual tongue-wagging ignoramuses (ignorami) who reportedly cruise Dearborn’s streets endlessly searching for Middle Easterners to jeer at.
Mr. Warikoo quotes one young lady on the price she pays:
“Some "look at us, smirk, stick out their tongues or shout out the window, 'Why do you have that on?' " said Arrwa Mogalli, 29, of Dearborn, who has worn hijab since she was 11. "You have nuns totally covered ... and no one questions it. But when a Muslim does it, we're from outer space."
As a ten-year Dearborn resident and a longtime Catholic, I have a point of difference with Ms. Mogalli on whether she often sees “nuns totally covered” in or around Dearborn, since any such spectacle was swept from every American diocese years before Ms. Mogalli began wearing hijab, or was even born. American nuns now march around waving their “NO WAR” signs in modest J.C. Penney pantsuits, and generally despise veils as reactionary, pre-Vatican II mummery.
But speaking on my own account, the religious sisters who tried to educate me all those years ago still wore habits and uncomfortable veils, and it’s true we did not question it, and I have never questioned the logic of Islamic women wearing veils up until now. The sisters wore their veils for the same reason that Islamic women wear them now (that is, when they're wearing them without compulsion and with a free will, and not under orders from the religious police)--for reasons of female modesty.
But Mr. Warikoo is kidding us if he thinks that the big challenge of Muslim young girls and women wearing hijab is that they have to do it in defiance of curious outsiders.
As he quotes from one Roleen Nawwas, in the theme sentence he sandbags till the end of his story, “the underlying concept [of hijab] is…‘A woman is like a pearl that needs to be hidden.’”
Which of course is a completely revolutionary idea. Or, to go back to my comment about the nuns, it is not revolutionary, but reactionary. The Islamic hijab, and the entire concept of female modesty, no less than the concept that a woman is a priceless thing that must be protected and hidden away, are so nakedly alien and contradictory to western values and ideas about equality and the relationship between the sexes as to be practically a return to the 12th century. Or, what is probably even more upsetting, practically a return to the 1950s.
I wouldn’t know how to begin documenting how enthusiastically the Detroit Free Press, for the forty years or so I’ve been reading it, has championed (under the generic heading of “women’s rights”) things like unrestricted abortion, no-fault divorce, the Equal Rights Amendment, Title IX entitlement for female athletes, compulsory sex education, liberal access to contraceptives for minors, government-subsidized child care, and that whole thing generally known as the “sexual revolution,” and the whole thing that has been called “equality for women.”
At the same time, the Free Press has staunchly opposed any social or legislative scheme that sought, or could even be accused of seeking, to impose “traditional”, regressive ideas about the sexes, the family, marriage, sex, or society on the rest of the masses yearning to breathe free. I've seen the Free Press shown such a consistent antipathy to traditional Catholicism that I have come to believe they have a shadow job title of Anti-Catholic Issues Editor.
Of course the Detroit Free Press was just one of thousands of liberal publications, read by, and responding to millions of like-minded readers through the years. They don't invent this stuff. They just repeat it in their pages. Endlessly. By now we can all recite the prevailing philosophy backwards and forwards.
For instance, we know now that a woman’s social equality with a man is best manifested when she competes with men in the workplace, and is least apparent when she submits herself to “traditional,” “patriarchal,” ideas of home and family that condemn her to remaining only a housewife and mother, in other words, being a loser.
We also have learned that a woman’s sexual equality with a man is best manifested when she is just as free as a man to choose engaging in guilt-free, uncommitted sexual relationships with men (or, for extra credit, other women); a healthy female begins this career no later than her mid-teens, and abstinence and chastity are nothing more than holdovers of stupid repressive religions invented by men to keep women down.
Only on June 8 the Free Press ran an editorial taking the, for them, unremarkable position of opposing abstinence-only sex education. (“Teach sex education for the real world”). And why not? Liberal, sophisticated, unshackled by arbitrary rules and guilt trips, the Free Press understands that young people cannot be expected to abstain from sex, and, when they don’t abstain, there isn't anything wrong with that, except perhaps for the health angle. Only tight-assed fun-killing repressive religious nuts think otherwise. The creeps.
Yet now here we are with a front-page story that takes this whole philosophy and upends it into the nearest trashcan. To wit: “The purpose of hijab: preserving modesty”, “the underlying concept [of hijab] is…‘A woman is like a pearl that needs to be hidden.’” Not only does the point of view uncritically praise the virtues of sexual modesty, but, even worse, it unapologetically endorses female subservience in a traditional stay-at-home role.
It is describing, as the headline boldly claims, and again without a word of apology, a "return to tradition." And we know the term "tradition" itself is dirtier to most liberals than any four-letter word, and that the notion of returning to the past is absolutely verboten to any self-respecting, right-thinking, progressive. One doesn't progress by going backwards, does one?
And just imagine how much more hated he would have been, (if it is possible to imagine he could have been hated more), if Jerry Falwell, in life, had made a public statement that “A woman is like a pearl that needs to be hidden.”
Or imagine if Lawrence Summers, in addition to pointing out to his Harvard professors that innate differences may have explain the fact of fewer female professors in math and science, claimed "it was all good, anyway" because “a woman is like a pearl that needs to be hidden.” (“Summers' remarks on women draw fire”).
Rather than being fired and allowed to drive out of town at the wheel of his own Volvo, Summers would surely have been carried out of town on a rail, after being tarred and feathered, and the Free Press editorial board would have looked on, approving.
The issue of Islam and its treatment of women is a huge one, and I'm not even trying to tackle it here. Suffice it so say that neither traditional sexual roles, nor modesty and chastity, are exclusive to the religion of Islam.
But we do know that, regardless of what I may think about traditional sex roles and modesty symbolized in the hijab or the nakoor, those virtues in much milder form are utterly obnoxious to an entire society full of ordinarily outspoken and indignant feminists, liberals, freethinkers, and progressives of all kinds.
But they won’t speak out. They never do. Not if the women are Muslim, and not if the reactionary force is Islam.
I don't know exactly why this is, whether it is hypocrisy, fear, or a hatred for Islam's enemies that is greater than hatred for the West's heritage. But it is as certain as sunrise that the Left will not decry in Dearborn's headscarves what it despises in a much more light-handed form in America's Christian colleges, churches, and schools.
Local Arab Americans Call for National Unity-- Islamic National Unity
Osama Siblani’s Arab-American News reports on last week’s mass unity rally (60 people or so, including children, though some sources have disputed even that high number) in front of Dearborn City Hall. “Local Arab Americans call for national unity”). Organized by local activist Tarek Baydoun, the rally was billed as a call for “national unity” and solidarity among the local Lebanese, Palestinians, and Iraqis in the face of increasing infighting in the Arab Middle East.
Youngblood Baydoun has been getting around: from involvement in a student-election fraud investigation at UM-Dearborn last year, ("SG ELECTIONS UNDER FIRE AGAIN"), to working for the college to divest from Israel, ("U-M Dearborn Passes Divestment Resolution"), to attacking critics of the proposed UM-Dearborn foot baths as "ideologically charged, right-wing bloggers" spreading "vitriolic, Islamaphobic rhetoric over the footbaths."
