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LA Times Story on Irvine Showing of Danish Muhammad Cartoons

2006-02-26T16:15:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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Planned Exhibit of Cartoons Protested

The caricatures of Muhammad will be displayed at a UCI student forum. Muslims object, and university officials are wary.
By Daniel Yi, Times Staff Writer
February 25 2006

Plans by a Republican student group at UC Irvine to showcase the controversial cartoons of the prophet Muhammad that led to violent protests around the world are drawing condemnation from Muslim groups and university officials.

The caricatures will be part of a panel discussion sponsored by the campus College Republicans scheduled for Tuesday at 7 p.m. in UCI's Crystal Cove Auditorium.

"We are firm believers in the 1st Amendment," said Kristin Lucero, a 21-year-old UCI senior and president of the campus College Republicans. "The public has the right to discuss as well as view the cartoons."

Lucero said the cartoons depicting Muhammad, first published by a Danish newspaper, would be displayed along with what she called anti-Semitic and anti-Western cartoons that have been published in Muslim nations. Depictions of Muhammad are prohibited under Islamic law.

She said the event was originally designed as a discussion about terrorism threats, but that the controversy over the caricatures of Muhammad offered another issue for debate.

Muslim students at UCI see the event as a provocation, said Marya Bangee, 19, a sophomore and member of the Muslim Student Union.

"First of all, unless they are living in a bubble, they have to know what has happened around the world" because of the cartoons, she said. "We don't want to limit anyone's freedom of speech, but with freedom comes responsibility."

The cartoons, which have since been reprinted by other publications, caused riots that claimed dozens of lives in several countries.

Bangee has asked the College Republicans to hold the event without showing the drawings. She said Muslim students fear the cartoons will incite violence locally.

That is the primary concern of university officials as well, said Sally Peterson, UCI's dean of students.

"Our No. 1 priority is going to be to have a safe and secure event," she said. "The students who want to pursue [this event], I am not sure they understand the impact of their actions."

Peterson said she had received letters from people who think showing the drawings will insult Muslims. She said the university can't stop organizers of the event from displaying the cartoons, but she hoped that a compromise could be reached.

"We are trying to get the groups together on both sides," she said. "But we don't have a lot of time."
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Technorati tags: Muslims, Republicans, University of California, Irvine, War With Islam.

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

New York Times Editorial on the Danish Muhammad Cartoons

2006-02-25T17:52:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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February 25, 2006
Editorial

Silenced by Islamist Rage

With every new riot over the Danish cartoons, it becomes clearer that the protests are no longer about the caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, but about the demagoguery of Islamic extremists. The demonstrators are undeniably outraged by what they perceive as blasphemy. But radical Islamists are trying to harness that indignation to their political goals and their theocratic ends by fomenting hatred for the West and for moderate regimes in the Muslim world. These are dangerous games, and they require the most resolute response.

It is not the West that is most threatened in this crisis. The voices of moderation in the Muslim world are the ones that are being intimidated and silenced. Those few journalists and leaders who have spoken out against the rioting have been vilified and assailed, and even jailed. According to a report by Michael Slackman and Hassan M. Fattah in The New York Times, 11 journalists in five Islamic countries face prosecution for printing some of the Danish cartoons, even when their purpose was to condemn them.

In most of these cases, the legal action represents attempts by cowed authorities to appease the Islamists. But the effect — in Yemen, Jordan and other countries — has only been to give extremists a dollop of legitimacy, and to encourage them to turn up the heat. That, in turn, increases the perception of a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West.

It is time for moderate Muslims to abandon the illusion that they can placate the Islamists by straddling the fence. It is they who must explain to their people that the cartoons were an isolated incident, and not the face of hostile crusaders. It is they who must make it clear to their people that blowing up mosques, beheading hostages and strapping on belts of explosives are far, far greater evils than a few drawings in a distant paper. They must do so because their future is at stake — not Denmark's

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Technorati tags: Danish Muhammad Cartoons, Islamofascism, MSM, New York Times, War With Islam.

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

New York Times Story on France and Jew Hatred.

2006-02-23T11:39:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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French Officials Now Say Killing of Jew Was in Part a Hate Crime

By ARIANE BERNARD and CRAIG S. SMITH
Published: February 23, 2006

PARIS, Feb. 22 — French authorities say a young Jewish man who was tortured and killed here this month was singled out because of his religion, supporting claims by French Jews that his killing was in part a hate crime.

“The truth is that these hoodlums first of all acted for villainous and sordid reasons — money — but they had the belief, and I quote, ‘that Jews have money,’” the interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, told French lawmakers on Tuesday, citing a statement by one of the men who kidnapped the victim, Ilan Halimi.

Mr. Halimi, 23, was kidnapped and held for three weeks while his captors, led by a Muslim immigrant from Ivory Coast, demanded a ransom from his family. He was found on Feb. 13, naked and covered with cigarette burns, near a suburban train station outside Paris, and died on his way to a hospital.

The French police initially dismissed accusations by Mr. Halimi's family and Jewish groups that anti-Semitism played a role in the crime, even after one suspect told investigators that Mr. Halimi had been a target because he was a Jew. The authorities changed their position after another suspect said Mr. Halimi had been burned on his forehead with a cigarette because of his religion.

France has struggled to strike a balance between suppressing anti-Semitism within the country's large Muslim community and addressing rising anti-Islamic sentiments in the broader population. The government was widely criticized several years ago for responding sluggishly to an outbreak of anti-Semitic incidents.

Jewish leaders again criticized the police and the news media, saying they played down the anti-Semitic aspect of the killing for fear of increasing tensions with Muslims.

Ruth Halimi, Mr. Halimi's mother, told the Israeli daily Haaretz on Sunday, “If Ilan hadn't been Jewish, he wouldn't have been murdered.” She also told the newspaper that the police told the family to ignore the gang's attempts to contact them.

“Nobody is denying that their priority was money, ” said Roger Cukierman, president of CRIF, France's umbrella Jewish organization. “But their vision, based on the prejudice that Jews have money, and then once they are kidnapped, the way they happily tortured them, shows the anti-Semitic element.”

President Jacques Chirac called Mr. Halimi's parents on Tuesday and assured them that full light would be shed on the circumstances, and in particular whether it was an anti-Semitic act, Élysée Palace said in a statement.

On Wednesday, Mr. Chirac and Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin said they would attend a memorial service for Mr. Halimi on Thursday. CRIF plans a silent march through Paris on Sunday.

The police found literature linking some suspects in the case to Palestinian and fundamentalist Muslim causes, but Mr. Sarkozy warned against blaming the country's Muslims. “What we don't need now, in addition to this barbarity, is misunderstanding, intolerance and racism,” he said Tuesday.

Mr. Halimi was abducted in January after being approached by a young woman at his workplace, a phone store. They later met at an undisclosed location, where his abductors were waiting for him.

Thirteen people are under formal investigation for the crime.

The main suspect, Youssouf Fofana, is thought to have fled to his native Ivory Coast. Mr. Fofana has been involved a number of violent robberies, a judicial official said.

Ariane Bernard reported from Paris for this article, and Craig S. Smith from Brussels.

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End of Archived Material

Technorati tags: Jacques Chirac, France, Ilan Halami, Jew Hatred, Jews, Muslims, Nicolas Sarkozy, Dominique de Villepin, War with Islam.

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

Items on Summers's Resignation From Harvard

2006-02-22T19:54:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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HARVARD POLITICS [Stanley Kurtz]

The New York Times notes that Summers knew he had to go when colleagues from the Clinton administration told him so.

The Times adds that Summers is thinking of advising a Democratic presidential campaign. There you have the explanation for Summers' appeasement. Summers is from the sane side of the Democratic Party (yes, there is one). These moderate Democrats want to bring the academy closer to the center of the country. But when push came to shove, the leftist faculty wouldn't play along.

That left Summers and his moderate Democrat backers on the board to choose between appeasement and a serious public battle. Ultimately, Summers and his allies backed down because they are part of the same national political coalition as the leftist faculty (which contributes heavily to the Democratic Party). Moderate Dems would be happy to reform the academy, but they don't have the stomach to treat leftist professors as open opponents. Only Republicans can do that. So in a way, we are seeing another iteration of the paralyzing split between DLC types and the fire-breathing base. The Democratic left is just too big, too powerful, and too essential to victory to be purged, as Peter Beinart wanted to do.

That brings us to all those surveys of party registration in the academy. Party registration is a rough proxy for point of view in those surveys. But the Summers case suggests that it might be something more as well. The minuscule number of Republicans professors on campus shows that even moderate Democrats are unable to put the academy's house in order without Republican help. So long as actual conservatives are effectively banned from the faculty (and make no mistake, they are now effectively banned), nothing will change. Not only will an entire set of ideas be missed, but even moderate Democrats will be cowed into submission. They can't make war on the folks they work with in their larger political battles. And right now the academy needs war, not love.

Alan Dershowitz, in "Coup against Summers a dubious victory for the politically correct" describes the center-left split at the heart of this conflict. And here is Amity Shlaes on how the moderate mind-set of Clinton's economic team tried but failed to reign in the radical 1970's era sensibility still dominant on Harvard's faculty.
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Originally here.
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February 22, 2006

President of Harvard Resigns, Ending Stormy 5-Year Tenure

By ALAN FINDER, PATRICK D. HEALY and KATE ZERNIKE

Lawrence H. Summers resigned yesterday as president of Harvard University after a relatively brief and turbulent tenure of five years, nudged by Harvard's governing corporation and facing a vote of no confidence from the influential Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The announcement by Dr. Summers, an economist and a former secretary of the Treasury, disappointed many students on the campus and raised questions about future leaders' ability to govern Harvard with its vocal and independent-minded faculty.

But advisers and confidants of Dr. Summers said he privately concluded a week ago that he should step down, after members of Harvard's governing corporation and friends — particularly from the Clinton administration — made it clear that his presidency was lost.

Dr. Summers, who earned a base salary of $563,000 in the 2004-5 academic year and received a 3 percent raise last July, is to leave office June 30. Derek C. Bok, 75, who was Harvard's president from 1971 to 1991, will serve as interim president until a permanent successor is found.

Hailed in his first days as a once-in-a-century leader, in the mold of perhaps Harvard's greatest president, Charles W. Eliot, Dr. Summers, 51, came into office with plans to expand the campus, put new focus on undergraduate education and integrate the university's schools. But he eventually alienated professors with a personal style that many saw as bullying and arrogant.

His well-known desire to change Harvard's culture, which he saw as complacent, was accompanied by slights to some faculty members and missteps like his statement last year that women might lack an intrinsic aptitude for math and science.

And some of his major decisions — including overhauling the undergraduate curriculum, appointing deans and mapping out a new campus — were hugely divisive at the 370-year-old university.

"I looked at the extent of the rancor that had emerged in parts of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences," Dr. Summers told reporters yesterday, "and the extent to which for many I personally had become a large issue, and concluded very reluctantly that the agenda for the university that I cared about — as well as my own satisfaction — would be best served by stepping down."

Dr. Summers's decision came after three fractious weeks following the resignation of William C. Kirby, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and left the university divided. About 50 students waving signs that said "Stay, Summers, Stay" and chanting "Larry, Larry" rallied in Harvard Yard yesterday after the news broke. Dr. Summers appeared to cheers and dispensed high-fives.

At the same time, several prominent donors said they were aghast at Dr. Summers's fall.

"How can anyone govern a university where a fraction of faculty members can force a president out?" said Joseph O'Donnell, a Boston business executive who is a former member of Harvard's Board of Overseers and a prominent donor.

But several of Dr. Summers's faculty critics — predominantly in the humanities and social sciences, but extended across the university — said the president had made the right decision.

"A strong leader is not just someone who can name a goal or force a change," said Mary C. Waters, a sociology professor, "but someone who can bring out the best in people and find ways to encourage teamwork."

Though Harvard negotiated a university professorship for Dr. Summers — the highest faculty position, with rights to teach in any department — his friends said they did not know if he would take it.

His sabbatical year next year, they said, may be a moment for him to survey his opportunities, including Wall Street or the possibility of advising a Democratic presidential campaign. Several of these people declined to speak on the record because they did not want to be seen as divulging Dr. Summers's thoughts.

But they were also not surprised at how his tenure ended. After last year's dispute over women in science and a no-confidence vote last March by the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, several senior Harvard officials close to Dr. Summers wondered whether each faculty meeting would become a moment to rekindle no-confidence votes.

"Win or lose, he realized that it was going to be very difficult to govern and that the better part of valor was to step aside," said David R. Gergen, director of the university's Center for Public Leadership at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Dr. Summers's aides and supporters had tried to find ways to save his presidency before the second no-confidence vote, set for next Tuesday. Dr. Summers also sought ideas from allies including another Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, Robert E. Rubin, who is a member of the seven-seat governing corporation, and Gene B. Sperling, a former economic adviser to Mr. Clinton.

At times Dr. Summers had sounded as if he wanted to fight on, some of his confidants said, but in other moments he sounded weary. By the time he left for a ski vacation in Utah last Thursday, he had decided to resign, two aides said yesterday.

At the same time, corporation members — particularly Nannerl O. Keohane, the former president of Duke University, and Robert D. Reischauer, president of the Urban Institute — began contacting professors to gauge their reaction to a resignation or even a forced dismissal.

Two Harvard faculty members, who spoke with several members of the corporation, said yesterday that they believed it was the corporation's idea, more than Dr. Summers's, that he step down. Members of the corporation did not respond to messages seeking comment. The Wall Street Journal reported on Monday that Dr. Summers was expected to resign this week.

Dr. Summers said yesterday that he was not forced to quit, and he sounded enthusiastic about starting new research on international economics after his sabbatical. "In the course of talking with a number of people about what to do," he said, "I of course spoke to members of the corporation, but it was my decision."

While the resignation of Dr. Kirby — and debate over whether he was forced out by Dr. Summers — touched off the current faculty uproar, Dr. Summers's greater problem was the intense ill will and even loathing toward him within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the university's largest unit.

The controversies often became a distraction for administrators who were trying to focus on priorities like planning the next major fund-raising campaign. Still, officials said that annual fund-raising was not down.

Dr. Summers apologized repeatedly for his communication skills, if not for his management. But his remarks about women in the sciences led to last year's 218-to-185 no-confidence vote, and, several professors said, that anger never dissipated.

Professors at the School of Public Health considered a similar vote last year before forgoing one. Dr. Summers also had sharp critics at the Law School and the Graduate School of Education.

"There was no smoking gun, but there were innumerable brush fires," said one critic, Howard Gardner, a professor of cognition and education, referring to the controversies surrounding Dr. Summers.

Since its founding in 1636, Harvard has ceded unusually strong power to its faculties over their different budgets, endowments and perquisites; the presidency, in turn, is designed to be a relatively weak office.

But Dr. Summers enthusiastically filled the bully pulpit. He inveighed against grade inflation and demanded more rigor in teaching, two issues that came up in his private conversation in 2001 with Cornel West, then a professor of African and African-American studies. Dr. West said afterward that he felt insulted by Dr. Summers, and he soon left for Princeton University.

Dr. Summers was more successful with students, who thrilled to the sight of the president's showing up at dances and study breaks, and signing dollar bills that bore his signature as Treasury secretary. In a weekend poll by The Harvard Crimson, the student daily, undergraduates backed him three to one.

Josh Downer, 19, a freshman, who rallied for Dr. Summers yesterday, said he believed that disgruntled faculty had forced him out. "The faculty is throwing a temper tantrum because the president set a bold agenda that doesn't necessarily align with the egos of the faculty," Mr. Downer said.

But to many officials and professors, the rift had become personality-driven, and Dr. Summers had not changed his behavior after promising to do so.

"It's very hard for adults to change their personality, and Harvard needs a personality who can get all the faculty and schools to work together for the good of the university," said Bruce Alberts, a member of Harvard's Board of Overseers.

Dr. Summers also offended some with what many saw as a style more suited to Washington than to Cambridge. He was driven in a black limousine with a license plate reading "1636," the year of Harvard's founding; Dr. Bok, by contrast, had driven his own Volkswagen bus. And Dr. Summers hired his own public relations adviser, who had worked for Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain; she has since departed.

Several professors said they resented the suggestion by Dr. Summers's supporters that he had been forced to resign because the Faculty of Arts and Sciences was simply intransigent.

"For all his extraordinary talents, he just hasn't provided the kind of leadership to the university that people were prepared to follow," said Harry R. Lewis, a professor of computer science and the former dean of Harvard College, who stepped down in 2003 after disagreeing frequently with Dr. Summers.

Other professors said they hoped the next president of Harvard would be no less forceful than Dr. Summers in the cause of the school's agenda.

"I hope people don't conclude from this episode that university presidents must be cautious souls with muted voices," said Michael J. Sandel, a professor of government. "What Harvard needs now is an activist president of bold vision, along with the ability to inspire others to help carry it through."

Edmund L. Andrews contributed reporting from Washington for this article, Jonathan D. Glater from New York and Katie Zezima from Cambridge, Mass.
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Originally here.
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Coup against Summers a dubious victory for the politically correct

By Alan M. Dershowitz | February 22, 2006

A PLURALITY of one faculty has brought about an academic coup d'etat against not only Harvard University president Lawrence Summers but also against the majority of students, faculty, and alumni. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which forced Summers's resignation by voting a lack of confidence in him last March and threatening to do so again on Feb. 28, is only one component of Harvard University and is hardly representative of widespread attitudes on the campus toward Summers. The graduate faculties, the students, and the alumni generally supported Summers for his many accomplishments. The Faculty of Arts and Sciences includes, in general, some of the most radical, hard-left elements within Harvard's diverse constituencies. And let there be no mistake about the origin of Summers's problem with that particular faculty: It started as a hard left-center conflict. Summers committed the cardinal sin against the academic hard left: He expressed politically incorrect views regarding gender, race, religion, sexual preference, and the military.

The original no-confidence motion contained an explanatory note that explicitly referenced "Mr. Summers' apparently ongoing convictions about the capacities and rights not only of women but also of African-Americans, third-world nations, gay people, and colonized peoples." The note also condemned Summers for his 2002 speech in which he said calls from professors and students for divestment from Israel were "anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent."

Although the explanatory note was eventually removed from the motion, it was the 400-pound gorilla in the room. Summers was being condemned for expressing views deemed offensive by some of the faculty. I personally disagreed with some of Summers's statements, but that is beside the point in an institution committed to academic freedom and diversity of viewpoints.

In the minds of at least some vocal members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, expressing such politically incorrect views is the academic equivalent of provoking Islamic extremists by depicting Prophet Mohammed in a political cartoon. Radical academics do not, of course, burn down buildings, at least not since the 1970s. Instead they introduce motions of no confidence and demand resignations of those who offend their sensibilities (while insisting on complete freedom of speech for those with whom they agree -- free speech for me but not for thee!).

Once the academic bloodletting began, it was difficult to stanch the wound. Everything Summers did, or did not do, became the object of criticism. Not only was the honeymoon over, the divorce had begun, at least in the minds of those determined to get rid of Summers. When he selected a new dean of Arts and Sciences, there were complaints. When the new dean resigned, there were complaints, some from the same faculty members who opposed the original selection.

When Summers recused himself from any investigation of his friend Andre Shleifer for investing in Russian companies while he was consulting about the Russian economy, he was condemned by some who would have condemned him even more vociferously had he not recused himself.

Summers could do no right in the eyes of his radical critics, who could never forgive him for his perceived original sins and who saw an opportunity to build wider coalitions every time Summers took actions that alienated other groups, as a president -- especially an activist and sometimes abrasive president -- will inevitably do. Some less ideological critics of Summers's leadership style then joined the radicals in a cacophony of strange bedfellows, but the core of the opposition always remained the hard left.

It was arrogant in the extreme for a plurality of a single faculty to purport to speak for the entire university, especially when that plurality is out of synch with the mainstream of Harvard. It was dangerous for the corporation to listen primarily to that faculty, without widely consulting other professors, students, and alumni who supported Summers. Now that this plurality of one faculty has succeeded in ousting the president, the most radical elements of Harvard will be emboldened to seek to mold all of Harvard in its image. If they succeed, Harvard will become a less diverse and less interesting institution of learning governed by political-correctness cops of the hard left. This is what happened in many European universities after the violent student protests of the late 1960s. It should not be allowed to happen at Harvard in the wake of the coup d'etat engineered by some in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

Alan M. Dershowitz has been a professor of law at Harvard for 42 years. His latest book is ''Preemption: A Knife That Cuts Both Ways."
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Originally here.
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Harvard Sold Larry Summers Down the Charles River: Amity Shlaes

Feb. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Harvard forced Larry Summers overboard after all. Yesterday, Summers announced he was leaving as president after five stormy years trying to row Harvard upstream toward the present.

This seems weird. After all, we're talking about Larry the Confident here, a man famous for the way he tossed his head back at the rest of the Group of Seven. As Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, Summers steered the economy of the biggest country in the world. Harvard is just a dinghy next to Battleship U.S.

Comparing Summers's experience in both offices is, however, useful. It reminds us that pulling retrograde institutions forward against resistance can be hard. Executives who try do so need unrelenting support. If they get the backup, they tend to succeed. If they don't, the result is ugly -- whether they are at the U.S. Treasury or Harvard.

Consider the Clinton administration, which by the second term knew what it wanted on the economic side. It wanted to prove that modern Democrats wouldn't trash the economy or the budget like their retrograde, union-beholden predecessors. It wanted a strong dollar, no matter what Big Steel said. It wanted to show that the party of the Great Society could lead the budget into surplus before the party of Reaganomics ever got a chance to.

Be Consistent

Whatever you believe about this policy, you have to concede that the Clinton Team was consistent. The administration pushed, and got, the end of welfare. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin repeated the phrase "the U.S. supports a strong dollar" so often it became a refrain. When Summers succeeded Rubin as Treasury secretary, the storyline stayed. Clinton backed both secretaries. Robert Reich, the old Labor Secretary, fumed, but he was already overboard himself, back in Massachusetts. And if Secretary Summers swaggered on the deck like a triumphalist, that suited the era.

Summers arrived in 2001 planning to transform Harvard, just as the Clintonites had transformed the concept of a Democratic administration. Under Summers, Harvard would be less of a home for the 1970s mindset, while demanding more intellectual competition. Corporate vice presidents don't have tenure any longer, so why should academics?

"There is one sector in the U.S. economy that hasn't changed like the rest: higher education," Richard Huber, Harvard alumnus and former chairman of Aetna Inc., said yesterday. "Summers wants Harvard in this century, not the last one."

Summers's Missteps

But Summers soon met trouble. The first rough patch came when he declined to consider divesting Harvard's holdings in Israel. About the same time a few star academics, annoyed that he demanded more teaching, huffed off to other universities.

Last year, Summers angered women's studies majors by noting a simple reality: once you get three standard deviations out there on math aptitude tests, you find more boys than girls. The president's point was that even if you didn't like that fact, you probably wanted to address it. But the professors swarmed him, ending the debate.

Next came the issue of Harvard's portfolio manager, Jack Meyer, who was paid millions for making billions for Harvard's endowment. Academics found that pay-to-endowment ratio too irritating to bear, and Meyer departed. Many months passed before Harvard replaced Meyer with Mohamed El-Erian, Pimco's bond star.

Confidence Deficit

The problem here, many believe, is Confident Larry. Neil Rudenstine, Summers's predecessor, is so collegial he can coax love from a stone. Summers is capable of antagonizing a stone in the same time frame, just by flashing his teeth.

The reality is more complex. Summers's problem at Harvard is indeed one of confidence. But this time too little confidence, not too much.

At Harvard, he had a habit of announcing a bold idea and then backing off with an elaborate apology. Hardly had the flap about women's intelligence come out than Harvard said it was spending an extra $50 million to lure more women and minorities to the faculty. This on top of outreach programs to enroll students from poor families.

Such behavior is too reactive and not consistent enough. Perhaps if Summers had gone around the Yard saying "Harvard supports a strong dollar," he might have stayed in office.

The real problem lies not with the man but with the institution. The Harvard Corp., Harvard's executive board, hired Summers to make changes. Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, Summers's old boss, joined the Corporation in 2002. But instead of standing by Summers, the Corporation gave its ear to the mob - - the professors who choose to take offense at reminders that they are less important than they believe themselves to be.

Not Enough

Harvard's management is now telling itself that Summers attempted too much, and that, perhaps, it would have been better to find someone more like Neil.

This is self-deception. One set of stakeholders to recognize this is Harvard's undergraduates. A poll last weekend by the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper, showed that undergraduates supported Summers 3-to-1. At least this group knows which decade this is. One student told the Crimson he liked Summers because Summers ran things "more like a business."

By afternoon yesterday, though, Summers was saying goodbye. It's a shame. After all, as Mr. Rubin himself knows: if you can change the Democratic Party, you can change a single university, even Harvard. But to do so, you need a boss to keep the wind in your sails.

To contact the writer of this column:
Amity Shlaes at ashlaes@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: February 22, 2006 00:05 EST
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End of Archived Material

Technorati tags: Alan Dershowitz, Harvard, Stanley Kurtz, Amy Shales, Larry Summers.

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

The Other Muhammad Cartoons

2006-02-20T21:38:00.000-08:00

Originally at http://www.weekendavisen.dk/, and finally found here.
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The Weekend avisen page, complete

Muhammad as bearded women, or possibly in drag

Muhammad as empty chair (top), plus Santa Muhammad

Allegedly, the Prophet Roaring by a Forest Lake

The Prophet's Foot (top), plus Muhammad as a Dane (the person pictured is one of the paper's editors).

Allegedly, the Prophet as He Saw Himself (top), plus allegedly The Prophet With Mom.

The Mona Lisa is revealed to actually be a painting of Muhammad.

The Prophet's Insides

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The Phony Cartoons

Supposed to be Muhammad as half pig, but actually an altered photograph of a guy at a French pig-squealing contest

Muhammad depicted as a Demonic Pedophile, allegedly sent to a Muslim by a Dane, but more likely drawn by a Muslim provacateur

Praying Muslim Being Screwed by a Dog, allegedly sent to a Muslim by a Dane, authenticity undetermined
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End of Archived Material

Technorati tags: Danish Muhammad Cartoons, Fake Danish Muhammad Cartoons, lies.

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

The New York Times on the Mecca Meeting

2006-02-20T21:07:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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The Protests

At Mecca Meeting, Cartoon Outrage Crystallized

By HASSAN M. FATTAH

Published: February 9, 2006

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Feb. 8 — As leaders of the world's 57 Muslim nations gathered for a summit meeting in Mecca in December, issues like religious extremism dominated the official agenda. But much of the talk in the hallways was of a wholly different issue: Danish cartoons satirizing the Prophet Muhammad.

The closing communiqué took note of the issue when it expressed "concern at rising hatred against Islam and Muslims and condemned the recent incident of desecration of the image of the Holy Prophet Muhammad in the media of certain countries" as well as over "using the freedom of expression as a pretext to defame religions."

The meeting in Mecca, a Saudi city from which non-Muslims are barred, drew minimal international press coverage even though such leaders as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran were in attendance. But on the road from quiet outrage in a small Muslim community in northern Europe to a set of international brush fires, the summit meeting of the Organization of the Islamic Conference — and the role its member governments played in the outrage — was something of a turning point.

After that meeting, anger at the Danish caricatures, especially at an official government level, became more public. In some countries, like Syria and Iran, that meant heavy press coverage in official news media and virtual government approval of demonstrations that ended with Danish embassies in flames.

In recent days, some governments in Muslim countries have tried to calm the rage, worried by the increasing level of violence and deaths in some cases.

But the pressure began building as early as October, when Danish Islamists were lobbying Arab ambassadors and Arab ambassadors lobbied Arab governments.

"It was no big deal until the Islamic conference when the O.I.C. took a stance against it," said Muhammad el-Sayed Said, deputy director of the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.

Sari Hanafi, an associate professor at the American University in Beirut, said that for Arab governments resentful of the Western push for democracy, the protests presented an opportunity to undercut the appeal of the West to Arab citizens. The freedom pushed by the West, they seemed to say, brought with it disrespect for Islam.

He said the demonstrations "started as a visceral reaction — of course they were offended — and then you had regimes taking advantage saying, 'Look, this is the democracy they're talking about.' "

The protests also allowed governments to outflank a growing challenge from Islamic opposition movements by defending Islam.

At first, the agitation was limited to Denmark. Ahmed Akkari, 28, a Lebanese-born Dane, acts as spokesman for the European Committee for Honoring the Prophet, an umbrella group of 27 Danish Muslim organizations to press the Danish government into action over the cartoons.

Mr. Akkari said the group had worked for more than two months in Denmark without eliciting any response. "We collected 17,000 signatures and delivered them to the office of the prime minister, we saw the minister of culture, we talked to the editor of the Jyllands-Posten, we took many steps within Denmark, but could get no action," Mr. Akkari said, referring to the newspaper that published the cartoons. He added that the prime minister's office had not even responded to the petition.

Frustrated, he said, the group turned to the ambassadors of Muslim countries in Denmark and asked them to speak to the prime minister on their behalf. He refused them too.

"Then the case moved to a new stage," Mr. Akkari recalled. "We decided then that to be heard, it must come from influential people in the Muslim world."

The group put together a 43-page dossier, including the offending cartoons and three more shocking images that had been sent to Danish Muslims who had spoken out against the Jyllands-Posten cartoons.

Mr. Akkari denied that the three other offending images had contributed to the violent reaction, saying the images, received in the mail by Muslims who had complained about the cartoons, were included to show the response that Muslims got when they spoke out in Denmark.

In early December, the group's first delegation of Danish Muslims flew to Cairo, where they met with the grand mufti, Muhammad Sayid Tantawy, Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit and Amr Moussa, the head of the Arab League.
"After that, there was a certain response," Mr. Akkari said, adding that the Cairo government and the Arab League both summoned the Danish ambassador to Egypt for talks.

Mr. Akkari denies that the group had meant to misinform, but concedes that there were misunderstandings along the way.

In Cairo, for example, the group also met with journalists from Egypt's media. During a news conference, they spoke about a proposal from the far-right Danish People's Party to ban the Koran in Denmark because of some 200 verses that are alleged to encourage violence.

Several newspapers then ran articles claiming that Denmark planned to issue a censored version of the Koran. The delegation returned to Denmark, but the dossier continued to make waves in the Middle East. Egypt's foreign minister had taken the dossier with him to the Mecca meeting, where he showed it around. The Danish group also sent a second delegation to Lebanon to meet religious and political leaders there.

Mr. Akkari went on that trip. The delegation met with the grand mufti in Lebanon, Muhammad Rashid Kabbani, and the spiritual head of Lebanon's Shiite Muslims, Sheik Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, as well as the patriarch of the Maronite Church, Nasrallah Sfeir. The group also appeared on Hezbollah's satellite station Al Manar TV, which is seen throughout the Arab world.

Mr. Akkari also made a side trip to Damascus, Syria, to deliver a copy of the dossier to that country's grand mufti, Sheik Ahmed Badr-Eddine Hassoun.

Lebanon's foreign minister, Fawzi Salloukh, says he agreed to meet in mid-December with Egypt's ambassador to Lebanon, who presented him with a letter from his foreign minister, Aboul Gheit, urging him to get involved in the issue. Attached to the letter were copies of some of the drawings.

At the end of December, the pace picked up as talk of a boycott became more prominent. The Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, comprising more than 50 states, published on its Web site a statement condemning "the aggressive campaign waged against Islam and its Prophet" by Jyllands-Posten, and officials of the organization said member nations should impose a boycott on Denmark until an apology was offered for the drawings.

"We encourage the organization's members to boycott Denmark both economically and politically until Denmark presents an official apology for the drawings that have offended the world's Muslims," said Abdulaziz Othman al-Twaijri, the organization's secretary general.

In a few weeks, the Jordanian Parliament condemned the cartoons, as had several other Arab governments.

On Jan. 10, as anti-Danish pressure built, a Norwegian newspaper republished the caricatures in an act of solidarity with the Danes, leading many Muslims to believe that a real campaign against them had begun.

On Jan. 26, in a key move, Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador to Denmark, and Libya followed suit. Saudi clerics began sounding the call for a boycott, and within a day, most Danish products were pulled off supermarket shelves.

"The Saudis did this because they have to score against Islamic fundamentalists," said Mr. Said, the Cairo political scientist. "Syria made an even worse miscalculation," he added, alluding to the sense that the protest had gotten out of hand. The issue of the cartoons came at a critical time in the Muslim world because of Muslim anger over the occupation of Iraq and a sense that Muslims were under siege. Strong showings by Islamists in elections in Egypt and the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections had given new momentum to Islamic movements in the region, and many economies, especially those in the Persian Gulf, realized their economic power as it pertained to Denmark.

"The cartoons were a fuse that lit a bigger fire," said Rami Khouri, editor at large at the English-language Daily Star of Beirut. "It is this deepening sense of vulnerability combines with a sense that the Islamists were on a roll that made it happen."

The wave swept many in the region. Sheik Muhammad Abu Zaid, an imam from the Lebanese town of Saida, said he began hearing of the caricatures from several Palestinian friends visiting from Denmark in December but made little of it.

"For me, honestly, this didn't seem so important," Sheik Abu Zaid said, comparing the drawings to those made of Jesus in Christian countries. "I thought, I know that this is something typical in such countries."

Then, he started to hear that ambassadors of Arab countries had tried to meet with the prime minister of Denmark and had been snubbed, and he began to feel differently.

"It started to seem that this way of thinking was an insult to us," he said. "It is fine to say, 'This is our freedom, this is our way of thinking.' But we began to believe that their freedom was something that hurts us."

