"Judgment Day in Mystery Babylon?"

"Anti-Americanism will become the global language of political protest - the default ideology of opposition - unifying the world's discontents and malcontents, some of whom, as we have discovered, can be very dangerous." (Fareed Zakaria)

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 -

November 2002
"Old And In The Way" (Karl Zinsmeister, The American Enterprise Magazine, from the December 2002 issue)
"Beautiful girls" (Bret Stephens, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/11/29)
"Afghans and the Guardian" (Matthew Leeming, The Spectator, from the 2002/11/30 issue)
"Miss World war" (Jennie Bristow, spiked, 2002/11/28)
"Down with beauty? Only when it's ugly" (Russell Smith, The Globe and Mail, 2002/11/27)
"A Funny Sort of Empire" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2002/11/27)
"The Hitchens-Pollitt Papers" (Christopher Hitchens, The Nation, 2002/11/26)
"W. Isn't Beelzebub, He's Just a Corleone - But Michael or Fredo?" (Ron Rosenbaum, New York Observer, from the 2002/11/25 issue)
"Osama issues new call to arms" (Jason Burke, The Observer, 2002/11/24)
"PM on aide: She calls me a moron, too" (Louise Elliott, Canadian Press, 2002/11/22)
"American Missionary Shot Dead in Lebanon" (Cynthia Johnston, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2002/11/21)
"Not So Mad in Madison" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/11/19)
"Kuffiyas and red flags" (Hani Shukrallah, Al-Ahram Weekly, from the 14 - 20 November 2002 issue)
"The Fantasy Life of American Liberals" (Charles Krauthammer, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/11/25 issue)
"How Do I Hate Thee?" (Christopher Caldwell, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/11/25 issue)
"Between the Lines of an Iraqi Letter" (Verlyn Klinkenborg, The New York Times, 2002/11/16)
"American view of Europe" (Martin Walker, UPI, 2002/11/13)
"The Great Depression" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/11/12)
"Profs who hate America" (Daniel Pipes, New York Post/danielpipes.org, 2002/11/12)
"Protocols of Elder Named Gore Vidal: Wacko 9/11 Piece" (Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer, from the 2002/11/11 issue)
"The End of An Era" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2002/11/08)
"Anti-Americanism" (Jamie Glazov, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/11/08)
"So-called liberals need to address the facts about terrorism" (Bala Ambati, The Chronicle Online, 2002/11/06)
"Failures of Nerve" (Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, from the November 2002 issue)
"The Left Dumbs Down" (Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times, 2002/11/05)
"Let Them Come to Berlin" (Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, 2002/11/03)
"The Chorus of Useful Idiots" (Bruce S. Thornton, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/11/01)

October 2002
"'O, Heinous, Strong, and Bold Conspiracy!'" (Andrew Breitbart, National Review, 2002/10/30)
"Idiocy of the week" (Andrew Sullivan, Salon.com, 2002/10/30)
"PA: CIA behind Moscow Terrorists" (PMW/IMRA, 2002/10/30)
"The (possible) assassination of Paul Wellstone" (Ted Rall, Yahoo! News, 2002/10/30)
"Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?" (Michael I. Niman, AlterNet, 2002/10/28)
"Menace on the Mall" (Joseph J. Sabia, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/10/28)
"Gore Vidal claims 'Bush junta' complicit in 9/11" (Sunder Katwala, The Observer, 2002/10/27)
"Thousands Rally Around World Against Iraq War" (Mark Wilkinson, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2002/10/27)
"Shame on you America-hating Liberals" (Tony Parsons, The Daily Mirror, 2002/10/25)
"The Real Roots of Arab Anti-Americanism" (Barry Rubin, Foreign Affairs, from the November/December 2002 issue)
"The Anti-Liberal Anti-War Case" (Michael Kelly, The Washington Post, 2002/10/23)
"America in the dock - Myth II: America wants war with Saddam because of oil" (David Frum, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/10/22)
"The Wages of Hate: Anti-semitism and the war" (Andrew Sullivan, The Sunday Times/andrewsullivan.com, 2002/10/20)
"So Long, Fellow Travelers" (Christopher Hitchens, The Washington Post Outlook, from the 2002/10/20 issue)
"They want to kill us all" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2002/10/19 issue)
"Susan Sontag Award" (andrewsullivan.com, 2002/10/17)
"I'm an American tired of American lies" (Woody Harrelson, The Guardian, 2002/10/17)
"Don't blame the west" (Clive James, The Guardian, 2002/10/16)
"A Nobel Idea of Peace" (Michael Kelly, The Washington Post, 2002/10/16)
"An enemy of America and a friend of Osama bin Laden" (The Age, 2002/10/15)
"Bleeding hearts left exposed as fools" (Gerard Henderson, The Sydney Morning Herald, 2002/10/14)
"Cornell Leftists Trash Columbus/America" (Joseph J. Sabia, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/10/14)
"Saved by U.S., Kuwait Now Shows Mixed Feelings" (Craig S. Smith, The New York Times, 2002/10/12)
"Mandela picks Iraq over U.S." (R.W. Johnson, National Post, 2002/10/11)
"Left Behind" (Jonathan V. Last, The Weekly Standard, 2002/10/11)
"Sontag Award Nominee" (andrewsullivan.com, 2002/10/11)
"Arab Press Reacts to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's Statements on Democracy and Freedom" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 427, 2002/10/11)
"Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee" (Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer, 2002/10/09)
"Banality in the courtroom" (Scot Lehigh, The Boston Globe, 2002/10/09)
"UNC-CH Groups Resume Anti-War Events" (Jon Sanders, Carolina Journal, from the October 2002 issue)
"Our Way" (Fareed Zakaria, The New Yorker, from the 2002/10/14 issue)
"Harry Belafonte slams Colin Powell as race sellout" (Matt Drudge, Drudge Report, 2002/10/08)
"Susan Sontag Nominee" (andrewsullivan.com, 2002/10/07)
"Diagnosing Dubya" (Charles Johnson, Little Green Footballs, 2002/10/06)
"Masters of the Universe" (Bill Keller, The New York Times, 2002/10/05)
"Put up or shut up" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2002/10/05 issue)
"Oakville MP compares Bush to WW2 villains" (Sheldon Alberts, National Post, 2002/10/03)

"Old And In The Way" (Karl Zinsmeister, The American Enterprise Magazine, from the December 2002 issue)
A must-read essay about the trans-Atlantic divide, including a description of a "large conference of European academics, government officials, and businessmen held in Warsaw, Poland": "There were barons and sirs and Danish executresses in microskirts and fey Frenchmen and Italian journalists sucking cigarettes as if a firing squad awaited - the whole panoply of Eurocharacters, set among the old buildings, gray skies, jammed streets, creaky plumbing, odd haircuts, high expenses, and cramped horizons that characterize so much of Europe today. ... The panel on which I spoke was chaired by Reiner Pommerin, a professor at the University of Dresden, colonel in the German air force reserves, and advisor to the German Ministry of Defense. ... Throughout the two days, Pommerin set the tone with an aggressively antagonistic attitude toward all things American. "Thank God we had the 11th of September," he declared - for this showed the U.S. how it feels to be humbled. Herr professor-colonel went on to suggest that Americans often feel nostalgic for the "good old days of slavery in the nineteenth century." ... Much of this would have made me laugh out loud, except that the vehemence and envy and certitude with which it was pronounced gave the proceedings an extremely ugly texture. Plus, these were European movers and shakers, not a bunch of pastry chefs. So it wasn't ignorance I was hearing. It was animus, jealousy, and willful spite." (Note: Found via "The case for trans-Atlantic conservatism" (Helle Dale, The Washington Times, 2002/11/27))

"Beautiful girls" (Bret Stephens, The Jerusalem Post, 2002/11/29)
Beauty and the beast XX: "'It is completely despicable that we have agreed to host this travesty,' British writer Muriel Gray said of the move. "These girls will be wearing swimwear dripping in blood." Added The Observer's Ros Coward: "It is almost impossible to retain the idea that an annual parade of female flesh is just an innocent quest for universal beauty acceptable to all reasonable people." Remarkable here isn't the view of Ms. Gray and her cohort. Rather, it's the coincidence of her views with those of Muslim fundamentalists who elsewhere in Nigeria condemn rape victims as "adulterers" and sentence them to death by stoning. "It's all about commercial sex trading," says Nigerian Muslim cleric Hussein Zakaria of the pageant, sounding a lot like Gloria Steinem (or is it Jerry Falwell?). "It's about nudity, it's about immorality, it's about exposing the youngsters to a sex hazard." As Muslim rioters went to town, many of them held aloft placards reading, "Down with Beauty," as if they, too, were readers of contemporary academic journals in post-feminist inquiry. ... Now usually, when someone points out that your views are shared by, say, neo-Nazis, it means the time has come to rethink those views. Not so with our beauty-contest critics. Taking note of the "Down with Beauty" banners, Russell Smith of Canada's Globe and Mail writes that the slogan "makes a strange kind of sense, if you interpret it to mean 'Down with this sort of incongruous, disrespectful cultural invasion.'" (See also: "Down with beauty? Only when it's ugly" (Russell Smith, The Globe and Mail, 2002/11/27))