Said Baydoun, “It is time for us to tell our own stories and plot our own destinies. Unity is needed…that will help us forge a brighter future for our community and the oppressed people in the Middle East and around the world.”
Fellow activist Rashid Baydoun said, “We are here in solidarity with the Palestinian, Iraqi, and Lebanese people. We want to let the American public know we are united.”
Attendee Imam Mohammed Ali Elahi also spoke out on the subject of national unity, actually quoting the Pledge of Allegiance, “I think unity and justice are the foundations of our faith. We are one nation under God, and we are one family.”
Except when the imam talked about being “one nation under God,” he wasn't talking about the American nation, but the Islamic nation, the ummah:
“We are one family under God, one humanity under God. Unity comes from God, disunity comes from Satan.”
The article portrays Imam Hisham Husseiny expanding on this idea.
"Quoting the Qur'an, he reminded the audience that, ‘The believers are like one body through their love, harmony, unity, and suffering. If one person suffers, the whole nation suffers. So wherever you grow a rose, it will bloom from America to Iraq to Lebanon to Palestine.’”
Any religion worthy of the name recognizes that obedience and devotion to one’s faith must come before even national loyalty. If forced to choose, I am a Catholic first, before I am an American.
But most of the time, we are not forced to choose, which is why people of almost every faith have been able to come to America and practice their various religions without having to renounce either citizenship or patriotism. It is also the reason we usually discuss our ultimate loyalties within our own religious communities, rather than wrapping them around bricks to throw defiantly at our benighted fellow citizens.
That's why I say, almost every faith has been able to blend into America, because there is always that exception one simply must make for Islam.
We noted the other day the self-defeating program of Muslim activists who engage in the most extreme rhetoric or tactics of intimidation against critics of any kind, while at the same time howling that Americans aren't any less suspicious of Muslims than they were immediately after 9/11.
Last week’s rally fits the pattern. The organizers say they wanted to “let the American public know we are united.” But united with whom? With the American public? No, but “… with the Palestinian, Iraqi, and Lebanese people.” With the “believers,” with the “one family,” with “humanity,” as defined by Islam. In other words, it's "Hey, America, we're united--WITH EACH OTHER. You go to hell! And what do you mean you don't trust us?"
By the way, the term “humanity” doesn’t include kaffirs like you and me.
And for all the talk about growing roses, Siblani drags the whole rainbow unity project back down to Earth when he prattles on about “how mature” these young firebrands are “regarding our causes. It is the first time in which Iraqis, Lebanese, and Palestinians stand together to condemn the same cause, the occupation. It is the occupation that is the source of all problems in the Arab world."
Siblani was unclear which “occupation” he had in mind, whether the old chestnut about the "illegal" occupation of Israel by Israelis, or the “occupation” of Iraq by a liberating coalition, both of which he hates. (For a better idea of where Siblani’s sympathies lie, take a look at a fawning pro-al-Sadr piece he just published in his newspaper. (“Iraq passes resolution to end occupation”)).
Or, there is always the occupation of Islamic lands by even a single infidel soldier--the ummah hates that one, too.
And it's not very encouraging to see that Siblani views the rally’s participants as “Iraqis, Lebanese, and Palestinians”--not as Americans.
Americans of all kinds, who owe no allegiance to the Prophet, can claim a respectable record of showing solidarity with “Iraqis, Lebanese, and Palestinians,” because as a nation we have shed blood to defend them (Iraq and Lebanon), or suffered through decades of costly and thankless frustration in an effort to foster the blooming of sanity in a wasteland of implacable hatred and revenge (Palestine).
We at Dearborn Underground are not in the business of advising Islamic leaders on how to do better PR with the American public. We’re much too busy commenting on the details of the bad public relations they’re already practicing as if by rote.
But for those who are trying to decide whether or not it’s true that Muslims in America are doing their best to blend in, this sort of public theater is worth a serious look.
Youngblood Baydoun has been getting around: from involvement in a student-election fraud investigation at UM-Dearborn last year, ("SG ELECTIONS UNDER FIRE AGAIN"), to working for the college to divest from Israel, ("U-M Dearborn Passes Divestment Resolution"), to attacking critics of the proposed UM-Dearborn foot baths as "ideologically charged, right-wing bloggers" spreading "vitriolic, Islamaphobic rhetoric over the footbaths."
Said Baydoun, “It is time for us to tell our own stories and plot our own destinies. Unity is needed…that will help us forge a brighter future for our community and the oppressed people in the Middle East and around the world.”
Fellow activist Rashid Baydoun said, “We are here in solidarity with the Palestinian, Iraqi, and Lebanese people. We want to let the American public know we are united.”
Attendee Imam Mohammed Ali Elahi also spoke out on the subject of national unity, actually quoting the Pledge of Allegiance, “I think unity and justice are the foundations of our faith. We are one nation under God, and we are one family.”
Except when the imam talked about being “one nation under God,” he wasn't talking about the American nation, but the Islamic nation, the ummah:
“We are one family under God, one humanity under God. Unity comes from God, disunity comes from Satan.”
The article portrays Imam Hisham Husseiny expanding on this idea.
"Quoting the Qur'an, he reminded the audience that, ‘The believers are like one body through their love, harmony, unity, and suffering. If one person suffers, the whole nation suffers. So wherever you grow a rose, it will bloom from America to Iraq to Lebanon to Palestine.’”
Any religion worthy of the name recognizes that obedience and devotion to one’s faith must come before even national loyalty. If forced to choose, I am a Catholic first, before I am an American.
But most of the time, we are not forced to choose, which is why people of almost every faith have been able to come to America and practice their various religions without having to renounce either citizenship or patriotism. It is also the reason we usually discuss our ultimate loyalties within our own religious communities, rather than wrapping them around bricks to throw defiantly at our benighted fellow citizens.
That's why I say, almost every faith has been able to blend into America, because there is always that exception one simply must make for Islam.
We noted the other day the self-defeating program of Muslim activists who engage in the most extreme rhetoric or tactics of intimidation against critics of any kind, while at the same time howling that Americans aren't any less suspicious of Muslims than they were immediately after 9/11.
Last week’s rally fits the pattern. The organizers say they wanted to “let the American public know we are united.” But united with whom? With the American public? No, but “… with the Palestinian, Iraqi, and Lebanese people.” With the “believers,” with the “one family,” with “humanity,” as defined by Islam. In other words, it's "Hey, America, we're united--WITH EACH OTHER. You go to hell! And what do you mean you don't trust us?"
By the way, the term “humanity” doesn’t include kaffirs like you and me.
And for all the talk about growing roses, Siblani drags the whole rainbow unity project back down to Earth when he prattles on about “how mature” these young firebrands are “regarding our causes. It is the first time in which Iraqis, Lebanese, and Palestinians stand together to condemn the same cause, the occupation. It is the occupation that is the source of all problems in the Arab world."
Siblani was unclear which “occupation” he had in mind, whether the old chestnut about the "illegal" occupation of Israel by Israelis, or the “occupation” of Iraq by a liberating coalition, both of which he hates. (For a better idea of where Siblani’s sympathies lie, take a look at a fawning pro-al-Sadr piece he just published in his newspaper. (“Iraq passes resolution to end occupation”)).