Last week, Sheik Abu Zaid heard about a march being planned on the Danish Consulate in Beirut, and he decided to join. He and 600 others boarded buses bound for Beirut. Within an hour of arriving, some of the demonstrators — none of his people, he insisted — became violent, and began attacking the building that housed the embassy. It was just two days after a similar attack against the Danish and Norwegian Embassies in Damascus.

"In the demonstration, I believe 99 percent of the people were good and peaceful, but I could hear people saying, 'We don't want to demonstrate peacefully; we want to burn,' " the sheik said.

He tried in vain to calm people down, he said. "I was calling to the people, 'Please, please follow us and go back.' " he said. "We were hoping to calm people down, and we were hoping to help the peaceful people who were caught in the middle of the fight."

Reporting for this article was contributed by Craig S. Smith from Paris, Katherine Zoepf from Beirut, Suha Maayeh from Amman, Abeer Allam from Cairo and Massoud A. Derhally from Dubai.
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End of Archived Material

Technorati tags: Danish Muhammad Cartoons, Jyllands-Posten, New York Times, Organization of the Islamic Conference, War With Islam.

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

The Washington Post on the Cartoon Flap

2006-02-20T13:42:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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Anatomy of the Cartoon Protest Movement
Opposing Certainties Widen Gap Between West and Muslim World

By Anthony Shadid and Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, February 16, 2006; A01

BEIRUT, Feb. 15 -- It was Oct. 13 when Teguh Santosa, a 30-year-old editor with wire-rim glasses, slicked-back black hair and a stubbly beard, decided to make a point in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country. His idea was a small gesture in a broader confrontation, illustrating the power of images in shaping sentiments. He scanned a dozen cartoons published in September by a Danish newspaper that lampooned the prophet Muhammad and chose to publish the one on his news Web site that has proven the most inflammatory: the prophet wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a lit fuse.

"I wanted them to know why it was insulting," said the thickset Santosa, a Muslim who runs the widely read Rakyat Merdeka Online.

To his surprise, there was almost no reaction. A few e-mailed comments to the Web site, he said. That was all. So he republished the caricature more than a week later, on Oct. 22. Again, nothing.

"We were confused," he recalled, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. "Why aren't people reacting to this story?"

What followed was a quintessentially 21st-century battle, a conflict steeped in decades, even centuries of grievances, reshaped by the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and their aftermath. A digitally interconnected world propelled it forward, as did a series of slights and missteps. And a cultural divide, at times so deep two sides cannot seemingly occupy the same space, transformed an almost incidental decision to publish a dozen cartoons on a page inside a small newspaper in Denmark into a global conflagration.

Protests have erupted in an arc stretching from Europe through Africa to East Asia and, at times, the United States. About a dozen people have died in Afghanistan; five have been killed this week in Pakistan. Muslim journalists were arrested for publishing the cartoons in Jordan, Algeria and Yemen. European countries have evacuated the staffs of embassies and nongovernmental organizations, Muslim countries have withdrawn ambassadors, and Danish exports that average more than $1 billion a year have dried up in a span of weeks.

But the scope of the fallout tells only one story. The debate over the cartoons is replete with unintended consequences, some still taking shape this week. On one side is a defense of freedom of expression, on the other an unforgivable insult to a sacred figure. In between are potentially longer-lasting repercussions: a rethinking of relations between Europe and the Muslim world, and a rare moment of empowerment among Muslims who have felt besieged. Given the moral certainty pronounced by each party, some in the middle feel forced to take sides, blurring the diversity of religious thought that might offer grounds for compromise.

In the United States and Europe, some officials have suggested that the governments of Syria and Iran, isolated abroad, have stoked the protests for internal political reasons. A few Muslim leaders have contended the controversy would have ended quickly with an apology. But the conflict illustrates a broader collision of worldviews, often fueled by feelings of Muslim weakness and injury that date back long before the cartoons were published.

"The way I see it, the war has already started," said Daii al-Islam al-Shahal, a Sunni Muslim cleric in the coastal Lebanese town of Tripoli, who helped organize protests this month against the cartoons in his home town and in Beirut. "Will it end soon, or will it come to a close only after it has completely wiped out the two sides? That is up to God."

This is the story of how it unfolded.

September

Denmark: Challenging a Religious Taboo

In September, Flemming Rose, a tall, soft-spoken editor for the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, had an idea.

He had read that museums in Sweden and London had removed artwork that their staff members deemed offensive to Muslims. A comedian told him he would be afraid to desecrate the Koran, a reluctance he did not have about the Bible. Then he read that a Danish children's book author couldn't find illustrators willing to work under their own names to draw illustrations of Muhammad, the 7th-century prophet of Islam, for a new book on the religion.

Frustrated, Rose decided to contact 25 Danish newspaper cartoonists with a request to draw Muhammad as they saw him. A dozen responded, and his newspaper published each illustration on Sept. 30.

"We have a tradition of satire in Denmark," said Rose, 47, the paper's cultural editor, who saw it as a matter of principle. "We do the same with the royal family, politicians, anyone. In a modern secular society, nobody can impose their religious taboos in the public domain."

"We were astonished and extremely shocked," responded Ahmed Abu Laban, a prominent cleric in Denmark. Representations of the prophet are banned by most schools of Islamic thought. For the devout, even his name is rarely uttered without the phrase "Peace and God's blessings upon him." To Abu Laban, it was not just a portrayal: One cartoon pictured Muhammad with the explosive turban. Another depicted him in heaven greeting suicide bombers; in Islamic tradition, martyrs are promised sensual rewards in paradise. "Enough," Muhammad is portrayed as saying. "We've run out of virgins."

"Muslims have been stigmatized," Abu Laban said. The cartoons, he added, are "the drop that made the cup overflow."

Within a week, Abu Laban and others began organizing. He and leaders of 11 Muslim groups wrote letters to the newspaper and to the Danish culture minister. They received no immediate response. They circulated a petition and submitted 17,000 signatures to Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen. They met with ambassadors from 11 Muslim countries, who asked Rasmussen for a meeting, which he declined.

"After that, we tried to figure out a way to get more voices with us and how to be heard and get respect here in Denmark," said Ahmed Akkari, 28, a Lebanese-born theological student who has emerged as a chief spokesman for the groups.

December

Middle East: Envoys of Protest

They decided to travel to the Middle East, where anti-American sentiment has long festered over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Iraq and a perceived U.S. intention to dominate the region. In recent years, surveys have shown that Muslims in the Arab world and elsewhere overwhelmingly see the U.S.-led war on terrorism as a war on Islam.

Akkari carried a 43-page dossier with photocopies of the Jyllands-Posten cartoons, along with 10 more illustrations that were published on Nov. 10 in Weekend Avisen, another Danish newspaper.

The dossier also included illustrations that depicted Muhammad as a pig and engaged in bestiality. Abu Laban and Akkari said those cartoons, and other obscene drawings of the prophet, had been mailed anonymously to Danish Muslim leaders after the controversy over the cartoons began. Critics have said the delegations deliberately inflamed the situation by passing off those cartoons as the ones published by Jyllands-Posten. Akkari and Abu Laban said those drawings were never represented as having appeared in the newspaper. Rather, they said they were included to illustrate what they called anger and prejudice against Muslims in Denmark.

"Freedom of expression without limits is like a car without brakes," Akkari said.

A delegation of five Danish Muslims went to Egypt on Dec. 4 and met with Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, head of al-Azhar, one of Sunni Islam's foremost establishments; Ali Juma, the mufti, or top cleric, of Egypt; and Amr Moussa, secretary general of the Arab League. They also met with an assistant to Ahmed Aboul Gheit, the Egyptian foreign minister. Akkari said the group stayed in Egypt about a week and gave a news conference that was covered extensively in the Arabic-language media.

A second delegation of four Muslims, including Akkari, went to Lebanon on Dec. 17 and met with Mohammed Rashid Kabbani, grand mufti of Lebanon; Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual head of the country's Shiite Muslims; and Nasrallah Sfeir, patriarch of the Maronite Catholic Church. The group stayed in Lebanon until Dec. 31. Akkari said he also made a day trip to Syria and gave a copy of the dossier to Sheik Ahmed Badr Eddine Hassoun, the grand mufti of Syria.

Among those they met was al-Shahal, the Lebanese cleric in Tripoli, who cringed at the sight of the pictures.

"Ugly and repugnant," he recalled thinking.

January

Saudi Arabia: 'A Revolution Inside Me '

Over the weeks that followed those trips, the conflict germinated, sometimes by the most modern of means.

In Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, Hashim Balkhy, a 43-year-old plastic surgeon who would not consider himself unduly conservative by his country's standards, heard about the cartoons on about Jan. 21. He received a text message on his cell phone from a friend in Medina, one of Islam's holiest cities, saying Danish newspapers had been making fun of the prophet for months.

We must boycott them, his friend said.

That night, after his wife and children had gone to bed, he spent almost four hours online, smoking Carlton cigarettes and reading Web sites. He discovered that within weeks, an entire virtual world had already been dedicated to the subject. He stayed up past dawn.

A few days later, he got an e-mail from a Yahoo discussion group called al-Bostan, which published the cartoons. His eyes wandered over the photos until he got to one portraying the prophet wearing a turban as a bomb. He stared at it.

"They don't know our prophet," he recalled thinking. "And they can't get away with this."

Balkhy was already upset with the West. The photos of torture by members of the U.S. military at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq had outraged him. He was bitter at American support for Israel. He had already stopped drinking Pepsi and Coke, as a symbolic gesture. But the victims in those cases were people -- Palestinians and Iraqis -- and this was the most pure man we know, Balkhy said.

"A revolution inside me started," he said.

He found that the most informative Web sites were the most religiously rigid. In the past, he had recoiled at some of their views, but he now came to rely on them for help in what had become a personal campaign.

On one Web site, he found the e-mail addresses of Danish embassies overseas, and a form letter to them. He cut and pasted a 27-page letter, written in both Arabic and English, and sent it to the embassies. The following day he sent a shorter version of the letter to the same list as well the Norwegian newspaper Magazinet, which had republished the cartoons in January. This time it was only in English. The third day, he e-mailed the same group a copy of a letter calling for a boycott.

He sent a copy of each e-mail to a separate list of 100 people, including colleagues in Egypt and Lebanon. Some he knew from training in Canada, others he met at conferences in the region. In the past, the list was often used to send jokes. This time, his messages encouraged those on the list to boycott Danish goods and, like him, write letters of protest to Danish diplomats, journalists and businessmen.

He joined what had become a virtual sphere of activism, with themes repeated from London to Jakarta, Indonesia. Its speed and scope were unprecedented; to him, it was empowering. As Balkhy sent his e-mails, thousands of others were circulating as well. Dozens of Web sites were set up. Among them was http://www.no4denmark.org/. Text messages beeped on cell phones: "Danish papers are making fun of our prophet," read one. "Boycott their products." Supermarkets in Saudi Arabia began pulling Danish goods from their shelves, and Saudi companies published advertisements citing their support for the boycott. The kingdom recalled its ambassador to Denmark.

"We had accomplished something," Balkhy said. "Our campaign was working."

Denmark: Stopping Short of an Apology

By Jan. 30, intense pressure had built on Rasmussen, a tough-talking farmer's son, and the editors at the Jyllands-Posten newspaper. Protesters in Muslim countries were burning Danish flags. The economic boycott that started in Saudi Arabia had nearly shut down sales of Danish cheese, butter and other products in the Muslim world. On that day, a Monday, Rasmussen expressed his first public criticism of the cartoons.

"I personally have such respect for people's religious feelings that I personally would not have depicted Muhammad, Jesus or other religious figures in such a manner that would offend other people," Rasmussen told Danish television. He stopped short of the apology demanded by Muslim leaders, saying he could not apologize for what was printed in a newspaper exercising free speech.

At about the same time, Carsten Juste, editor in chief of Jyllands-Posten, posted a similar statement. "In our opinion, the 12 drawings were not intended to be offensive, nor were they at variance with Danish law, but they have indisputably offended many Muslims, for which we apologize," he wrote.

Al-Shahal, the Lebanese cleric, watched Rasmussen's remarks on al-Jazeera satellite television. So did Balkhy, on both al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya, another Arabic-language satellite network. Both felt the same way. "Truthfully, it wasn't a real apology, in the precise meaning of the word," al-Shahal said. Balkhy was blunter: Rasmussen had "tried to weasel out of an apology."

February

Berlin: A Free Expression Paradox

In Berlin, Roger Koppel, editor of Die Welt newspaper, saw the apologies by Rasmussen and Juste as an alarming defeat for Europe's tradition of free speech. The next day, Tuesday, Jan. 31, he met with his editorial team and ordered up a front-page story on the issue, including a reproduction of the cartoon of Muhammad with the bomb in his turban positioned at the top of Page One. At least six other European papers did the same, sharply increasing anger in the Muslim world about how the dispute was being handled.

"This had now become a huge political story," Koppel said. "In a secular Western society, a prime minister and a newspaper had to issue an apology for exercising their right to satire."

Koppel said he found many of the cartoons "ridiculous," but the quality of the images wasn't the point.

"You don't deliberately stir up religious hatred, but, sorry, we live in a secular country in the West," he said. "It's part of our culture. It's just not possible that our culture gets somehow penalized by threats." It is illegal in Germany -- and punishable by prison time -- to make statements denying or questioning the existence of the Holocaust. It is also a crime to make "patently false statements" about the Holocaust, such as minimizing the number of victims. Some Muslims have argued that such laws constitute a double standard: in the West it's fine, they argue, to denigrate Muslims, but not Jews.

"It's not a double standard because it's the right of every culture to have its own taboos," Koppel said.

Koppel said that given Germany's painful history with the Nazis and the Holocaust, German society had chosen to establish certain limits on free speech. He said people in Germany must abide by those laws, just as people in Muslim countries must abide by the laws and traditions of those lands. He said a newspaper publishing the Muhammad cartoons in a Muslim country should expect to be punished, while a newspaper publishing them in Germany should expect to be protected by German guarantees of free speech.

In Milan, Gianni Riotta, deputy editor of the Corriere della Sera newspaper, was framing it in a different way.

While defending Jyllands-Posten's right to publish, he said the Danish newspaper made a mistake in judgment by running all 12 cartoons, which he said carried the implication that "all Muslims are terrorists." Riotta said it reminded him of his days studying at Columbia University in New York under famed American television news producer Fred Friendly. He recalled Friendly telling the class, "Shouting fire in a crowded theater is not freedom of expression, it's being stupid."

Riotta had in mind publishing something with what he thought was a clearer perspective. The Corriere, one of Italy's most respected papers, ran a package of nine cartoons: three of the "least offensive" Danish cartoons, along with three anti-Semitic cartoons taken from Arab newspapers and three Nazi-era propaganda posters.

"We wanted to publish to show that these cartoons were really offensive and really racist," Riotta said. "We wanted to give our readers some perspective: This was not Salman Rushdie." Riotta said that, as a reporter, he had covered the controversy over Rushdie's novel, "The Satanic Verses," and that he believed the Danish cartoons could not be considered in the same literary league with Rushdie's book.

Muslim World: Building Solidarity

Republishing the cartoons unleashed a torrent of response.

Governments were already taking action: Interior ministers from 17 Arab nations called on the Danish government to punish the Jyllands-Posten newspaper. The Saudi interior minister urged the other nations to recall their ambassadors from Denmark. Protesters burned a large photo of Prime Minister Rasmussen outside the U.N. compound in Gaza City, scenes repeated elsewhere in Muslim countries. Algeria and Yemen, among others, were calling for U.N. action against Denmark.

In Indonesia, Santosa, the Web site editor, decided to publish one of the cartoons yet again.

"But then after I published the picture, a lot of Muslim people got angry at me. Then I said, 'Oh my God, what happened?" He put the cartoon up at 9 a.m. on Thursday, Feb. 2. He pulled it down less than 12 hours later.

In time, editors in Algeria, Yemen and Jordan were arrested for publishing the cartoons, often to bring attention to the offense.

Some of the region's most influential leaders weighed in.

Fadlallah, the senior Lebanese Shiite cleric, dismissed defending the cartoons under the principle of freedom of expression. Why, then, were some European networks banning al-Manar, the television station of Lebanon's Hezbollah group, on the grounds that it incited people? Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi, a leading Sunni Muslim scholar, called on Muslims to use the dispute to strengthen solidarity. "The whole nation must be angry and rise up to show their anger," he said. "We are not a nation of donkeys. We are a nation of lions."

Protests erupted the next day, Feb. 3, after Friday prayers in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Palestinian territories and Iraq. They would be dwarfed by the scenes that unfolded that weekend in Lebanon and Syria.

Feb. 4

Middle East 'Defending the Prophet'

For days in Damascus, diplomats had heard about protests planned for Saturday. In the streets, there were posters of a Danish flag with a red X across it. Text messages went out on Friday, their source unclear: "Join us in defending our prophet and what is sacred." It added, "What are you going to do in order to answer to your prophet in the afterlife?"

The Norwegian and Danish embassies requested extra security, the diplomats said, but received none.

The protesters gathered on Feb. 4 carrying Syrian flags and banners calling on the Danish ambassador to leave the country. They tore down the flags hanging on the building. Soon, people began throwing rocks and gasoline bombs. Diplomats said they saw what appeared to be Syrian intelligence agents in the crowd. Before dusk, the Danish Embassy was ablaze, and other protesters went to the Norwegian Embassy, burning it as well. Another crowd went to the French Embassy, but was driven back by water hoses.

Ammar Sahloul, a wealthy businessman, heard about the demonstration through text messages, canceled work on Saturday and went with nearly 60 of his employees. He said he reached the Danish Embassy's doors and tried to calm things down, in vain.

"I wanted to express our resentment in the way that the prophet taught us," said Sahloul, 40. "He would not have wanted things to happen the way they happened outside the embassies."

That day, typewritten leaflets were circulating in neighboring Lebanon, calling for another demonstration in Beirut on Sunday. "They have declared war," it read. "So for the victory of our Prophet, we must accept the challenge." The 1,000 leaflets were issued by the Salafi Group in Lebanon, headed by al-Shahal, who first met the Danish delegation in December.

Hundreds boarded buses in Tripoli, flying green-and-black banners with white Islamic inscriptions from the windows. They passed at least seven army checkpoints on the way to Beirut unhindered. In time, thousands gathered in the Lebanese capital, some rampaging through a Christian neighborhood and setting fire to the building that housed the Danish Embassy. Al-Shahal, carrying a loudspeaker, said he was among the clerics who tried to restrain the crowd.

"The truth? I felt sorry when I saw it," he said. "The protest should have demonstrated strength, but with wisdom."

A day later, in Afghanistan, protesters chanting anti-American slogans tried to storm the U.S. air base in Bagram. Afghan security forces fired on the crowd, killing at least three people. More protests followed in other Afghan cities, the grievances multiplying and mixing. In all, about 12 people were killed. Unlike in Lebanon and Syria, calls were passed not by technology, but word of mouth. Few had seen the cartoons, but they had become the topic of Friday sermons there, each retelling tinged with another exaggeration.

"I haven't seen the cartoon itself, but I was told that our prophet has a hand grenade on his turban and each of his fingers, too," said Haji Mohammed Rafiq Shahir, head of a council of professionals in the western Afghan city of Herat.

This Week

Beirut Silencing Voices of Moderation

Amira el-Solh, 28, is a Lebanese Palestinian who lives in Beirut. She had heard about a text message calling for the protest in Lebanon. She, too, was angry about the caricatures, but recalled thinking that the Lebanese have greater worries today.

"Ten minutes of thought," she said she gave it.

The next day, as the protests raged in Beirut, she stayed glued to the television: Lebanese channels, CNN and the BBC. She talked to friends in Beirut, in Europe and the United States. At night, she met with friends, all disgusted with the way things had turned out.

But as she looks back at the dispute -- from the repeated publishing of the cartoons, to the protests, to the violence that pulled at Lebanon's frayed sectarian tapestry, to the moral certainty infusing the debate -- she sees the controversy as less about a dozen cartoons and more about a sense of siege in the Muslim world that forces everyone to take sides. "It's upsetting that you have to defend your identity as a Muslim constantly," she said.

She thought back to other divides in history -- the Green Line that partitioned civil war-era Beirut, the Iron Curtain, the Berlin Wall. She resented having to qualify herself as liberal or conservative, secular or religious. She worried that, in time, those definitions might become irrelevant. Perhaps they already have.

"These walls weren't so long ago," she said. "It was people who built them, and it will be people who will resurrect them."

"Do you want to silence voices of moderation, of coexistence?" she asked this week. "And this is what the generalizations of these cartoons do. It silences any individual as a Muslim and groups me along with everyone else."
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End of story.

Originally here.
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Widespread Outrage Over Cartoons

Anger Grew in Months Following Publication in Danish Newspapers

Anthony Shadid
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 16, 2006; 12:00 PM

Washington Post staff writer Anthony Shadid , who is based in Beirut, was online Thursday, Feb. 16, at noon ET to discuss the fallout over Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad as continuing outrage has soured diplomatic relations and violent protests have lead to deaths in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Read more: Anatomy of the Cartoon Protest Movement, (Post, Feb. 16, 2006)

The transcript follows.
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Anthony Shadid: Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to join you all today from Beirut. I see there are a lot of questions already so I'll go ahead and get started.

_______________________

Williamsburg, Va.; Are the protests of these cartoons based more on the mere fact that they depict the Prophet, or because they indicate that he is a violent terrorist?

Anthony Shadid: I think it's both. But if we take a step back, it's really a broader issue. What we've seen the past weeks, I think, is the elaboration of an accumulation of resentments and grievances, the cartoons being the latest and, in some ways, the most tangible.

_______________________

Los Angeles, Calif.; The magnitude of the cartoon protests is not surprising given the incredible cultural disconnect between Muslim nations and the West. It seems like the only ones surprised by this reaction are the European newspapers that took a "militant" stand for secularism and free speech by printing the cartoons. But images of widespread rioting and protests in Muslim countries reinforce the cartoon-stereotype of rigid, fanatical Muslims. Does lack of surprise over the violent reactions mean that we have insight into the Muslim perspective or does it mean that we believe the cartoons?

Anthony Shadid: I think it's an interesting point. I was interviewing a cleric in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli, and I asked him that question. Basically, does the violent response, in some instances, reinforce stereotypes that many in the region think the cartoons represent? He agreed. And, to his credit, he was one of the clerics, with a bullhorn, trying to restrain protesters during the rampage in Beirut. There has certainly been a backlash to the violent aspects of the response, from Ayatollah Fadlallah in Lebanon, to Sistani in Iraq, to Sunni leaders elsewhere. I guess I'd add that there has been a sense of empowerment as well -- that the Muslim community is having its voice heard, in part through a successful boycott of Danish products. A mixed bag, I guess.

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Aarhus, Denmark; At first I was opposed to Jyllands-Posten printing the cartoons. But now I feel it was necessary. The fanaticism and intolerance of a few have been exposed. We have seen our flags been burned; many Danes have received death threats. We are deeply offended, but I am proud to say that none of the 200.000 Muslims in Denmark have anything to fear. Not even the extremists. I am sorry that Muslims have been offended, but I and our Prime Minister cannot apology for something a single newspaper has done.

Anthony Shadid: As a journalist, I feel conflicted about the decision. As someone living in the region, I understand somewhat the depth of the response. We are talking about a divide here, and there is a certainty on each side that often drowns out voices that might be contrarian.

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Montreal, Canada; Your timeline of the cartoon crisis has a gaping hole: why didn't you mention that al-Farj (also spelled al-Farg) a 100,000 copies weekly newspaper in Cairo also published the Danish cartoons on October 17 during the Ramadan?

Nobody reacted to this publication. But last week, as if on cue, Egyptians suddenly exploded in anger with the rest of the Muslim world.

Anthony Shadid: I tell you -- with the word limit we had on the story, we left out a lot. I'm sorry about that. You're right about the Egyptian newspaper. But the lead of the story noted that they were published in October in Indonesia, as well. I thought we addressed that point right at the top of the piece.

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Washington, D.C.; Having lived in the Middle East for five years, I can't help but shake my head at the fact that these people are so easily being manipulated by their governments. I totally understand them being offended by the cartoons- goodness knows there are many times I've been offended by something mocking Christianity- but shouldn't they be demonstrating against their governments not doing enough to give them jobs, security, etc.?

And can you please shed some light as to why Muslims think that non-Muslims should be expected to adhere to Muslim rules?

Anthony Shadid: My sense, this isn't solely a case of manipulation. I suspect there was some of that going on. But was Syria responsible for what happened in Beirut? Its sympathizers may have had a hand, but there was plenty of anger already there to let things get out of hand. Like I said in an earlier question, we're talking about accumulated grievances here, many of which date back to Sept. 11. I'm not sanctioning them, I'm just pointing out they exist. Often those grievances are stated in existential terms, that the war on terror is, in fact, a war on Islam. I suspect most Americans would disagree, but that perspective is out there.

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Buffalo, N.Y.; How much of the anger was really about the cartoons and how much was it just a dislike of the West? I saw quite a few American flags burning even though the cartoons had nothing to do with America.

Anthony Shadid: There's no question that grievances were conflated, interconnected and so on. I think we saw that especially in Afghanistan. In some ways, that's what worries me. I've always been struck, in the Arab world at least, by the ability of people to distinguish American policy, for instance, from, say, Americans, or European policy from individual citizens. I fear that's becoming less the case these days.

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Sterling, Va.; Why is most of the news media willing to publish old photos of Abu Ghraib but are unwilling to publish the "cartoons of blasphemy"?

Anthony Shadid: This is an interesting point -- the most graphic Abu Ghraib images were, in fact, not published. I'm not sure what that says, but I think editors (I'm not one, so I won't speak too much for them) make decisions several times a day on language, taste and so on. There's no firm rule on what gets in a paper and doesn't. I think the Post's decision on the cartoons probably fits within that notion of what is appropriate.

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Ocala, Fla.; If these groups are so angry at the West, why do they keep moving into Western countries? It seems like they should fix their own countries first.

Anthony Shadid: I notice a real danger in American discourse (and in the discourse here, as well) to make sweeping generalizations. Who are "these groups" you're talking about? Which countries do you mean? I don't think all Americans would want to be associated with every U.S. policy. I don't think all Muslims would want to be grouped with those who burned the embassies in Damascus. We fall into that problem in journalism, as well. "Muslim opinion," "the Muslim world," and so on. I don't always see a way around it, but usually, I don't think it helps us understand the real issues at stake.

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Alexandria, Va.; Isn't what is different about the cartoon protests that we think the cause of the protests is not appropriate? But the reality is that they are protesting against us on a regular basis. It's not the protests that are different this time, its that the purported reason for them is different, and this is what we notice. When they protest a book being abused, we think it odd, but since we don't want to abuse books, we don't notice as much.

Anthony Shadid: I don't know about that. The depth of the reaction is far greater this time around. I think it touched a nerve. I think it reflects, as I've said a couple times, accumulated grievances and resentments. I think a lot of people here see it as a little over the top -- maybe not even the cartoons, but the decision to publish them over and over.

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Philadelphia, Pa.; It seems a sham that European newspapers and governments evoke "freedom of expression" to avoid criticizing the publication of tasteless cartoons. It reminds me of high school students distributing a "spoof" newspaper that makes offensive comments about fellow students. In both cases, "freedom of expression" should not prevent criticism of the materials as offensive and inappropriate.

Additionally, it appears that in many post-Enlightenment European societies minorities gain full admission only if they accept assimilation and secularization. That is in contrast to the United States, where religiosity and religious diversity has been accepted, more or less. That attitude arguably can be traced to George Washington, whose letters to diverse religious institutions are proudly displayed by those institutions to this day.

What developments do you expect in Europe in regard to tolerance of religious and ethnic minorities?

Anthony Shadid: I can't really answer to the last two paragraphs, but as to the first, I'd point you to the discussion in today's story with the German and Italian editors. I thought it was fascinating, the way they elaborated their positions and the point they were trying to get across. I thought both were pretty nuanced and reflective.

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Springfield, Va.; In today's report you called this "a rare moment of empowerment among Muslims who have felt besieged." I don't know anyone living in the west who views the violent protests, boycotts, and publishing of anti-Holocaust cartoons as a step forward for Muslims. Please expand on how you see the various actions and reactions empowering Muslims.

Anthony Shadid: This is an interesting question, and it was a point that struck me in writing the story. I don't think Muslims would measure their empowerment vis a vis Western attitudes. And I'm not sure that empowerment, in itself, is, as you put it, a step forward. My point was this: There is a widespread sense among many in the Arab and Muslim world that they've been on the receiving end since Sept. 11. Their voices are not always heard. They're overwhelmed by what they see as double standards. Here was an instance when they communicated their outrage, sometimes in peaceful ways. Perhaps more tellingly, and specifically in Saudi Arabia, they carried out a boycott that was, from their view, successful. The doctor we mention in the story would see this as the success of a grass-roots campaign, and I think in one reading, that in itself is empowerment.

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Gothenburg, Sweden; How widespread is the anger caused by the cartoons? How does the "man on the street" in the Arab world feel about this? Is the anger and protest and so on mostly fueled by fanatics or is it more widespread?

Anthony Shadid: I have to say I think it's more widespread. The woman I ended the story with, I thought, was an interesting perspective. The issue itself was peripheral to her, but that didn't mean it didn't resonate at some level. There's no question it's what people are talking about and watching on television.

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Knoxville, Tenn.; I am a Pakistani immigrant. Though I felt insulted by the cartoons I was very disappointed at the recent violent riots in Pakistan. Why are Muslims today so emotional and lacking in smart thinking? A peaceful protest would have worked far far better.

Anthony Shadid: I've heard that point quite a bit. The cleric in Tripoli I met made the same argument: a protest should have shown "strength with wisdom."

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Seattle, Wash.; Arab newspapers print anti-Semitic cartoons of Jews every day. How come these same Muslims who are so upset about the Danish cartoon think these cartoons of Jews eating babies is OK?

Anthony Shadid: That was the point the Italian editor tried to make in today's story.

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San Diego, Calif.; Could you comment on The Post's decision not to publish these cartoons? In the interest of full disclosure, I believe the cartoons ARE the story and that not republishing abandons journalistic integrity. You cannot publish dozens of pictures of the riots caused by the cartoons without publishing the cartoons themselves. I'm very concerned that these cartoons have not been widely republished in the U.S. out of fear of retribution.

Anthony Shadid: This is a question that is coming up a lot in this forum. (I'm sorry, I'm not able to get to everyone's.) Like I said, I'm not an editor, but my understanding of the decision is that it seems to fit within the same thinking on publishing photos of dead soldiers, of the most graphic Abu Ghraib shots and so on. I don't think it's fear of retribution. I think it's a certain community standard that the Post feels obligated to uphold.

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Cambridge, Mass.; Mr. Shadid:

With reference to freedom of the press and respect for religion aside, do you believe the current escalating tension and wanton violence will precipitate widespread conflicts as backlashes against Muslims (inevitably) begin to materialize, leading to a kind of "clash of civilization"? Thanks.

Anthony Shadid: I'm going to speak as someone who lives in the Middle East. I don't have a good feeling about the state of affairs today. It's a gut reaction, but sentiments in this region (and let's face it, the tenor of discourse in the West, too) have changed dramatically in the 10 years or so that I've been a reporter in the Middle East. What does that mean? I don't know. But in a lot of ways, I find it sad.

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Fredericksburg, Va.; In 1989 artist Andrew Serrano produced the art piece "Piss Christ" a crucifix in a jar of urine. Many were offended, many were disgusted. but no one rioted, no one burned down building and no one was killed. In fact the work was subsidized by the Federal government through an arts grant. This controversy isn't about a cartoon, this is about a group of religious zealots imposing their beliefs through violence. If it wasn't the cartoon it would be something else.

Anthony Shadid: This is a question that's best answered by someone a lot smarter than me. But I think there's a danger in viewing this as a simple issue of religious representation. We're talking about different world views -- the relationship between religion and society/life, the taboos that come with representing figures in Christianity and Islam, the disempowerment felt by so many in the region, differing shades of the very notion of identity . . . the list could go on and on. My point is this: There's a context here that's sometimes lost, and I think that context is crucial in understanding the depth of the debate as well as the reaction.

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Nichols Hills, Okla.; How strong is the belief in the Middle East that Western governments control the Western press, and therefore the Western governments are accountable for the cartoons? And if it is a strong belief, is that due to their only experiences being state controlled media? or otherwise?

Anthony Shadid: OK, I'd be a miserable Okie, if I didn't get to the questions from my hometown. I think that point is often made in the West -- that Arabs and Muslims don't understand the very notion of a free press. To be honest, I don't agree with it. I think people -- not all, but many -- do understand that the newspapers in Europe are not state-controlled. These requests for an apology were often stated in broader terms. I'm not agreeing with the requests, but I think often those making them do not think the governments themselves were responsible for publishing the cartoons.

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Oklahoma City, Okla.; How do Muslims "in the Middle East street" perceive the more moderate U.S. Muslims who have not reacted violently to the cartoons? Are the moderate U.S. Muslims viewed just as bad as the U.S. infidels?

Anthony Shadid: And another from Oklahoma. There's definitely been a certain revulsion at the violence, particularly in Beirut. But I haven't really come across a moderate/extreme divide that's all that pronounced on the issue. And here's why -- again, it's not solely the cartoons. I think the most sophisticated will make that point that it's a representation that feeds into stereotypes and generalizations, made by those with the power to impose them. Does that make sense? It's similar to what the woman who concluded the story was saying: I'm being grouped with everyone else, depriving me of a middle ground, and in that case, I have no choice but to identify myself as such.

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Austin, Tex.; I have a more general question. Who (if anybody) speaks for the US and Europe in the Arabic media?

