Best of the Web Today - March 23, 2004
By JAMES TARANTO
A Religion of Peace?
The Council on American-Islamic Relations has weighed in on Israel's killing of terrorist Ahmed Yassin. Not surprisingly, CAIR sides against Israel:
We condemn this violation of international law as an act of state terrorism by Ariel Sharon's out-of-control government. Israel's extra-judicial killing of an Islamic religious leader can only serve to perpetuate the cycle of violence throughout the region. The international community must now take concrete steps to help protect the Palestinian people against such wanton Israeli violence.
Yassin was a founder and the "spiritual leader" of Hamas. The Covenant of the Hamas, the group's founding document, makes clear that Hamas has no intention of ever stopping the "cycle of violence." Its preamble states: "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." Article 7 asserts: "The Day of Judgment will not come about until Moslems fight Jews and kill them. Then, the Jews will hide behind rocks and trees, and the rocks and trees will cry out: 'O Moslem, there is a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.' " And Article 13 says: "So-called peaceful solutions and international conferences are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement. . . . There is no solution for the Palestinian problem except by Jihad."
Is Islamist terrorism a perversion of a great and peaceful religion? We hope so, but CAIR, by bestowing on Yassin the status of "an Islamic religious leader," seems to reject this view.
Albright's Appeasement
"The Bush administration's decision to detain hundreds of people in Guantanamo, Cuba, may be helping the al-Qaeda network recruit terrorists, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said today," reports Bloomberg News:
"It is possible and perhaps probable that anger over these detentions has helped (Osama) bin Laden succeed in recruiting more new operatives," Albright, secretary of state in the Clinton administration, said in prepared testimony. Albright is among the first witnesses as an independent commission on the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks opened two days of politically charged hearings.
Then again, we tried not holding anyone at Guantanamo, and the result was a series of al Qaeda attacks culminating with Sept. 11. Somehow bin Laden & Co. managed to find things to be angry about anyway. Go figure.
But there's a serious point here: Just about any antiterror measure can be expected to make terrorists or terrorist wannabes angry. Albright's appeasement approach would lead to complete paralysis and, no doubt, to more terrorist attacks. One wonders what John Kerry thinks of all this.
Fighting Terror With Psychobabble
The Boston Globe thought this letter to the editor, from Alexander Boros of Rochester, N.H., was worth publishing:
The so-called war on terrorism is a misnomer because war itself is a form of terrorism. It should, therefore, be called the terrorism on terrorism, or maybe even the war on war. That sounds insane because it is insane. More insanity leads only to more insanity. Any good therapist will tell you it's necessary to own your own feelings. Seen in this light, terror is a feeling of intense fear that needs to be owned by the person who feels it.
Other people don't make you feel intense fear, but rather you feel intense fear when other people say or do something. That's a paradigm shift away from blame and toward personal responsibility.
No longer blaming others for your own feelings of terror, you can then come to accept your feelings and deal with them appropriately.
Ask yourself, "Shall I seek an outer war to find an inner peace, or shall I seek an inner peace without an outer war?"
If only all those people at the World Trade Center had accepted "personal responsibility" rather than "blaming others," they might have found "inner peace." May they rest in peace, and may Alexander Boros be spared their fate, no matter how much "more insanity" he inflicts on the rest of us.
Kerry vs. Chavez
John Kerry is having more foreign-leader problems. "Kerry has attacked Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez as a dubious democrat hostile to U.S. interests," Reuters reports. The statement on Kerry's Web site is actually pretty good:
With the future of the democratic process at a critical juncture in Venezuela, we should work to bring all possible international pressure to bear on President Chavez to allow the referendum to proceed. . . .
Throughout his time in office, President Chavez has repeatedly undermined democratic institutions by using extra-legal means, including politically motivated incarcerations, to consolidate power. In fact, his close relationship with Fidel Castro has raised serious questions about his commitment to leading a truly democratic government.
But as Reuters notes, two weeks ago Chavez "publicly praised the Democrat contender, hailing his health care plans and likening him to assassinated U.S. President John Kennedy." We're glad Kerry didn't reciprocate, but Kerry's growing list of foreign endorsers--the lunatic from North Korea, the appeaser from Spain, the anti-Semite from Malaysia and now the budding despot from Venezuela--doesn't exactly inspire confidence.