Or, there is always the occupation of Islamic lands by even a single infidel soldier--the ummah hates that one, too.
And it's not very encouraging to see that Siblani views the rally’s participants as “Iraqis, Lebanese, and Palestinians”--not as Americans.
Americans of all kinds, who owe no allegiance to the Prophet, can claim a respectable record of showing solidarity with “Iraqis, Lebanese, and Palestinians,” because as a nation we have shed blood to defend them (Iraq and Lebanon), or suffered through decades of costly and thankless frustration in an effort to foster the blooming of sanity in a wasteland of implacable hatred and revenge (Palestine).
We at Dearborn Underground are not in the business of advising Islamic leaders on how to do better PR with the American public. We’re much too busy commenting on the details of the bad public relations they’re already practicing as if by rote.
But for those who are trying to decide whether or not it’s true that Muslims in America are doing their best to blend in, this sort of public theater is worth a serious look.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
CAIR: Just a Shadow of Its Former Self, But Still Plenty Shadowy
A Washington Times article reports how tax documents obtained from the IRS reveal that the membership of Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has fallen by 90% since 9/11. “CAIR membersip falls 90% since 9/11”).
From a total of more than 29,000 in 2000, CAIR membership has plummeted to fewer than 1,700 dues-paying members in 2006.
One critic, fellow Muslim M. Zuhdi Jasser, director of American Islamic Forum for Democracy, is quoted saying it is a “myth” that CAIR represents the American Muslim population, as opposed to only its donors and members.
“’Post-9/11, they have marginalized themselves by their tired exploitation of media attention for victimization issues at the expense of representing the priorities of the American Muslim population,’ Mr. Jasser said.”
In spite of the lack of dues-paying members, CAIR has from 19 to 26 contributors who have provided up to $2.6 million annually. The donor names were redacted in the tax documents obtained by the Washington Times.
CAIR has a long association with the Muslim Brotherhood. A recent federal indictment charging the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development with fund-rasing for Hamas, money laundering, and tax fraud, listed CAIR among 300 unindicted co-conspirators.
From a total of more than 29,000 in 2000, CAIR membership has plummeted to fewer than 1,700 dues-paying members in 2006.
One critic, fellow Muslim M. Zuhdi Jasser, director of American Islamic Forum for Democracy, is quoted saying it is a “myth” that CAIR represents the American Muslim population, as opposed to only its donors and members.
“’Post-9/11, they have marginalized themselves by their tired exploitation of media attention for victimization issues at the expense of representing the priorities of the American Muslim population,’ Mr. Jasser said.”
In spite of the lack of dues-paying members, CAIR has from 19 to 26 contributors who have provided up to $2.6 million annually. The donor names were redacted in the tax documents obtained by the Washington Times.
CAIR has a long association with the Muslim Brotherhood. A recent federal indictment charging the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development with fund-rasing for Hamas, money laundering, and tax fraud, listed CAIR among 300 unindicted co-conspirators.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
The Soldier's Creed
Fouad Ajami sent the following open letter in last Friday's Wall Street Journal to President Bush. Its subject is I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. It is well worth reading, and thinking about.
Fallen Soldier
Mr. President, do not leave this man behind.
BY FOUAD AJAMI
Friday, June 8, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Mr. President, some weeks ago, I wrote a letter of appeal, a character reference, to Judge Reggie B. Walton, urging leniency for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Scooter, I said, has seen the undoing of his world, but he comes before a "just court in a just and decent country." I was joined by men and women of greater acclaim in our public life, but the petitions were in vain. Now the legal process has played out, Judge Walton has issued a harsh prison term of 30 months, and what will rescue this honorable man is the power of pardon that is exclusively yours.
This case has been, from the start, about the Iraq war and its legitimacy. Judge Walton came to it late; before him were laid bare the technical and narrowly legalistic matters of it. But you possess a greater knowledge of this case, a keen sense of the man caught up in this storm, and of the great contest and tensions that swirl around the Iraq war. To Scooter's detractors, and yours, it was the "sin" of that devoted public servant that he believed in the nobility of this war, that he did not trim his sails, and that he didn't duck when the war lost its luster.
In "The Soldier's Creed," there is a particularly compelling principle: "I will never leave a fallen comrade." This is a cherished belief, and it has been so since soldiers and chroniclers and philosophers thought about wars and great, common endeavors. Across time and space, cultures, each in its own way, have given voice to this most basic of beliefs. They have done it, we know, to give heart to those who embark on a common mission, to give them confidence that they will not be given up under duress. A process that yields up Scooter Libby to a zealous prosecutor is justice gone awry.
Mr. President, the one defining mark of your own moral outlook is the distinction between friend and foe, a refusal to be lulled into moral and political compromises. Your critics have made much of this and have seen it as self-righteousness and moral absolutism, but this has guided you through the great, divisive issues faced by our country over these last, searing years. Scooter Libby was a soldier in your--our--war in Iraq, he was chief of staff to a vice president who had become a lightning rod to the war's critics. He didn't sit around the councils of power only to make the rounds in Georgetown's salons insinuating that this was not his war all along. He didn't claim this war when it promised an easy victory only to desert it when it stalled in the alleyways of Fallujah and Baghdad and in the twilight world of Arab politics. You are not a lawyer, Mr. President, nor is the vast populace out there. The men and women who entrusted you with the presidency, I dare say, are hard pressed to understand why former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who was the admitted leaker of Mrs. Wilson's identity to columnist Robert Novak, has the comforts of home and freedom and privilege while Scooter Libby faces the dreaded prospect of imprisonment.
Much ink has been spilled on this case, and its moral and legal absurdity is more evident by the day. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald could not, and would not, decide whether this was a case about outing an undercover agent, or a plain case of perjury and obstruction of justice. He had the best of possible worlds: He presented this case as one of perjury, insisted that the undercover status of Valerie Plame Wilson was of no consequence, then shifted grounds to introduce the Intelligence Identities Protection Act at a latter phase in the proceedings. The "covertness" of Mrs. Wilson was never convincingly and fully established. Even Judge Walton himself was not sure of her employment status. So the recollections of Scooter Libby clashed with those of journalist Tim Russert? Surely, we don't end an honorable career in public service and haul a man off to prison on that thinnest of reeds.
A war raged in the inner councils of your administration. The Department of State and the CIA let it be known that they were on the side of the angels, that they harbored great doubts about this expedition into Iraq, that they were "multilateralists" at heart, but that they had lost the war to Vice President Dick Cheney and to the "hawks" around him. In the midst of this, Scooter Libby worked tirelessly and quietly to prosecute and explain and defend this war. He accepted the logic of the Iraq war, the great surprises we met in the course of this war.
He was never a triumphalist. The man I got to know in the aftermath of 9/11, the man you know so much better, was stoical about our causes in the Arab-Islamic world. He was a man of great depth. He knew moral complexity (his remarkably lyrical novel, "The Apprentice," bears witness to an eye for human folly and disappointment) but he stuck to your agenda and to this war. He was not steeped in the ways of the Arabs, but he sought out, tirelessly, all that could be ascertained about the radicalisms threatening our country. From my vantage point as an interpreter of Arab and Islamic matters, I could testify to his great curiosity and relentless devotion. He was keen to understand the winds at play in the Islamic world. This legal process thus removed from the higher ranks of our national security a man of real abilities and insight.