"Afghans and the Guardian" (Matthew Leeming, The Spectator, from the 2002/11/30 issue)
A must-read article, comparing the reality in Afghanistan with left-wing analysis and prophecying - for example an article by Jason Burke: "It was nothing more than a credulous regurgitation of Pakistani propaganda. The Taleban, it claimed, were a spontaneous law-and-order movement of theology students revolted by the widespread rapes perpetrated by the warlords. This is rubbish. ... I read this article out to a class I took at Kabul University. I thought that they would find it quite funny, but halfway through I realised it wasn't getting any laughs. I stopped because the women were angry. The few of them who had received any education during the long night of Taleban rule had done so at secret schools. The mother of one had been beaten with electrical flex because a spy from the ministry for the prevention of vice and propagation of virtue had heard her shoes clicking on the pavement. 'Who is this man?' she demanded. I said that he was the Observer's chief reporter. 'How can he say such things?' 'Because he hates America,' I said. 'He also says that all the Taleban did was to make law out of what had always been the case in rural areas.' There was uproar. Even the men joined in. They thought that this was really impertinent and offensive. 'He also says,' I went on, 'that there is no need to ban television because there aren't any.' 'Who does he think we are. Of course we've got television.' And that's true. I've watched television all over the country, even in a Khirgiz yurt in the High Pamirs. The only perspective from which one can make sense of these vapourings (by Burke in the London Review of Books, March 2001) is an assumption that if the Taleban were anti-American, they must basically be OK. Presumably they think the same thing about Saddam Hussein." (See also: "Diary" (Jason Burke, London Review of Books, 2001/03/22))

"Miss World war" (Jennie Bristow, spiked, 2002/11/28)
Bristow on Western reactions to the Miss World massacre: "'Is there no end to the wilful, decadent tactlessness of the West?' asks Libby Purves, writing in The Times (London) about the Miss World debacle. Rod Liddle, in the Guardian, claims that '[f]or the predominantly Muslim population of northern Nigeria, the whole thing was, clearly, an affront'. Liddle continues: 'It would have appeared, to the imams and the fervently faithful, as a quintessential example of everything that is rancid and grotesque about the hated, godless Western culture. And although we might draw the line at killing people over it all, it is hard, from a theoretical point of view, to disagree with them about this.' Both these articles were published on the same day, have almost the same title (plays on 'Miss World' and 'ugliness'), and make pretty much the same point: that the dark underbelly of the Nigerian riots lies not in Nigeria, but in the Western-created Miss World. ... So obsessed are we becoming with the shortcomings of what we have made of consumer society that we forget about the massive industrial, technological, scientific and cultural advances that freed us up to be obsessed with sex and shopping. Two hundred years of history is presented as being as inconsequential as 50 years of Miss World - and beneath the discussion about protecting Nigeria from beauty pageants lies the prejudice that such countries should be protected from modernising influences, even those as naff as this." (See also: "Third World reveals Miss World ugliness" (Libby Purves, The Times, 2002/11/26) and "The ugly side of Miss World" (Rod Liddle, The Guardian, 2002/11/26))

"Down with beauty? Only when it's ugly" (Russell Smith, The Globe and Mail, 2002/11/27)
Beauty and the beast XVIII. An extra-ordinary stupid anti-Western column, finding "a strange kind of sense" in the Miss World 2002 massacre. But thankfully Smith himself wouldn't "kill anyone over it": "A sign held up in the initial stages of the demonstrations in Kaduna, Nigeria, read "Down with beauty." ... Beauty itself is obviously not the issue here: It's a particularly Western kind of beauty, which many don't find beautiful at all. ... It's also not beautiful. Beauty must contain some element of the extraordinary, of the singular. It must be startling. Jean Anouilh said that real beauty had to be grave; Albert Camus said that beauty was unbearable; Lautreamont declared that beauty must be convulsive. Whatever they all meant, it is clear that none of those adjectives applies to the blow-dried suburban niceness of the Miss World pageant. And this is why the "Down with beauty" banner of the Nigerian protestors makes a strange kind of sense, if you interpret it to mean "Down with this sort of incongruous, disrespectful cultural invasion." It doesn't mean "Down with beauty." It means "Down with ugliness." (Of course, I wouldn't kill anyone over it.)" (Note: In a Guardian-article Rod Liddle also expresses sympathy with the sentiments of the rioters, although, he adds, "we might draw the line at killing people over it all" ("The ugly side of Miss World" (Rod Liddle, The Guardian, 2002/11/26)): "For the predominantly Muslim population of northern Nigeria, the whole thing was, clearly, an affront - and for reasons not a million miles removed from those that make most of us think it an affront, too. It would have appeared, to the imams and the fervently faithful, as a quintessential example of everything that is rancid and grotesque about the hated, godless western culture. And although we might draw the line at killing people over it all, it is hard, from a theoretical point of view, to disagree with them about this.")

"A Funny Sort of Empire" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2002/11/27)
"It is popular now to talk of the American "empire." In Europe particularly there are comparisons of Mr. Bush to Caesar - and worse - and invocations all sorts of pretentious poli-sci jargon like "hegemon," "imperium," and "subject states," along with neologisms like "hyperpower" and "overdogs." But if we really are imperial, we rule over a very funny sort of empire. ... Athenians, Romans, Ottomans, and the British wanted land and treasure and grabbed all they could get when they could. The United States hasn't annexed anyone's soil since the Spanish-American War - a checkered period in American history that still makes us, not them, out as villains in our own history books. ... Our bases dot the globe to keep the sea-lanes open, thugs and murderers under wraps, and terrorists away from European, Japanese, and American globalists who profit mightily by blanketing the world with everything from antibiotics and contact lenses to BMWs and Jennifer Lopez - in other words, to keep the world safe and prosperous enough for Michael Moore to rant on spec, for Noam Chomsky to garner a lot of money and tenure from a defense-contracting MIT, for Barbra Streisand to make millions, for Edward Said's endowed chair to withstand Wall Street downturns, for Jesse Jackson to take off safely on his jet-powered, tax-free junkets."

"The Hitchens-Pollitt Papers" (Christopher Hitchens, The Nation, 2002/11/26)
Christopher Hitchens writes a letter to columnist Katha Pollitt, explaining why he left The Nation: "Just watching the sluggish stream sliding by in the past few months, I have seen the editor of CounterPunch, one of our fellow columnists, reprint a vicious and paranoid and subliterate screed, explicitly associating Jew power with the destruction of the World Trade Center. I have read Gore Vidal's dark suggestion that September 11 was prearranged, and Norman Mailer's view that the dead of that day are no more significant than traffic accidents and Noam Chomsky's repeated assertion that Al Qaeda at its worst is no better than American foreign policy on a good day. I think I have just named some of the political and cultural centerpieces of the Nation worldview. ... It may now seem trite to say that September 11 and other confrontations "changed everything." For me, it didn't so much change everything as reinforce something. I am against aggressive totalitarian states and I am resolutely opposed to religious fanaticism. I am also sickened by any attempt to call these hideous things by other names. Most especially in its horrible elicitation of readers' letters on the anniversary of September 11, The Nation joined the amoral side. It's the customers I want to demoralize, not just the poor editors. I say that they stand for neutralism where no such thing is possible or desirable, and I say the hell with it." (See also: "Letter to an Ex-Contrarian" (Katha Pollitt, The Nation, 2002/11/07). For more on The Hitchens-The Nation affair, see also: "The Reliable Source" (Lloyd Grove, The Washington Post, 2002/09/26))

"W. Isn't Beelzebub, He's Just a Corleone - But Michael or Fredo?" (Ron Rosenbaum, New York Observer, from the 2002/11/25 issue)
"Pardon me if I return to that sign: "BUSH IS A DEVIL … HANDS OFF N. KOREA, IRAQ," etc. Pardon me if I ask what might seem like a naïve question, but isn't the Left supposed to be on the side of oppressed people, rather than on the side of the police states, such as North Korea, or the vicious theocracies, such as Iran, that oppress them? That's why I used to think of myself as part of the Left. How did it all turn around so that if Mr. Bush opposes a police state, that particular police state is then taken under the nurturing, protective wing of the Left - and those oppressed people don't count. Police states like Iraq and North Korea must be worth protecting even though they torture their citizens, murder their dissenters, repress women and gays, because - well, because Bush is the devil, and if the devil opposes something, it must have something going for it. ... It simply amazes me that the Left doesn't get that the people who attacked us don't just want God in some pledge; they want to execute "blasphemers," beat women into burqas, stone gays - America was founded by escapees from such theocracies. How can the Left be so blind to who the real enemy is? How can they have so alienated themselves - not just from the electorate, but from reason itself, dumbing down dissidence to paranoid Vidalian mass-murder conspiracy charges? Because, in effect, they have founded their own religion: Bush hatred. It doesn't have a God, but it does have a Satan: Bush is the devil."

