"Judgment
Day in Mystery Babylon?"
"The Daily Mirror called on its readers to 'Mourn on the 4th of July - for the victims of George W Bush and his bid to control the world'." (Alice Thompson)
News and commentary on anti-Americanism and anti-West sentiments.
Part 1: 2001/09/12 - 2001/09/29
Part 2: 2001/10/01 - 2001/12/28
Part 3: 2002/01/08 - 2002/06/28
Part 4: 2002/07/01 - 2002/08/30
Part 5: 2002/09/03 - 2002/09/30
Part 6: 2002/10/03 - 2002/11/30
Part 7: 2002/12/01 - 2003/01/15
Part 8: 2003/01/17 -August 2002
"The Tatters of Anticolonialism" (Bruce S. Thornton, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/08/30)
"Iranian Conservative Daily: 'America is the New Nazism'" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 417, 2002/08/30)
"Saudi Reactions to the Lawsuit by September 11 Families" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 416, 2002/08/30)
"Does John Ashcroft's 'Camp Plan' Actually Exist?" (John Hawkins, Right Wing News, 2002/08/23)
"Challenging ignorance on Islam: A ten-point primer for Americans" (Gary Leupp, Arab News, 2002/08/19 [?])
"The Saudis' Bad Press" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/08/16)
"The U.S.-German Conversation" (Claudia Winkler, The Weekly Standard, 2002/08/15)
"Bush in the hot seat over flooded Europe" (Cape Times/IOL, 2002/08/14)
"Global warmth for U.S. after 9/11 turns to frost" (Ellen Hale, USA Today, 2002/08/14)
"Schools of Hatred" (The Times, 2002/08/10)
"Islamist Leaders in London Interviewed" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 410, 2002/08/09)
"Saddam warns against Iraq attack" (BBC News, 2002/08/08)
"Open Letter to America from a Canadian" (W.R. McDougall, The Baltimore Chronicle, 2002/08/07)
"Sophisticated Stupidity" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/08/07)
"Sontagism" (Stefan Kanfer, City Journal, 2002/08/07)
"The logic of empire" (George Monbiot, The Guardian, 2002/08/06)
"National Weekly Arab-American Paper Publishes Poems: "Yes, I am a Terrorist" and 'Bush is an Ape'" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 407, 2002/08/04)July 2002
"Islam rejecting globalization - and Jews and Israel" (Yair Sheleg, Haaretz, 2002/07/22)
"Stereotyping and the Decline of Common Sense" (Paul Hollander, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/07/19)
"Saddam vows to defeat United States" (UPI, 2002/07/17)
"Spies Like Us" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/07/15)
"Sontag Award Nominee" (andrewsullivan.com, 2002/07/15)
"All the Hate That's Fit to Print" (Stephen Schwartz, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/07/22 issue)
"Tales of Canterbury's Future?" (Peter Mullen, The Wall Street Journal, 2002/07/12)
"Bush pulls it off again" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2002/07/13 issue)
"Communists and Islamic Extremists - Then and Now" (Stephen Schwartz, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/07/08)
"Why Don't We Listen Anymore?" (Clyde Prestowitz, The Washington Post, 2002/07/07)
"Why does everybody suddenly hate America?" (Alice Thompson, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/07/05)
"As Pakistani's Popularity Slides, 'Busharraf' Is a Figure of Ridicule" (Dexter Filkins, The New York Times, 2002/07/05)
"Egyptian Government Daily Al-Akhbar Responds to Bush's Address" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 397, 2002/07/02)
"The Cold War and the War Against Terror" (Jamie Glazov, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/07/01)
"The Tatters of Anticolonialism" (Bruce S. Thornton, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/08/30)
Thornton on the Marxist concepts of "colonialism" and "imperialism": "The behavior of the Europeans in the rest of the world - grabbing territory and resources, just as human beings had done for millennia - was now redefined as some new unique evil peculiar to Western capitalist societies. ... But what about America? The greatest capitalist and bourgeois nation in history had no colonial empire to speak of. ... The answer was to transform American minorities, particularly blacks and Indians, into the equivalents of third-world colonial subjects. ... If the Europeans and Americans were like the rest of humanity in violently appropriating resources, they were different in one fundamental respect: ultimately they viewed their own behavior as evil and a betrayal of the highest Western values. ... "Colonialism" and "imperialism" are verbal smokescreens used to disguise an ideologically skewed standard by which America and the West are judged uniquely evil and the rest of the world is idealized into noble-savage victims whose violence is justified or rationalized away as an understandable response to Western depredations. That is, these concepts justify an anti-Western and anti-American prejudice.""Iranian Conservative Daily: 'America is the New Nazism'" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 417, 2002/08/30)
