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Politics : THE BIN LADEN LOVERS' HALL OF SHAME AKA THE BIN LAUNDRY LIST -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: E who wrote (168)	11/25/2001 9:16:47 PM
From: KLP	Respond to of 383

This too, may be a little harsh for our sensibilities....but then again...maybe not. Certainly something to think about. Resentment as a religion November 25, 2001 Marian Kester Coombs The questions of the hour are "Is Islam the problem?" and "If so, then what is Islam?" The West had been waiting for the formidable Salman Rushdie — a man who has been living under a "fatwa" a few years longer than the rest of us — to weigh in, and he did so in early November, answering the question "Is it Islam?" with a resounding yes. Islam, he noted, unlike Christianity, is a petrified belief structure that has never undergone any sort of Reformation since its inception in the seventh century; its most modern self-critique consists of 18th-century Wahhabism, a fundamentalist, puritanical, theocratic reaction to the "corruption of the true faith" which has now found its most perfect incarnation in the Taliban. Another man who should know, expatriate Iranian author and journalist Amir Taheri, also begs us to blame Islam. "The refusal to subject Islam to rational analysis" — anathema to believers — "is a recipe for further fanaticism," wrote Mr. Taheri in the Wall Street Journal on Oct. 27. "All but one of the world's remaining military regimes are in Muslim countries. With the exception of Turkey and Bangladesh, there are no real elections in any Muslim country. Of the current 30 active conflicts in the world no fewer than 28 concern Muslim governments and/or communities. Two-thirds of the world's political prisoners are held in Muslim countries, which also carry out 80 percent of all executions each year." Islam should be critiqued not as a belief system but as "an existential reality," argues Mr. Taheri, one that prevents Muslim nations "from developing a modern political culture, without which they cannot reform their societies and rebuild their economies." Nick Griffin is a British National Party politician who just shocked the U.K. establishment by winning 16.4 percent of the general election vote in Oldham, a town in the north of England where Muslim riots and attacks on white Britons have become epidemic. He was in the States the other day to warn Americans what is in store for us as the "clash of civilizations" gets up-close and personal. Mr. Griffin has made a study of Islam and finds it to be not a religion, in the sense of requiring some sort of moral response from the believer, but rather a tendency, in the political sense of a faction contesting for power. The Koran, which he likens to "the Talmud on angel dust," instructs believers living in "infidel" nations to lay low until they reach about 10 percent of the population; then they may attack and disrupt the sinful host society with a better chance of ultimate takeover. With a birthrate of six children per woman in contrast to the native British rate of 1.7, Muslims are massing to hit that critical percentage in Britain very soon. In France they are already there, and Muslim unrest, from gangs assaulting French girls to machine-gun attacks on police stations, has been steadily increasing. Mr. Griffin warns that the European experience has destroyed any illusions about Muslim assimilation of the West. Official protestations to the contrary, they are here not to assimilate, but to conquer. What is the wellspring of this implacable enmity? We know its history: briefly, the repulsion of the Mohammedan armies by Charles the Hammer near Tours in 732 A.D., the attack on Jerusalem by the First Crusade in 1099 and the Crusades that followed, the Cid's exploits in the 12th century, Ferdinand and Isabella's expulsion of the Moors from most of Spain in 1492, Phillip III's reconquest of Granada and the remaining Moor-held Spanish provinces in 1609, the halt of the Ottoman Empire's forces at the gates of Vienna in 1683, the Ottoman collapse after World War I. But what keeps Islam's appetite for conflict with "Christendom" ever whetted? After all, Spain no longer simmers vengefully over England's rude reception of the Armada, nor are the Dutch still spoiling for a rematch over the East Indies. Islam does not move on because for some reason it cannot. Shelby Steele wrote "War of the Worlds" for the Wall Street Journal of Sept. 17 a stirring ode to Western civilization in which he declared, "It has always astounded me how much white Americans take for granted the rich and utterly decisive heritage of Western culture," and warned that "White guilt morally and culturally disarms the West [and] only inflames the narcissism of the ineffectual" Third World. Later, one Sajid Ali Khan opined from London that "Greek civilization was fortunately translated into Arabic and