Archived news and commentary: September 23 - 29, 2002

2002/09/23 - 2002/09/29
2002/09/16 - 2002/09/22
2002/09/09 - 2002/09/15
2002/09/02 - 2002/09/08
2002/08/26 - 2002/09/01
2002/08/19 - 2002/08/25
2002/08/12 - 2002/08/18
2002/08/05 - 2002/08/11
2002/07/29 - 2002/08/04
2002/07/22 - 2002/07/28
2002/07/15 - 2002/07/21
2002/07/08 - 2002/07/14
2002/07/01 - 2002/07/07

Sunday, September 29, 2002

News and commentary:

"Congress Sharply Divided on Iraq" (Laura Meckler, AP/Yahoo! News, 2002/09/29)
"Despite President Bush's predictions of unity on Iraq, members of Congress voiced sharply divergent views Sunday on military action to remove Saddam Hussein from power. Two Democratic congressmen, speaking from Baghdad, said Iraqi officials have assured them that they will allow weapons inspectors unfettered access. The lawmakers accused Bush of wrongly pushing the United States toward war. "They said they would allow us to go look anywhere we wanted," said Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash., on ABC's "This Week." "Let the U.N. inspectors do their job," added Rep. David Bonior, D-Mich. ...
"You don't start out by putting the gun to their head and saying we're going to shoot you if you blink," McDermott said. Asked about Iraq's history of denying access to inspectors, Bonior said the United States should not 'play the blame game.'"

"The Making of John Walker Lindh" (Timothy Roche et al., TIME, 2002/09/29)
"Yemenites say the blame for Lindh's radicalism lies elsewhere, however. A language teacher says Lindh came from the U.S. already hating America. And Lindh's correspondence from Yemen evinces an ambivalence toward the U.S. In a letter to his mother dated Sept. 23, 1998, he refers to the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Africa the previous month, saying the attacks "seem far more likely to have been carried out by the American government than by any Muslims." ...
He took language instruction at a different school but still pursued religious studies at Al-Iman University, which, despite its designation and funding from gulf states and Saudi Arabia, is an undistinguished building on a hill surrounded by dirt paths. The school boasts 4,000 male students and 1,000 female students from 55 countries. "Even Americans?" a TIME reporter asked Aisha Abdel Maguid al-Zindani, the daughter of the school's founder. "Yes, of course," she replied. Did she remember the American mujahid? 'I don't know anything about him. But anyway, we are not the terrorists; the Americans are.'"

"Israel Ends Siege on Arafat's HQ" (Ibrahim Hazboun, AP/Yahoo! News, 2002/09/29)
"Israel bowed to U.N. demands and U.S. pressure Sunday, pulling troops and tanks out through the barbed wire that encircles Yasser Arafat's headquarters. The Palestinian leader said the move was only "cosmetic." ... Briefly emerging from his building - one of the last still standing in the Palestinian government complex - Arafat flashed a V-for-victory sign to a crowd of several hundred supporters. ...
Nevertheless, Arafat accused Israel of continuing to violate Tuesday's U.N. Security Council resolution demanding an end to the siege as well as to Israel's months-long occupation of Palestinian cities and to terrorism and other violence from both sides. ...
Some Israeli troops remained within a few hundred yards of the compound and Israeli officials said they still planned to arrest wanted men who were among the 200 people holed up with Arafat since the siege started on Sept. 19."

"Refined uranium found in Turkey weighs grams, not kilograms" (Yossi Melman, Haaretz, 2002/09/29)
"The refined uranium caught by Turkish police Saturday weighed far less than originally thought, an official source in southwestern Turkey said Sunday. It was originally believed that the Turkish paramilitary police had seized over 15 kg of weapons-grade uranium in the operation that also resulted in the detention of two men accused of smuggling the substance. The actual weight of the uranium turned out to be hundreds of grams, a fraction of the initial estimate. The uranium is to be sent for tests to the local Atomic Energy Agency. The two suspects were brought before a judge Saturday night charged with the illegal sale of the material."

"Left Over - Hitchens, 9/11 and Us" (Andrew Sullivan, The Sunday Times/andrewsullivan.com, 2002/09/29)
"But as Hitchens looked around him, even in the days after the atrocity, he found something rather different. He found that a deep and lingering hatred of America over-powered some leftists' objection to mass murder. He found excuses for totalitarian hatred. He saw exactly what Orwell had seen in the leftist intelligentsia of his own time: not simply a passivity in the face of evil, but almost an admiration for it. And he was disgusted. Since those first days of shock, the hard Left has merely redoubled its assault on a free society's right to self-defense. The endless series of rationalizations, the opposition to any war to fight terror, now the sad and pathetic moral abdication of those who see president Bush as more of a threat to world order and peace than Saddam Hussein - all these responses, under-written by a simpering, barely concealed anti-Semitism, would be enough to turn anyone's stomach, let alone a good liberal's. At some point, when you look around and see that this is the quality of one's ideological allies, you have to break ranks, if only for the sake of personal moral hygiene." (See also: "The Reliable Source" (Lloyd Grove, The Washington Post, 2002/09/26))

"Shabana Is Late for School" (Susan Dominus, The New York Times Magazine, 2002/09/29)
"Shabana was only 6 when the Taliban came to power. Instead of going to school, Shabana spent many of her waking hours staring at the mountains she could see from the windows in one of her family's two rooms. Like most people in Kabul, her parents were ethnic Tajiks, and rarely let their daughters leave the house, afraid they'd be punished by soldiers or, worse, abducted - they'd heard stories about girls snatched from the street and married off to Taliban fighters, Pashtuns from the south. Frishta occasionally ventured out to the bazaar with her mother, but Shabana almost never strayed beyond her small, dusty front yard, enclosed by a wall so high even her father couldn't see over it. ...
By law, girls living under the Taliban were to have the exact same set of experiences - essentially none, outside the duties of housework and a passing familiarity with the Koran. ...
As a result, the girls of Afghanistan offer psychologists a case study in the long-term effects of social deprivation...''

"A big day out in Leftistan" (Euan Ferguson, The Observer, 2002/09/29)
More from the anti-war march: "Many, many Muslim groups, and most containing women and children, although some uneasy thoughts pass through your mind when you see a line of pretty six-year-old black-clad Muslim toddlers walking ahead of the megaphone chanting 'George Bush, we know you/Daddy was a killer too,' and singing about Sharon and Hitler. All the groups, the old Left and the new radical worried world of Islam, merged for the most part very easily, although there was an altercation at one point when the organisers tried to persuade a group of young Palestinians to go to the very back of the march, or preferably go home, but at least take off the official march T-shirt; for some reason they objected to the youths' having strapped fake stacks of suicide-bombers' dynamite across their chests. They changed their T-shirts."

 

Saturday, September 28, 2002

News and commentary:

"More than 150,000 march through London against Iraq invasion" (Audrey Woods, AP/Yahoo! News, 2002/09/28)
More than 150,000 sleepwalking to disaster: "'We believe it would be wholly immoral and wrong and criminal for the United States and Britain to attack Iraq and inflict casualties upon innocent people,' Tony Benn, a former Labor Party legislator and veteran left-winger, told a huge crowd seated in Hyde Park. ...
Tam Dalyell, a senior Labor Party legislator, said the confrontation with Iraq was the most dangerous standoff since the Cuban missile crisis. "We are sleepwalking to disaster," he said, to thunderous applause from the crowd. ...
Scotland Yard said more than 150,000 demonstrators took part in the march. The Stop the War Coalition, which helped organize the march, estimated that 400,000 people took part. ...
The march was also meant as a protest against Israel's policies in the West Bank and Gaza, and many protesters expressed sympathy for the Palestinian cause. "Stop Israeli war crimes," said one sign."

"Genocide in Palestine" (Islamic Republic News Agency, 2002/09/28)
All the usual anti-Semitic comparisons between nazism and zionism are made in this editorial from the official Iranian news agency:
"With a definite green light from the United States, Ariel Sharon and his cohorts of war criminals are perpetrating a real genocide against the Palestinian people. ...
According to fresh statistics released by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, more than 1700 Palestinians, a third of them children and minors, have been killed since the outbreak of the Intifada on September 28, 2000. ...
Hence, it is a real genocide or at least an attempted genocide if one is to give humanity the benefit of the doubt. ... But the brutal ugliness of the Zionist mentality did not stop there. The Israeli army has effectively reduced all Palestinian population centers to virtual concentration camps, cut off from each other and isolated from the rest of the world. ...
The Israeli genocidal rampage against the Palestinians is more than a harsh reaction to the Palestinian uprising against military occupation and apartheid. It is actually a deliberate policy aimed first and foremost at effecting and expediting a "final solution" to the enduring Palestinian issue. ... One would wonder what the Arabs are waiting for. Are they waiting until Masjid Al-Aqsa is reduced to rubble or until Zionist Nazism makes its blitz into Egypt and the Levant?"

