Best of the Web Today - March 22, 2004
By JAMES TARANTO
72 Raisins for Yassin
This morning brought happy news in the global war on terror: Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the genocidal maniac who serves as Hamas's "spiritual leader," is dead, killed by an Israeli missile strike. Yassin was quite a prolific murderer. "Over the past 3 1/2 years, . . . Hamas has, in 425 attacks, killed 377 Israelis and wounded 2076," notes the Jerusalem Post. "Hamas perpetrated 52 suicide attacks, in which 288 people were killed and 1646 were wounded."
The Middle East Media Research Institute quotes Yassin as saying in a 1998 ineterview: "The day in which I will die as a shahid [martyr] will be the happiest day of my life." So this is a happy day for everyone.
Everyone, that is, except the Europeans, including even Prime Minister Tony Blair, who lined up to condemn Israel. The Scotsman reports that Blair's spokesman called the death of this mass murderer "a setback" for the so-called peace process, while Foreign Secretary Jack Straw called the killing "unlawful" and added that "he did not believe that Israel would benefit from the killing of an old man in a wheelchair"--a rather condescending thing to say about people with disabilities. (Yassin was crippled in a childhood soccer accident.)
Reuters quotes France's Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin: "France condemns the action against Sheikh Yassin. At a time when it is important to mobilize for the relaunch of the peace process, such acts can only fuel the cycle of violence." Of course, if Hamas hadn't killed hundreds of innocent people, Israel would have had no cause to kill Yassin. But there are limits. "Germany avoided condemnation of the helicopter rocket attack," the "news" service notes. We suppose it would be awkward for Germany, of all countries, to mourn the death of a mass killer of Jews.
Meanwhile, London's Guardian reports that "Yasser Arafat has apologised to the father of a young Arab man who was shot dead in Jerusalem in a botched attempt by the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade to murder a Jewish settler":
George Khoury, a 20-year-old economics student at Jerusalem's Hebrew University and the son of a prominent lawyer, was jogging through a neighbourhood mostly populated by Jews when gunmen shot him in the head, neck and stomach on Friday night.
Arafat won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994.
As far as we know, European leaders have issued no outraged condemnations of Khoury's murder. To guys like de Villepin, it would seem, Arab lives are cheap unless they are devoted to the murder of Jews.
South Africa's Jerry Falwell
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, was in America last week, where he made the rounds of the cable talk shows. We caught him on MSNBC's "Hardball" with Chris Matthews, and while he was once a leader in a worthy cause, his views on the threats facing the world today are utterly fatuous. He denounced not only the liberation of Iraq but the liberation of Afghanistan, and he espoused a novel theory as to what motivates the terrorists of al Qaeda:
Tutu: It is quite crucial for us to want to look at what are the root causes that enable or make people be ready to engage in desperate acts.
Matthews: What do you think they are?
Tutu: Well, I believe myself that there's no way in which we are likely to win the war against terrorism, as long as you've got conditions of poverty, of disease, of ignorance that can make people so desperate that they believe the only options they have are to engage in acts of that kind.
Matthews: But the people who struck us on September 11 were people who were reasonably well educated. They were technical people. Maybe they didn't have Ph.D.s, but they had educations that would have allowed them to make a living quite well in the Western world.
Tutu: Now, the point is, if precisely people of that sort who look at the inequities of the international economic order--I mean, to think just now that you say to the developing world, in order for you to make it, produce more. So you sell. And they do produce more.
But then the developed world has massive, massive agricultural subsidies that ensure that farmers in those rich countries can produce their stuff cheaply. And there are high tariffs that prevent the developing country from being able to sell their goods. And so you say, these guys are playing a game and they make the rules for the game and they are the referees in this games. It is so lopsided that anyone seeking to be a normal person realizes that the odds are stacked against us so horrendously that people will say, I am ready to do anything to get out of this trap.
We sympathize with Tutu's criticism of Western trade policies, but if he thinks Osama bin Laden and his followers are agitating for free trade, he's nuts. It's reminiscent of Jerry Falwell's comment just after Sept. 11 that the attack was the fault of "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way," or George McGovern's suggestion in a December 2002 article that terrorists are angry at America for not adopting a McGovernite foreign policy.