thence percolated into 'the West.' And so on so forth. For instance do his heroic paler-skinned not all use Arabic numerals? The Arab al-gibr gives rise to algebra in the most recent spelling, and also to the sort of gibberish with which Mr. Steele is haunted." Preferring not to dwell on the peculiarities of Mr. Khan's opinion, Jed Skillman opined back from Brookfield, Ill., that he had missed the point: "It's true the West has adopted the use of Arabic numerals. It happened some time ago and it's not news. I think the point is that no one thinks of himself as 'acting Arabic' for doing so." In other words, algebra was a long time ago — what have you done for us lately? Explaining why the Arab world, once a center of learning and scientific inquiry, had lost momentum to the West by around 1500, Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy noted mildly in the New York Times on Oct. 30: "The notion that all knowledge is in the Great Text [Koran] is a great disincentive to learning." Arab scholars may have preserved and translated the treasures of Greek science, keeping them alive to be passed later to Europeans, and collaborated on the invention of zero and the decimal system, but they could not sustain the social conditions necessary to the search for scientific truth. Because Islamic states are theocratic, they dare not encourage theoretical inquiries and technological innovations that would tend to produce strains in what should be a perfect and immutable God-ordained system. And because the Islamic motivation to do science is only religious, the kind of disinterested, open-ended "pure" science that has so benefited the world is rarely pursued. One also need not be a Friedan feminist to see how the lowly status of Muslim women permits an unhealthy psychic base of unearned male supremacism. Chivalry, another innovation unique to the West, was a deliberate drive by European men to reform masculinity and to honor women qua women. Muslim polygamy, likewise, creates a large pool of "undomesticated" and disenfranchised men ripe for recruitment to fanaticism, while Western monogamy has worked to offer each man a peaceful democratic stake in society (cf. the writings of Kevin MacDonald). One of the nastier features of globalization is how every culture is now forced to compare itself to every other. No more do the veiling effects of time and distance mercifully render "mysterious" the brutish everyday realities of more backward peoples. For those who once were great and now are way behind, the glare of global invidious comparison is particularly unbearable. Not a contemporary but nonetheless a highly modern voice is that of Friedrich Nietzsche, the "posthumous" man who inhabited a world post-God and beyond Good and Evil. His critique of ressentiment — the "self-poisoned mind" of resentment — fits Islam like a glove. For Nietzsche, the repressed emotion of ressentiment leads at length to an entire falsified worldview, a whole revalued code of values, a complete morality based upon sour grapes, vindictiveness, delusions of grandeur and an embittered sense of helpless inferiority. The envied enemy is hated for his superior virtues, which are transformed by the alchemy of ressentiment into objects of loathing. Sociologists also distinguish between two types of juvenile deviant behavior: criminality which aims at direct personal gain, and delinquency which targets symbols such as schools and churches. This distinction accounts for the strong element of vandalism — sheer malicious joy in destroying — that is so striking in the current terrorist campaign; Islam is collective, ethnic ressentiment expressing itself in the attempted wholesale vandalization of Western society. The "Son of Sam" defense ("My dog made me do it") has now been joined by the "Son of Islam" defense ("My god made me do it"). Gods, dogs — as long as you can relocate the will to kill and maim outside yourself in some higher power, you're righteous. Right? Before September 11, Americans who reacted against the many hate-filled threats and insults directed at our country were labeled "paranoid" and instructed to blithely ignore such provocations. Now the media squeak in wonderment at "how naive we all were," and scold us to hurry up and worry about everything under the sun. Meanwhile, London's Sunday Telegraph reports that our close trading partners, the Chinese, by the thousands are snapping up garish videos of the September attack with narration like "This is the America the whole world has wanted to see," and "Look at the panic in their faces as they wipe off the dust and crawl out of their strong buildings — now just a heap of rubble. We will never fear these people again, they have been shown to be soft-bellied paper tigers." Please let us know when it's no longer "paranoid" to react to these little digs, OK? Marian Kester Coombs is a free-lance writer. washtimes.com

