Archived news and commentary: November 5 - 11, 2001

2001/12/24 - 2001/12/31
2001/12/17 - 2001/12/23
2002/12/10 - 2001/12/16
2002/12/03 - 2001/12/09
2001/11/26 - 2001/12/02
2001/11/19 - 2001/11/25
2001/11/12 - 2001/11/18
2001/11/05 - 2001/11/11
2001/10/29 - 2001/11/04
2001/10/22 - 2001/10/28
2001/10/15 - 2001/10/21
2001/10/08 - 2001/10/14
2001/10/01 - 2001/10/07
2001/09/24 - 2001/09/30
2001/09/17 - 2001/09/23
2001/09/11 - 2001/09/16

News and commentary:

"Bin Laden: Yes, I did it" (David Bamber, The Daily Telegraph, 2001/11/11)
"Osama bin Laden has for the first time admitted that his al-Qa'eda group carried out the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the Telegraph can reveal. In a previously undisclosed video which has been circulating for 14 days among his supporters, he confesses that "history should be a witness that we are terrorists. Yes, we kill their innocents". In the footage, shot in the Afghan mountains at the end of October, a smiling bin Laden goes on to say that the World Trade Centre's twin towers were a "legitimate target" and the pilots who hijacked the planes were 'blessed by Allah'."

"Do the Terrorists Have Nukes?" (Pavel Felgenhauer, The Wall Street Journal, 2001/11/11)
"Bin Laden and al Qaeda may have no usable nuclear weapons yet, as U.S. authorities assume. But experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency warn that there is a weapons category that is in many respects worse than nukes and much easier to make--radioactive bombs. Such a weapon is a device to spread deadly radioactive contamination over a large area without a nuclear explosion. It may rely on a mix of conventional explosives with some highly radioactive substance like spent nuclear fuel, cesium that is used in medicine or in industry, plutonium from a nuclear weapon, or plutonium from a conventional nuclear power station that is not suitable for weapons production. The explosion of such a bomb would create a radioactive cloud and cause severe and long-lasting contamination. If such a thing happened in New York, humans might have to abandon parts of Manhattan for hundreds, if not thousands of years, as they have the town of Pripyat in Ukraine, near the Chernobyl disaster area." (See also: "Osama claims he has nukes: If US uses N-arms it will get same response" (Hamid Mir, Dawn, 2001/11/10))

"Why Are We Hiding bin Laden?" (Robert H. Giles, The New York Times, 2001/11/11)
"White House officials called on network executives last month, after a videotaped statement by Mr. bin Laden was widely broadcast on Oct. 7. The administration persuaded the networks that self-censorship was necessary to the war effort. The tapes of Mr. bin Laden were merely propaganda, it was suggested. Besides, he might be using the tapes to send hidden messages to terrorists, although no evidence was offered to support this notion. Network officials agreed to treat future broadcasts with care. ... There had been no further Western sightings of the elusive leader of Al Qaeda until last Saturday, when Al Jazeera, an Arab satellite channel, broadcast a 20-minute videotape of Mr. bin Laden. ... At that moment, we discovered what the "treat with care" arrangement meant. Brief segments were broadcast on the Fox News Channel and CNN, with news anchors reading quotations or paraphrased versions of Mr. bin Laden's statement that executives judged to be newsworthy. Americans could not get access to the full content of Mr. bin Laden's statement; even now the transcript is most easily located online rather than in more traditional news sources."

 

Saturday, November 10, 2001

News and commentary:

"Nations or shopping malls?" (James C. Bennett, UPI, 2001/11/10)
"There is nothing like war to bring out the contradictions of bad policy. Since Sept. 11, the multicultural chickens are coming home to roost with a vengeance, both in America and particularly in Britain. The politically correct left and postmodernist miasma of academia have waged an intellectual war for decades against the concepts of assimilation and common identity, and in favor of the competing concept of universal cultural relativity. The fruit of these efforts has been to bring into being small but ideologically potent groups of persons who hold American and British passports, but who feel no civic obligation or loyalty to their fellow citizens. Although few as a percentage of all Muslim immigrants, this fringe is still significant in absolute terms. Rather than taking up arms in defense of their country and compatriots, they demonstrate their approval of the murder of the innocent civilians in the World Trade Center, deliver fatwas supporting the assassination of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and in some cases have rushed off to bear arms against America and Britain. ... The British government spent taxpayers' money to confine students from Pakistan in Urdu-language, Moslem-only schools with an anti-assimilationist curriculum that taught nothing of the Anglosphere tradition of striving for liberty. Instead it painted Britain as a society uniquely guilty of imperialist and racist crimes against humanity. ... The multiculturalists have partly succeeded in transforming strong civic states into large-scale shopping malls, whose residents are encouraged to browse for their political and cultural identities in the ideological equivalent of the mall food court."

"Rock stars: Shut up!" (Debbie Schlussel, TownHall, 2001/11/10)
"Sounding like the knee-jerk nincompoop that he must be, [John Cougar] Mellencamp thinks that, "Instead of worrying about somebody having a pen knife on an airplane, we should be figuring out why a brother of ours would behave so incorrectly. What have we done to make this part of the world family so hateful to us?" Puh-leeze. Mellencamp sounds like Ted Kennedy liberals who say, "Don't jail the muggers and murderers. They can't help it. Let's look at the root causes." Put him on flights with box-cutter-equipped murderers, while they're looking for those root causes he uses to justify our "brothers" the terrorists' "incorrect behavior" of murdering 5,000 innocent Americans."