"Osama issues new call to arms" (Jason Burke, The Observer, 2002/11/24)
"A chilling new message from Osama bin Laden is being circulated among British Islamic extremists, calling for attacks on civilians and describing the 'Islamic nation' as 'eager for martyrdom'. ... The translated letter was originally posted in Arabic on a Saudi Arabian website previously used by al-Qaeda to disseminate messages. Within the last two weeks British Islamists have translated the letter, the most comprehensive explanation of bin Laden's ideology to be issued for several years, and posted it on English-language websites run from the UK. ... Bin laden issues a direct threat to the West: 'Anyone who tries to destroy our villages and cities, then we are going to destroy their villages and cities. Anyone who steals our fortunes, then we must destroy their economy. Anyone who kills our civilians, then we are going to kill their civilians.'" (See also: "Full text: bin Laden's 'letter to America'" (The Observer, 2002/11/24): "(2) The second thing we call you to, is to stop your oppression, lies, immorality and debauchery that has spread among you.
(a) We call you to be a people of manners, principles, honour, and purity; to reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest. We call you to all of this that you may be freed from that which you have become caught up in; that you may be freed from the deceptive lies that you are a great nation, that your leaders spread amongst you to conceal from you the despicable state to which you have reached.")

"PM on aide: She calls me a moron, too" (Louise Elliott, Canadian Press, 2002/11/22)
"Prime Minister Jean Chrétien refused today to accept the resignation of his embattled communications director, Francoise Ducros, over her alleged remark that U.S. President George W. Bush is a "moron." Chrétien said Ducros had apologized to him for the furor sparked by a conversation she had with a journalist at the NATO summit in Prague. ... Ducros, who did not appear at the news conference in Prague, told Chrétien she couldn't recall whether she made the remark but acknowledged she frequently uses the word "moron," Chrétien said. "I know her very well," the prime minister told reporters. 'She may have used that word against me a few times and I am sure she used it against you many times. It's a word she uses regularly.'"

"American Missionary Shot Dead in Lebanon" (Cynthia Johnston, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2002/11/21)
"A suspected Islamist gunman shot dead an American woman missionary with three bullets to the head at a church clinic in southern Lebanon on Thursday, security officials and aid workers said. There was no immediate claim of responsibility, but aid workers said the evangelical church center that runs the clinic for pregnant women had received warnings from anti-American Lebanese Muslim groups demanding it leave Lebanon. ... A friend of Weatherall's said she arrived in Lebanon nearly two years ago and had helped pregnant Lebanese and Palestinian women from the nearby Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp. "She loved her work. She helped pregnant women. She went with some of them to their deliveries to support them and she talked to them and helped them," said Asa Bjork from Sweden."

"Not So Mad in Madison" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/11/19)
"But while political correctness may be fading among college students, there are still a lot of insane faculty members, such as Frank Stahl, a geneticist at the University of Oregon. The Eugene Weekly reports Stahl is pushing the faculty senate to pass a resolution opposed to regime change in Iraq, though the university's president, Dave Frohnmayer, opposes the effort. Stahl seems to be suffering from hallucinations: The nation is faced with "a fascist takeover of the American government," Stahl says. The Bush administration is colluding with corporations to use the war to hold its grip on power, Stahl says. "It's a way to keep the citizenry repressed," he says. ... Stahl says an anti-war vote could cost the UO support in the Republican state Legislature and from corporations. But he says such considerations shouldn't matter. "It mattered to the German universities, that's why they shut up when their Jews were murdered [in World War II]," Stahl says." (See also: "War on Campus" (Alan Pittman, Eugene Weekly, 2002/11/14))

"Kuffiyas and red flags" (Hani Shukrallah, Al-Ahram Weekly, from the 14 - 20 November 2002 issue)
Shukrallah's report from the anti-globalisation meeting in Florence gives a glimpse into the mindset behind it: "'It is 1933 and Hitler is in power.' It is with just such a sense of urgency and alarm, argued Samir Amin, chairman of the World Forum for Alternatives (WFA), that the increasingly militaristic character of capitalist globalisation must be viewed. Amin's ominous reference to Hitler's accession to power in Germany in January 1933 was made during a meeting of some two dozen people, members of the Executive Council of the WFA, held on the sidelines of the European Social Forum (ESF), which on Sunday concluded nearly a week of intense activity. The sense of dread engendered by the US administration's apparent attachment to "perpetual war" was not confined to that one small meeting at the 17th-century Hotel Porta Rossa. In over 350 formal meetings, conferences, seminars, workshops and cultural activities (held at the 16th-century Da Basso Fortress - which served as the main site for ESF activities - and in dozens of other locations throughout the magnificent Renaissance city), America's prospective war in Iraq loomed large, underlining the most abhorrent aspect of an increasingly dehumanised and corporate-dominated world." (For more on Amin, see also an Al-Ahram-interview with him - "Empire of chaos challenged" (Fatemah Farag, Al-Ahram Weekly, from the 24 - 30 October 2002 issue): "According to Amin, military action is being resorted to by the US to mobilise its partners and terrorize the rest of the world; and that is the crux of the war against terrorism. The events of 9/11 are simply a conjuncture that serve the ongoing purpose. "I sometimes wonder if the whole thing [9/11] was not fabricated." ... Part of that scenario is also the control of oil sources not only in the Middle East but also, and perhaps more importantly, in Central Asia." Amin's article about the 9/11 attacks is also telling, with its chomskyite moral equivalence, flagrant lie about Sharon and view of the attacks as "desperate acts by victims of the system" - "U.S. Hegemony and the Response to Terror" (Samir Amin, Monthly Review, from the November 2001 issue): "This may be the first such slaughter to strike on U.S. soil but it is far from being unique. However, the media never made the same effort nor were they so persistent when they covered Iraqi civilian casualties; or Yugoslavs bombed by NATO; or Palestinians massacred at Sabra and Shatila on Sharon's orders and now being assassinated daily also by his order; or Egyptian prisoners of war murdered in cold blood. ... There is no possibility of a united front against terrorism. Only the development of a united front against international and social injustice can serve to make such desperate acts by victims of the system useless on their part and so no longer possible.")

"The Fantasy Life of American Liberals" (Charles Krauthammer, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/11/25 issue)
"There have been three successful Republican presidents in the modern era (i.e., since the New Deal), all of whose successes confounded the liberal elites. It began with their inability to fathom how Americans could prefer Eisenhower to Stevenson. ... The next puzzle was Ronald Reagan, the "amiable dunce" (Clark Clifford's famously obtuse characterization) who somehow brought down the Soviet empire. ... His genial smile concealed not just stupidity but evil intentions. No, not his evil intentions - he being too dimwitted even to merit moral opprobrium - but the evil intentions of those manipulating him behind the scenes. Twenty years later, the liberal nightmare returns in the form of George W. Bush, another exemplar of the trinity of Republican success: geniality, empty-headedness, and evil. With him, there is a similar difficulty reconciling the apparent antitheticals: empty-headedness and evil. Once again this is explained by the Manchurian Candidate theory, Bush, the simpleton, being the puppet of a vast, dark, right-wing cabal. ... Judging by their wild and crazy reaction to their defeat on November 5, one can only conclude that this election has left liberal elites further out of touch with reality than at any time in recent memory. As a former psychiatrist, I can confidently predict that logic and empirical evidence will have no therapeutic effect. It's time for the Thorazine." (See also: "The Great Depression" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/11/12))

"How Do I Hate Thee?" (Christopher Caldwell, The Weekly Standard, from the 2002/11/25 issue)
A report from Florence on the anti-globalist movement: "This bus was covered in posters, one of which was the famous image of Che Guevara silhouetted in black on a red background. But on a second look, you realized that it was a picture not of Che but of Osama bin Laden. This was typical. All the groups at the Fortezza da Basso traveled in the name of pacifism, but the only people they enjoined to follow the pacifist path were governments and institutions facing armed insurgencies. Palestinian liberation seemed at times to be the main purpose of the gathering, and anti-Israel sentiments threatened to drown out anti-American ones. ... Even if one takes the reasonable-people-can-differ view of the Middle East conflict, the thoroughness with which the assembly welcomed every terrorist, guerrilla army, and freelance maimer of civilians could only be marveled at. ... The only two portrait-posters visible besides the bin Laden one featured the Kurdish terrorist Abdullah Oçalan and Carlo Giuliani, the protester killed while attacking the police in the Genoa demonstration. Giuliani, shown in jogging pants, smiling sweetly and drinking a beer, was treated as a martyr, his death as an unprovoked aggression. This decontextualization of left-wing violence was the rule. Never was Palestinian terrorism mentioned. The American attack on Afghanistan was mentioned in every single panel I attended, but the attacks of September 11 were never adduced as a cause." (See also: "Huge anti-war protest in Florence" (BBC News, 2002/11/09))