The Schadenfreude of your political detractors over the Libby verdict lays bare the essence of this case: an indictment of the Iraq war itself. The critics of the war shall grant you no reprieve if you let Scooter Libby do prison time. They will see his imprisonment as additional proof that this has been a war of folly from the outset.
At the beginning of this ordeal, it would have been the proper thing to acknowledge that this case rested on a political difference over the prosecution of the war, that Valerie Plame Wilson and Joseph Wilson were protagonists in a struggle over the conflict. It was then, it should be recalled, that you, Mr. President, said that any of your staff caught up in that case "would no longer work in my administration." And it was then that the Justice Department stepped out of the way to let a special prosecutor launch an investigation that would, by necessity, have to vindicate itself. The better part of wisdom was to see the matter for what it was--a policy difference over the war, a matter that should never have been criminalized.
The prosecutor, and the jury and the judge, had before them a case that purported to stand alone, a trial of one man's memory and recollections. But you have before you what they and the rest of us don't--a memory of the passions and the panic, and the certitude, which gave rise to the war. And a sense, I am confident, of the quiet and selfless man who sat in the outer circle when your cabinet deliberated over our country's choices in Iraq, and in those burning grounds of the Arab-Islamic world. Scooter Libby was there for the beginning of that campaign. He can't be left behind as a casualty of a war our country had once proudly claimed as its own.
Mr. Ajami, the 2006 Bradley Prize recipient, teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University.
Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Fallen Soldier
Mr. President, do not leave this man behind.
BY FOUAD AJAMI
Friday, June 8, 2007 12:01 a.m.
Mr. President, some weeks ago, I wrote a letter of appeal, a character reference, to Judge Reggie B. Walton, urging leniency for I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Scooter, I said, has seen the undoing of his world, but he comes before a "just court in a just and decent country." I was joined by men and women of greater acclaim in our public life, but the petitions were in vain. Now the legal process has played out, Judge Walton has issued a harsh prison term of 30 months, and what will rescue this honorable man is the power of pardon that is exclusively yours.
This case has been, from the start, about the Iraq war and its legitimacy. Judge Walton came to it late; before him were laid bare the technical and narrowly legalistic matters of it. But you possess a greater knowledge of this case, a keen sense of the man caught up in this storm, and of the great contest and tensions that swirl around the Iraq war. To Scooter's detractors, and yours, it was the "sin" of that devoted public servant that he believed in the nobility of this war, that he did not trim his sails, and that he didn't duck when the war lost its luster.
In "The Soldier's Creed," there is a particularly compelling principle: "I will never leave a fallen comrade." This is a cherished belief, and it has been so since soldiers and chroniclers and philosophers thought about wars and great, common endeavors. Across time and space, cultures, each in its own way, have given voice to this most basic of beliefs. They have done it, we know, to give heart to those who embark on a common mission, to give them confidence that they will not be given up under duress. A process that yields up Scooter Libby to a zealous prosecutor is justice gone awry.
Mr. President, the one defining mark of your own moral outlook is the distinction between friend and foe, a refusal to be lulled into moral and political compromises. Your critics have made much of this and have seen it as self-righteousness and moral absolutism, but this has guided you through the great, divisive issues faced by our country over these last, searing years. Scooter Libby was a soldier in your--our--war in Iraq, he was chief of staff to a vice president who had become a lightning rod to the war's critics. He didn't sit around the councils of power only to make the rounds in Georgetown's salons insinuating that this was not his war all along. He didn't claim this war when it promised an easy victory only to desert it when it stalled in the alleyways of Fallujah and Baghdad and in the twilight world of Arab politics. You are not a lawyer, Mr. President, nor is the vast populace out there. The men and women who entrusted you with the presidency, I dare say, are hard pressed to understand why former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, who was the admitted leaker of Mrs. Wilson's identity to columnist Robert Novak, has the comforts of home and freedom and privilege while Scooter Libby faces the dreaded prospect of imprisonment.
Much ink has been spilled on this case, and its moral and legal absurdity is more evident by the day. Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald could not, and would not, decide whether this was a case about outing an undercover agent, or a plain case of perjury and obstruction of justice. He had the best of possible worlds: He presented this case as one of perjury, insisted that the undercover status of Valerie Plame Wilson was of no consequence, then shifted grounds to introduce the Intelligence Identities Protection Act at a latter phase in the proceedings. The "covertness" of Mrs. Wilson was never convincingly and fully established. Even Judge Walton himself was not sure of her employment status. So the recollections of Scooter Libby clashed with those of journalist Tim Russert? Surely, we don't end an honorable career in public service and haul a man off to prison on that thinnest of reeds.
A war raged in the inner councils of your administration. The Department of State and the CIA let it be known that they were on the side of the angels, that they harbored great doubts about this expedition into Iraq, that they were "multilateralists" at heart, but that they had lost the war to Vice President Dick Cheney and to the "hawks" around him. In the midst of this, Scooter Libby worked tirelessly and quietly to prosecute and explain and defend this war. He accepted the logic of the Iraq war, the great surprises we met in the course of this war.
He was never a triumphalist. The man I got to know in the aftermath of 9/11, the man you know so much better, was stoical about our causes in the Arab-Islamic world. He was a man of great depth. He knew moral complexity (his remarkably lyrical novel, "The Apprentice," bears witness to an eye for human folly and disappointment) but he stuck to your agenda and to this war. He was not steeped in the ways of the Arabs, but he sought out, tirelessly, all that could be ascertained about the radicalisms threatening our country. From my vantage point as an interpreter of Arab and Islamic matters, I could testify to his great curiosity and relentless devotion. He was keen to understand the winds at play in the Islamic world. This legal process thus removed from the higher ranks of our national security a man of real abilities and insight.
The Schadenfreude of your political detractors over the Libby verdict lays bare the essence of this case: an indictment of the Iraq war itself. The critics of the war shall grant you no reprieve if you let Scooter Libby do prison time. They will see his imprisonment as additional proof that this has been a war of folly from the outset.
At the beginning of this ordeal, it would have been the proper thing to acknowledge that this case rested on a political difference over the prosecution of the war, that Valerie Plame Wilson and Joseph Wilson were protagonists in a struggle over the conflict. It was then, it should be recalled, that you, Mr. President, said that any of your staff caught up in that case "would no longer work in my administration." And it was then that the Justice Department stepped out of the way to let a special prosecutor launch an investigation that would, by necessity, have to vindicate itself. The better part of wisdom was to see the matter for what it was--a policy difference over the war, a matter that should never have been criminalized.
The prosecutor, and the jury and the judge, had before them a case that purported to stand alone, a trial of one man's memory and recollections. But you have before you what they and the rest of us don't--a memory of the passions and the panic, and the certitude, which gave rise to the war. And a sense, I am confident, of the quiet and selfless man who sat in the outer circle when your cabinet deliberated over our country's choices in Iraq, and in those burning grounds of the Arab-Islamic world. Scooter Libby was there for the beginning of that campaign. He can't be left behind as a casualty of a war our country had once proudly claimed as its own.