Excerpts from an editorial in the Iranian Farsi-language conservative daily Jumhur-ye Islami, drawing parallels George W. Bush's America and Adolf Hitler's Nazi Germany: "These are some of the words of Ayatollah Khamenei, the Supreme Leader of the revolution... For the past half-century, the language of the Americans has always been the language of power and coercion. If Hitler had had to show the face of a bloodthirsty dictator, he would have had to adopt [the face of] George W. Bush... who has, for the past 20 months, since the beginning of his rule, taken on the pattern of Hitler's behavior in international relations. ... There is a great resemblance between the behavior of today's Americans and the behavior of the Nazis then: terrorizing other countries, seeking to rule over [them], intervening aerially [by bombing], and making a mockery of all the international rules and treaties.""Saudi Reactions to the Lawsuit by September 11 Families" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 416, 2002/08/30)
Excerpts from articles in Saudi newspapers on the lawsuit against Saudi and other Arab officials and organizations by the families of September 11 victims: "In an article titled "This is America," [Saleh Al-Shihi, a columnist for the Saudi daily Al-Watan] wrote: "This is America, the civilization that arose on the skulls of others. ... America, that erected the Statue of Liberty so as to plunder others by it; America, that established liberty in order to kill millions of people in its name, from the Indians to Afghan children..." ... A columnist for the Saudi daily Al-Riyadh, Abdallah Al-Kaid, wrote: 'The [Saudi] people are not to be blamed for the state of horror to which you [Americans] are subject in your country – a situation from which you will not escape... unless you concede the rights of the people and fight the evil among you and stop your aggression towards the world. ... We have no need to defend our good and clean name, as we are peace-loving people who never started a war against anyone throughout their history. As for you [Americans], no one needs proof of your crimes, written in history in ink as black as your history of murder and genocide.'""Does John Ashcroft's 'Camp Plan' Actually Exist?" (John Hawkins, Right Wing News, 2002/08/23)
"Did you know that John Ashcroft has announced that he intends to put "U.S. citizens he deems to be enemy combatants" into camps? Well best selling author Michael Moore has heard about it and it reminds him of the Nazi concentration camps... "With only two "enemy combatants" so far, we'll have to find some more soon to make it a really good, fun camp. All hail the mutterland!" ... Oddly enough, every single reference to this story that I found on the net seemed to be somehow linked to a single editorial written by Johnathan Turley in the LA Times. In Turley's August 14th piece called 'Camps for Citizens: Ashcroft's Hellish Vision,' Johnathan Turley states over and over again in the article that John Ashcroft intends to create "camps" for American citizens. ... ...Turley's entire screed in the LA Times sprang from the third paragraph of the piece, "The Goose Creek, S.C., facility that houses Mr. Padilla ... now has a special wing that could be used to jail about 20 U.S. citizens if the government were to deem them enemy combatants, a senior administration official said." ... First off, whatever you may think of possibly jailing 20 "enemy combatants" without trial, doing so certainly does not in any way, shape, or form mean you've created a "camp." Furthermore, how does imprisoning 20 men in one Navy brig somehow constitute creating "camps", much less having a "camp plan?" Worse yet, to compare jailing less than two dozen people believed to be connected to terrorist organizations to putting 120,000+ Americans in camps based on their ethnicity goes beyond gross exaggeration into what many people would call deliberate deception." (See also: Michael Moore (2002/08/23) and "Camps for Citizens: Ashcroft's Hellish Vision" (Jonathan Turley, Los Angeles Times, 2002/08/14))
"Challenging ignorance on Islam: A ten-point primer for Americans" (Gary Leupp, Arab News, 2002/08/19 [?])
