Archived news and commentary: February 4 - 10, 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, February 10, 2002

News and commentary:

"Two Israeli women killed in weekend terror attacks" (israelinsider, 2002/02/10)
"Moranne Amit, 25, a law student at the University of Haifa, was stabbed to death on Friday by four Palestinian teenagers in the Peace Forest near the Sherover Promenade in southern Jerusalem. ... The attack on Amit took place early Friday afternoon, when Amit and friend Gil Nevo were walking in the Peace Forest and encountered four masked assailants armed with knives. The two fled in separate directions. The Palestinians caught up with her and stabbed her multiple times. ... The police apprehended all four Palestinian attackers, residents of the mixed Jewish-Arab Abu Tor neighborhood. One was lightly wounded by gunshots in the hand and foot. Another, Samar Abu Miala, 14, collapsed and died shortly after his arrest. Police initially claimed that he died of a heart attack, but an autopsy revealed a bullet in his stomach, the apparent cause of his death. Palestinian head of preventative security in Gaza, Mohammed Dahlan, claimed that Miala was innocent of any crime and that the police officers beat him to death for no reason. "They murdered the boy in cold blood and afterward claimed he carried out an attack," Dahlan said. Police flatly rejected the claim and said that the surviving attackers re-enacted the assault and led them to a nearby cave where they stored weapons and materials for Molotov cocktails. According to Yediot Aharonot, Police said the Palestinians youths confessed that after attacking homes in nearby Armon Hanatziv months ago with Molotov cocktails, they were disappointed by the lack of significant damage, and unsuccessfully tried igniting gas cannisters next to apartment buildings. After this failure, they bought clubs and beat a Spanish tourist, then purchased knives with which they stabbed resident Henry Weill. When this attack did not result in death, they bought larger knives, which they used to kill Amit." (See also: "Terrorists kill two Israeli women in separate attacks" (Haaretz, 2002/02/10) and "Teen terror cell kills woman in Jerusalem park" (Etgar Lefkovits, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/02/10))

"My Fellow Lefties... - Stop it with the American-bashing" (Michael H. Shuman, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/02/18 issue)
"The Left's first reaction after the September 11 attacks was to suggest that America was finally getting its just deserts. Bill Blum, an author of anti-CIA books frequently quoted by the undergraduate Left, argued that the terrorist hijackers "had a political purpose: retaliation for decades of military, economic and political oppression imposed upon the Middle East by The American Empire." ... While the World Trade Center site continued to smolder, a new slogan began to circulate: "Justice, Not Vengeance." This at least had the virtue of not making common cause with Osama bin Laden. Yet, the formula was intended to suggest that any use of force was tantamount to revenge and therefore unjustified. ... Progressives, who were so unwilling to condemn the use of force by terrorists, were eager to condemn any use by the victims, before a single shot was even fired."

Saturday, February 9, 2002

News and commentary:

"Edward W. Said, intellectual" (Bruce Bawer, The Hudson Review/brucebawer.com, from the Winter 2002 issue)
An excellent essay about Edward W. Said: "In the wake of the destruction of the World Trade Center, to read Said on the subject of terrorism – a term he often puts in quotation marks, as if to question its legitimacy as a concept – is an experience in a category of its own. In a 1988 article that appears in The Politics of Dispossession, Said does his best to suggest to the reader that the very notion of "terrorism" is imprecise, ideologically charged, and – well – downright vulgar, and that the connection in Western minds between this term and Arab and Moslem societies is unjust. ... Arguing that terrorism-targeted nations such as the United States are in fact responsible for "state violence" that dwarfs the "private violence" of so-called terrorists, Said praises as "sensible" an article by one Eqbal Ahmad, who describes terrorism as "a violent way of expressing long-felt, collective grievances" and who refers sympathetically to "the violence of the helpless." ... "I must...confess," Said has written, "that I find the entire arsenal of words and phrases that derive from the concept of terrorism both inadequate and shameful." Well, for my part I must confess that I find Said's slick, supercilious, faculty-lounge intellectualization of terror morally unsettling. It is one thing to analyze terror; it is quite another to attempt, as Said has done repeatedly, to analyze it away."

