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Inside
Al Qaeda’s Training Camps: What they’re ready for.
(10/01/02) new
By Bryan Preston at The National Review Online
“Al Qaeda, the notorious terrorist gang responsible for killing 3,025
innocents a year ago, is still alive and planning future atrocities. Though
last fall’s military campaign robbed the group of its terrorist training
bases in Afghanistan, and possibly of its leader, Osama bin Laden, there
is every reason to believe that al Qaeda is still trying to train its
troops in weapons use, tactics, and hostage-taking at bases we’ve
yet to find and destroy. And as recent developments in upstate New York
make clear, al Qaeda probably already has scores of sleeper troops inside
the U.S. and around Europe — troops already trained, and awaiting their
signal.”
The
Bigotry of Jihad (10/02/02) new
By John Perazzo at FrontPage Magazine
“Liberals in academia and the media largely refuse to acknowledge
the prejudice that animates anti-Israeli and anti-American sentiment in
much of the Arab world today. Rather than identify it as raw, unadulterated
bigotry, they posit all sorts of rational ‘explanations’ for
Muslim antipathy toward other groups.... Rarely is it suggested that Islamic
extremists might just be plain, old-fashioned bigots — not unlike the
white American bigots who killed James Byrd four years ago.”
Innocents
Abroad (10/01/02) new
By George Will in The Washington Post
“Not since Jane Fonda posed for photographers at a Hanoi antiaircraft
gun has there been anything like Rep. Jim McDermott, speaking to ABC’s
‘This Week’ from Baghdad, saying Americans should take Saddam
Hussein at his word but should not take President Bush at his. McDermott,
in his seventh term representing Seattle, said Iraqi officials promised
him and his traveling companion, Rep. David E. Bonior, a 13-term Michigan
Democrat, that weapons inspectors would be ‘allowed to look anywhere.’”
McDermott
accuses Bush of plotting to be emperor (10/07/02) new
In The Seattle Times by David Postman
“U.S. Rep. Jim McDermott broadened his attack on George W. Bush’s
war plans yesterday, saying the president is threatening military action
in Iraq as part of a plot to crown himself emperor of America. Criticized
for saying on a trip to Iraq early last week that Bush would mislead the
American public, McDermott, a Seattle Democrat, was back in his district
yesterday telling cheering supporters that Bush is planning a war to distract
voters’ attention from domestic problems.”
Crude
(10/07/02) new
By Peter Beinard at The New Republic
“Whatever you think of the Bushies, September 11, 2001, changed their
view of the world. And it is that changed view that has brought America
to the brink of war. The left can call that new outlook reckless or arrogant
or dumb. But they should at least admit that it’s sincere.”
Message
Full of Hypocrisy: Labour forgot Clinton’s notorious foreign policy
(10/07/02) new
By Christopher Hitchens in The Mirror
“Imagine if, during the Clinton presidency, ex-presidents Reagan
or Bush had addressed the Tory Party conference, cast doubt upon the legitimacy
of Clinton’s election, trashed his domestic and foreign policy and
offered him lukewarm support at a time of crisis. It never happened, because
there is a tradition it should not, but in breaking with ex-presidential
etiquette Clinton, who’ll do anything for an audience, met an audience
that would apparently do anything for him.”
Put
up or shut up (10/05/02) new
By Mark Steyn in The Spectator
“Structurally, the UN is a creature of the Cold War. It formalised
the stalemate of East and West: it was designed to prevent rather than
enable action; it tended towards inertia, which was no bad thing given
the potentially catastrophic consequences of the alternative. But we no
longer have a bipolar world, and so the vetoes only work one way — to
restrain the sole surviving superpower. England’s clergy have redefined
the Christian concept of a just war to mean only one blessed by the Security
Council, which is to say the governments of France, Russia and China:
it will be left to two atheists and a lapsed Catholic to determine whether
this is a war Christians can support.”