"Turkish Police Seize Weapons-Grade Uranium" (Reuters, 2002/09/28)
"Turkish paramilitary police have seized more than 33 pounds of weapons-grade uranium and detained two men accused of smuggling the material, the state-run Anatolian news agency said on Saturday. Officers in the southern province of Sanliurfa, which borders Syria and is about 155 miles from the Iraqi border, were acting on a tip-off when they stopped a taxi cab and discovered the uranium in a lead container hidden beneath the vehicle's seat, the agency said. Authorities believe the uranium came from an east European country and has a value of about $5 million, Anatolian said."

"Palestinians Mark Year 2 of Uprising" (Ibrahim Barzak, AP/Yahoo! News, 2002/09/28)
"Sending balloons rather than bullets into the sky, thousands of Palestinians demonstrated on the second anniversary of their uprising against Israel, even as two more died in clashes with Israeli troops. Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat , under Israeli siege in his headquarters for the 10th day, promised to continue the struggle for a Palestinian state with its capital in Jerusalem. He made his remarks by telephone to tens of thousands of marchers in Gaza City. "Noble Jerusalem will remain the capital of the Palestinian state," Arafat said over a loudspeaker, repeating his long-standing position. "We are not only defending our holy places, Christian and Islamic, but every inch of our holy land. ... Speaking to reporters at the rally from his car while surrounded by bodyguards, the founder of the radical Islamic group Hamas, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, urged the intefadeh to continue. "Resistance is the only way to achieve our goals and recover our rights," he said." (See also: "Tens of thousands march in Lebanon to support Palestinian uprising" (Bassem Mroue, AP/Yahoo! News, 2002/09/27))

"CAIR-less with the Truth" (Jake Tapper, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/10/07 issue)
"Less than a week after the September 11 terrorist attacks, President Bush visited the Islamic Center in Washington to make it clear that Islam and Muslims in general should not be held responsible. There he met with, among others, Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), perhaps the most prominent Muslim advocacy group in the country. ...
In a previously unnoticed interview conducted by Sanaa Al-Said, the executive director of CAIR says that Israel was responsible for the September 11 attacks. He goes on to say that he discussed this with President George W. Bush who, in Awad's version of events, allowed that this was a possibility. Perhaps needless to say, a White House official adamantly denies that such a conversation ever took place. ...
What's more, Awad told El-Osboa, it was clear to him that no Muslim could have been responsible for the attacks because of "the big contradiction between what was said in the biographies of the suspects - that they were drinking alcohol and sleeping with women - and the behavioral biographies of bin Laden's group." To that, President Bush is said to have told Awad that "the door is open for speculations and there might be a conspiracy behind the conspiracy. This means that if those that carried out the attack were Arabs, then non-Arabs and non-Muslims could be behind them." A White House official calls Awad's tale of his conversation with the president absolutely "ridiculous." It simply "didn't happen," he said." (See also: "Islam's flawed spokesmen" (Jake Tapper, Salon.com, 2001/09/26))

"Time for Toppling" (Bernard Lewis, The Wall Street Journal, 2002/09/28)
"A regime change may well be dangerous, but sometimes the dangers of inaction are greater than those of action. ... It is often said and generally agreed that democracies do not start wars. Democratic governments are elected by the people and are answerable to the people, and with exceedingly rare exceptions, the people prefer peace. ...
It is equally true, but less recognized, that dictatorships do not make peace. The world war started by the Axis ended with its defeat. The Cold War started by the Soviet Union ended with its collapse. In the same way, the dictatorships that rule much of the Middle East today will not, indeed cannot, make peace, because they need conflict to justify their tyrannical oppression of their own people, and to deflect their peoples' anger against an external enemy. As with the Axis and the Soviet Union, real peace will come only with their defeat or, preferably, collapse, and their replacement by governments that have been chosen and can be dismissed by their people and will therefore seek to resolve, not provoke, conflicts."

"New Jersey Laureate Refuses to Resign Over Poem" (Matthew Purdy, The New York Times, 2002/09/28)
"A month after Amiri Baraka became the poet laureate of New Jersey, Gov. James E. McGreevey asked the writer and political activist to resign yesterday because a poem he read at a recent poetry festival implies that Israel knew about the Sept. 11 attack in advance. ... "I'm not resigning," Mr. Baraka said at his home in Newark, vowing to fight removal. ... The governor asked for the resignation because of a poem titled "Somebody Blew Up America," which Mr. Baraka recited a week ago at the renowned Dodge Poetry Festival in Waterloo, N.J. ...

Who knew the World Trade Center was gonna get bombed
Who told 4000 Israeli workers at the Twin Towers
To stay home that day
Why did Sharon stay away?

Mr. Baraka's poem repeats a persistent yet widely discredited story that has circulated on the Internet since the terror attacks. "Everything said about Israel in the poem is easily researched," Mr. Baraka said. 'If you criticize Israel, they hide behind the religion and call you anti-Semitic.'" (See also: "The Events of September 11 and the Arab Media: The New Antisemitic Myth" (MEMRI, Special Report - No. 7, 2002/09/13) and "4,000 Jews, 1 Lie - Tracking an Internet hoax" (Bryan Curtis, Slate, 2001/10/05). UPDATE: FrontPageMagazine has posted the complete poem: "Somebody Blew Up America" (Amiri Baraka, FrontPageMagazine. 2002/10/04). Also, ADL has a compilation of anti-Semitic statements and writings of Baraka: "Amira Baraka: In His Own Words" (ADL, September 2002))

"Armed men stopped boarding German plane to Israel" (Reuters/Haaretz, 2002/09/28)
Things that make you go hm?: "Two men armed with a knife and a pistol were stopped trying to board a German plane bound for Tel Aviv last week, but escaped by saying they were undercover security agents, an airline official said on Friday. German national airline Lufthansa said one of its security officials said he had caught the men trying to get on the plane as it was being prepared for departure to Israel at Frankfurt airport last Saturday. ...
The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily said Lufthansa had averted a possible hijacking. It said the men, who appeared to be Arabs, drove off across the runway in a car with airport plates after saying they were carrying out a security check. There was some confusion over whether the men had been carrying out a test to check security levels at Frankfurt airport, with a spokesman for the Interior Ministry telling a regular government news conference on Friday the German border police had not been involved in such an operation."

"U.S Plan Requires Inspection Access to All Sites" (Michael R. Gordon, The New York Times, 2002/09/28)
"The Bush administration has drafted a stringent plan for arms inspections that provides for unrestricted access to all sites in Iraq, including Saddam Hussein's presidential compounds and palaces, and authorizes the use of military force if Baghdad interferes, according to European and American officials. ... Mr. Hussein has a seven-day deadline to accept the resolution and declare all of his programs of weapons of mass destruction, and a further 23 days to open up the sites concerned and provide all documents to support the declaration, an American official said. Inspections would be intrusive, possibly with military guards, and could occur at any site in Iraq. ...
If Baghdad failed to comply with the inspection demands - by failing to provide a full or accurate list, for example - the draft resolution calls for "all necessary means to restore international peace and security," a diplomatic euphemism for American and British military action to remove Mr. Hussein from power." (See also: "Iraq Rejects UN Draft; U.S., British Seek Backing" (Hassan Hafidh, Reuters, 2002/09/28): "Iraq, threatening a "fierce war" if attacked, rejected on Saturday a draft U.S.-proposed Security Council resolution requiring Baghdad to comply with new arms inspection rules within 30 days or face military action.")

 

Friday, September 27, 2002

News and commentary:

"Tens of thousands march in Lebanon to support Palestinian uprising" (Bassem Mroue, AP/Yahoo! News, 2002/09/27)
"Chanting "death to Israel" and "death to America," tens of thousands of Lebanese marched Friday through the streets of Beirut to demonstrate support for Palestinians as their uprising enters its third year. ... About 400 to 500 worshippers chanted "God is greater than America" at Cairo's Al-Azhar mosque, the most respected theological center in the Muslim world, in a prelude to a larger demo planned for Saturday. ... "We hope that we open the doors for a holy war," said Magdy Oror, a leader of the suspended Islamic-leaning Labor Party, accusing Arab leaders of not heeding the 'aspirations of their people.'" (See also the AP-picture of a "group of young supporters of the Hezbollah militia with painted faces carry toy guns during a demonstration in suburban Beirut", posted by Little Green Footballs.)