After McGovern's article appeared, we dubbed this "vicarious terrorism": people who should know better claiming that if only we embrace their pet cause, it will appease the enemies of civilization. Falwell at least had the decency to apologize for his remarks. We're not holding our breath waiting for McGovern and Tutu to do the same.
Carter Defends Saddam
Another Nobel peace laureate, Jimmy Carter, is speaking out against the liberation of Iraq. In an interview with the Independent, a far-left London newspaper, Carter--best known for standing by impotently for 444 days while Iranian terrorists held American diplomats hostage--has this to say:
"There was no reason for us to become involved in Iraq recently. That was a war based on lies and misinterpretations from London and from Washington, claiming falsely that Saddam Hussein was responsible for [the] 9/11 attacks, claiming falsely that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. And I think that President Bush and Prime Minister Blair probably knew that many of the allegations were based on uncertain intelligence . . . a decision was made to go to war [then people said] 'Let's find a reason to do so.' "
Is Carter really unaware that we had already been involved in Iraq for 12 years? It seems unlikely. As Brent Scowcroft has noted, Carter attempted to scuttle the first Bush administration's effort to liberate Kuwait after Saddam's invasion:
In the midst of this careful diplomacy, former President Jimmy Carter wrote the members of the [U.N.] Security Council asking them not to support the resolution. He argued that the costs in human life and the economic consequences, not to mention the permanent destabilization of the Middle East, were too high and unnecessary, "unless all peaceful resolution efforts are first exhausted." He called for the UN to mandate a "good faith" negotiation with the Iraqi leaders to consider their concerns, and to ask the Arabs to try to work out a peaceful solution, "without any restraint on their agenda." It was an unbelievable letter, asking the other members of the council to vote against his own country.
Now, in the Independent interview, Carter blasts the current administration for acting "unilaterally." The man's gall knows no bounds.
The Clarke Kerfuffle
Richard Clarke, a former antiterrorism adviser to the White House, has gotten a lot of attention for some bizarre claims about the Bush administration's response to Sept. 11. Clarke appeared on "60 Minutes" last night, and here's the CBS News Web site's account of what he had to say:
After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate. As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.
"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said to [Lesley] Stahl. "And we all said . . . no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And [Donald] Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, 'Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.
"Initially, I thought when he said, 'There aren't enough targets in-- in Afghanistan,' I thought he was joking. . . ."
Perhaps it escaped Clarke's notice, but less than a month after Sept. 11, the U.S. did begin bombing Afghanistan, while the military effort to liberate Iraq didn't get under way until a year and a half later. So just what Clarke is complaining about? Well, we found an October 2003 quote, from a guest on PBS's "NewsHour," that sums it up nicely: "What people are complaining about is that there is contention and debate and analysis and confrontation. I think that's better than trying to sweep everything under the rug." The guest was none other than Richard Clarke.
In a February 2003 article for SecurityFocus.net, George Smith reported that Clarke had a rather unimpressive record when it comes to terrorism:
In 1986, as a State Department bureaucrat with pull, he came up with a plan to battle terrorism and subvert Muammar Qaddafi by having SR-71s produce sonic booms over Libya. This was to be accompanied by rafts washing onto the sands of Tripoli, the aim of which was to create the illusion of a coming attack. When this nonsense was revealed, it created embarrassment for the Reagan administration and was buried.
In 1998, according to the New Republic, Clarke "played a key role in the Clinton administration's misguided retaliation for the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which targeted bin Laden's terrorist camps in Afghanistan and a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan." The pharmaceutical factory was, apparently, just a pharmaceutical factory, and we now know how impressed bin Laden was by cruise missiles that miss.
Clarke also "devoted great effort to convincing national movers and shakers that cyberattack was the coming thing," Smith writes. "While ostensibly involved in preparations for bioterrorism and trying to sound alarms about Osama bin Laden, Clarke was most often seen in the news predicting ways in which electronic attacks were going to change everything and rewrite the calculus of conflict."
In an article last week for Time, Clarke offered this brilliant advice: "In addition to placing more cameras on our subway platforms, maybe we should be asking why the terrorists hate us." Blogger John Hinderaker notes that Clarke is jointly teaching a course at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government with Rand Beers, a foreign-policy adviser to the Kerry campaign. All of which leaves us inclined to take anything this guy says with a grain of salt.