Homosexuality
debate could split Anglican Church (08/17/02) new
In The Telegraph by Jonathan Petre
“Homosexuality will prove ‘more powerful than God’ if it
causes further divisions in the Anglican Church, its most senior leaders
have said. In the frankest admission yet that the controversy could tear
the worldwide Church apart, the group of 12 primates and bishops said
it was dominating their agenda. The group, whose members include the new
Archbishop of Canterbury, was set up by the present Archbishop, Dr George
Carey, to bridge differences between liberals and traditionalists following
the 1998 Lambeth Conference. After a series of meetings over three years,
however, it conceded that profound disagreements still remained and it
acknowledged that the issue could split the Church still further.”
Carey
warns of Church split on gays (09/17/02) new
In The Telegraph by Jonathan Petre
“In a stinging rebuke to liberal bishops who are flouting the agreed
position of the Church, Dr Carey said that individuals were undermining
the whole institution by acting on their own. A number of dioceses in
the Unites States and Canada are planning to bless homosexual ‘marriages’
and in another, a traditionalist priest has been deposed by his liberal
bishop. Dr Carey said that he had previously condemned the ‘schism’
created by traditionalists and evangelicals who have broken away in protest
at the actions of a number of liberal bishops, particularly over homosexuality.
These liberal bishops had, however, ignored calls to desist from such
actions, which were contrary to the views of the overwhelming majority
and which were prompting ‘conscientious’ clergy to leave.”
Denounce
gays or quit, church body tells Williams (09/26/02) new
In The Telegraph by Jonathan Petre
“Prominent evangelicals in the Church of England raised the stakes
over homosexuality yesterday by challenging the new Archbishop of Canterbury
to renounce his liberal views or resign. Reform, the conservative evangelical
network whose 1,500 members include more than 500 clergy and a bishop,
said that it could not welcome the appointment of Dr Rowan Williams to
Canterbury because of his ‘non-biblical’ views. In an unprecedented
move, the group said that unless Dr Williams was prepared publicly to
affirm the Church’s traditional teaching that all sex outside heterosexual
marriage was sinful he should withdraw from the post ‘for the sake
of the Church’s gospel witness and unity’.”
Rift
within Church over gays deepens (10/03/02) new
In The Telegraph by Jonathan Petre
“The rift in the Church of England over homosexuality deepened last
night when two mainstream evangelical groups joined the growing chorus
of criticism of the new Archbishop of Canterbury’s liberal stance
on the issue. In a sign that battle lines are being drawn up, the two
groups, which represent several thousand clergy and which are based in
every diocese, said that concern over Dr Rowan Williams existed far more
widely than among the relatively small ‘conservative’ evangelical
wing of the Church. The Church of England Evangelical Council and the
Anglican Evangelical Assembly backed the move by the conservative evangelical
network Reform to urge Dr Williams to renounce his liberal views or resign,
as reported in The Telegraph last week.”
Motive
for Massacre: It’s not about “the West.” It’s about
religious beliefs. (09/27/02)
By Paul Marshall at OpinionJournal
“The key in each case is not a geopolitical affiliation but an unacceptable
religious belief. When al Qaeda was formed in 1998, it was named the ‘World
Islamic Front for Holy War Against Jews and Crusaders.’ Osama bin
Laden stressed in an Al-Jazeera interview at the time that his target
was ‘World Christianity, which is allied with Jews and Zionism.’”
Globalthink’s
Perils (09/24/02)
By Daniel Pipes in The New York Post
“In the debate over Iraq, the Democrats and most allied governments
are demanding United Nations Security Council endorsement of a military
campaign — or they are against it. This is a strange position. The
U.S. government, with an over two-century record of forwarding human rights
and defeating tyrants, is to defer to the United Nations? The duly elected
leaders of the United States should step aside and let assorted dictators
make key decisions affecting American national security?”
Nothing
to lose but their chains (09/28/02)
By David Pryce-Jones in The Spectator
“Iraq may soon be liberated. The Americans are building bases and
runways in the Middle East, airlifting men and supplies, and passing the
resolutions in Congress necessary to take military action. Regime change
is what President Bush has set his heart on. Condoleezza Rice goes further:
she calls for democracy, not only in Iraq but also in the wider Muslim
world. From the reaction all over Europe, you might think that Washington
was insisting on the sacrifice of the first-born.”