Quality news shows in the US (the NewsHour, for instance) generally find some pretty eloquent spokesmen for different Arab/Muslim points of view.

Are there comparable figures on TV in the Arab/Muslim world explaining why some people in the West think that these cartoons should be published? Or even explaining facts, like for instance that the Pope can't stop publication of the cartoons?

Are there even many people with the Arabic-language skills to do so?

Anthony Shadid: You might be surprised by how many Western voices make it on Arabic television. I'm always struck that Jazeera and Arabiya will sometimes dedicate more air time to, say, a State Department briefing or a news conference than their Western counterparts might.

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Richmond, Va.; Unfortunately I have to agree, like it or not, that the response to the cartoons brought out, for some at least, the very characteristics that the cartoons mocked. It would be like an Irishman beating someone up in a bar who said that Irishmen love to drink and fight.

Having said that, I'm glad that the response hasn't been worse, given the magnitude of the insult that many Muslims consider the cartoons to be. I'm glad to see that many Muslim leaders are calling for a more measured response.

I hope everybody learns something from this.

Anthony Shadid: It's a good point, and one that I've heard often. It will be interesting to see how we look back on this in five or 10 years. Was it symptomatic of a much greater problem, an aberration, or the start of a dialogue? I suspect it's the first, but we'll see.

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New York, N.Y.; To what extent were Syrian officials involved in the embassy attacks there? You mentioned that intelligence agents were seen among the crowd, and this is a country where spontaneous demonstrations are quite rare, if they occur at all.

Anthony Shadid: This is a good question, and to be honest, I don't know the answer. My best guess, and again, it's a guess: Authorities didn't mind the protest, and they might not have minded it getting out of hand, but they probably didn't incite or plan the burning themselves.

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Washington, D.C.; Mr Shadid:

What kind of apology for these cartoons do you think would make a difference? At this point there has been so much violence, I'm wondering if any apology would make any difference at all. (Whether anyone would be willing to make such an apology is an entirely separate issue.)

Thank you for taking our questions today.

Anthony Shadid: I'm probably wrong, but I suspect a lot of this would have been avoided had the meetings, apologies and petitions been received differently in the first place in Denmark. I'm not blaming the Danish authorities. I'm just saying that those events unleashed a far more aggressive campaign that brought the issue to the region, where, in a remarkably interconnected world, it took little time to ignite.

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Madison, Wis.: Since the original cartoons were published last year, and there has been violence for the last few weeks, just how long do you expect these protests over the cartoons to last?

Anthony Shadid: I don't know. They're still going on, and I suspect they'll go on a little while longer. I think it depends on whether the cartoons are republished and what happens in the region.

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Anthony Shadid: I think I'm going to have to wrap it up. I apologize. I got to less than half the questions, but I've never seen this much interest in an issue on Live Online. That says a lot about the subject itself, I guess. Hope to join you all again soon.

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Editor's Note: washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions. washingtonpost.com is not responsible for any content posted by third parties.

© 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive
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End of story.

Originally here.
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Why I Published Those Cartoons

By Flemming Rose
Sunday, February 19, 2006; B01

Childish. Irresponsible. Hate speech. A provocation just for the sake of provocation. A PR stunt. Critics of 12 cartoons of the prophet Muhammad I decided to publish in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten have not minced their words. They say that freedom of expression does not imply an endorsement of insulting people's religious feelings, and besides, they add, the media censor themselves every day. So, please do not teach us a lesson about limitless freedom of speech.

I agree that the freedom to publish things doesn't mean you publish everything. Jyllands-Posten would not publish pornographic images or graphic details of dead bodies; swear words rarely make it into our pages. So we are not fundamentalists in our support for freedom of expression.

But the cartoon story is different.

Those examples have to do with exercising restraint because of ethical standards and taste; call it editing. By contrast, I commissioned the cartoons in response to several incidents of self-censorship in Europe caused by widening fears and feelings of intimidation in dealing with issues related to Islam. And I still believe that this is a topic that we Europeans must confront, challenging moderate Muslims to speak out. The idea wasn't to provoke gratuitously -- and we certainly didn't intend to trigger violent demonstrations throughout the Muslim world. Our goal was simply to push back self-imposed limits on expression that seemed to be closing in tighter.

At the end of September, a Danish standup comedian said in an interview with Jyllands-Posten that he had no problem urinating on the Bible in front of a camera, but he dared not do the same thing with the Koran.

This was the culmination of a series of disturbing instances of self-censorship. Last September, a Danish children's writer had trouble finding an illustrator for a book about the life of Muhammad. Three people turned down the job for fear of consequences. The person who finally accepted insisted on anonymity, which in my book is a form of self-censorship. European translators of a critical book about Islam also did not want their names to appear on the book cover beside the name of the author, a Somalia-born Dutch politician who has herself been in hiding.

Around the same time, the Tate gallery in London withdrew an installation by the avant-garde artist John Latham depicting the Koran, Bible and Talmud torn to pieces. The museum explained that it did not want to stir things up after the London bombings. (A few months earlier, to avoid offending Muslims, a museum in Goteborg, Sweden, had removed a painting with a sexual motif and a quotation from the Koran.)

Finally, at the end of September, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen met with a group of imams, one of whom called on the prime minister to interfere with the press in order to get more positive coverage of Islam.

So, over two weeks we witnessed a half-dozen cases of self-censorship, pitting freedom of speech against the fear of confronting issues about Islam. This was a legitimate news story to cover, and Jyllands-Posten decided to do it by adopting the well-known journalistic principle: Show, don't tell. I wrote to members of the association of Danish cartoonists asking them "to draw Muhammad as you see him." We certainly did not ask them to make fun of the prophet. Twelve out of 25 active members responded.

We have a tradition of satire when dealing with the royal family and other public figures, and that was reflected in the cartoons. The cartoonists treated Islam the same way they treat Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and other religions. And by treating Muslims in Denmark as equals they made a point: We are integrating you into the Danish tradition of satire because you are part of our society, not strangers. The cartoons are including, rather than excluding, Muslims.

The cartoons do not in any way demonize or stereotype Muslims. In fact, they differ from one another both in the way they depict the prophet and in whom they target. One cartoon makes fun of Jyllands-Posten, portraying its cultural editors as a bunch of reactionary provocateurs. Another suggests that the children's writer who could not find an illustrator for his book went public just to get cheap publicity. A third puts the head of the anti-immigration Danish People's Party in a lineup, as if she is a suspected criminal.

One cartoon -- depicting the prophet with a bomb in his turban -- has drawn the harshest criticism. Angry voices claim the cartoon is saying that the prophet is a terrorist or that every Muslim is a terrorist. I read it differently: Some individuals have taken the religion of Islam hostage by committing terrorist acts in the name of the prophet. They are the ones who have given the religion a bad name. The cartoon also plays into the fairy tale about Aladdin and the orange that fell into his turban and made his fortune. This suggests that the bomb comes from the outside world and is not an inherent characteristic of the prophet.

On occasion, Jyllands-Posten has refused to print satirical cartoons of Jesus, but not because it applies a double standard. In fact, the same cartoonist who drew the image of Muhammed with a bomb in his turban drew a cartoon with Jesus on the cross having dollar notes in his eyes and another with the star of David attached to a bomb fuse. There were, however, no embassy burnings or death threats when we published those.

Has Jyllands-Posten insulted and disrespected Islam? It certainly didn't intend to. But what does respect mean? When I visit a mosque, I show my respect by taking off my shoes. I follow the customs, just as I do in a church, synagogue or other holy place. But if a believer demands that I, as a nonbeliever, observe his taboos in the public domain, he is not asking for my respect, but for my submission. And that is incompatible with a secular democracy.

This is exactly why Karl Popper, in his seminal work "The Open Society and Its Enemies," insisted that one should not be tolerant with the intolerant. Nowhere do so many religions coexist peacefully as in a democracy where freedom of expression is a fundamental right. In Saudi Arabia, you can get arrested for wearing a cross or having a Bible in your suitcase, while Muslims in secular Denmark can have their own mosques, cemeteries, schools, TV and radio stations.

I acknowledge that some people have been offended by the publication of the cartoons, and Jyllands-Posten has apologized for that. But we cannot apologize for our right to publish material, even offensive material. You cannot edit a newspaper if you are paralyzed by worries about every possible insult.

I am offended by things in the paper every day: transcripts of speeches by Osama bin Laden, photos from Abu Ghraib, people insisting that Israel should be erased from the face of the Earth, people saying the Holocaust never happened. But that does not mean that I would refrain from printing them as long as they fell within the limits of the law and of the newspaper's ethical code. That other editors would make different choices is the essence of pluralism.

As a former correspondent in the Soviet Union, I am sensitive about calls for censorship on the grounds of insult. This is a popular trick of totalitarian movements: Label any critique or call for debate as an insult and punish the offenders. That is what happened to human rights activists and writers such as Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir Bukovsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Natan Sharansky, Boris Pasternak. The regime accused them of anti-Soviet propaganda, just as some Muslims are labeling 12 cartoons in a Danish newspaper anti-Islamic.

The lesson from the Cold War is: If you give in to totalitarian impulses once, new demands follow. The West prevailed in the Cold War because we stood by our fundamental values and did not appease totalitarian tyrants.

Since the Sept. 30 publication of the cartoons, we have had a constructive debate in Denmark and Europe about freedom of expression, freedom of religion and respect for immigrants and people's beliefs. Never before have so many Danish Muslims participated in a public dialogue -- in town hall meetings, letters to editors, opinion columns and debates on radio and TV. We have had no anti-Muslim riots, no Muslims fleeing the country and no Muslims committing violence. The radical imams who misinformed their counterparts in the Middle East about the situation for Muslims in Denmark have been marginalized. They no longer speak for the Muslim community in Denmark because moderate Muslims have had the courage to speak out against them.

In January, Jyllands-Posten ran three full pages of interviews and photos of moderate Muslims saying no to being represented by the imams. They insist that their faith is compatible with a modern secular democracy. A network of moderate Muslims committed to the constitution has been established, and the anti-immigration People's Party called on its members to differentiate between radical and moderate Muslims, i.e. between Muslims propagating sharia law and Muslims accepting the rule of secular law. The Muslim face of Denmark has changed, and it is becoming clear that this is not a debate between "them" and "us," but between those committed to democracy in Denmark and those who are not.

This is the sort of debate that Jyllands-Posten had hoped to generate when it chose to test the limits of self-censorship by calling on cartoonists to challenge a Muslim taboo. Did we achieve our purpose? Yes and no. Some of the spirited defenses of our freedom of expression have been inspiring. But tragic demonstrations throughout the Middle East and Asia were not what we anticipated, much less desired. Moreover, the newspaper has received 104 registered threats, 10 people have been arrested, cartoonists have been forced into hiding because of threats against their lives and Jyllands-Posten's headquarters have been evacuated several times due to bomb threats. This is hardly a climate for easing self-censorship.

Still, I think the cartoons now have a place in two separate narratives, one in Europe and one in the Middle East. In the words of the Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the integration of Muslims into European societies has been sped up by 300 years due to the cartoons; perhaps we do not need to fight the battle for the Enlightenment all over again in Europe. The narrative in the Middle East is more complex, but that has very little to do with the cartoons.

flemming.rose@jp.dk

Flemming Rose is the culture editor of the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company
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End of Story.

My letter to Flemming Rose.
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Dear Mr. Fleming [and no, I don't know why I confused his first and last names]:

I just read your opinion piece in the Washington Post, and I can't help but feel you were a bit naive, if you thought that those cartoons wouldn't provoke violence.

But otherwise, I agree with everything you wrote. It's necessary for us in the West to make it clear that we are willing to welcome Muslims into our society, WHEN THEY BECOME PART OF THAT SOCIETY. Otherwise, no.

You mentioned the West's refusal to bow to totalitarianism in the Soviet Union. It's worth remembering that in the Baltics in 1939, the Soviets demanded the right to base troops, and a voice in the composition of the government. Then, when the citizens committed "anti-Soviet Acts," the Kremlin demanded the right to a greater say in the Baltic governments, and the basing of more troops in the Baltic countries. The end came with the Soviets taking the Baltics over.

The Soviets made the same demands of Finland. The Finns refused, and had to fight an invasion, but they retained their independence.

So I'm proud of you for standing up to the Radical Islamic Fascists. Denmark is fighting for all of us in the West, and I support you wholeheartedly and unquailifiedly.

Best Wishes,
Stephen M.
St. Onge
Minneapolis, MN

http://fatsteve.blogspot.com/
DELENDAM ESSE SAUDI ARABIA!
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End of Letter.

My letter to The Washington Post
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Dear Post Editors:

The good news about your story of February 16th, "Anatomy of the Cartoon Protest Movement," is that it's some of the best coverage I've seen of this story in the MSM. The bad news is, it's a disgraceful failure, journalistically and morally.

Let me start with your purely journalistic failures. One of your story's authors said "I tell you -- with the word limit we had on the story, we left out a lot." All print newspapers have space restrictions, but the web doesn't. You could have put up a 'full' version of the story online, and a space-constrained one in print. Instead, you left things out of both versions.

And when you're trying to make a space limit, it behooves you to leave out the less important stuff, and concentrate on the most important. Looking at your story, I can't help but notice the things it leaves out. For instance, the story notes that there were extra cartoons in the dossier the Muslim "leaders" took to the Mid-East:

"The dossier also included illustrations that depicted Muhammad as a pig and engaged in bestiality. Abu Laban and Akkari said those cartoons, and other obscene drawings of the prophet, had been mailed anonymously to Danish Muslim leaders after the controversy over the cartoons began." And who were these Muslims who received the drawings? No one has ever said. The Muslim leaders won't tell anyone their names. Threatening letters supposedly accompanied the drawings, but the Danish Muslim leaders won't provide copies of them. Of the three cartoons, one is an altered picture of a participant in a French pig-squealing contest, as a blogger documented at http://www.neandernews.com/?p=54%20. Another, labeling Muhammad a demonic pedophile, has lettering that appears to be drawn by an Arab, as documented at http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_02_05-2006_02_11.shtml#1139559700 and http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2006_02_05-2006_02_11.shtml#1139697364. In short, anyone who paid attention would have known, by the time the story was published, that there is something very suspicious about these three extra cartoons, and that it's quite possible that Danish Muslims deliberately faked them. But there is no mention of that in the article, or any attempt to investigate their origin.

Another thing the article leaves out is the meeting with the Organization of the Islamic Conference in Mecca, between the two Danish Muslim visits, where the Egyptian Foreign Minister showed the dossier to representitives of other government (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/09/international/middleeast/09cartoon.html?ei=5088&en=ab6eabaaf6fd940b&ex=1297141200&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss&pagewanted=print). It was only after that meeting that the protest took off. This strongly argues for government involvement in the organization of the protests. Again, the Post doesn't follow up.

Your story moves to January, where we read this:

"In Jiddah, Saudi Arabia, Hashim Balkhy, a 43-year-old plastic surgeon who would not consider himself unduly conservative by his country's standards, heard about the cartoons on about Jan. 21. He received a text message on his cell phone from a friend in Medina, one of Islam's holiest cities, saying Danish newspapers had been making fun of the prophet for months.
"We must boycott them, his friend said.

"That night, after his wife and children had gone to bed, he spent almost four hours online, smoking Carlton cigarettes and reading Web sites. He discovered that within weeks, an entire virtual world had already been dedicated to the subject. He stayed up past dawn."

Let's stop and review for a second. On September 30th, the cartoons are published. In October, Muslims put them up on websites (your story) and publish them on the front pages of newspapers (http://i1.tinypic.com/nfik52.jpg, http://freedomforegyptians.blogspot.com/2006/02/egyptian-newspaper-pictures-that.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_Jyllands-Posten_Muhammad_cartoons_controversy). Yet there is no reaction. No riots take place. No one appears to be paying attention.

Then, in December, the Danish Muslims bring the issue to the attention of governments in Islamic countries, and THEN, suddenly, "an entire virtual world" springs up, and Muslims are arranging a boycott of Danish goods. Just who created this virtual world, and how, and why? Who thought up the boycott idea, and started spreading the idea? Apparently, the Post doesn't think that question important.

In February, the riots start. In Tripoli, Lebanon, someone lays on buses and brings in hundreds of demonstrators to Beirut. The army passes them through checkpoints, and the Danish embassy is set ablaze. Reports The Guardian:

"And then in the early afternoon, as suddenly as it had all begun, it ended. The leaders of the mob turned to the angry young men beside them and told them it was time to leave. Obediently the crowd thinned out and began walking back to the buses, even as the Danish embassy continued to burn. By 3pm there wasn't a single protester left on the street."

Who organized these buses? Why weren't there more police and troops on hand? Who were these obediently dispersing demonstrators? Again, the Post doesn't think that's important. Yet you had room for much less interesting material in the article. I don't know if your reporters and editors were ignorant of the facts I've mentioned, or deliberately decided not to cover this information, but it's lousy journalism regardless of the causes.

As for your moral failure, it comes down to apparent cowardice and hidden editorializing. It is obvious from what is in the story that various people deliberately worked on stirring up Muslim outrage over the cartoons, but you are determined not to see that. We get talk of "compromise" from the reporter, without any discussion of what such a compromise might look like. Just to what extent is Anthony Shadid willing to allow Muslims to tell Western newspapers what they may publish, and what do the papers get in return? Is the Post willing to allow any other group the right to tell it what's acceptable to publish? It looks from here like the answer is 'Well, if the other groups are willing to kill us over trivia, we'll do whatever they want too.' After all, you Ombudswoman said recently that you're supposed to offend people from time to time.

The story and the online discussion at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006/02/15/DI2006021501630.html keep coming up with the idea of "Opposing certainties," without mentioning what these certainties are. But it appears the Post is CERTAIN that whatever said certainties are, if people were in doubt, everything could be worked out peacefully. The story talks about Muslim outrage over the depiction of Muhammad with a bomb in his turbin, but never asks the obvious questions 'What's outrageous about that? Muslims set bombs in the name of religion every day. Are you willing to denounce all of those bombers too? Do you have any plans to stop their actions?' And your reporters keep talking of "centuries of grievances" being responsible for the riots and demonstrations, without ever producing any quotations from the demonstrators or rioters on their motivations -- or on anything else, for that matter.

The impression of The Washington Post and its staff I'm left with is "Good little Dhimmis." And that in turn makes me ill.

Very Sincerely Yours,
Stephen M.
St. Onge
Minneapolis, MN

http://fatsteve.blogspot.com/
DELENDAM ESSE SAUDI ARABIA!
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End of Archived Material

Technorati tags: Danish Muhammad Cartoons, Muhammed, Flemming Rose, Anthony Shadid, War With Islam, Washington Post.

New York Times Story on Democratic Electoral Woes

2006-02-14T17:53:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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February 8, 2006

Some Democrats Are Sensing Missed Opportunities

By ADAM NAGOURNEY
and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

WASHINGTON, Feb. 7 — Democrats are heading into this year’s elections in a position weaker than they had hoped for, party leaders say, stirring concern that they are letting pass an opportunity to exploit what they see as widespread Republican vulnerabilities.

In interviews, senior Democrats said they were optimistic about significant gains in Congressional elections this fall, calling this the best political environment they have faced since President Bush took office.

But Democrats described a growing sense that they had failed to take full advantage of the troubles that have plagued Mr. Bush and his party since the middle of last year, driving down the president’s approval ratings, opening divisions among Republicans in Congress over policy and potentially putting control of the House and Senate into play in November.

Asked to describe the health of the Democratic Party, Senator Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, said: “A lot worse than it should be. This has not been a very good two months.”

“We seem to be losing our voice when it comes to the basic things people worry about,” Mr. Dodd said.

Democrats said they had not yet figured out how to counter the White House’s long assault on their national security credentials. And they said their opportunities to break through to voters with a coherent message on domestic and foreign policy — should they settle on one — were restricted by the lack of an established, nationally known leader to carry their message this fall.

As a result, some Democrats said, their party could lose its chance to do to Republicans this year what the Republicans did to them in 1994: make the midterm election, normally dominated by regional and local concerns, a national referendum on the party in power.

“I think that two-thirds of the American people think the country is going in the wrong direction,” said Senator Barack Obama, the first-term Illinois Democrat who is widely viewed as one of the party’s promising stars. “They’re not sure yet whether Democrats can move it in the right direction.”

Mr. Obama said the Democratic Party had not seized the moment, adding: “We have been in a reactive posture for too long. I think we have been very good at saying no, but not good enough at saying yes.”

Some Democrats said they favored remaining largely on the sidelines while Republicans struggled under the glare of a corruption inquiry. And some said there was still time for the party to get its act together. But many others said the party needed to move quickly to offer a comprehensive governing agenda, even as they expressed concern about who could make the case.

Their concern was aggravated by the image of high-profile Democrats, including Senator Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, challenging the legality of Mr. Bush’s secret surveillance program this week at a time when the White House has sought to portray Democrats as weak on security.

“We’re selling our party short; you’ve got to stand for a lot more than just blasting the other side,” said Gov. Phil Bredesen of Tennessee. “The country is wide open to hear some alternatives, but I don’t think it’s wide open to all these criticisms. I am sitting here and getting all my e-mail about the things we are supposed to say about the president’s speech, but it’s extremely light on ideas. It’s like, ‘We’re for jobs and we’re for America.’ ”

To a certain extent, the frustrations afflicting Democrats are typical for a party out of power. In Congress, the Democrats have become largely marginalized by the Republican majority, depriving them of a ready platform either to make attacks or offer their own ideas. Presidential campaigns typically produce prominent party leaders, followed around the country by a cluster of reporters and television crews, but that is at least two years away.

Yet in many ways, the Democratic Party’s problems seem particularly tangled today, a source of frustration to Democratic leaders as they have watched opinion polls indicating that the public is souring on the Republican Party and receptive to Democratic leadership.

And the problems are besetting Democrats at a pivotal moment, as they struggle to adapt to a shifting American political landscape, and a concerted effort by this White House to make permanent inroads among once traditional Democratic voters.

Since Mr. Bush’s re-election, Democrats have been divided over whether to take on the Republicans in a more confrontational manner, ideologically and politically, or to move more forcefully to stake out the center on social and national security issues. They are being pushed, from the left wing of the party, to stand for what they say are the party’s historical liberal values.

But among more establishment Democrats, there is concern that many of the party’s most visible leaders — among them, Howard Dean, the Democratic chairman; Senator John Kerry, the party’s 2004 presidential candidate; Mr. Kennedy; Representative Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader; and Al Gore, who has assumed a higher profile as the party heads toward the 2008 presidential primaries — may be flawed messengers.

In this view, the most visible Democrats are vulnerable to Republican attacks portraying them as out of the mainstream on issues including security and budget-cutting.

One of the party’s most prominent members, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, has been relatively absent for much of this debate, a characteristic display of public caution that her aides say reflects her concern for keeping focused on her re-election bid. Mrs. Clinton, who has only nominal opposition, declined requests for an interview to discuss her views of the party.

Mr. Kerry said the party’s authority had been diluted because of the absence of one or two obvious leaders, though he expressed confidence that would change.

“We are fighting to find a voice under difficult circumstances, and I’m confident, over the next few months, you are going to see that happen,” Mr. Kerry said in an interview. “Our megaphone is just not as large as their megaphone, and we have a harder time getting that message out, even when people are on the same page.”

Beyond that, while there is a surfeit of issues for Democrats to use against Republicans — including corruption, the war in Iraq, energy prices and health care — party leaders are divided about what Democrats should be talking about and about how soon they should engage in the debate.

In a speech last week in Washington and in an interview, Senator Evan Bayh of Indiana, who is considering a run for president in 2008, sharply criticized fellow Democrats who were arguing that the party should focus only on domestic issues and turn away from national security, since that has been the strong suit for this White House since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11.

“I think the Republicans are ripe for the taking on this issue,” Mr. Bayh said in the interview, “but not until we rehabilitate our own image. I think there’s a certain element of denial about how we are viewed, perhaps incorrectly but viewed nonetheless, by many Americans as being deficient on national security.”

In his speech, to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Mr. Bayh said: “As Democrats, we have a patriotic duty and political imperative to lay out our ideas for protecting America. Frankly, our fellow citizens have doubts about us. We have work to do.”

Some Democrats argued that the party had time to put up its ideas, and that it would be smarter to wait until later, when voters would be paying attention.

“When you bring it out early, you are going to leave it open for the spinmeisters in Rove’s machine, the Republican side, to tear it to pieces,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois.

But former Senator John Edwards of North Carolina, the party’s 2004 vice-presidential nominee and a prospective presidential candidate for 2008, said he thought Americans were eager to hear the contrasting case.

“What the American people are hungry to hear from us is, ‘what is the difference?’ ” Mr. Edwards said in an interview. “What will we do? How will we deal with the corruption issue in Washington? How will we deal with the huge moral issues that we have at home? This is a huge opportunity for our party to show what we are made of.”

Historically at least, Democrats should be in a strong position. The out-of-power party typically gains seats in the midterm elections of a president’s second term. And Democrats said they had a particularly compelling case for voting out the party in power this year because of investigations centered on the White House and Congress, including the influence-peddling case involving the lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

“We’re going to keep hammering this,” said Mr. Dean, the party chairman, referring to the scandals. “One thing the Republicans have taught us is that values and character matter.”

Yet some Democrats warned that it would be a mistake to talk only about ethics.

“It’s absolutely required that the party talk about things in addition to the Abramoff scandal,” said Martin Frost, former leader of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “I think the climate is absolutely right to take back the House or the Senate or both. But you can’t do it without a program.”

And Mr. Bayh said, “I don’t believe we will win by just not being them.”

Ms. Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, did not dispute that argument. But, pointing to the Democratic strategy in defeating Mr. Bush’s Social Security proposal last year, she said there was no rush.

“People said, ‘You can’t beat something with nothing,’ ” she said, arguing that the Democrats had in fact accomplished precisely that this year. “I feel very confident about where we are.”

And Senator Barbara Boxer, also a California Democrat, said: “We have a strategy. First is to convince the American people that what’s happening in Washington is not working. We have achieved that. Now we have to, at this stage, convince people that we are the ones to bring positive change.”

_________________________________
End of Archived Material

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

Stratfor on the Cartoon Flap

2006-02-14T16:50:00.000-08:00

Originally from a mailing list I'm on.
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The Cartoon Backlash: Redefining Alignments

By George Friedman

There is something rotten in the state of Denmark. We just couldn't help but open with that — with apologies to Shakespeare. Nonetheless, there is something exceedingly odd in the notion that Denmark — which has made a national religion of not being offensive to anyone — could become the focal point of Muslim rage. The sight of the Danish and Norwegian embassies being burned in Damascus — and Scandinavians in general being warned to leave Islamic countries — has an aura of the surreal: Nobody gets mad at Denmark or Norway. Yet, death threats are now being hurled against the Danes and Norwegians as though they were mad-dog friends of Dick Cheney. History has its interesting moments.

At the same time, the matter is not to be dismissed lightly. The explosion in the Muslim world over the publication of 12 cartoons by a minor Danish newspaper — cartoons that first appeared back in September — has, remarkably, redefined the geopolitical matrix of the U.S.-jihadist war. Or, to be more precise, it has set in motion something that appears to be redefining that matrix. We do not mean here simply a clash of civilizations, although that is undoubtedly part of it. Rather, we mean that alignments within the Islamic world and within the West appear to be in flux in some very important ways.

Let's begin with the obvious: the debate over the cartoons. There is a prohibition in Islam against making images of the Prophet Mohammed [Well, some branches of Islam, anyway. Many Shia find no problem with them — St. Onge]. There also is a prohibition against ridiculing the Prophet. Thus, a cartoon that ridicules the Prophet violates two fundamental rules simultaneously. Muslims around the world were deeply offended by these cartoons.

It must be emphatically pointed out that the Muslim rejection of the cartoons does not derive from a universalistic view that one should respect religions. The criticism does not derive from a secularist view that holds all religions in equal indifference and requires “sensitivity”not on account of theologies, but in order to avoid hurting anyone's feelings. The Muslim view is theological: The Prophet Mohammed is not to be ridiculed or portrayed. But violating the sensibilities of other religions is not taboo. Therefore, Muslims frequently, in action, print and speech, do and say things about other religions — Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism — that followers of these religions would find defamatory. The Taliban, for example, were not concerned about the views among other religions when they destroyed the famous Buddhas in Bamiyan. The Muslim demand is honest and authentic: It is for respect for Islam, not a general secular respect for all beliefs as if they were all equal.

The response from the West, and from Europe in particular, has been to frame the question as a matter of free speech. European newspapers, wishing to show solidarity with the Danes, have reprinted the cartoons, further infuriating the Muslims. European liberalism has a more complex profile than Islamic rage over insults. In many countries, it is illegal to incite racial hatred. It is difficult to imagine that the defenders of these cartoons would sit by quietly if a racially defamatory cartoon were published. Or, imagine the reception among liberal Europeans — or on any American campus — if a professor published a book purporting to prove that women were intellectually inferior to men. (The mere suggestion of such a thing, by the president of Harvard in a recent speech, led to calls for his resignation.)

In terms of the dialogue over the cartoons, there is enough to amuse even the most jaded observers. The sight of Muslims arguing the need for greater sensitivity among others, and of advocates of laws against racial hatred demanding absolute free speech, is truly marvelous to behold. There is, of course, one minor difference between the two sides: The Muslims are threatening to kill people who offend them and are burning embassies — in essence, holding entire nations responsible for the actions of a few of their citizens. The European liberals are merely making speeches. They are not threatening to kill critics of the modern secular state. That also distinguishes the Muslims from, say, Christians in the United States who have been affronted by National Endowment for the Arts grants.

These are not trivial distinctions. But what is important is this: The controversy over the cartoons involves issues so fundamental to the two sides that neither can give in. The Muslims cannot accept visual satire involving the Prophet. Nor can the Europeans accept that Muslims can, using the threat of force, dictate what can be published. Core values are at stake, and that translates into geopolitics.

In one sense, there is nothing new or interesting in intellectual inconsistency or dishonesty. Nor is there very much new about Muslims — or at least radical ones — threatening to kill people who offend them. What is new is the breadth of the Muslim response and the fact that it is directed obsessively not against the United States, but against European states.

One of the primary features of the U.S.-jihadist war has been that each side has tried to divide the other along a pre-existing fault line. For the United States, in both Afghanistan and Iraq, the manipulation of Sunni-Shiite tensions has been evident. For the jihadists, and even more for non-jihadist Muslims caught up in the war, the tension between the United States and Europe has been a critical fault line to manipulate. It is significant, then, that the cartoon affair threatens to overwhelm both the Euro-American split and the Sunni-Shiite split. It is, paradoxically, an affair that unifies as well as divides.

The Fissures in the West

It is dangerous and difficult to speak of the “European position”— there really isn't one. But there is a Franco-German position that generally has been taken to be the European position. More precisely, there is the elite Franco-German position that The New York Times refers to whenever it mentions “Europe.”That is the Europe that we mean now.

In the European view, then, the United States massively overreacted to 9/11. Apart from the criticism of Iraq, the Europeans believe that the United States failed to appreciate al Qaeda's relative isolation within the Islamic world and, by reshaping its relations with the Islamic world over 9/11, caused more damage. Indeed, this view goes, the United States increased the power of al Qaeda and added unnecessarily to the threat it presents. Implicit in the European criticisms — particularly from the French — was the view that American cowboy insensitivity to the Muslim world not only increased the danger after 9/11, but effectively precipitated 9/11. From excessive support for Israel to support for Egypt and Jordan, the United States alienated the Muslims. In other words, 9/11 was the result of a lack of sophistication and poor policy decisions by the United States — and the response to the 9/11 attacks was simply over the top.

Now an affair has blown up that not only did not involve the United States, but also did not involve a state decision. The decision to publish the offending cartoons was that of a Danish private citizen. The Islamic response has been to hold the entire state responsible. As the cartoons were republished, it was not the publications printing them that were viewed as responsible, but the states in which they were published. There were attacks on embassies, gunmen in EU offices at Gaza, threats of another 9/11 in Europe.

From a psychological standpoint, this drives home to the Europeans an argument that the Bush administration has been making from the beginning — that the threat from Muslim extremists is not really a response to anything, but a constantly present danger that can be triggered by anything or nothing. European states cannot control what private publications publish. That means that, like it or not, they are hostage to Islamic perceptions. The threat, therefore, is not under their control. And thus, even if the actions or policies of the United States did precipitate 9/11, the Europeans are no more immune to the threat than the Americans are.

This combines with the Paris riots last November and the generally deteriorating relationships between Muslims in Europe and the dominant populations. The pictures of demonstrators in London, threatening the city with another 9/11, touch extremely sensitive nerves. It becomes increasingly difficult for Europeans to distinguish between their own relationship with the Islamic world and the American relationship with the Islamic world. A sense of shared fate emerges, driving the Americans and Europeans closer together. At a time when pressing issues like Iranian nuclear weapons are on the table, this increases Washington's freedom of action. Put another way, the Muslim strategy of splitting the United States and Europe — and using Europe to constrain the United States — was heavily damaged by the Muslim response to the cartoons.