"Patten lays into Bush's America" (Jonathan Freedland, The Guardian, 2002/02/09)
"Chris Patten, the EU commissioner in charge of Europe's international relations, has launched a scathing attack on American foreign policy - accusing the Bush administration of a dangerously "absolutist and simplistic" stance towards the rest of the world. ... But Mr Patten's greatest ire is reserved for America's go-it-alone approach to international relations. "However mighty you are, even if you're the greatest superpower in the world, you cannot do it all on your own." He calls on Europe's 15 member states to put aside their traditional wariness of angering the US and to speak up, forging an international stance of their own on issues ranging from the Middle East to global warming."

Friday, February 8, 2002

News and commentary:

"Why Arafat Must Go" (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2002/02/08)
"The Karine A, however, demonstrated that the Palestinian Authority had developed a military relationship with Iran, the country the State Department calls the single worst source of terrorism in the world. Hence, the awful outcome of the Oslo "peace process" finally becomes clear: not peace, not a demilitarized Palestinian state living side-by-side with Israel, but an Iranian client-state - a new member of the "axis of evil," well-armed, terrorist and violently anti-American - planted in the heart of the Middle East, destabilizing not just Israel but Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. That the United States cannot tolerate."

"Saudi Government Official: American Jews are 'Brothers of Apes and Pigs'" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch No. 343, 2002/02/08)
"The popular Al-Jazeera talk show, "The Opposite Direction," recently addressed the issue of whether Osama bin Laden has served the cause of Islam, or damaged it. ... However, [the Saudi preacher from the Ministry of Islamic Affairs in Saudi
Arabia] Al-Haddal stood firmly in defense of bin Laden. In his comments he also fiercely attacked American Jewry. Following are excerpts of Al-Haddal's statements: 'I don't believe that the attack on America [on September 11th] was perpetrated by bin Laden or the Muslims. I think differently. I believe it was a scheme. What is happening now is a continuation of an ancient attack. It is a continuation of the Jewish deception and the Jewish-Zionist wickedness which infiltrates the U.S. ... I am surprised that the Christian U.S. allows the 'brothers of apes and pigs' [meaning the Jews] to corrupt it. ... [The Jews] are the most despicable people who walked the land and are the worms of the entire world. They are all evil. And why? Because they are deceiving and plotting aggressors...'"

Thursday, February 7, 2002

News and commentary:

"The Longest War" (Victor Davis Hanson, American Heritage, from the February/March 2002 issue)
"The underpinnings of Western culture - freedom, civic militarism, capitalism, individualism, constitutional government, secular rationalism, and natural inquiry relatively immune from political audit and religious backlash - have always brought carnage to adversaries when applied on the battlefield. ... Indeed, our Western ideals revealed themselves even during and right after the terrorist attacks: doomed airline passengers voting to storm the hijackers to prevent further carnage to their countrymen; Congress freely voting to find vast sums of capital for military operations; bizarre military hardware and frightening weapons of death flashing on our television screens as they headed eastward; media critics and pundits openly lauding and criticizing U.S. actions past, present, and future, and thereby helping us define the nature of both the threat and our response; individual rescue workers, aided by huge and sophisticated machines, devising on their own initiative ad hoc methods of saving victims and calming a devastated city. The Taliban and their supporters in the Middle East, like the Ottomans of old, are, to put it plainly, parasitic on Western civilization. A bin Laden can kill Americans only through terror, stealth, Western technology, and familiarity with American culture."

"France raises terror war concerns" (CNN.com, 2002/02/07)
"Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine told France Inter radio on Wednesday: "We are friends of the United States, we are friends of that people and we will remain so. ... But we are threatened today by a new simplism which consists in reducing everything to the war on terrorism." ... Although France was among those European countries that backed the U.S.-led campaign against terrorism following the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington, it has joined Germany and Britain in expressing concerns. ... Vedrine also criticised U.S. support for Israel in its conflict with the Palestinians. He said that Europeans opposed it and that the American vision of globalisation was not one France shared. "Europeans are unanimous in not supporting the Middle East policy of the White House," Vedrine said."

Note: Due to a computer crash Watch will not be updated daily for a while.