We
Must Fight Iraq (09/26/02)
By Christopher Hitchens in The Mirror
“It is almost certainly a mistake to assume anybody’s position
on Iraq is determined by evidence alone. After all, last year there was
overwhelming evidence of the connection between the World Trade Center
aggression, al-Qaeda and the Taliban — and a decisive UN mandate
for action — but many on the left opposed military action in Afghanistan,
and still do. I have the feeling that Tony Blair would feel happier making
the moral case that Saddam must go.”
Consider
This: Clinton’s chief Iraq expert announces his reluctant belief
that an invasion is needed. (09/26/02)
By Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online
“Setting aside, for the moment, the question of which political party
is responsible for past missteps, Pollack’s more politically significant
point may be his concluding claim that ‘the members of the international
community who bleat about the importance of collective security, multilateral
diplomacy, and international law have gravely weakened all three (not
to mention the U.N. Security Council) by allowing Iraq to flout them while
chastising the United States (and our handful of allies) when we objected....’
In other words, Pollack argues that the same nations now screaming about
our invasion plans are the very ones who undermined the legal and multilateral
policy of containment against Iraq.”
Iraq
and the War on Terrorism (09/23/02)
Speech by Al Gore at San Francisco’s Commonwealth
Club in USA Today
“I’m speaking today in an effort to recommend a specific course
of action for our country which I believe would be preferable to the course
recommended by President Bush. Specifically, I am deeply concerned that
the policy we are presently following with respect to Iraq has the potential
to seriously damage our ability to win the war against terrorism and to
weaken our ability to lead the world in this new century.”
For
Remarks on Iraq, Gore Gets Praise and Scorn (09/25/02)
By Adam Nagourney in The New York Times
“Mr. Gore's advisers described his speech as a genuine expression
of sentiment about an issue with which he has long been closely identified,
rather than an attempt to position himself for the 2004 presidential election.
He wrote it after consulting a fairly far-flung group of advisers that
included Rob Reiner, the actor and filmmaker. For all that, some Democrats
expressed skepticism that Mr. Gore had enhanced his standing.”
Speechless
(09/26/02)
By Editors of The New Republic
“The former vice president’s speech almost perfectly encapsulated
the evasions that have characterized the Democratic Party’s response
to President Bush’s proposed war in Iraq. In typical Democratic style,
Gore didn’t say he opposed the war. In fact, he endorsed the goal
of regime change — before presenting a series of qualifications that
would likely make that goal impossible.”
The
new San Francisco democrat (09/27/02)
By Jonah Goldberg at TownHall
“Gore doubles back, crisscrosses and zigzags — between favoring
force, opposing force, opposing multilateralism, opposing unilateralism
— the only conclusion one can reach is that this speech wasn’t
written to reveal his convictions. It was crafted as an attack on Bush
and an attempt to win the Democratic nomination. The overriding theme
wasn’t to depoliticize the war but to blame George Bush, at all costs.”
Look
Who’s Playing Politics (09/25/02)
By Michael Kelly in The Washington Post
“Gore’s speech was one no decent politician could have delivered.
It was dishonest, cheap, low. It was hollow. It was bereft of policy,
of solutions, of constructive ideas, very nearly of facts — bereft
of anything other than taunts and jibes and embarrassingly obvious lies.
It was breathtakingly hypocritical, a naked political assault delivered
in tones of moral condescension from a man pretending to be superior to
mere politics. It was wretched. It was vile. It was contemptible. But
I understate.”
Conservative
Churches Grew Fastest in 1990’s, Report Says (09/18/02)
In The New York Times by Laurie Goodstein
“Socially conservative churches that demand high commitment from
their members grew faster than other religious denominations in the last
decade, according to a study released yesterday by statisticians who count
American religious affiliations every 10 years.... ‘I was astounded
to see that by and large the growing churches are those that we ordinarily
call conservative,’ said Ken Sanchagrin, director of the Glenmary
Research Center and a professor and chairman of the department of sociology
at Mars Hill College in Mars Hill, N.C. ‘And when I looked at those
that were declining, most were moderate or liberal churches. And the more
liberal the denomination, by most people’s definition, the more they
were losing.’”
