Archived news and commentary: November 19 - 25, 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:

"Clare Short betrays our cause and her ignorance" (Richard Perle, The Sunday Times, 2001/11/25)
"Miss Short shares what she believes to be the international consensus that there is a demonstrable connection between middle-class Saudi and Egyptian terrorists killing innocent civilians, in a plot directed by a Saudi millionaire, and the existence of poverty in the world. Thus she argues that action to alleviate poverty is needed to prevent a repeat of the September 11 attacks. ... No, Miss Short's international consensus is something else: the preferred cliche of ministers of international development. I am all for trying to alleviate poverty - not because I believe it will make us safer, but because it is the decent thing to do. But we won't succeed in eliminating poverty soon. And while we are waiting, I hope Miss Short will forgive me if I say I would like to begin by eliminating Osama bin Laden."

"Konduz on verge of falling" (CNN.com, 2001/11/25)
"The first Northern Alliance troops have entered Kunduz, as the city's Taliban and foreign defenders were surrendering "continuously". No fighting was initially reported as the Taliban opposition moved in, according Northern Alliance commanders. ... More than 1,300 Taliban from Konduz surrendered Saturday, many of them streaming out of the city in trucks, cars, jeeps, and some tanks. They were greeted as heroes and said they would switch sides to help the Northern Alliance fight for the city. Defecting troops said they surrendered in part because U.S. airstrikes had demoralized Taliban forces in the city."

News and commentary:

"The siege of Kunduz is a defining moment for us all" (Fergal Keane, Independent, 2001/11/24)
"We have come to a moment of crucial moral choice in the still young century. It has arisen because of a dust-blown town whose name may yet come to rank among the sites of the most notorious atrocities of the last 100 years. Kunduz. A place that might become like My Lai in Vietnam, Hama in Syria or Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon. Or maybe not. For Kunduz is not yet the chronicle of a massacre foretold. There is still time to save the city and the 300,000 people – fighters and civilians – besieged within its perimeters. ... The coalition must use whatever pressure it can to insist that the Northern Alliance does not embark on a rampage in Kunduz. It is, in the most fundamental sense imaginable, a choice about the kind of world in which we want to live."

"Truth is lies" (The Times, 2001/11/24)
"Nothing could be more cynical or despicable than the harnessing by President Mugabe’s vile regime of President Bush’s war on terrorism to its own intimidation of Zimbabwe’s Opposition and independent press. In Orwellian language, a government spokesman has accused of "terrorism" six journalists trying to penetrate the miasma of official lies, and used the Bush definition to make ominous threats against their supporters - especially the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC). 'We agree with President Bush that anyone who in any way finances, harbours or defends terrorists is himself a terrorist,' he said. 'We too will not make any difference between terrorists and their friends and supporters.'"

"Israeli Forces Kill a Top Leader of Islamic Group in West Bank" (James Bennet, The New York Times, 2001/11/24)
"Firing missiles from helicopters at a van on a West Bank road, Israeli forces tonight killed a top leader of the Palestinian extremist group Hamas who had eluded them for years, Hamas officials said. The man, Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, had been wanted by the Israelis since at least 1995, and his escapes from previous attempts to capture or kill him had gained him a reputation in the West Bank as "the man with seven lives." ... Two brothers who were members of Hamas were also killed in the attack, on a day when at least seven Palestinians, combatants and civilians, died violently in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. On Thursday, five Palestinian boys died in Gaza in an explosion that Palestinian officials attributed to an Israeli bomb. Israeli officials said today that they would investigate the incident. The surge in violence precedes the arrival on Monday of American envoys spearheading the Bush administration's first intensive drive for peace in the Middle East."

News and commentary:

"What Enoch was really saying" (Simon Heffer, The Spectator, from the 2001/11/24 issue)
"The recent exposure of cracks in our so-called 'multicultural' society, as a result of the war against terrorism, has brought [Enoch Powell's] Birmingham speech of April 1968 back to several people's minds. ... The word 'multiculturalism' was not in his vocabulary, but the speech was a warning against it. It was a warning to politicians of the mess they were storing up for the future by their refusal to act on this problem when it was 'a cloud no bigger than a man's hand'. The angry demonstrations by British Muslims against the native civilisation that we have seen in recent weeks, and which have helped drive the Home Secretary to propose some draconian laws to keep the peace in multicultural Britain, are symbols of the extreme behaviour that has been made inevitable by the failure to heed what Powell said."