Leupp is a Associate Professor of History at Tufts University. He has prepared a "primer on Islam for Americans" because "ignorance" is "raw material for a made-in-USA version of fascism". According to Leupp, school vouchers are far more threatening than Islamist terrorism: "Recent changes in US law (allowing the use of vouchers to support religious schools at taxpayer's expense), and the failure of the courts to prosecute behavior which plainly violates the constitutional separation of church and state, demonstrate that medieval thinking and fundamentalism retain a strong hold in sections of US society, and are well represented in the Bush administration. The American people are, I submit, far more threatened by Christian fundamentalism than its Islamic counterpart.""The Saudis' Bad Press" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/08/16)
Taranto quotes two articles from Arab News: "For example, Nourah Abdul Aziz Al-Khereiji writes: "Is the vainglorious and headstrong United States taking the world to total destruction? Blind US actions against Arab and Muslim countries will undoubtedly halt global economic progress causing untold miseries the world over. ... Hasn't the US proven itself to be a terrorist country by resorting to methods of terrorizing peace-loving people in various parts of the world? Isn't its unilateral attempt to redraw the map of the Middle East an act of international terrorism?" ... Then there's Israel Shamir, who writes anti-Semitic screeds from Israel. In his latest, he suggests America and Britain were on the wrong side in World War II, faulting them for having dropped bombs on "Germans and French, for offending Jews." Offending? He refers to the "Judeo-American cult, probably the most violent and war-prone since Genghis Khan" and claims that "your average American Jew values his Jewish-ness well above his American-ness." Shamir concludes with the observation that "there are many good Jews, in Israel and in the US alike." How very reassuring." (See also: "Extension of terrorism by other means" (Nourah Abdul Aziz Al-Khereiji, Arab News, 2002/08/16 [?]) and "Take the money and run" (Israel Shamir, Arab News, 2002/08/16))
"The U.S.-German Conversation" (Claudia Winkler, The Weekly Standard, 2002/08/15)
"For the past week, a U.S.-German debate over the war on terrorism has been raging in the German press. Here, almost no one has noticed. Similarly, almost no one paid attention back in February, when the Institute for American Values, a small New York think tank specializing in family issues, published "What We're Fighting For: A Letter From America," signed by 60 intellectuals of mostly neo-con persuasion. (Think Fukuyama, Huntington, Galston, Putnam, Weigel.) Some Germans, however, did notice, and they responded in May with a letter of their own. Its 103 signatories are, loosely speaking, pacifist intellectuals or peace-movement activists - a more mainstream group in Germany than in the United States, given Germany's very different intellectual history. Now the Institute for American Values' comeback, published on August 8, is making front-page news and prompting comment in newspapers across Germany. The original American letter was a fairly sophisticated 20-page reflection on basic political values, separation of church and state, just-war theory, and the provocation of September 11. It concluded that war is justified against the "organized killers with global reach [who] now threaten all of us." The German reply is entitled "A World of Justice and Peace Would Be Different." It rejects the very concept of "just war" as "an ill-starred historical concept" and calls the killing of civilians in the American assault on Afghanistan 'mass murder.'" (See also: "What We're Fighting For: A Letter from America" (Institute for American Values, 2002/02/12), "A World of Justice and Peace would be Different" (Propositions Online, 2002/05/17) and "Is the Use of Force Ever Morally Justified?" (Propositions Online, 2002/08/08))
"Bush in the hot seat over flooded Europe" (Cape Times/IOL, 2002/08/14)
Guess who's to blame for the flooding in Europe?: "As thousands flee flooding in central Europe, many people in Germany are convinced they know where to put the blame for the catastrophe - on United States President George Bush's refusal to sign the Kyoto climate accords. ... "Monsoon rains are sending our rivers over their bands as the Alpine glaciers are receding at an alarming rate and it is all due to global warming and the failure of the Kyoto accords due to Bush's refusal to sign," a television reporter told viewers. ... The leftist Tageszeitung said the floods proved once and for all that "Bush is not omnipotent. He has made a big mistake." The Heidelberg newspaper Rhein-Neckar Zeitung said: 'The final decision on long-term climate policy rests with the US. The Bush administration has put the issue at the bottom of its agenda and that is truly a man-made catastrophe.'""Global warmth for U.S. after 9/11 turns to frost" (Ellen Hale, USA Today, 2002/08/14)
"Here in Britain, the United States' staunchest friend, snide remarks and downright animosity greet many Americans these days. It's not just religious radicals and terrorists who resent the United States anymore. ... "My sense is that much of the rampant anti-Americanism we see now is very much linked to a war with Iraq and the Israel-Palestine issue," says Mary Kaldor, a London-based scholar on international relations. In the popular Straw Poll BBC radio show July 26, Kaldor debated with Washington Post reporter T. R. Reid whether "American power is the power of the good." She argued that the U.S. role as the sole superpower was a danger to the rest of the world. At the end of the program, 70% of the studio audience said it agreed with her. ... New Yorker Julia Magnet, a journalist who just moved to London, found that out when she decided to throw a Fourth of July party for British friends. Between grilled sausages and chocolate cake, her friends launched an attack on Bush and the United States. They called Bush a "homicidal maniac" and "stupid" and the United States the 'world's biggest terrorist.'""Schools of Hatred" (The Times, 2002/08/10)
