Archived news and commentary: January 1 - 6, 2002

2002/03/25 - 2002/03/31
2002/03/18 - 2002/03/24
2002/03/11 - 2002/03/17
2002/03/04 - 2002/03/10
2002/02/25 - 2002/03/03
2002/02/18 - 2002/02/24
2002/02/11 - 2002/02/17
2002/02/04 - 2002/02/10
2002/01/28 - 2002/02/03
2002/01/21 - 2002/01/27
2002/01/14 - 2002/01/20
2002/01/07 - 2002/01/13
2002/01/01 - 2002/01/06

Sunday, January 6, 2002

News and commentary:

"Terrorism on the high seas" (The Jerusalem Post, 2002/01/06)
"Also on board the vessel were short- and long-range Katyushas, including 122 mm rockets with a range of some 20 kilometers, which would have put most of Israel's cities and industry at risk. That the ship is connected to the PA is beyond doubt - its captain is a senior officer in PA Chairman Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Naval Police, and the ship itself is owned by the PA. ... Equally worrisome was the presence of a Hizbullah officer on board the ship, which demonstrates the increasing level of cooperation among various Middle Eastern terrorist groups. ... That Iran would be willing to send a shipload of heavy weapons to the region for use by terrorists, just four months after the World Trade Center attack, obviously means the ayatollahs think they can act with impunity. It is time for America to disabuse them of that notion once and for all."

 

Saturday, January 5, 2002

News and commentary:

"Israel Seizes Ship It Says Was Arming Palestinians" (James Bennet and Joel Greenberg, The New York Times, 2002/01/05)
"The Israeli Army said today that it had seized a ship carrying 50 tons of rockets, mines, anti-tank missiles and other munitions meant for Yasir Arafat's Palestinian Authority, even as the Bush administration's envoy met with Mr. Arafat in the hope of strengthening his declared cease-fire with Israel. Palestinian officials denied any link to the ship, the Karine A, and dismissed the announcement a day after the seizure as propaganda timed to undermine Mr. Arafat. But Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, chief of staff of the Israeli Army, said that the Karine A was owned by the Palestinian Authority, which governs Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and that its captain and several of its officers were members of the Palestinian naval police. "The P.A. is drenched from head to toe with terror," General Mofaz said."

 

Friday, January 4, 2002

News and commentary:

"God and Mammon: Does Poverty Cause Militant Islam?" (Daniel Pipes, from The National Interest, Winter 2002 issue)
"What causes Muslims to turn to militant Islam? Some analysts have noted the poverty of Afghanistan and concluded that herein lay the problem. ... Behind these analyses lies an assumption that socioeconomic distress drives Muslims to extremism. ... But the empirical record evinces little correlation between economics and militant Islam. Aggregate measures of wealth and economic trends fall flat as predictors of where militant Islam will be strong and where not. On the level of individuals, too, conventional wisdom points to militant Islam attracting the poor, the alienated and the marginal - but research finds precisely the opposite to be true. To the extent that economic factors explain who becomes Islamist, they point to the fairly well off, not the poor. ... Like fascism and Marxism-Leninism in their heydays, militant Islam attracts highly competent, motivated and ambitious individuals. Far from being the laggards of society, they are its leaders."

"Is Paris Burning? - Vichy-style Jew-hating surfaces in Western Europe" (Jonathan Mark, The Jewish Week, 2002/01/04)
"The other week, threats from French-Palestinians forced a Paris theater to cancel a special "Harry Potter" Chanukah screening for Jewish children. Just before Rosh HaShanah, 200 Arabs attacked Jews on the Champs Elysees. In recent months there have been more than 40 firebombings of Jewish buildings in France. Officials from two separate Jewish organizations told Reuters (Dec. 14) the climate was "like before World War II," and the French media reflects that."

"The Saudi Threat" (Ralph Peters, The Wall Street Journal, 2002/01/04)
"Instead of an instability that opens the door to freedom, the Saudis foment instability that leads to still-greater oppression, backwardness and bigotry. By funding religious extremists from Michigan to Mindanao, the Saudis have done their best to destroy democracies, turn back the clock on human rights and deny religious freedom to Islamic and other populations - while the United States guarantees Saudi security. It is the most preposterous and wrongheaded policy in American history since the defense of slavery."

"Where Power Talks" (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2002/01/04)
"Religious fanaticism thrives on its sense of inevitability, on its aura of triumph and divine appointment. Nothing, therefore, deflates it like military defeat. For years, Islamic extremism went from victory to victory, from the Iranian revolution of 1979 to the radicalization of Sudan and Afghanistan to the world-shaking success of Sept. 11. Then it finally met real resistance in Afghanistan, home of the most radical Islamic state, and was utterly broken in nine weeks by American power. Gone is the mandate of heaven."

News and commentary:

"This time, India means business" (Richard Beeston, The Times, 2002/01/03)
"From ordinary working men and women, up to Atal Behari Vajpayee, the Prime Minister, there is a strong consensus that the Kashmiri insurgency, which has been dragging on for a decade, with support from Pakistan, must be tackled with the same determination that the United States has shown in its campaign against the Taleban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan after the attacks on New York and Washington on September 11. 'You can't fight terrorism in Afghanistan and spread it in Kashmir. This can't go on,' Mr Vajpayee said yesterday, addressing a conference of mayors in Lucknow, his home town. 'You can’t see terrorism in two ways, it can’t be seen in pieces, it has to be seen in totality . . . Pakistan is also bound by United Nations Security Council resolutions which are against terrorism.'"