"The Scandal of Middle East Studies" (Stanley Kurtz, The Weekly Standard, from the 2001/11/19 issue)
"Into the breach stepped John Esposito, a professor of Islamic studies at Holy Cross College who, in books like "The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality" (1992) and (with John O. Voll) "Islam and Democracy" (1996), popularized Said's ideas by purging them of their overt leftism and anti-Americanism and ingeniously applying them to Islam. ...
Esposito's solution was to announce that Islamic fundamentalism had been a movement of democratic reform all along, and only orientalist prejudice had prevented Westerners from seeing this happy truth. ...
He and his followers disparaged public concern about terrorism as barely disguised anti-Muslim prejudice. Thus, after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, Columbia historian Richard Bulliet organized a conference not to grapple with the emergence of terrorism in New York, but to attack the wave of anti-Muslim prejudice that supposedly would be set off by a guilty verdict in the bombers' trials. ...
Six months before September 11, Sarah Lawrence professor Fawaz Gerges, whose work drew on Esposito's paradigm, asked: "Should not observers and academics keep skeptical about the U.S. government's assessment of the terrorist threat? To what extent do terrorist 'experts' indirectly perpetuate this irrational fear of terrorism by focusing too much on farfetched horrible scenarios?" ...
Edward Said, meanwhile, was approvingly recycling the argument of Esposito's book "The Islamic Threat" - that the fear of terrorism is the latest mutation of Cold War paranoia. An influential article of Said's appeared in the New York Times Magazine on November 21, 1993, under a title that, in retrospect, nicely encapsulates the worthlessness of his prognostications: 'The Phony Islamic Threat.'"

"Osama claims he has nukes: If US uses N-arms it will get same response" (Hamid Mir, Dawn, 2001/11/10)
"Osama bin Laden has said that "we have chemical and nuclear weapons as a deterrent and if America used them against us we reserve the right to use them". He said this in a special interview with Hamid Mir, the editor of Ausaf, for Dawn and Ausaf, at an undisclosed location near Kabul. ... HM: Some Western media claim that you are trying to acquire chemical and nuclear weapons. How much truth is there in such reports? OSB: I heard the speech of American President Bush yesterday (Oct 7). He was scaring the European countries that Osama wanted to attack with weapons of mass destruction. I wish to declare that if America used chemical or nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as deterrent."

News and commentary:

"Afghan opposition 'capture' key city" (BBC News, 2001/11/09)
"Afghanistan's opposition Northern Alliance say they have captured the strategically important northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif. The claim has not been independently confirmed. If true, it would represent a major victory in the American-led campaign and the first significant defeat for the Taleban. A prominent opposition general, General Abdul Rashid Dostum, told the BBC that he and other Northern Alliance commanders were inside the city. He said their forces had encountered fierce resistance from the Taleban."

"Heads They Win - Tails we lose" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2001/11/09)
"For much of September we were reminded, through historical fictions, that attacks against Afghanistan meant suicide-with no real study of Alexander the Great's career, the Third Anglo-Afghani war, or the true situation during the Soviet occupation of 1980-82. Then, after our initial strategic airstrikes and near-annihilation of the Taliban's traditional military assets, talking heads sarcastically referred to an absence of real targets, while critics overseas agonized that a sophisticated modern air force was simply pounding those who could not fight back. Now, weeks later, the harpies have reversed course and castigated our military for not doing enough. By this logic, we should expect in the future that when we are successful in the use of overwhelming force, we will be dubbed bullies of an outclassed foe-and that, when we suffer reverses, we will be pounced on for naively blundering into a quagmire."

"Hazy shades of treason" (Eileen Ciesla, Jewish World Review, 2001/11/09)
"In remarks offered at Georgetown University on November 7th, former President Bill Clinton examined possible reasons for the terrorist attacks. He found them with the nation's Founders, the Crusades, and a lack of dialogue with Muslims. ... "In the first Crusade, when Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was a Muslim on Temple Mount. I can tell you that story is still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it." Blaming America for the Crusades, a series of wars that occurred 700 years before our nation's founding, brings one perilously close to the opinions of Osama bin Laden, but also of Noam Chomsky. ... Can there be a debate between those citizens who either verbally support, or actually volunteer in the Taliban's army and the rest of America's citizenry? Only in the blurry world of multiculturalism, where all opinions are valid, all civilizations advanced (except Western), all expressions justified and any action can be rationalized and defended in its proper 'context.'"

"The New Black Panther Halloween Special" (Bo Crader, The Daily Standard, 2001/11/09)
"Some Halloween specials are funnier than others. Take, for instance, the New Black Panther Party's "Emergency Town Hall Meeting," at the National Press Club which was broadcast on C-SPAN as a "Forum on U.S. Anti-Terrorism Efforts & Muslims" on October 31. ... Imaam Abdul Alim Musa, an ex-con and former cocaine dealer, began the meeting by pledging to get to the bottom of the "raggedy truth and dressed-up lies" of September 11. He suggested the 19 terrorist hijackers deserve praise for rising "to the level of martyrdom, which is the highest level in Islam." Yet, moments later, he declared the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks a conspiracy by the United States. They "sunk their own battleship, the Maine," to start the Spanish-American War, staged the Gulf of Tonkin incident to start the Vietnam War, and perpetrated the September 11 attacks, Musa claimed, in order to justify a war on Islam. ... Marilyn Killingham of the Republic of New Africa, described as a "Human Rights Activist," euphemized the September 11 mass-murder as "the politics of visibility": 'Sometimes you have to do something when people ignore your suffering, you have to use the politics of visibility . . . that was nine-eleven-oh-one, the politics of visibility.'" (See also: "More Muslim enemies from within" (Michelle Malkin, TownHall, 2001/11/02))