Mr. Ajami, the 2006 Bradley Prize recipient, teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at the Johns Hopkins University.
Copyright © 2007 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Monday, June 11, 2007
Americans Suspicious of Muslims!--No, Really!
Last week Dearborn’s ADC leader, Imad Hamad, was complaining to the Detroit News that American Arabs "often feel caught in the middle." (“Convention to tackle Arab-American rights”). He was speaking at the opening of the ADC’s convention over the weekend in Washington, D.C.
Hamad went on to complain that “[l]ots of people act like we are responsible for the violence and terrorism in places like Iraq. We're sick of the questioning of our Americanism and our loyalty to this great nation. We see ourselves often on the hot seat.”
Reporter Deb Price, doing her best PR for the subjects of her piece, also describes how this challenge “is underscored by polling from the Pew Research Center: 35 percent of Americans -- one in three -- told pollsters in September that they feel more suspicious of people of Middle Eastern descent since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. That high figure is virtually unchanged since August 2002.”
I suppose the point is that Muslims in America are doing their best to mind their own business, but somehow keep getting thrust--innocently--into "the middle" of controversial issues regarding violence and terrorism.
Except I think Muslims in America are in the middle because their leaders put them there--and they put themselves there--by their loud endorsment of radical, extreme positions. If American Islam is on the hot seat, it is because American Islam keeps choosing the hot seat.
A case in point is the unhelpful decision out of this weekend's convention to try re-opening last summer’s Israeli-Hezbollah war by calling for a UN investigation of Israel’s “war crimes.” ("American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee calls for investigation of Israeli military operation").
Is this Hamad’s idea of staying out of the hot seat?
The fact is that both sides in that conflict were already investigated by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN, and both sides were accused of war crimes. Naturally, Israel got the brunt of the criticism, as all three organizations are reflexively anti-Israel. But even Amnesty International had to admit that Hezbollah was guilty of war crimes for deliberately targeting its missiles at Israeli civilians. ("Hezbollah accused of war crimes").
In fact, it was much worse than that. A well-documented study produced by an Israeli think tank, and reported on by Clifford D. May, (“Hezbollah’s War CrimesLet’s go to the videotape"), confirmed what we could already see on our own TV sets:
"This study,” writes Reuven Erlich, the Center’s director, “analyzes two central concepts of Hezbollah's warfare. … The first is the broad use of the Lebanese civilian population as a living shield; the second, viewing the Israeli civilian population as the primary target for the enormous rocket arsenal Hezbollah built up over a period of years. Both acts are considered war crimes under international law.”
The report and its accompanying photos and videos show Hezbollah rocket launchers hidden in Lebanese villages, alongside schools, mosques, and hospitals; also rockets being launched from near U.N. outposts.
One Hezbollah detainee acknowledges on videotape that he transported missiles while carrying a white flag — used when Lebanese noncombatants wanted to signal Israelis that they were attempting to flee the battlefield. Other Hezbollah prisoners talked openly of using private homes both to store weapons and launch missiles.
As far as I'm concerned, the open support by so many in the Muslim community in America for America’s sworn enemy--Hezbollah--was a disgrace to the Arab-American community. In the midst of the war it was reported that as many as half of Dearborn’s Arabs took to the streets to chant praises for Hezbollah's head terrorist, Hassan Nasrallah (“Mideast View from the Midwest"):
At one recent demonstration, organized by the Congress of Arab-Americans, about 1,000 people attended. College-age men asked, in call and response fashion, "Who is your army?" Protestors responded: "Hezbollah." "Who is your leader?" they were asked. "Nasrallah," the chanters responded. Many carried placards of the Hezbollah leader. A few days earlier at an even larger demonstration, more than 15,000 turned out, about half of Dearborn's Arab community.
Arab-American News publisher Osama Siblani was getting his jabs in, too, saying
the fighting is fueling anger in his community -- not at Hezbollah, but at the Bush administration.
The anger that you see in the Arab community, you do not see in the eyes of the American community," says Siblani. "They're not viewing the same thing. And the perspective you get out of Jazeera or Arabiya, you do not get it out of Fox News or CNN."
Siblani says many in the community who opposed Hezbollah before the fighting have now changed their minds. The U.S. State Department has designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization. Siblani disagrees.
"The terrorist here is the Bush administration," he says.
Is it so hard to imagine why the people Siblani and Hamad claim they speak for are “caught in the middle,” or having their patriotism questioned? Lots of Americans don't like Israel, but like it or not, Israel is a staunch ally. Hezbollah is, and has always been, a sworn enemy of the United States and an unrepentant murderer of our fighting men.
What are we supposed to think when people are in front of our city hall chanting, "Hezbollah is our army, and Nasrallah is our leader!"? Or when Siblani tells us even more American Muslims are lending support to Hezbollah?
There just aren’t many Americans who are going to take kindly to overt support for Hezbollah, one of the most anti-American organizations in our collective memories. If you do those kinds of things, you are going to remain mistrusted, and that mistrust is going to grow.
And even though you have a First Amendment right to voice that opinion, when you do so as loudly and angrily as you do, you can’t then complain that somebody else is sticking your innocent self in the middle, or your innocent butt on the hot seat: you’re doing it all by yourself. You’re chosen to take sides, and the side you’ve chosen, by and large, is odious to the average American.
So really, is there any wonder why the average American, as a direct result of seeing such actions and hearing such sentiments, hasn’t lost his mistrust of Muslims since 9/11?
Is it possible that the Pew figure reflecting suspicion of Middle Easterners is unchanged because America’s non-Arab population have looked, in vain, to the Muslim community for some credible assurance that they deplore, rather than tacitly support, the mentality that brought us 9/11, the six imams, and a dozen other domestic incidents of violence directly tied to jihad?
Nor do one-sided articles such as Deb Price’s, (which reads like the worst kind of CAIR or ADC press release on last summer’s war) help things.
This blog was born out of the refusal of the local press to do anything other than print pro-Muslim propaganda in its coverage of terrorist issues and Islam, especially the awful reporting on the Israeli-Hezbollah war. I don’t believe now that most newspaper readers failed to notice this lopsided coverage, either. We can all recognize the pattern after a while, and know when we're being given just one side.
And I believe most readers just conclude that editors are going along because they’re afraid of angering the Islamic community. Knowing that fact makes the readers, if not exactly afraid themselves, at least uneasy.
After all, what kind of power it is that can force the big strong American press, that fearless guardian that presumes to bring down presidents and end wars, to become too chicken to print the Muslim names of suspicious characters arrested at airports, or to run commentaries or letters critical of Hezbollah, or to fudge story after story about favoritism shown Muslims by local governments and kowtowing politicians?
At any rate, if Hamad, Siblani, and company want to complain that Muslims in America are being unfairly stuck “in the middle,” they may want to do a quick review of their own overheated positions.
Trust is still something that’s earned.
And like it or not, after 9/11, the price Americans are charging for it has gone way up.
Hamad went on to complain that “[l]ots of people act like we are responsible for the violence and terrorism in places like Iraq. We're sick of the questioning of our Americanism and our loyalty to this great nation. We see ourselves often on the hot seat.”