To: E who wrote (168)	11/25/2001 9:19:26 PM
From: KLP	Respond to of 383

And another "opinion".... But it looks like these folks were actually there ... Kabul's 'room of pain' unlocks torture secrets by Philip Sherwell and Julian West in Kabul (Filed: 25/11/2001) THE evidence lies scattered on the filthy concrete floor. Lipstick, bracelets, compact cases, perfume, nail polish, hair-clips, even shiny black handbags: each one enough to condemn a woman to the "room of pain" in the Taliban's Afghanistan. On the wall nearby are rust-coloured stains and long, deep scratches: the blood and fingernail gouges left behind by women tortured in this room as punishment for their alleged crimes against Islam. Kabul's infamous women's prison yielded its grim secrets last week after the zealots of the Taliban fled the city. It was here that the feared religious police incarcerated and tortured women deemed to have breached the codes of dress and behaviour imposed by the mullahs at the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. Accused female adulterers and criminals were also brought here before being taken to public squares and stadiums to be stoned, flogged or have limbs amputated. Workers at the prison recall hearing inmates' screams seeping from behind the locked doors of the room of pain. From the wall of the small stone-walled torture chamber dangles a green rope used to tie up prisoners still shrouded in their head-to-ankle burqas. The Northern Alliance, the city's new ruler, has appointed a senior official to investigate the abuses committed in the women's jail under its director, the Pakistani cleric Mullah Kebale. The full scale of the atrocities will probably never be known, however, as the Taliban burnt the prison's files and records when they fled. More alarmingly, the retreating Taliban forces also drove away almost 100 women inmates as they headed south in a fleet of pick-up trucks towards Kandahar. Relatives broke down in hysterics after they came to the unguarded jail the next morning, only to find that their daughters, sisters and mothers had disappeared. Left behind in spartan cells that housed up to 20 women and their children were their lice-infested mattresses and ragged clothes. The departure was so abrupt that their laundry still hung from washing lines strung across a small courtyard surrounded by barbed wire. Some of the warders' torture implements, including thick metal manacles and the long rubber whips with which the religious police routinely beat their victims, were abandoned in the rush. So were many of the beauty products and jewellery secretly worn by women under their burqas, only for the items to land them in jail when they were discovered. Under the Taliban, even white shoes and shiny handbags were considered too racy for a woman to wear outdoors. Yet some women took enormous risks running underground beauty parlours. Last week The Telegraph visited one such parlour in a bedroom on a squalid housing estate where a woman called Mehbooba maintained an Aladdin's cave of perming lotion, hairspray, lipstick, nail polish and hand-carved wooden curlers. On a shelf is a handpainted sign reading "Yamarut Beauty Parlour", which the 41-year-old Moscow-trained beautician had hidden during the Taliban's rule. For six years, women from the neighbouring flats secretly visited her. "We had to be fashionable," said Mehbooba. "Even though we weren't seen, it was important to us, it helped to keep our spirits alive." Had she or her clients been discovered they would have ended up in the room of pain. Others were hauled into the squalid prison and beaten for offences such as walking or talking with a man who was not a close relative, or for briefly lifting their veils to look at an item in a shop. Sharbano, 32, had been a prison officer at the jail before the Taliban seized the city in 1996 and banned women from working. The next time she returned to the compound was to visit a friend who had been arrested because her husband was suspected of supporting the alliance. She still shakes as she describes the "savagery" of the three Taliban who forced the woman down on to the floor, covered her body with a blanket and then whipped her repeatedly with a thick cable. Shan Fahim was a policeman stationed in the main headquarters. He recalls the screams and cries of women held there and says the torturers were "animals". He said: "They could not hide their excitement when they discussed what they had done. They just used the name of Islam as an excuse to justify their actions. They were not normal people." Wajihah Shah, a 30-year-old mother-of-three, returned to her job as prison administrator last week. The religious police beat her twice, once for travelling alone in a taxi with the driver, and the other time for attending an unauthorised sewing evening with female friends. She is now helping to investigate the abuses at the prison. On her first day back at her desk, she removed her burqa and revealed a face made up with mascara and lipstick - just the sort of decadent excesses that would have landed her inside the same jail under the Taliban. portal.telegraph.co.uk.

