Archived news and commentary: February 18 - 24, 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 24, 2002

News and commentary:

"Charmed by Tyranny" (Steven Menashi, Policy Review, from the February & March 2002 issue)
A review of Mark Lilla's "The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics": "But what accounts for tyranny's apologists in free societies? Why would an intellectual, unthreatened by censorship or official coercion, seek to justify repressive, dictatorial regimes "or, as was more common," Lilla writes, "to deny any essential difference between tyranny and the free societies of the West?" Lilla seeks to answer the question, as Milosz did, through a series of profiles of modern intellectuals. ...
In each of his case studies, Lilla evokes the passion for truth — or, at least, for ideas — that animated each thinker. "Thinking has come to life again" was how Hannah Arendt described her generation’s reaction to the advent of Martin Heidegger, her teacher and lover. For years, a group of gifted intellectuals would gather at the feet of Alexandre Kojève, the great interpreter of Hegel, as he would expound, line-by-line, The Phenomenology of Spirit. ...
Our current intellectual culture, surely, exhibits the passionate allure of ideas. Today's thinkers aim above all at final answers, and so trendy ideologies and "isms" dominate the landscape of contemporary thought. But intellectuals content to rest on the shallow but dependable ground of multiculturalism, nationalism, relativism, or some other key to eternal happiness and justice — who work only to incite moral fervor in the public mind — are more interested in preaching than understanding. Such thinkers, as Lilla writes of the European intellectuals, "consider themselves to be independent minds, when the truth is that they are a herd driven by their inner demons and thirsty for the approval of a fickle public."
Intellectuals who disseminate political ideas as religious answers, in a sort of modern prophecy, incite passion rather than thought. It's not philosophy; it is hubris."

"Blair and Bush to plot war on Iraq" (Kamal Ahmed, The Observer, 2002/02/24)
"Tony Blair and the United States President George Bush are to hold a specially convened summit in April to finalise details of military action to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Blair will travel to Washington in six weeks' time in a clear signal that Downing Street fully backs Bush's plans to launch a war against Iraq if Saddam does not agree to deadlines to destroy his arsenal of weapons of mass destruction."

Saturday, February 23, 2002

News and commentary:

"Killers Likely Never Intended to Free Pearl" (John Ward Anderson and Peter Baker, The Washington Post, 2002/02/23)
"The videotaped killing of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl suggests that his death was carefully planned by kidnappers who probably never intended to set him free, police sources and analysts said today. ... The possible motives range from sending a warning to Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, not to crack down on Islamic extremists, to retaliating against the United States for its war in Afghanistan."

Friday, February 22, 2002

News and commentary:

"On the right side of history" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2002/02/23 issue)
"For more than five months now, a continuous stream of preposterous criticism of the Americans has had at its core the assumption that such a demotic culture must necessarily be a profoundly stupid one. Yet funnily enough, it's the sophisticates who keep getting everything wrong: the Arab street will rise up! Musharraf will be overthrown! The Taleban will never surrender! Millions will starve! Thousands of Afghan civilians are dead! (Not true: see below.) There's evidently a powerful psychological need among the non-American Western elites to believe that, if America is big, it must also be blundering; if it's powerful, it must also be clumsy; if it's technologically superior, it must also be morally inferior."

"Reality has finally sunk in" (Gerald M. Steinberg, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/02/22)
"For Arafat, the escalating terrorist attacks are the core of the Palestinian "war of independence," in which all Israelis are targets and in which the human toll on Palestinian society is irrelevant. The Palestinian leadership has even stopped repeating the myth of a popular uprising, although the term "intifada" will continue to be used to give a romantic air to suicide bombings and other forms of senseless murder. For Israel, in contrast, this is another battle in the war of survival. However, as a result of the "accomplishments" of the Oslo process, this war is led by Palestinian armed forces and terrorist gangs (not quite the gendarmarie that was portrayed), rather than the armies of surrounding Arab states."