"Between the Lines of an Iraqi Letter" (Verlyn Klinkenborg, The New York Times, 2002/11/16)
"Twice in the past week, George W. Bush has been called "Pharaoh" in missives from the Middle East. The word was uttered by the voice on an audiotape broadcast by Al Jazeera, which may or may not have been that of Osama bin Laden, and it also appeared in the recent letter from Naji Sabri, the Iraqi foreign minister, to Kofi Annan accepting the return of United Nations weapons inspectors to Iraq. ... In the Koran, as in the Bible, the Pharaoh is the very image of organized evil. ... The text of the Iraqi foreign minister's letter will remind many people of the intemperate language that used to come out of the Soviet Union. Indeed, the text borrows as richly from that old Communist vocabulary as it does from the lexicon of the Koran and the sanitized language of United Nations resolutions. ... The Iraqi letter reaches for the language of moral suasion, trying to speak in apothegms, as well as in the logic of international law, but every rhetoric it touches turns as hollow as the case it is making. It talks about stabbing the truth "with the dagger of evil." It argues that "he who remains silent in the defense of truth is a dumb devil." And though a reader ends up feeling that he is reading through a glass, darkly, pondering a text where the subtlest implications have been buried by a garbled rendering into English, the real purport of the letter is perfectly clear. It is a howl of temporary surrender, a plea of continuing defiance." (See also: "Text: Letter From Iraqi Foreign Minister to the U.N." (The Washington Post, 2002/11/13))

"American view of Europe" (Martin Walker, UPI, 2002/11/13)
"'You want to know what I really think of the Europeans?' asked the senior State Department official. "I think they have been wrong on just about every major international issue for the past 20 years. ... These were also the people who were wrong about Ronald Reagan and the Evil Empire, the same 'friends' who helped vote us off the United Nations Human Rights Commission. These are the people who whine about our Farm Bill when they are the world's prime protectionists. They are not just repeatedly wrong; they are also a bunch of hypocrites. So why should we pay attention to a single thing they say?" ... Well, the Europeans may still be able to count on the sympathies and cultural deference of many East Coast journalists, but something has shifted among the diplomats, the think tanks and even many of the academics. At a think-tank meeting last week, when a European diplomat asked rather patronizingly what all these American weapons were actually for, a renowned liberal academic simply quoted Kipling's line about "Making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep." And then he turned on his heel and walked away. ... It is now widely understood that of all the Europeans, only the British can begin to fight on the same modern battlefield as the hugely expensive and technologically advanced American forces. The rest of the Europeans are so many free riders on the readiness of American taxpayers to spend twice as much as Europeans on what remains the common defense."

"The Great Depression" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/11/12)
A sample of responses from some Democrats and liberals to last week's Republican election victories: "Bill Moyers, PBS: "For the first time in the memory of anyone alive, the entire federal government - the Congress, the Executive, the Judiciary - is united behind a right-wing agenda for which George W. Bush believes he now has a mandate. That mandate includes the power of the state to force pregnant women to give up control over their own lives. It includes using the taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich. It includes giving corporations a free hand to eviscerate the environment and control the regulatory agencies meant to hold them accountable. ... It is a heady time in Washington - a heady time for piety, profits, and military power, all joined at the hip by ideology and money." ...
Darlene Weesner, an unsuccessful candidate for county office in Florida: "Marion County is now under siege by the Gestapo, and the Fuhrer is the leader of the Republican Party. All I can tell you is the community is missing out on the wonderful plans I had in store for all of us."
Ira Hozinsky, in a published e-mail to bilious blogger Eric Alterman: "The reason for the Republican triumph is simple: the American people are stupid. The ineptitude and corruption of the Bush Administration are radiantly obvious to anyone with half a brain, and it should not have been necessary for the Democrats to make any case at all. It should be abundantly clear to anyone with principles and intelligence that trying to bring about meaningful change through electoral politics is a waste of time. The American people don't want it. They want to have their pockets picked and their sons sent to their deaths in Iraq, as long as these things are done by a frat brother." (See also: "Bill Moyers on Election 2002" (PBS, 2002/11/08), "Blaming the Victim: The Rapist Mentality" (Monica Friedlander, Democrats.com, November 2002) and Altercation (MSNBC, November 2002))

"Profs who hate America" (Daniel Pipes, New York Post/danielpipes.org, 2002/11/12)
"Americans broadly agree on two facts about the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq: its brutality and the danger it poses to themselves, especially the danger of nuclear attack. Disagreement arises primarily over what to do: Take out the regime now? Give Baghdad another chance? Follow the United Nations' lead? Visit an American university, however, and you'll often enter a topsy-turvy world in which professors consider the United States (not Iraq) the problem and oil (not nukes) the issue. ... Noam Chomsky, professor of linguistics at MIT and far-left luminary, insists that President Bush and his advisers oppose Saddam not because of his many crimes or his reach for nuclear weapons. "We all know ... what they're aiming at," Chomsky said in a recent interview, "Iraq has the second-largest oil reserves in the world." Jim Rego, visiting assistant professor of chemistry at Swarthmore College, stated at a panel discussion that, even after Sept. 11, the U.S. government is merely manufacturing another enemy "to have an identity." Rego explained his thinking with an elegance characteristic of the Left: 'I think we've run out of people's butts to kick and that we essentially want to keep the butt-kicking going.'"

"Protocols of Elder Named Gore Vidal: Wacko 9/11 Piece" (Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer, from the 2002/11/11 issue)
Rosenbaum on Gore Vidal's "The Enemy Within", in which he attempts to "prove - well, insinuate in a Nixonian way - that a secret cabal (the Bush/oil "junta") instigated the 9/11 mass murders in order to increase their profit margins": "But all of this previous silliness doesn't rise to the stupendous heights Mr. Vidal reserves for his final few thousand words. A finale that begins when he invokes Hitler: "Many commentators of a certain age have noted how Hitlerian our junta sounds as it threatens first one country for harbouring terrorists and then another." Our sage finds some merit in this wisdom: "It is true that Hitler liked to pretend to be the injured - or threatened - party before he struck." He seems to be saying that somehow the W.T.C. mass murder was an example of the U.S. "pretending" to be injured. This will be somewhat hard to sell to the survivors of the W.T.C. attacks, who, I guess, are "pretending" to have lost their children, fathers and mothers. Clearly our sage has lost track, in his frenzy, of one slight difference between the U.S. and Hitler's Reich: Hitler did pretend injury; he dressed up prisoners in Polish uniforms to stage an attack on a German radio station in order to provide a fig leaf for his 1939 attack on Poland, for instance. But we didn't pretend to be attacked by others on 9/11, although implicitly, metaphorically, sleazily, that is what our sage implies with his Hitler analogy. But it turns out we're actually a little worse than Hitler: " … something new has been added since the classic Roman Hitlerian mantra, 'they are threatening us, we must attack first.'" The new addition that makes us worse than Hitler: We are more open about it than Hitler - at least to the penetrating gaze of our seer - thus a little worse, in our shamelessness, than Hitler." (See also:"The Enemy Within" (Gore Vidal, The Observer/UQ Wire, 2002/10/27) and "Gore Vidal claims 'Bush junta' complicit in 9/11" (Sunder Katwala, The Observer, 2002/10/27))

"The End of An Era" (Victor Davis Hanson, National Review, 2002/11/08)
Hanson on the "bankruptcy of the anti-Americanists": "So we have at last arrived at Cloudcuckooland: A hierarchal United States military is more tolerant of liberals in its ranks than liberal universities are of their critics on campus. Republicans support dangerous interventions abroad to remove dictators and free oppressed peoples, as leftist dissidents agitate for hands-off mass murderers and medieval theocrats. A democratic Israel is slandered as imperialistic and fascistic while an authoritarian Palestinian regime is given a pass for theft, murder, and torture. And liberals, women, and homosexuals are saved in Afghanistan thanks to the work of Air Force pilots and special forces, as reactionary fundamentalists and thugs seek to hold onto their autocracy in part by finding solace with anti-American leftists. Who would have ever thought that democratic Iraqis would seek our military's help, while agents of Saddam Hussein would line up to find solidarity with those now marching? Face it: Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Yasser Arafat, and Saddam Hussein - not the ghosts of the thousands of their innocent dead - all prefer Ramsey Clark to George Bush. We are seeing nothing less than quite literally the end of an era - witnessed by the intellectual suicide of an entire generation, who in their last gasps are proving they have been not very moral people all along."

"Anti-Americanism" (Jamie Glazov, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/11/08)
A FrontPage Symposium with Paul Hollander, Stanley Kurtz, Dan Flynn and Victor Davis Hanson about the new secular religion: "Flynn: I think the basic problem with the anti-Americans is that they hold the United States to a standard that they would never hold any non-Western nation to. America's critics compare America with utopia and find America lacking. This method of analysis guarantees the results that those who employ it desire. Compare anything to an ideal and it's going to fall short. Compare America to places that actually exist and we look rather spectacular. ... A better method of analysis is to compare America to actual countries, rather than imaginary ones. The Left no longer has its city on a hill (the Soviet Union), but it still has its Sodom and Gomorrah (the United States). Many saw the fall of Communism as the death of the Left. It wasn't. For the American Left, the collapse of Communism may have been a positive thing. No longer having to defend the indefensible in East Germany, the USSR, Cambodia, and elsewhere, the Left now directs its energy towards attacking the United States. This is what's so appealing about the new anti-Americanism to many young people - it's safe from criticism because it has no positive program and holds up no country as its ideal; it merely focuses its jaundiced eye upon the sins (both real and imagined) of America and the West."