"Holy fools" (Peter Mullen, The Spectator, from the 2001/11/10 issue)
"Where do most prominent churchmen locate blame for the atrocities of 11 September? With Osama bin Laden and al-Qa’eda? With the Taleban? With global terrorism? By their public utterances, it is clear that they lay responsibility firmly at the feet of the US. ... It is axiomatic among the bishops that the US is oppressor-in-chief. So the Bishop of Guildford says we "need to look at the long-term causes of such terrorist acts". And he doesn’t mean envy, hatred and malice on the part of the terrorists; he means the capitalist system which pays his stipend. ... The Archbishop of Wales said, "There is no final security without the redistribution of power" (CT, 28 September). In other words, reward the countries which sponsor terrorism for their terrorist acts."

"We Muslims pledge support for Queen and country, too" (Sher Khan, The Daily Telegraph, 2001/11/09)
Khan answers Charles Moore's "Why I will not sign the Pledge to British Muslims" (The Daily Telegraph, 2001/11/07): "He expresses concern about "a sense that too many British Muslims are hostile to the society in which they live and place their deepest loyalties elsewhere". It is because the mainstream Muslim community does not recognise these sentiments that we felt the need to address these discrepancies during Islam Awareness Week. ... First, there is an assumption that allegiance to the faith of Islam conflicts with allegiance to our country. This is not the Islam we recognise. Our faith obliges us to give our loyalty to that which is just and right. ... In any conflict, our loyalties lie with those who have been wronged, whoever they are. ... Islam Awareness Week comes after weeks of attacks on and threats towards British Muslims, leading to a constant state of fear. In order to calm this fear, we sought reassurance from high-profile politicians and community leaders to endorse a "Pledge to British Muslims". ... Signatories to the pledge have included the Prime Minister and editors of major national newspapers. I feel I am in good company."

 

Thursday, November 8, 2001

News and commentary:

"'I want to start a kindergarten for extremism'" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch No. 298, 2001/11/08)
Excerpts from a brilliant satiric article published in the London daily Al-Hayat by the Egyptian playwright Ali Salem, in which he sarcastically suggests opening a kindergarten to teach terrorist values:
"I will say to them: 'Kids, don't believe that others worship the same god as we; they are infidels who worship other deities. You must always think of ways to force them to worship whom we worship — the others are foreigners, and foreigners are infidels. The task for which I am preparing you is to purge the world of them.' This is your holy message: 'Don't believe the story that they stick to about freedom, democracy, human rights, progress, and civilization; they are liars and deceivers. They hate us because we are better, greater, and stronger than they.' ...
Dear children: 'Hate the beaches. Hate the flowers and the roses. Hate the wheat fields. Hate the trees. Hate music. Hate all manner of artistic, literary, or scientific endeavor. Hate tenderness. Hate reason and intellect. Hate your families and your countrymen. Hate others — all others. Hate yourselves. Hate your teachers. Hate me. Hate this school. Hate life and everything in it.' Go on, get to class."

"Holocaust denial comes to Knoxville..." (Glenn Reynolds, InstaPundit, 2001/11/08)
"...in the form of a "teach in" on the war scheduled for November 14th. I received an email flyer for this event, and thought little of it until I opened the PDF attachment containing the poster for the event. There, side by side, were pictures of the WTC collapsing and of the burning Red Cross warehouse in Kabul that was accidentally hit by a bomb. They were quite explicitly presented as equivalent events. To equate a deliberate attack that killed 5000 people (and was meant to kill far more) with an accidental attack that killed no one is a grotesque moral obtuseness that borders on the obscene. It is, quite literally, a species of holocaust denial. ...
The treatment of the World Trade Center attack in this poster is grotesque, insensitive, and beyond belief. Or it would be, if I hadn't seen similar things from the so-called "peace" movement already. Of course, as a believer in free speech, I think they have the right to speak on campus, just as Nazis or other hate groups would have the right to speak on campus. And I mean it exactly that way."

"Allegiances in a Multicultural Age" (John O'Sullivan, National Review, 2001/11/08)
"For the last decade or so, multiculturalism has been the reigning doctrine in Britain almost as much as in the U.S. ... An official commission, inquiring into a murder by racist hooligans, diagnosed the polite British bobby as suffering from "institutionalized racism." An unofficial commission, headed by a Labor peer, criticized the very concept of "Britishness" as inherently racist and exclusionary. ...
Today, with a war looming, Mr. Blair needs to draw on the reserves of traditional British patriotism. But he has bumped up against one consequence of multiculturalism: Not everyone in the country regards Britain either as home or as the nation to which they owe allegiance. ...
Not that multiculturalism wants to encourage such loyalties. Quite the reverse. It regards them as the cultural oppression of ethnic minorities. It encourages immigrants, their children and their grandchildren to cut themselves off from their fellow citizens and remain foreigners indefinitely. And if Britain's Muslims are the test, it has had some success in that regard. Under the impact of war, Tony Blair is discovering that multiculturalism is fundamentally incompatible with either patriotism or national unity."