The Road to Damascus
In a story it buried in its Saturday edition, the New York Times reports that Iraq's liberation is emboldening opponents of the world's sole remaining Baathist dictatorship, in Syria:
A year ago, it would have been inconceivable for a citizen of Syria, run by the Baath Party of President Bashar al-Assad, to make a documentary film with the working title, "Fifteen Reasons Why I Hate the Baath."
Yet watching the overthrow of Saddam Hussein across the border in Iraq prompted Omar Amiralay to do just that. "It gave me the courage to do it," he said.
"When you see one of the two Baath parties broken, collapsing, you can only hope that it will be the turn of the Syrian Baath next," he added, having just completed the film, eventually called "A Flood in Baath Country," for a European arts channel. "The myth of having to live under despots for eternity collapsed."
The Associated Press reports that Spain's new Socialist government wants "to pressure European allies and the United States for a new approach to fighting terrorism--based less on military force and police measures and more on rooting out social and economic inequities blamed for turning Muslim countries into breeding grounds for young men prone to terrorism." But the Socialists are too blinkered to realize that liberating Iraq was the best possible way to begin doing just that.
'Antiwar' Is Anti-American
Saturday was a slow news day, which was good news for the "antiwar" nuts who staged demonstrations against the liberation of Iraq. They managed to get a lot more attention than they deserved, and for the most part the news media painted a false picture of them as reasonable dissenters from U.S. policy.
How come this photo wasn't on the front page of every newspaper in the country? It shows a demonstrator holding a sign reading: "I [heart] NY even more without the World Trade Center." (This site has lots more photos, though too little bandwidth to serve all the traffic it's been getting.)
The New York Times, reporting on a Left Coast march, quotes one Michael Kozart, a physician at San Francisco General Hospital: "We are exercising our constitutional right to free speech. There has been a criminalization of dissent in this country." So far as we know, however, Kozart was not arrested.
The AllahPundit blog publishes an e-mail form a New York reader who went out to counterprotest:
Some of the peace marchers tended toward violence and they did not like it one little bit that we crashed their whacked out party. Unfortunately, some in our group were attacked, actually a couple of times. I didn't know that peace marchers would think to "put a bullet in your head," but I guess that's how uninformed I am about peace. . . .
At one point things got really pretty dicey as one of my fellow protest warriors was being choked right there in the middle of the street and the NYPD came in and rescued us! They corralled us into a bull pen sort of place and protected us from the peace marchers . . . Then, they assigned a scooter brigade to guard us while we expressed our right of free speech. My poor sainted husband, who I talked into coming with me was being shoved and screamed at by the ANSWER security squad (brown shirts) and he remarked that we have free speech in the U.S. to which the goon screamed in return "there is no [expletive] free speech." I think this would come as a surprise to the thousands of police officers that were assigned to this march in order for people to exercise their right to assembly and free speech.
While in the police bullpen one of the big wig officers came up to me and said under his breath "I can't say this in public but we love you guys, we wish you would turn out more often." I told him the problem was that we have jobs and therefore our time is somewhat limited.
This ought to make clear who are the real enemies of free speech.
Reports of My Withdrawal Have Been Greatly Exaggerated
Poor Dennis Kucinich can't seem to catch a break. The Associated Press reports that among those speaking at the "antiwar" rally in New York was "former Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich." But Kucinich is still a candidate for president. Indeed, another AP dispatch reports he plans a swing through Oregon to campaign for that state's May 18 primary.
Oh well, at least the Saudis respect Kucinich. An op-ed in the Arab News calls him "a voice for sanity and moderation in U.S. politics."
Guess Who Calls Kerry 'Irresponsible'?
Boy is this campaign getting negative. John Kerry has come under attack as "reckless" and "irresponsible" for voting last October to defund the military and reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Here's what Kerry's critic had to say: "I don't think any United States senator is going to abandon our troops and recklessly leave Iraq to whatever follows as a result of simply cutting and running. That's irresponsible."
Who is waging this harsh campaign against John Kerry? None other than John Kerry. ABC's Jake Tapper notes that on Sept. 14, Kerry appeared on "Face the Nation," where he was asked how he would vote on the $87 billion supplemental appropriation then under consideration if Congress refused to approve a tax-hike amendment he was passing. He said a "no" vote would be reckless and irresponsible--then, then next month, proceeded to cast just such a vote.