Reporter Deb Price, doing her best PR for the subjects of her piece, also describes how this challenge “is underscored by polling from the Pew Research Center: 35 percent of Americans -- one in three -- told pollsters in September that they feel more suspicious of people of Middle Eastern descent since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. That high figure is virtually unchanged since August 2002.”
I suppose the point is that Muslims in America are doing their best to mind their own business, but somehow keep getting thrust--innocently--into "the middle" of controversial issues regarding violence and terrorism.
Except I think Muslims in America are in the middle because their leaders put them there--and they put themselves there--by their loud endorsment of radical, extreme positions. If American Islam is on the hot seat, it is because American Islam keeps choosing the hot seat.
A case in point is the unhelpful decision out of this weekend's convention to try re-opening last summer’s Israeli-Hezbollah war by calling for a UN investigation of Israel’s “war crimes.” ("American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee calls for investigation of Israeli military operation").
Is this Hamad’s idea of staying out of the hot seat?
The fact is that both sides in that conflict were already investigated by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the UN, and both sides were accused of war crimes. Naturally, Israel got the brunt of the criticism, as all three organizations are reflexively anti-Israel. But even Amnesty International had to admit that Hezbollah was guilty of war crimes for deliberately targeting its missiles at Israeli civilians. ("Hezbollah accused of war crimes").
In fact, it was much worse than that. A well-documented study produced by an Israeli think tank, and reported on by Clifford D. May, (“Hezbollah’s War CrimesLet’s go to the videotape"), confirmed what we could already see on our own TV sets:
"This study,” writes Reuven Erlich, the Center’s director, “analyzes two central concepts of Hezbollah's warfare. … The first is the broad use of the Lebanese civilian population as a living shield; the second, viewing the Israeli civilian population as the primary target for the enormous rocket arsenal Hezbollah built up over a period of years. Both acts are considered war crimes under international law.”
The report and its accompanying photos and videos show Hezbollah rocket launchers hidden in Lebanese villages, alongside schools, mosques, and hospitals; also rockets being launched from near U.N. outposts.
One Hezbollah detainee acknowledges on videotape that he transported missiles while carrying a white flag — used when Lebanese noncombatants wanted to signal Israelis that they were attempting to flee the battlefield. Other Hezbollah prisoners talked openly of using private homes both to store weapons and launch missiles.
As far as I'm concerned, the open support by so many in the Muslim community in America for America’s sworn enemy--Hezbollah--was a disgrace to the Arab-American community. In the midst of the war it was reported that as many as half of Dearborn’s Arabs took to the streets to chant praises for Hezbollah's head terrorist, Hassan Nasrallah (“Mideast View from the Midwest"):
At one recent demonstration, organized by the Congress of Arab-Americans, about 1,000 people attended. College-age men asked, in call and response fashion, "Who is your army?" Protestors responded: "Hezbollah." "Who is your leader?" they were asked. "Nasrallah," the chanters responded. Many carried placards of the Hezbollah leader. A few days earlier at an even larger demonstration, more than 15,000 turned out, about half of Dearborn's Arab community.
Arab-American News publisher Osama Siblani was getting his jabs in, too, saying
the fighting is fueling anger in his community -- not at Hezbollah, but at the Bush administration.
The anger that you see in the Arab community, you do not see in the eyes of the American community," says Siblani. "They're not viewing the same thing. And the perspective you get out of Jazeera or Arabiya, you do not get it out of Fox News or CNN."
Siblani says many in the community who opposed Hezbollah before the fighting have now changed their minds. The U.S. State Department has designated Hezbollah a terrorist organization. Siblani disagrees.
"The terrorist here is the Bush administration," he says.
Is it so hard to imagine why the people Siblani and Hamad claim they speak for are “caught in the middle,” or having their patriotism questioned? Lots of Americans don't like Israel, but like it or not, Israel is a staunch ally. Hezbollah is, and has always been, a sworn enemy of the United States and an unrepentant murderer of our fighting men.
What are we supposed to think when people are in front of our city hall chanting, "Hezbollah is our army, and Nasrallah is our leader!"? Or when Siblani tells us even more American Muslims are lending support to Hezbollah?
There just aren’t many Americans who are going to take kindly to overt support for Hezbollah, one of the most anti-American organizations in our collective memories. If you do those kinds of things, you are going to remain mistrusted, and that mistrust is going to grow.
And even though you have a First Amendment right to voice that opinion, when you do so as loudly and angrily as you do, you can’t then complain that somebody else is sticking your innocent self in the middle, or your innocent butt on the hot seat: you’re doing it all by yourself. You’re chosen to take sides, and the side you’ve chosen, by and large, is odious to the average American.
So really, is there any wonder why the average American, as a direct result of seeing such actions and hearing such sentiments, hasn’t lost his mistrust of Muslims since 9/11?
Is it possible that the Pew figure reflecting suspicion of Middle Easterners is unchanged because America’s non-Arab population have looked, in vain, to the Muslim community for some credible assurance that they deplore, rather than tacitly support, the mentality that brought us 9/11, the six imams, and a dozen other domestic incidents of violence directly tied to jihad?
Nor do one-sided articles such as Deb Price’s, (which reads like the worst kind of CAIR or ADC press release on last summer’s war) help things.
This blog was born out of the refusal of the local press to do anything other than print pro-Muslim propaganda in its coverage of terrorist issues and Islam, especially the awful reporting on the Israeli-Hezbollah war. I don’t believe now that most newspaper readers failed to notice this lopsided coverage, either. We can all recognize the pattern after a while, and know when we're being given just one side.
And I believe most readers just conclude that editors are going along because they’re afraid of angering the Islamic community. Knowing that fact makes the readers, if not exactly afraid themselves, at least uneasy.
After all, what kind of power it is that can force the big strong American press, that fearless guardian that presumes to bring down presidents and end wars, to become too chicken to print the Muslim names of suspicious characters arrested at airports, or to run commentaries or letters critical of Hezbollah, or to fudge story after story about favoritism shown Muslims by local governments and kowtowing politicians?
At any rate, if Hamad, Siblani, and company want to complain that Muslims in America are being unfairly stuck “in the middle,” they may want to do a quick review of their own overheated positions.
Trust is still something that’s earned.
And like it or not, after 9/11, the price Americans are charging for it has gone way up.
Islam, By the Book
The following appeared in this Sunday's Detroit News/Free Press:
Insurgents' threat: Convert, pay up or get out
June 10, 2007
BY HANNAH ALLAM and LEILA FADEL
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- An Al Qaeda-affiliated insurgent group is giving Christians in Baghdad a stark set of options: Convert to Islam, marry your daughters to our fighters, pay an Islamic tax or leave with only the clothes on your back.
A U.S. military official said U.S. forces became aware of the threats last month and now have erected barriers around the largest Christian enclave in Baghdad's Dora neighborhood in an effort to protect its residents.
Christians in Baghdad refuse to discuss the threats for fear of retribution.
But in Syria, where thousands of Iraqi Christians have fled, tales abound of families that were killed or driven from their homes because they either refused or couldn't afford to pay the jizya, a tax usually levied on non-Muslim men of military age that's been part of Islam for more than 1,000 years.