"The murder of three Pakistani nurses at a missionary school by assailants hurling grenades has sent a wave of fear and revulsion throughout Pakistan. ... But it is all too clear that, for the fanatics emerging from the seminaries and mosques under the control of obscurantist mullahs, Christians of any race and Westerners are legitimate targets. ... What the West has shockingly failed to acknowledge is that the funds to support some of the most fanatical and anti-Western seminaries have often come from the West. Rich Muslims in Europe, and especially in Britain, have smugly discharged their religious duty to support charity by sending millions of pounds to addresses that are often fronts for the training of terrorists. And until the West stops the flow of funds to these distant centres of terrorist indoctrination, Mr Musharraf's war against fanaticism will fail. More Christians will be murdered, more hatred engendered and more terrorists strengthened in their determination to strike at the West." (See also: "Grenades Kill at Church in Pakistan" (Munir Ahmad, AP/Yahoo! News, 2002/08/09))"Islamist Leaders in London Interviewed" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 410, 2002/08/09)
Translations of two highly interesting interviews with "two Islamist leaders living in London: Sheikh Abu Hamza the Egyptian, imam of the Finsbury Park Mosque and head of the Ansar Al-Shari'ah organization, and Sheikh Omar Bakri, originally from Syria, who established and heads the Islamic Religious Court in London and also heads the Al-Muhajiroun Islamist organization." Here's an excerpt from the interview with Omar Bakri:
"Bakri: "Allah willing, we will transform the West into Dar Al-Islam [that is, a region under Islamic rule] by means of invasion from without. If an Islamic state arises and invades [the West] we will be its army and its soldiers from within. If not, [we will change the West] through ideological invasion from here, without war and killing." ...
Q: "You are charged with links to organizations towards which Britain is hostile and which it sees as enemies. You preach to your pupils to see the Taliban movement and Osama bin Laden as the group which [according to Muslim tradition] will be saved [on Judgment Day]."
Bakri: 'As long as my words do not become actions, they do no harm! Here, the law does not punish you for words, as long as there is no proof you have carried out actions. In such a case you are still on the margins of the law, and they cannot punish you. If they want to punish you, they must present evidence against you, otherwise their laws will be in a state of internal contradiction. Then this will serve Islam, because we will be able to claim that the capitalist camp has failed in the face of the Islamic camp in actualizing the things in which it believes, like freedom of expression.'" (Note: Abu Hamza puts forth a conspiracy theory regarding the September 11 terror attacks - "It turned out that Al-Qa'ida was not connected to the events. From an engineer's standpoint, I can prove that these buildings did not fall just like that because of a fire... Anyone who knows the properties of these buildings knows that Al-Qa'ida didn't do it. These buildings were blown up from within...")"Saddam warns against Iraq attack" (BBC News, 2002/08/08)
"In his first public remarks since US President George W Bush vowed last month to see the Iraqi leader replaced, Saddam Hussein said that "evil people" who threaten Arab and Muslim countries would be left "in the dustbin of history". ... In his address, marking the end of the Iran-Iraq war in 1988, Saddam Hussein said the way to achieve "peace and security" was through "equitable dialogue and on the basis of international law and international covenants". ... But, he said, "the enemy" refused to listen to appeals from Arab and Muslim countries and had "rejected all the initiatives and calls for peace, which we had proposed more than once". ... The Iraqi leader urged Iraqis to be prepared "with all the force you can to face your enemies", adding 'the forces of evil will carry their coffins on their back to die in a disgraceful failure.'" (See also transcript of full speech: "Speech of His Excellency President Saddam Hussein on the occasion of 14th Anniversary of the Day of the Great Victory" (Iraqi News Agency, 2002/08/08): "The forces of evil will carry their coffins on their backs, to die in disgraceful failure, taking their schemes back with them, or to dig their own graves, after they bring death to themselves on every Arab or Muslim soil against which they perpetrate aggression, including the Iraq, the land of Jihad and the banner. We say this to refute the grumbling and sibiliation of those bragging their power, governed by the devil, their master in every evil act and crime which they perpetrate against the land of the Arabs and Muslims, while they wade in the rivers of innocent blood they shed in the world, believing that the people of the world should become slaves to Tyranny and its threats, both declared and executed threats.")"Open Letter to America from a Canadian" (W.R. McDougall, The Baltimore Chronicle, 2002/08/07)