"So-called liberals need to address the facts about terrorism" (Bala Ambati, The Chronicle Online, 2002/11/06)
Found via Little Green Footballs: "American attacks on al Qaeda and their Taliban hosts continue to be met with loathing and outrage that the U.S. government would take action to meet its primary responsibility - protecting its citizens. Any U.S. military action now is tarred with accusations of imperialism. ... When liberals denounce the United States for the regrettable but minimized and unavoidable civilian casualties of U.S. action in Afghanistan, do they consider the consequences of the Taliban regime to Afghans, let alone Americans? The Taliban slaughtered 1.5 million Afghans in their reign's 5 years; US action stopped an annual murder of 300,000 Afghans, and allowed girls to go to school without being beaten! Why do liberals now defend one of the world's most repressive regimes, Iraq, which has slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Shiites, used chemical and biological weapons on its own people and seeks nuclear weapons to expand a reign of terror? ... It takes true courage to be a dove, but no honor accrues to being an ostrich. The Procrustean logic of blaming all the world's ills on the United States blinds these liberals to real evil. Shredding facts to fit pet notions is a poor alibi for the cowardice of willful ignorance of reality."

"Failures of Nerve" (Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, from the November 2002 issue)
"Anti-Americanism, in both its patently murderous and fatuously sophisticated forms, is a growth industry. ... Is there a connection between the Mary Beards and what Mark Steyn has aptly dubbed the weird beards of the world? - between the prattling intellectuals and the pragmatic terrorists? In an important sense the answer is Yes. ... This is not to suggest that Harold Pinter (say) is responsible for Mullah Omar; it is to suggest that he helps create a climate of opinion where Mullah Omars have a better chance of thriving. ... Orwell noted that pacifism was "objectively pro-Nazi" because it inculcated an attitude that aided England's enemies. Just so, anti-Americanism is objectively pro-terrorist. It was not surprising that the Nazis did all they could to encourage pacifism among the English (just as the Soviets actively aided the anti-War movement in America in the 1960s and 1970s). Similarly, anti-Americanism helps to create a climate where terrorism is excused, rationalized, explained - explained away. We deserved it; we had it coming; arrogance; poverty; the environment; root causes … Pacifism was built around phrases that sounded pleasant (peace, love, non-violence) but that were essentially deceptive because they were unrealistic - that is, untrue to the nature of reality, to the way the world actually works (as distinct from the way we might wish that it did)."

"The Left Dumbs Down" (Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times, 2002/11/05)
"In the 1990's, nothing made conservatives look sillier than the way they excoriated Bill and Hillary Clinton as traitors and even murderers. Yet these days, the intelligent left is dumbing down and showing signs of slipping into a similar cesspool of outraged incoherence. It's debasing and marginalizing itself by marshaling epithets rather than arguments. President Bush is criticized not just for catastrophically frittering away our budget surplus or for rushing us into a mess in Iraq. Rather, Citizens for Legitimate Government put it this way in its e-mail newsletter: "We have an Idiot Usurping Lying Weasel for a President." Close your eyes, and it sounds just like Rush Limbaugh."

"Let Them Come to Berlin" (Thomas L. Friedman, The New York Times, 2002/11/03)
"Bottom line: Many Europeans today fear, or detest, America more than they fear Saddam. That's crazy, but it explains why Mr. Schröder easily moved from raising legitimate questions about how to handle Iraq to taking Germany out of any war against Saddam under any conditions. This put Germany to the left of Saudi Arabia, which at least says it will support an Iraq war if it is approved by the U.N. It was the kind of rhetoric that leaves Americans thinking Europeans won't use force under any conditions, and therefore are a danger to themselves and to us. It is time for both sides to knock it off. We need each other. ... With a nod to J.F.K., my motto today is simple: "Ich bin ein New Yorker." We are all New Yorkers now. Wherever you live, if you believe in the open society, if you cherish a world of freedom, you are now in World War III - a war against the new totalitarians, who strike at our businesses, discos, airports and theaters in an attempt to get us to shut ourselves in and our societies down. Either we fight this war together, or we lose it together. To those who forgot what it takes to defend the open society, let them come to Berlin - let them walk the winding path where the Wall once stood and recall the collective effort that brought it down."

"The Chorus of Useful Idiots" (Bruce S. Thornton, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/11/01)
"For years Communism was the opiate of the secular materialists, an apocalyptic creed which filled the chosen with assurance of their righteousness and election. So too with anti-Americanism, a sect of that old-time Marxist religion. This doctrine knows the font of evil in the world - the West and especially America - whose deadly sins of "imperialism" and "colonialism" and "racism" have created a fallen world of suffering and exploitation, a world whose redemption depends on battling the power and influence of the wicked militarists and global capitalists. Or as one sign from last week's "anti-war" rally in New York succinctly put it, "Bush is a Devil." America is guilty and must atone for its sins by abandoning its power and pouring vast sums of money into its Third World victims, for only then will the golden age of peace, equality, and universal tolerance come about."

"'O, Heinous, Strong, and Bold Conspiracy!'" (Andrew Breitbart, National Review, 2002/10/30)
Breitbart on the era of Leftist conspiracy theorizing: "The instinct to go wacky is so reflexive in current progressive ranks that even before Paul Wellstone's body has been buried, his death has become the subject of a purported Republican plot. Yes: Bush and the evil cabal so feared the mighty Minnesota populist that they rigged his plane engine and knocked off seven innocents in the process. ... Indifferent to history's harsh judgment, self-proclaimed progressives continue to navigate the political map without a moral compass. The modern Left explains its political losses - both electoral and strategic - not by turning to self-reflection but by resorting to raw conspiracy-theorizing, emptied of reason. So preposterous is the average conspiracy allegation that it can only too clearly be seen to be motivated by cynicism - to say nothing of the scary possibility that the Democratic party believes their supporters are too gullible to challenge them. And notice that none of these plots are ever brought to a verifiable conclusion. Nor is there even an attempt at verifying or disproving them: After all, if they were to be proved wrong, the conspiracies couldn't hover above as a permanent fog with which to distract the electorate - over and over and over again."

"Idiocy of the week" (Andrew Sullivan, Salon.com, 2002/10/30)
Sullivan on the conspiracy theory of the week - Michael I. Niman's and Ted Rall's "Wellstone-was-murdered"-columns: "Should the U.N. be called in to investigate whether the "president" of the United States ordered a hit job on a leading senator? This is looney tunes. It reminds me of the nut cases on the right who peddled the notion that Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster. Niman isn't an outcast. He teaches at a state-funded university in New York state. He is way out there on the left, but so are most of the faculty members at mainstream colleges these days. ... In other words, Niman's bizarre conspiracy theory is perfectly within the orbit of respectable left-wing opinion. As if to prove that, the cartoonist Ted Rall, widely syndicated in the liberal media, has echoed the charge in his Universal Press Syndicate column. ... If this kind of speculation doesn't transgress essential American reasonableness, then what on earth does?" (See also: "The (possible) assassination of Paul Wellstone" (Ted Rall, Yahoo! News, 2002/10/30) and "Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?" (Michael I. Niman, AlterNet, 2002/10/28))

"PA: CIA behind Moscow Terrorists" (PMW/IMRA, 2002/10/30)
File under "Blame America First": "A senior writer in the Palestinian Authority official daily claims that the attack in Moscow by Islamic terrorists was a CIA plot. According to the writer, the US hopes that having the Russians suffer a Muslim terror attack will convince them to vote with the US in the UN in support of attacking Iraq. ... The following is from the text of the article: ... "The CIA will never acknowledge its responsibility for this operation which claimed over 170 lives, including those of the perpetrators.... However, the American message reached Moscow and was, perhaps, read the same way by the decision makers in France, who oppose the American pressure in the Security Council and insistently resist giving the Americans an international power of attorney to destroy the most ancient of Arab countries. We do not know whether there are members of pro-American organizations in Paris, but we believe that American Intelligence has no need for operatives in France, and we therefore fear a recurrence of a bloody scene in the capitol of [our] friends, the French." ... [Fuad Abu Hajleh, senior columnists, PA official daily, Al-Hayat Al-Jadida, October 29, 2002]"