"Democracy's Uneasy Steps in Islamic World" (Douglas Jehl, The New York Times, 2001/11/23)
"In the Arab world, true democracy is scarcer than in any other part of the globe. The Persian Gulf is ruled by kings, emirs, sheiks and sultans. Elsewhere, leaders may be called president, like Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, but even they are strongmen who run for office unopposed. ... The basic principle of one person one vote frightens many Arabs, and for a practical reason. At a time when democracy is new and its institutions untested, and with many Arab societies divided among tribes or sects, or between modernists and traditionalists, there are concerns that majorities might become tyrannical."

"The Silent Imams" (Charles Krauthammer, The Washington Post, 2001/11/23)
"Imagine if 19 murderous Christian fundamentalists hijacked four airplanes over Saudi Arabia and, in the name of God, crashed them into the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, destroying the holy Kaaba and killing thousands of innocent Muslim pilgrims. Could anyone doubt that the entire Christian world - clergy and theologians, leaders and lay folk - would rise as one to denounce the act? ... And yet after Sept. 11, where were the Muslim theologians and clergy, the imams and mullahs, rising around the world to declare that Sept. 11 was a crime against Islam? Where were the fatwas against Osama bin Laden? The voices of high religious authority have been scandalously still. ... Hence that great post-Sept. 11 oddity: Deafening silence from the spiritual authorities of Islam, obsessive chatter from Americans, largely Christian, filling that silence with near apologetic professions of good faith and tolerance."

"Terrorist Software" (Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, 2001/11/23)
"Over coffee the other day here in the gulf, an Arab friend - a sweet, thoughtful, liberal person - confided to me something that was deeply troubling him: "My 11-year-old son thinks bin Laden is a good man." For Americans, Osama bin Laden is a mass murderer. But for many young Arabs, bin Laden, even in defeat, is still Robin Hood. What attracts them to him is not his vision of the ideal Muslim society, which few would want to live in. No, what attracts them to him is his sheer defiance of everything young Arabs and Muslims detest - their hypocritical rulers, Israel, U.S. dominance and their own economic backwardness."

 

News and commentary:

"Charity workers tell of ordeal in 'human zoo'" (Roger Boyes, The Times, 2001/11/22)
"A grisly account of torture in Taleban prisons was given yesterday by four recently freed German aid workers held hostage for 101 days. Cruel games with a gun, maggoty food and regular parades of the women before their guards were part of life behind bars for the captives. ... The youngest of the German prisoners, Kati Jellinek, 29, was blonde and of particular interest to the Taleban. When she was arrested, five men with Kalashnikovs demanded that she pack, unpack and repack her underwear. ... For up to nine hours at a time, Margit Stebner, 43, was forced to sit in a cell in the Taleban secret police headquarters in Kabul. An official raised a pistol and shot into the wall 20 inches from her ear. ... Georg Taubmann, 45, the team leader, was in a cell with thieves awaiting amputation of their hands. Some prisoners had open wounds from their heavy chains; others were deranged from torture and fear."

"Focus Shifts to Guerrilla Warfare in the South" (Thomas E. Ricks, International Herald Tribune, 2001/11/22)
"Despite all the talk at the Pentagon of an unconventional war, much of the action has resembled a very conventional conflict, with Northern Alliance fighters carrying out set-piece advances aided by U.S. air strikes. But the fighting in the south promises to resemble classic guerrilla war, experts said. As described by military planners and experts outside the government, the next phase will be murkier, lacking definable front lines, with U.S. forces pursuing small groups of Taliban leaders and members of Osama bin Laden's Qaida terror network."

News and commentary:

"Danes Dump Hamlet, back tough laws" (Martin Sieff, UPI, 2001/11/21)
"Hamlet, Prince of Denmark couldn't make up his mind. But this week, the Danish people did. And they confirmed a global trend in prosperous democracies for far tougher immigration and law-and-order policies. ... The Liberals became the largest party in the nation for the first time in 81 years, going up to 56 seats The anti-immigration, upstart Danish People's Party also did well, going up to 22 seats becoming the third largest in the little nation of 5.3 million people for the first time. ... The defeat of the Social Democrats, coming as it does right after the failure of the Australian Labour Party to evict Prime Minister John Howard and his Liberals in Australia last week, suggests several significant new trends are developing in major industrialized democracies. First, immigration and related security and law and order issues are now taking center stage around the world following the mega-terrorist horrors of Sept. 11. These issues proved decisive in Denmark just as they did in Australia. .... Second, the Danish result, like the Australian one, suggests that the tidal wave of center-left governments that combined conservative free market economics with radical and multi-cultural social ones over the past decade since the collapse of communism has now spent itself and is in full retreat."