"Yasser Arafat, Zionist - A new history of victimization" (Steven Menashi, National Review, 2001/11/08)
"Arafat effected this dramatic shift in public opinion by recasting the image of the Palestinian national movement. The PLO stopped presenting itself as a guerilla army, aimed at wiping Israel off the map, and instead adopted the pose of a humanitarian effort aimed at protecting a beleaguered minority, the Palestinian Arabs, and establishing a homeland for a dispossessed people. In short, Arafat presented the Palestinians to the world as Jews. Arafat's drive to project an appearance of Palestinian sympathy with the victims of terror in New York and Washington is part of his long-term strategy is for the Palestinians to imitate the Jews — not the Jews of historical record, but the sinister Jews of the Palestinian imagination, who fabricated a history of oppression and won global sympathy, and who arrived in a foreign land under a banner of peace and then dislocated its inhabitants by conquest."

"Challenging Israel's legitimacy" (Daniel Doron, The Jerusalem Post, 2001/11/08)
"Immediately after Oslo, the Palestinian Authority's "cultural" organs started celebrating "Canaanite festivals." They were designed to underscore the PA's newly invented claim that the Palestinian Arabs - whose ancestors conquered Palestine in the seventh century, about 2000 years after the Jewish tribes settled the Holy Land - were actually descendants of the Canaanites, and therefore the land's "original" inhabitants, possessing a prior claim to it. Innocently, Israelis dismissed these claims as yet another harmless Arab fantasy. But recently, as widening Western circles subjected to Arab propaganda started questioning Israel's rights to the land, and suggesting that it was stolen from the Arabs and should be returned to them, Israelis finally realized that the web of historical fabrications, distortions, and outright lies (like the insistence that the Temple Mount was never a Jewish place of worship) spun by the PA and its Western sympathizers is a serious challenge to Israel's legitimacy and right to exist. ... In brief, the Palestinians are not fighting for the return of "Palestinian lands," private or national, but for the possession of lands that were Turkish or British in the past. Facts do no impress Arab propagandists and their Western sympathizers. The BBC will continue undermining Israel and spouting Hanan Ashrawi's lies. But facts matter to the fair minded. For their sake, and ours, we must keep repeating the truth and dispelling Arab lies."

 

Wednesday, November 7, 2001

News and commentary:

"Taliban shooting refugees" (AFP/The Advertiser, 2001/11/07)
"The Taliban are slaughtering Afghans who try to flee the country, gunning them down in cold blood, refugees who have made it to Pakistan say. ... Of a dozen Afghans interviewed, all had tales of random killings, human rights abuses and persecution. Some told of mass murders. ... "When we decided to leave Afghanistan we saw the Taliban attacking people who were fleeing. People were gathering on the road to leave and they were shot. We have seen this," [Ovr Mohd] said. "I saw 50 people in front of me who were killed. They were women, children and men," Mohd added, claiming the killings happened a month ago. ... Sad Shah Musa, 50, echoed these experiences. "People are running and the Taliban are shooting them," he said. "We have lost our lives in Afghanistan. We have lost everything. ''Why are you fleeing, this is your country', they say. They say, 'You are against the Taliban, you are running away' and then they shoot.'"

"Hamas Weekly: Anthrax should be put into America's drinking water" (Special Dispatch No. 297, MEMRI, 2001/11/07)
A column which gives a vivid insight into the mindset we are up against: "In his weekly op-ed, Dr. 'Atallah Abu Al-Subh, a columnist for the Hamas weekly Al-Risala (Gaza), writes open letters to prominent figures, ideologies, and events. His most recent letter, No. 163, was titled "To Anthrax": "...Oh Anthrax, despite your wretchedness, you have sown horror in the heart of the lady of arrogance, of tyranny, of boastfulness! ... Our hearts, repressed, exiled, and oppressed, were filled with belief that Allah is capable of defeating America by means of the weakest of his earthly soldiers, after he used you to sow horror in their hearts... ... You make the U.S. appease us, and hint to us at a rosy future and a life of ease... through a [new] Marshall Plan. ... May you continue to advance, to permeate, and to spread. If I may give you a word of advice, enter the air of those ‘symbols,' the water faucets from which they drink, and the pens with which they draft their traps and conspiracies against the wretched peoples… ... I hope that we only hear about you when you enter the body of every base man among the arrogant and their agents."

"War Support Ebbs Worldwide - Sept. 11 Doesn't Justify Bombing, Many Say" (Kevin Sullivan, The Washington Post, 2001/11/07)
"A poll taken this week for France 3 television and France Info radio, for instance, showed support among the French for the U.S. military campaign has dropped to 51 percent, down from 66 percent shortly after the bombing began Oct. 7. Support also has declined in Germany, where polls show more than 65 percent of respondents now want the U.S. attacks to end, and in Spain, where a poll for Cadena SER radio showed 69 percent of those surveyed want the bombing to stop. ... "No one in his right mind can defend the gruesome murder of innocent children and the elderly in pursuit of one man whose guilt cannot be proved beyond doubt," Garth le Pere, director of the Institute for Global Dialogue, told reporters in Johannesburg."

"The Real New World Order - The American and the Islamic challenge" (Charles Krauthammar, The Weekly Standard, from the 2001/11/12 issue)
"The asymmetry is almost comical. The whole world against one man. If in the end the United States, backed by every Great Power, cannot succeed in defeating some cave dwellers in the most backward country on earth, then the entire structure of world stability, which rests ultimately on the pacifying deterrent effect of American power, will be fatally threatened. ... If the guarantor of world peace for the last half century cannot succeed in a war of self-defense against Afghanistan (!), then the whole post-World War II structure - open borders, open trade, open seas, open societies - will begin to unravel. The first President Bush sought to establish a New World Order. He failed, in part because he allowed himself to lose a war he had just won. The second President Bush never sought a New World Order. It was handed to him on Sept. 11. To maintain it, however, he has a war to win."