The Intra-Ummah Divide

But so too was the split between Sunni and Shia. Tensions between these two communities have always been substantial. Theological differences aside, both international friction and internal friction have been severe. The Iran-Iraq war, current near-civil war in Iraq, tensions between Sunnis and Shia in the Gulf states, all point to the obvious: These two communities are, while both Muslim, mistrustful of one another. Shiite Iran has long viewed Sunni Saudi Arabia as the corrupt tool of the United States, while radical Sunnis saw Iran as collaborating with the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The cartoons are the one thing that both communities — not only in the Middle East but also in the wider Muslim world — must agree about. Neither side can afford to allow any give in this affair and still hope to maintain any credibility in the Islamic world. Each community — and each state that is dominated by one community or another — must work to establish (or maintain) its Islamic credentials. A case in point is the violence against Danish and Norwegian diplomatic offices in Syria (and later, in Lebanon and Iran) — which undoubtedly occurred with Syrian government involvement. Syria is ruled by Alawites, a Shiite sect. Syria — aligned with Iran — is home to a major Sunni community; there is another in Lebanon. The cartoons provided what was essentially a secular regime the opportunity to take the lead in a religious matter, by permitting the attacks on the embassies. This helped consolidate the regime's position, however temporarily.

Indeed, the Sunni and Shiite communities appear to be competing with each other as to which is more offended. The Shiite Iranian-Syrian bloc has taken the lead in violence, but the Sunni community has been quite vigorous as well. The cartoons are being turned into a test of authenticity for Muslims. To the degree that Muslims are prepared to tolerate or even move past this issue, they are being attacked as being willing to tolerate the Prophet's defamation. The cartoons are forcing a radicalization of parts of the Muslim community that are uneasy with the passions of the moment.

Beneficiaries on Both Sides

The processes under way in the West and within the Islamic world are naturally interacting. The attacks on embassies, and threats against lives, that are based on nationality alone are radicalizing the Western perspective of Islam. The unwillingness of Western governments to punish or curtail the distribution of the cartoons is taken as a sign of the real feelings of the West. The situation is constantly compressing each community, even as they are divided.

One might say that all this is inevitable. After all, what other response would there be, on either side? But this is where the odd part begins: The cartoons actually were published in September, and — though they drew some complaints, even at the diplomatic level — didn't come close to sparking riots. Events unfolded slowly: The objections of a Muslim cleric in Denmark upon the initial publication by Jyllands-Posten eventually prompted leaders of the Islamic Faith Community to travel to Egypt, Syria and Lebanon in December, purposely “to stir up attitudes against Denmark and the Danes”in response to the cartoons. As is now obvious, attitudes have certainly been stirred.

There are beneficiaries. It is important to note here that the fact that someone benefits from something does not mean that he was responsible for it. (We say this because in the past, when we have noted the beneficiaries of an event or situation, the not-so-bright bulbs in some quarters took to assuming that we meant the beneficiaries deliberately engineered the event.)

Still, there are two clear beneficiaries. One is the United States: The cartoon affair is serving to further narrow the rift between the Bush administration's view of the Islamic world and that of many Europeans. Between the Paris riots last year, the religiously motivated murder of a Dutch filmmaker and the “blame Denmark”campaign, European patience is wearing thin. The other beneficiary is Iran. As Iran moves toward a confrontation with the United States over nuclear weapons, this helps to rally the Muslim world to its side: Iran wants to be viewed as the defender of Islam, and Sunnis who have raised questions about its flirtations with the United States in Iraq are now seeing Iran as the leader in outrage against Europe.

The cartoons have changed the dynamics both within Europe and the Islamic world, and between them. That is not to say the furor will not die down in due course, but it will take a long time for the bad feelings to dissipate. This has created a serious barrier between moderate Muslims and Europeans who were opposed to the United States. They were the ones most likely to be willing to collaborate, and the current uproar makes that collaboration much more difficult.

It's hard to believe that a few cartoons could be that significant, but these are.

_________________________________
End of Archived Material

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

BBC Story on Cartoon Flap

2006-02-14T16:03:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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Muslim cartoon fury claims lives

At least five people have been killed in Afghanistan as protests against European cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad swept across the country.

Two people died when protesters turned on the US airbase at Bagram - although the US has had no involvement with the images, which originated in Denmark.

Meanwhile in Somalia, a teenage boy died after protesters attacked police.

Iran announced it was halting trade with Denmark, as protesters pelted the Danish embassy with petrol bombs.

Police fired tear gas in a bid to keep back hundreds of angry demonstrators, some of whom attempted to scale the wall into the embassy compound. Earlier, the Austrian embassy in Tehran came under attack.

The violence follows attacks on Danish embassies in Syria and Lebanon over the weekend. The cartoons were first published in a Danish newspaper.

Tensions continue to escalate around the world:

Norway demands compensation from Syria after its embassy in Damascus was set on fire on Saturday
The Turkish and Spanish prime ministers make a joint plea for respect and calm in an article in the International Herald Tribune
In Indonesia, protesters target the Danish and US consulates in Surabaya, the country's second largest city. Protests are also held in the capital, Jakarta
Riot police in the Indian capital, Delhi, fire tear gas and water cannons to disperse hundreds of student protesters
Shops and businesses across Indian-administered Kashmir close after a general strike is called in protest at the drawings
In Thailand, protesters shout "God is great" and stamp on Denmark's flag outside the country's embassy in Bangkok, the Associated Press news agency reports
There are protests again outside the European Union offices in Gaza, following demonstrations there last week.

'Test our feelings'

Hundreds of people took part in the morning demonstration in Afghanistan's Laghman province, in a second day of protests in the city.

Three people died when police fired on protesters after a police station came under attack, a government spokesman said.

Demonstrators shouted "death to Denmark" and "death to France". They called for the expulsion of diplomats and soldiers, who were sent by both countries as part of international efforts in the US-led "war on terror".

"They want to test our feelings," protester Mawli Abdul Qahar Abu Israra told the BBC.

"They want to know whether Muslims are extremists or not. Death to them and to their newspapers," he said.

In Bagram district, a peaceful protest in the morning turned violent when around 300 "bandits and gangsters" tried to enter the US base, local police chief Mawlana Sayed Khel told the BBC.

A shoot-out with police left two protesters dead, and six police officers injured, he said.

Elsewhere, hundreds protested in Kandahar, Mazar-e-Sharif and the north-eastern province of Takhar. Some 200 demonstrators gathered outside the Danish embassy in the capital, Kabul.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai reiterated his condemnation of the cartoons and called on western nations to take "a strong measure" to ensure such cartoons do not appear again. "It's not good for anybody," he told CNN.

'Defending freedoms'

In the autonomous Somali region of Puntland, demonstrators marched through the port city of Bosaso, shouting anti-Western slogans and converging on the UN and international aid agency buildings.

A 14-year-old boy was reportedly trampled underfoot as police fired into the air to try and disperse an increasingly angry crowd.

Peaceful protests were held in several other Somali towns.

The cartoons first appeared in a Danish newspaper in September and caused outrage among Muslims, who consider any images of Muhammad offensive.

One of the cartoons shows Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban.

Newspapers across Europe republished the pictures last week, saying they were defending freedom of expression.

_________________________________
End of Archived Material

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

New Republic Story on Kerry's Filibuster

2006-02-10T20:37:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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ON THE HILL
Swiss Miss
by Michael Crowley

Moments before Monday's vote on whether to filibuster the nomination of Samuel Alito, John Kerry was speaking to a near-empty Senate chamber. In his typical stentorian fashion, Kerry was arguing for a filibuster of the Supreme Court nominee, an effort the Massachusetts senator had single-handedly initiated a few days earlier to the open chagrin of fellow Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid. "What could possibly be more important than this?" asked Kerry, who stood alone amid a sea of empty desks. But Kerry's plea for relevancy didn't cause much of a stir until his Massachusetts colleague and filibuster partner, Ted Kennedy, rose to unleash a bellowing anti-Alito stemwinder. With a reddening face and hoarse voice, Kennedy waved his arms and smacked his podium with his open hand. The commotion caused a crew of usually blasé reporters to scurry from their workstations and into the Senate press balcony to watch. "There is nothing that's more important than the vote we cast on the Supreme Court, except sending young Americans to war!" Kennedy thundered. When the old lion's mighty lungs finally ceased, Kerry strolled over and firmly shook Kennedy's hand. From up in the press section, one could overhear Kennedy say, "Thanks, John," in commendation of Kerry's leading role in the last-ditch fight against Alito. Before he departed, Kerry threw a noticeable glance up at the now-crowded press section, clearly measuring the response.

In a vacuum, this would have appeared a heady moment for John Kerry. But, by most measures, Kerry's gambit was a flop. In substantive terms, the filibuster vote was a blowout: Only 25 of the 41 Democrats needed to block a confirmation vote sided with Kerry, and many of them did so grudgingly. In political terms, it was even worse. Kerry's last-minute stand spoon-fed reporters a story line of Democratic division and infighting. What's more, Democrats complained that this Gallipoli charge had handed Republicans an easy victory on the eve of the State of the Union — and had drowned out their own competing message.

The Alito flap is hardly the first time Kerry's efforts to remain relevant and to position himself for another White House run have put him at odds with his fellow Senate Democrats. In late November, for instance, Democrats fumed after Kerry scheduled a press conference reacting to a major Iraq address by President Bush at the same time as one planned by Senate Democrats, muddying his party's response and enabling reporters to revisit old 2004 campaign themes about Kerry's position on the war. This week's filibuster fizzle is just the latest example of how Kerry has begun to adopt a new, fighting-mad persona — and to alienate colleagues who think he's just positioning himself for 2008 at their expense.

One reason Democrats suspect the motives behind Kerry's attempted Alito filibuster is the way he went about it. Until last week, when he suddenly declared his opposition to the judge, Kerry had played virtually no role in opposing Alito's nomination. Shortly after this, in consultation with Kennedy, aides say, Kerry decided his party needed to mount a more forceful stand and declared that he would use his senatorial prerogative to attempt a filibuster — even though head counts had already made it unambiguously clear that Alito could not be blocked. In a closed-door meeting of Senate Democrats last Wednesday, Kerry and Kennedy made a vigorous plea for a filibuster. But they were challenged by Harry Reid and by no less a Bush nominee-basher than Chuck Schumer of New York, who, as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, is responsible for overseeing the party's 2006 Senate races. Schumer understood, as did Reid and many other Democrats, that the Alito nomination had already put vulnerable Democratic incumbents and candidates from red states in an awkward position — pulled between pro-Bush voters and the demands of liberal interest groups, activists, and bloggers. Forcing those Democrats to choose sides on yet another vote would only heighten their agony. Even Barbara Mikulski, a Kennedy-style paleoliberal, argued that Democrats should worry more about electoral realities than about taking bold stands for their own sake.

Democrats might have been more receptive had Kerry not been so late to the game. If he were really so appalled by Alito, they say, he should have been working for weeks to rally opposition. "The problem with Kerry is just that he sits on the sidelines. He was two weeks too late if he wanted to get involved in this fight and influence it in a meaningful way," says a Democratic Senate strategist. A Kerry aide counters that, apart from the Senate Judiciary Committee's Alito hearings, the Senate had been out of session for much of January. "Charges that it was hastily done don't consider the realities of the calendar," says the aide. But the Senate reconvened on January 18, a full week before Kerry's move. Indeed, it was Kerry who was most out of pocket; he missed the Alito hearings for a long trip to Iraq and, soon after, departed for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In fact, many Democrats cringe at the way Kerry briefly waged his fight by phone from Davos — which perfectly reinforces his culturally effete image. That several prominent Republicans, including John McCain, were also in Davos last week didn't stop the GOP from ridiculing Kerry with jokes about "yodeling" in his filibuster while skiing the Swiss Alps. "It was unfair, but perception is 99 percent of the battle," says one aide to a potential 2008 Kerry rival.

Kerry also forced some Democrats into highly awkward positions. Reid, for instance, initially groused about Kerry's move on the Senate floor, making the apt point that there had been "adequate time for people to debate" Alito. But, once Kerry cast the die, Reid (and Schumer) were forced to support the filibuster for fear of enraging liberals. Republicans taunted Reid for flip-flopping. Meanwhile, every other Democrat considering a 2008 White House run — Hillary Clinton, Evan Bayh, Joe Biden, Russ Feingold — voted with Kerry, even though none had planned to force a filibuster themselves. After the filibuster fell short, the White House issued a triumphal statement boasting of a "strong, bipartisan majority" vote for Alito. Some Democrats found that especially embittering, given that the final vote on his confirmation was much closer: 58-42, one of the narrowest confirmation margins of any Supreme Court justice. Kerry spokesman David Wade argues that the filibuster "helped strengthen the number of votes against final confirmation." But, although Democrats showed remarkable unity on the final Alito vote (only four members defected), that solidarity was overshadowed by the filibuster flap. "Democrats split over filibuster on alito," declared the front page of the January 27 Washington Post. Kerry "handed President Bush a big win on the eve of the State of the Union," says one veteran Senate Democratic aide. Moreover, Democrats were irritated that Kerry's move had sucked up so much press attention before Bush's speech. "The whole Democratic strategy was to go into the State of the Union framing it around ethics and corruption," says the irritated Democratic Senate strategist. "We were doing the Republicans' job by thrusting [Alito] into the spotlight rather than ethics."

By Monday, the aggravation at Kerry was plain to see. On a typical day, reporters can barely fend off the press-loving Schumer. But, when he arrived outside the Senate chamber for the filibuster vote, Schumer was grumpy and terse. In what may have been an unprecedented event, Schumer blurted out a quick statement to the press mob and then turned heel and abruptly fled into the chamber.

So what explains Kerry's decision? It may be that he really believes Alito is an intolerable radical. But so do many other Democrats, like Schumer, who still concluded a filibuster was a net loser politically. Kerry presented his move as a matter of principle: "I reject those notions that there ought to somehow be some political calculus about the future," he declared. "I know this is flying against some of the sort of political punditry of Washington." Yet his actions were entirely consistent with someone wooing liberal activists in preparation for the 2008 presidential primaries. From his escalating criticism of the Iraq war to his recent public quip about a possible Bush impeachment (aides insist it was a joke), Kerry is sounding more and more intent on challenging Clinton from the left. His Alito joust has made him a champion for Democratic pro-choice and civil rights leaders. He has also impressed activists in the liberal blogosphere — including at DailyKos.com, where he posted an explanation of his filibuster move. But even some liberal bloggers smelled a rat. At the site MyDD.com, the influential blogger Matt Stoller called Kerry's decision "a classic example of 'get points for trying' politics . . . a way for Senators to get credit from the left-wing of the party without having to actually do anything or stop anything. . . The attitude that the insiders have towards us is that we are a stupid ATM set up to feed their ineffectiveness." Poor John Kerry. It takes real talent to be trashed by the very people to whom you are trying to pander.

Michael Crowley is a senior editor at TNR.

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End of Archived Material

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

Daily Telegraph Blog Post and Column on the Danish Muhammed Cartoons

2006-02-04T12:14:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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David Rennie has been the Europe Correspondent of The Daily Telegraph since January 2005. He was previously posted to Sydney, Beijing and Washington DC. He lives in Brussels with his wife and two young children.

Friday, February 03, 2006
A Danish Muslim activist speaks
Posted at: 12:16

Last night, for the newspaper edition, I spoke at length to a spokesman for the group of Danish imams and activists who have done more than anyone else to bring the Mohammed cartoon row to international prominence.

As this blog has reported in the last couple of days, there have been sharp questions in Denmark about the role played by these Danish Muslim delegations that made repeated trips to the Middle East late last year. There have been still sharper questions about the 43 page dossier on "Danish racism and Islamophobia" they carried with them, in meetings with scholars, officials of the Arab League and senior clerics in Cairo and Beirut.

The delegations were publicly criticised by the Danish prime minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who said he was "speechless" that his fellow countrymen could tour the Arab world "inciting antipathy towards Denmark".

Above all, there have been serious concerns about three mysterious cartoons that were included in the dossier, in addition to the 12 images that started the row when they were published by a Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, in September.

The extra cartoons, whose origins remain obscure, included an image of Mohammed with a pig's snout, one of a dog raping a praying Muslim, and one depicting Mohammed as a "Paedophile demon".

As I report in today's Daily Telegraph, several media organisations, some in the Arab world but also including the BBC and the Australian SBS television network, have mistakenly reported that the pig-snouted cartoon was one of those published in "Jyllands-Posten."

To an extent, this entire blog is an experiment - as some readers have made very clear, one of the touchstones of the blogosphere is the shared belief that the mainstream media sometimes (often?) does a lousy job of reporting news, at least at anything more than the most superficial level.

I do not entirely agree - you would not expect me to. But where does that leave MSM bloggers like me?

I propose an experiment. It is clear from blogs worldwide that there is a great interest in knowing more about the cartoon row, and its origins, so bloggers can then subject that information to their own analysis.

As a staff reporter for a big newspaper, I enjoy certain privileges - one of which is the chance to get people at the heart of stories to speak to me. I cannot deny that one of the limitations of print media is we then only have room to carry some of what we learn from such interviews.

So I propose to print here more or less the entire contents of my notebook, after speaking to the spokesman for this Danish Muslim group. I do not have time to polish it, please feel free to quarry it for your own thoughts. His name is Ahmed Akkari, he told me he is "about 30", and he told me his side of the story about the three extra cartoons, and gave me his version of the row.

I do not endorse or condemn what he says by printing it here. I have spoken to Danish reporters who complain that some of the things Mr Akkari has told them have not always checked out. In particular, when they asked to meet the Muslims supposedly sent the three extra cartoons as hate mail (see below), he did not agree to the request.

This is going to be an unusual and long posting. If readers feel this a worthwhile experiment, or inappropriate for this blog, do let me know.

Q: I would like to ask you about the delegations that traveled to the Middle East, and the dossier with the cartoons. I wanted to clarify the origins of the extra three cartoons.

Amhed Akkari: Actually, these three cartoons weren't in the newspaper, that was written in the dossier that the persons took with them. The dossier had the 12 newspaper pictures in colour, these three (extra) cartoons came very much later in the dossier. They were inside, but separated from the newspaper cartoons by a lot of letters, letters that had been sent to the minister of culture and so on.

[The extras] were in white and black, and there was no address on them.

Amur Musa [secretary-general of the Arab League, one of the leaders shown the dossier] is not a small child, to think that this is "Jyllands-Posten" when he sees an amateur picture like this one, and neither is the mufti of Egypt, and the others. They are not people who can be quickly made tense by seeing such a picture. Neither is the cardinal of the Maronite church in Lebanon, we also visited him and showed him the same dossier.

The problem is that some Danish newspaper has made a sandstorm about these three, but an expert, several Danish experts, one of them is called Nina Smith, she had this dossier in front of her on television, live in Denmark, and she said there is no manipulation in this dossier, and she had all the cartoons before her. So it is actually a minor false information that is out there.

I was with one of the delegation, and I can inform you that we were four or five educated persons with an academic background, it wasn't people who are illiterate or something like that.

We have given this dossier to all the Danish newspapers, we haven't hidden it, if there was something wrong you should hide it. Danish television, their journalists told me they could see very clearly it was written in this appendix, what is in the dossier, one, two, three, and it was written very clearly that these were anonymous letters that Muslims got after participating in the debate.

We have written this in two places, and our lawyer he is called Heverman [?] if you like you can phone him, and he told us: "Your case is very clear, because you have made clear exactly about these cartoons. We have been accused falsely, and he said it is very easy to make it clear, and you can call him, he's from a big lawyer company here in Copenhagen.

Q: Were your visits the main reason for the interest in the cartoons? Why have they suddenly become a big issue?

A: I think because it was only by now that the average Muslim in the world heard about the cartoons. If you remember, Pakistan was one of the countries who very quickly responded. But we haven't been in Pakistan, we haven't sent any dossier, we haven't shown them any pictures. In Kashmir, they closed their shops, and there were protests.

I think why there is a strong attention on the case now is there has been the pilgrimage, there has been the Hajj to Mecca, you know the Hajj is where 2.5 million Muslims meet, there are conferences and small talks here and there, and I think that it was just in the Hajj that for example Saudi and other countries may have heard about the case, and thought it was very, very bad, and they began to react.

We haven't been in Saudi Arabia, we haven't been in Iran or Iraq, or visited any funny, let us say terror cells, or any people of that kind. We have visited the same mufti [of Egypt] that was visited by the French prime minister a year ago, you remember what he said then?

This mufti said then he could not interfere in French affairs about the headscarf [law]. This same mufti, we showed him the cartoons of Jyllands-Posten, he reacted and said this is unacceptable. The same man.

Q: What do you think about the current reaction in the Muslim world? Is it excessive, or appropriate?

A: I think it is natural, actually, because you know Jyllands-Posten has stepped on the feelings of one billion Muslims in the world, by drawing their prophet with a bomb in his head, and by making him ugly and a criminal with one eye.

You know, we Muslims love Mohammed very much, Muslims [can be] cultural, moderate, fundamental, radical, but everybody goes back to Mohammed, and they say, I am connected with Mohammed.

The most calm and cultural Muslim cannot accept that I am accused of following a man who has a bomb in his head that is going to blow up in a second, this is what makes the reactions, believe me.

Here in Denmark we have a debate right now about freedom of speech, we have a debate about drawing Mohammed or not. But I have seen some history books in the library, where they have some drawings of Mohammed, from Iranian and Persian ancient times.

Why didn't Muslims protest on those, if the problem was drawings? The problem was the way he has been drawn, and the negative attitude it leaves in the eyes of the viewer.

Q: So do you support the right of Western authors to use respectful drawings of Mohammed?

A: I actually think we should take this debate later. This has been a debate between Muslim scholars for many hundred years and so on. Let us just get to a point where we can understand each other, us and this newspaper. We had two meetings with this newspaper, did you know that?

I was there, and we told the chief editor very clearly, we said Carsten, please, when you talk about freedom of speech and censorship, because he said to us they were making a test to see if they was any censorship. We told him please, as well as we are informed, historically, the freedom of speech has been there to stand up to leaders, to dictators, when governments close the mouths of the people.

But we never understood that you should try to test the freedom of speech on one of the most exhausted, and discriminated against and weak communities in Europe, everybody knows that about the Muslim community. We have criminal youngsters, we have fanatics, we have social and economic problems, we have a large number of people who are illiterate and have low qualifications.

Trying to test the freedom of speech against a group like that? And using the character of someone like Mohammed who is a worldwide character, that is very well respected by many non-Muslims, as a person who had great influence in history. They can criticise, but to put a bomb in his head, like that, it was very bad.

Q: What do you think about threats to Danes, and the death threats to the original cartoonists?

A: We set out our views very clearly at a press conference two days ago. I am the spokesman of this group. The European Committee for Honouring the Prophet. 27 organisations, and I said clearly on behalf of them, we do not accept that any Danish citizen should be hurt, and burning the flag is not anything that makes good. I am a Danish citizen, we also have some 5,000 Muslims who are ethnic Danish, and the flag is their flag.

Q: Is the flag your flag?

A: Yes, and I said for us Muslims that [Rasmussen] is also our prime minister, I haven't made any revolution against him.

Q: Do you support the consumer boycott?

A: I was surprised it got so far. We haven't had any influence on what has happened, so I cannot say any negative or positive thing about it. I have an understanding of the anger, because we knew, we knew that what the newspaper did will bring this anger.

I was also surprised it went so far very quickly. The latest developments are very dangerous. If some militant group goes to church and does something wrong it can really escalate, and make a danger in the European community. I am afraid if we do not try to make this case end, and talk to the Arab world in a good way, make the newspapers take their responsibility at the same time, it will perhaps be possible for some average person...

You know in Denmark we have some right wing extremists, and we have in the Muslim world also average people who maybe do not have a reasonable mind. Tomorrow [Friday], I am going to speak on one of the largest satellite programmes in the Muslim world, on Orbit.

I have a message for the Arab world, they cannot say to the Queen in Denmark that she should come and make an apology. You know, I just laughed and slapped my head [when I heard that demand]. It is not fair, because she has no political powers, and they must understand.

You know, al-Jazeera, on their news they said 79 per cent of Danes does not want an apology [for the cartoons]. But this was only an opinion poll of 500 Danes, so the message on al-Jazeera is totally wrong, it will give the wrong impression of the Danish population.

Q: Is there a danger of violence?

A: For four months, we have been trying to take this conflict in hand politically, through the legal system, so we should not see any case, any scenario like Holland.

Q: Like the killing of Theo van Gogh?

A: Yes. I can tell you, if just one person does anything wrong in Denmark, I think our mosques, our institutions, our women, our girls will be a target for some right-wing extremists here in Denmark. It isn't in any Muslims' interests that this case will escalate.

Q: Do you think it will happen?

A: I am afraid, we had a meeting with the Danish intelligence service two days ago, we came out with a common press release, and other Muslims and imams. At that meeting, they said that the situation is very, very tense, and they asked that we should participate, to talk to people, we said we would.

Right now we have an SMS going round between our contacts, telling people not to react to provocations from right-wing extremists, like burning the Koran, but I know some Muslims will not listen to our message.

If you follow our steps from the beginning, you can see we did not start our movement by traveling to the Middle East, we started in Denmark by contacting several officials and newspapers, and the next step was contacting ambassadors.

You know, if we really wanted war and to make people angry, we should have traveled to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia from the beginning, because the people there react in another way than they do in Egypt or the Lebanon.

Lebanon there are maybe 20 different religions and ethnic groups. If we wanted a purely Muslim community we should have chosen Saudi Arabia, or Iran, or Pakistan.

Our good intentions are very clear, we go to countries that we know can make a good influence, but unfortunately the case has gone out of hand because the newspaper has not accepted that they have to take a responsibility in this case, and they have made a great mistake.

Q: What do you think about the other European newspapers that have printed the cartoons?

A: I think they do not know what they are doing, actually, and I do not hope they are going to fulfil the [Samuel] Huntington prophecy of the "Clash of Civilisations". They are saying, ok, let's clash, we have our values and so on.

Q: Do you think there will be a clash of civilizations?

A: I hope not. I have read the Huntington book, and he has some points, but I hope that what others say will be true.

Q: I have read you are an imam?

A: No, I am a spokesman for 27 organisations. I am a Danish citizen, I have some theological background, but I am educated in sociology and pedagogy.

Q: Do those include Hizb al-Tahrir? [a radical Islamic group present in Denmark].

A: No, they are not with us. I was very astonished they did not react, but I was afraid that this group, of all groups, would use this chance to do something. I am really astonished by this reaction.

Q: You are linked to Ahmed Abu Laban? [a leading Danish imam, accused in the Danish media of saying one thing at home, and another to the Arab world]

A: No, Abu Laban and his mosque is one of the 27 organisations,. We also have Turkish communities, and Pakistani groups and so on.

Q: Do you feel some violence is more likely than not?

A: It is more likely. I have actually received threats on my phone. Also, one of the other leaders of a delegation, some people came to his home and asked his neighbours which was his home.

It is more likely right now, here and now, any minute that we will hear of violence, unless the police can keep an eye on it, and God protects us.

Q: Do you think the violence will come from one side, or either side?

A: I am sure it could come from both sides, because many Europeans are not so well aware about the dangers from right-wing extremists. They are just as dangerous as Muslim extremists. But they are very organised, and working under the table, so you cannot see them.

Q: What is the level of anger among young Muslims you know. High enough for them to do something stupid?

A: It is very high. But not so much in Denmark, I think a lot of the young people [here] have shown us fortunately for four months now that they are not going to do something illegal. Hopefully they will keep to that.

Q: But outside Denmark?

A: You can watch the news, like me. I have just seen some Iraqi group threatening Denmark, and some Qa'eda group threatening Denmark. We saw pictures from Gaza some moments ago.
_________________________________

Originally here.
_________________________________

If you get rid of the Danes, you'll have to keep paying the Danegeld

By Charles Moore

(Filed: 04/02/2006)

It's some time since I visited Palestine, so I may be out of date, but I don't remember seeing many Danish flags on sale there. Not much demand, I suppose. I raise the question because, as soon as the row about the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten broke, angry Muslims popped up in Gaza City, and many other places, well supplied with Danish flags ready to burn. (In doing so, by the way, they offered a mortal insult to the most sacred symbol of my own religion, Christianity, since the Danish flag has a cross on it, but let that pass.)

Why were those Danish flags to hand? Who built up the stockpile so that they could be quickly dragged out right across the Muslim world and burnt where television cameras would come and look? The more you study this story of "spontaneous" Muslim rage, the odder it seems.

It's some time since I visited Palestine, so I may be out of date, but I don't remember seeing many Danish flags on sale there. Not much demand, I suppose. I raise the question because, as soon as the row about the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in Jyllands-Posten broke, angry Muslims popped up in Gaza City, and many other places, well supplied with Danish flags ready to burn. (In doing so, by the way, they offered a mortal insult to the most sacred symbol of my own religion, Christianity, since the Danish flag has a cross on it, but let that pass.)

Why were those Danish flags to hand? Who built up the stockpile so that they could be quickly dragged out right across the Muslim world and burnt where television cameras would come and look? The more you study this story of "spontaneous" Muslim rage, the odder it seems.

The complained-of cartoons first appeared in October; they have provoked such fury only now. As reported in this newspaper yesterday, it turns out that a group of Danish imams circulated the images to brethren in Muslim countries. When they did so, they included in their package three other, much more offensive cartoons which had not appeared in Jyllands-Posten but were lumped together so that many thought they had.

It rather looks as if the anger with which all Muslims are said to be burning needed some pretty determined stoking. Peter Mandelson, who seems to think that his job as European Trade Commissioner entitles him to pronounce on matters of faith and morals, accuses the papers that republished the cartoons of "adding fuel to the flames"; but those flames were lit (literally, as well as figuratively) by well-organised, radical Muslims who wanted other Muslims to get furious. How this network has operated would make a cracking piece of investigative journalism.

Now the BBC announces that the head of the International Association of Muslim Scholars has called for an "international day of anger" about the cartoons. It did not name this scholar, or tell us who he is. He is Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi. According to Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, Qaradawi is like Pope John XXIII for Catholics, "the most progressive force for change" in the Muslim world.

Yet if you look up Qaradawi's pronouncements, you find that he sympathises with the judicial killing of homosexuals, and wants the rejection of dialogue with Jews in favour of "the sword and the rifle." He is very keen on suicide bombing, especially if the people who blow themselves up are children - "we have the children bomb." This is a man for whom a single "day of anger" is surely little different from the other 364 days of the year.

Which leads me to question the extreme tenderness with which so many governments and media outlets in the West treat these outbursts of outrage. It is assumed that Muslims have a common, almost always bristling, view about their faith, which must be respected. Of course it is right that people's deeply held beliefs should be treated courteously, but it is a great mistake - made out of ignorance - to assume that those who shout the loudest are the most representative.

This was the error in the case in Luton, where a schoolgirl's desire to wear the jilbab was upheld in the erroneous belief that this is what Islam demands. In fact, the girl was backed by an extremist group, and most of the other Muslims at the school showed no inclination to dress in full-length gowns like her. It's as if the Muslim world decided that the views of the Rev Ian Paisley represented the whole of authentic Christianity.

There is no reason to doubt that Muslims worry very much about depictions of Mohammed. Like many, chiefly Protestant, Christians, they fear idolatry. But, as I write, I have beside me a learned book about Islamic art and architecture which shows numerous Muslim paintings from Turkey, Persia, Arabia and so on. These depict the Prophet preaching, having visions, being fed by his wet nurse, going on his Night-Journey to heaven, etc. The truth is that in Islam, as in Christianity, not everyone agrees about what is permissible.

Some of these depictions are in Western museums. What will the authorities do if the puritan factions within Islam start calling for them to be removed from display (this call has been made, by the way, about a medieval Christian depiction of the Prophet in Bologna)? Will their feeling of "offence" outweigh the rights of everyone else?

Obviously, in the case of the Danish pictures, there was no danger of idolatry, since the pictures were unflattering. The problem, rather, was insult. But I am a bit confused about why someone like Qaradawi thinks it is insulting to show the Prophet's turban turned into a bomb, as one of the cartoons does. He never stops telling us that Islam commands its followers to blow other people up.

If we take fright whenever extreme Muslims complain, we put more power in their hands. If the Religious Hatred Bill had passed unamended this week, it would have been an open invitation to any Muslim who likes getting angry to try to back his anger with the force of law. Even in its emasculated state, the Bill will still encourage him, thus stirring the ill-feeling its authors say they want to suppress.

On the Today programme yesterday, Stewart Lee, author of Jerry Springer: The Opera - in which Jesus appears wearing nappies - let the cat out of the bag. He suggested that it was fine to offend Christians because they had themselves degraded their iconography; Islam, however, has always been more "conscientious about protecting the brand".

The implication of the remark is fascinating. It is that the only people whose feelings artists, newspapers and so on should consider are those who protest violently. The fact that Christians nowadays do not threaten to blow up art galleries, invade television studios or kill writers and producers does not mean that their tolerance is rewarded by politeness. It means that they are insulted the more.

Right now, at the fashionable White Cube Gallery in Hoxton, you can see the latest work of Gilbert and George, mainly devoted, it is reported, to attacks on the Catholic Church. The show is called Sonofagod Pictures and it features the head of Christ on the Cross replaced with that of a primitive deity. One picture includes the slogan "God loves F***ing".

Like most Christians, I find this offensive, but I think I must live with the offence in the interests of freedom. If I find, however, that people who threaten violence do have the power to suppress what they dislike, why should I bother to defend freedom any more? Why shouldn't I ring up the Hon Jay Jopling, the proprietor, and tell him that I shall burn down the White Cube Gallery unless he tears Gilbert and George off the walls? I won't, I promise, but how much longer before some Christians do? The Islamist example shows that it works.

There is a great deal of talk about responsible journalism, gratuitous offence, multicultural sensitivities and so on. Jack Straw gibbers about the irresponsibility of the cartoons, but says nothing against the Muslims threatening death in response to them. I wish someone would mention the word that dominates Western culture in the face of militant Islam - fear. And then I wish someone would face it down.
_________________________________
End of Archived Material

Technorati tags: BBC, children bomb, Danish Muhammed Cartoons, Danish Muslim activists, International Association of Muslim Scholars, Jyllands-Posten, Stewart Lee, Ken Livingstone, Peter Mandelson, Muslims, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, David Rennie, Jack Straw, White Cube Gallery.