"Hussein 'uses doubles for public appearances'" (Hugh Williamson, Financial Times, 2002/09/27)
"Saddam Hussein uses at least three doubles to pose as him during public appearances, according to German forensic scientists. The doubles, used for security reasons, appear almost identical to the 65-year-old Iraqi leader, with only tiny differences in facial features. Plastic surgery might have been used to improve the features of doubles, claimed researchers at Homburg university in Saarland, south-western Germany. In a paper to be presented on Saturday at a German medical conference, the researchers drew on new technology to discern minor differences between images of Mr Hussein on recent photos and in video clips. Dieter Buhmann, a forensic pathologist, said he was sure at least three doubles existed, based on examining 450 images of the Iraqi leader. ...
He said that in film clips taken since 1998 only the doubles, and not the leader himself, appeared. The ZDF public television network, which reported on Mr Buhmann's research this week, said the Iraqi leader also sent doubles to attend high-level internal government meetings."

"Time to get the facts right" (David Welch, New York Post, 2002/09/27)
"This article by the U.S. Ambassador to Egypt ran in several Egyptian papers this month - and was widely condemned by leading Egyptian leftist intellectuals.": "Unfortunately, the anniversary also brought yet more media voices questioning who planned and committed the attacks, and positing incredible conspiracy theories without the slightest bit of evidence to back them up. Leading Egyptian newspapers and magazines in the past two weeks alone have published columns by senior columnists who suggested governments or groups other than al Qaeda were responsible. A leading Egyptian professor of sociology, in a public lecture on Sept. 11, 2002, spent nearly half an hour trying to cast doubt on al Qaeda's culpability and even went so far as to implicate the U.S. government by asserting that America had benefited from the attacks. ...
Sadly, such disregard for the facts in such a serious matter can tarnish the reputation of the Egyptian media in the eyes of the world. I hope editors will keep this in mind and exercise their editorial judgment when reviewing articles or columns to print in their publications. If nothing else, responsible media should be dedicated to telling the truth, not spreading falsehood, and knowing the difference between the two." (See also: "U.S. Ambassador in Sept 11 Spat with Egypt Media" (Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2002/09/21): "A statement issued on Saturday by newspaper columnists, writers and cartoonists from state-owned and opposition papers said Welch should "go back to his country," accusing the U.S. media as "only seeing the region through Israeli eyes." "He talks as if he's addressing slaves or citizens of some banana republic. ... Whether he was the ambassador of America or Micronesia, it's odd that he should tell Egyptian journalists how to think and write," it said. "He made an unprecedented call for imposing new restrictions on articles and columns in the Egyptian press," the statement said.")

"Iraq: The Snare of Inspections" (Gary Milhollin and Kelly Motz, Commentary/Iraq Watch Bulletin, from the October 2002 issue)
"Whatever one's stance on the question of how best to handle Saddam Hussein, it is vital to understand one thing. Unless the Iraqi dictator should suddenly and totally reverse course on arms inspection and everything that goes with it, or be forced into early retirement - in other words, unless Saddam Hussein's Iraq ceases to be Saddam Hussein’s Iraq inspections will never work."

"Militants Are Said to Amass Missiles in South Lebanon" (Michael R. Gordon, The New York Times, 2002/09/27)
"Hezbollah militants in southern Lebanon have amassed thousands of surface-to-surface rockets, including missiles with the range to strike cities in northern Israel, according to senior Israeli and Western officials. ...
Western and Israeli security officials say most of Hezbollah's rockets have been provided by Iran, one of Israel's staunchest enemies. The officials said that thousands of rockets were flown to the Syrian capital of Damascus and driven by truck to southern Lebanon. Israeli security officials said that Syria has now begun to send rockets of its own."

"Al Qaeda linked to Saddam" (Rowan Scarborough, The Washington Times, 2002/09/27)
"Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld yesterday accused Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein of harboring al Qaeda terrorists and aiding their quest for weapons of mass destruction. ... The thrust of the administration's case during the past two days is based on:
- "Very reliable reporting" of senior-level contacts between al Qaeda and Baghdad going back a decade and occurring recently.
- Unidentified al Qaeda detainees and other sources, who say Iraq helped al Qaeda in its quest to acquire weapons of mass destruction and aided training in those weapons.
- Discussions by Iraq to provide a haven to al Qaeda members on the run, some of whom already have "found refuge" there."

"Top Hamas Bombmaker Survives Attack" (Ibrahim Barzak, AP/Yahoo! News, 2002/09/26)
"Israel confirmed Friday that a top Hamas bombmaker survived an Israeli airstrike aimed at killing him, an operation that wounded 35 bystanders, including 15 children, and drew international criticism. Mohammed Deif, the intended target, was wounded when two missiles fired by Israeli helicopters in a crowded Gaza City neighborhood obliterated his green Mercedes, blowing apart two of his bodyguards. "The reports that I'm getting from our people are that he was indeed wounded, not an injury that he won't recover from," Israeli Science Minister Matan Vilnai, a former deputy military chief of staff, told Israel Army Radio."

 

Thursday, September 26, 2002

News and commentary:

"Israel confident Hamas military wing head killed in Gaza; Hamas denies" (Margot Dudkevitch, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/09/26)
"A high-ranking Israeli security official on Thursday said the IDF was "one hundred percent" sure that the head of Hamas's military wing was killed when IAF helicopters fired two rockets at a car in Gaza City earlier, Israeli news agency Itim reported, although sources in Hamas have claimed he survived the attack. An Israeli government spokesman, Daniel Seaman, confirmed on Thursday that the target of the air strike was Mohammed Deif, who headed Izzadin Kassam, the military wing of Hamas, and who has topped Israel's wanted list for at least 15 years. But although three men were killed in the attack, with one of the victims identified as Issa Abu Abajram, a leader of the Al Aksa Martyrs' Brigade, it was as yet unclear if Deif himself was in fact killed. Palestinian sources said more than 25 people were wounded in the attack, and said 10 of these were children. Six were in critical condition, doctors in Gaza city said. In the past two years, 76 wanted Palestinians and 52 bystanders have been killed in targeted Israeli attacks. In Gaza City, Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi, said Deif, who escaped an Israeli attack earlier this year, had again survived. "The Zionists failed again in killing Deif," he said." (See also: "Profile: Hamas commander Mohammed Deif" (Martin Asser, BBC News, 2002/09/26))

"Friday Sermons in Saudi Mosques: Review and Analysis" (MEMRI, Special Report - No. 8, 2002/09/26)
An analysis of major themes featured in Friday sermons in Saudi Mosques: "'The Jews' are the central issue of many sermons delivered in Saudi mosques. ...
In a sermon delivered at the Al-Nour mosque in Al-Khobar, Sheikh Nasser Muhammad Al-Ahmad said: 'In the Jews, an astonishing quantity of moral abomination and corrupt behavior has accumulated. These cannot exist in any other nation. What is amazing is that this corruption in all things concerning morality, and this impudent behavior, are not limited to a specific generation of Jews, or to a specific group of Jews, but are manifest in the distorted Jew everywhere. ... Moral corruption is a general trait of the Jews, all the Jews. [These are] stable hereditary genes [found] in the Jew in every time and in every place. If you want to know the Jew through and through, imagine a group of perverse moral traits... ...
Most of the world's wars, particularly the great modern wars, were planned and started by the Jews so as to disseminate corruption in the land, and to achieve their goals on the ruins of the human race...'" (Note: MEMRI has a new section with streaming videos. The first is a compilation of excerpts from "Friday Sermons on Palestinian Authority Television".)

"I say monger away, baby" (Mark Steyn, National Post, 2002/09/26)
Steyn takes on Eric Tam of Yale University's Department of Political Science who has accused him of spreading "incendiary falsehoods" and called him a "hatemonger": "Mr Skaarup's allegation that "non-Danes" were responsible for three-quarters of the country's rapes has been quoted by the BBC, The New Statesman, The Economist and other notorious hatemongers. ... As it turns out, he was rounding down. He was referring to the statement by the Minister of Justice, Lene Espersen, in the Danish Parliament on March 8th this year. The minister said that 76.5% of convicted rapists were of non-Danish ethnic origin. ... What should the West do about this problem? Well, we could start by acknowledging it. Fact: Almost all Denmark's rape victims are ethnic Danish girls or women. Fact: An ethnic Danish girl is far more likely to be raped by a Muslim than an ethnic Dane. Fact: Immigration means that more Danish women get raped. You can argue about the way to change these stubborn facts - curtail immigration vs increase outreach, cut welfare vs educate immigrant parents - as the People's Party and the Muslim Youth League are doing. These are tenable positions in the debate. But, when you insist someone's a "hatemonger" even for mentioning these awkward demographic trends, you're just trying to shut down the debate..." (See also: "Multiculturalists are the real racists" (Mark Steyn, National Post, 2002/08/20))