At first I thought this was a parody of anti-Americanism, as McDougall crams just about every conceivable platitude into it. Can you imagine a "progressive" paper publishing something like this about any other countries than the U.S.A. or Israel?: "Your once-great nation has fallen into madness, an affliction of mass denial that brings shivers up the spines of millions outside your borders. ... You have become a nation of monsters, America. Hypocrites. Murderers. Fools. ... How many of you give the slightest damn about the totalitarian measures your government is taking to keep its secret meetings, grubby files and treasonous activities from your eyes?.... ... As I write these words, I can only imagine what additional horrors your shadow government might be planning in what will surely be an attempt to justify militarism and totalitarianism on a universal scale. A nuclear explosion in one of your cities, perhaps? A massive bio-chemical attack? Or perhaps it will be some Arab terrorist who finally commits the terrible deed, his last thought before death being the promises you made to him before you killed his family.""Sophisticated Stupidity" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/08/07)
"George Orwell is said to have observed that some ideas are so stupid, only an intellectual could believe them. A wonderful example comes from columnist James Carroll in the Boston Globe. Carroll uses yesterday's anniversary of the nuking of Hiroshima to argue that Saddam Hussein is no worse than America. ... "If we used the nuclear weapon as much to send a signal to the Soviet Union as to end World War II, then all the wickedness unfolding from that use - not only the arms race, but the demonic new idea that national power can properly depend on the threat of mass destruction - belongs to us. If Saddam Hussein wants weapons of mass destruction for the sake of the strategic diplomatic power they will give him, he is playing by rules written in Washington." This is like arguing that cops have guns, so we shouldn't begrudge them to criminals. In Carroll's blinkered view, there is no moral distinction between America - which ultimately used the power of its nuclear weapons to liberate the Soviet Union and most of its world-wide empire from communism - and Saddam's Iraq, a barbaric regime whose raison d'être is the glorification and enrichment of a murderous lunatic." (See also: "A mistake and a crime" (James Carroll, The Boston Globe, 2002/07/06))"Sontagism" (Stefan Kanfer, City Journal, 2002/08/07)
Kanfer on Susan Sontag - "The queen of knee-jerk anti-Americanism strikes again": "The occasion: the Lincoln Center Festival production of three traditional Iranian plays. ... The plays concerned child martyrdom - indeed, one ended with the bloody beheading of a ten-year-old—and during a post-production symposium Sontag congratulated the festival director for importing the dramas to the U.S. "You've done something incredible," she burbled. "To view these works was a privilege and a duty for us who don't live by the contemptible rhetoric of the Bush administration. The last thing in the world we want to do is cooperate with the jihadist mentality of this administration." ... Manifestly, Sontag did not intend to imply that George W. Bush had converted to Islam. She meant that the present U.S. government was as zealous and vengeful as . . . but the lady preferred not to connect the dots." (See also: "First Reactions" (Susan Sontag, The New Yorker, 2001/09/17))"The logic of empire" (George Monbiot, The Guardian, 2002/08/06)
Or, rather, "The logic of neo-Marxist anti-Americanism": "There is something almost comical about the prospect of George Bush waging war on another nation because that nation has defied international law. Since Bush came to office, the United States government has torn up more international treaties and disregarded more UN conventions than the rest of the world has in 20 years. ... Even its preparedness to go to war with Iraq without a mandate from the UN security council is a defiance of international law far graver than Saddam Hussein's non-compliance with UN weapons inspectors. ... As the US government discovers that it can threaten and attack other nations with impunity, it will surely soon begin to threaten countries that have numbered among its allies. As its insatiable demand for resources prompts ever bolder colonial adventures, it will come to interfere directly with the strategic interests of other quasi-imperial states. ... To accept that the US presents a danger to the rest of the world would be to acknowledge the need to resist it. ... And we should cross our fingers and hope that a combination of economic mismanagement, gangster capitalism and excessive military spending will reduce America's power to the extent that it ceases to use the rest of the world as its doormat.""National Weekly Arab-American Paper Publishes Poems: "Yes, I am a Terrorist" and 'Bush is an Ape'" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 407, 2002/08/04)
Two translated poems from Al-Watan, "an Arabic-language 'national weekly Arab-American newspaper' published in Washington D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York". Here's an excerpt from one (in the other, "The Ape" by Nasir Thabet, George W. Bush is likened to "an accursed ape ... ruling this world"):
"Yes, I Am A Terrorist
By Ahmad Matar
...
While it is they [the West] who have urged me to be ashamed of my culture
...
So that I become their slave
And perform amongst them
The rituals of flies.
...
As for me, as long as I am related to freedom
Everything I do is considered
Terrorism.
...
They have destroyed my world
Let them reap what they have sown.