"Two or three months ago, we heard we were going to be forcibly removed from Dora," said Rafah Elia Daoud, 53, who fled to Damascus, Syria's capital, in May. "Not everyone got a paper with the threat, but we knew. The choice was to convert, pay the jizya or get out."
Madeline Shukr Yusuf, 74, recalled her flight from Iraq. She said she didn't have enough money to pay a monthly jizya of 250,000 Iraqis dinars, about $200. The insurgents were determined to collect their tax, she said.
"They wanted to kill me and take my gold bracelets," she said, tears filling her eyes at the memory. "They tell us pay or give a daughter in marriage to a fighter."
Christian communities
Iraq long had been home to thriving Christian communities, primarily Assyrians and Chaldeans, who trace their roots to ancient Mesopotamia. Some of Saddam Hussein's closest confidants were Christian, including his foreign minister, Tarik Aziz. Christian communities were prominent in many major Iraqi cities, including Mosul in the north and Basra in the south.
Iraqi Christians are a tiny minority in the country of some 24 million.
In metro Detroit, where more than 50,000 Chaldeans live, many of whom emigrated from Iraq, there is concern about relatives in Baghdad and traditional Chaldean enclaves near Mosul.
Chaldeans are Iraqi Catholics. They speak the ancient language used by Jesus, Aramaic.
As Iraq has descended into chaos, many Christians have fled, joining an estimated 2.2 million exiles, including 1.4 million Iraqis now estimated to be living in Syria. At least 19,000 Iraqi Christians have registered in Damascus with the United Nations refugee agency, and thousands more are thought to have sought shelter there but have yet to register.
Copyright © 2007 Detroit Free Press Inc.
The jizya tax is an integral part of triumphant Islam towards its subjects, (dhimmis), intended both to humiliate those forced to pay it, and to help fund the sharia system. Robert Spencer describes it, in part, in a recent FrontPage Magazine article, ("Whitewashing Radical Islam"):
Dhimmis must endure inferior status under the Sharia; if they protest, they risk forfeiting the “protection” that they buy with their special high tax rate (jizya) and their humiliation.
The elaborate legal superstructure of dhimmitude in Islamic law is founded on the Qur’an’s Sura 9:29, which calls on Muslims to “fight” against the “People of the Book” (primarily Jews and Christians) “until they pay the Jizya [special tax for non-Muslims] with willing submission, feel themselves subdued.” A vast body of Muslim theology and jurisprudence guaranteed dhimmis relative security as long as the jizya was paid; if payment ceased, jihad would resume.
This is the origin of the system of dhimmitude — a vast, uniquely Islamic institution of religious apartheid, implemented for over a millennium across three continents (Asia, Africa, and Europe) and still influential in Islamic nations’ policies toward non-Muslim populations. The native “infidel” populations of lands conquered by Islamic armies were required to pay the jizya, recognize Islamic ownership of their land and accept laws forbidding them to own weapons, ring church bells, build new places of worship or repair old ones, testify in Muslim courts, or dress like Muslims. If they complained about these inequalities, they risked forfeiting their “protection.”
Insurgents' threat: Convert, pay up or get out
June 10, 2007
BY HANNAH ALLAM and LEILA FADEL
MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPERS
BAGHDAD, Iraq -- An Al Qaeda-affiliated insurgent group is giving Christians in Baghdad a stark set of options: Convert to Islam, marry your daughters to our fighters, pay an Islamic tax or leave with only the clothes on your back.
A U.S. military official said U.S. forces became aware of the threats last month and now have erected barriers around the largest Christian enclave in Baghdad's Dora neighborhood in an effort to protect its residents.
Christians in Baghdad refuse to discuss the threats for fear of retribution.
But in Syria, where thousands of Iraqi Christians have fled, tales abound of families that were killed or driven from their homes because they either refused or couldn't afford to pay the jizya, a tax usually levied on non-Muslim men of military age that's been part of Islam for more than 1,000 years.
"Two or three months ago, we heard we were going to be forcibly removed from Dora," said Rafah Elia Daoud, 53, who fled to Damascus, Syria's capital, in May. "Not everyone got a paper with the threat, but we knew. The choice was to convert, pay the jizya or get out."
Madeline Shukr Yusuf, 74, recalled her flight from Iraq. She said she didn't have enough money to pay a monthly jizya of 250,000 Iraqis dinars, about $200. The insurgents were determined to collect their tax, she said.
"They wanted to kill me and take my gold bracelets," she said, tears filling her eyes at the memory. "They tell us pay or give a daughter in marriage to a fighter."
Christian communities
Iraq long had been home to thriving Christian communities, primarily Assyrians and Chaldeans, who trace their roots to ancient Mesopotamia. Some of Saddam Hussein's closest confidants were Christian, including his foreign minister, Tarik Aziz. Christian communities were prominent in many major Iraqi cities, including Mosul in the north and Basra in the south.
Iraqi Christians are a tiny minority in the country of some 24 million.
In metro Detroit, where more than 50,000 Chaldeans live, many of whom emigrated from Iraq, there is concern about relatives in Baghdad and traditional Chaldean enclaves near Mosul.
Chaldeans are Iraqi Catholics. They speak the ancient language used by Jesus, Aramaic.
As Iraq has descended into chaos, many Christians have fled, joining an estimated 2.2 million exiles, including 1.4 million Iraqis now estimated to be living in Syria. At least 19,000 Iraqi Christians have registered in Damascus with the United Nations refugee agency, and thousands more are thought to have sought shelter there but have yet to register.
Copyright © 2007 Detroit Free Press Inc.
The jizya tax is an integral part of triumphant Islam towards its subjects, (dhimmis), intended both to humiliate those forced to pay it, and to help fund the sharia system. Robert Spencer describes it, in part, in a recent FrontPage Magazine article, ("Whitewashing Radical Islam"):
Dhimmis must endure inferior status under the Sharia; if they protest, they risk forfeiting the “protection” that they buy with their special high tax rate (jizya) and their humiliation.
The elaborate legal superstructure of dhimmitude in Islamic law is founded on the Qur’an’s Sura 9:29, which calls on Muslims to “fight” against the “People of the Book” (primarily Jews and Christians) “until they pay the Jizya [special tax for non-Muslims] with willing submission, feel themselves subdued.” A vast body of Muslim theology and jurisprudence guaranteed dhimmis relative security as long as the jizya was paid; if payment ceased, jihad would resume.
This is the origin of the system of dhimmitude — a vast, uniquely Islamic institution of religious apartheid, implemented for over a millennium across three continents (Asia, Africa, and Europe) and still influential in Islamic nations’ policies toward non-Muslim populations. The native “infidel” populations of lands conquered by Islamic armies were required to pay the jizya, recognize Islamic ownership of their land and accept laws forbidding them to own weapons, ring church bells, build new places of worship or repair old ones, testify in Muslim courts, or dress like Muslims. If they complained about these inequalities, they risked forfeiting their “protection.”