The Washington Post has a nice survey of Kerry's confused approach to foreign policy, which includes this nugget:
Robert Kagan, senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said he senses that Kerry in recent years has been refashioning his foreign-policy persona, making it appear tougher, in preparation for a run for the presidency. "The question, setting aside the campaign, is: Where is John Kerry's heart?" said Kagan, who has advocated a muscular U.S. approach to world affairs. "My sense is his heart is in the anti-Vietnam, '70s-'80s left."
And indeed, the opening anecdote in the piece suggests that Kerry is far to the left of the last Democratic president:
When President Bill Clinton referred to the United States as "the indispensable nation" during his second inaugural address in 1997, and then as other U.S. officials picked up the term, Sen. John F. Kerry recoiled. He turned to his longtime foreign policy aide Nancy Stetson to ask, "Why are we adopting such an arrogant, obnoxious tone?"
Can America afford to have someone like this in the White House in times of war?
America-Haters for Kerry
Noam Chomsky isn't exactly a foreign leader; he's an American citizen who holds no office. But for the sake of this item, we're inclined to deem him an honorary foreign leader, since he does have a wide following among far-left foreigners, while he's hardly known in his own country. Chomsky has endorsed John Kerry for president, saying the Massachusetts Democrat is a "fraction" better than President Bush.
The American press doesn't even seem to have noticed Chomsky's endorsement, which we read about in London's left-wing Guardian.
What Would We Do Without Experts?
"Expert Says Williams' Shotgun Fired Only When Trigger Was Pressed"--headline, Philadelphia Inquirer, March 17
What Would We Do Without Indonesia Police?
"Indonesia Police Says Blast Due to Explosive Material"--headline, News International (Pakistan), March 22
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What Would Papers Do Without Editors?
"Editor: Papers Must Bridge Credibility Gap"--headline, Associated Press, March 20
Can't They Even Get This Straight?
The New York Times published this correction yesterday:
A review in the Book Review last Sunday about "Burning Down My Masters' House," by the former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair, referred imprecisely to his comments about Rick Bragg, another former Times reporter. Although the book is critical of reporters who depend on the work of uncredited part-time contributors, it never "directly criticizes" Mr. Bragg. The review also misstated the period in which Mr. Blair wrote an article, which he acknowledges having plagiarized from another newspaper, about the mother of a soldier killed in Iraq. It was during the week, not "over a blackout weekend."
God Is My Co-Pilot
"Virgin Celebrates First Mid-Air Birth"--headline, Sunday Telegraph (London), March 21
Everyone's a Critic
John Kerry isn't the only American bedeviled by undesirable endorsements from foreign leaders. Reuters reports that Mel Gibson got a thumbs-up from "The Passion of the Christ" from a certain Nobel Peace Prize winner:
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat watched Mel Gibsons's [sic] controversial "Passion of the Christ" at a private screening on Saturday and said it was not anti-Semitic, officials said. . . .
"The president did not feel the film was anti-Semitic," said Hanan Ashrawi, a prominent Palestinian Christian who watched it with him on a DVD copy.
Arafat's advisor Nabil Abu Rdainah told the official Palestinian news agency WAFA the 74-year-old former guerrilla leader had hailed the film as "moving and historical."
John Kerry also weighed in on "The Passion" a few weeks back, though he hadn't actually seen the picture.
Hey, are you thinking what we're thinking? Kerry may be looking for a new job come November. Arafat's career has stalled of late, and he's in a dangerous line of work, as Ahmed Yassin can attest, or could have attested yesterday anyway. The Associated Press quotes an anonymous Arafat aide as saying of the boss: "He is like a man who was hit on the head because they killed Yassin and now they could kill him. He feels his turn is next and he is sad and worried."
Wouldn't it be fascinating to hear John Kerry hold forth on the latest French art-house films? Aren't you dying to find out if "Schindler's List," just out on DVD, merits a thumbs-up from Arafat? Siskel and Ebert are no more, Gene Siskel having died in 1999. But why not make Kerry and Arafat co-hosts in a revival of their old "Sneak Previews" format? |