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

Mohammed Cartoons, Plus Photo and Stories about Mohammed Cartoons

2006-02-03T06:43:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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Iraqi Shiite Muslims stomp on a painting of the Danish flag denouncing the country's publication of a cartoon of the Muslim prophet Muhammad, Thursday, Feb. 2, 2006, in the holy city of Najaf, 160 kilometers (100 miles) south of Baghdad, Iraq. Denmark is receiving Muslim protests over the newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad published in one of their major news publications. A series of caricatures, published Sept. 30 in the Danish Jyllands-Posten daily, angered Muslims that show the prophet Muhammad wearing a turban shaped as a bomb with a burning fuse. (AP Photo/Alaa al- Marjani)
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Originally here.
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Protests Over Muhammad Cartoons Escalate

By IBRAHIM BARZAK,

Associated Press Writer
Thu Feb 2, 5:49 PM ET

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Outrage over caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad escalated in the Arab and Islamic world Thursday, with Palestinian gunmen briefly kidnapping a German citizen and protesters in Pakistan chanting "death to France" and "death to Denmark."

Palestinian militants surrounded European Union headquarters in Gaza, and gunmen burst into several hotels and apartments in the West Bank in search of foreigners to take hostage.

In Iraq, Islamic leaders urged worshippers to stage demonstrations from Baghdad to the southern city of Basra following weekly prayer services Friday. Afghanistan and Indonesia condemned the drawings, and Iran summoned the Austrian ambassador, whose country holds the EU presidency.

The issue opened divisions among European Union governments. Austrian Foreign Minister Ursula Plassnik said EU leaders have a responsibility to "clearly condemn" insults to any religion. But French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy said he preferred "an excess of caricature to an excess of censorship."

Sarkozy joined journalists in rallying around the editorial director of France Soir, who was fired by the newspaper's Egyptian owner. France Soir and several other newspapers across Europe reprinted the caricatures this week in a show of support for freedom of expression.

The cartoons were first published in September in a Danish newspaper, touching off anger among Muslims who knew about it. The issue reignited last week after Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador to Denmark.

The Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, had asked 40 cartoonists to draw images of the prophet. The purpose, its chief editor said, was "to examine whether people would succumb to self-censorship, as we have seen in other cases when it comes to Muslim issues."

Islamic law, based on clerics' interpretation of the Quran and the sayings of the prophet, forbids depictions of the Prophet Muhammad and other major religious figures — even positive ones — to prevent idolatry. Shiite Muslim clerics differ in that they allow images of their greatest saint, Ali, the prophet's son-in-law, though not Muhammad.

Critics say the drawings were particularly insulting because some appeared to ridicule Muhammad. One cartoon showed the prophet wearing a turban shaped as a bomb.

France's Grand Rabbi Joseph Sitruk said he shared Muslim anger.

"We gain nothing by lowering religions, humiliating them and making caricatures of them. It's a lack of honesty and respect," he said. He said freedom of expression "is not a right without limits."

In the Arab world, a Jordanian newspaper, Shihan, took the bold step Thursday of running some of the drawings, saying it wanted to show its readers how offensive the cartoons were but also urging the world's Muslims to "be reasonable." Its editorial noted that Jyllands-Posten had apologized, "but for some reason, nobody in the Muslim world wants to hear the apology."

Hours later, the Jordanian government threatened legal action against Shihan, and the owners of the weekly said they had fired its chief editor, Jihad al-Momani, and withdrawn the issue from sale.

The outrage Thursday was most tangible in the Palestinian territories, where Norway and Denmark closed diplomatic offices after masked gunmen threatened to kidnap foreigners in Gaza.

Palestinian gunmen in the West Bank searched several hotels, and a German citizen was briefly kidnapped by gunmen from a hotel in the city of Nablus. Palestinian police freed the German, a teacher, after less than an hour.

Foreign reporters either pulled out of Gaza on Thursday or canceled plans to go to the coastal strip.

Palestinian security officials said they would try to protect foreigners in Gaza. Nineteen foreigners have been kidnapped in Gaza in recent months; all were freed unharmed.

The protests in the Palestinian territories came a week after the Islamic militant group Hamas defeated the ruling Fatah Party in parliamentary elections.

In one unusual twist, Mahmoud Zahar, a Hamas leader, visited a Gaza church Thursday and promised protection to Christians after Fatah gunmen threatened to target churches as part of their protests. Zahar offered to dispatch gunmen from Hamas' military wing, the Izzedine al Qassam Brigades, to guard the church.

"You are our brothers," Zahar told Father Manuel Musallam of the Holy Family Church.

In Gaza City, a dozen gunmen linked to Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas' defeated Fatah Party surrounded the EU Commission's local office.

One of the militants, flanked by two masked men with assault rifles, said the governments of Germany, France, Norway and Denmark must apologize for the cartoons by Thursday evening. If no apology is issued, the gunmen said they would target citizens of the four countries and shut down media offices, including the French news agency.

"Any citizens of these countries, who are present in Gaza, will put themselves in danger," the gunman said.

About 10 armed Palestinians gathered later at the French cultural center in Gaza City and warned of a "tough response" to any further disparagement of Muhammad.

Only a few dozen foreigners from the targeted countries were in Gaza on Thursday. Many others pulled out in recent months, following a spate of abductions of foreigners by Fatah-linked gunmen.

Danish and French members of an international observer team at the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt stayed away from Gaza on Thursday, and instead worked from the group's headquarters in the Israeli town of Ashkelon, said a spokesman, Julio de La Guardia.

Gunhild Forselv, spokeswoman for the international mission in the West Bank town of Hebron, said she was in touch with community leaders and was not concerned for the safety of the 72-member observer force, which includes 21 Norwegians and 11 Danes. "We don't feel threatened," she said.

The EU's election observers were winding down operations, as planned, said Mathias Eick, who is German. He said the Gaza office had been closed and that 49 observers were in Ramallah. "There were security risks even before the election and nothing has changed," he said.

Norway closed its representative office in the West Bank to the public because of the threats, but said the 23-member staff remained on the job.

The Danish Foreign Ministry in Copenhagen said all Danes, except for two diplomats, have left the West Bank and Gaza in recent days. The Danish representative office in the West Bank was to be closed Friday because of the threats, a diplomat said.

In Nablus, gunmen from the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, a violent Fatah offshoot, went to four hotels and told staff they must not host Europeans from the targeted countries. The gunmen said they searched two apartments for foreigners to kidnap, but didn't find any. Foreigners now have three days to leave town, the gunmen said in an impromptu news conference after their fruitless search.

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Originally here.
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Muslims Again Protest Muhammad Caricatures

By QASSIM ABDEL-ZAHRA

Associated Press Writer

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip - Tens of thousands of angry Muslims marched through Palestinian cities, burning the Danish flag and calling for vengeance Friday against European countries where caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were published.

Angry protests against the drawings were spread in the Muslim world.

In Iraq, thousands demonstrated after Friday mosque services, and the country's leading Shiite cleric denounced the drawings. About 4,500 people rallied in Basra and hundreds at a Baghdad mosque. Danish flags were burned at both demonstrations.

Muslims in Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia demonstrated against the European nations whose papers published them.

The caricatures, including one depicting the Muslim prophet wearing a turban fashioned into a bomb, were reprinted in Norwegian, French, German and, even, Jordanian papers after first appearing in a Danish paper in September. The caricatures were republished after Muslims decried the images as insulting to their prophet. Dutch-language newspapers in Belgium and two Italian right-wing papers reprinted the drawings Friday.

Islamic law, based on clerics' interpretation of the Quran and the sayings of the prophet, forbids depiction's of the Prophet Muhammad and other major religious figures — even positive ones — to prevent idolatry. Shiite Muslim clerics differ in that they allow images of their greatest saint, Ali, the prophet's son-in-law, though not Muhammad.

Danish Prime Minister Fogh Rasmussen, in a meeting with the Egyptian ambassador, reiterated his stance that the government cannot interfere with issues concerning the press. On Monday, he said his government could not apologize on behalf of a newspaper, but that he personally "never would have depicted Muhammad, Jesus or any other religious character in a way that could offend other people."

Early Friday, Palestinian militants threw a bomb at a French cultural center in Gaza City, and many Palestinians began boycotting European goods, especially those from Denmark.

"Whoever defames our prophet should be executed," said Ismail Hassan, 37, a tailor who marched through the pouring rain along with hundreds of others in the West Bank city of Ramallah.

"Bin Laden our beloved, Denmark must be blown up," protesters in Ramallah chanted.

In mosques throughout Palestinian cities, clerics condemned the cartoons. An imam at the Omari Mosque in Gaza City told 9,000 worshippers that those behind the drawings should have their heads cut off.

"If they want a war of religions, we are ready," Hassan Sharaf, an imam in Nablus, said in his sermon.

About 10,000 demonstrators, including gunmen from the Islamic militant group Hamas firing in the air, marched through Gaza City to the Palestinian legislature, where they climbed on the roof, waving green Hamas banners.

"We are ready to redeem you with our souls and our blood our beloved prophet," they chanted."Down, Down Denmark."

Thousands of protesters in the center of Nablus burned at least 10 Danish flags. In Jenin, about 1,500 people demonstrated, burning Danish dairy products. Hundreds protested in Jericho, and protests were held in towns throughout Gaza.

Fearing an outbreak of violence, Israel barred all Palestinians under age 45 from praying at Jerusalem's Al Aqsa Mosque compound, Islam's third holiest site.

Nevertheless, about 100 men chanting Islamic slogans and carrying a green Hamas flag demonstrated outside Jerusalem's Old City on Friday afternoon. The crowd scattered when police on horseback arrived, and some of the protesters threw rocks. Police broke up a second demonstration at Damascus Gate with tear gas and stun grenades.

In Iraq, the country's top Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, decried the drawings but did not call for protests.

"We strongly denounce and condemn this horrific action," he said in a statement posted on his Web site and dated Tuesday.

Al-Sistani, who wields enormous influence over Iraq's majority Shiites, made no call for protests and suggested that militant Muslims were partly to blame for distorting Islam's image.

He referred to "misguided and oppressive" segments of the Muslim community and said their actions "projected a distorted and dark image of the faith of justice, love and brotherhood."

"Enemies have exploited this . . . to spread their poison and revive their old hatreds with new methods and mechanisms," he said.

The drawings were first published in September in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The issue reignited last week after Saudi Arabia recalled its ambassador to Denmark and many European newspapers reprinted them this week.

The Jyllands-Posten had asked 40 cartoonists to draw images of the prophet. The purpose, its chief editor said, was "to examine whether people would succumb to self-censorship, as we have seen in other cases when it comes to Muslim issues."

The 12 caricatures have prompted boycotts of Danish goods, bomb threats and demonstrations in front of Danish embassies across the Islamic world. Muslims have also directed their anger at other European countries, with Palestinian gunmen briefly kidnapping a German citizen Thursday and surrounding European Union headquarters in Gaza.

Turkey's Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was quoted as saying the caricatures are an attack on "our spiritual values" which have damaged efforts to establish an alliance between the Muslim world and Europe.

Hundreds of Turks emerging from mosques following Friday prayers staged demonstrations, including one in front of the Danish consulate in Istanbul.

"Hands that reach Islam must be broken," chanted a group of extremists outside the Merkez Mosque in Istanbul.

In Jakarta, Indonesia, more than 150 hardline Muslims stormed a high-rise building housing the Danish Embassy on Friday and tore down and burned the country's flag.

Pakistan's parliament unanimously voted to condemn the drawings as a "vicious, outrageous and provocative campaign" that has "hurt the faith and feelings of Muslims all over the world." About 800 people protested in Pakistan's capital, Islamabad, chanting "Death to Denmark" and "Death to France." Another rally in the southern city of Karachi drew 1,200 people.

Fundamentalist Muslims protested outside the Danish Embassy in Malaysia, chanting "Long live Islam, destroy our enemies."

British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw criticized European media outlets for republishing the caricatures as demonstrators prepared to take to the streets of London.
____

Associated Press Writers Qassim Abdul-Zahra and Sinan Salaheddin in Baghdad, Iraq; Selcan Hacaoglu in Ankara, Turkey; Benjamin Harvey in Istanbul, Turkey; Maria Sanminiatelli in Rome; Jan M. Olsen in Copenhagen, Denmark; Munir Ahmad in Islamabad, Pakistan; and Irwan Firdaus in Jakarta, Indonesia, contributed to this report.
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End of Archived Material

Technorati tags: Belgium, Britain, Danish Muhammed Cartoons, Denmark, France, Germany, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Islam, Islamists, Italy, Jordan, Osama bin Laden, Malaysia, Muslim protests, Muslims, Norway, Pakistan, Anders Fogh Rasmussen , Saudi Arabia, terrorism, terrorists, Turkey, War with Islam.

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

AP Story on Sheehan

2006-01-30T11:19:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
_________________________________

Cindy Sheehan May Challenge Calif. Senator

By IAN JAMES, Associated Press Writer
Sun Jan 29, 1:05 AM ET

CARACAS, Venezuela - Cindy Sheehan, the peace activist who set up camp near President Bush's Texas ranch last summer, said Saturday she is considering running against Sen. Dianne Feinstein (news, bio, voting record) to protest what she called the California lawmaker's support for the war in Iraq.

"She voted for the war. She continues to vote for the funding. She won't call for an immediate withdrawal of the troops," Sheehan told The Associated Press in an interview while attending the World Social Forum in Venezuela along with thousands of other anti-war and anti-globalization activists.

"I think our senator needs to be held accountable for her support of George Bush and his war policies," said Sheehan, whose 24-year-old soldier son Casey was killed in Iraq in 2004.

Feinstein's campaign manager, Kam Kuwata, said the senator "doesn't support George Bush and his war policies."

"She has stated publicly on numerous occasions that she felt she was misled by the administration at the time of the vote," Kuwata said by phone from California.

But with troops committed, Feinstein believes immediate withdrawal is not a responsible option, Kuwata said.

"Senator Feinstein's position is, let's work toward quickly turning over the defense of Iraq to Iraqis so that we can bring the troops home as soon as possible," he said.

Sheehan accused Feinstein of being out of touch with Californians on the issue.

She said she would decide whether to run after talking with her three other adult children. The Democratic primary will be held in June, and candidates must submit their statements for the voter guide by Feb. 14.

Kuwata said Feinstein and Sheehan appear to have a fundamental disagreement over whether troops should be pulled out right now. "That's why they have elections, and if she decides to file (paperwork to run), so be it," he said.

Sheehan said running in the Democratic primary would help make a broader point.

"If I decided to run, I would have no illusions of winning, but it would bring attention to all the peace candidates in the country," she said.

Sheehan, 48, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., said she would head to Washington on Sunday for protests against Bush's State of the Union address on Tuesday, and then return to California to discuss her idea of running against Feinstein with her son and two daughters.

"I can't see — if they think it's going to help peace — that they would be opposed to me doing it," she said.
_________________________________
End of Archived Material

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

Washington Post Article on Brain-Scan Lie Detectors

2006-01-30T05:30:00.000-08:00

Originally http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/28/AR2006012800605.html.
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Brain Scans May Be Used As Lie Detectors

By MALCOLM RITTER

The Associated Press
Sunday, January 29, 2006; 1:34 AM

CHARLESTON, S.C. -- Picture this: Your boss is threatening to fire you because he thinks you stole company property. He doesn't believe your denials. Your lawyer suggests you deny it one more time _ in a brain scanner that will show you're telling the truth.

Wacky? Science fiction? It might happen this summer.

Just the other day I lay flat on my back as a scanner probed the tiniest crevices of my brain and a computer screen asked, "Did you take the watch?"

The lab I was visiting recently reported catching lies with 90 percent accuracy. And an entrepreneur in Massachusetts is hoping to commercialize the system in the coming months.

"I'd use it tomorrow in virtually every criminal and civil case on my desk" to check up on the truthfulness of clients, said attorney Robert Shapiro, best known for defending O.J. Simpson against murder charges.

Shapiro serves as an adviser to entrepreneur Steven Laken and has a financial interest in Cephos Corp., which Laken founded to commercialize the brain-scanning work being done at the Medical University of South Carolina.

That's where I had my brain-scan interrogation. But this lab isn't alone. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have also reported impressive accuracy through brain-scanning recently. California entrepreneur Joel T. Huizenga plans to use that work to start offering lie-detecting services in Philadelphia this July.

His outfit, No Lie MRI Inc., will serve government agencies and "anybody that wants to demonstrate that they're telling the truth," he said.

Both labs use brain-scanning technology called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. It's a standard tool for studying the brain, but research into using it to detect lies is still in early stages. Nobody really knows yet whether it will prove more accurate than polygraphs, which measure things like blood pressure and breathing rate to look for emotional signals of lying.

But advocates for fMRI say it has the potential to be more accurate, because it zeros in on the source of lying, the brain, rather than using indirect measures. So it may someday provide lawyers with something polygraphs can't: legal evidence of truth-telling that's widely admissible in court. (Courts generally regard polygraph results as unreliable, and either prohibit such evidence or allow it only if both sides in a case agree to let it in.)

Laken said he's aiming to offer the fMRI service for use in situations like libel, slander and fraud where it's one person's word against another, and perhaps in employee screening by government agencies. Attorneys suggest it would be more useful in civil than most criminal cases, he said.

Of course, there's no telling where the general approach might lead. A law review article has discussed the legality of using fMRI to interrogate foreigners in U.S. custody. Maybe police will use it as an interrogation tool, too, or perhaps major companies will find it a cheaper than litigation or arbitration when an employee is accused of stealing something important, other observers say.

For his part, Shapiro says he'd switch to fMRI from polygraph for screening certain clients because he figures it would be more reliable and maybe more credible to law enforcement agencies.

In any case, the idea of using fMRI to detect lies has started a buzz among scientists, legal experts and ethicists. Many worry about rushing too quickly from the lab to real-world use. Some caution that it may not work as well in the real world as the early lab results suggest.

And others worry that it might.

Unlike perusing your mail or tapping your phone, this is "looking inside your brain," Hank Greely, a law professor who directs the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences, told me a few days before my scan.

It "does seem to me to be a significant change in our ability . . . to invade what has been the last untouchable sanctuary, the contents of your own mind," Greely said. "It should make us stop and think to what extent we should allow this to be done."

But Dr. Mark George, the genial neurologist and psychiatrist who let me lie in his scanner and be grilled by his computer, said he doesn't see a privacy problem with the technology.

That's because it's impossible to test people without their consent, he said. Subjects have to cooperate so fully _ holding the head still, and reading and responding to the questions, for example _ that they have to agree to the scan.

"It really doesn't read your mind if you don't want your mind to be read," he said. "If I were wrongly accused and this were available, I'd want my defense lawyer to help me get this."

So maybe the technology is better termed a "truth confirmer" than lie detector, he said.

Whatever you call it, the technology has produced some eyebrow-raising results. George and his colleagues recently reported that using fMRI data, a computer was able to spot lies in 28 out of 31 volunteers.

I joined an extension of that study. That's why I found myself lying on a narrow table in George's lab while he and his assistants pulled a barrel-shaped framework over my head like a rigid hood. As it brushed the tip of my nose and blotted out the light from the room, I looked straight ahead to see a computer screen, which would be my interrogator.

Then the table eased into the tunnel of the fMRI scanner, a machine the size of a small storage shed. Only my legs stuck out.

As I focused on the questions popping up on the computer screen, the scanner roared like a tractor trying to uproot a tree stump.

It was bombarding me with radio waves and a powerful magnetic field to create detailed images of my brain and detect tiny changes in blood flow in certain areas. Those changes would indicate those areas were working a bit harder than usual, and according to research by George and others, that would in turn indicate I was lying.

Some questions that popped up on that screen were easy: Am I awake, is it 2004, do I like movies. Others were a little more challenging: Have I ever cheated on taxes, or gossiped, or deceived a loved one. As instructed, I answered them all truthfully, pushing the "Yes" button with my thumb or the "No" button with my index finger.

Then, there it was: "Did you remove a watch from the drawer?"

Just a half-hour or so before, in an adjacent room, I'd been told to remove either a watch or a ring from a drawer and slip it into a locker with my briefcase. This was the mock crime that volunteers lied about in George's study. So I took the watch. As I lay in the scanner I remembered seizing its gold metal band and nestling it into the locker.

So, the computer was asking, did I take the watch?

No, I replied with a jab of my finger. I didn't steal nuthin.'

I lied again and again. Other questions about the watch popped up seemingly at random during the interrogation. Is the watch in my locker? Is it in the drawer? Did I steal it from the drawer?

The same questions came up about the ring, and I told the truth about those.

It would be a different computer's job to figure out which I was lying about, the watch or the ring. It would compare the way my brain acted when I responded to those questions versus what my brain did when I responded truthfully to the other questions. Whichever looked more different from the "truthful" brain activity would be considered the signature of deceit.

Finally, after answering 160 questions over the course of 16 minutes _ actually, it was 80 questions two times apiece _ I was done. The machine returned me to the bright light of the scanning room.

The computer's verdict? That would take a few days to produce, since it required a lot of data analysis. I didn't mind waiting. It's not like the result would help get me fired, or lose a lawsuit, or send me to jail.

Nobody in George's studies faced consequences like that, which is one reason the lab results may not apply to real-world situations. George has already begun another study in which volunteers face "a little more jeopardy" from the mock crime. He declined to describe it because he didn't want prospective volunteers to hear about it ahead of time. That work is funded by the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute.

Other questions remain. How would this work on people with brain diseases? Or people taking medications? How would this work on people outside the 18-to-50 age range included in George's recent work?

How about experienced liars? George hopes eventually to study volunteers from prisons.

And then there's the matter of the three people who got away with lying in his recent study. For some reason, the computer failed to identify the object they'd stolen. George says he doesn't know what went wrong.

But in a real-world situation, he said, the person being questioned would go through an exercise like the ring-or-watch task as well as being quizzed about the topic at hand. That way, if the computer failed in the experimental task, it would be obvious that it couldn't judge the person's truthfulness.

Because of that, George said, he's comfortable with entrepreneur Laken's plans to introduce the scanning service to lawyers, though just on a limited basis, by the middle of this year. Lab studies are obviously necessary, he said, but "at a certain point you really have to start applying and see how it works. And I think we're getting close."

But Jennifer Vendemia, a University of South Carolina researcher who studies deception and the brain, said she finds Laken's timetable premature. So little research has been done on using fMRI for this purpose that it's too soon to make any judgment about how useful it could be, she said.

Without studies to see how well the technique works in other labs _ a standard procedure in the scientific world _ its reliability might be an issue, said Dr. Sean Spence of the University of Sheffield in England, who also studies fMRI for detecting deception.

Speaking more generally, ethical and legal experts said they were wary of quickly using fMRI for spotting lies.

"What's really scary is if we start implementing this before we know how accurate it really is," Greely said. "People could be sent to jail, people could be sent to the death penalty, people could lose their jobs."

Greely recently called for pre-marketing approval of lie-detection devices in general, like the federal government carries out for medications.

Judy Illes, director of Stanford's program in neuroethics, also has concerns: Could people, including victims of crimes, be coerced into taking an fMRI test? Could it distinguish accurate memories from muddled ones? Could it detect a person who's being misleading without actually lying?

Her worries multiply if fMRI evidence starts showing up in the courtroom. For one thing, unlike the technical data from a polygraph, it can be used to make brain images that look simple and convincing, belying the complexity of the data behind them, she said.

"You show a jury a picture with a nice red spot, that can have a very strong impact in a very rapid way. . . . We need to understand how juries are going to respond to that information. Will they be open to complex explanations of what the images do and do not mean?"

There's also a philosophical argument in case fMRI works all too well. Greely notes that four Supreme Court justices wrote in 1998 that if polygraphs were reliable enough to use as evidence, they shouldn't be admitted because they would usurp the jury's role of determining the truth. With only four votes, that position doesn't stand as legal precedent, but it's "an interesting straw in the wind" for how fMRI might be received someday, he said.

It didn't take any jury to find the truth in my case.

"We nabbed ya," George said after sending me the results of my scan. "It wasn't a close call."

I was ratted out by the three parts of my brain the technique targets. They'd become more active when I lied about taking the watch than when I truthfully denied taking the ring.

Those areas are involved in juggling the demands of doing several things at once, in thinking about oneself, and in stopping oneself from making a natural response _ all things the brain apparently does when it pulls back from blurting the truth and works up a whopper instead, George said.

Of course, nobody is going to make me or anybody else climb into an fMRI scanner every time they want a statement verified. The procedure is too cumbersome to be used so casually, George says.

But he figures that if a perfect lie detector were developed, that practical consideration might not matter. The mere knowledge that one is available, he said, might provoke people to clean up their acts.

"My hope," George said, "would be that it might make the world operate a little bit more openly and honestly."
_________________________________
End of Archived Material

Technorati tags: Cephos Corporation, Department of Defense Polygraph Institute, fMRI, functional magnetic resonance imaging, Joel T. Huizenga, Steven Laken, lie detectors,
No Lie MRI Incorporated.

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

Hillary on Bush Surveillance

2006-01-29T05:48:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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Sen. Clinton Blasts Bush on Eavesdropping

Jan 25, 4:28 PM (ET)

By RON FOURNIER

WASHINGTON (AP) - Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton called President Bush's explanations for eavesdropping on domestic conversations without warrants "strange" and "far-fetched" Wednesday in blistering criticism ahead of the president's State of the Union address.

"Obviously, I support tracking down terrorists. I think that's our obligation. But I think it can be done in a lawful way," the New York Democrat said.

Clinton, a potential 2008 presidential candidate, told reporters she did not yet know whether the administration's warrantless eavesdropping broke any laws. But the senator said she did not buy the White House's main justification for the tactic.

"Their argument that it's rooted in the authority to go after al-Qaida is far-fetched," she said in an apparent reference to a congressional resolution passed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attack. The Bush administration has argued that the resolution gave the president authority to order such electronic surveillance as part of efforts to protect the nation from terrorists.

"Their argument that it's rooted in the Constitution inherently is kind of strange because we have FISA and FISA operated very effectively and it wasn't that hard to get their permission," she said. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was established by Congress to approve eavesdropping warrants, even retroactively, but Bush has argued that the process often takes too long.

Clinton leveled her criticism at a meeting of the nation's mayors while Bush toured the National Security Agency, which conducts the eavesdropping. His tour was part of the White House's aggressive campaign to defend the practice of eavesdropping on calls and other communications made overseas from the United States.

Polls suggest the public is divided on whether the administration should be able to eavesdrop on suspected terrorist communications, a practice that has drawn criticism from many congressional Democrats, human rights and civil liberties groups. Bush and his political team have signaled that the eavesdropping program will be a campaign issue in November, part of a broader strategy to cast Democrats as weak on terrorism.

"It is clear Hillary Clinton is more concerned with political attacks than substantive dialogue on how to fight and win the war on terror," said Republican Party spokesman Danny Diaz.

Clinton talked to reporters after addressing the mayors in a speech that criticized Bush's health care, economic and anti-terrorism policies.

Pointing the Democratic-leaning crowd to the president's State of the Union address on Jan. 31, she said his message amounts to "You're on your own."

"We are shifting costs and shifting risks on to individuals and families and local governments," Clinton said. "Mayors, you're on your own to protect citizens. Senior citizens who were promised a prescription drug benefit are on their own to figure out how to access the complicated and confusing program. Three-and-a-half million children who will be affected by cuts to Medicaid are on their own."

Claiming a piece of her husband's legacy, the former first lady said there was a budget surplus five years ago when President Clinton was in the White House. "If we were a company or a household, we would have already filed for bankruptcy," she said of the nation's current fiscal condition.

She said money needed to fight and respond to terrorism has been denied states and cities. "The sense of urgency that marked the days and months following the 9/11 attacks has largely given way to politics as usual" in Washington, the senator said.

Should she decide to run for president, Clinton would be an early favorite for the Democratic nomination because of her high profile and ability to raise money. But a recent CNN-USA Today-Gallup poll suggests that she remains a divisive figure: 51 percent of the respondents said they definitely would not vote for her.

Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack, another potential 2008 candidate, accepted an award at the mayors conference for his state's investment in the arts. He said Iowa has generated $2 billion in economic activity by investing in museums, libraries, convention centers, parks and bike trails - a lesson, he said, for Bush.

"We need to get our fiscal house in order and make long-term investment in infrastructure to make America competitive," Vilsack said in an interview.
_________________________________
End of Archived Material

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

From The New Republic Online: "A Fighting Faith"

2006-01-28T23:15:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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AN ARGUMENT FOR A NEW LIBERALISM.

A Fighting Faith

by Peter Beinart
Post date: 12.02.04
Issue date: 12.13.04

On January 4, 1947, 130 men and women met at Washington's Willard Hotel to save American liberalism. A few months earlier, in articles in The New Republic and elsewhere, the columnists Joseph and Stewart Alsop had warned that "the liberal movement is now engaged in sowing the seeds of its own destruction." Liberals, they argued, "consistently avoided the great political reality of the present: the Soviet challenge to the West." Unless that changed, "In the spasm of terror which will seize this country . . . it is the right — the very extreme right — which is most likely to gain victory."

During World War II, only one major liberal organization, the Union for Democratic Action (UDA), had banned communists from its ranks. At the Willard, members of the UDA met to expand and rename their organization. The attendees, who included Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, Walter Reuther, and Eleanor Roosevelt, issued a press release that enumerated the new organization's principles. Announcing the formation of Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the statement declared, "[B]ecause the interests of the United States are the interests of free men everywhere," America should support "democratic and freedom-loving peoples the world over." That meant unceasing opposition to communism, an ideology "hostile to the principles of freedom and democracy on which the Republic has grown great."

At the time, the ADA's was still a minority view among American liberals. Two of the most influential journals of liberal opinion, The New Republic and The Nation, both rejected militant anti-communism. Former Vice President Henry Wallace, a hero to many liberals, saw communists as allies in the fight for domestic and international progress. As Steven M. Gillon notes in Politics and Vision, his excellent history of the ADA, it was virtually the only liberal organization to back President Harry S Truman's March, 1947 decision to aid Greece and Turkey in their battle against Soviet subversion.

But, over the next two years, in bitter political combat across the institutions of American liberalism, anticommunism gained strength. With the ADA's help, Truman crushed Wallace's third-party challenge en route to reelection. The formerly leftist Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) expelled its communist affiliates and The New Republic broke with Wallace, its former editor. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) denounced communism, as did the NAACP. By 1949, three years after Winston Churchill warned that an "iron curtain" had descended across Europe, Schlesinger could write in The Vital Center: "Mid-twentieth century liberalism, I believe, has thus been fundamentally reshaped . . . by the exposure of the Soviet Union, and by the deepening of our knowledge of man. The consequence of this historical re-education has been an unconditional rejection of totalitarianism."

Today, three years after September 11th brought the United States face-to-face with a new totalitarian threat, liberalism has still not "been fundamentally reshaped" by the experience. On the right, a "historical re-education" has indeed occurred — replacing the isolationism of the Gingrich Congress with George W. Bush and Dick Cheney's near-theological faith in the transformative capacity of U.S. military might. But American liberalism, as defined by its activist organizations, remains largely what it was in the 1990s — a collection of domestic interests and concerns. On health care, gay rights, and the environment, there is a positive vision, articulated with passion. But there is little liberal passion to win the struggle against Al Qaeda — even though totalitarian Islam has killed thousands of Americans and aims to kill millions; and even though, if it gained power, its efforts to force every aspect of life into conformity with a barbaric interpretation of Islam would reign terror upon women, religious minorities, and anyone in the Muslim world with a thirst for modernity or freedom.

When liberals talk about America's new era, the discussion is largely negative — against the Iraq war, against restrictions on civil liberties, against America's worsening reputation in the world. In sharp contrast to the first years of the cold war, post-September 11th liberalism has produced leaders and institutions — most notably Michael Moore and MoveOn — that do not put the struggle against America's new totalitarian foe at the center of their hopes for a better world. As a result, the Democratic Party boasts a fairly hawkish foreign policy establishment and a cadre of politicians and strategists eager to look tough. But, below this small elite sits a Wallacite grassroots that views America's new struggle as a distraction, if not a mirage. Two elections, and two defeats, into the September 11th era, American liberalism still has not had its meeting at the Willard Hotel. And the hour is getting late.

The Kerry Compromise

The press loves a surprise. And so, in the days immediately after November 2nd, journalists trumpeted the revelation that "moral values" had cost John Kerry the election. Upon deeper investigation, however, the reasons for Kerry's loss don't look that surprising at all. In fact, they are largely the same reasons congressional Democrats lost in 2002.

Pundits have seized on exit polls showing that the electorate's single greatest concern was moral values, cited by 22 percent of voters. But, as my colleague Andrew Sullivan has pointed out ("Uncivil Union," November 22nd), a similar share of the electorate cited moral values in the '90s. The real change this year was on foreign policy. In 2000, only 12 percent of voters cited "world affairs" as their paramount issue; this year, 34 percent mentioned either Iraq or terrorism. (Combined, the two foreign policy categories dwarf moral values.) Voters who cited terrorism backed Bush even more strongly than those who cited moral values. And it was largely this new cohort — the same one that handed the GOP its Senate majority in 2002 — that accounts for Bush's improvement over 2000. As Paul Freedman recently calculated in Slate, if you control for Bush's share of the vote four years ago, "a 10-point increase in the percentage of voters [in a given state] citing terrorism as the most important problem translates into a 3-point Bush gain. A 10-point increase in morality voters, on the other hand, has no effect."