"Former Iranian President Rafsanjani on Using a Nuclear Bomb Against Israel" (Special Dispatch No. 325, MEMRI, 2002/01/03)
"Former Iranian president and "Expediency Council" Chairman Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani gave the Al-Quds Day sermon on December 14, 2001 at Tehran University, which was attended by thousands of worshippers. In the sermon, he addressed solving the problem of Israel with nuclear weapons. ...
Rafsanjani said that Muslims must surround colonialism and force them [the colonialists] to see whether Israel is beneficial to them or not. If one day, he said, the world of Islam comes to possess the weapons currently in Israel's possession [meaning nuclear weapons] — on that day this method of global arrogance would come to a dead end. This, he said, is because the use of a nuclear bomb in Israel will leave nothing on the ground, whereas it will only damage the world of Islam."

News and commentary:

"The real value of diversity" (Kenan Malik, Connections, from the Winter 2001-2 issue)
A brilliant essay on multicultural problems as the inevitable result of multiculturalism: "The multicultural approach appears to be a sensitive response to the needs of black communities. In fact it is underpinned by the same assumption that has dogged the debate about race relations from the start: the idea that black people are in some way fundamentally different from 'British' people and that the problem of race relations is about how to accommodate these 'differences'. ... Multiculturalism, on the other hand, has not simply entrenched the divisions created by racism, but made cross-cultural interaction more difficult by encouraging people to assert their cultural differences. And in areas where there was both a sharp division between Asian and white communities, and where both communities suffered disproportionately from unemployment and social deprivation, the two groups began to view these problems through the lens of cultural and racial differences, blaming each other for their problems. The inevitable result was the riots into which these towns descended last spring. ... Cultural diversity only makes sense within a framework of common values and beliefs that enable us to treat all people equally. And to create such a framework requires us to be a bit more intolerant and to show a bit less respect."

"Winners and Losers" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2002/01/02)
"The left, both on and off campus, has been reduced to a state of ethical insolvency - followed by silence - in the aftermath of September 11. The roll call of published idiotic remarks by the likes of Mary Beard, Eric Foner, Frederic Jameson, Barbara Kingsolver, Arundhati Roy, Edward Said, Susan Sontag, Alice Walker, and a host of others has revealed that the luminaries of today's Western cultural and intellectual establishment are not merely ignorant of politics, history, and culture, but often downright immature, hysterical, and inarticulate. Marxism has been discredited as both murderous and impoverishing; postmodernism as hypocritical and nonsensical. And now we see that the only skeleton of an ideology remaining that feeds the elite left is a reactive anti-Americanism."

Note: Added a search function powered by FusionBot, which seems to be quite fast and nifty. Should be helpful when searching for an article, writer or a particular subject in the steadily growing archive.

News and commentary:

"Professors of Palestine" (Martin Kramer, Middle East Quarterly, from the Winter 2002 issue)
Kramer analyses how "academic units such as departments, centers, and institutes - turn themselves into blatant partisans of one side or the other.":
"It was amusing to see British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) "Panorama" trot out Princeton University's Richard Falk to declare Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon indictable for war crimes. It happened in "The Accused," the attempt by "Panorama" to cast Sharon as a war criminal over the Sabra and Shatila massacres of 1982. Since the program didn't add one iota of evidence to the record, three "expert" opinions constituted the crux of the argument. Falk, the Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice, was the most unequivocal of the lot: he found Sharon indictable, "no doubt whatsoever." I hadn't seen Falk’s authority invoked so reverentially since my own student days at Princeton. Back then, he was the leading campus enthusiast of the Ayatollah Khomeini. "The depiction of Khomeini as fanatical, reactionary, and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false," he wrote in 1979. "Iran may yet provide us with a desperately-needed model of humane government for a third-world country." ... Falk is famous for his one-size-fits-all definition of war crimes and crimes against humanity. In 1998, for example, he warned officials responsible for implementing the United Nations sanctions against Iraq of their "criminal accountability for complicity in the commission of crimes against humanity." The insistence of U.S. leaders on continuing the sanctions regime "subjects them to potential criminal responsibility." Extracting such ex cathedra rulings from Falk is easy business. This year it is Sharon, next year it could be George Bush senior or Bill Clinton. Stay tuned to the BBC."

"Diary of a Terrorist" (Harper's Magazine, from the January 2002 issue)
The prison diary of Ahmad Omar Sayed Sheikh, the main suspect in the abduction of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, covering the kidnapping of "a Westerner" in India 1994: "Shah-Saab's next instruction was to hunt down an American. I set off for the YMCA. By evening I had established rapport with a chap I thought to be American and had told him about my village when to my annoyance I found out he was German. I was about to leave when an American joined in the conversation."

"Zawahiri Urged Al Qaeda to Let Fighters Escape For Jihad's Sake" (Walter Pincus, The Washington Post, 2002/01/01)
"In a book smuggled out of Afghanistan last month, the man considered second in command of Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network wrote that when faced with military defeat, "the movement must pull out as many personnel as possible to the safety of a shelter," to continue the fight at another time and place. ... Like bin Laden, Zawahiri said the goal of the jihad, or holy war, was to establish a religious state throughout the Islamic world and "reinstate its fallen caliphate [a single leader] and regain its lost glory." Zawahiri repeated bin Laden's instruction that the U.S. economy is a crucial target, but he suggested that the first goal should be to strike Americans and Jews 'in our [Muslim] countries.'"

See the archive for earlier news and commentary.

 

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"When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label."

Jacques Barzun

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"The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt" (Oriana Fallaci, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/03/13)

"How the West Was Won and How It Will Be Lost" (Oriana Fallaci, The American Enterprise, from the January/February 2003 issue)

"On Jew-hatred in Europe" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2002/04/13)

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