Wednesday, February 6, 2002

News and commentary:

"Anti-Americanism has taken the world by storm" (Salman Rushdie, The Guardian, 2002/02/06)
"America did, in Afghanistan, what had to be done and did it well. The bad news, however, is that none of these successes has won friends for the United States outside Afghanistan. In fact, the effectiveness of the American campaign may paradoxically have made the world hate America more than it did before. Western critics of America's Afghan campaign are enraged because they have been shown to be wrong at every step: no, US forces weren't humiliated the way the Russians had been; and yes, the air strikes did work; and no, the Northern Alliance didn't massacre people in Kabul; and yes, the Taliban did crumble away like the hated tyrants they were, even in their southern strongholds; and no, it wasn't that difficult to get the militants out of their cave fortresses; and yes, the various factions succeeded in putting together a new government that is surprising people by functioning pretty well. Meanwhile, those elements in the Arab and Muslim world who blame America for their own feelings of political impotence are feeling more impotent than ever."

"The Losers" (Thomas S. Garlinghouse, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/02/06)
"Besides the Taliban, the biggest loser in America’s "War on Terror" has been the American Left. Although its most prominent spokesmen - such as Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Susan Sontag, and Edward Said - remain celebrities in the halls of academe, elsewhere the Left hasn’t fared as well. In the weeks and months following September 11, millions of average Americans heard, many for the first time, the undiluted hatred of America that is so characteristic of the American Left. They were being told, in effect, that America had it coming. It was a message, emanating from a pampered and well-paid intelligentsia, that these average Americans, still reeling from the horrific terrorist attacks, were in no mood to hear."

"Iranians for Bush" (S. Rob Sobhani, The Wall Street Journal, 2002/02/06)
"As a guest at the station that night, I witnessed hundreds of calls, faxes and e-mails from inside Iran praising Mr. Bush. For the first time since the establishment of the theocracy, a U.S. president had chosen to speak to, and for, Iran's downtrodden. An outpouring of support from within Iran for Mr. Bush would surprise those who have heard loud criticism of aspects of his address, particularly his attack on the "axis of evil," in which he included the Iranian regime. European officials, having begun to cozy up to the Tehran mullahs, are loath to do a turnaround. Besides, the more sophisticated dislike all this talk of "evil." But not those who suffer under the mullahs' rule, and know evil when they see it up close. An overwhelming majority of the people of Iran welcomed President Bush's comments. Here was an American president who had separated the nation of Iran from its oppressive government."

News and commentary:

"Why the Turn to Suicide?" (Richard Cohen, The Washington Post, 2002/02/05)
"But what Arafat needs to do - because it would be smart as well as right - is get himself and his people on the right side of the line. He needs to condemn not just violence but suicide bombings in particular. He needs to reassert what were once Palestinian values and specifically rebuke families who exult in the death of their loved ones and the murder of innocents. Suicide bombers are not just killing themselves and others. They're killing the very humanity of their own people."

"The Return of Anti-Semitism" (Hillel Halkin, The Wall Street Journal, 2002/02/05)
"That anti-Semitism has grown in direct proportion to Palestinian violence against Israel; that it has systematically ignored this violence in order to concentrate exclusively on the evils of Israeli retaliation; that it has gotten worse even as the world has applauded, or passively accepted, an American attack in Afghanistan, many times more destructive of innocent lives than any Israeli reprisal, on terror groups closely allied with Israel's enemies - this defies all rationalization. It can open the eyes even of sleepers. One must not give an inch on this point. The new anti-Israelism is nothing but the old anti-Semitism in disguise."

"Arab Media on State of the Union Address: Bush like Hitler, Bin Laden and Shylock" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch No. 341, 2002/02/05)
"A much harsher response came from Abd Al-Bari 'Atwan, editor of the London Arabic-language daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi, who compared President Bush to Hitler. In an article titled "A Rash and Vulgar President," 'Atwan wrote: "The American president George Bush, whom all agree is reckless and inexperienced, presented himself in his 'State of the Union address'... as a leader thirsty for bloodshed and for declaring war on half the world to satisfy a sense of vengeance and in submission to the sick Israeli incitement that stems from the interests of the Hebrew state - even if [satisfying] these interests comes at the expense of the destruction of the entire world. ... President Bush's fiery address reminds us of the speeches of the Nazi, Adolph Hitler. His threatening of Iran and Iraq remind us of Hitler's threatening of Poland and Czechoslovakia. ... The axis of evil in the world is not Iran, Iraq, and North Korea; it is America and Israel..."