"The (possible) assassination of Paul Wellstone" (Ted Rall, Yahoo! News, 2002/10/30)
Rall echoes Michael I. Niman's allegation that Bush might have ordered an assassination of Wellstone. Loony beyond imagination: "George W. Bush and his henchmen stole the presidency. They threw thousands of innocent people into prison without even charging them with a crime. ... Now some Democrats and progressive Americans are asking the unthinkable about an administration they increasingly believe to be ruled by thugs and renegades. Did government gangsters murder the United States' most liberal legislator? ... With Election Day looming on Nov. 5, many analysts were predicting a Wellstone victory and continued Democratic dominance of the Senate. Perhaps, the thinking goes, someone in the Bush regime decided Wellstone had to go. ... Asking mailmen to spy on ordinary Americans, creating military tribunals for anyone deemed an "enemy combatant," locking prisoners of war in dog cages, spending a decade's worth of savings in six months, allowing journalists to die rather than provide them with help in a war zone, smearing Democratic politicians as anti-American, invading sovereign nations without excuse - these are acts that transgress essential American reasonableness. A man capable of these things seems, by definition, capable of anything." (See also: "Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?" (Michael I. Niman, AlterNet, 2002/10/28) and "Ted Rall and His Web of Half-Truths: A Critique" (John Giuffo, The Comics Journal, from the #247 issue))

"Was Paul Wellstone Murdered?" (Michael I. Niman, AlterNet, 2002/10/28)
Anti-Bush conspiracy theorizing gone insane. Found via Best of the Web Today: "Wellstone's popularity surged after he voted to oppose the Senate resolution authorizing George Bush to wage war in Iraq. ... Then he died. ... There is no indication today that Wellstone's death was the result of foul play. What we do know, however, is that Wellstone emerged as the most visible obstacle standing in the way of a draconian political agenda by an unelected government. And now he is conveniently gone. For our government to maintain its credibility at this time, we need an open and accountable independent investigation involving international participation into the death of Paul Wellstone. Hopefully we will find out, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that this was indeed an untimely accident. For the sake of our country, we need to know this."

"Menace on the Mall" (Joseph J. Sabia, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/10/28)
Sabia on the "anti-war" rally in Washington, D.C.: "Zara Khan, leader of the City University of New York's (CUNY) Student Liberation Action Movement, kicked off the festivities by comparing the terrorist attacks of September 11 to tuition hikes: "On September 11, 2001, we lost our students to an act of terror and then we lost our students to immigrant tuition hikes, which are meant to terrorize immigrant communities in New York City. ... We the people of conscience in the United States can call out a terrorist when we see him steal the presidency. We can call out a terrorist when we see his energy policies. And we can call out a terrorist when we see him struggling to make a case for the war in Iraq." ... Ramsey Clark, Attorney General under President Lyndon Johnson, compared the Bush Administration's foreign policy with the domestic terror advanced by Nazi Schutzstaffel Chief Heinrich Himmler: 'We are destroying the United Nations, which was created to end the scourge of war. We are thumbing our nose at the Nuremberg charter, which stood, if anything, for [a policy of] 'you cannot strike first,' because Nazi Germany struck first time and time again. What did Heinrich Himmler tell the Gestapo? He said, 'Shoot first, ask questions later and I will protect you.' And that is what we plan to do with Iraq and other countries.'"

"Gore Vidal claims 'Bush junta' complicit in 9/11" (Sunder Katwala, The Observer, 2002/10/27)
Conspiracy theorizing à la Vidal: "Vidal's highly controversial 7000 word polemic titled 'The Enemy Within' - published in the print edition of The Observer today - argues that what he calls a 'Bush junta' used the terrorist attacks as a pretext to enact a pre-existing agenda to invade Afghanistan and crack down on civil liberties at home. Vidal writes: 'We still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday, or for what true purpose. But it is fairly plain to many civil libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas Bush-Cheney junta. ... Osama was chosen on aesthetic grounds to be the frightening logo for our long-contemplated invasion and conquest of Afghanistan ... [because] the administration is convinced that Americans are so simple-minded that they can deal with no scenario more complex than the venerable, lone, crazed killer (this time with zombie helpers) who does evil just for the fun of it 'cause he hates us because we're rich 'n free 'n he's not.'" (UPDATE: The full text can be found here: "The Enemy Within" (Gore Vidal, The Observer/UQ Wire, 2002/10/27). See also:"Gore Vidal Says Bush 'Wants War to Go on Forever'" (Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2002/09/09))

"Thousands Rally Around World Against Iraq War" (Mark Wilkinson, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2002/10/27)
Sarandon's belief that terrorism can't be "fought with violence" is just mindnumbingly stupid: "Tens of thousands of anti-war protesters marched peacefully on the White House on Saturday to express opposition to a possible U.S. attack on Iraq, some chanting slogans accusing President Bush of planning genocide. ... In Washington, actress Susan Sarandon, who supports numerous liberal causes, accused Bush of having "hijacked our losses and our fears." Sarandon said terrorism could not be fought with violence and that most Americans did not want a conflict. ... "George Bush, you can't hide. We charge you with genocide!" chanted the demonstrators, who were escorted by mounted U.S. Park Police and watched by 600 police officers along the route in the heart of the nation's capital." (See also: "US peace marches draw thousands" (BBC News, 2002/10/26))

"Shame on you America-hating Liberals" (Tony Parsons, The Daily Mirror, 2002/10/25)
"As a lesson in the pitiless cruelty of the human race, September 11 was up there with Pol Pot's mountain of skulls in Cambodia, or the skeletal bodies stacked like garbage in the Nazi concentration camps. An unspeakable act so cruel, so calculated and so utterly merciless that surely the world could agree on one thing - nobody deserves this fate. Surely there could be consensus: the victims were truly innocent, the perpetrators truly evil. But to the world's eternal shame, 9/11 is increasingly seen as America's comeuppance. Incredibly, anti-Americanism has increased over the last year. ...
These days you don't have to be some dust-encrusted nut job in Kabul or Karachi or Finsbury Park to see America as the Great Satan. ...
I love America, yet America is hated. I guess that makes me Bush's poodle. But I would rather be a dog in New York City than a Prince in Riyadh. Above all, America is hated because it is what every country wants to be - rich, free, strong, open, optimistic. ...
Remember, remember, September 11. One of the greatest atrocities in human history was committed against America. No, do more than remember. Never forget."

"The Real Roots of Arab Anti-Americanism" (Barry Rubin, Foreign Affairs, from the November/December 2002 issue)
"Arab and Muslim hatred of the United States is not just, or even mainly, a response to actual U.S. policies - policies that, if anything, have been remarkably pro-Arab and pro-Muslim over the years. Rather, such animus is largely the product of self-interested manipulation by various groups within Arab society, groups that use anti-Americanism as a foil to distract public attention from other, far more serious problems within those societies. ... To justify outrage against the United States, the enemy must be portrayed as a bully. But to encourage challenges against it, the United States must also be depicted as a weakling. ... To be effective, anti-Americanism must therefore persuade masses and leaders that the United States is simultaneously horrible and helpless, and that it will not do anything if it is attacked, ridiculed, or disregarded. ... As these comments suggest, it has been the United States' perceived softness in recent years, rather than its bullying behavior, that has encouraged the anti-Americans to act on their beliefs. After the United States failed to respond aggressively to many terrorist attacks against its citizens, stood by while Americans were seized as hostages in Iran and Lebanon, let Saddam Hussein remain in power while letting the shah fall, pressured its friends and courted its enemies, and allowed its prized Arab-Israeli peace process be destroyed, why should anyone have respected its interests or fear its wrath?"

"The Anti-Liberal Anti-War Case" (Michael Kelly, The Washington Post, 2002/10/23)
"In its essence, the liberal argument against war is that the immoral actor is America - that America is, or imminently threatens to become, what the American president might call evil: a nationalist, imperialist, law-breaking pariah state at odds with its own traditions and values. This bitter view has become the liberal establishment line, here and in Europe. A candid explication of the line is put forward in "The Threat of America," the lead article in the October issue of the London Review of Books. ... Lieven sums up his America: "What we see now is the tragedy of a great country, with noble impulses, successful institutions, magnificent historical achievements and immense energies, which has become a menace to itself and to mankind." ... In the end, it comes to this: The anti-warriors of the left would rather see Iraq continue as a slave state under Saddam Hussein than concede any legitimacy to the idea of an American (or at least a Republican) use of force. It's a price they are willing to pay. Because, you see, America is "a menace." Well, it is a point of view. But you might have a hard time convincing the average Iraqi torture victim that it is a liberal one, or moral one." (See also: "The Push for War" (Anatol Lieven, London Review of Books, from the 2002/10/03 issue))

"America in the dock - Myth II: America wants war with Saddam because of oil" (David Frum, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/10/22)
The second of a five-part series about British attitudes to America: "One Labour MP, Alan Simpson, phrased the accusation pungently in the Commons during the debate after Tony Blair presented the Government's dossier against Iraq. Saddam Hussein's "real crime", Mr Simpson said, "is his threat to negotiate oil contracts with Russia and France, not America". President George W Bush was like a drunk "who needs to satisfy his thirst for power and oil", and it was Mr Blair's duty "not to pass the bottle". ... Think for a minute about the logic of the claim that America wants to fight for oil. Does that mean "for access to oil"? America can already freely purchase all the oil it wants. There has not been a credible threat to access to oil supplies since the Arab embargo of 1973-74 and there is no credible threat to access today. Saddam wants to sell more oil, not less. And if conquest and occupation were necessary to obtain oil, why wouldn't America attack an easier target than Iraq - Angola, for example?" (See also: "America in the dock - Myth I: America is totally in hock to the Jewish lobby" (David Frum, The Daily Telegraph, 2002/10/21))