"German Poison" (Michael Barone, usnews.com, 2002/09/26)
"It will always be a fact that Schröder's government went to the polls with a cabinet minister who compared an American president to Hitler. That is not just a discourtesy to Bush; it is a libel against the American people, for it suggests that they would elect a president comparable to Hitler. This ingrained hatred of America and assumption that conservative Americans are equivalent to fascists will not be unfamiliar to those who have, as I have, had contact with the chattering classes of Europe. Däubler-Gmelin's remark tells you just about much about the culture and mind-set of the German and the European legal establishments. She is a graduate of one of Germany's best law schools, and her attitudes are common." (See also: "Schroeder Says Controversial Minister to Step Down" (Nick Tattersall, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2002/09/23))

"Nothing to lose but their chains" (David Pryce-Jones, The Spectator, from the 2002/09/28 issue)
"Iraq may soon be liberated. ... From the reaction all over Europe, you might think that Washington was insisting on the sacrifice of the first-born. ... The expedients to which free people are reduced in order to avoid facing up to totalitarian tyranny are always a wonder. Any Iraqi in a position to utter his opinion without being tortured and killed has no doubt at all. Kanan Makiya, Iraq's leading equivalent of the Soviet dissidents of old, asks America to 'think big'. Iraq, he writes, is the best example of why the United States 'should carefully excise the cancerous growth of extremism from the region'. ...
There are tens of thousands of such people, but the Alice Mahons, George Galloways, Harold Pinters and other bishops of our cosy little world are not equipped morally or intellectually to hear them."

"Consider This" (Stanley Kurtz, National Review, 2002/09/26)
Kurtz on Kenneth Pollack's "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq". Pollack was "the principal working-level official responsible for implementing U.S. policy on Iraq" in the Clinton administration: "But what Pollack stresses is the terrible danger that, once in possession of nuclear weapons, Saddam will take this as a license to invade Kuwait, and otherwise terrorize the Middle East. The real danger from Saddam's possession of nuclear weapons is the conviction they will create in Saddam that he can act with impunity in the region, safe in the knowledge that the U.S. or Israel will not dare attack him (for fear of risking nuclear annihilation of their troops). ...
A nuclear-armed Saddam taking over Kuwait and threatening Saudi Arabia leaves us with a choice between ceding him control of the world's oil supply, or of seeing that supply destroyed and contaminated for decades by a nuclear strike, sending the world's economy into radical shock, perhaps for years."

"The New Imperium" (Roger Scruton, National Review, 2002/09/26)
The fourth installment of a series of excerpts from Roger Scruton's "The West and the Rest": "Entering this new and bewildering political labyrinth [EU] the Muslim immigrant will certainly find a freedom and a prosperity that are unfamiliar in his country of origin. ...
What the Muslim immigrant will not find, however, is any process of nation-building that might serve to recruit him to membership in the surrounding social order. He will live in strict isolation, and regard the world in which he earns his living as of no independent concern to him. ...
The new European superstate therefore offers a breeding ground for Islamic terrorists. Just as the official culture of Europe involves a repudiation of the nation and its pride, so does the Muslim terrorist target the nation-state as the true work of Satan. The attacks on America were a response to the world's most successful attempt at nation-building, which projects its power, its freedom, and its detritus so effectively around the globe. All the principal actors in the atrocities of September 11 had resided in Europe, and received there both training and indoctrination through the local cells of al Qaeda. The plot to attack America was not hatched in any Muslim country, but on the continent where the West began." (See also:"Transnational Government" (Roger Scruton, National Review, 2002/09/25), "The Personal State" (Roger Scruton, National Review, 2002/09/24) and "The West and the Rest" (Roger Scruton, National Review, 2002/09/23))

"Ask Professor Esposito" (Martin Kramer, Sandstorm, 2002/09/26)
"Professor Esposito has an academic partnership with one Azzam Tamimi, a Palestinian residing in London. They have co-edited a book. Tamimi has published another book in a series edited by Esposito (in the preface, Tamimi calls Esposito "my ustadh," my teacher). Tamimi also runs something called the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in London. Esposito sits on its board of advisors - the only American to do so. In short, this seems to be a close liaison. The problem is, Azzam Tamimi is Hamas. ...
Consider, for example, an interview given by Tamimi to a leading Spanish newspaper last November. Headline: "I admire the Taliban; they are courageous." Tamimi begins by assuring the interviewer that "everyone" in the Arab world cheered upon seeing the Twin Towers fall. "Excuse me," says the interviewer, "did you understand my question?" Tamimi: "In the Arab and Muslim countries, everyone jumped for joy. That's what you asked me, isn't it?" ...
Later, Tamimi gives his solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict: "The Israelis stole our houses, which are today occupied by Jews from Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Morocco, Ethiopia, Brooklyn. They should return to their homes, and give ours back to us! ... That's non-negotiable. Therefore I support Hamas." ...
And those suicide bombers? 'Do not call them suicide bombers, call them shuhada [martyrs] as they have not escaped the miseries of life. They gave their life. Life is sacred, but some things like truth and justice are more sacred than life. They are not desperate, they are hopefuls... [The Israelis] have guns, we have the human bomb. We love death, they love life.'"

"The Genocidal Hamas Charter" (David G. Littman, National Review, 2002/09/26)
"The 1988 Hamas charter (an acronym for "Islamic Resistance Movement" in Arabic) is both political and genocidal - yet the United Nations has never denounced it. ... Hamas is against any Middle East peace process: "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through jihad. All initiatives, proposals, and international conferences are a waste of time and vain endeavors" (Article 13). And then there is the Hamas slogan, which has inspired countless jihadist bombers: "Allah is its goal, The Prophet its model, the Qur'an its Charter, jihad its path, and death for the cause of Allah its most sublime belief" (Article 8). Hamas is committed to continuing jihad against "the Jews" until Allah's victory is implemented. The land of Palestine, it affirms, must be cleansed from their impurity and viciousness. Muslims are obligated by order of the Prophet to fight and kill the Jews wherever they find them. This call to genocide is justified by a hadith which concludes article 7 of the charter: The Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to implement Allah's promise, whatever time that may take. "The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said: 'The Day of Judgment will not come about until the Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them)...'" ... This controversial hadith - related by the eminent compiler al-Bukhari in the 9th century - has since become a commonplace belief among Islamists."

"Why Iraq Can't Be Deterred" (Kenneth M. Pollack, The New York Times, 2002/09/26)
"What all this suggests is that if Saddam Hussein is able to acquire nuclear weapons, he will see them as tools to achieve his goals - to dominate the Arab world, destroy Israel and punish America. He might not launch such weapons immediately in pursuit of these aims, but that is cold comfort. There is every reason to believe that he would brandish them to deter the United States from interfering in his efforts to conquer or blackmail neighboring countries. ...
On the other hand, staking our hopes on a policy of deterrence would cost little now (except a loss of face), but it would run the much greater risk of postponing the day of reckoning to a time of Iraq's choosing. Given Mr. Hussein's history of catastrophic miscalculations and his faith that nuclear weapons can deter not him but us, there is every reason to believe that the question is not one of war or no war, but rather war now or war later - a war without nuclear weapons or a war with them."

"The Reliable Source" (Lloyd Grove, The Washington Post, 2002/09/26)
"After two decades at the Nation magazine, toiling with increasing alienation and discomfort in the vineyards of the Left, Washington-based Brit journalist Christopher Hitchens is giving up his biweekly column, "Minority Report," and quitting the paleoliberal journal of opinion. With a typically Hitchensian drum roll and flourish, he announces his abrupt departure in the column that went to press yesterday. ...
"I have come to realize that the magazine ... is becoming the voice and the echo chamber of those who truly believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden. ... In these circumstances it seems to me false to continue the association, which is why I have decided to make this 'Minority Report' my last one." ...
"I suppose Hitch's departure has been inevitable ever since the Weekly Standard said he was more important than George Orwell," said another once-close friend, Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn... ...
'Hitch is no longer the beautiful slender young man of the Left. Now he's just another middle-aged porker of the Right.'" (See also: "We Must Fight Iraq" (Christopher Hitchens, The Daily Mirror, 2002/09/26) and "Taking Sides" (Christopher Hitchens, The Nation, 2002/09/26): "I am on the side of the Iraqi and Kurdish opponents of this filthy menace. And they are on the side of civil society in a wider conflict, which is the civil war now burning across the Muslim world from Indonesia to Nigeria. The theocratic and absolutist side in this war hopes to win it by exporting it here, which in turn means that we have no expectation of staying out of the war, and no right to be neutral in it.")