"Sharon Has Plan for Buffer Zones to Protect Israel" (James Bennet, The New York Times, 2002/02/22)
"Ariel Sharon, the Israeli prime minister, said tonight that Israel would create buffer zones to achieve "security separation" from the Palestinians, as he urgently appealed for national unity in the face of sharpening criticism that he lacks a plan to end 16 months of grinding conflict. 'The state of Israel is not collapsing,' Mr. Sharon said in an address to the nation. 'And it will not collapse.'"

"The Axis of Rudeness" (Peter D. Feaver, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/02/25 issue)
"Or consider Chris Patten, the bureaucrat in charge of "international affairs" for the European Union. Europe's seniormost diplomat dismissed the speech with the derisive comment, "I find it hard to believe that's a thought-through policy." The irony is that these European leaders have used extraordinarily undiplomatic means to protest a speech that they disliked on the grounds that it was undiplomatic. It scarcely needs saying that their shrill outbursts would be considered intolerable were they coming the other way across the Atlantic. In point of fact, no American diplomat would ever treat a policy dispute with the rudeness and petulance that is standard fare over here."

"Filmed Execution of WSJ Reporter Sets Off Revulsion" (Brian Williams, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2002/02/22)
"The slaying of kidnapped U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl, whose throat was slit on camera by Islamic radicals in Pakistan, set off a wave of revulsion on Friday against his murderers. ... His body has not been found and it is unclear exactly when and where he was executed. But in a account of Pearl's last moments, the Pakistani official, who asked not to be identified, said Pearl's last words uttered on camera before his killing were that he was a Jew and his father was a Jew. "I have been told that the last words uttered by Pearl in the videotape, immediately before his throat was slit, were 'Yes I am a Jew and my father is a Jew'," the official said." (UPDATE: The video can be found at ProHosters, for example.)

"Daniel Pearl, RIP" (The Wall Street Journal, 2002/02/22)
"The terrorists who attacked America on September 11 thought they would cower a nation into retreating from the world. Instead they made Americans more resolute than ever about protecting themselves and their values around the world. The killers of Danny Pearl may think they will intimidate American journalists into retreating from their job of reporting on the world. They will discover that they are equally mistaken."

"Kidnapped Reporter Is Dead" (Peter Baker and Kamran Khan, The Washington Post, 2002/02/22)
"Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, who was abducted a month ago while investigating Islamic militants, has been killed by his captors, the newspaper and officials in the United States and Pakistan said today. The announcement was made after a videotape containing grisly footage of Pearl being executed was delivered to authorities in Pakistan and relayed to the U.S. consulate in Karachi, according to U.S. and Pakistani sources close to the investigation."

Thursday, February 21, 2002

News and commentary:

"Peace? No chance" (Benny Morris, The Guardian, 2002/02/21)
"The Palestinian Authority (PA) has emerged as a virtual kingdom of mendacity, where every official, from President Arafat down, spends his days lying to a succession of western journalists. The reporters routinely give the lies credence equal to or greater than what they hear from straight, or far less mendacious, Israeli officials. One day Arafat charges that the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) uses uranium-tipped shells against Palestinian civilians. The next day it's poison gas. Then, for lack of independent corroboration, the charges simply vanish - and the Palestinians go on to the next lie, again garnering headlines in western and Arab newspapers. Daily, Palestinian officials bewail Israeli "massacres" and "bombings" of Palestinian civilians - when in fact there have been no massacres and the bombings have invariably been directed at empty PA buildings. The only civilians deliberately targeted and killed in large numbers, indeed massacred, are Israeli - by Palestinian suicide bombers."