"Why I will not sign the Pledge to British Muslims" (Charles Moore, The Daily Telegraph, 2001/11/07)
"The week before last, I received a letter from Sher Khan, the national coordinator of the Islamic Society of Britain. As I was "one of an initial 40 key opinion formers", I was invited to sign "The Pledge to British Muslims". This would indicate my "long-term support for Muslim people", as part of Muslim Awareness Week, he said. ... Mr Khan's letter referred to "the beating of a Muslim cab driver in London and the attack on a young Muslim woman with a baseball bat in Swindon" as examples of why the Pledge was necessary. Certainly, these are horrible incidents, but what would Muslim leaders say if they were asked to sign a Pledge to British Jews/Sikhs/Christians against religious intolerance because of attacks on synagogues, or after the attacks on Sikh schoolchildren in Derby... ... Actually, I think it would be insulting to ask Muslims to sign any pledge. Most Muslims in Britain show by their actions, and many confirm with their words, that they accept Mr Young's norms: they shouldn't be bullied into putting it in writing. But if that is true for them, how much more is it true for everyone else? I decided not to sign. One notes that the bullying of the non-signers has started. The new Conservative leader, Iain Duncan Smith, has been assailed on the Today programme. The Daily Mirror - which thinks that the Pledge is a "race test", though the word race is not mentioned - calls him "arrogant, ignorant and offensive". ... Those who have rushed to sign remind one of the people who used to sign petitions in the name of "peace" run by those who supported unilateral nuclear disarmament in the days of the Cold War. By failing to see the difference between unobjectionable sentiments and the context in which they are framed, they show a lack of judgment."

"Pacifism isn't just wrong, it's immoral" (Don Feder, TownHall, 2001/11/07)
"Violence solves nothing, is the protestors' universal refrain. Nonsense. Violence gave America its independence. Violence saved the Union and freed the slaves. Violence kept Hitler from killing the rest of Europe's Jews. ... For the flower-power brigade, there's always an excuse to turn tail and run. Prior to World War II, isolationists told us Hitler was a nationalist who had legitimate grievances against the West. During the Vietnam War, campus protestors hailed the Viet Cong as agrarian reformers. It wasn't our war, they wailed. But it was our fight -- and millions of dead Cambodians and Vietnamese, who were murdered by the victors, wish we'd won it. And the Gulf War? "Blood for oil," anti-war activists chanted. Then they drove away in their VW buses to well-heated homes, paid for with jobs dependent on reliable energy supplies. ... Pacifism isn't just wrong; it's immoral. ... Not to punish mass murder is to acquiesce to evil. Pacifism is a betrayal of the innocent. ... Pacifism works well - as long as pacifist pleading goes largely unheeded and anti-war activists remain a distinct minority. Then they can feel noble while others fight their battles and protect their freedom. Only the battlefield sacrifices of generations of our best and bravest have given us a country where pacifists can bad-mouth America in comfort and security."

 

Tuesday, November 6, 2001

News and commentary:

"'You are either with us or against us'" (CNN.com, 2001/11/06)
"President Bush said Tuesday that there was no room for neutrality in the war against terrorism. In a joint news conference with French President Jacques Chirac, Bush said coalition partners would be called upon to back up their support with action. He said he would deliver that message in his speech Saturday to the United Nations. ... Bush said he would not point out any specific countries in his speech. "Over time it's going to be important for nations to know they will be held accountable for inactivity," he said. 'You're either with us or against us in the fight against terror.'" (See also: "President Bush: 'No Nation Can Be Neutral in This Conflict'" (The White House, 2001/11/06))

"What Women Want" (Sharon Lerner, Village Voice, 2001/11/06)
"Feminists also have a pragmatic argument: that missiles and soldiers won't topple the Taliban. "I continue to wish with all my heart for the regime to be overthrown; I just don't think the U.S. military can do it," says author Susan Sontag, whose September 18 article in The New Yorker set the tone for criticism of U.S. military policy. The choice "isn't bombs or nothing," says Sontag, who doesn't consider herself a pacifist. "The world is a complicated place. We can put pressure on our allies and offer bribes and rewards." ... The peace position was also taken by the Worldwide Sisterhood Against Terrorism and War, an organization of about 80 feminists that includes women from Central Asia as well as such U.S. notables as Gloria Steinem, Alice Walker, and Susan Sarandon. In a petition headlined "Not in Our Name," the group declared, 'We will not support the bombing or U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, for it would only punish suffering people and increase the hatred on which terrorists feed.'"

"Global Thinker" (Megan Rosenfeld, The Washington Post, 2001/11/06)
An interview with Benjamin R. Barber, author of "Jihad vs. McWorld" (1995): "In it, Barber describes how the cultural differences between tribalism - ethnic and religious fundamentalism - and global capitalism are (or were) headed inevitably for an explosion of violence. Both are threats to democracy, he argues, and thus intertwine to create the conditions and the motive for combustion. By "McWorld" he means not just the multinational corporations for whom national boundaries are more or less obsolete but also the American values wrapped in such low-culture packaging as pop music, movies, fast food and video games. "Jihad" is those forces who fear and oppose that modernism, people who see themselves engaged in "a holy struggle against something that is seen as evil," Barber says." (See also: "Jihad vs. McWorld" (Benjamin R. Barber, The Atlantic, from the March 1992 issue))