"PA arrests 18 alleged collaborators" (Khaled Abu Toameh, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/09/26)
"Eighteen Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel have been arrested by the Palestinian Authority's security forces, Gen. Musa Arafat, head of PA Military Intelligence, announced Wednesday. ...
The announcement came shortly after masked gunmen in Gaza announced through loudspeakers that they had executed Akram Zatmah, a 22-year-old student from Rafah who confessed to having assisted Israel in last month's assassination of Salah Shehadeh, a senior commander of the military wing of Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Zatmeh's body was discovered at a garbage dump near Gaza. He died after being shot in the head several times. He was being held in a prison belonging to the Preventive Security Service in the Gaza Strip. Some Palestinians said that Zatmeh, who was never put on trial, was delivered to Hamas gunmen yesterday morning by members of the PSS. ...
In the light of the serious charges against the suspects, it is almost certain they will be sentenced to death."

"Rice Links al-Qaida With Iraq" (John J. Lumpkin, AP/Yahoo! News, 2002/09/26)
"President Bush's national security adviser said al-Qaida operatives have found refuge in Baghdad, and accused Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime of helping Osama bin Laden's followers develop chemical weapons. Condoleezza Rice's statements, aired Wednesday on PBS' "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" program, are the strongest yet alleging contacts between al-Qaida and the Iraqi government. Previously, evidence of the two working together was tenuous, or came from unreliable sources. ...
"We clearly know that there were in the past and have been contacts between senior Iraqi officials and members of al-Qaida going back for actually quite a long time," Rice said. 'We know too that several of the (al-Qaida) detainees, in particular some high-ranking detainees, have said that Iraq provided some training to al-Qaida in chemical weapons development.'"

 

Wednesday, September 25, 2002

News and commentary:

"Transnational Government" (Roger Scruton, National Review, 2002/09/25)
The third installment of a series of excerpts from Roger Scruton's "The West and the Rest": "Pertinent in the present context is the U.N. Convention on Refugees and Asylum, ratified in 1951, at a time when migration was not common and asylum rarely offered or sought. This piece of legislation obliges our governments to offer asylum to all who need it, and to give hospitality meanwhile to those who claim it. As a result of global mobility, some two million people arrive every year in Europe, ostensibly seeking asylum but in fact wishing to profit from the black economy, and in any case enjoying the obligatory hospitality required by the U.N. Convention. As a result, European states have lost control of their borders, have unknown numbers of illegal residents, and have black economies that grow larger by the week. Moreover, anyone who suggests that the U.N. Convention is anachronistic, politically dangerous, and socially destructive is subjected to intimidating criticism and risks being denounced as a "racist" or worse.
The political and economic advantages that lead people to seek asylum in the West are the result of territorial jurisdiction. Yet territorial jurisdictions can survive only if borders are controlled. Transnational legislation, acting together with the culture of repudiation, is therefore rapidly undermining the conditions that make Western freedoms durable. The effect of this on the politics of France and Holland is now evident to everyone. And when we find among the "asylum seekers" the vast majority of those Islamist cells that have grown up in London, Paris, and Hamburg, we begin to recognize just how much the political culture of the West is bent on a path of self-destruction." (See also: "The Personal State" (Roger Scruton, National Review, 2002/09/24) and "The West and the Rest" (Roger Scruton, National Review, 2002/09/23))

"Hating Israel is part of campus culture" (Jonathan Kay, National Post/Campus Watch, 2002/09/25)
"Last week, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew himself up on a Tel Aviv bus, propelling pounds of densely packed metal shrapnel into the vehicle's passengers. Five people were killed instantly, and 60 others wounded. The event presumably failed to darken the day of Ted Honderich, a Canadian-born philosopher who teaches at University College London. Last week, he told an audience in Toronto that Palestinians have a "moral right" to blow up Jews. And he encourages them to exercise it: "To claim a moral right on behalf of the Palestinians to their terrorism is to say that they are right to engage in it, that it is permissible if not obligatory." ...
The real problem is more generic [than anti-Semitism], and has to do with the lingering instinct among academics to romanticize terrorism as an expression of righteous class struggle. Honderich and his European colleagues still see Yasser Arafat as Che Guevara in a kaffiyeh. ...
By the deluded lights of warmed-over Marxists, it all comes down to class struggle. Apocalyptic Islam and anti-Semitism are just clever cover stories for liberating the masses."

"Suspected al-Qaida camp seen in Iran" (Jim Miklaszewski and Robert Windrem, MSNBC, 2002/09/25)
"U.S. intelligence has detected a suspected al-Qaida training camp in a remote area of eastern Iran along the border with Afghanistan, sources tell NBC News. Overhead imagery shows what appears to be a training camp complete with a terrorist obstacle course and rifle range, very much like those used by al-Qaida in Afghanistan to train for assassinations. It has been reported previously that a number of al-Qaida leaders had fled to eastern Iran, but this would be the first evidence that al-Qaida is actually using Iran to resume terrorist training."

"Seven Dead in Attack on Pakistan Christian Charity" (Aamir Ashraf, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2002/09/25)
"Two gunmen burst into the offices of a Christian charity in the Pakistani city of Karachi on Wednesday and tied up and gagged seven Christians before shooting them at point blank range, police said. The attack was the latest in a series of bloody assaults on Christian or Western targets since Pakistan's military government sided with the U.S.-led war on terror last year. ...
The attack took place at the city center offices of the Idare-e Amn-O-Insaf, or the Organization for Peace and Justice. "The gunmen first roped all the people inside the room, they also taped their mouths," a police officer told Reuters. "After, they fired straight at their heads." ...
Idare-e Amn-O-Insaf is a welfare organization supported by both Protestant and Catholic churches, providing legal aid for poor Christians and Muslims, offering help and advice for women and supporting small development projects."

"Liberal Egyptian Intellectual on the Arab Regimes' Role in Missing the Opportunity of Camp David 2000" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 422, 2002/09/25)
"In a recent article published in the London Arabic-language daily Al-Hayat, liberal Egyptian author Amin Al-Mahdi criticized the Arab regimes for their exploitation of the Palestinian issue and their role in the Palestinian rejection of President Clinton's peace proposals of July 2000": "…In my personal opinion, no matter what peace proposal Clinton presented to the Arab side, it was sure to be rejected. This is because the Palestinian issue was always the main source of legitimacy for the revolutionary [Arab] regimes that established rural or tribal military republics. ...
More important, it was the prop for the war declared on democracy and modernization [by the Arab regimes], an eternal pretext for the bill of divorce from the free world and for imposing various laws, from emergency laws through military laws. ... The Arab regime tried to create a kind of new Cold War, by forming an alliance with Islamic fundamentalism and establishing a new shadow empire in Central Asia. The centers of tension, such as the Palestinian issue, [the war in] southern Sudan, and the friction in the Gulf, took the place of the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall, making it possible to man the barricades, to close themselves off, and to create polarization with the entire world."

"Feeling a Bit Woolsey" (Stephen F. Hayes, The Weekly Standard, 2002/09/25)
"California representative Lynn Woolsey wants the United States to sign something she refers to as CEDAW - the United Nations' Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. So she sent out a "dear colleague" letter that reads, in part: "Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, United States, Iran. Which one of these is different from the others??? If you guessed the United States - you're wrong. If you guessed Saudi Arabia, you're right." The Saudis, you see, have signed the treaty. The United States has not. Some people might conclude that this example proves the worthlessness of U.N.-sponsored paper proclamations. Not Lynn Woolsey. ...
Again, from the letter: ... "Over the past 20 years, CEDAW has become an important tool for nations to end human rights abuses of women and girls - such as those committed by the Taliban in Afghanistan." You remember those stories, don't you? The ones about Mullah Omar heading down to the U.N.-funded soccer stadium that became a public execution coliseum - primarily for women who committed heinous crimes such as reading - and suddenly stopping short. "Damn," the one-eyed tyrant would exclaim to the other men in the Taliban's leadership, 'we can't do this. What about CEDAW? It's become an important tool for us to end human rights abuses of women and girls.'"