"Help Iraqis Take Their Country Back" (Kanan Makiya, The New York Times, 2001/11/21)
"What is desperately needed is an iron American resolve to end the existing regime, backed up with financial resources for the opposition and stronger security guarantees to the Kurds than are in place now. Operating from secured bases in the country, and perhaps in Kuwait or Jordan, Iraqis can do the rest. There is now a tremendous opportunity to end American indifference and inaction toward the political cancer that Saddam Hussein represents in this region. This is a part of the world that needs a radical shift in American policy. If the challenge represented by the attacks of Sept. 11 is going to be met, then overthrowing Saddam Hussein by reaching out to the people of Iraq is where it has to begin."

"Postmodern Jihad: What Osama bin Laden learned from the Left" (Waller R. Newell, Jewish World Review, 2001/11/21)
"Sartre's protégé, the Algerian writer Frantz Fanon, crystallized the Third World variant of postmodernist revolution in "The Wretched of the Earth" (1961). From there, it entered the world of Middle Eastern radicals. ... MANY ELEMENTS in the ideology of al Qaeda - set forth most clearly in Osama bin Laden's 1996 "Declaration of War Against America" - derive from this same mix. Indeed, in Arab intellectual circles today, bin Laden is already being likened to an earlier icon of Third World revolution who renounced a life of privilege to head for the mountains and fight the American oppressor, Che Guevara. According to Cairo journalist Issandr Elamsani, Arab leftist intellectuals still see the world very much in 1960s terms. 'They are all ex-Sorbonne, old Marxists,' he says, 'who look at everything through a postcolonial prism.'"

"Defiant Taleban to fight on" (BBC News, 2001/11/21)
"The Taleban say they will fight to the death to hold on to areas still under their control in Afghanistan. Syed Tayyab Agha, a spokesman for Taleban leader Mullah Omar, said the movement was still in control of three Afghan provinces, and part of another. ... The Taleban say they will fight to the death to hold on to areas still under their control in Afghanistan. Syed Tayyab Agha, a spokesman for Taleban leader Mullah Omar, said the movement was still in control of three Afghan provinces, and part of another."

News and commentary:

"Idiocy Watch: Special Norman Mailer Edition" (The New Republic, 2001/11/20)
A report on what Norman Mailer told an audience at the Cross Border Festival in Amsterdam on October 29: "Everything wrong with America led to the point where the country built that tower of Babel, which consequently had to be destroyed. ... And then came the next shock. We had to realize that the people that did this were brilliant. It showed that the ego we could hold up until September 10 was inadequate. ... The key thing is that we in America are convinced that it was blind, mad fanatics who didn't know what they were doing. But what if those perpetrators were right and we were not? We have long ago lost the capability to take a calm look at the enormity of our enemy's position."

"Bombing stopped Milosevic: it will stop bin Laden, too" (Ibrahim Rugova, The Daily Telegraph, 2001/11/20)
"As I listen to reports of American air strikes over Afghanistan, I can remember when Nato aircraft were in action in the skies above Kosovo. We saw them as our saviours, defending us because we were at risk. But some people in Nato countries criticised their governments for intervening. Fortunately for us, they were ignored. ... To a Kosovo Albanian, the criticisms of the military campaign in Afghanistan are strikingly familiar. When Milosevic refused to capitulate after only a few days of bombing, the critics queued up to say the military campaign was flawed and failing. ... Another criticism of the Nato air campaign in Kosovo at the time was that it created, rather than averted, a humanitarian crisis there. People are today saying the same thing about the military campaign in Afghanistan. But in Kosovo, as in Afghanistan, what many people failed to realise was that the humanitarian crisis had begun much earlier. In Kosovo, many thousands of people were displaced by Milosevic's security forces the year before. In Afghanistan, the situation is even more stark: more than 4.5 million Afghans had been forced to flee their homes in the years of conflict before September 11."

"Diehards kill four journalists" (Philip Smucker, The Daily Telegraph, 2001/11/20)
"Four journalists were forced out of their cars at gunpoint yesterday and shot dead by Taliban diehards in what anti-Taliban officials said marked the start of the ousted regime's threatened guerrilla campaign. ... Tory Ali, the driver of the second car, said: "They dragged my passengers towards the river. The journalists were pleading, even grabbing at their beards." He said that one of the killers picked up a large stone and hit one of the men several times on the head. "After that, they were shot in the back." The gunmen then stole satellite phones, cameras and the journalists' belongings. After the killings, one of them approached a taxi driver and asked: "Do you know your Islam?" When the driver quoted the Muslim declaration of faith, another killer said: 'You people say that the Taliban have been removed from power. No. We are here until we take our revenge.'"