To: E who wrote (168)	11/25/2001 9:27:53 PM
From: Patrick Slevin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 383

In the 1960s dissent was tolerated; sometimes it got out of hand and riots ensured, but it was tolerated by and large. There was no immediate danger to the country nor the military response then either. Probably 90 percent of the country supported America's posture in VietNam. The Silent Majority stayed silent. Today, people are less willing to be Silent. The difference today is that although the Minority is still vocal, the Majority has decided to be vocal as well. The tone of this thread, whether you care for it or not, is the way certain people feel. And just as the dissidents have a right to their opinion, the people here do as well. Maybe it's well that people do voice their opinion in such a fashion. Staying Silent in the 1960s gave rise to a group today that still thinks the US is wrong no matter what happens. The town of Berkley is afraid to put an American Flag on a firetruck because of possible reprisals by the Children of the 60s. I won't tell you that I think even half the people mentioned here are criminals. Far from it. However, these people have just as much right to vent as the people who get press merely because they are authors, or actors, or some other such media personalities. I doubt that such people care about opinions expressed here, and I for one welcome the opinions here. I don't wish to know what media personalities think; instead I want to know what the person like me thinks. Barbara Streisand isn't posting here. If I want to know what she thinks I'm sure someone will beat me over the head with it in the New York Times or on the radio or some other such place where opinion is controlled.

To: E who wrote (168)	11/26/2001 7:47:41 AM
From: jlallen	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 383

Ahem. Get serious. This thread is a bit of a spooof I borrowed from a local talk show. Bu seriously, just as you are free to advocate your opinion, so am I free to advocate mine. When someone expresses an opinion I find treasonous, antiAmerican, whatever, I will say so. I'm sorry you don't like that state of affairs. Tough darts.... JLA

To: E who wrote (168)	11/27/2001 2:07:57 AM
From: BDR	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 383