One foreign leader who's unlikely to endorse Kerry is Britain's Tony Blair. The Sunday Telegraph reports Blair has ordered Labour Party ministers and officials, with one exception, not to attend Kerry's official nomination at the Democratic Convention in July. "Mr Blair's intervention, which will prevent his Labour colleagues from offering their traditional support to the Democrats, has astonished ministers who remember the close links Labour had with Bill Clinton during previous presidential campaigns," notes the Telegraph.
Mr. Populist
"From a sailing mecca to a ski resort, presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, enjoy the trappings of their wealth in at least five homes and vacation getaways valued at nearly $33 million," the Associated Press reports. "Some are private escapes for the family, while others serve as prime spots to host fund-raisers and exclusive gatherings for wealthy donors."
Meanwhile, Kerry wants to raise taxes on people who make a paltry $200,000 a year. He's waging class war against people who aren't as filthy rich as he is.
Rip Van Milbank
"GOP Exposé: Kerry, Closet Frenchman" reads the snide headline of a column by Dana Milbank in today's Washington Post. We wrote about this last April. Why is Milbank waddling in with this now? Has he been asleep for the past year?
Also, here's a news tip for Milbank: Look into this Vietnam thing. We understand Kerry served there.
The Great Unraveling
In the first paragraph of his column today, former Enron adviser Paul Krugman engages in a little "journalism" worthy of his erstwhile employer:
After 9/11, the administration's secretiveness knew no limits--Americans, Ari Fleischer ominously warned, "need to watch what they say, watch what they do." Patriotic citizens were supposed to accept the administration's version of events, not ask awkward questions.
As Donald Luskin notes, here is what Fleischer actually said, in a Sept. 27, 2001, press briefing:
It's a terrible thing to say, and it unfortunate. And that's why--there was an earlier question about has the President said anything to people in his own party--they're reminders to all Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do. This is not a time for remarks like that; there never is.
Fleischer was referring not to anything the administration was trying to keep secret, nor to anyone who had asked "awkward questions." He was answering a question about TV blowhard Bill Maher's remarks that the Sept. 11 terrorists were "not cowardly," while Americans were, for "lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away." The earlier question to which Fleischer referred was about then-Rep. John Cooksey's comment that anyone "wearing a diaper on his head" should be subject to extra law-enforcement scrutiny.
Krugman's column extols the Bush administration's foes as truth-tellers, so it really takes chutzpah for him to open it by so mendaciously Dowdifying Fleischer's comment.
Zero-Tolerance Watch
"The Ringgold School Board expelled a white high school student because he allegedly claimed he wanted to 'line up all of the black students and kill them,' " reports the Valley Independent of Monessen, Pa. This doesn't sound terribly unreasonable, but the paper adds that the Ringgold School Board also is requiring the 15-year-old to "undergo a drug and alcohol assessment." Why? (Hat tip: ZeroIntelligence.net.)
The Los Angeles Times reports that 17-year-old Paul Houchin was suspended from Foothill Technology High School in Ventura for bringing an air gun to school. He planned to use it "as a prop in an anti-drug video he was filming in a visual communications class." Maybe they can make him take a drug test too.
Do the Right Thing?
Here's an interesting item in USA Today's sports section:
When filmmaker Spike Lee said in a taped segment on ABC's NBA Hangtime on Sunday, "Listen to the white media and it is like nobody has ever played basketball before" Larry Bird, studio analyst Byron Scott said, "I don't care if you talk white, black, green, (Bird) was great. Period. End of story."
Lee is black, and Bird is white; the exchange is reminiscent of the kerfuffle last fall in which ESPN ousted Rush Limbaugh as a football commentator because Limbaugh said the media were overpraising Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb, who is black. So where's the outrage over Lee's remarks? The lack thereof is almost enough to make one thing there's a double standard when it comes to race in America.
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Will They Hit Back?
"Harry Potter Hits His Teens"--headline, Arizona Republic, March 21
Just One of Those Days When Nothing Goes Right
"Severed Head Delays Man From Boarding Plane"--headline, FoxNews.com, March 23
Journalists for Suppressing the News
Michael Arrieta-Walden, ombudsman for the Oregonian, makes this eyebrow-raising revelation in a column on coverage of the debate over same-sex marriage:
Some journalists at The Oregonian and elsewhere agree with readers who say that covering the views of opponents of homosexuality causes the harm of endorsing prejudice, and will especially appear biased and discriminatory when looked back on 10 years from now.
Now, it's unreasonable to expect journalists not to have opinions on the issues of the day. But a "journalist" who thinks opposing views shouldn't even be covered is in the wrong profession. If such people really work at the Oregonian, why hasn't the paper fired them, or at least transferred them to a job in advertising or circulation? |