"Arabs on Our Side" (Fareed Zakaria, The Washington Post, 2001/11/20)
"This is not to say that there isn't plenty of anti-American sentiment in these countries. There is, and it poses a serious problem for Washington. But it did not translate into support for bin Laden, Islamic fundamentalism or terrorism. On the evidence of the past six weeks, most Muslims are still struggling to combine their faith with modernity and have not given in to fantasies about a medieval utopia based on "pure Islam." ... Osama bin Laden did seem to appeal to millions of frustrated people in the Islamic world. But much of his appeal was as an alternative to the wretched regimes of the Arab world and as a symbol of defiance against the mighty American superpower. Once you take success away from bin Laden, what's left is a spoiled Saudi millionaire with a medieval world view. It turned out that there wasn't much support for that in the Muslim world."

News and commentary:

"An Arsenal of Believers" (Nasra Hassan, The New Yorker, from the 2001/11/19 issue)
"I asked S. to describe his preparations for the suicide mission. "We were in a constant state of worship," he said. "We told each other that if the Israelis only knew how joyful we were they would whip us to death! Those were the happiest days of my life." 'What is the attraction of martyrdom?' I asked. 'The power of the spirit pulls us upward, while the power of material things pulls us downward,' he said. 'Someone bent on martyrdom becomes immune to the material pull. Our planner asked, 'What if the operation fails?' We told him, 'In any case, we get to meet the Prophet and his companions, inshallah.' We were floating, swimming, in the feeling that we were about to enter eternity.'"

"The Revolt of Islam" (Bernard Lewis, The New Yorker, from the 2001/11/19 issue)
"For Osama bin Laden, 2001 marks the resumption of the war for the religious dominance of the world that began in the seventh century. For him and his followers, this is a moment of opportunity. Today, America exemplifies the civilization and embodies the leadership of the House of War, and, like Rome and Byzantium, it has become degenerate and demoralized, ready to be overthrown. ... If bin Laden can persuade the world of Islam to accept his views and his leadership, then a long and bitter struggle lies ahead, and not only for America. Sooner or later, Al Qaeda and related groups will clash with the other neighbors of Islam - Russia, China, India - who may prove less squeamish than the Americans in using their power against Muslims and their sanctities. If bin Laden is correct in his calculations and succeeds in his war, then a dark future awaits the world, especially the part of it that embraces Islam."

"Victory shifts the Muslim World" (Daniel Pipes, New York Post/danielpipes.org, 2001/11/19)
"For two decades - since Ayatollah Khomeini reached power in Iran in 1979 spouting "Death to America" - U.S. embassies, planes, ships, and barracks have been assaulted, leading to hundreds of American deaths. In the face of this, Washington hardly responded. And, as Muslims watched militant Islam inflict one defeat after another on the far more powerful United States, they increasingly concluded that America, for all its resources, was tired and soft. ... The Sept. 11 attacks were expected to take a major step toward extinguishing America by demoralizing the population and leading to civil unrest, perhaps starting a sequence of events that would lead to the U.S. government's collapse. Instead, the more than 4,000 deaths served as a rousing call to arms. Just two months later, the deployment of U.S. might has reduced the prospects of militant Islam. The pattern is clear: So long as Americans submitted passively to murderous attacks by militant Islam, this movement gained support among Muslims. When Americans finally fought militant Islam, its appeal quickly diminished."

"Looking the World in the Eye" (Robert D. Kaplan, The Atlantic, from the December 2001 issue)
An admiring and excellent portrait of Samuel P. Huntington: "If American political science leaves any lasting intellectual monument, the work of Samuel Huntington will be one of its pillars. A passage in the conclusion of "American Politics" has always seemed to me to capture the essence of Huntington's enduring judgment and political sensibility: 'Critics say that America is a lie because its reality falls so far short of its ideals. They are wrong. America is not a lie; it is a disappointment. But it can be a disappointment only because it is also a hope.'" (See also: "The Clash of Civilizations?" (Samuel P. Huntington, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993))

See the archive for earlier news and commentary.

 

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

Jacques Barzun

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, New York Sun, 2006/11/16)

"Terrorists are recruiting in our schools, says MI5 boss" (Philip Johnston, The Daily Telegraph, 2006/11/10)

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From the archives

Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.

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

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

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

"Anger and Pride" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2001/12/19)

Weekly archive

2006/12/04 - 2006/12/10
2006/11/27 - 2006/12/03
2006/11/20 - 2006/11/26
2006/11/13 - 2006/11/19
2006/11/06 - 2006/11/12
2006/10/30 - 2006/11/05

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Author index

› Ajami, Fouad - Johnson, Paul
› Kagan, Robert - Ye'or, Bat



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