On national security, Kerry's nomination was a compromise between a party elite desperate to neutralize the terrorism issue and a liberal base unwilling to redefine itself for the post-September 11th world. In the early days of his candidacy, Kerry seemed destined to run as a hawk. In June, 2002, he attacked Bush from the right for not committing American ground troops in the mountains of Tora Bora. Like the other leading candidates in the race, he voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. This not only pleased Kerry's consultants, who hoped to inoculate him against charges that he was soft on terrorism, but it satisfied his foreign policy advisers as well.

The Democratic foreign policy establishment that counseled the leading presidential candidates during the primaries — and coalesced behind Kerry after he won the nomination — was the product of a decade-long evolution. Bill Clinton had come into office with little passion for foreign policy, except as it affected the U.S. economy. But, over time, his administration grew more concerned with international affairs and more hawkish. In August, 1995, Clinton finally sent NATO warplanes into action in Bosnia. And, four years later, the United States, again working through NATO, launched a humanitarian war in Kosovo, preventing another ethnic cleansing and setting the stage for a democratic revolution in Belgrade. It was an air war, to be sure, and it put few American lives at risk. But it was a war nonetheless, initiated without U.N. backing by a Democratic president in response to internal events in a sovereign country.

For top Kerry foreign policy advisers, such as Richard Holbrooke and Joseph Biden, Bosnia and Kosovo seemed like models for a new post-Vietnam liberalism that embraced U.S. power. And September 11th validated the transformation. Democratic foreign policy wonks not only supported the war in Afghanistan, they generally felt it didn't go far enough — urging a larger NATO force capable of securing the entire country. And, while disturbed by the Bush administration's handling of Iraq, they agreed that Saddam Hussein was a threat and, more generally, supported aggressive efforts to democratize the Muslim world. As National Journal's Paul Starobin noted in a September 2004 profile, "Kerry and his foreign-policy advisers are not doves. They are liberal war hawks who would be unafraid to use American power to promote their values." At the Democratic convention, Biden said that the "overwhelming obligation of the next president is clear" — to exercise "the full measure of our power" to defeat Islamist totalitarianism.

Had history taken a different course, this new brand of liberalism might have expanded beyond a narrow foreign policy elite. The war in Afghanistan, while unlike Kosovo a war of self-defense, once again brought the Western democracies together against a deeply illiberal foe. Had that war, rather than the war in Iraq, become the defining event of the post-September 11th era, the "re-education" about U.S. power, and about the new totalitarian threat from the Muslim world that had transformed Kerry's advisers, might have trickled down to the party's liberal base, transforming it as well.

Instead, Bush's war on terrorism became a partisan affair — defined in the liberal mind not by images of American soldiers walking Afghan girls to school, but by John Ashcroft's mass detentions and Cheney's false claims about Iraqi WMD. The left's post-September 11th enthusiasm for an aggressive campaign against Al Qaeda — epitomized by students at liberal campuses signing up for jobs with the CIA — was overwhelmed by horror at the bungled Iraq war. So, when the Democratic presidential candidates began courting their party's activists in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2003, they found a liberal grassroots that viewed the war on terrorism in negative terms and judged the candidates less on their enthusiasm for defeating Al Qaeda than on their enthusiasm for defeating Bush. The three candidates who made winning the war on terrorism the centerpiece of their campaigns — Joseph Lieberman, Bob Graham, and Wesley Clark — each failed to capture the imagination of liberal activists eager for a positive agenda only in the domestic sphere. Three of the early front-runners — Kerry, John Edwards, and Dick Gephardt — each sank as Howard Dean pilloried them for supporting Ashcroft's Patriot Act and the Iraq war.

Three months before the Iowa caucuses, facing mass liberal defections to Dean, Kerry voted against Bush's $87 billion supplemental request for Iraq. With that vote, the Kerry compromise was born. To Kerry's foreign policy advisers, some of whom supported the supplemental funding, he remained a vehicle for an aggressive war on terrorism. And that may well have been Kerry's own intention. But, to the liberal voters who would choose the party's nominee, he became a more electable Dean. Kerry's opposition to the $87 billion didn't only change his image on the war in Iraq; it changed his image on the war on terrorism itself. His justification for opposing the $87 billion was essentially isolationist: "We shouldn't be opening firehouses in Baghdad and closing them down in our own communities." And, by exploiting public antipathy toward foreign aid and nation-building, the natural building blocks of any liberal antitotalitarian effort in the Muslim world, Kerry signaled that liberalism's moral energies should be unleashed primarily at home.

Kerry's vote against the $87 billion helped him lure back the liberal activists he needed to win Iowa, and Iowa catapulted him toward the nomination. But the vote came back to haunt him in two ways. Most obviously, it helped the Bush campaign paint him as unprincipled. But, more subtly, it made it harder for Kerry to ask Americans to sacrifice in a global campaign for freedom. Biden could suggest "a new program of national service" and other measures to "spread the cost and hardship of the war on terror beyond our soldiers and their families." But, whenever Kerry flirted with asking Americans to do more to meet America's new threat, he found himself limited by his prior emphasis on doing less. At times, he said his primary focus in Iraq would be bringing American troops home. He called for expanding the military but pledged that none of the new troops would go to Iraq, the new center of the terror war, where he had said American forces were undermanned. Kerry's criticisms of Bush's Iraq policy were trenchant, but the only alternative principle he clearly articulated was multilateralism, which often sounded like a veiled way of asking Americans to do less. And, because he never urged a national mobilization for safety and freedom, his discussion of terrorism lacked Bush's grandeur. That wasn't an accident. Had Kerry aggressively championed a national mobilization to win the war on terrorism, he wouldn't have been the Democratic nominee.

The Softs

Kerry was a flawed candidate, but he was not the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem was the party's liberal base, which would have refused to nominate anyone who proposed redefining the Democratic Party in the way the ADA did in 1947. The challenge for Democrats today is not to find a different kind of presidential candidate. It is to transform the party at its grassroots so that a different kind of presidential candidate can emerge. That means abandoning the unity-at-all-costs ethos that governed American liberalism in 2004. And it requires a sustained battle to wrest the Democratic Party from the heirs of Henry Wallace. In the party today, two such heirs loom largest: Michael Moore and MoveOn.

In 1950, the journal The New Leader divided American liberals into "hards" and "softs." The hards, epitomized by the ADA, believed anti-communism was the fundamental litmus test for a decent left. Non-communism was not enough; opposition to the totalitarian threat was the prerequisite for membership in American liberalism because communism was the defining moral challenge of the age.

The softs, by contrast, were not necessarily communists themselves. But they refused to make anti-communism their guiding principle. For them, the threat to liberal values came entirely from the right — from militarists, from red-baiters, and from the forces of economic reaction. To attack the communists, reliable allies in the fight for civil rights and economic justice, was a distraction from the struggle for progress.

Moore is the most prominent soft in the United States today. Most Democrats agree with him about the Iraq war, about Ashcroft, and about Bush. What they do not recognize, or do not acknowledge, is that Moore does not oppose Bush's policies because he thinks they fail to effectively address the terrorist threat; he does not believe there is a terrorist threat. For Moore, terrorism is an opiate whipped up by corporate bosses. In Dude, Where's My Country?,he says it plainly: "There is no terrorist threat." And he wonders, "Why has our government gone to such absurd lengths to convince us our lives are in danger?"

Moore views totalitarian Islam the way Wallace viewed communism: As a phantom, a ruse employed by the only enemies that matter, those on the right. Saudi extremists may have brought down the Twin Towers, but the real menace is the Carlyle Group. Today, most liberals naively consider Moore a useful ally, a bomb-thrower against a right-wing that deserves to be torched. What they do not understand is that his real casualties are on the decent left. When Moore opposes the war against the Taliban, he casts doubt upon the sincerity of liberals who say they opposed the Iraq war because they wanted to win in Afghanistan first. When Moore says terrorism should be no greater a national concern than car accidents or pneumonia, he makes it harder for liberals to claim that their belief in civil liberties does not imply a diminished vigilance against Al Qaeda.

Moore is a non-totalitarian, but, like Wallace, he is not an anti-totalitarian. And, when Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe and Tom Daschle flocked to the Washington premiere of Fahrenheit 9/11, and when Moore sat in Jimmy Carter's box at the Democratic convention, many Americans wondered whether the Democratic Party was anti-totalitarian either.

If Moore is America's leading individual soft, liberalism's premier soft organization is MoveOn. MoveOn was formed to oppose Clinton's impeachment, but, after September 11th, it turned to opposing the war in Afghanistan. A MoveOn-sponsored petition warned, "If we retaliate by bombing Kabul and kill people oppressed by the Taliban, we become like the terrorists we oppose."

By January 2002, MoveOn was collaborating with 9-11peace.org, a website founded by Eli Pariser, who would later become MoveOn's most visible spokesman. One early 9-11peace.org bulletin urged supporters to "[c]all world leaders and ask them to call off the bombing," and to "[f]ly the UN Flag as a symbol of global unity and support for international law." Others questioned the wisdom of increased funding for the CIA and the deployment of American troops to assist in anti-terrorist efforts in the Philippines. In October, 2002, after 9-11peace.org was incorporated into MoveOn, an organization bulletin suggested that the United States should have "utilize[d] international law and judicial procedures, including due process" against bin Laden and that "it's possible that a tribunal could even have garnered cooperation from the Taliban."

In the past several years, MoveOn has emerged, in the words of Salon's Michelle Goldberg, as "the most important political advocacy group in Democratic circles." It boasts more than 1.5 million members and raised a remarkable $40 million for the 2004 election. Many MoveOn supporters probably disagree with the organization's opposition to the Afghan war, if they are even aware of it, and simply see the group as an effective means to combat Bush. But one of the lessons of the early cold war is scrupulousness about whom liberals let speak in their name. And, while MoveOn's frequent bulletins are far more thoughtful than Moore's rants, they convey the same basic hostility to U.S. power.

In the early days after September 11th, MoveOn suggested that foreign aid might prove a better way to defeat terrorism than military action. But, in recent years, it seems to have largely lost interest in any agenda for fighting terrorism at all. Instead, MoveOn's discussion of the subject seems dominated by two, entirely negative, ideas. First, the war on terrorism crushes civil liberties. On July 18, 2002, in a bulletin titled "Can Democracy Survive an Endless 'War'?," MoveOn charged that the Patriot Act had "nullified large portions of the Bill of Rights." Having grossly inflated the Act's effect, the bulletin then contrasted it with the — implicitly far smaller — danger from Al Qaeda, asking: "Is the threat to the United States' existence great enough to justify the evisceration of our most treasured principles?"

Secondly, the war on terrorism diverts attention from liberalism's positive agenda, which is overwhelmingly domestic. The MoveOn bulletin consists largely of links to articles in other publications, and, while the organization says it "does not necessarily endorse the views espoused on the pages that we link to," the articles generally fit the party line. On October 2, 2002, MoveOn linked to what it called an "excellent article," whose author complained that "it seems all anyone in Washington can think or talk about is terrorism, rebuilding Afghanistan and un-building Iraq." Another article in the same bulletin notes that "a large proportion of [federal] money is earmarked for security concerns related to the 'war on terrorism,' leaving less money available for basic public services."

Like the softs of the early cold war, MoveOn sees threats to liberalism only on the right. And thus, it makes common cause with the most deeply illiberal elements on the international left. In its campaign against the Iraq war, MoveOn urged its supporters to participate in protests co-sponsored by International answer, a front for the World Workers Party, which has defended Saddam, Slobodan Milosevic, and Kim Jong Il. When George Packer, in The New York Times Magazine, asked Pariser about sharing the stage with apologists for dictators, he replied, "I'm personally against defending Slobodan Milosevic and calling North Korea a socialist heaven, but it's just not relevant right now."

Pariser's words could serve as the slogan for today's softs, who do not see the fight against dictatorship and jihad as relevant to their brand of liberalism. When The New York Times asked delegates to this summer's Democratic and Republican conventions which issues were most important, only 2 percent of Democrats mentioned terrorism, compared with 15 percent of Republicans. One percent of Democrats mentioned defense, compared with 15 percent of Republicans. And 1 percent of Democrats mentioned homeland security, compared with 8 percent of Republicans. The irony is that Kerry — influenced by his relatively hawkish advisers — actually supported boosting homeland security funding and increasing the size of the military. But he got little public credit for those proposals, perhaps because most Americans still see the GOP as the party more concerned with security, at home and abroad. And, judging from the delegates at the two conventions, that perception is exactly right.

The Vital Center

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. would not have shared MoveOn's fear of an "endless war" on terrorism. In The Vital Center, he wrote, "Free society and totalitarianism today struggle for the minds and hearts of men.. . . If we believe in free society hard enough to keep on fighting for it, we are pledged to a permanent crisis which will test the moral, political and very possibly the military strength of each side. A 'permanent' crisis? Well, a generation or two anyway, permanent in one's own lifetime."

Schlesinger, in other words, saw the struggle against the totalitarianism of his time not as a distraction from liberalism's real concerns, or as alien to liberalism's core values, but as the arena in which those values found their deepest expression. That meant several things. First, if liberalism was to credibly oppose totalitarianism, it could not be reflexively hostile to military force. Schlesinger denounced what he called "doughfaces," liberals with "a weakness for impotence . . . a fear, that is, of making concrete decisions and being held to account for concrete consequences." Nothing better captures Moore, who denounced the Taliban for its hideous violations of human rights but opposed military action against it — preferring pie-in-the-sky suggestions about nonviolent regime change.

For Schlesinger (who, ironically, has moved toward a softer liberalism later in life), in fact, it was conservatives, with their obsessive hostility to higher taxes, who could not be trusted to fund America's cold war struggle. "An important segment of business opinion," he wrote, "still hesitates to undertake a foreign policy of the magnitude necessary to prop up a free world against totalitarianism lest it add a few dollars to the tax rate." After Dwight Eisenhower became president, the ADA took up this line, arguing in October, 1953 that the "overriding issue before the American people today is whether the national defense is to be determined by the demands of the world situation or sacrificed to the worship of tax reductions and a balanced budget." Such critiques laid the groundwork for John F. Kennedy's 1960 campaign — a campaign, as Richard Walton notes in Cold War and Counterrevolution, "dominated by a hard-line, get-tough attack on communism." Once in office, Kennedy dramatically increased military spending.

Such a critique might seem unavailable to liberals today, given that Bush, having abandoned the Republican Party's traditional concern with balanced budgets, seems content to cut taxes and strengthen the U.S. military at the same time. But subtly, the Republican Party's dual imperatives have already begun to collide — with a stronger defense consistently losing out. Bush has not increased the size of the U.S. military since September 11th — despite repeated calls from hawks in his own party — in part because, given his massive tax cuts, he simply cannot afford to. An anti-totalitarian liberalism would attack those tax cuts not merely as unfair and fiscally reckless, but, above all, as long-term threats to America's ability to wage war against fanatical Islam. Today, however, there is no liberal constituency for such an argument in a Democratic Party in which only 2 percent of delegates called "terrorism" their paramount issue and another 1 percent mentioned "defense."

But Schlesinger and the ADA didn't only attack the right as weak on national defense; they charged that conservatives were not committed to defeating communism in the battle for hearts and minds. It was the ADA's ally, Truman, who had developed the Marshall Plan to safeguard European democracies through massive U.S. foreign aid. And, when Truman proposed extending the principle to the Third World, calling in his 1949 inaugural address for "a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas," it was congressional Republicans who resisted the effort.

Support for a U.S.-led campaign to defeat Third World communism through economic development and social justice remained central to anti-totalitarian liberalism throughout the 1950s. Addressing an ADA meeting in 1952, Democratic SenatorBrien McMahon of Connecticut called for an "army" of young Americans to travel to the Third World as "missionaries of democracy." In 1955, the ADA called for doubling U.S. aid to the Third World, to blunt "the main thrust of communist expansion" and to "help those countries provide the reality of freedom and make an actual start toward economic betterment." When Kennedy took office, he proposed the Alliance for Progress, a $20 billion Marshall Plan for Latin America. And, answering McMahon's call, he launched the Peace Corps, an opportunity for young Americans to participate "in the great common task of bringing to man that decent way of life which is the foundation of freedom and a condition of peace."

The critique the ADA leveled in the '50s could be leveled by liberals again today. For all the Bush administration's talk about promoting freedom in the Muslim world, its efforts have been crippled by the Republican Party's deep-seated opposition to foreign aid and nation-building, illustrated most disastrously in Iraq. The resources that the United States has committed to democratization and development in the Middle East are trivial, prompting Naiem Sherbiny of Egypt's reformist Ibn Khaldun Center to tell The Washington Post late last year that the Bush administration was "pussyfooting at the margin with small stuff."

Many Democratic foreign policy thinkers favor a far more ambitious U.S. effort. Biden, for instance, has called for the United States to "dramatically expand our investment in global education." But, while an updated Marshall Plan and an expanded Peace Corps for the Muslim world are more naturally liberal than conservative ideas, they have not resonated among post-September 11th liberal activists. A new Peace Corps requires faith in America's ability to improve the world, something that Moore — who has said the United States "is known for bringing sadness and misery to places around the globe" — clearly lacks. And a new Marshall Plan clearly contradicts the zero-sum view of foreign aid that undergirded Kerry's vote against the $87 billion. In their alienation over Iraq, many liberal activists seem to see the very idea of democracy-promotion as alien. When the Times asked Democratic delegates whether the "United States should try to change a dictatorship to a democracy where it can, or should the United States stay out of other countries' affairs," more than three times as many Democrats answered "stay out," even though the question said nothing about military force.

What the ADA understood, and today's softs do not, is that, while in a narrow sense the struggle against totalitarianism may divert resources from domestic causes, it also provides a powerful rationale for a more just society at home. During the early cold war, liberals repeatedly argued that the denial of African American civil rights undermined America's anti-communist efforts in the Third World. This linkage between freedom at home and freedom abroad was particularly important in the debate over civil liberties. One of the hallmarks of ADA liberals was their refusal to imply — as groups like MoveOn sometimes do today — that civil liberties violations represent a greater threat to liberal values than America's totalitarian foes. And, whenever possible, they argued that violations of individual freedom were wrong, at least in part, because they hindered the anti-communist effort. Sadly, few liberal indictments of, for instance, the Ashcroft detentions are couched in similar terms today.

Toward an Anti-Totalitarian Liberalism

For liberals to make such arguments effectively, they must first take back their movement from the softs. We will know such an effort has begun when dissension breaks out within America's key liberal institutions. In the late '40s, the conflict played out in Minnesota's left-leaning Democratic Farmer-Labor Party, which Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy wrested away from Wallace supporters. It created friction within the NAACP. And it divided the ACLU, which split apart in 1951, with anti-communists controlling the organization and non-communists leaving to form the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee.

But, most important, the conflict played out in the labor movement. In 1946, the CIO, which had long included communist-dominated affiliates, began to move against them. Over fierce communist opposition, the CIO endorsed the Marshall Plan, Truman's reelection bid, and the formation of NATO. And, in 1949, the Organization's executive board expelled eleven unions. As Mary Sperling McAuliffe notes in her book Crisis on the Left: Cold War Politics and American Liberals, 1947-1954, while some of the expelled affiliates were openly communist, others were expelled merely for refusing to declare themselves anti-communist, a sharp contrast from the Popular Front mentality that governed MoveOn's opposition to the Iraq war.

Softs attacked the CIO's action as McCarthyite, but it eliminated any doubt about the American labor movement's commitment to the anti-communist cause. And that commitment became a key part of cold war foreign policy. Already in 1944, the CIO's more conservative rival, the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had created the Free Trade Union Committee (FTUC), which worked to build an anti-totalitarian labor movement around the world. Between 1947 and 1948, the FTUC helped create an alternative to the communist-dominated General Confederation of Labor in France. It helped socialist trade unionists distribute anti-communist literature in Germany's Soviet-controlled zone. And it helped anti-communists take control of the Confederation of Labor in Greece. By the early '60s, the newly merged AFL-CIO was assisting anti-communists in the Third World as well, with the American Institute for Free Labor Development training 30,000 Latin American trade unionists in courses "with a particular emphasis on the theme of democracy versus totalitarianism." And the AFL-CIO was spending a remarkable 20 percent of its budget on foreign programs. In 1969, Ronald Radosh could remark in his book, American Labor and United States Foreign Policy, on the "total absorption of American labor leaders in the ideology of Cold War liberalism."

That absorption mattered. It created a constituency, deep in the grassroots of the Democratic Party, for the marriage between social justice at home and aggressive anti-communism abroad. Today, however, the U.S. labor movement is largely disconnected from the war against totalitarian Islam, even though independent, liberal-minded unions are an important part of the battle against dictatorship and fanaticism in the Muslim world.

The fight against the Soviet Union was an easier fit, of course, since the unions had seen communism up close. And today's AFL-CIO is not about to purge member unions that ignore national security. But, if elements within American labor threw themselves into the movement for reform in the Muslim world, they would create a base of support for Democrats who put winning the war on terrorism at the center of their campaigns. The same is true for feminist groups, for whom the rights of Muslim women are a natural concern. If these organizations judged candidates on their commitment to promoting liberalism in the Muslim world, and not merely on their commitment to international family planning, they too would subtly shift the Democratic Party's national security image. Challenging the "doughface" feminists who opposed the Afghan war and those labor unionists with a knee-jerk suspicion of U.S. power might produce bitter internal conflict. And doing so is harder today because liberals don't have a sympathetic White House to enact liberal anti-totalitarianism policies. But, unless liberals stop glossing over fundamental differences in the name of unity, they never will.

Obviously, Al Qaeda and the Soviet Union are not the same. The ussr was a totalitarian superpower; Al Qaeda merely espouses a totalitarian ideology, which has had mercifully little access to the instruments of state power. Communism was more culturally familiar, which provided greater opportunities for domestic subversion but also meant that the United States could more easily mount an ideological response. The peoples of the contemporary Muslim world are far more cynical than the peoples of cold war Eastern Europe about U.S. intentions, though they still yearn for the freedoms the United States embodies.

But, despite these differences, Islamist totalitarianism — like Soviet totalitarianism before it — threatens the United States and the aspirations of millions across the world. And, as long as that threat remains, defeating it must be liberalism's north star. Methods for defeating totalitarian Islam are a legitimate topic of internal liberal debate. But the centrality of the effort is not. The recognition that liberals face an external enemy more grave, and more illiberal, than George W. Bush should be the litmus test of a decent left.

Today, the war on terrorism is partially obscured by the war in Iraq, which has made liberals cynical about the purposes of U.S. power. But, even if Iraq is Vietnam, it no more obviates the war on terrorism than Vietnam obviated the battle against communism. Global jihad will be with us long after American troops stop dying in Falluja and Mosul. And thus, liberalism will rise or fall on whether it can become, again, what Schlesinger called "a fighting faith."

Of all the things contemporary liberals can learn from their forbearers half a century ago, perhaps the most important is that national security can be a calling. If the struggles for gay marriage and universal health care lay rightful claim to liberal idealism, so does the struggle to protect the United States by spreading freedom in the Muslim world. It, too, can provide the moral purpose for which a new generation of liberals yearn. As it did for the men and women who convened at the Willard Hotel.

Peter Beinart is the editor of TNR.
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End of Archived Material

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

Washington Post Story on Blogs Influence on the Democratic Party

2006-01-28T19:22:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 28, 2006; A06

Democrats are getting an early glimpse of an intraparty rift that could complicate efforts to win back the White House: fiery liberals raising their voices on Web sites and in interest groups vs. elected officials trying to appeal to a much broader audience.

These activists — spearheaded by battle-ready bloggers and making their influence felt through relentless e-mail campaigns — have denounced what they regard as a flaccid Democratic response to the Supreme Court fight, President Bush's upcoming State of the Union address and the Iraq war. In every case, they have portrayed party leaders as gutless sellouts.

First, liberal Web logs went after Democrats for selecting Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to deliver the response to Bush's speech next Tuesday. Kaine's political sins: He was too willing to drape his candidacy in references to religion and too unwilling to speak out aggressively against Bush on the Iraq war. Kaine has been lauded by party officials for finding a victory formula in Bush country by running on faith, values and fiscal discipline.

Many Web commentators wanted Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.), a leading critic of the Iraq war who advocates a speedy withdrawal, to be the opposition voice on the State of the Union night. Most Democratic lawmakers have distanced themselves from the Murtha position. "What the hell are they thinking?" was the title of liberal blogger Arianna Huffington's column blasting the Kaine selection.

"Blogs can take up a lot of time if you're on them," Kaine said to reporters Thursday. "You can get a lot done if you're not bitterly partisan."

The Virginia Democrat said he will not adjust his speech to placate the party's base. "I'm not anybody's mouthpiece or shill or poster boy for that matter. I'm going to say what I think needs to be said and they seem very comfortable with that."

Liberal activists seemed to have slightly more influence with their campaign to persuade Senate Democrats to filibuster the Supreme Court nomination of Samuel A. Alito Jr. Despite several polls showing that the public opposes the effort, Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) on Thursday strongly advocated the filibuster plan — and wrote about his choice on the Daily Kos, a Web site popular with liberals. Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), a leading liberal and critic of the Iraq war, told reporters Kerry's viewpoint is not shared by most in a culturally conservative swing state such as West Virginia. Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) also opposes the filibuster.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) is another frequent target of the Internet attacks. Code Pink, an antiwar women's group with a flashy Web site, plans to protest one of Clinton's weekend fundraisers and is using the Web site to rally people against the New York Democrat. The critics say Clinton has not challenged Bush aggressively enough on Iraq.

"The bloggers and online donors represent an important resource for the party, but they are not representative of the majority you need to win elections," said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic lobbyist who advised Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign. "The trick will be to harness their energy and their money without looking like you are a captive of the activist left."

The blogs-vs.-establishment fight represents the latest version of a familiar Democratic dispute. It boils down to how much national candidates should compromise on what are considered core Democratic values — such as abortion rights, gun control and opposition to conservative judges — to win national elections.

Many Democrats say the only way to win nationally is for the party to become stronger on the economy and promote a centrist image on cultural values, as Kaine did in Virginia and as Bill Clinton did in two successful presidential campaigns.

The new twist in this debate is the Web, which in recent election cycles emerged as a powerful political force, one expected to figure even more prominently as more people get high-speed connections and turn to the Internet for news and commentary. Unlike the past, the "pressure is conveyed through a faster, better organized, more insistent medium," said Jim Jordan, a Democratic strategist.

In the 2004 campaign, liberals used the Web to organize meetings and raise money to power the unexpected rise of former Vermont governor Howard Dean in the Democratic primaries. Dean, a newcomer to national politics who connected with liberals with his antiwar position and declaration to supporters that "you have the power" to change Washington, shattered fundraising records and for months was considered the front-runner in the race for the nomination.

But the Democratic establishment turned on Dean, and his grass-roots operation was not as strong in reality as it appeared on the Internet. Since then, liberal activists have created scores of political blogs and used the Web as an organizing tool and a way to quickly vent frustrations to Democratic leaders in Washington.

The closest historic parallel would be the talk-radio phenomenon of the early 1980s, when conservatives — like liberals now — felt powerless and certain they did not have a way to voice their views because the mainstream media and many of their own leaders considered them out of touch. Through talk radio, often aired in rural parts of the country on the AM dial, conservatives pushed the party to the right on social issues and tax cuts.

The question Democrats will debate over the next few years is whether the prevailing views of liberal activists on the war, the role of religion in politics and budget policies will help or hinder efforts to recapture the presidency and Congress.

Even if they disagree with their positions, Democratic candidates recognize from the Dean experience the power of the activists to raise money and infuse a campaign with their energy. On the flip side, the Alito and Kaine episodes serve as a cautionary tales of what can happen to politicians when they spurn the blogs.

"John Kerry is beginning to bring the traditional Democratic leadership in Washington together with the untraditional netroots activists of the country," James Boyce wrote on the Huffington Post. "A man often accused of being the ultimate Washington insider looked outside of the beltway and saw the concern, in fact, the distress among literally millions of online Democrats."

Other Democrats, Boyce wrote, "triangulated, fabricated, postulated and capitulated."

Staff writer Michael D. Shear contributed to this report.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company
_________________________________
End of Archived Material

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And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

Statistical Summary of Major U.S. Wars, With a Comparison to the Iraq Campaign

2006-01-27T22:05:00.000-08:00

Originally here, reproduced with some additions.

USCWC -- Statistical Summary: America's Major Wars


I. The Military Participation Ratio

Conflict                   Population   Enrolled    Ratio
                           (millions)  (thousands)
Revolutionary War                 3.5    200.0      5.7%
War of 1812                       7.6    286.0      3.8%
Mexican War                      21.1     78.7      0.4%
Civil War: Union                 26.2  2,803.3     10.7%
         : Confederate            8.1  1,064.2     13.1%
         : Combined              34.3  3,867.5     11.1%
Spanish-American War             74.6    306.8      0.4%
World War I                     102.8  4,743.8      4.6%
World War II                    133.5 16,353.7     12.2%
Korean War                      151.7  5,764.1      3.8%
Vietnam War                     204.9  8,744.0      4.3%
Gulf War                        260.0  2,750.0      1.1%

The military participation ratio is the percentage of people
under arms. While the ratio for the Second World War seems surprisingly high compared with those for the Revolutionary War and the Civil War, this is due to the fact that the War for Independence took place before the Industrial Revolution, and the Civil War occurred before its fullest impact, while the nation's womanpower was not tapped in either earlier conflict as well, for either military or economic mobilization. The figure "Enrolled" represents the number of personnel maintained in the service. It is somewhat unreliable, since it includes multiple enlistments in the case of wars prior to 1900, and is a gross figure, including all personnel ever in the service during the conflict. In addition, figures for post-1945 wars are polluted to some extent by the fact that a significant portion of the forces under arms during these conflicts were not actually directly engaged in the war, but were securing the nation's other global commitments.

II. Casualties


                                    <------------Casualties------------>
                                    [-----Deaths---]
                                                       Total              Total
Conflict                Enrolled    Combat   Other    Deaths    Wounded   Casualties
Revolutionary War          200.0    4,435   *          4,435      6,188      10,623  
War of 1812                286.0    2,260   *          2,260      4,505       6,765  
Mexican War                 78.7    1,733   11,550    13,283      4,152      17,435  
Civil War: Union         2,803.3  110,070  249,458   359,528    275,175     634,703  
           Confederate   1,064.2   74,524  124,000   198,524    137,000 +   335,524  
           Combined      3,867.5  184,594  373,458   558,052    412,175 +   970,227  
Spanish-American War       306.8      385    2,061     2,446      1,662       4,108  
World War I              4,743.8   53,513   63,195   116,708    204,002     320,710  
World War II            16,353.7  292,131   115,185  407,316    670,846   1,078,162  
Korean War               5,764.1   33,651   *         33,651    103,284     136,935  
Vietnam War              8,744.0   47,369   10,799    58,168    153,303     211,471  
Gulf War                 2,750.0      148      145       293        467 ^       760  


                               <-----Percentages----->   Duration 
Conflict                Ratio  KIA    Dead   Casualty   Months  KIA/Month          
Revolutionary War        2.4   2.2%    2.2%     5.3%      80       55
War of 1812              3.0   0.8%    0.8%     2.4%      30       75
Mexican War              1.3   2.2%   16.9%    22.2%      20       87
Civil War: Union         1.8   3.9%   12.8%    22.6%      48    2,293
           Confederate   1.7   7.0%   18.7%    31.5%      48    1,553
           Combined      1.7   4.8%   14.4%    25.1%      48    3,846
Spanish-American War     1.7   0.1%    0.8%     1.3%       4       96 &
World War I              2.7   1.1%    2.5%     6.8%      19    2,816
World War II             2.6   1.8%    2.5%     6.6%      44    6,639
Korean War               4.1   0.6%    0.6%     2.4%      37      909
Vietnam War              3.6   0.5%    0.7%     2.4%      90      526
Gulf War                 2.6   0.0%    0.0%     0.0%       1      148

Combat deaths refers to troops killed in action or dead of
wounds. Other includes deaths from disease, privation, and accidents, and includes losses among prisoners of war. Wounded excludes those who died of their wounds, who are included under Combat Deaths. Ratio is the proportion of wounded in action to combat deaths. Note that the wounded figures do not include cases of disease. Under Percentages, KIA refers to the percent of those enrolled killed in action, Dead to the percent dead from all causes, and Casualty to the percent killed or injured. KIA/Month, killed in action per month, gives a fair indication of the intensity of combat.

Notes:

* Non-battle deaths not known for these wars.

+ Confederate non-battle deaths and wounded estimated.

& Actually only six weeks of sustained combat.

^ There was only one month of combat.

III. Financial Cost


Conflict                            Cost in $ Billions  Per Capita 
                                    Current      1990s  (in $1990)  
The Revolution (1775-1783)             .10         1.2  $   342.86
War of 1812 (1812-1815)                .09         0.7       92.11
Mexican War (1846-1848)                .07         1.1       52.13
Civil War (1861-1865): Union          3.20        27.3    1,041.98
                     : Confederate    2.00        17.1    2,111.11
                     : Combined       5.20        44.4    1,294.46
Spanish American War (1898)            .40         6.3       84.45
World War I (1917-1918)              26.00       196.5    1,911.47
World War II (1941-1945)            288.00     2,091.3   15,655.17
Korea (1950-1953)                    54.00       263.9    1,739.62
Vietnam (1964-1972)                 111.00       346.7    1,692.04
Gulf War (1990-1991)                 61.00        61.1      235.00

The table compares the cost of America's principal wars
since 1775 on the basis of then current and 1990s dollars. Current dollars are the actual numbers spent at the time. Thus, a 1775-1783 dollar had the equivalent purchasing power of $10.75 in 1990s terms. Actually this conversion is only a very rough guide, but at least gives some idea of the relative costs of the ten wars on an adjusted basis. However, it is not possible to take into account drastic changes in social structure (most Americans were farmers in 1775, and didn't use much money), and the increasing affluence of American society over the two centuries covered by the table.