<<I point out that the few dissenters against our military response hardly pose a danger to our country, the support by the citizenry for our military actions being close to ninety per cent. The only reward for demonizing and attempting to intimidate into silence our fellow Americans is the gratification derived from expressing anger and of course from having found OBL-surrogates to scapegoat. >> I would point out that a few people posting on an obscure website (and getting more obscure all the time, judging by the declining participation in SI) hardly pose a danger to free speach. And as for "attempting to intimidate into silence our fellow Americans", well I think you are really stretching if you think that this thread is capable of doing that. Perhaps you think that postings on the stock discussion threads on SI are capable of moving markets, too? Would that it were so. Give it a rest. Speaking of self-importance, I enjoyed this article in today's paper and thought I would post it here, since silencing dissent from Hollywood has been one of the goals of this thread. (I'm kidding, so ease up) opinionjournal.com You Mean Terrorists Don't Read Variety? Hollywood grapples with its unimportance. BY ROB LONG Monday, November 26, 2001 12:01 a.m. EST LOS ANGELES--Jerry Lewis once bid farewell to a nightclub audience with this heartfelt prayer: "May all of your friends," he intoned, "be show business people." What he meant, I guess, is that show business people--or, in the earlier jargon, "show people" and in the earliest jargon, "carnival people"--have uniquely deep and satisfying friendships. As Frank Sinatra was once overheard saying to a close friend, "I wish that someone would hurt your family so that I could find that person and hurt them back." You see, out here in Hollywood, we like to feel useful. And to be useful, we must first feel important. But it's hard to feel important when the biggest terrorist of them all, Osama bin Laden--really, let's face it, the guy who practically defines the A-list of villains--hasn't had the common courtesy to so much as name us in a fatwa. "Of course, the studios are next," a studio executive told me at lunch, in the days following Sept. 11. "They'll definitely hit one of the big talent agencies," a big talent agent told me on the phone a week or two later. "Probably not one of the smaller literary ones, but an Endeavor, a CAA, yeah, I'm sure they're next," he went on. "Really?" I asked. "Do you really think al Qaeda reads Variety?" Eyes were rolled in my direction. "Rob," an entertainment industry attorney said to me, "everyone reads Variety, okay? Don't be naive." So the studios barricaded themselves with concrete barriers and bomb-sniffing dogs, mail was opened and checked for mysterious powder, and the town braced itself for what was surely going to be the next wave of attacks. We are, we told ourselves, the single most influential group of people in the nation. We are the exporters of the American way of life, the sellers of the American dream, and the picture postcard image of decadence for every nerdy, dateless Islamic extremist from Bishkek to Istanbul. When people think of America, they think of blondes, "Baywatch," and the beach. On the great heap of American society, we're at the top; if America is a fashionable nightclub, we are very much sauntering in at the front of the line. I mean, aren't we? Because with the war almost over and the wave of anthrax mailings last week's news, we're suddenly not so sure that we're on the A-list of people worth murdering. It's impossible to wrap your head around, I know, but maybe, just maybe, all of our music and television and movies--the collected work product of thousands of talented people-- is, well, marginal. Irrelevant, even. Nice to have around, but a quiet-now-the-grownups-are-talking type thing. "I miss Clinton," a development executive at a television network said to me last week. "First off, the guy was always in town. I mean, he must have spent half of his eight years in L.A. Second, he listened. Really listened. I remember back then we had a sitcom on the air and one of the actresses on it was really concerned about . . . I don't know, air quality or something . . . and she marched right up to him and started talking air quality policy stuff to him and he just listened for, like, half an hour." It's true. When Bill Clinton was president, we were more than entertainers and campaign contributors. We were policy makers and deep thinkers. Our ideas on environmental protection and space exploration were sought after by the White House. Articles were written in important chronicles--well, Vanity Fair, but still--about the "New Establishment" and the "Powerful Media" and guess what? They were talking about us! We were the New Establishment, and we had the president in town to prove it. We slept over in the Lincoln Bedroom and had all-night snack and policy fests in the White House kitchen and got Important Briefings from Important Staffers. It was a glorious time, let me tell you. Even I miss it, and I'm a Republican. Not long ago, Karl Rove convened a meeting of Hollywood's top executives to discuss how we could join the war effort. The days that preceded the event were a blur of furious jockeying for seat placement and wheedling invitations. Hollywood is prepared, the various executives promised, to support the president and the war effort. But when the meeting was over, the only concrete outcome was an agreement by the studios to supply first-run movies to our armed forces overseas. That's it. That's where we are on the food chain these days--somewhere in the middle ranks of Defense Department suppliers. In the wake of his masterful handling of Sept. 11, our president has been compared to Shakespeare's Prince Hal, the callow youth who transforms himself into a warrior king and into the leader of a great nation. In many ways, this comparison rings true. But what happens to Falstaff, Prince Hal's entertaining and pompous companion? What happens to the clown when the party hats are put aside for the real and grim business of war? He sinks to his rightful place, is what happens. And after eight years of Bill Clinton, Hollywood is back where it belongs. At the great Thanksgiving dinner of American society, we are back eating at the kids' table. Among the not-so-terrible casualties of Sept. 11, along with Bill Maher's career and Susan Sontag's credibility, we must now add Hollywood's flatulent self-importance. Just my luck. Now that we've got a Republican in the White House, I've joined the ranks of the unimportant. Mr. Long is a writer in Hollywood and a contributing editor of National Review. He is the author of "Conversations With My Agent" (Penguin, 1998).