"Harvard scholar's '96 book becomes the word on war" (Patrick Healy, The Boston Globe, 2001/11/06)
An interview with Samuel Huntington, author of ''The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order'' (1996): "The current war, Huntington said in the interview, does not meet his criteria for a clash of civilizations, as long as Muslim and Western nations unite in coalition. ... 'Unfortunately, it seems to me that a true clash is quite likely to happen, as the war goes on and [as] more and more pictures of civilian casualties come out of Afghanistan,' Huntington said. 'I fear that while Sept. 11 united the West, the response to Sept. 11 will unite the Muslim world.''' (See also: "The Clash of Civilizations?" (Samuel P. Huntington, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993))

"The Dogs of War" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2001/11/06)
"The Saudis' princes tease us with polite lectures about our errant policies, more obliquely suggesting that our bombing may lose "friends" among the moderate states. Yet America, unlike Saudi Arabia, has not merely the veneer of modern civilization, but is its wellspring. In a real war, despite severe dislocation we can survive, as in the past, without Saudi oil. The royal family and the faux-culture of the Gulf cannot. Fifteen of their citizens helped to murder 6,000 unsuspecting Americans in a time of peace - a single wing of American fighters could end their entire regime in a few days of war. Such are the frightening and horrendous realities that lurk beneath the unspoken surface when the dogs of war are unleashed. ... After the unprovoked murder of thousands of Americans, the governments in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Palestine, Iraq, and Iran should not lecture us about either our policies or morality, but rather should fear that they themselves are on the edge of a frightening precipice. ... There is a growing chorus of rarely-heard-from Americans between the two coasts - one little known by fundamentalists in the Middle East, or their agents in our capital - which has had enough of all this. They are reaching a state of fury over thousands of our dead, constant germ scares, bomb threats, screaming imams on public television slandering our dead, sneering caveats from puffed-up academics, and lectures from corrupt governments mixed with veiled threats."

"Chomsky Attacks U.S. Double Standards on Terrorism" (tehrantimes.com, 2001/11/06)
Noam Chomsky is on a "lecture tour" in Central Asia, preaching his anti-American gospel. One would hope that his fanaticism finally stands exposed for all to see by his Post-September 11 stance: "Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor Noam Chomsky launched a stunning attack on Washington double standards on terrorism. According to the statesman, an English daily published from New Delhi, Chomsky in his clearest voice of dissent in contemporary America described the U.S.-led attacks on Afghanistan as a "silent genocide", affecting millions of innocent civilians. "They are not the Taleban," he told an overflowing audience at the Fifth D.T. Lakdawala memorial lecture on 'peering into the abyss of the future' which included Indian ministers, diplomats, members of the academia in a 70-minute lecture at the Ficci Auditorium in New Delhi recently. "Terrorism is terrorism that is directed against the U.S. and its friends and allies," he said before reeling out a string of statistics on the misery of the Afghanistan people and U.S. neo-imperialist policies over the decades. ... Chomsky, who kicked off his fortnight long lecture tour of the subcontinent, which will also take him to Pakistan, highlighted the use of brute military and economic might by the U.S. against indigenous people in various parts of the world, particularly Central America. "In the Reagan years alone, U.S.-sponsored state terrorists in Central America left hundreds of thousands of tortured and mutilated corpses, millions on maimed and orphaned, and four countries in ruins, he said." (See also: "Brendan - Manufacturing dissent: Chomsky dissembles on Afghan hunger" (SpinSanity, 2001/11/05): "Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary Online defines genocide as "the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group". It is a grave charge that Chomsky completely fails to prove. The lack of food aid to starving Afghans is neither deliberate (if it was, why would the US be increasing its food aid efforts?) nor systematic (most of the lack of food aid is attributable to the Taliban blocking its distribution). Moreover, the "genocide" is not "silent". On October 9, shortly before Chomsky's speech, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, among other papers, all ran stories on relief officials who believed the US airdrops of food were inadequate. This coverage has continued in the mainstream US press. In fact, the Washington Post recently reported that an international food airlift is now being planned to bring greater supplies into remote regions of the country. Millions of Afghans are undoubtedly at risk, creating real moral dilemmas. Unfortunately, Chomsky's deceptive and inflammatory rhetoric adds little to the debate.". Also: "Noam Chomsky Volunteers to Serve as Domestic Propaganda Chief for Taliban War Machine" (David Horowitz, FrontPageMagazine, 2001/10/29))

"Fighting bin Ladenism" (Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, 2001/11/06)
"This is the game that produced bin Ladenism: Arab regimes fail to build a real future for their people. This triggers seething anger. Their young people who can get visas escape overseas. Those who can't turn to the mosque and Islam to protest. The regimes crush the violent Muslim protesters, but to avoid being accused of being anti-Muslim the regimes give money and free rein to their most hard-line, but nonviolent, Moslem clerics, while also redirecting their public's anger onto America through their press. Result: America ends up being hated and Islam gets handed over to the most anti-modern forces. Have a nice day. ... Here's the good news: Some Arab-Muslim voices are popping up, rejecting the garbage peddled by the regimes. The London-based newspaper Al Hayat just published a letter from an Egyptian film critic, Samir Farid. It said: 'I felt ashamed while reading most, if not all, of the commentary [on Sept. 11], primarily in the Egyptian press. ... Most, if not all, of what I read proves that the poison of the undemocratic, military Arab regimes has also entered the bloodstream of the [intellectual] elite. These [people] no longer see ... destruction for its own sake as disgraceful. What murky future awaits this region?'"