News and commentary:

"Aftermath of war" (Alistair Cooke, BBC News, 2002/02/04)
"And as for the gusher of pious rage that sprang up from the dumb release of that wretched photograph of detainees shackled for a hazardous moment or two, I can only offer the first-hand testimony of a serious and respected British correspondent who's just been done there. He says, frankly, that what he saw for years in the prisons of Northern Ireland made Guantanamo look like a Holiday Inn. He found the men well-fed, with hot Muslim meals apart from various snacks and candy bars. They enjoy hot showers, they write home, they have room to jump around in. Perhaps the Pentagon would make up for its dumb blunder by releasing a new, true photograph of the whole 158 detainees standing alongside the 161 surgeons, doctors, paramedics and nurses assigned to them - 161 for 158 patients, a ration of personal medical care unknown I should think to prisoners anywhere or even I daresay to the English newspaper editors who are so outraged by the barbarity of American treatment."

"America and Anti-Americans" (Salman Rushdie, The New York Times, 2002/02/04)
"In spite of the military successes, America finds itself facing a broader ideological adversary that may turn out to be as hard to defeat as militant Islam: anti-Americanism, which is presently becoming more evident everywhere. ... These days there seem to be as many of these accusers outside the Muslim world as inside it. Anybody who has visited Britain and Europe, or followed the public conversation there during the past five months, will have been struck, even shocked, by the depth of anti-American feeling among large segments of the population. Western anti-Americanism is an altogether more petulant phenomenon than its Islamic counterpart and far more personalized. Muslim countries don't like America's power, its "arrogance," its success; but in the non-American West, the main objection seems to be to American people. Night after night, I have found myself listening to Londoners' diatribes against the sheer weirdness of the American citizenry. The attacks on America are routinely discounted. ("Americans only care about their own dead.") American patriotism, obesity, emotionality, self-centeredness: these are the crucial issues."

"The Terror-Aiding Prof" (Daniel Pipes, New York Post/danielpipes.org, 2002/02/04)
Pipes on Sami Al-Arian, "a tenured professor at the University of South Florida (USF) in Tampa": "Al-Arian founded two organizations, the Islamic Committee for Palestine (ICP) and the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE), which - according to an Immigration and Naturalization Service affidavit - were used as fronts to enable terrorists to enter the United States. ...
The ICP was known as the American arm of Islamic Jihad, a terrorist organization with a record of killing Americans, such as 20-year-old Alisa Flatow. "We like to call it the Islamic Committee for Palestine here for security reasons," announced one ICP fundraiser. ...
Emerson reports that the FBI, while searching the WISE offices, "uncovered one of the largest collections of terrorist fund-raising and propaganda material ever seized in the United States." It also discovered many connections between WISE and international terrorists.
Al-Arian, in short, has been an integral part of the terror network that Americans now find themselves at war with. His case is not about academic freedom of speech but about a professor being held accountable for being part of a terrorist apparatus that has killed Americans." (See also: "Timeline of Events: USF, WISE and Sami Al-Arian, The University of South Florida, December 19, 2001" (USF, 2001/12/19))

"Rice says Arafat's 'vision' in article 'not helpful'" (Janine Zacharia and Margot Dudkevitch, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/02/04)
"US President George W. Bush's National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice described Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat's opinion piece in The New York Times yesterday as "not helpful." ... 'What Chairman Arafat needs to do is to deal with the terrorists in his midst. He knows what he needs to do. He knows that there are Hamas and Hizbullah elements around him. ... He knows that the Karine A affair - the shipment of arms apparently was purchased from Iran and shipped through Hizbullah - is a violation of the Oslo Accords.'" (See also: "The Palestinian Vision of Peace" (Yasir Arafat, The New York Times, 2002/02/03))

 

See the archive for earlier news and commentary.

 

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Jacques Barzun

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