If on my lips and in the cells of my blood
The globalization of destruction has borne fruit
Here I say it. I write, I draw it
I imprint it upon the forehead of the West
with my wooden shoe:
Yes, I am a terrorist!""Islam rejecting globalization - and Jews and Israel" (Yair Sheleg, Haaretz, 2002/07/22)
An excellent article on the affinity between the "theory of anti-globalization" and anti-Semitism: "Three weeks after the Twin Towers attack on September 11, the prestigious Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram published an article in which the writer hoped that "with the collapse of the city of globalization, it's possible to dare to predict that the whole theory of globalization will be buried with it." ... Islamic Fundamentalism today represents one of the most prominent elements in resistance to globalization; and the Jews, not only Israelis, are seen by Muslim Fundamentalists as the vanguard of the detested globalization process. This association of the Jew with a maligned global trend invariably leads to propaganda and discourse that is laden with anti-Semitism. ... It would appear that despite obvious differences between the left in Europe and radical Islamic thinkers, anti-globalization displays by both groups are animated by hostility to the United States and its growing domination around the globe. ... In this connection, Becker refers to an "unholy alliance between, on the one hand, some of the most dubious regimes in the world, belonging to Arab and Muslim states, and, on the other hand, some of the most enlightened organizations, in the name of the joint struggle against globalization" ... Mira Assau has been active for several years in "Green Action," an Israeli organization which is active in the campaign against globalization. ... Assau doesn't believe that placards which compare the Star of David and swastikas constitute anti-Semitic agitation. "On the contrary," she declares. 'This is an act of defiance against racism, and against the racist policies of the government of Israel. In no way is it against the Jewish people.'""Stereotyping and the Decline of Common Sense" (Paul Hollander, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/07/19)
"The precipitous decline of common sense in our times, associated with a politically correct solicitousness toward some minorities was also revealed in the recent case of a Muslim woman in Florida who insisted on her right to wear the type of veil (niqab) that covered her entire face except her eyes in the photograph used in her driver's license. The picture, needless to say, is completely useless for the purpose it is supposed to serve, namely the visual identification of the driver. ... The Florida case makes it clear that multiculturalism carried to its logical, politically correct conclusion is incompatible with the existence of a modern secular society in which the laws apply equally to everybody regardless their religious beliefs. By the same token the pretense that everybody flying, or hanging around nuclear power plants has an equal likelihood of committing terrorism is as absurd as to insist that no differences exist among the many human groups, or that members of particular social, national or ethnic groups have nothing in common. At the root of both of these beliefs we find the type of multiculturalism that harbors relentless hostility toward American society and Western values and extends sympathy to every group that questions or rejects these values.""Saddam vows to defeat United States" (UPI, 2002/07/17)
"Iraqi President Saddam Hussein on Wednesday vowed to defeat any U.S. attack on Iraq, urging his people to stand fast and fight for the independence and sovereignty of their country. "Fight with eagerness and vitality and patience whenever you are forced to defend yourself. ... Your faith is the source of prosperity, freedom, independence, stability and justice to which you aspire," Saddam said in a speech broadcast on official television on the occasion of the 34th anniversary of the Baath Party's taking power in Iraq in a 1968 military coup. ... "Iraq will be victorious, victorious, victorious. ... All the foreign roaring you are hearing will be withered away by the wind, because the enemy is a greedy oppressor and enemy of God," Saddam said in the 40-minute speech." (See also full transcript: "Speech of His Excellency President Saddam Hussein on the occasion of the Thirty-forth Anniversery of the 17-30 July Revolution" (uruklink.net, 2002/07/17))"Spies Like Us" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/07/15)
"An alarming revelation by one Ritt Goldstein in today's Sydney Morning Herald: "The Bush Administration aims to recruit millions of United States citizens as domestic informants in a program likely to alarm civil liberties groups. The Terrorism Information and Prevention System, or TIPS, means the US will have a higher percentage of citizen informants than the former East Germany through the infamous Stasi secret police." Yikes, we're a police state! But a look at the Citizens Corps Web site shows that Goldstein is simply being hysterical: "Operation TIPS - the Terrorism Information and Prevention System - will be a nationwide program giving millions of American truckers, letter carriers, train conductors, ship captains, utility employees, and others a formal way to report suspicious terrorist activity. ... Every participant in this new program will be given an Operation TIPS information sticker to be affixed to the cab of their vehicle or placed in some other public location so that the toll-free reporting number is readily available." Sounds more like Neighborhood Watch than the Stasi - and indeed, Neighborhood Watch is another program of the Citizens Corps." (See also: "US planning to recruit one in 24 Americans as citizen spies" (Ritt Goldstein, Sydney Morning Herald, 2002/07/15) and "Operation TIPS" (Citizen Corps, Summer 2002))"Sontag Award Nominee" (andrewsullivan.com, 2002/07/15)