 

Monday, November 5, 2001

News and commentary:

"Wahhabis in America" (Stephen Schwartz, The Weekly Standard, 2001/11/05)
"As Powell should be aware, the Wahhabi-Saudi establishment subsidizes terrorism while seeking to control Muslim religious institutions and activities around the world. Saudi influence reaches even the overwhelming majority of mosques in the United States. The issue, therefore, is not muzzling the Wahhabis, but removing the muzzle from their victims, over whom they exercise an abusive control. ... For Wahhabis everywhere, the party line is laid down in Riyadh, which simultaneously foments terrorist teaching and disclaims any responsibility for Wahhabi atrocities, exemplified by those of bin Laden. Saudis corrupt Muslims abroad in exactly the way that the Soviet Union once bought the loyalty of foreign intellectuals, labor leaders, and guerrilla fighters, and for the same ends. This worldwide subversion can be combated only as fascist and Communist sedition were once fought: with courage and determination, and in full solidarity with the Muslim heroes in the forefront of resistance to it."

"The spirit of terrorism" (Jean Baudrillard, Le Monde/<nettime>, 2001/11/05)
Rachel Bloul's translation of Baudrillard's article on 9/11 gives a glimpse of the spirit of postmodernism. Through the fog of post-modern dialectics he seems to say that the attacks were the world itself resisting domination and The West declaring war on itself through suicide:
"All the speeches and commentaries betray a gigantic abreaction to the event itself and to the fascination that it exerts. Moral condemnation and the sacred union against terrorism are equal to the prodigious jubilation engendered by witnessing this global superpower being destroyed; better, by seeing it more or less self-destroying, even suiciding spectacularly. Though it is (this superpower) that has, through its unbearable power, engendered all that violence brewing around the world, and therefore this terrorist imagination which - unknowingly - inhabits us all. That we have dreamed of this event, that everybody without exception has dreamt of it, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree, - this is unacceptable for Western moral conscience, but it is still a fact, and one which is justly measured by the pathetic violence of all those discourses which attempt to erase it. ...
And power is complicit with its own destruction. When the two towers collapsed, one could feel that they answered the suicide of the kamikazes by their own suicide. It has been said: "God cannot declare war on Itself". Well, It can. The West, in its God-like position (of divine power, and absolute moral legitimacy) becomes suicidal, and declares war on itself. ... In this way it is indeed a World War, not the third one, but the fourth and only truly World War, as it has as stakes globalization itself. ...
It is that which haunts every global order, every hegemonic domination; - if Islam dominated the world, terrorism would fight against it. For it is the world itself which resists domination." (See also: "The Mind of Terrorism" (Jean Baudrilliard, Le Monde/Watch, 2001/11/02 [2003/01/09])

"Under Our Very Noses. The Terrorist Next Door" (Adrian Karatnycky, Freedom House/National Review, 2001/11/05)
"The key hijackers, including Mohamed Atta, were well-educated children of privilege. None of them suffered first-hand economic privation or political oppression. Equally important, it is becoming clear that hundreds, if not thousands, of graduates of bin Laden's schools for terror are Muslims who have grown up and been educated in the United States and Europe. To understand the September 11 terrorists, we should have in mind the profile of the classic revolutionary: deracinated, middle class, shaped in part by exile. In other words, the image of Lenin in Zurich or London; or of Pol Pot and Ho Chi Minh in Paris. Like their Leninist revolutionary forebears, the terrorist shock troops of al-Qaeda see their mission as an international revolutionin their case, to create the khilafah, a global government under Islamic rule. For them, Islamism is the new universal revolutionary creed, and bin Laden is Sheikh Guevara."

"Exhibition opens in former US embassy" (Jonathan Steele, The Guardian, 2001/11/05)
"Crowds of teenage girls, clad in black chadors and shouting anti-American slogans, marched past the old US embassy in Tehran yesterday to mark the 22nd anniversary of its storming by hardline students and Islamic revolutionary guards in 1979. This year's "national day of fighting against global arrogance" was different. For the first time since the hostage seizure which kept 52 American diplomats captive for more than 14 months, the doors of the building dubbed "the nest of spies" were opened. ... The highlight of the bizarre exhibition is the "glass room", a chamber made entirely of glass set inside a room lined with aluminium foil to thwart bugging devices. A waxwork of William Sullivan, the last US ambassador to Iran, sits at a table. Mr Sullivan's former office is hung with framed photographs of mosques captioned: "The mosques of Muslims in America - a shining star in a dark sky." In the empty rooms the Iranians have mounted exhibitions celebrating movements which oppose Israel and US policy in the Middle East, including Islamic Jihad and Hizbullah. The final room is devoted to the attack on Afghanistan. Pictures of ruined houses in Kandahar have the caption: 'Result of bomb-drops of American and English fighters.'"

"Fighting Militant Islam, Without Bias" (Daniel Pipes, City Journal, from the Vol. 11, No. 4 issue, Autumn 2001)
"[Islamism] adapts an age-old faith to the political requirements of our day, sharing some key premises of the earlier totalitarianisms, fascism and Marxism-Leninism. It is an Islamic-flavored version of radical utopianism. Individual Islamists may appear law-abiding and reasonable, but they are part of a totalitarian movement, and as such, all must be considered potential killers. ... What must Americans do to protect themselves from Islamists while safeguarding the civil rights of law-abiding Muslims? The first and most straightforward thing is not to allow any more Islamists into the country. Each Islamist who enters the United States, whether as a visitor or an immigrant, is one more enemy on the home front. ... Keeping Islamists out of the country is an obvious first step, but it will be equally important to watch closely Islamists already living here as citizens or residents. Unfortunately, this means all Muslims must face heightened scrutiny. For the inescapable and painful fact is that, while anyone might become a fascist or communist, only Muslims find Islamism tempting. ... A third key task will be to combat the totalitarian ideology of militant Islam. That means isolating such noisy and vicious Islamist institutions as the American Muslim Council, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Politicians, the press, corporations, voluntary organizations, and society as a whole - all must shun these groups and grant them not a shred of legitimacy."