Note that the figures are for direct costs only, omitting pension costs, which tended to triple the ultimate outlays. The table also omits the cost of damage to the national infrastructure during those wars waged on American soil. Confederate figures are estimated.

For the Gulf War it is worth noting that various members of the allied coalition reimbursed the U.S. for 88-percent ($54 billion) of the amount shown, so the actual cost to the taxpayer was only about $7 billion, roughly the same as for the Spanish-American War, and on a per capita basis only $26.92, arguably the least expensive war in the nation's history.

Compiled by Al Nofi, reformated and total deaths calculated by Stephen M. St. Onge

 
                                                                            Proportionate Deaths
                       Population     Total                Total     Pop.   for a population
Conflict                (millions)    Deaths  Wounded Casualties    Ratio   of 300 Million
Revolutionary War            3.5     4,435      6,188      10,623   85.71     380,143
War of 1812                  7.6     2,260      4,505       6,765   39.47      89,211
Mexican War                 21.1    13,283      4,152      17,435   14.22     188,858
Civil War: Union            26.2   359,528    275,175     634,703   11.45   4,116,733
           Confederate       8.2   198,524    137,000est. 335,524   35.59   7,263,073
           Combined         34.3   558,052    412,175est. 970,227    8.75   4,480,921
Spanish-American War        74.6     2,446      1,662       4,108    4.02       6,684
World War I                102.8   116,708    204,002     320,710    2.92     341,584
World War II               133.5   407,316    670,846   1,078,162    2.25     915,316
Korean War                 151.7    33,651    103,284     136,935    1.98      66,548
Vietnam War                204.9    58,168    153,303     211,471    1.47      85,165
Gulf War                   260.0       293        467         760    1.15         877
Iraq War                   300.0     2,377                                      2,377

Sources: Table 2-23: "Principal Wars in which the US Participated:
US Military Personnel Serving and Casualties" prepared by Washington Headquarters Services, Directorate for Information Operations and Reports. US Department of Defense Records.

Other Related Links:

USCWC Links--Casualties
America's Wars and Casualties
America's Wars Fact Sheet
Americans Killed in Action

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And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

Mark Steyn on Osama's Unimportance

2006-01-27T01:55:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
_________________________________
Osama doesn’t matter any more
Mark Steyn

You know this fellow David Cameron? Well, obviously you do. But I’m thousands of miles away and I don’t, not really. I mean, I know who he is, and I read The Spectator, and I buy the London papers when I’m up in Montreal. But I’m not sure I’ve ever knowingly seen this Cameron guy on TV and I wouldn’t recognise the sound of his voice on the radio. And if I had to give a speech to, say, some Tory ladies in Banbury about the challenges facing David Cameron, I’m not sure I could plausibly pass myself off as being au courant on the talking points, the new buzz words, the frame of reference, etc.

By contrast, consider this new tape from Osama — or ‘Osama’ (I don’t rule out the possibility that it’s some Pashtun voice-over maestro from the Waziri branch of Equity). The ‘exiled Saudi dissident’ (as the Associated Press described him) had the audio cassette schlepped over to al-Jazeera so he could bring the Great Satan up to speed on his plans to rain down death and destruction on the United States any day now. But, having got that out of the way, he then sportingly offered a deal to Washington. “We do not mind offering you a long-term truce with fair conditions that we adhere to,” said the ‘exiled Saudi dissident’. “We are a nation that God has forbidden to lie and cheat. So both sides can enjoy security and stability under this truce so we can build Iraq and Afghanistan, which have been destroyed in this war.”

And round about this point you start to notice that, for a guy supposedly holed up in a cave, he seems to be remarkably well informed about current Democratic party soundbites and media spin. Indeed, his withdrawal plan was presented in pretty much the same terms as the House Democrat leader Nancy Pelosi would put it. He points out that most Americans favour getting out of Iraq. “There is no shame in this solution,” he said genially, “which prevents the wasting of billions of dollars that have gone to those with influence, and merchants of war in America” — i.e., Dick Cheney and Halliburton. It was the same in November 2004 when he popped up to pledge that Kerry-voting blue states wouldn’t be laid waste in this big new attack he’s been working on. Whether he’s been hiding out at the Cannes Film Festival or he’d just sent Ahmed on a three-day ride to the Jalalabad Blockbusters, he’d evidently seen the bit in Fahrenheit 9/11 where, as the planes hit the World Trade Center, the President stays in the Florida grade school classroom reading My Pet Goat. “It appeared to him,” scoffed Osama, “that a little girl’s talk about her goat and its butting was more important than the planes and their butting of the skyscrapers.” It’s the way he tells them.

Assume for the purposes of argument that these messages are, indeed, from Osama bin Laden — that he slipped across the border after the battle of Tora Bora and has spent four years in Pakistan watching cable news and recording audio cassettes promising the next big attack on America will be happening any day now. Meanwhile, in a typical week’s foot-of-page-27 items, which presumably he catches in the Pathan newsreel before the Michael Moore double feature at the Peshawar Odeon, he hears that the Yemen government has arrested 19 al-Qa’eda followers plotting to blow up the Aden Hotel; the notoriously seething Arab street rises up in Samarra and holds a huge demo against ...al-Qa’eda; a BBC poll finds that Afghans and Iraqis are among the happiest people in the world (BBC coverage of their respective quagmires notwithstanding); and, just to cap a grand start to 2006, a bunch of Hellfire missiles rain down on the remote village of Damadola, killing four of your top deputies at a dinner party to plan that next big attack.

As bin Laden went on making Bush the butt of his goat jokes, Michael Moore must have been calling his lawyer. “Did you get the feeling that he had a bootleg of my movie?” mused the corpulent provocateur. “Are there DVD players in those caves in Afghanistan?”

You know, that’s not a bad question. It’s clear from their taped messages that Omichael bin Mooren and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are news junkies. They’re a lot more familiar with what Ted Kennedy and Howard Dean are saying than I am with what David Cameron and Charles Kennedy are saying. Is it possible to get premium cable service in the Pakistani tribal lands without anybody in Washington getting wind of it? According to Peter Bergen’s new book The Osama bin Laden I Know, the bin man and his lieutenants are big fans of Larry King Live. Given CNN’s ratings, I’ll bet they’re glad somebody is. Rob Long of National Review has joked for years about Osama and Saddam winding up doing the big interview with Larry, but apparently at Jihad Central it’s no laughing matter: “Saratoga, Florida, you’re next with Osama bin Laden! Tomorrow night for the full hour, comedy legend Dick Van Dyke! Osama, tell me about the cave. Smelly?” Again, you’d think someone would notice Larry’s getting a 50 per cent audience share in Alizai (the other set overheated during the Bhutto hanging).

Who exactly is in need of the ‘truce’ here? Head office has already been obliged to send a memo to al-Zarkawi’s franchise in Iraq advising him to ease up on the bombings of mosques and shopping markets and the assassination of respected septuagenarian Sunni imams and so forth, and gently hinting that the marketing department wouldn’t mind seeing a return to the days when al-Qa’eda killed — what’s the word? — infidels.

And at the end of the day Osama switches on the TV and watches Larry King interview Ann-Margret.

It is almost four years since I mooted that the bin man had gone to the virgins. If he hasn’t, then I wonder what he makes — beyond the desperate ‘truce’ gambit offered as a cynical enticement to Democrats and Europeans — of the way things are going. Afghanistan will never be his again. The House of Saud’s double-game is a lot more one-sided these days. And, as the visit of General Musharraf’s Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz to Washington made plain, the prospect of Talebanising Pakistan has slipped beyond Osama’s grasp: the AQ Khan network has been busted up, there are said to be American ‘observers’ at the nuke facilities, and the ISI, the country’s deeply duplicitous intelligence service, is on a tight leash. President Bush underlined to Shaukat Aziz this week that America intends to continue exercising its right of hot pursuit and either send choppers into Pakistan to seize suspects or cut to the chase and blow up their homes. On the whole, Musharraf is cool with that: if someone has to incinerate remote villages, he’d rather it was the Great Satan. For his part, Bush is happy for the General to be as co-operative as he can without getting assassinated. Eighteen people died in the attack on Damadola, and OK, some of them were women and children, but others were men Osama can ill afford to lose, and at one of the three houses reduced to rubble his Number Two, al-Zawahiri himself, is known to have swung by for dinner from time to time. Sorry, but that’s war: you have the enemy round for cocktails, your pad’s on the target list from then on. And yes, it means your wife’s sister, who’s never been terribly political and indeed didn’t utter a word all night, gets incinerated with the al-Qa’eda mastermind. “Message: I don’t care,” as George Bush Sr. might say.

Bin Laden supposedly staged 9/11 because he was having a hard time getting America’s attention. Through the 1990s, he blew up embassies and barracks, and Bill Clinton could barely zip his pants up long enough to lob a token cruise missile at an empty tent. In 2000, al-Qa’eda attacked the USS Cole in harbour and killed 17 sailors. The Defense Secretary, Bill Cohen, advised Mr Clinton that the attack “was not sufficiently provocative” to warrant a response. So a year later Osama tried again — and this time he got his response.

He was convinced that, if you drew America into war, it would lose. Al-Qa’eda has no fear of superpowers. It believes it brought down the Soviet Union, which was weak but vicious. So America, being weak and decadent, should have been a piece of cake. Osama’s entire strategy was based on the notion that Americans are soft and pampered and just can’t hack a real war with real enemies. And, given the amount of CNN and BBC he watches, why wouldn’t he think that?

The Left likes to bleat that “America created Osama bin Laden” and, like so many of its cheap sneers, it never thinks beyond that to the logical question: why did it create bin Laden? Right now, the Democrats and media are engaging in a big ol’ song’n’dance about oversight of intelligence operations. Congressional oversight, judicial oversight, bureaucratic oversight, the more memos to fill, the more forms to file, the better. Whether or not any country needs an intelligence service, nobody needs an intelligence service that has to do everything with the lights up, in public, in triplicate. In the 1970s, Congress dramatically reined in the CIA, gutting clandestine and covert operations. Then at the end of the decade the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and, with the loss of the Shah in Iran, even the Carter administration was smart enough to wonder: what if they don’t stop in Kabul? What if they decide to press on — to Tehran and the Gulf?

So they decide to take the precaution of bogging them down in Afghanistan. In post-Watergate Washington, you can’t put down “Covert Operation to destabilise the Hindu Kush” as a line item on the Federal budget. So the administration has a quiet word with their chums in the region, and the House of Saud, whose expenditures are subject to less rigorous audits than the CIA’s, agrees to pony up the cash and run the recruitment ads, and Pakistan’s ISI comes on board as the local liaison. The Democrats rage all the time about the “outsourcing” of American jobs to the Third World, but the outsourcing of a critical anti-Soviet operation reverberated all the way to 9/11. It dramatically enhanced both the reach and prestige of Saudi Wahabism and the ISI, and it deluded the jihadi into believing they’d overthrown the Soviet Union because the Great Satan was a big sissy who was too scared to do it himself.

Now what’s left of al-Qaeda’s leadership sits around a semi-ruined village crossing names out of its Rolodex — the A-list Saudi princes who no longer return calls — and hoping that the next time one of its freelance operations kills a bunch of people, they won’t be yet another bunch of Muslims, as they have been remorselessly in Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, Bangladesh, etc. Yet every time they switch on the TV, there are the experts bleating about the Iraqi quagmire and Democrats asserting that an historically low rate of casualties is too high a price to pay and we need to skedaddle out of there. You can’t blame Osama or whoever makes his audio tapes for being confused. I’ve written before about the media bubble — the tendency of Democrats and the press to reinforce each other’s illusions. But I’m saddened to think you can be halfway round the globe in some of the wildest turf on earth where no state’s writ runs and still be trapped in the media bubble. Osama may be the most pitiful example of a man who made the mistake of confusing media conventional wisdom with reality.

In the old days he was a smarter than average nutter. He created a terror organisation whose diffused structure made it hard for its enemies to tell whether they were winning against it. But, by the same token, that structure also makes it hard for him to tell whether he’s winning against us. And right now, as that whiney loser cassette tape suggests, they’re the ones who could use a victory. Osama bin Laden is, in that sense, just another symptom rather than the cause of our recent troubles. The spread of Wahabism, which Prince Turki and others persuaded the CIA to use as a strategic asset of convenience, is a bigger problem. And the Saudi-funded radicalisation of Muslim populations around the world is a bigger one still, and may yet prove terminal for parts of Europe.

But a man in Waziristan or Overtheristan watching Cindy Sheehan on CNN? He’s not what it’s about any more.
_________________________________
End of Archived Material

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

The Perils of Pretending to be a Nazi

2006-01-26T17:49:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
_________________________________

Sham neo-Nazi finds himself between a Reich and a hard place

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Jacques Pluss has accomplished the impossible. He has managed to get himself hated by everyone.

Nazis, socialists, lefties, righties, academics, nonacademics -- if they have any feeling about Pluss, those feelings are negative.

I may be the only person in America who appreciates what he has done. And what he has done is to single-handedly expose the myth of academic freedom in America.

Pluss did this with an unprecedented -- some would say nutty -- piece of guerrilla theater that just came to light the other day. At this time last year, Pluss was a quiet and otherwise unremarkable part- time history teacher at the Fairleigh Dickinson University campus in Teaneck. Then in March, the student newspaper received a mysterious letter postmarked from a small village in Ireland. The letter alleged that Pluss was a member of a neo-Nazi group in America and was also, among other things, an Irish Republican Army member who was being investigated concerning a recent drive-by killing in Belfast.

The neo-Nazis and the IRA generally don't move in the same circles, so that should have tipped off the college kids that something about the letter was a bit fishy. But then a bit of investigation turned up the curious fact that Pluss had been holding forth on an Internet radio station hosted by the National Socialist Movement.

Before long, Pluss was summarily booted from his teaching post and told not to show up on campus again. Fairleigh Dickinson officials said the firing had nothing to do with his politics. The dismissal was, they said, the result of some absences that had, coincidentally enough, come to their attention at the same time they learned of his tendency to march around in a brown shirt wearing black boots.

Having gotten that bit of legalese out of the way, they then went on to denounce Pluss for his political views. "It's not politics; it's hate mongering," a dean by the name of John Snyder told the Bergen Record. "It's just hatred directed at the very students he taught."

When I phoned Pluss at the time, he protested the hypocrisy of the FDU faculty. Murderous leftist movements of all types are welcome on campuses all over America, he told me, but their right-wing equivalents are repressed. Back when he was a professor at William Paterson University some years ago, Pluss told me, a fellow professor had a huge hammer-and-sickle banner on her office wall. Che Guevara's a big hit among college kids these days, and Chairman Mao's not far behind, he noted.

I agreed with Pluss on that point. But when he launched into a spiel about the subtle but overlooked charms of that Austrian politician formerly known as Adolf Schickelgruber, I began to think he was a few Stukas short of a squadron, if you know what I mean.

It now turns out Pluss is not a Nazi; he's just a post-modernist. The other day, Pluss posted an article on the History News Network Web site (http://hnn.us/) titled "Now It Can Be Told: Why I Pretended to Be a Neo-Nazi." The episode, he writes, was inspired by the great French deconstructionists Jacques Derrida and Michele Foucault, who had insisted on "the need for the historian to 'become' her or his subject."

When I phoned him yesterday, the 52-year-old Pluss said his experience, which he expects to turn into a book, has brought him even more hatred from the academics who had hated him already.

"I had thought there would at least have been some more academically and intellectually oriented responses," said Pluss, whose Ph.D. in medieval history is from the highly respected University of Chicago.

Meanwhile, the storm-trooper wannabes he had befriended want to do to him what Hitler did to the Danzig Corridor. They've been phoning him with death threats, he said.

"They're a real bunch of misfits," Pluss said.

But they're good material for a historian. And Pluss said he couldn't have gotten that material without immersing himself in the movement.

"The theory behind my actions came from legitimate scholarship," Pluss said. "I thought to myself, 'Let's do a method-acting approach to the study of history and see how it works.' I chose the Nazis because they were absolutely the most obnoxious, whacky group I could find."

The academics were a close second, however.

Pluss wanted to test their reactions as well, which is why he mailed off that nutty letter when he was vacationing in Ireland. The FDU officials took the bait. So much for academic freedom. Pluss was not only booted from the campus but shunned by all of his former colleagues.

"I knew them to be a bunch of jerks," he told me. "If they wanted to dump me for my political views, why can't they just come out and say it?"

Pluss plans to write up the whole experience in the form of a historical novel. That gave me an idea. I had just read "A Million Little Pieces," that bogus memoir of drug rehab by James Frey that became a million seller. If hanging out with a bunch of bored druggies makes for a best seller, how about hanging out with a wacky bunch of nutty neo-Nazis?

"I've got just one more question," I said to Pluss before he had to go. "Have you had your people contact Oprah?"

Paul Mulshine is a Star-Ledger columnist. He may be reached at pmulshine@starledger.com.
_________________________________
End of Archived Material

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And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
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A Tribute to a USAmerican Hero

2006-01-19T19:07:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
_________________________________

A DIFFERENT SORT OF WAR HERO

By MICHAEL FUMENTO

January 18, 2006 -- UNLESS you've been reading the obituaries in recent days you've probably never heard of Hugh Thompson Jr. In the finest tradition of the U.S. military, Thompson — who died Jan. 6 of cancer — was a brave man who saved many lives in Vietnam. But the lives he saved were of Vietnamese civilians at a hamlet called My Lai who were being murdered by Thompson's fellow soldiers.

It's an unfortunate fact that American soldiers massacred civilians even before they had their own country, namely in the French and Indian Wars that ended a decade before the Revolution. Civilian massacres (on both sides) were a fixture of the Indian Wars of the 19th century and occurred in the Philippine-American War in the early 20th century.

Guerrilla conflicts bring out the worst in soldiers because of the tremendous stress and frustration of being killed by and chasing "ghosts," but also because soldiers know that insurrectionists can't survive without the help — achieved willingly or through threats and terror — of the civilian populace.

That was true of the civilians in the My Lai area who supported the enemy Viet Cong. Things boiled over when the Communists launched their massive Tet Offensive in January 1968.

A platoon of soldiers led by Lt. William Calley entered My Lai on March 18, 1968 and began systematically killing everyone. Calley himself machine-gunned a ditch full of villagers. Ultimately, 350 to 500 died — but the toll could have been higher if an Army scout helicopter crew led by 24-year-old Warrant Officer Thompson hadn't witnessed the killings during a flyover and decided they would not close their eyes.

Obituary writers, while celebrating the courage of Thompson and his crew — Spec. Lawrence Colburn and Spec. Glenn Andreotta (killed in action just weeks later) — didn't realize how far it went. "They landed the helicopter in the line of fire between American troops and fleeing Vietnamese civilians and pointed their own guns at the U.S. soldiers to prevent more killings," the Associated Press reported. That conjures up images of a heavily-armored gunship bristling with mini-guns and rocket pods. In reality, their OH-23 Raven was more mosquito than bird. It had thin armor; its weapons comprised merely two light machine guns. An infantry platoon with machine guns, mortars, and grenade launchers could have converted it to scrap metal.

It wasn't armor and weapons that stopped those frenzied troops, but the moral authority conveyed by setting that machine down where Thompson did.

Its presence between soldiers and civilians was a reminder that — no matter how brutal the enemy (indeed, the Communists were busily slaughtering about 3,000 civilians in the temporarily-occupied city of Hue at about this time) — Americans are supposed to be the good guys.

"Hugh Thompson is a symbol of the American soldier who fought with honor in Vietnam," Trent Angers, author of "The Forgotten Hero of My Lai," told the Lafayette, La. Daily Advertiser. "He took to heart the basic Judeo-Christian principles of how you should act toward your neighbors." Thompson put it more simply in a 1998 AP interview. "These people were looking at me for help and there was no way I could turn my back on them."

After his interference maneuver, Thompson arraigned a cease-fire with the U.S. troops, called in more helicopters to aid medical evacuations and coaxed terrified civilians out of a bunker so they could be helped. Later he testified at the court martial of Calley, who was convicted.

Like most heroes, Thompson refused to sing his own praises. It wasn't until 1998 that he and his crewmates got received the Soldier's Medal (Andreotta posthumously), the highest U.S. military award for bravery when not confronting an enemy.

It would be nice to think there simply could never be another My Lai, but the military knows better. Indeed, for the last five years both Thompson and Colburn have lectured at West Point Military Academy, says instructor Col. Tom Kolditz. "We've sought to make our graduates expert in how to make things like that not happen," he told me, and he thinks we now have "a lot of positive role models from Iraq and Afghanistan."

But Thompson, he says, will be missed.

Michael Fumento is a Hudson Institute senior fellow.

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George Friedman on Iran

2006-01-19T16:23:00.000-08:00

Originally from an e-mail list I'm on.
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Iran's Redefined Strategy

By George Friedman

The Iranians have broken the International Atomic Energy Agency seals on some of their nuclear facilities. They did this very deliberately and publicly to make certain that everyone knew that Tehran was proceeding with its nuclear program. Prior to this, and in parallel, the Iranians began to — among other things — systematically bait the Israelis, threatening to wipe them from the face of the earth.

The question, of course, is what exactly the Iranians are up to. They do not yet have nuclear weapons. The Israelis do. The Iranians have now hinted that (a) they plan to build nuclear weapons and have implied, as clearly as possible without saying it, that (b) they plan to use them against Israel. On the surface, these statements appear to be begging for a pre-emptive strike by Israel. There are many things one might hope for, but a surprise visit from the Israeli air force is not usually one of them. Nevertheless, that is exactly what the Iranians seem to be doing, so we need to sort this out.

There are four possibilities:

1. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, is insane and wants to be attacked because of a bad childhood.
2. The Iranians are engaged in a complex diplomatic maneuver, and this is part of it.
3. The Iranians think they can get nuclear weapons — and a deterrent to Israel — before the Israelis attack.
4. The Iranians, actually and rationally, would welcome an Israeli — or for that matter, American — air strike.

Let's begin with the insanity issue, just to get it out of the way. One of the ways to avoid thinking seriously about foreign policy is to dismiss as a nutcase anyone who does not behave as you yourself would. As such, he is unpredictable and, while scary, cannot be controlled. You are therefore relieved of the burden of doing anything about him. In foreign policy, it is sometimes useful to appear to be insane, as it is in poker: The less predictable you are, the more power you have — and insanity is a great tool of unpredictability. Some leaders cultivate an aura of insanity.

However, people who climb to the leadership of nations containing many millions of people must be highly disciplined, with insight into others and the ability to plan carefully. Lunatics rarely have those characteristics. Certainly, there have been sociopaths — like Hitler — but at the same time, he was a very able, insightful, meticulous man. He might have been crazy, but dismissing him because he was crazy — as many did — was a massive mistake. Moreover, leaders do not rise alone. They are surrounded by other ambitious people. In the case of Ahmadinejad, he is answerable to others above him (in this case, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), alongside him and below him. He did not get to where he is by being nuts — and even if we think what he says is insane, it clearly doesn't strike the rest of his audience as insane. Thinking of him as insane is neither helpful nor clarifying.

The Three-Player Game

So what is happening?

First, the Iranians obviously are responding to the Americans. Tehran's position in Iraq is not what the Iranians had hoped it would be. U.S. maneuvers with the Sunnis in Iraq and the behavior of Iraqi Shiite leaders clearly have created a situation in which the outcome will not be the creation of an Iranian satellite state. At best, Iraq will be influenced by Iran or neutral. At worst, it will drift back into opposition to Iran — which has been Iraq's traditional geopolitical position. This is not satisfactory. Iran's Iraq policy has not failed, but it is not the outcome Tehran dreamt of in 2003.

There is a much larger issue. The United States has managed its position in Iraq — to the extent that it has been managed — by manipulating the Sunni-Shiite fault line in the Muslim world. In the same way that Richard Nixon manipulated the Sino-Soviet split, the fundamental fault line in the Communist world, to keep the Soviets contained and off-balance late in the Vietnam War, so the Bush administration has used the primordial fault line in the Islamic world, the Sunni-Shiite split, to manipulate the situation in Iraq.

Washington did this on a broader scale as well. Having enticed Iran with new opportunities — both for Iran as a nation and as the leading Shiite power in a post-Saddam world — the administration turned to Sunni countries like Saudi Arabia and enticed them into accommodation with the United States by allowing them to consider the consequences of an ascended Iran under canopy of a relationship with the United States. Washington used that vision of Iran to gain leverage in Saudi Arabia. The United States has been moving back and forth between Sunnis and Shia since the invasion of Afghanistan, when it obtained Iranian support for operations in Afghanistan's Shiite regions. Each side was using the other. The United States, however, attained the strategic goal of any three-player game: It became the swing player between Sunnis and Shia.

This was not what the Iranians had hoped for.

Reclaiming the Banner

There is yet another dimension to this. In 1979, when the Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini deposed the Shah of Iran, Iran was the center of revolutionary Islamism. It both stood against the United States and positioned itself as the standard-bearer for radical Islamist youth. It was Iran, through its creation, Hezbollah, that pioneered suicide bombings. It championed the principle of revolutionary Islamism against both collaborationist states like Saudi Arabia and secular revolutionaries like Yasser Arafat. It positioned Shi'ism as the protector of the faith and the hope of the future.

In having to defend against Saddam Hussein's Iraq in the 1980s, and the resulting containment battle, Iran became ensnared in a range of necessary but compromising relationships. Recall, if you will, that the Iran-Contra affair revealed not only that the United States used Israel to send weapons to Iran, but also that Iran accepted weapons from Israel. Iran did what it had to in order to survive, but the complexity of its operations led to serious compromises. By the late 1990s, Iran had lost any pretense of revolutionary primacy in the Islamic world. It had been flanked by the Sunni Wahhabi movement, al Qaeda.

The Iranians always saw al Qaeda as an outgrowth of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and therefore, through Shiite and Iranian eyes, never trusted it. Iran certainly didn't want al Qaeda to usurp the position of primary challenger to the West. Under any circumstances, it did not want al Qaeda to flourish. It was caught in a challenge. First, it had to reduce al Qaeda's influence, or concede that the Sunnis had taken the banner from Khomeini's revolution. Second, Iran had to reclaim its place. Third, it had to do this without undermining its geopolitical interests.

Tehran spent the time from 2003 through 2005 maximizing what it could from the Iraq situation. It also quietly participated in the reduction of al Qaeda's network and global reach. In doing so, it appeared to much of the Islamic world as clever and capable, but not particularly principled. Tehran's clear willingness to collaborate on some level with the United States in Afghanistan, in Iraq and in the war on al Qaeda made it appear as collaborationist as it had accused the Kuwaitis or Saudis of being in the past. By the end of 2005, Iran had secured its western frontier as well as it could, had achieved what influence it could in Baghdad, had seen al Qaeda weakened. It was time for the next phase. It had to reclaim its position as the leader of the Islamic revolutionary movement for itself and for Shi'ism.

Thus, the selection of the new president was, in retrospect, carefully engineered. After President Mohammed Khatami's term, all moderates were excluded from the electoral process by decree, and the election came down to a struggle between former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani — an heir to Khomeini's tradition, but also an heir to the tactical pragmatism of the 1980s and 1990s — and Ahmadinejad, the clearest descendent of the Khomeini revolution that there was in Iran, and someone who in many ways had avoided the worst taints of compromise.

Ahmadinejad was set loose to reclaim Iran's position in the Muslim world. Since Iran had collaborated with Israel during the 1980s, and since Iranian money in Lebanon had mingled with Israeli money, the first thing he had to do was to reassert Iran's anti-Zionist credentials. He did that by threatening Israel's existence and denying the Holocaust. Whether he believed what he was saying is immaterial. Ahmadinejad used the Holocaust issue to do two things: First, he established himself as intellectually both anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish, taking the far flank among Islamic leaders; and second, he signaled a massive breach with Khatami's approach.

Khatami was focused on splitting the Western world by dividing the Americans from the Europeans. In carrying out this policy, he had to manipulate the Europeans. The Europeans were always open to the claim that the Americans were being rigid and were delighted to serve the role of sophisticated mediator. Khatami used the Europeans' vanity brilliantly, sucking them into endless discussions and turning the Iran situation into a problem the Europeans were having with the United States.

But Tehran paid a price for this in the Muslim world. In drawing close to the Europeans, the Iranians simply appeared to be up to their old game of unprincipled realpolitik with people — Europeans — who were no better than the Americans. The Europeans were simply Americans who were weaker. Ahmadinejad could not carry out his strategy of flanking the Wahhabis and still continue the minuet with Europe. So he ended Khatami's game with a bang, with a massive diatribe on the Holocaust and by arguing that if there had been one, the Europeans bore the blame. That froze Germany out of any further dealings with Tehran, and even the French had to back off. Iran's stock in the Islamic world started to rise.

The Nuclear Gambit

The second phase was for Iran to very publicly resume — or very publicly claim to be resuming — development of a nuclear weapon. This signaled three things:

1. Iran's policy of accommodation with the West was over.
2. Iran intended to get a nuclear weapon in order to become the only real challenge to Israel and, not incidentally, a regional power that Sunni states would have to deal with.
3. Iran was prepared to take risks that no other Muslim actor was prepared to take. Al Qaeda was a piker.

The fundamental fact is that Ahmadinejad knows that, except in the case of extreme luck, Iran will not be able to get nuclear weapons. First, building a nuclear device is not the same thing as building a nuclear weapon. A nuclear weapon must be sufficiently small, robust and reliable to deliver to a target. A nuclear device has to sit there and go boom. The key technologies here are not the ones that build a device but the ones that turn a device into a weapon — and then there is the delivery system to worry about: range, reliability, payload, accuracy. Iran has a way to go.

A lot of countries don't want an Iranian bomb. Israel is one. The United States is another. Throw Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and most of the 'Stans into this, and there are not a lot of supporters for an Iranian bomb. However, there are only two countries that can do something about it. The Israelis don't want to get the grief, but they are the ones who cannot avoid action because they are the most vulnerable if Iran should develop a weapon. The United States doesn't want Israel to strike at Iran, as that would massively complicate the U.S. situation in the region, but it doesn't want to carry out the strike itself either.

This, by the way, is a good place to pause and explain to readers who will write in wondering why the United States will tolerate an Israeli nuclear force but not an Iranian one. The answer is simple. Israel will probably not blow up New York. That's why the United States doesn't mind Israel having nukes and does mind Iran having them. Is that fair? This is power politics, not sharing time in preschool. End of digression.

Intra-Islamic Diplomacy

If the Iranians are seen as getting too close to a weapon, either the United States or Israel will take them out, and there is an outside chance that the facilities could not be taken out with a high degree of assurance unless nukes are used. In the past, our view was that the Iranians would move carefully in using the nukes to gain leverage against the United States. That is no longer clear. Their focus now seems to be not on their traditional diplomacy, but on a more radical, intra-Islamic diplomacy. That means that they might welcome a (survivable) attack by Israel or the United States. It would burnish Iran's credentials as the true martyr and fighter of Islam.

Meanwhile, the Iranians appear to be reaching out to the Sunnis on a number of levels. Muqtada al-Sadr, the leader of a radical Shiite group in Iraq with ties to Iran, visited Saudi Arabia recently. There are contacts between radical Shia and Sunnis in Lebanon as well. The Iranians appear to be engaged in an attempt to create the kind of coalition in the Muslim world that al Qaeda failed to create. From Tehran's point of view, if they get a deliverable nuclear device, that's great — but if they are attacked by Israel or the United States, that's not a bad outcome either.

In short, the diplomacy that Iran practiced from the beginning of the Iraq-Iran war until after the U.S. invasion of Iraq appears to be ended. Iran is making a play for ownership of revolutionary Islamism on behalf of itself and the Shia. Thus, Tehran will continue to make provocative moves, while hoping to avoid counterstrikes. On the other hand, if there are counterstrikes, the Iranians will probably be able to live with that as well.
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html experiment

2006-01-13T20:41:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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more stuff,
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Der Spriegel Interviews Donald Rumsfeld

2006-01-13T08:39:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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SPIEGEL: Mr. Secretary, you just came back from China where you voiced concern about the rapid build-up of the Chinese military. Is China a threat to the U.S?

Rumsfeld: I did not voice concern quite the way you suggested. I pointed out that there are an awful lot of experts who look at the official statements about the size of their investment in defense capabilities and believe that the actual numbers are two or three times larger. Any country in the world, obviously, can spend as much as they want for their defense and purchase the things they want to purchase. The thing that causes the question is the disparity between what people say they are doing relative to what they are actually doing. That was the point I was making.

SPIEGEL: Will China be the main rival to the United States in this or the next century?

Rumsfeld: I think it would be a mistake to assume that. I don't have any idea. I don't think anyone does. I doubt even the Chinese know. Since the days of Deng Xiaoping, China has made a conscious decision to open the economic system up in a manner that is sufficient to permit growth and opportunities for their people. They are engaging the world from an economic standpoint, which I think is a good thing. In order to do that successfully they are going to have to allow an awful lot of people to come in to their country. They are going to have to have many computers and there is going to be an awful lot more information flowing in and out of their country. More Chinese people will learn the truth, that the successful countries in the world are the ones with free political systems and free economic systems. That creates a tension in a political system that is not as free. To the extent the desire to have a more closed political system prevails, the economic system would suffer. To the extent the economic system succeeds, it will have a moderating and opening effect on the political side.