"The Wages of Hate: Anti-semitism and the war" (Andrew Sullivan, The Sunday Times/andrewsullivan.com, 2002/10/20)
"To single Israel out for condemnation and divestment, while ignoring all these others, is so self-evidently bizarre that it begs an obvious question. What are these anti-Israel fanatics really obsessed about? Where are the divestment campaigns for China or Zimbabwe? The answer, I think, lies in the nature of part of today's left. It is fueled above all by resentment - resentment of the West's success, resentment of the freedom to trade, resentment of any person or country, like Israel or Britain or the U.S., that has enriched itself by means of freedom and hard work. ... Ask the average leftist today what he is for, and you will not get a particularly eloquent response. ... But what they do know is what they are against: American power, Israeli human rights abuses, British neo-imperialism, the "racist" war on Afghanistan, and on and on. Get them started on their hatreds, and the words pour out. No wonder some have started selling the Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Central Park. This negativism matters. When you have a movement based on resentment, when you have a political style that is as bitter as it is angry, when your rhetoric focuses not on those who are murdering partiers in Bali or workers in Manhattan, but on those democratic powers trying to defend and protect them, then your fate is cast. A politics of resentment is a poisonous creature that slowly embitters itself. You should not be surprised if the most poisonous form of resentment that the world has ever known springs up, unbidden, in your midst."

"So Long, Fellow Travelers" (Christopher Hitchens, The Washington Post Outlook, from the 2002/10/20 issue)
"As someone who has done a good deal of marching and public speaking about Vietnam, Chile, South Africa, Palestine and East Timor in his time (and would do it all again), I can only hint at how much I despise a Left that thinks of Osama bin Laden as a slightly misguided anti-imperialist. ... Or a Left that can think of Milosevic and Saddam as victims. Instead of internationalism, we find among the Left now a sort of affectless, neutralist, smirking isolationism. In this moral universe, the views of the corrupt and conservative Jacques Chirac - who built Saddam Hussein a nuclear reactor, knowing what he wanted it for - carry more weight than those of persecuted Iraqi democrats. In this moral universe, the figure of Jimmy Carter - who incited Saddam to attack Iran in 1980, without any U.N. or congressional consultation that I can remember - is considered axiomatically more statesmanlike than Bush. Sooner or later, one way or another, the Iraqi and Kurdish peoples will be free of Saddam Hussein. When that day comes, I am booked to have a reunion in Baghdad with several old comrades who have been through hell. We shall not be inviting anyone who spent this precious time urging democratic countries to give Saddam another chance."

"They want to kill us all" (Mark Steyn, The Spectator, from the 2002/10/19 issue)
"Mr [Bruce] Haigh was an Australian diplomat in Indonesia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and he's in no doubt as to why hundreds of his compatriots were blown up in Bali. As he told Australia's Nine Network, 'The root cause of this issue has been America's backing of Israel on Palestine.' You don't say. It may well be true that, for certain Muslims 'frustrated' by Washington’s support for Israeli 'intransigence', blowing up Australians in Bali makes perfect sense. But, if even this most elastic of root causes can be stretched halfway around the globe to a place conspicuously lacking either Jews or Americans, then clearly it can apply to anyone or anything... As the likes of Mr Haigh demonstrate every day, the more you insist the Islamist psychosis is a rational phenomenon to be accommodated, the more you risk sounding just as nutty as the terrorists. ... The first choice of Islamists is to kill Americans and Jews, or best of all an American Jew - like Daniel Pearl, the late Wall Street Journal reporter. Failing that, they're happy to kill Australians, Britons, Canadians, Swedes, Germans, as they did in Bali. We are all infidels. ... The objective isn't a self-governing Palestine but the death of the West."

"Susan Sontag Award" (andrewsullivan.com, 2002/10/17)
Sullivan quotes Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's, from the print edition of the October issue: "When asked by worried friends and acquaintances whether the President was borrowing his geopolitical theory from the diaries of Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, I assured them that the President didn't have the patience to read more than two or three pages of a Tom Clancy novel."

"I'm an American tired of American lies" (Woody Harrelson, The Guardian, 2002/10/17)
An astonishingly juvenile anti-American column by Harrelson, in which US is viewed as a perennial racist and imperialist power built on lies: "We've killed a million Iraqis since the start of the Gulf war - mostly by blocking humanitarian aid. Let's stop now. ... I'm an American tired of lies. And with our government, it's mostly lies. ... Columbus is the perfect symbol of US foreign policy to this day. This is a racist and imperialist war. The warmongers who stole the White House (you call them "hawks", but I would never disparage such a fine bird) have hijacked a nation's grief and turned it into a perpetual war on any non-white country they choose to describe as terrorist."

"Don't blame the west" (Clive James, The Guardian, 2002/10/16)
James on Australian pundits: "Not just the majority of the intellectuals, academics and schoolteachers, but most of the face-workers in the media, share the view that international terrorism is to be explained by the vices of the liberal democracies. Or, at any rate, they shared it until a few days ago. It will be interesting, in the shattering light of an explosive event, to see if that easy view continues now to be quite so widespread, and how much room is made for the more awkward view that the true instigation for terrorism might not be the vices of the liberal democracies, but their virtues. ... The consensus will die hard in Australia, just as it is dying hard here in Britain. On Monday morning, the Independent carried an editorial headed: "Unless there is more justice in the world, Bali will be repeated." Towards the end of the editorial, it was explained that the chief injustice was "the failure of the US to use its influence to secure a fair settlement between Israelis and Palestinians." ... But surely the reverse is true: they are students of the opposite of history, which is theocratic fanaticism. Especially, they are dedicated to knowing as little as possible about the history of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. A typical terrorist expert on the subject believes that Hitler had the right idea, that The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a true story, and that the obliteration of the state of Israel is a religious requirement."

"A Nobel Idea of Peace" (Michael Kelly, The Washington Post, 2002/10/16)
Kelly on the latest Nobel Peace Price, which was awarded to Jimmy Carter: "Many thoughts are unthinkable to the ideologically bankrupt establishment left that the Nobellians exemplify. Paramount among these is that war - or, to be precise, war or the threat of war sponsored by the United States - has been the modern world's great deliverer of peace. But there the truth sits. Name, in the past hundred years, a single important triumph for peace and for liberal democracy that was purchased by the jaw-jawing the Nobellians so admire. No rush, take your time. Now, look at what American war-war (and the threat of American war-war) won: the defeat of the fascist attempt to rule the world; the defeat of the communist attempt to rule the world; the consequent rebuilding of a Europe protected by American arms into a democratic and peaceful continent for the first time in history; the rebuilding of an American-protected Japan into a democratic and peaceful nation for the first time in history; the emergence of a world in which, for the first time in history, the peaceful values of liberal democracy are the ascendant norm. No, no, it remains unthinkable. To imagine American force was a force for good, one would have to imagine America was a force for good. And this, the Bourbons of Oslo will never, never do." (See also :"The Nobel Appeasement Prize" (James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal/Best of the Web Today, 2002/10/11) and "Nobel Peace Prize Awarded to Carter With Criticism of Bush" (The New York Times, 2002/10/11))

"An enemy of America and a friend of Osama bin Laden" (The Age, 2002/10/15)
A transcript of a recent interview from ABC with Abu Bakar Bashir: "I hate the American Government but not the American people because they are being manipulated by Jews to fight against Islam. It is the duty of Muslims to hate America because they are launching an anti-Muslim crusade right now - this has been announced by President Bush himself . So as long as the US Government cooperates with Jews to fight us, it is incumbent on Muslims to hate America, to fight back. But I stress, I hate the US Government, not the people. I know there are good Americans. But there is nothing good to say about the US Government because they harbour evil designs against Islam. ...
Q: You say you are very anti-American. Does that stop with America, or does it include other countries, like Australia, that are getting on board with the so-called war on terrorism? Is it an anti-Western view?
A: It is our obligation to hate all nations helping the US because those countries who support America's war on terrorists are actually fighting against Islam. The Koran states that Jews and Christians hate Islam. Countries like Pakistan or even the Australian Government, we have to hate them because their fight is directed against Islam and is based on anti-Islam teachings, so we have to hate that."