"Our Islamic Fifth Column" (Farrukh Dhondy, City Journal, from the Vol. 11, No. 4 issue, Autumn 2001)
"And yet even when liberal Muslims declare that what was done to the victims of New York, of the Pentagon, and of the four airliners was an atrocity contrary to the tenets and teachings of the Quran, that it was indeed a sinful transgression of Islam that will not lead to paradise but to hell, the majority of Muslims around the world don't believe them, because they have been convinced by the interpretation of the fundamentalist, whom liberal Muslims allowed to remain unchallenged for so long. ... The creed that leads these vandals to disown and destroy anything that is deemed "un-Islamic" leads them to a mission to challenge and convert the world, through terror if necessary. They don't for a moment consider that the world doesn't want a religion that suppresses women, adopts a medieval creed of crime and punishment, forces people to prayer at the behest of the police, forbids the writing of novels, the making of films, and the playing of music, and destroys the minds of its young and leads them to fanatical acts of suicidal terror in which they murder upward of 6,000 innocents."

"Beijing produces videos glorifying terrorist attacks on 'arrogant' US" (Damien McElroy, The Daily Telegraph, 2001/11/05)
"The Chinese state-run propaganda machine is cashing in on the terror attacks in New York and Washington, producing books, films and video games glorifying the strikes as a humbling blow against an arrogant nation. ... As rescue workers pick through the rubble of the twin towers, the commentator proclaims that the city had reaped the consequences of decades of American bullying of weaker nations. He said: ''This is the America the whole world has wanted to see. Blood debts have been repaid in blood. America has bombed other countries and used its hegemony to deny the natural rights of others without paying the price. Who until now has dared to avenge the hurts inflicted by unaccountable Americans.'' ... On the unofficial films the commentary is even more callous: 'Look at the panic in their faces as they wipe off the dust and crawl out of their strong buildings - now just a heap of rubble. We will never fear these people again, they have been shown to be soft-bellied paper tigers.'"

"Getting It Wrong in the Middle East" (Daniel Pipes, Jewish World Review, 2001/11/05)
"Whoever paid attention to the American professors who specialize on the Middle East would have heard some surprising things before September 11. For one, they dismissed militant Islamic terror as unworthy of their attention. Listen to Fawaz Gerges - a well-known scholar whose credentials include connections to Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard, as well as a professorship at Sarah Lawrence College in New York: Gerges declared himself skeptical of the U.S. government's warnings about terrorism and criticized what he called "the terrorist industry" (a disdainful term for specialists on this topic) for exaggerating "the terrorist threat to American citizens." Professor Gerges even accused (in a sentence I expect him deeply to regret) terrorist specialists of indirectly perpetuating an "irrational fear of terrorism by focusing too much on farfetched horrible scenarios." Hmm. Gerges, it bears noting, published these insights just a half year before the farfetched suicide hijackings of September 11. He is just one scholar of many who got it wrong, as my colleague Martin Kramer shows in his new book, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Washington Institute for Near East Policy)."

"What are we fighting against? It's simple - fundamentalism" (Barbara Amiel, The Daily Telegraph, 2001/11/05)
"Opponents of the war always begin with a solemn condemnation of the slaughter in Manhattan. Having done that, they offer no means of preventing more terrorism except through resort to diplomacy, intelligence gathering and pressure on the Israelis to make peace with the Palestinians. Since America has tried diplomatic and legal channels to extradite bin Laden for several years without success, that route is a dead end. ... This shows a total incomprehension that Britain was attacked as well as America. Bin Laden's own declaration of war was against Christians, Jews, infidels and Crusaders - our entire modern civilisation. For anyone not to understand this is, to put it mildly, a failure in thinking. ... What are we to make of people who call for further diplomatic dialogue with the Taliban or tell us to think about Gandhi? This is a joke. Much as I dislike looking at people's reasoning in psychological terms, one is forced to do it in the same way you might if someone argued that the Moon is made of green cheese."

"Earth to Ivory Tower: Get Real!" (Kay S. Hymowitz and Harry Stein, The Wall Street Journal, 2001/11/05)
"As close to self-parody as they come, these speeches make clear what motivates those Americans, on campus and off, who remain in a state of moral denial even after getting a Technicolor view of evil: multiculturalism. This ideology goes way beyond preaching the tolerance that is a bedrock virtue of a pluralistic society to insisting that all cultures are equally good - regardless of whether they beat their women, practice slavery or torture political dissidents. ... The moral paralysis these ideas have caused is blatantly obvious on college campuses. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, one teacher of creative writing at Pasadena City College described a class discussion of Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," in which students refused to judge the stoning of a village resident because they believed human sacrifice might be part of the villagers' religion. One student explained: "We are taught not to judge - and if [stoning] has worked for them," we can't condemn it. In another article in the same journal, a Hamilton College philosophy professor noted that his students were reluctant to judge Hitler, apartheid, and slavery. "Of course I dislike the Nazis," one student observed, "but who is to say they are morally wrong?" If one can't judge Nazism morally repugnant, it's easy to ascribe to murderous terrorists understandable and even valid reasons. Aren't Islamist radicals expressing their own cultural truth?"

 

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