Sullivan quotes a column by the British chomskyite John Pilger, combining the usual mix of topsy-turvy moral equivalence and conspiracy theorizing: "Having swept the Palestinians into the arms of the supreme terrorist Ariel Sharon, the Christian Right fundamentalists running the plutocracy in Washington, now replenish their arsenal in preparation for an attack on the 22 million suffering people of Iraq. Should anyone need reminding, Iraq is a nation held hostage to an American-led embargo every bit as barbaric as the dictatorship over which Iraqis have no control. Contrary to propaganda orchestrated from Washington and London, the coming attack has nothing to do with Saddam Hussein's 'weapons of mass destruction', if these exist at all. The reason is that America wants a more compliant thug to run the world's second greatest source of oil." (See also: "The great charade" (John Pilger, The Observer, 2002/07/14))"All the Hate That's Fit to Print" (Stephen Schwartz, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/07/22 issue)
"What's gone unremarked is that [Hadayet] could just as easily have been incited by the steady diet of violent rhetoric served up by the American Muslim community media - periodicals with names like The Minaret, Islamic Horizons, the Weekly Mirror International, and the Muslim Observer, which toe the anti-American, anti-Israel line of Saudi Arabia's Islamofascist Wahhabi sect. ... These publications make no attempt to hide their attachments to international extremist groups. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood - which preaches the classic neo-Wahhabi doctrine of the supremacy of Islam and condemnation of non-extremist Muslims as irreligious - receives support from at-Talib (The Student), published at UCLA by the Islamic Center of Southern California, and from Islamic Horizons, based in Plainfield, Indiana. ... Meanwhile, in the March 27 issue of the Weekly Mirror International (www.readmirror.com), author Khalil Osman declaims, 'The Bush administration has demonstrated unprecedented zeal in instituting draconian measures aimed mainly at Arabs and Muslims. ... As more details became known, a chilling picture of a full-blooded campaign against Muslims and Arabs began to emerge.'""Tales of Canterbury's Future?" (Peter Mullen, The Wall Street Journal, 2002/07/12)
Mullen on archbishop Rowan Williams, who is likely to become the next archbishop of Canterbury: "As it happens, he was in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, at a conference on spirituality. He has given us his reflections on the atrocities in a booklet titled "Writing in the Sand," published late last year. ... The archbishop wants us to "understand" the terrorists' motives. "We have something of the freedom to consider whether or not we turn to violence and so, in virtue of that very fact, are rather different from those who experience their world as leaving no other option." But this is cant. Of course the suicide bombers had "other options": Not every Muslim thinks that the only answer to his problems is to destroy New York. ... Once we have admitted that the atrocity was not the terrorists' fault, what next? "We begin to find some sense of what they and we might together recognise as good." Really? But how to make common moral cause between democracy's rule of law and nihilistic killing? Do sit down Osama. Have another éclair while we discuss the terms of trade. ... Dr. Williams is often described here as something of a saint. In fact, he is an old-fashioned class warrior, a typical bien-pensant despiser of Western capitalism and the way of life that goes with it.""Bush pulls it off again" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2002/07/13 issue)
"In Whitehall, meanwhile, 'senior civil servants' brief John Simpson that Bush is 'a bear of very little brain' and that his Middle East speech was 'puerile', 'absurdly ignorant' and 'ludicrous'... ... For Bush, it's a win–win situation. If the Palestinians elect the Hamas crowd, he can say, 'Fine, I respect your choice. Call me back when you decide to put self-government before self-detonation.' If they opt for plausible state and municipal legislators, Bush will have re-established an important principle: that when the Americans sign on to nation-building they do so only to bring into being functioning democratic, civilised states - as they did with postwar Germany and Japan. ... The question Matthew Parris might like to ask as he weeds his borders is why could no European leader make a speech like that? How did it come about that the entire EU reflexively stuck with an aging terrorist who cancelled the last scheduled elections? Which bear is really the one with the little brain? The one who in under three weeks has changed the dynamic of the Palestinian question? Or the one whose gags are as stale as his world view?""Communists and Islamic Extremists - Then and Now" (Stephen Schwartz, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/07/08)
"America's capacity to defend itself spiritually and intellectually had been deeply harmed by "anti-anti-Communism." The legacy of this deviation in American political life is audible whenever the claim is made that firm measures against terrorists - the use before September 11 of "secret evidence," or, after that date, denying terror troopers status as prisoners of war, investigating extremist activities that sheltered under the cover of religion, more efficient standards for wiretapping, detention of aliens, higher levels of transportation and communications security, or the failure to provide "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh with a "dream team" of lawyers in the Afghan hinterland - threatened to put America on the terrorists' level. America was told repeatedly it must fight for protection of the rights of its enemies if it was not to become indistinguishable from them. Similarly, apologists for Bin Laden and his accomplices insisted that evidence of his terrorist activities, satisfying absurdly high standards, must be produced before action could be taken against him.""Why Don't We Listen Anymore?" (Clyde Prestowitz, The Washington Post, 2002/07/07)