Sunday, June 10, 2007
From Dhimmi Watch
June 9, 2007
Fitzgerald: No public funds for Islamic footbaths
DEARBORN -- The University of Michigan-Dearborn plans to spend $25,000 for foot-washing stations, making it easier for Muslim students to practice their religion but sparking questions about the separation of church and state.The university claims the stations are needed to accommodate Muslim students, who must ritually wash their bodies -- including the feet -- up to five times each day before prayers. But critics hit conservative blogs and radio airwaves Monday to argue public money shouldn't cover the cost. -- from this article
I have been in airport bathrooms when someone will come up, paying no attention to right or left, and start performing his wudu, while water flies all over the place as that person places his feet, one after the other, in the sink and washes them. While these -- to many -- nauseating public ablutions take place, most people hasten away without going near even the empty sinks.
There is no god-given right to come to other countries and inflict one's behavior, in fulfilling some kind of faith-based mandate, in public places. The nurses who were arrested for singing Christmas carols behind closed doors, in their own apartments in Western apartment complexes, in Saudi Arabia, were not inflicting this on anyone: it was the religious police checking up, as they do everywhere they can. But, for example, the slitting of a sheep's throat, and letting it bleed to death on the street, can and should be banned -- whether or not this is considered "part of Islam."
If Muslim students wish to have foot-washing sinks available, then they can certainly pay for them. After all, there is hardly a mosque or a madrasa in this country that does not receive, when it needs it, all kinds of financial support from those who, across the seas, batten on the unmerited oil trillions, and by this point have used, collectively, more than one hundred billion of it (the estimate for Saudi Arabia alone) to pay for mosques, madrasas, armies of Western hirelings, and propaganda of every sort.
A mere $25,000 shouldn't faze the Saudis. And you might argue that $25,000 is so little -- why not spend it ourselves? But it is a symbolic act, an act that will be, and is, taken by Muslims not as a kind act, an act of accommodation (as those behind it might naturally think, for they think in terms of sweet reason, and compromise, and all that), but instead is taken in quite a different spirit, as one more indication (see the postings at Jihad Watch of the commenter who calls herself “Naseem,” passim) that Islam Is On the March, that here and there, little by little, the Infidels are yielding. It is of great symbolic value to Muslims. And it will not result in gratitude, but merely in a swelling of the sense that obstacles, one by one, to the spread of Islam are being removed. And that, after all, is what Jihad is partly about: the removing of those obstacles, and of obstacles of all kinds wherever they are, so that Islam may spread and dominate, and eventually Muslims come to rule. The dismissal of this as merely an alarmist fantasy shows that the dismisser has not been paying attention -- not to the tenets of Islam, not to 1350 years of Islamic history and the subjugation of non-Muslims, and certainly not to what has happened, over just the last 2-3 decades, in the lands of Western Europe.
Every concession, every misuse of public funds, every Muslim employee of city or state government who has been permitted undiscovered or unpunished to be relentlessly pushing for special deals in order to promote Islam or to make sure that fellow Muslims are hired here, and here, and here -- all of this, every single act, needs to be noisily (and also quietly) opposed. (See that Boston Redevelopment Authority employee, working to get city-owned land sold in a sweetheart deal for a mosque, and see what else that employee did on his still-unexplained trip or trips to Saudi Arabia.) "We must fight them over here so we don't have to fight them over there" would be an apter description of what needs to be done, although in truth there is no place where such "fighting" (not necessarily of the conventional, military variety) will not have to take place.
Thursday, June 07, 2007
UM Grad and Law Student on Civil Rights: "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen."
Remember when emblems of American racism were black sharecroppers denied equal chances at education, employment, and political power, or maybe seamstresses who had to ride the bus to work because they couldn’t afford a car?
Apparently things have gotten so much better on the race front, (and yet somehow worse than ever, according to the New York Times and NPR), that one can still be a victim of severe racism and manage to do quite well.
Today’s Detroit News reports this weekend’s 24th annual convention of Arab-Americans leaders in Washington, D.C., including locals Osama Siblani, publisher of the Dearborn-based Arab American News, and Imad Hamad, regional director of the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee (“Convention to tackle Arab-American rights”).
(Today’s article is under Deb Price’s byline, although she usually writes as the News’s lesbian-affairs columnist. Gregg Krupa is their regular reporter on Arab-Americans, but he's been strangely AWOL all week, all the stranger since the controversy over the UM-Dearborn foot baths should have been his beat. That story was covered instead by Karen Bouffard. But then lo and behold this morning I find Gregg has re-appeared in a nice piece about an Arab American handholding demonstration. “(People of Arabic descent give unity a hand in Dearborn”).)
In any event, this weekend’s convention is meant to brainstorm “solutions to threats to civil liberties at home as well as to the ongoing turmoil in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.”
On the civil liberties front, one panelist, Salah Husseini, 25, plans to
“talk about his experiences growing up in Grosse Pointe, attending University of Michigan and now going to law school at American University. ‘There is a huge problem with racism, and now it is being directed at Muslims and Arabs,’ he said.”
Just in case that went by too fast, I will repeat.
Mr. Husseini grew up in Grosse Pointe, attended the University of Michigan, and is now a law student at one of the most prestigious law schools in the country. His area of subject matter on the panel will be the “huge problem with racism, directed at Muslims and Arabs," including, presumably, himself.
Talk about a brother being behind the 8-Ball.
Obviously, being the victim of prejudice hasn't kept him down. But just imagine where'd he be now if it weren't for this country's huge problem with racism?
Apparently things have gotten so much better on the race front, (and yet somehow worse than ever, according to the New York Times and NPR), that one can still be a victim of severe racism and manage to do quite well.
Today’s Detroit News reports this weekend’s 24th annual convention of Arab-Americans leaders in Washington, D.C., including locals Osama Siblani, publisher of the Dearborn-based Arab American News, and Imad Hamad, regional director of the American-Arab Anti Discrimination Committee (“Convention to tackle Arab-American rights”).
(Today’s article is under Deb Price’s byline, although she usually writes as the News’s lesbian-affairs columnist. Gregg Krupa is their regular reporter on Arab-Americans, but he's been strangely AWOL all week, all the stranger since the controversy over the UM-Dearborn foot baths should have been his beat. That story was covered instead by Karen Bouffard. But then lo and behold this morning I find Gregg has re-appeared in a nice piece about an Arab American handholding demonstration. “(People of Arabic descent give unity a hand in Dearborn”).)
In any event, this weekend’s convention is meant to brainstorm “solutions to threats to civil liberties at home as well as to the ongoing turmoil in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East.”
On the civil liberties front, one panelist, Salah Husseini, 25, plans to
“talk about his experiences growing up in Grosse Pointe, attending University of Michigan and now going to law school at American University. ‘There is a huge problem with racism, and now it is being directed at Muslims and Arabs,’ he said.”
Just in case that went by too fast, I will repeat.
Mr. Husseini grew up in Grosse Pointe, attended the University of Michigan, and is now a law student at one of the most prestigious law schools in the country. His area of subject matter on the panel will be the “huge problem with racism, directed at Muslims and Arabs," including, presumably, himself.
Talk about a brother being behind the 8-Ball.
Obviously, being the victim of prejudice hasn't kept him down. But just imagine where'd he be now if it weren't for this country's huge problem with racism?
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