Christianity’s
New Center (09/12/02)
Interview of Philip Jenkins by Katie Bacon at
Atlantic Unbound
“In the global South you have almost a pre-Vatican II, old-world
kind of Catholicism. Catholics there are more concerned with the traditional,
more willing to accept authority and leadership, more prepared to insist
on orthodoxy. Whereas in America and Europe we tend to have cafeteria
Catholicism, as in, I'll take a little bit of this, a little bit of that,
throw in a bit of Wicca, and see what we come up with.”
Prior
Knowledge of Sept. 11 Not Just Urban Legend (09/10/02)
At Insight on the News by Jeffrey Scott Shapiro
“‘What are you looking at?’ asked the schoolteacher as
she approached one of her freshman students. The boy, a young Palestinian,
seemed captivated as he stared out the window across Brooklyn toward the
lower downtown area of Manhattan. ‘Do you see those two buildings?’
he asked while pointing toward the World Trade Center. ‘They won’t
be standing there next week.’ It was noon, Sept. 6, 2001.”
Hippocratic
Oafs: Muslims demand sensitivity. They ought to show some too.
(09/20/02)
By Peggy Noonan at OpinionJournal
“So the Southerners are eyeballing the young Muslim males. Maybe
these guys are bad guys. They allow themselves to think this in part
because one of the things Americans regret most since Sept. 11 2001 is
their lack of suspicion. We’re all very live-and-let-live. Before
Sept. 11, young Muslim males could tell someone in passing that soon those
towers in New York will go boom. And fearing to offend, fearing to hurt
the feelings of another person, we’d let it pass. We’d mind
our business, give them the benefit of the doubt.”
Iraqi
Interrogatories: The usual questions about Iraq. (09/20/02)
By Victor Davis Hanson at The National Review Online
“Since September 11 there has no longer been a margin of safety —
or error — allowing us a measure of absolute certainty before action.
Long gone is the notion that American soil is inviolable or that enemies
will not butcher thousands of civilians unexpectedly and in time of peace.
All we need to know is that [Saddam Hussein] broke the armistice agreements
of the first war, violated the weapons-inspections accords, likes to attack
other countries, dallies with terrorists, has nightmarish weapons, and
has already fought us once. That he is a dictator, killed thousands of
his own people, sought to assassinate a president of the United States,
tried to destroy the ecology of Kuwait, and sent missiles into Israel
and Saudi Arabia are not misdemeanors.”
Behind
the Hate: The enemy’s problem. (09/11/02)
By David Pryce-Jones at The National Review Online
“For centuries now, the West and its social order has challenged
other civilizations. In the face of that challenge, China, Japan, India,
adopted the science and the arts, even the music, which were both the
cause and the effect of Western creativity. Leaders and thinkers in Muslim
countries also tried to match the West. With the possible exception of
Turkey, they proved unable to do so. The reasons for this are unclear.
Nobody and nothing effectively stands in the way of education, reform,
experiment in building a modern social order with its own special characteristics
like other peoples.”
Is
This the Way to Decide on Iraq? (09/20/02)
By Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post
“When the case for war is made purely in terms of American national
interest — in terms of the safety, security and very lives of American
citizens — chins are pulled as the Democrats think it over. But when
the case is the abstraction of being the good international citizen and
strengthening the House of Kofi, the Democrats are ready to parachute
into Baghdad.”
U.S.
Was Aware of bin Laden Threat Before Sept. 11 Attacks (09/19/02)
In The New York Times by James Risen
“The Congressional panels’ staff director said on Wednesday
that the American intelligence community was told in 1998 that Arab terrorists
were planning to fly a bomb-laden aircraft into the World Trade Center,
but the F.B.I. and the Federal Aviation Administration did not take the
threat seriously. The August 1998 intelligence report from the Central
Intelligence Agency was just one of several warnings the United States
received, but did not seriously analyze, in the years leading up to the
Sept. 11 attacks that were detailed at the Congressional hearings.”
Congress
was Warned Two Months Before 9/11 Attacks (09/19/02)
At Cybercast News Service by Jeff Johnson
“Based on information gathered by the committee, there were a total
of 28 pieces of intelligence information gathered after June 1998 that
hinted bin Laden wanted to strike the U.S., including 11 indicating an
imminent attack after March 2001. Additionally, 12 so-called ‘intelligence
indicators’ lead analysts to believe that al Qaeda would use airplanes
to strike targets in Washington, D.C., and New York.”