SPIEGEL: In other words, where there is a market economy a democracy will also evolve?

Rumsfeld: Not necessarily. Clearly, there are some countries that have had fairly restrictive political systems and been quite successful from an economic standpoint.

SPIEGEL: Chile in the Pinochet era for example.

Rumsfeld: Yes exactly. No question. But in the end Chile made the conscious decision to replace the military leadership with a democratic system.

SPIEGEL: Will China become the world's second superpower?

Rumsfeld: The Chinese have a lot going for them and I wish them well. I just hope that the rest of the world will encourage them to become a responsible and constructive, increasingly engaged participant. Stability is an advantage for their economy. No one wins if there's war, no one wins if there's conflict, or uncertainty, or fear. Money flees instability. One would hope China would increasingly feel they have a say in the successful international system. That it's in their interest, for example to behave in a way that the rest of the world wants to have the Olympics in their country. If that happens, we'll have a better and more successful world.

SPIEGEL: One of those troubling conflicts the world is concerned about is taking place in Iraq. In February 2003 in Munich, Germany's Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer confronted you on your case for the Iraq war by saying: "I am not convinced." Do you believe you have convinced the world that you were right on Iraq?

Rumsfeld: Oh, I wouldn't think so. It is hard for people to become convinced of something they don't want to be convinced of. If one looks at Afghanistan first and thinks about it four years ago: Al-Qaida was there, the Taliban was running the country, women couldn't go out, kids couldn't fly kites, they were killing people in the soccer stadium instead of playing soccer. Look at it today: Of course they have the narcotics and problems of corruption, but they have an elected president, the constitution is a purely Afghan constitution, they have a parliament, they have provincial elections, the refugees have returned, internally displaced people have gone home, the economy is growing at a good rate. It is a considerable success story but it's largely unnoticed.

Now, go to Iraq. I don't think that people are convinced there either. I doubt that they will be in two, three or four years. Fischer was so adamant in his position. On the other hand, I think it was a renowned Middle East scholar who said, that things are not good in Iraq, but they've never been better.

SPIEGEL: Today even a majority of Americans are opposed to the war in Iraq. What went wrong?

Rumsfeld: In Iraq, a couple of years ago, there were mass-graves in that country; they are going to be talked about in the trial of Saddam Hussein. Today they have a constitution, it's an Iraqi constitution; it's theirs. They are going to have an election on December 15th. Clearly, the Iraqi people are engaging in a political process. They are arguing, tugging and pulling. Even the Sunnis admit that they made a terrible mistake not participating and now they are leaning forward. There has been more participation registered on their part. Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds are all going to be engaged in the election process between now and December 15th. I think you'll see a successful election.

SPIEGEL: On a daily basis, though, there are terrorist attacks. Over 2,000 US soldiers have now been killed.

Rumsfeld: We thought there would be a spike in incidents prior to the October 15th referendum. There wasn't. There could be in December, however. But, increasingly, the pressure being put on the terrorists and the insurgents is working. They are capturing or killing large numbers of senior al-Qaida and Zarqawi-type people. Lately we put in a tip line, so that Iraqis can call in anonymously. They don't get any money for it, but they can call and say "Look, down the street two doors, there are some guys making bombs." And the number of tips being called in is increasing. The Iraqi security forces are being killed in high numbers by the insurgents and at a certain moment the Iraqis are not going to like it any more. It's their country.

SPIEGEL: Who are the insurgents primarily fighting against: the US or the Iraqi government?

Rumsfeld: The insurgents are not fighting the coalition, the insurgents are fighting the Iraqi security forces, they are fighting the Iraqi government that's been elected by the Iraqi people. Much to the disappointment of some people, I suspect that we are going to find in the months ahead that the process will work and that Iraq will become an important country with water resources, with intelligent people, with oil in a critical part of the world, that will have a more democratic system than its neighbors for the benefit of the region and the world.

SPIEGEL: But why are you losing public support at home?

Rumsfeld: That's always been true with wars. Go back and look at history. My Lord, Harry Truman who did a wonderful job as president -- even you might admit that. He contributed to the post World War II world structure and he left office with 23 percent approval rating.

SPIEGEL: Popularity, in other words, is not a reliable indicator?

Rumsfeld: My Lord, if you get up in the morning in a leadership position and you start chasing popularity polls! The center of gravity in the war in Iraq is not in Iraq. We are not going to lose battles; we're not going to lose skirmishes. Look, the places being fought are your country's public (editor's note: Germany) and our country's public and you (editor's note: the media) are the people that are affecting that. Over time, we'll get it right.

SPIEGEL: Should the US administration have acted differently to get the Sunnis involved in the process of building peace and democracy?

Rumsfeld: The critical task is to make all elements feel they are part of it. The way that country operated under Saddam Hussein was, if you didn't behave you got killed, you got thrown into prison, your family got killed. That's what held it together. Repression works. Now, with the constitution they are trying to fashion a piece of paper that will substitute for repression, that they can look at and say, "That's going to protect me." It's a big leap of faith to do that. The Sunnis were the minority that benefited from the regime of Saddam Hussein. They obviously concluded that they're going to lose out. They need to find a way to be confident, that, even though they are a minority, they'd be treated fairly and they'd be a part of it. It's taking them time to get there. Quite honestly the Sunni neighbors have not been anywhere near helpful. Maybe, because they were less enamoured of a representative democratic system than some of the rest of us.

SPIEGEL: Which countries are you talking about?

Rumsfeld: Oh, just some of the Sunni neighbors.... Now they see that they have to keep the Sunnis in the game. So, I think it's coming. It is their country, it's not our country. They are going to have to find their way to it and it's a bumpy road. Democracy is a tough business. The suggestion, that there are some geniuses who could say "Oh, let's do it that way!" and having it a nice, smooth path is outrageous. History doesn't work that way. Look how long it took Germany after World War II to get itself on the right track.

SPIEGEL: Aren't you afraid that you will end up with a fundamentalist Iraq?

Rumsfeld: Anything is possible. It's their country and they are going to do what they do. But it would be a mistake and I don't think it will happen. Sure, I worry about lots of things. I sit down and make lists of all the terrible things that could happen.

SPIEGEL: You really do that?

Rumsfeld: You bet your life I do it and I've always done it. What can we do to prevent the worst from happening? Or if it does happen and it's out of our control, how can we mitigate it?

SPIEGEL: You once wrote in a memo: Are we losing or winning the war on terrorism? Have you come any closer to an answer?

Rumsfeld: I wrote a memo in October 2003 and I sent it to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dick Myers. I could see the data as to the numbers of people that we were capturing and killing. What I could not see were the number of people that were entering the business, going through the madrassas schools, being trained by people, receiving monetary contributions and being taught how to be a suicide-bomber. Those people are determined. They want to re-establish a caliphate. They want to knock off the moderate Muslim regimes. Where are we today with it? It is a very hard thing to know the answer, but there are a lot of very good signs, for example the number of senior people that continue to be tracked. It's a fact that Osama bin Laden has not been out on video for a hell of a long time. Maybe he's getting shy but he never was before.

SPIEGEL: Syria -- and Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad -- is under international pressure because of its alleged role in the assassination of the former Lebanese Prime Minister Hariri. Could Syria follow the Libyan path -- that of coming clear with its past and trying to engage with the Western world?

Rumsfeld: This is clearly something that is possible and certainly desirable. I am trying to climb inside the head of an individual like (Libyan leader Moammar) Gadhafi and figure out what would cause him to do that? There were some significant things that happened: The exposure of the A.Q. Khan (editor's note: the scientist behind the Pakistani nuclear weapons program who was found to have sold nuclear weapons technology to Libya among other countries) network, the adverse effects of being labeled a terrorist state, the persistence of the concern about the Pan Am aircraft that was shot down over Lockerbie, Scotland.

You look at Kim Jong Il -- what might cause him to take a different path? In the case of Syria, I used to meet with (Bashar al-Assad's) father (editor's note: former Syrian leader Hafez al-Assad) and I could pretty well put myself in his shoes and look at what the world looked like through his eyes. Today, it is a bit different. His son is now in power. What the dynamic would be that might cause him to decide to steer a different course is harder to know.

SPIEGEL: In the end Gadhafi came clean and was able to survive as the dictator of Libya. Maybe Bashar al-Assad too could survive?

Rumsfeld: If you look at history, there are lots of examples of how that could happen. One thing we know about authoritarian regimes is that they are highly centralised -- to use a euphemism for a few other words we could have selected. The goal as leader is to perpetuate the regime when you get up in the morning. It becomes if not an obsession, then a very high priority. Before a shifting of course can take place, they have to have concluded that doing so will perpetuate the regime.

SPIEGEL: How concerned are you about Iran?

Rumsfeld: All of us have to be concerned when a country that important, large and wealthy is disconnected from the normal interactions with the rest of the world. They obviously have certain ambitions, powers and military capabilities ...

SPIEGEL: ...and nuclear ambitions...

Rumsfeld: That's apparently what France, Germany, the UK and the International Atomic Energy Agency have concluded. Everyone wants to have the Iranians as part of the world community, but they aren't yet. Therefore there's less predictability and more danger.

SPIEGEL: The US is trying to make the case in the United Nations Security Council.

Rumsfeld: I would not say that. I thought France, Germany and the UK were working on that problem.

SPIEGEL: What kind of sanctions are we talking about?

Rumsfeld: I'm not talking about sanctions. I thought you, and the U.K. and France were.

SPIEGEL: You aren't?

Rumsfeld: I'm not talking about sanctions. You've got the lead. Well, lead!

SPIEGEL: You mean the Europeans.

Rumsfeld: Sure. My Goodness, Iran is your neighbour. We don't have to do everything!

SPIEGEL: We are in the middle of regime change in Germany...

Rumsfeld: ... that's hardly the phrase I would have selected.

SPIEGEL: The change in government hasn't been quite as sweeping as many had expected. What are your hopes and expectations as to the new government?

Rumsfeld: You know, President Bush wouldn't even allow me to get involved in his presidential re-election campaign. He thinks that the secretary of state and the secretary of defense should stay out of politics. So, if I am staying out of American politics you can be sure, I would stay out of German politics. It seems to me that free countries engaged in the world tend to be a good thing. But, the German people and leadership have to decide about the extent to which they want to be engaged in the world. That's up to them, not me.

SPIEGEL: Since the time of the Cold War, US nuclear bombs have been stationed on German territory. What is their purpose today?

Rumsfeld: I think I'll leave that to the Germans and to NATO. Some countries in Europe made the decision to allow them to be on the continent. It was seen to be in their interest and is still seen that way today as it persists. So one would assume it continues being in their interest.

SPIEGEL: That's hardly an answer.

Rumsfeld: That was a very good answer.

SPIEGEL: For many Germans you are the incarnation of American unilateralism. Others admire the clarity of your language. Some of your quotes were printed as poetry in the newspapers.

Rumsfeld: That's not my goal, to be a poet.

SPIEGEL: Who is the real Rumsfeld? A poet? A warrior?

Rumsfeld: Goodness. The one thing we know for sure is that he is not the caricature that is frequently painted. But it's for you to judge.

SPIEGEL: Give us a hint.

Rumsfeld: Anyone who wants to know the answer and does a modest amount of research finds that I've been working hard in Latin America, Central America to pull those countries together to more cooperation. I suppose, you could use the phrase multilateral. I hate to be seen as characterizing myself in a certain way. So I won't. I will talk about the United States. NATO is a military alliance and I am the official from the United States that is centrally involved with NATO. The initiatives that NATO has undertaken over the past five years are initiatives that I've been deeply involved in: the expansion of NATO into a larger organisation, the NATO response force. NATO is as "un-unilateralist" as one could imagine. The characterisation resulted from a statement I made some time ago, when I said that the mission determines the coalition, which I think is self-evident. The US, for example is now helping in Pakistan. The mission didn't require that we go and organise 50 countries to do that with us. It requires speed and we have the capability of putting speed behind something. We committed dozens of helicopters and they are now saving lives. That is that mission. As it was with the tsunami and frankly, as it was with Afghanistan. There must be 40 countries helping in Afghanistan.

SPIEGEL: And Germany's quite a big part of it.

Rumsfeld: You bet. And we spend a pile of time getting countries to be more involved. And a lot of money helping them get there, providing intelligence for them. Why? Because we want more countries to feel they have a stake in the success of Afghanistan. And it is a success.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Secretary, thank you very much for this interview.
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Technorati tags: Der Spiegel, Iran, Iraq, Iraq war, Donald Rumsfeld, United States.

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

New York Times Story on Echelon

2006-01-13T01:03:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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May 27, 1999

Lawmakers Raise Questions About International Spy Network

By NIALL McKAY

An international surveillance network established by the National Security Agency and British intelligence services has come under scrutiny in recent weeks, as lawmakers in the United States question whether the network, known as Echelon, could be used to monitor American citizens.

Last week, the House Committee on Intelligence requested that the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency provide a detailed report to Congress explaining what legal standards they use to monitor the conversations, transmissions and activities of American citizens.

The request is part of an amendment to the annual intelligence budget bill, the Intelligence Reauthorization Act. It was proposed by Bob Barr, a Georgia Republican and was supported by the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Porter Goss, a Florida Republican. The amendment was passed by the House on May 13 and will now go before the Senate.

Barr, a former CIA analyst, is part of a growing contingent in the United States, Europe and Australia alarmed by the existence of Echelon, a computer system that monitors millions of e-mail, fax, telex and phone messages sent over satellite-based communications systems as well as terrestrial-based data communications. The system was established under what is known as the "UKUSA Agreement" after World War II and includes the security agencies of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.

Although Echelon was originally set up as an international spy network, lawmakers are concerned that it could be used to eavesdrop on American citizens.

"I am concerned there are not sufficient legal mechanisms in place to protect our private information from unauthorized government eavesdropping through such mechanisms as Project Echelon," Barr said in an interview on Tuesday.

The finished report will outline the legal bases and other criteria used by United States intelligence agencies when assessing potential wiretap targets. It will be submitted to the House and made available to the public.

"If the agencies feel unable to provide a full account to the public, then a second classified report will be provided to the House Committee on Intelligence," Barr said. "This is to stop the agencies hiding behind a cloak of secrecy."

Judith Emmel, chief of public affairs for the NSA, declined to comment about the UKUSA Agreement but said the agency was committed to responding to all information requests covered by Barr's amendment. "The NSA's Office of General Counsel works hard to ensure that all Agency activities are conducted in accordance with the highest constitutional, legal and ethical standards," she said.

Until last Sunday, no government or intelligence agency from the member states had openly admitted to the existence of the UKUSA Agreement or Echelon. However, on a television program broadcast on Sunday in Australia, the director of Australia's Defence Signals Directorate acknowledged the existence of the agreement. The official, Martin Brady, declined to be interviewed for the "Sunday Program," but provided a statement for its special on Echelon. "DSD does cooperate with counterpart signals intelligence organizations overseas under the UKUSA relationship," the statement said.

Meanwhile, European Parliament officials have also expressed concern about the use of Echelon to gather economic intelligence for participating nations. Last October, the spying system came to the attention of the Parliament during a debate on Europe's intelligence relationship with the United States. At that time, the Parliament decided it needed more information about Echelon and asked its Science and Technology Options Assessment Panel to commission a report.

The report, entitled "Development of Surveillance Technology and Risk of Abuse of Economic Information", was published on May 10 and provides a detailed account of Echelon and other intelligence monitoring systems.

According to the report, Echelon is just one of the many code names for the monitoring system, which consists of satellite interception stations in participating countries. The stations collectively monitor millions of voice and data messages each day. These messages are then scanned and checked against certain key criteria held in a computer system called the "Dictionary." In the case of voice communications, the criteria could include a suspected criminal's telephone number; with respect to data communications, the messages might be scanned for certain keywords, like "bomb" or "drugs." The report also alleges that Echelon is capable of monitoring terrestrial Internet traffic through interception nodes placed on deep-sea communications cables.

While few dispute the necessity of a system like Echelon to apprehend foreign spies, drug traffickers and terrorists, many are concerned that the system could be abused to collect economic and political information.

"The recent revelations about China's spying activities in the U.S. demonstrates that there is a clear need for electronic monitoring capabilities," said Patrick Poole, a lecturer in government and economics at Bannock Burn College in Franklin, Tenn., who compiled a report on Echelon for the Free Congress Foundation. "But those capabilities can be abused for political or economic purposes so we need to ensure that there is some sort of legislative control over these systems."

On the "Sunday Program" special on Echelon, Mike Frost, a former employee of Canada's Communications Security Establishment, said that Britain's intelligence agency requested that the CSE monitor the communications of British government officials in the late 1980s. Under British law, the intelligence agency is prohibited from monitoring its own government. Frost also said that since the cold war is over, the "the focus now is towards economic intelligence."

Still, Echelon has been shrouded in such secrecy that its very existence has been difficult to prove. Barr's amendment aims to change that.

"If this report reveals that information about American citizens is being collected without legal authorization, the intelligence community will have some serious explaining to do," Barr said.

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End of Archived Material

Technorati tags: Echelon, MSM, New York Times, NSA.

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

Ralph Peters on the Intel 'Scandals'

2006-01-11T01:09:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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INTEL, LIES & TREASON

By RALPH PETERS

ACCORDING to the Democratic Party's leaders, we all have been betrayed by the Bush administration's Big Brother intelligence tactics as evil government operatives invaded the privacy of innocent Americans.

Stop lying. Show us the victims.

Name one honest citizen who has been targeted by our intelligence system. Name one innocent man or woman whose life has been destroyed. Come on, Nancy. Give it up, Howard. Name just one.

Can't do it? OK. Let's dispense with the partisan rhetoric and reach for the facts:

1) Has a single reader of this column suffered personally from our government's efforts to defend us against terrorists? Have any of your relatives or even your remotest acquaintances felt our intel system intrude into their lives?

That's what I always ask the group-think lefties. Not one has ever been able to answer "Yes."

2) The same big-lie politicians attacking the president's efforts to uncover plots against America by monitoring terrorist communications will be the first to shriek that the War on Terror has failed when we're attacked again.

They want it both ways: Drop our defenses, then blame Bush when terrorists strike.

3) The "eavesdropping" operations revealed so sanctimoniously by The New York Times aimed exclusively at foreign terrorists and their willing contacts on our soil. When such operations are "exposed," the terrorists find ways to work around them. Doesn't it just make sense to keep secrets from enemies who announce they want to kill Americans? Who already have killed Americans?

4) Would the Pelosi-Dean gang prefer to give the terrorists the run of the house? For all of their whining, the ultra-Dems have never laid out a coherent, detailed strategy of their own for fighting terror. Show us your plan!

5) Contrary to the nonsense concocted by Hollywood ("King Kong" was far more realistic than "Syriana"), the intelligence community isn't populated by evil sneaks plotting to destroy the constitution and assassinate bothersome citizens from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

I worked in the intel field for 22 years and still give occasional lectures at various agencies, and the truth is that analysts and technicians work in cubicles that would make Dilbert run screaming. Recent recruiting efforts mean that more-senior officials work in cubicles, too.

Our intelligence professionals could make more money in private industry. But they serve because they believe in our country and their mission. And not one of them goes to work in the morning asking, "How can I do a bad job for my fellow citizens today? How can I subvert the Constitution?"

6) Our intelligence system has so many built-in safeguards to protect the personal information of our citizens that it seemed like overkill to me. Intelligence reports couldn't include even a passing reference to any American citizen by name (given the variety of American names, we did a lot of scrambling to conform to the very strict rules).

My fellow Americans, the real threats to your information security are Google, eBay, chat rooms, credit applications, junk mail, etc. And the Democratic National Committee holds vastly more information about individual American citizens in its files than do all of our intelligence agencies combined.

7) Self-interested renegades posing as whistleblowers aren't patriots, they're traitors. Not one of the recent "anonymous sources" has been able to cite a single example of an innocent American harmed by our intelligence campaign against Islamist terrorists.

The leaks that so badly compromised our security were made to score political points by those who place their personal and political vendettas above our nation's safety.

8) We need to get serious about treason and the destructive culture of leaks — on both sides of the aisle. Let's face it: Both political parties have served our country badly with their use of leaks for partisan purposes.

Compromising classified information, for any purpose and at any level, is a serious crime. Those who betray their trust and harm our national defense need to go to jail — for life. If we were truly serious, we'd treat treason as a capital offense again.

The dishonesty and cynicism on the American left is breathtaking. The only reason the Dems are hand-wringing over the imaginary threat to your personal secrets is that every other approach has failed them.

They couldn't get the traction they expected by betraying our troops and declaring Iraq a failure (note how shamelessly the Dems have deserted Cindy Sheehan as her nuttiness turned radioactive — they'll bail on John Murtha, too, as he gets whackier). Now they're trying to convince you that Big Brother Bush is peeping through the blinds to make sure you and your spouse stick to the missionary position.

The truth is that you are being endangered. By politicians so desperate to gain power that they willingly pave the way for terrorist attacks.

The Dean-Pelosi chapter of the Osama bin Laden Fan Club has provided aid and comfort to our enemies. Reasoned dissent is patriotic, but serving as propaganda agents for mass murderers is something else. Now the Dem extremists are welcoming the compromise of clandestine programs to prevent terrorist attacks.

They, not Bush, are flouting our laws. By encouraging the compromise of classified material. And you will pay.

When the Islamist killers come to our soil again and left-wing politicians attempt to exploit our dead by howling that the War on Terror failed, just remember who it was that gave away our secrets to the terrorists.

Ralph Peters is a former military intelligence officer.
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End of Archived Material

Technorati tags: Democrats, intelligence, leaks, left wing, lies, MSM, Ralph Peters, treason.

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

Frank Wilson on MSM and Political Blogs

2006-01-05T04:11:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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Monday, January 02, 2006
Some thoughts on blogging ...

I have been blogging for nearly a year. So I thought I’d opine a bit on the subject. First, something general:

Relations between blogs and the MSM remain tense, as these links from Glenn Reynolds and Roger Simon clearly indicate. I have myself heard in the newsroom comments about blogs that actually did sound, in Michelle Malkin’s phrase, "thoroughly unhinged."

But it really isn’t blogging in general that bothers the MSM. It’s only the political blogs. The MSM doesn’t care about lit blogs or cooking blogs or knitting blogs — or even tech blogs or science blogs (except to the extent they might be useful in advancing some editorial viewpoint).

Blogs have challenged the MSM’s self-designated right to shape political debate by choosing what to cover and how to cover it. The MSM claims it has resources not available to bloggers — and it does. So how explain the disparity between what was reported in the papers and on TV during Hurricane Katrina and what we have since determined was actually the case? This was, after all, the demonstration case for the superiority of the MSM.

Amanda Bennett, editor of The Inquirer, wrote a column that ran on Christmas about surveys of our readers’ likes and dislikes. The finding I thought most interesting was this: "More than half our readers weren't even aware that we had endorsed a presidential candidate! This really seems remarkable, considering that we had gone to the trouble of endorsing John Kerry for 21 straight days.

But maybe not. Lots of people may go into journalism because they’re interested in politics, but it doesn’t follow from that the people who read newspapers share that interest. A good many do, of course — and they are precisely the ones likely to read blogs as well and to blog themselves.

I suspect that the MSM’s role in shaping political debate is going to steadily decline. There will be plenty for it to cover. But from now on the agenda, increasingly, is going to be set by others. The blogs are here to stay. Political debate now takes place in an electronic agora. Get used to it.

But it’s the rest of the readers that interest me, the people who didn’t even know we had endorsed a candidate for president. Now if you think the be-all and end-all of existence is politics, then you will probably dismiss such people as boobs. I suspect they’re people who have better things to do than be preoccupied day in and day out by matters over which the only control they have involves entering a booth and casting a vote every now and again.

Reporters and editors ought to start visiting the rest of the blogosphere. It might give them some idea of what that large chunk of readers uninterested in the editorial board’s orotund pronouncements really is interested in. Plenty of potential stories there. Plenty of potential readers, too.
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End of Archived Material

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

Article on Good News in 2005 by Amir Taheri

2006-01-05T03:39:00.000-08:00

Originally here.
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Arab News
Saturday, 31, December, 2005 (30, Dhul Qa`dah, 1426)

C’mon! 2005 Wasn’t So Bad After All
Amir Taheri —

Tired of reading bad news for a whole year? Well, here is some relief: 2005, designated by doomsayers as annus horriblis, is drawing to a close as one of the best years of the new century so far.

Let us start with the good political news.

The annual report of Freedom House, which measures the advance of liberty across the globe, describes 2005 as the best year since the reports started in 1975. Of the 198 member-states of the United Nations only eight — Cuba, North Korea, Turkmenistan, The Sudan, Uzbekistan, Syria and Libya — experienced setbacks in terms of freedom in 2005. By contrast 27 nations advanced towards greater freedom — an all time record. In Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, and the Ukraine peaceful revolutions succeeded in toppling despotic regimes and installing people-based governments. There were clean elections in other countries emerging from decades of dictatorship, civil war and anarchy. One was Liberia, arguably the world’s most unfortunate nation in recent memory.

It was also in 2005 that Afghanistan and Iraq adopted new democratic constitutions. Afghanistan held presidential and parliamentary elections while Iraq organized a constitutional referendum and two general elections. Predictions that Afghanistan and Iraq were about to plunge into civil war or disintegrate proved groundless as did Noam Chomsky’s "scientific forecast" that six million Afghans would die as a result of their liberation from the Taleban.

There was more good news across the broader Middle East region.

Egypt held its first presidential election in conditions that, though not ideal, represented improvement on past exercises. That was followed by the first genuinely contested general election in Egypt since the 1952 military coup d’etat. Saudi Arabia also held its first elections, albeit at the municipal level and without the participation of women. In neighboring Kuwait, however, women won the franchise after 40 years of struggle. Lebanon recharged its national batteries with a "Cedar Revolution" that culminated in the expulsion of Syrian troops after three decades of occupation.

Libya’s decision to abandon its weapons of mass destruction programs was also good news. The quantities of chemical and bacteriological "substances" that Col. Muammar Qaddafi handed over to the United States and Britain were large enough, if converted into weapons, to kill tens of millions of peoples.

Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza was good news, especially since it led to a re-organization of the Israeli political scene and the emergence of a new centrist force promising peace.

You may be surprised but I also regard the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the new president of the Islamic Republic as good news. The reason is simple: Ahmadinejad has the courage, some might say recklessness, to cast aside the hypocritical mask worn by his two predecessors, both businessmen-mullahs, in a strategy of deception. He has eschewed taqiyah (dissimulation) and that, believe me, is welcome news. His presidency will force the people of Iran and the rest of the world either to come to terms with the Khomeinist revolution or challenge it in a meaningful way.

Looking at Europe the best news, perhaps, was the rejection by the French and the Dutch of the proposed European Constitution — a convoluted document produced by technocrats with little regard for democratic principles. The secret of Europe’s success as a civilization has been its diversity, a fact that always allowed those who thought and did things differently to find a home within the continent. The scheme to kill that diversity by inventing a European super-state is the worst threat facing the European civilization.

Opposition to the liberation of Iraq was supposed to topple the governments of Britain, Denmark, and Australia, which are committed to helping Iraq. But that didn’t happen. All three won new mandates, at times with increased majorities. Opponents of the liberation of Iraq, however, did not fare so well. Gerhard Schroeder, the most opportunistic chancellor that federal Germany has had since its creation, was chased out of office by Angela Merkel who had shed no tears over the demise of Saddam Hussein.

In France, President Jacques Chirac, who had also done all he could to keep Saddam Hussein in power, ended up losing every local, regional, and European election that his party contested, not to speak of his humiliating defeat in the European Constitution referendum.

Even when the year was marred by bad news, some good eventually evolved in every case.

The Asian tsunami, which struck five days before 2005 started, claimed many lives. But it also ended the 40-year insurgency that had claimed over 100,000 lives in the Indonesian province of Aceh. By last November, according to the United Nations reports, more than 60 percent of those affected by the tsunami had been re-housed and helped to return to work, an unprecedented achievement by any standards.

Good also came out of another tragedy: The earthquake that devastated Kashmir. The tragedy forced India and Pakistan to open the cease-fire line for the first time since 1947 and, more importantly, to agree on a framework for resolving an issue that has kept them in conflict for half a century.

The series of deadly hurricanes that hit the United States also claimed many lives. But predictions of economic collapse and racial war proved groundless. Katrina did hurt the US economic momentarily but did not provoke the black-vs.-white conflicts that some had hoped for. The claim that most victims of the hurricane had been poor blacks was debunked when the final list showed that the majority of the 3,400 people who died had been white and middle-class. Incidentally, the number of deaths was far below the "tens of thousands" predicted by doomsayers.

There was also good news in the fact that none of the bad news forecast materialized. The "Arab street" which was supposed to explode didn’t, except when it did in the form of backlash against terrorism in Morocco, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia.

Although oil reached the $70 per barrel mark, this did not trigger an economic slump. The global economy absorbed the shock with relative ease. Some even claim that the price rise led to a transfer of cash to the oil exporting nations which, in turn, increased their imports thus giving a boost to the dull economies of Germany and Japan, the world’s first and second largest exporting nations.

In any case, the global economy grew by 3.4 percent, better than the Consensus Forecasts had predicted in December 2004. The US economy, which, if we believe the New York Times, has been on the" verge of collapse" since Bill Clinton left office, grew by a staggering 3.5 percent. Even Japan, emerging from a decade of stagnation, achieved a 2.4 percent annual growth rate. The much predicted bursting of the Chinese bubble did not happen. In fact, China ended 2005 becoming the world’s fourth largest economy with a dazzling 9.3 percent growth rate. India, too, did well with a 7.5 percent annual growth that has already made it one of the world’s 10 largest economies.

All this, of course, will not drive doomsayers out of business. They will say: OK, 2005 wasn’t bad, but wait for 2006!

The Persian poet Saadi, however, is said to have worn a ring bearing the hadith: "There is good in what happens!" (Al-khair fi ma waq’aa). His English colleague Shelly also had a ring with a different message: The Best is yet to come!

Happy 2006 to you all.

Copyright: Arab News © 2003 [sic] All rights reserved. Site designed by: arabix and powered by Eima IT
_________________________________
End of Archived Material

And always remember Steve's words of political wisdom:
THE HOUSE OF SAUD MUST BE DESTROYED!

Fat Steve's Archives

LA Times Story on Irvine Showing of Danish Muhammad Cartoons

Planned Exhibit of Cartoons Protested

New York Times Editorial on the Danish Muhammad Cartoons

Silenced by Islamist Rage

New York Times Story on France and Jew Hatred.

French Officials Now Say Killing of Jew Was in Part a Hate Crime

Items on Summers's Resignation From Harvard

President of Harvard Resigns, Ending Stormy 5-Year Tenure

Coup against Summers a dubious victory for the politically correct

Harvard Sold Larry Summers Down the Charles River: Amity Shlaes

The Other Muhammad Cartoons

The New York Times on the Mecca Meeting

At Mecca Meeting, Cartoon Outrage Crystallized

By HASSAN M. FATTAH

The Washington Post on the Cartoon Flap

Anatomy of the Cartoon Protest Movement

Widespread Outrage Over Cartoons

New York Times Story on Democratic Electoral Woes

Some Democrats Are Sensing Missed Opportunities

Stratfor on the Cartoon Flap

The Cartoon Backlash: Redefining Alignments

By George Friedman

BBC Story on Cartoon Flap

Muslim cartoon fury claims lives At least five people have been killed in Afghanistan as protests against European cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad swept across the country.

'Test our feelings'

'Defending freedoms'

New Republic Story on Kerry's Filibuster

Daily Telegraph Blog Post and Column on the Danish Muhammed Cartoons

If you get rid of the Danes, you'll have to keep paying the Danegeld

By Charles Moore

Mohammed Cartoons, Plus Photo and Stories about Mohammed Cartoons

Protests Over Muhammad Cartoons Escalate

By IBRAHIM BARZAK,

Muslims Again Protest Muhammad Caricatures

By QASSIM ABDEL-ZAHRA

AP Story on Sheehan

Cindy Sheehan May Challenge Calif. Senator

Washington Post Article on Brain-Scan Lie Detectors

Brain Scans May Be Used As Lie Detectors

By MALCOLM RITTER

Hillary on Bush Surveillance

From The New Republic Online: "A Fighting Faith"

A Fighting Faith

Washington Post Story on Blogs Influence on the Democratic Party

By Jim VandeHeiWashington Post Staff WriterSaturday, January 28, 2006; A06

Statistical Summary of Major U.S. Wars, With a Comparison to the Iraq Campaign

USCWC -- Statistical Summary: America's Major Wars

I. The Military Participation Ratio

II. Casualties

III. Financial Cost

Mark Steyn on Osama's Unimportance

The Perils of Pretending to be a Nazi

Sham neo-Nazi finds himself between a Reich and a hard place

Thursday, January 19, 2006

A Tribute to a USAmerican Hero

A DIFFERENT SORT OF WAR HERO By MICHAEL FUMENTO

George Friedman on Iran

Iran's Redefined Strategy

By George Friedman

html experiment

Der Spriegel Interviews Donald Rumsfeld

New York Times Story on Echelon

May 27, 1999

Lawmakers Raise Questions About International Spy Network

By NIALL McKAY

Ralph Peters on the Intel 'Scandals'

INTEL, LIES & TREASON

By RALPH PETERS

Frank Wilson on MSM and Political Blogs

Article on Good News in 2005 by Amir Taheri

Muslim cartoon fury claims lives

At least five people have been killed in Afghanistan as protests against European cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad swept across the country.

By Jim VandeHei
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 28, 2006; A06

A DIFFERENT SORT OF WAR HERO

By MICHAEL FUMENTO