"Bleeding hearts left exposed as fools" (Gerard Henderson, The Sydney Morning Herald, 2002/10/14)
"Perhaps those who blamed the US for September 11 will now realise they have been deluded. Who will be on Michael Leunig's Christmas card list this time? Last year, in the aftermath of the terrorist murders in the United States, the Melbourne-based cartoonist declared that it was time to extend "mercy, forgiveness, compassion" to, wait for it, the leader of al-Qaeda. Writing in The Age on Christmas Eve, the intellectual guru of Down Under's leftist luvvies declared: "Might we, can we, find a place in our heart for the humanity of Osama bin Laden and those others? On Christmas Day, can we consider their suffering, their children and the possibility that they too have their goodness? It is a family day, and Osama is our relative." It remains to be seen whether Leunig will exhibit similar sentiments this Christmas with respect to the weekend's massacre of the innocents. ... Then there are the asinine utterances of the infantile left. Remember the claim by Bob Ellis that there are many kinds of terrorism - including "a creditor's threatening letter" (The Canberra Times, January 14, 2002)? And Richard Neville's assertion in Amerika Psycho (Ocean Press, 2002) that US policy after September 11 can be explained in terms of Bush's aim to "extend America's grip on the wealth of the world". ... Whatever personal positions are held about Bush, Blair and John Howard, contemporary terrorism amounts to an attack on Western civilisation. The sooner this is understood, the sooner the likes of Leunig will recognise that bin Laden is one of those brothers who, if given the chance, commits fratricide; before, during or after Christmas."

"Cornell Leftists Trash Columbus/America" (Joseph J. Sabia, FrontPageMagazine, 2002/10/14)
"As cities around the country hold traditional Columbus Day celebrations, America-haters on today's college campuses will be protesting Christopher Columbus' alleged genocidal megalomania. ... Recently, a mob of Native, Hispanic, and black students at Cornell University held an anti-Columbus Day rally at which protesters blamed white people for everything from systematic murder to New Coke. An angry black student stood at the center of the rally holding a defaced American flag. The following message was scrawled along Old Glory's white stripes: "We live in a country founded by cheats, murderers, rapists, thieves, terrorists whom [sic] captured, killed, enslaved millions of Africans, whom [sic] killed more Natives than Nazis did Jews while the Catholic Church is behind the altar justifying molestation - God bless Amerikkka." ... The message on the flag was especially puzzling because it linked European voyagers of the late 1400s with (i) America's Founding Fathers of the late 1700s, (ii) the German Nazis of the 1930s, and (iii) the Catholic Church of the 1990s. It's hard to keep track of what these people are arguing and who the alleged perpetrators are. But that's part of their point - they link every white person to National Socialism or the Ku Klux Klan and romanticize savage, murderous backward cultures."

"Saved by U.S., Kuwait Now Shows Mixed Feelings" (Craig S. Smith, The New York Times, 2002/10/12)
"Muhammad al-Mulaifi, head of the information department at Kuwait's Ministry of Islamic Affairs, tried momentarily to suppress a smile, then broke into a broad grin when asked if he supported the terrorist attacks on the United States last year. "I would be lying if said I wasn't happy about the attack," he said, sitting on the floor of his air-conditioned home office, a carpeted, cushioned oasis amid the harsh heat of this small, dry country. Mr. Mulaifi said that many Kuwaitis were delighted about what had happened to the United States and that he had attended parties held in celebration. "Only then did we see America suffer for a few seconds what Muslims have been suffering for a long time," he said. His view is not an uncommon one among Muslims in this part of the world, but it is surprising coming from someone whose country the United States rescued from Iraqi domination just over 11 years ago."

"Mandela picks Iraq over U.S." (R.W. Johnson, National Post, 2002/10/11)
"Mandela has uttered stronger and stronger statements critical of Bush. ... When this failed to move Bush Jr., Mandela declared the U.S. threat of pre-emptive war to bring about regime change in Iraq meant that the United States, not Iraq, was now "a danger to world peace." He followed this up by announcing that "some people" were saying that the United States was flouting the United Nations' authority because Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, was a black man. Last week Mandela went further still, no longer putting such allegations in the mouths of "some people," but openly charging that the Bush administration was acting out of racist and white supremacist motives in not "obeying" Kofi Annan. 'No country, however powerful it may be, is entitled to act outside the UN. When UN secretaries-general were white we never had the question of any country ignoring the United Nations, but now that we have got black secretaries-general like Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan certain countries that believe in white supremacy are ignoring the UN for racist reasons.'"

"Left Behind" (Jonathan V. Last, The Weekly Standard, 2002/10/11)
Last on yesterday's "Prominent Citizens Oppose War with Iraq" press conference: "The religious left, in the person of Linda Fuller, of Habitat for Humanity, asked, "Can you imagine the difference if we voted, as a nation, to pray for Osama bin Laden?" Fuller then recounted a story about her son. Evidently, when he was a young boy there was another kid in the neighborhood who always bullied him. Confronted with what to do about this bully, Fuller convinced her son to invite him to his birthday party. The bully came to the party, and afterwards, the two were fast friends. Paul Wolfowitz, take note. ... The most memorable thing about the presentation of NOW's Olga Vivas was Vivas's job title. She's the "Action Vice President" at the National Organization for Women. (Is that like an action figure? Does she come with kung-fu grip? Shouldn't Dick Cheney demand the same title?) But she did have the best red meat of the day, saying that it isn't radical Islam, but rather "U.S. foreign policy" that "has already contributed to" the "oppression" of women in the Middle East. Besides, she asked, "Isn't there terror being inflicted on the women and children of the United States" by Bush's domestic policy?"

"Sontag Award Nominee" (andrewsullivan.com, 2002/10/11)
Sullivan quotes Glenda Gilmore, professor of history, Yale University: "It is not enough for Bush to be President of the United States, he must become the Emperor of the World. This unclothed emperor is, as they say in Texas, all hat and no brains. In the years before us, I fear there will be causes worth dying for. There will be tyrants so unstoppable that we will have to fight them to preserve our own freedom. But that is not the case now. Instead of standing up against tyranny, we are bringing it to our own doorstep. We have met the enemy, and it is us." (See also: "Variations on Iraq: Glenda Gilmore" (Glenda Gilmore, yaledailynews, 2002/10/11))

"Arab Press Reacts to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice's Statements on Democracy and Freedom" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 427, 2002/10/11)
"In a recent interview with the Financial Times, National Security Advisor to President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, stated that the United States wishes to bring democracy and freedom to the Arab world. In response, a number of Arab newspapers harshly criticized National Security Advisor Rice, often focusing on her African-American heritage. ... The Jordanian daily Al-Dustour wrote that National Security Advisor Rice claims that ... 'She is ignoring more than one and a half billion Muslims who suffer from America's greed and oppression and from its cruel and visible war against Islam and Muslims. ... O Muslims, here is America invading you with its steel, its fire and its oppression. Its bloodthirsty individuals, the likes of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice and Sharon, are carrying to you death, destruction, devastation, enslavement and evil which will start in Iraq after they have suppressed Afghanistan and Palestine, and will end, if we do not protect ourselves, in the last piece of land in our extended Muslim world which will be converted into a gigantic Guantanamo extending from one ocean to another.'"

"Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee" (Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer, 2002/10/09)
A must-read farewell to the lunatic left: "Until finally, the coup de grâce - the Big Idiocy, the idiocy di tutti idiocies. It came from the very well-respected and influential academic, who said that there was at least one thing that was to be welcomed about 9/11: It might give Americans the impetus to do "what the Germans had done in the 60's" - make an honest reassessment of their past and its origins, as a way to renewal. Reassessment of our past: Clearly he was speaking admiringly of the 60's generation in Germany coming to terms with its Nazi past, with Germany’s embrace of Hitler. At that point, having sat silently through an accumulation of self-hating anti-Americanism, I couldn't take it any more. ... ...We should be grateful for 9/11 because it would allow us to reassess our shameful, even Nazi-like, past? "Isn't there an implicit analogy you're making between America and Nazi Germany?" I asked. "It's just an analogy," he said. Well, goodbye to all that, goodbye to the entire mind-set behind it: the inability to distinguish America's sporadic blundering depradations (dissent from which was sometimes successful) from "Germany's past," Hitlerism. It was "just an analogy." ... The silence of the Left, or the exclusive focus of the Left, on America's alleged crimes over the past half-century, the disdainful sneering at America's deplorable "Cold War mentality" - none of this has to be reassessed in light of the evidence of genocides that surpassed Hitler's, all in the name of a Marxist ideology. ... Goodbye to people who have demonstrated that what terror means to them is the terror of ever having to admit they were wrong, the terror of allowing the hideous facts of history to impinge upon their insulated ideology."

"Banality in the courtroom" (Scot Lehigh, The Boston Globe, 2002/10/09)
Lehigh on the Richard Reid case: "Second, for those who believe that America brings terrorism on itself, those whose implicit premise is that if only we changed our ways, we'd have no trouble with the world, the case of the shoebomber should be revealing. Through his interrogation and e-mails, we've learned his bill of particulars against the United States. Democratic countries, he told prosecutors, are contrary to God's will. ''This is a war between Islam and democracy,'' he e-mailed his mother. A society that permits homosexuality and sex outside marriage (and that is marred by alcoholism and drug addiction) also violates God's will, he believed. And, of course, he loathed the United States because without it, he thought, Israel could not exist. And because there are US troops in the Middle East. That's the outlook of radical Islam: Extreme, irrational, medieval, antipathetic to modernity. It would be a mark of intellectual clarity for America's critics to recognize that mindset for exactly what it is." (Not