"Who Is Behind Lynne Stewart?" (Michael Tremoglie, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/09/25)
"Ramsey Clark is the founder of the International Action Committee (IAC), a pro-Saddam, pro-Milosevic organization that regards America as the world's leading and most threatening terrorist state. ... The National Co-Director of the IAC is Brian Becker, who is a member of the secretariat of the WWP, and a member of the A.N.S.W.E.R coalition steering committee. A.N.S.W.E.R. is presently coordinating anti-American, pro-Iraq "peace" protests across the country. ...
Becker and the IAC are also staunch defenders of Slobodan Miloslevic, Kim II Sung and Kim Sung II and Mumia Abu-Jamal. On June 23, 2001 Becker directed a "people's tribunal" condemning US war crimes in Korea. ... Clark and IAC members periodically meet with North Korean, Iraqi and Cuban government officials. Among other charges the group has made, the IAC has claimed that Usama bin Laden is the victim of an American imperialist plot. ...
The mainstream media has somehow missed the fact that the most ubiquitous organizer of "anti-war" protests is directed by a terrorist support group. It would seem that a question on this front to Ramsey Clark at one of his regular press conferences might be in order." (See also: "Left Behind" (George Packer, The New York Times Magazine, 2002/09/22))

"In Kucinich's World" (John Perazzo, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/09/25)
Perazzo on US Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), "one of the leading voices in the chorus opposing US military action against Iraq, and one of Congress' most outspoken critics of President Bush": "Like so many who share his political persuasion, Mr. Kucinich believes that his own good intentions can warm and win the hearts of ruthless tyrants. "In the finest example of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr.," he says, "we can learn to confront our enemies with ahimsa, unconditional love." ... With regard to the military action that brought down the Taliban, he decries our country's "bombing of civilians in Afghanistan," and laments that "the blood of innocent people who perished on September 11 [was] avenged with the blood of innocent villagers in Afghanistan." This astounding characterization of what our armed forces did reads like a propaganda piece from the pen of Mullah Omar himself."

"Moral case against war is at best naive, at worst idiotic" (Janet Daley, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/09/25)
"When the obtuse camp pleads for concern about the innocent Iraqis who may suffer in an American attack, I wonder about the innocent Kurds who have suffered under Saddam's homicidal persecution. When the obtuse-niks plead for more time for hapless United Nations weapons inspectors to be fobbed off and obstructed, I wonder if they would be so blithely passive about racist mass murder in other countries? Would George Galloway have spoken so assiduously against military intervention if the old white regime in South Africa had gassed Soweto?"

"Look Who's Playing Politics" (Michael Kelly, The Washington Post, 2002/09/25)
Kelly was not impressed by Al Gore's speech: "Politics are allowed in politics, but there are limits, and there is a pale, and Gore has now shown himself to be ignorant of those limits, and he has now placed himself beyond that pale. Gore's speech was one no decent politician could have delivered. It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy, of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts - bereft of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies. It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible. But I understate." (See also the text of former vice president Al Gore's speech before the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco: "Text: Gore Assails Bush's Iraq Policy" (Al Gore, The Washington Post, 2002/09/23))

"Indian troops end temple siege" (BBC News, 2002/09/25)
"The siege at a Hindu temple in Gujarat state has ended after Indian troops stormed the building and shot dead two gunmen who had killed more than 30 people. About 70 "Black Cat" commandos moved in overnight to end the 12-hour siege at the Swaminarayan Temple in the state capital, Gandhinagar. ... "The two attackers were killed shortly after daybreak," said Brigadier Raj Sitapathy, who led the assault. He said the "bloodbath" - the victims included 13 men, six women and four children - had occurred in a prayer hall. The two attackers were carrying letters pouring "venom" on India, Brigadier Sitapathy told the BBC before suggesting they belonged to a Pakistani-based militant group called Tehrik-e-Kasak - a frontline, he said, for the outlawed Lashkar-e-Toiba."

 

Tuesday, September 24, 2002

News and commentary:

"Shock Therapy" (Mohammed Al-Jassem, Newsweek, from the 2002/09/30 issue)
"Some Arabs are proud of Saddam's development and possession of weapons of mass destruction. The more the Bush administration tries to prove that Saddam possesses those weapons, the further it gets from achieving its goal of winning converts to its cause. But the irony is that only an actual invasion of Iraq and the overthrowing of Saddam would produce a radical shift in public opinion, changing the terms of the reference of the public debate. For now, the rhetoric used to convince American public opinion does not work at all to convince Arab public opinion. In fact, this rhetoric has become a source of inspiration for Arab sloganeering. This is in part the result of widespread anti-Americanism. But, more importantly, it's a result of the fact that the Arabs are living part of their daily lives in a dream world. They sink into a political dream world, fed by the backlash to American rhetoric that is eagerly seized upon and spiced up by Arab intellectuals. ...
The Arabs need shock therapy, some kind of tremor that would bring them back to reality and away from their political dreamscape. Egypt's loss in the 1967 war against Israel was the sort of shock that did away with the nationalist slogans prevalent since the July 1952 revolution carried out by Gen. Gamal Abdul Nasser. If the 1967 shock laid the ground for the spread of Islamism as an alternative to the nationalism, the "Saddam Shock" might be what is needed to launch the era of pragmatism."

"Best Harassment of an Arab in the Wake of 9/11" (New York Press, from the 2002/09/25 issue)
From the Best of Manhattan issue, picked up via The Corner: "It's two weeks after the World Trade Center massacre, and we're visiting our favorite pita place in the former shadows of the WTC. Maybe we're gullible enough to think that we're showing support for a local Arab-American. We ask if he's had any kind of harassment. "There was this one woman," he explained, 'who came in from The New York Times. She kept telling me that she understood if I hated America. I finally told her not to come back until she wanted to write about my business.'"

"Indian Hindu Temple Under Siege, 29 People Killed" (Thomas Kutty Abraham, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2002/09/24)
"Gunmen hurling grenades and wielding AK-47s stormed a Hindu temple in western India on Tuesday, killing 29 men, women and children and trapping others inside as Indian commandos laid siege to the building. The attack in Gandhinagar, capital of the western state of Gujarat where at least 1,000 died in Hindu-Muslim bloodshed earlier this year, stoked fears of fresh communal unrest. Police said more than 70 people were injured and at least 25 people were trapped inside the Akshardham Temple complex along with between two to four unidentified gunmen. ...
Without naming Pakistan, [Indian Deputy Prime Minister Lal Krishna Advani] implicitly pointed a finger at Islamabad by saying that "the enemies of the country" were using the attack to shift attention from disputed Kashmir. State elections are currently under way in Indian Kashmir. "I see in this a very deliberate design," he told reporters."

"A Palestinian Mother: I am Proud to Send My Son on a Suicide Mission" (IMRA, 2002/09/24)
"Um Nadil, a Palestinian mother, encouraged her son, a Hamas operative, to carry out a suicide terrorist attack against an Israeli target. In an interview on Al Jazeera television (29 June 2002), she explains her Islamic perspective and her motives as a mother who "sacrificed" her child. Following is a portion of the transcript from Al Jazeera: ... I give him the best but I also I sacrifice him. A good deed is found in this sacrifice. ... Our land is occupied, there are enemies, the Western world is behaving aggressively, and heresy is attempting to cruelly take control over the Islam and destroy it. ... If we shall not fight the battle of the Jihad, heresy will rule the world with cruelty. ... I swear by the name of Allah that our lives would not be happy without the Jihad - the Jihad is our lives. If our lives were not based on the values of the Jihad, we would not be alive. We would be dead. I talked my son into sacrificing himself for Allah, and he was more than willing to do so. All the children of Palestine, the Palestinian youths and the teenagers are crying, consumed with passion and eager for Jihad, for Allah and for suicide terror attacks. It is not, at it has been said, out of desperation of [this] life, but out of an expectation for a better one."

"The Personal State" (Roger Scruton, National Review, 2002/09/24)
The second installment of a series of excerpts from Roger Scruton's "The West and the Rest": "Interestingly, the principal target of al Qaeda, as of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, is neither Western civilization, nor Christianity, nor global capitalism, nor anything else that can be given an abstract profile - it is the United States, conceived as a sovereign nation-state. In an uncanny way, the Islamists have identified the core component of the system that they wish to destroy. ...
Like a firm or a church, a nation-state is not merely a collection of individuals. It is a moral and legal person, which acts on its own behalf and is liable for what it does. ...
When we speak in the same terms of Iraq or North Korea, however, we are speaking obliquely. There is no such entity as Iraq, only a legal fiction erected by the United Nations for the purpose of dealing with whichever individual, clique, or faction is for the moment holding the people of that country hostage. ...
International law can do nothing to control al Qaeda, nor is the United Nations effective against organizations that neither are, nor aspire to be, nation-states. While it is possible to bring pressure to bear on individual states that harbor terrorists, this pressure is ineffective against a failed state, or against a state like Iran, which is happy to ignore requests from Satan." (See also: "The West and the Rest" (Roger Scruton, National Review, 2002/09/23))

"Prime Minister's Iraq statement to Parliament" (Tony Blair, 10 Downing Street, 2002/09/24)
"But two things about Saddam stand out. He has used these weapons, thousands dying in chemical weapons attacks in Iraq itself. He used them in the Iran-Iraq war, started by him, in which one million people died. And his is a regime with no moderate elements to appeal to. Read the chapter on Saddam and human rights. Read not just about the one million dead in the war with Iran, not just about the 100,000 Kurds brutally murdered in northern Iraq; not just the 200,000 Shia Muslims driven from the marshlands in southern Iraq; not just the attempt to subjugate and brutalise the Kuwaitis in 1990 which led to the Gulf War. Read about the routine butchering of political opponents; the prison "cleansing" regimes in which thousands die; the torture chambers and hideous penalties supervised by him and his family and detailed by Amnesty International. Read it all and again I defy anyone to say that this cruel and sadistic dictator should be allowed any possibility of getting his hands on more chemical, biological or even nuclear weapons."