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The
Role of Government in Education (1955)
By Milton Friedman in Economics and the Public Interest
“This re-examination of the role of government in education suggests
that the growth of governmental responsibility in this area has been unbalanced.
Government has appropriately financed general education for citizenship,
but in the process it has been led also to administer most of the schools
that provide such education. Yet, as we have seen, the administration
of schools is neither required by the financing of education, nor justifiable
in its own right in a predominantly free enterprise society. Government
has appropriately been concerned with widening the opportunity of young
men and women to get professional and technical training, but it has sought
to further this objective by the inappropriate means of subsidizing such
education, largely in the form of making it available free or at a low
price at governmentally operated schools. The lack of balance in governmental
activity reflects primarily the failure to separate sharply the question
what activities it is appropriate for government to finance from
the question what activities it is appropriate for government to administer
— a distinction that is important in other areas of government activity
as well. Because the financing of general education by government is widely
accepted, the provision of general education directly by govern mental
bodies has also been accepted. But institutions that provide general education
are especially well suited also to provide some kinds of vocational and
professional education, so the acceptance of direct government provision
of general education has led to the direct provision of vocational education.
To complete the circle, the provision of vocational education has, in
turn, meant that it too was financed by government, since financing has
been predominantly of educational institutions not of particular kinds
of educational services.”
Advice
to Graduates About Advice (06/06/1971)
By Edward C. Banfield at Claremont McKenna College
“Figures of speech, especially metaphors, are peculiarly serviceable
to people who give advice about social problems. The use of them tends
to create an emotional response in the listener that enhances the urgency
of the ‘problem’ thus raising the value of the putative ‘solution’
that the advice-giver offers. I sometimes wonder if we could have an ‘urban
crisis’ without a good supply of metaphors. Suppose that a writer
could not speak of ‘decaying neighborhoods’ but instead had
to say what he meant straight out — say that the well-off have moved
away from aging unfashionable neighborhoods, that this has given the less
well-off opportunities to move into housing better than they formerly
had, and that they, for obvious reasons, are in most instances disposed
to spend less on the repair and maintenance of houses than the former
occupiers were. Or suppose that a United States Senator instead of saying,
as one recently did, that ‘the cities are mortally sick and getting
sicker’ and that the ‘states are in a state of chronic crisis’
had to speak plainly — in this instance, perhaps, to say that although
in the last decade the cities and states have increased their revenues
by a factor of three, there are nevertheless many voters who would like
to have more spent, provided of course that the taxes are paid mainly
by others.”
The
End of History? (Summer 1989)
By Francis Fukuyama in The National Interest
“The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of
all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western
liberalism. In the past decade, there have been unmistakable changes in
the intellectual climate of the world’s two largest communist countries,
and the beginnings of significant reform movements in both. But this phenomenon
extends beyond high politics and it can be seen also in the ineluctable
spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as the
peasants’ markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout
China, the cooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past
year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores, and
the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran. What we may
be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a
particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such:
that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the
universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human
government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to
fill the pages of Foreign Affairs’s yearly summaries
of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred
primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete
in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing
that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.”
An
Explosion of Green (Apr. 1995)
By Bill McKibben in The Atlantic
“In the early nineteenth century the cleric Timothy Dwight reported
that the 240-mile journey from Boston to New York City passed through
no more than twenty miles of forest. Surveying the changes wrought by
farmers and loggers in New Hampshire, he wrote, ‘The forests are
not only cut down, but there appears little reason to hope that they will
ever grow again.’ Less than two centuries later, despite great increases
in the state’s population, 90 percent of New Hampshire is covered
by forest. Vermont was 35 percent woods in 1850 and is 80 percent today,
and even Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island have seen woodlands
rebound to the point where they cover nearly three fifths of southern
New England. This process, which began as farmers abandoned the cold and
rocky pastures of the East for the fertile fields of the Midwest, has
not yet run its course.... This unintentional and mostly unnoticed renewal
of the rural and mountainous East — not the spotted owl, not the
salvation of Alaska’s pristine ranges — represents the great
environmental story of the United States, and in some ways of the whole
world. Here, where ‘suburb’ and ‘megalopolis’ were
added to the world’s vocabulary, an explosion of green is under way,
one that could offer hope to much of the rest of the planet.”