"'The way things are going, it will soon be the United States against the world.' That comment, by a top political leader in Kuala Lumpur, was just one of hundreds of expressions of a new and disturbing alienation from America that I heard during a recent swing through 14 Asian, European and Latin American capitals. ... Of course, anti-Americanism is not new, but what I found disturbing after 35 years of visiting these cities was that foreign leaders who have been longtime friends of the United States are the ones voicing dismay. ... The gulf between the American view of the Middle East and that of virtually everyone else could not be wider. ... It is radicalizing attitudes in countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia. Strategically important and traditionally practitioners of a liberal Islam, neither nation has significant economic or political ties to the Middle East. Yet no conversation there can get past the Israeli-Palestinian situation that has caused many, including longtime friends of America, to conclude that the United States is attacking Islam itself.""Why does everybody suddenly hate America?" (Alice Thompson, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/07/05)
"It was Independence Day yesterday - the United States was on high alert after September 11. Yet in the 10 months since the terrible salami-slicing of the World Trade Centre, we have become increasingly anti-American. A book published yesterday is called Why Do People Hate America?. Can you imagine a book called Why Do People Hate Arabs? or Why Do People Hate Jews? The author, Ziauddin Sardor, says we should be disgusted by this avaricious country, which spends enough on pet food alone to meet the health and nutrition requirements for the world's poor. British tabloid newspapers can be equally anti-American. The Daily Mirror called on its readers to 'Mourn on the 4th of July - for the victims of George W Bush and his bid to control the world'.""As Pakistani's Popularity Slides, 'Busharraf' Is a Figure of Ridicule" (Dexter Filkins, The New York Times, 2002/07/05)
"Nine months after joining the Western coalition against terrorism, General Musharraf, 58, is isolated in his own land, increasingly a figure of ridicule and the focus of a growing anti-Western fury that is shared by Islamic militants and the middle class alike. The decline in the general's fortunes represents an abrupt turnaround since last autumn, when he was hailed at home and in the West as a reform-minded Muslim leader in the mold of Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey and one of the general's heroes. ... General Musharraf's dutiful carrying out of Washington's demands is galvanizing a widespread feeling here that he has largely traded away Pakistan's sovereignty to the United States and that Pakistan's new policy toward Kashmir is the latest in a series of humiliations he has endured at America's hand. With F.B.I. agents now joining in raids of suspected hideouts of Al Qaeda and the Taliban, the anti-American sentiment here has reached a peak. Indeed, General Musharraf has become so closely identified with the Americans that he has even earned a nickname on Pakistan's streets: 'Busharraf.'""Egyptian Government Daily Al-Akhbar Responds to Bush's Address" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 397, 2002/07/02)
Excerpts from an Op-Ed in the Egyptian government daily Al-Akhbar: "The next day, the Al-Akhbar editorial, titled, "No one would support America if the events of September 11 recurred," read: 'Is America weak to such an extent?!... America, with all the might of [its] power of oppression, locks horns with the besieged Yasser Arafat, who wants to remove the blockade from the Palestinian people and himself! The government of America... talks only of Yasser Arafat, and demands his removal, as if it was he who was derailing the peace process! ... America thinks it is distant from this danger, but it would seem that it has forgotten – or pretends it has forgotten – September 11, 2001, which exposed its weakness! It is not out of [reach] of anyone! And America, under Bush's leadership, is close to no one's heart. For this reason, it is noticeable that the international sympathy following the events of September 11 is dissipating! America ... has allocated $90 million to survey international public opinion regarding America. It knows that no one is sympathetic towards her or supports her except for Israel and Sharon – a fact that evokes ridicule, because America, Israel, and Sharon are one. There is no difference. No difference.'""The Cold War and the War Against Terror" (Jamie Glazov, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/07/01)
FrontPageMagazine invited Vladimir Bukovsky, Daniel Pipes, Paul Hollander and Michael Ledeen to "compare the threat of radical Islam to that of the Soviet empire": "Bukovsky: I think we have to keep focused on the psychotic state of the minds of Western leftwing intellectuals. Even if they are in power as they are today, they still view themselves as an opposition, as underdogs, as victims. Second, although they crave absolute power, they do not accept any responsibility for exercising it. You can say, if you wish, that it is self-destructive tendency, but only from an objective viewpoint. Thus, objectively, their theories and actions usually lead to destruction of the society. They just refuse to see themselves as a part of it. This is why Western leftist intellectuals represented a great threat to the West in the face of the Soviet threat, and why they represent such a great threat to the West right now in the face of Islamic extremism."
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