"Saddam 'has plans to use chemical weapons'" (The Guardian, 2002/09/24)
"Iraq has "military plans for the use of chemical and biological weapons", according to the government's long-awaited 50-page dossier on Saddam Hussein's regime, which was published today.
The document says Saddam has plans to use the weapons even against his own population and some are deployable within 45 minutes of an order to use them. The dossier, distributed hours before the House of Commons begins an emergency debate on Iraq, also says Saddam has retained command and control authority over the weapons and has sought to acquire "significant quantities" of uranium from Africa, despite having no civil nuclear programme that could require it." (See also the dossier: "Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction - The Assessment of the British Government" (10 Downing Street, 2002/09/24) and "Iraq condemns Blair dossier" (BBC News, 2002/09/24): "The Iraqi Culture Minister, Hamid Hammadi, said Mr Blair was "acting as part of the Zionist campaign against Iraq and all his claims are baseless". In Cairo, the Iraqi Foreign Minister, Naji Sabri, said the dossier "aims to justify the unjustifiable... aggressive intentions against Iraq". "This is just scaremongering, exaggeration and lies," he said.")

"The opportunist" (Andrew Sullivan, Salon.com, 2002/09/24)
"Al Gore's bitter and negative speech in San Francisco on Monday contained any number of clashes with his previous positions. After all, regime change in Iraq was a policy endorsed by the Clinton administration. Two years ago, Gore said, quite simply, that Saddam must go. Earlier this year, he said that a "final reckoning" with Iraq was essential in any war on terror and that Iraq represented a "virulent threat in a class by itself." ...
What's changed is that Gore senses a political advantage if he shifts tack and opposes the Bush administration. Once again, in a speech in which he condemns the Bushies for playing domestic politics with the war, Gore is clearly guilty of projection. It's Gore - not Bush - who is putting his own short-term political interests above his long-standing principles and positions."
(See also the text of former vice president Al Gore's speech before the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco: "Text: Gore Assails Bush's Iraq Policy" (Al Gore, The Washington Post, 2002/09/23): "And, I believe that we are perfectly capable of staying the course in our war against Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network, while simultaneously taking those steps necessary to build an international coalition to join us in taking on Saddam Hussein in a timely fashion. If you're going after Jesse James, you ought to organize the posse first, especially if you're in the middle of a gunfight with somebody who's out after you.")

"Iraq's Faux Capitulation" (Richard O. Spertzel, The Wall Street Journal, 2002/09/24)
"When Iraq announced last week that it would allow inspectors to return without conditions, many diplomats and the press jumped with glee. At last, Iraq, responding to pressure, had a miraculous change of heart. China, Russia, France and many Arab nations quickly asserted that no new Security Council resolution would be necessary. All studiously ignored the statement's fine print, which was reinforced in the lengthy, more formal notification to the United Nations later in the week. Iraq stipulated that inspectors had to respect the country's dignity, sovereignty and territorial integrity. It also stipulated that the U.N. had to apply the rules governing elimination of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to Israel as well. If that wasn't enough condition-setting, Saddam Hussein then came back to add that all conditions previously negotiated with the U.N. had to apply, notably the hamstringing agreement by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan that called for prior notification and accompaniment of inspectors by diplomats to "sensitive" sites. This is progress? Given 24 hours notification, any country could hide even "smoking gun" evidence of a biological weapons program. Such inspections are designed for failure."

"I was threatened by a Palestinian official for a story in the 'Post'" (Khaled Abu Toameh, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/09/24)
"One of Qurei's senior aides, Salah Elayan, phoned me to protest the story. ... Even after I hung up the phone, refusing to hear the abuse and threats, he made several more calls to my mobile phone, repeating his threats and curses. An hour later, another one of Qurei's aides, Firas Yaghi, also called to threaten, this time under the pretext that the story had "harmed Qurei's dignity and presented him as someone who is humiliating himself in front of the Israeli prime minister." ...
Intimidation of journalists in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is not a new phenomenon but not all choose to tell the story. ...
It becomes even more complicated and dangerous if, like myself, you are an Arab journalist working with the foreign or Israeli media. Then you are expected to be an "obedient servant" or a "soldier" in the war of propaganda. You are expected to tell the truth only if it sounds and looks convenient and appropriate. Otherwise, you could be risking your life."

"Israeli troops kill nine Palestinians, injure 24 in Gaza operations" (AP/The Jerusalem Post, 2002/09/24)
"Israeli forces armed with tanks and helicopters clashed with Palestinian gunmen in Gaza before daybreak Tuesday, killing nine Palestinians in the bloodiest operation there in two months. The Gaza incursion was Israel's largest since the current round of Palestinian-Israeli violence began two years ago, according to witnesses and Palestinian security officials. They said at least 60 Israeli tanks and armored vehicles were involved. ... On Monday, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon said Israel had been preparing an incursion in Gaza to crack down on the militant group Hamas and extend the army's efforts to dismantle weapons factories there. ... In searches in the Zeitoun neighborhood of Gaza City, soldiers discovered and detonated 13 weapons workshops used to make Kassam rockets, the military said, adding that it has found 58 weapons workshops in Gaza so far this month."

Added in archive:
"Mr Greenway, please listen..." (Francois Gautier, Rediff, 2002/07/28)

 

Monday, September 23, 2002

News and commentary:

"The End of the Pax Britannica" (David Pryce-Jones, City Comment, 2002/09/23)
"It looks as though Iraq will be invaded, and redesigned by means of "regime change." There are almost as many critics of the latter concept as there are of the former, but they have evidently not thought much about why and how Iraq came into existence in the first place. It is a country in name only, manufactured by Britain in its imperial heyday. As world events now make clear, the whole Middle East, and beyond, needs a new dispensation. ... What's happening in several places of the world today, and most conspicuously in Iraq, is the disappearance of the last vestiges of Britain's handiwork or influence. ...
"Regime change" is another way of saying that there are states too dangerous to themselves and to others to be tolerated in a world with modern weaponry. Saddam Hussein's Iraq, today's Saudi Arabia, and Yasser Arafat's Palestine are destabilizing the Middle East and beyond. This is as much a question of wrongly drawn borders as of pernicious leaders. But what is not to be doubted is that to break up Iraq is not somehow to go against the grain of history or morality, but only to rectify the fantasies of Lawrence of Arabia and his ilk."

"The Face of Muslim 'Moderation'" (Zoli Simon, Insight on the News, 2002/09/23)
"The biggest annual convention of Muslims in the country is hosted by the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). While many traditional Muslims consider it a radical Islamist group, ISNA went out of its way during its four-day convention, held for the first time in Washington, to portray itself as moderate in all things great and small. But many observers still have doubts about its newfound moderation, especially given its reported ties to such alleged terrorism-connected groups as the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) and the Muslim World League. ISNA was there at the formation of the predecessor organization of HLF, according to terrorism expert Steve Emerson. ...
Professor Agha Saeed, chairman of the American Muslim Alliance, scolded "professional racists like Daniel Pipes," the respected Middle East expert, and praised Rep. Cynthia McKinney (D-Ga.), who not only offered to accept large sums of money from a Saudi prince after then New York mayor Rudy Giuliani refused it, but claimed Bush knew about the Sept. 11 attacks in advance but let them happen anyway so his defense-contractor friends could profit from a military buildup. Or so McKinney's conspiracy theory goes. The mention of McKinney's name received a huge round of applause, and then a standing ovation from about 90 percent of those present."