Wednesday, February 20, 2002

News and commentary:

"Israel's Rhetorical Capitulations" (Steven Plaut, The Israel Report, 2002/02/20)
"Year after year, the Arab world would invent a new public relations theme or a new form of disinformation or a new way to misrepresent the Arab war against Israel. Then, in a matter of a few years, Israel would attempt to defeat that aggression by accepting and co-opting the very same terminologies and misrepresentations. The granddaddy of all such decisions was the agreement to accept the disinformation by the Arab world that the Arab-Israeli conflict had something to do with Palestinians. It was only well into the 1970s that the Arabs themselves thought up the idea of basing their campaign on "Palestinian rights." Before that, they had a far more candid approach and demanded openly that the Jews be tossed into the sea. The "Palestinianization" of the campaign of Arab aggression arose from their realization that you can catch far more bees with self-determination than with genocide. Palestinian self-determination played the same role for Arab aggression as Sudeten self-determination did for German aggression. ... The very adoption of the "Palestinian cause" as the fig leaf for the Arab war against Israel was itself an act of aggression. It was immediately adopted by the anti-Jewish Left and other anti-Semites around the world. Israel's response to this rhetorical aggression should have been to refuse to discuss the conflict at all with those whose statements included the word "Palestinian." Israeli PR people - that is, if Israel ever had developed any PR campaign - should have repeated ten times a day that Israel's war is with the Arab countries and has no more to do with the "Palestinians" than it does with the Hittites."

"Israeli Troops Kill 15 Palestinians" (The Washington Post, 2002/02/20)
"Firing missiles, tank shells and machine guns at Palestinian Authority positions, Israeli troops killed 15 Palestinians on Wednesday in reprisals for a Palestinian shooting ambush that killed six Israeli soldiers – one of the deadliest attacks on Israeli troops in 17 months of fighting.Under pressure to stop the Palestinian attacks, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon signalled a shift in policy that could intensify the military's actions against Palestinians."

"The Saudi Challenge" (Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, 2002/02/20)
"Without those changes, this country is going to get poorer and poorer, because 40 percent of the population is under 14 — meaning the biggest population bulge hasn't even hit the labor market yet. This could be dynamite. In December an end-of-Ramadan youth brawl erupted on the Jidda coastal road, during which the crowd turned against the police and shouted anti-government and anti-U.S. slogans, leading to some 300 arrests. ... As one middle-class Saudi put it to me: 'The problem here is not Islam. The problem is too many young men with no job and no university and nowhere to go except to the mosque, where some [radical preachers] fill their heads with anger for America. Every home now has two or three not working. This is the real problem.'"

Tuesday, February 19, 2002

News and commentary:

"The New Left inherits a tradition of hatred" (Michael Gove, The Times, 2002/02/19)
"The first trend, Ray-Ban Radicalism, is now common on the Left, where foreign affairs are seen through a single set of lenses. Conflicts everywhere are perceived as struggles between “imperialist” oppressors and the wretched of the earth, irrespective of the real complexities. In Cuba and Nicaragua, and with increasing inappropriateness in Ulster and Israel, the Left indulges terror while casting its victims as the "real" oppressors. In the Middle East the terrorists who challenge Israel’s right to exist are invested with radical chic and suicide bombers are depicted as romantic martyrs rather than mass-murderers."

Monday, February 18, 2002

News and commentary:

"America's war on terrorism is a fight for all democracies" (Barbara Amiel, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/02/18)
"In this context, one cannot ignore the appalling words of the EU Commissioner for External Relations, Chris Patten, in the Guardian last week. Mr Patten characterised September 11 as "the dark side of globalisation" and saw its remedy as addressing "the root causes of terrorism and violence". ... For him, the authors of a ruthless murder of thousands of innocent people were motivated by legitimate grievances and the answer to their crimes is to address these grievances. In his world view, when faced with evil, one must look for the "root causes" and ameliorate them, even if in practice it means rewarding them. Applied to crimes of this kind, this is a complete inversion of all logic. On this basis, once the Battle of Britain was over, we should have stopped fighting Hitler in order to find out what the "root causes" were of the grievance that made this man want to kill millions of innocent people."

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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From the archives

Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.

"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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