The
Doomslayer (Feb. 1997)
By Ed Regis in Wired
“The world is getting progressively poorer, and it’s all because
of population, or more precisely, overpopulation. There’s
a finite store of resources on our pale blue dot, spaceship Earth, our
small and fragile tiny planet, and we’re fast approaching its ultimate
carrying capacity. The limits to growth are finally upon us, and we’re
living on borrowed time. The laws of population growth are inexorable.
Unless we act decisively, the final result is written in stone: mass poverty,
famine, starvation, and death. Time is short, and we have to act now.
That’s the standard and canonical litany.... There’s just one
problem with The Litany, just one slight little wee imperfection: every
item in that dim and dreary recitation, each and every last claim, is
false.... Thus saith The Doomslayer, one Julian
L. Simon, a neither shy nor retiring nor particularly mild-mannered
professor of business administration at a middling eastern-seaboard state
university. Simon paints a somewhat different picture of the human condition
circa 1997. ‘Our species is better off in just about every measurable
material way,’ he says. ‘Just about every important long-run
measure of human material welfare shows improvement over the decades and
centuries, in the United States and the rest of the world. Raw materials
— all of them — have become less scarce rather than more. The
air in the US and in other rich countries is irrefutably safer to breathe.
Water cleanliness has improved. The environment is increasingly healthy,
with every prospect that this trend will continue.’”
A brilliant parody:
Transgressing
the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity
(Spring/Summer 1996)
By Alan Sokal in Social Text
“There are many natural scientists, and especially physicists, who
continue to reject the notion that the disciplines concerned with social
and cultural criticism can have anything to contribute, except perhaps
peripherally, to their research. Still less are they receptive to the
idea that the very foundations of their worldview must be revised or rebuilt
in the light of such criticism. Rather, they cling to the dogma imposed
by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony over the Western intellectual
outlook, which can be summarized briefly as follows: that there exists
an external world, whose properties are independent of any individual
human being and indeed of humanity as a whole; that these properties are
encoded in ‘eternal’ physical laws; and that human beings can
obtain reliable, albeit imperfect and tentative, knowledge of these laws
by hewing to the ‘objective’ procedures and epistemological
strictures prescribed by the (so-called) scientific method.”
... and, in explanation, ...
A
Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies (May/June 1996)
By Alan Sokal in Lingua Franca
“For some years I’ve been troubled by an apparent decline in
the standards of rigor in certain precincts of the academic humanities.
But I’m a mere physicist: If I find myself unable to make heads or
tails of jouissance and differance, perhaps that just reflects
my own inadequacy. So, to test the prevailing intellectual standards,
I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment:
Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies — whose
editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew
Ross — publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it
sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions?
The answer, unfortunately, is yes.... What’s going on here? Could
the editors really not have realized that my article was written as a
parody?”
Networks
Need a Reality Check: A firsthand account of liberal bias at CBS News.
(02/13/1996)
By Bernard Goldbert in The Wall Street Journal
“There are lots of reasons fewer people are watching network news,
and one of them, I’m more convinced than ever, is that our viewers
simply don’t trust us. And for good reason. The old argument that
the networks and other ‘media elites’ have a liberal bias is
so blatantly true that it’s hardly worth discussing anymore. No,
we don’t sit around in dark corners and plan strategies on how we’re
going to slant the news. We don’t have to. It comes naturally to
most reporters.”
There
is No Time, There Will Be Time (11/18/1998)
By Peggy Noonan in Forbes ASAP
“When you consider who is gifted and crazed with rage... when you
think of the terrorist places and the terrorist countries... who do they
hate most? The Great Satan, the United States. What is its most important
place? Some would say Washington. I would say the great city of the United
States is the great city of the world, the dense 10-mile-long island called
Manhattan, where the economic and media power of the nation resides, the
city that is the psychological center of our modernity, our hedonism,
our creativity, our hard-shouldered hipness, our unthinking arrogance.”
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