"A Challenge to House Master Hanson" (Alan M. Dershowitz, The Harvard Crimson, 2002/09/23)
Dershowitz agrees with the Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers that "singling out Israel, among all the countries in the world, for divestment, is an action which is anti-Semitic in effect, if not in intent": "As an advocate and practitioner of human rights throughout the world, I can confidently assert that Israel's record on human rights is among the best, especially among nations that have confronted comparable threats. Though far from perfect, Israel has shown extraordinary concern for avoiding civilian casualties in its half-century effort to protect its civilians from terrorism. Jordan killed more Palestinians in a single month than Israel has between 1948 and the present. ...
Nor is Israel the only country that is occupying lands claimed by others. China, Russia, Turkey, Iraq, Spain, France and numerous other countries control not only land, but people who seek independence. Indeed, among these countries Israel is the only one that has offered statehood... ...
Let me propose an alternative to singling out Israel for divestment: let Harvard choose nations for investment in the order of the human rights records. If that were done, investment in Israel would increase dramatically, while investments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, Philippines, Indonesia, the Palestinian Authority and most other countries of the world would decrease markedly." (See also: "Address at morning prayers" (Lawrence H. Summers, Harvard University, 2002/09/17))

"The West and the Rest" (Roger Scruton, National Review, 2002/09/23)
The first installment of a series of excerpts from Roger Scruton's "The West and the Rest": "Islamism is not a nationalist movement, still less a bid to establish a new kind of secular state. It rejects the modern state and its secular law in the name of a "brotherhood" that reaches secretly to all Muslim hearts, uniting them against the infidel. And because its purpose is religious rather than political, the goal is incapable of realization. ...
Where Islamists succeed in gaining power - as in Iran, Sudan, and Afghanistan - the result is not the reign of peace and piety promised by the Prophet, but murder and persecution on a scale matched in our time only by the Nazis and the Communists. The Islamist, like the Russian nihilist, is an exile in this world; and when he succeeds in obtaining power over his fellow human beings, it is in order to punish them for being human. ...
As the examples of bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the September 11 terrorists demonstrate, Islamism is not a cry of distress from the "wretched of the earth." It is an implacable summons to war, issued by globetrotting middle-class Muslims, many of them extremely wealthy, and most of them sufficiently well versed in Western civilization and its benefits to be able to exploit the modern world to the full. ...
Globalization, therefore, offers militant Islam the opportunity that it has lacked since the Ottoman retreat from central Europe. It both concentrates the resolve of the believer and offers him a sword with which to prosecute God's will."

"Not Peace-Loving, After All" (Rod Dreher, National Review, 2002/09/23)
A presentation of Robert Spencer's "Islam Unveiled", in which he maintains that Islam itself, and not only Islamism, is a threat to pluralist democracy: "Warns Spencer, "The culture of tolerance threatens to render the West incapable of drawing reasonable distinctions. The general reluctance to criticize any non-Christian religion and the almost universal public ignorance about Islam make for a lethal mix." This is a deeply unsettling little volume, because it offers scant hope that the West can live at peace with Islam unless the religion changes radically, and even less hope that that is possible. ...
A pious Muslim may consult an imam or spiritual leader for guidance, but he will also read the Koran himself. He will find there many divine instructions to make constant war on the infidel, who is only to be given the choice of conversion, slave-like subjugation (in historian Bat Yeor's word, dhimmitude) - or death. And throughout Islamic history, that's exactly how Muslim societies have behaved toward non-Muslims, who are by the very fact of their unbelief not considered innocents in the eternal, divinely mandated conflict."

"Chilling 'Chatter' of Jihad" (Sebastian Rotella, Los Angeles Times, 2002/09/23)
"At the wheel was the top Al Qaeda operative in Italy, Abdelkader Mahmoud Es Sayed, whose car served as a headquarters, a refuge, a kind of confessional for aspiring holy warriors. "Sheik, if someone wants to go fight, why don't you let him?" a tormented 31-year-old Tunisian named Adel ben Soltane asked while riding in the Citroen on Dec. 7, 2000, according to transcripts of intercepts by Italian police. "The important thing is that you dream about it," Es Sayed answered paternally. "When the moment comes, you never know if you'll be a martyr in Algeria, Tunisia, America or in Central Asia. You won't know." "I want to eliminate these pigs, these swine," Ben Soltane said. He told Es Sayed that he despised everything about Italy: "I hate the people, I hate the documents. ... I want to go anywhere else." ...
The young men saw themselves as warrior-monks assailed by the temptations of a prosperous, fun-loving society. The way other men might watch pornography, they sat in a seedy apartment chortling at videos of moujahedeen slaughtering Russian soldiers in the snows of Chechnya. "Look, look how they cut his throat," a suspect named Khaled exclaimed, according to the transcript of an intercept March 22, 2001, in an apartment in suburban Gallarate."

"The Twentieth Man" (Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker, from the 2002/09/30 issue)
Hersh's in-depth report about the case against Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged "twentieth hijacker": "Moussaoui was certainly connected to Al Qaeda, but his real value to the United States may have been as a witness and not as a stand-in for the dead hijackers, who are beyond punishment. That potential appears to have been traded away for the sake of a high-profile prosecution that is politically and emotionally satisfying. Moussaoui's arrest, one former C.I.A. official told me, 'was totally circumstantial. They cast a wide net and the guy happened to be a little fish who got caught up in it. They know it now. And nobody will back off.'"

"The Man Behind Bin Laden" (Lawrence Wright, The New Yorker, from the 2002/09/16 issue)
Wright's in-depth profile of the Al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is finally available online: "In 1998, Zawahiri commissioned a study on the Jewish influence in America. As a result of the study, Islamic Jihad formally placed the United States on its list of acceptable targets. Bin Laden was sufficiently pleased to raise the organization's annual budget from three hundred thousand dollars to five hundred thousand. "America is now controlled by the Jews, completely, as are its news, its elections, its economy, and its politics," Zawahiri explained in the Jihad journal, Al-Mujahidoun, later that year. 'It uses Israel to attack its neighbors and to slaughter those who are living peacefully there. ...
If we are a nation of martyrs - as we claim - all that we need is courage of heart and the will of killers and the belief in what we claim to be love of death for Allah's sake. That is the key to our triumph and the beginning of their defeat. If you want to live as free people and to die in honor and be sent as martyrs, the road in front of you is clear.'"

"Schroeder Says Controversial Minister to Step Down" (Nick Tattersall, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2002/09/23)
"German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder said on Monday a minister who enraged Washington by allegedly linking President Bush to Hitler would step aside, but repeated his opposition to war against Iraq. German-U.S. relations have become increasingly strained in recent weeks as Schroeder's staunch anti-war rhetoric helped him to secure a second term in office in Sunday's general election while angering the United States. Relations fell to a fresh low last week after justice minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin was reported as saying Bush's saber-rattling on Iraq was a ploy that Hitler has also used to divert attention from domestic issues." (See also: "U.S. Slams German Minister for Bush-Hitler Comment" (Reuters, 2002/09/19))

"Tirawi victim tells of torture" (The Jerusalem Post, 2002/09/23)
"A Palestinian accused of collaboration who managed to flee from Hebron last week has accused Palestinian Authority General Intelligence chief Tawfik Tirawi's men of torturing him and many others suspected of working as "informers" for the Shin Bet. ... Tirawi is one of 20 wanted Palestinians who are reportedly hiding in PA Chairman Yasser Arafat's Mukata headquarters compound in Ramallah.The man said Tirawi's men had brutally tortured him since his arrest about 18 months ago. He said he was released only after a relative paid a top General Intelligence official $10,000. ...
He said that for the first month, he was tortured almost daily inside his small cell. ... "They tied me to an electricity poll and pretended that I was about to be executed," he said. ...
Then the policemen aimed their rifles at me and waited for the order. Seconds later one of the officers shouted: 'Fire.' I could hear them pulling the triggers, but I didn't feel the pain. 'For a moment, I didn't know if I was alive or dead. I heard shots, but there was no pain or blood. I quickly realized that it was a mock execution. It was the worst experience in my life. For a while, I thought I was dead. Only when I heard them laughing did I understand that they were just trying to intimidate me.'"

"Sharon's Hard Choice" (William Safire, The New York Times, 2002/09/23)
"Before Palestinian Arabs can earn a state of their own, they will have to fight and win a war - but not a war against Israel. Before they can claim readiness for sovereignty, the Palestinian majority must put in place leaders brave enough to win a civil war to crush rebellious zealots who demand the conquest of Israel. ...
But those men of the future have in the past failed to move into the vacuum at the top. Because they were loath to take over from the temporizing Tunis crowd, they forced the Israeli Army to act as anti-terror's surrogate. The irony is in the fire: only when Israel defeats Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other killers can the majority of Arabs step forward and create a new life for themselves. ...
Its power to win is restrained by the European-Arab coalition in the U.N., now threatening to order Israel to ease up again on its retaliation for recent suicide bombings. Also holding Sharon back from fighting to win is his desire to keep dovish Labor Party politicians inside the unity tent. As a result, we see the oscillation between crackdown and ease-up that has led to a war without a winner."

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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

Articles of the week

"Losing the Enlightenment" (Victor Davis Hanson, OpinionJournal, 2006/11/29)

"Allah’s England?" (Daniel Johnson, Commentary. November 2006)

"'Sex in the Park': The latest doings of the Danish imams" (Henrik Bering, The Weekly Standard, 2006/11/18)

"Narcissism on Stilts" (Harold Evans, Ne