The Good & the Bad: Stephen Schwartz on Islam and Wahhabism. (11/18/02)
An Interview by Kathryn Jean Lopez at National Review Online
“Most immigrant Muslims in the U.S. came to this country to get away from extremism and are horrified to see that their faith is in extremist hands here. They believed, before coming here, that the U.S. government would never permit such a thing to happen. However, their children are often indoctrinated and radicalized by extremists operating through Muslim schools, Islamic Sunday schools, and radical campus groups. That the U.S. government turned a blind idea to the Wahhabization of American Islam is deeply shocking and disturbing for them. They feel intimidated and defeated. The fact that the U.S. political and media elite have done almost nothing to enable traditional Muslims in this country to oppose Wahhabism makes the situation that much worse.”

10 Questions for Adel al-Jubeir: Taking on the Saudi spin king. (12/04/02)
By Stephen Schwartz at National Review Online
“The Saudi state is founded on Wahhabism, the most extreme, violent, puristic, fundamentalist, and rigid form of Islam in the history of the religion. It attacks non-Wahhabi Muslims, it calls for genocide of Shias, it preaches contempt and hatred of Christians, Jews, and Hindus. The Saudi state has only one option: to fully investigate its subjects’ involvement in 9/11, followed by full disclosure to the American people, arrests, and trials, and a final, irrevocable break of the Saudi monarchy with the Wahhabi ideology and its international network.”

A Wahhabism Problem: Misleading historical negationism. (12/06/02)
By Andrew G. Bostom at National Review Online
“Today, the Muslim intelligentsia focus almost exclusively on debatable ‘human-rights violations’ in the disputed territories of Gaza, Judea, and Samaria, while ignoring the blatant and indisputable atrocities committed by Muslims against non-Muslims throughout the world. The most egregious examples include: the genocidal slaughter, starvation, and enslavement of south Sudanese Christians and animists by the Islamist Khartoum government forces; the mass murder of Indonesian Christians by Muslim jihadists, with minimal preventive intervention by the official Muslim Indonesian government; the imposition of sharia-sanctioned discrimination and punishments, including mutilation, against non-Muslims in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Sudan, and northern Nigeria; the brutal murders of Copts during pogroms by the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamists, as well as official Egyptian government-mandated social and political discrimination against the Copts; murderous terrorist attacks and the return of such heinous institutions as bonded labor, and punishment for ‘blasphemy,’ directed against Pakistani Christians by Pakistani Muslims.”

A fatwa of one’s own (12/05/02)
By Mark Steyn in The National Post
“Everything that has become pathetically familiar to us since September 11th was present in the Rushdie affair: First, the silence of the ‘moderate Muslims’: a few Islamic scholars pointed out that the Ayatollah had no authority to issue the fatwa; they quickly shut up when the consequences of not doing so became apparent. Second, the squeamishness of the establishment: Rushdie was infuriated when the Archbishop of Canterbury lapsed into root-cause mode.... And, most important of all, the Rushdie affair should have taught us that there’s nothing to negotiate. Mohammed Siddiqui wrote to The Independent from a Yorkshire mosque to endorse the fatwa by citing Sura 5 verses 33-34: ‘The punishment of those who wage war against God and His Apostle, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land, is execution, or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land....’”

No More Fanaticism as Usual (11/27/02)
By Salman Rushdie in The New York Times
“If the moderate voices of Islam cannot or will not insist on the modernization of their culture — and of their faith as well — then it may be these so-called ‘Rushdies’ who have to do it for them. For every such individual who is vilified and oppressed, two more, ten more, a thousand more will spring up. They will spring up because you can’t keep people’s minds, feelings and needs in jail forever, no matter how brutal your inquisitions. The Islamic world today is being held prisoner, not by Western but by Islamic captors, who are fighting to keep closed a world that a badly outnumbered few are trying to open. As long as the majority remains silent, this will be a tough war to win. But in the end, or so we must hope, someone will kick down that prison door.”

Latest attack on Jews brings a deafening silence (12/02/02)
By Rosie DiManno in The Toronto Star
“I have been waiting, in the days since Thursday’s abominable attack, for just one word of sympathy, of pity, from the Muslim world. One note of commiseration to emanate from inside the thousands of mosques, one hint of regret and empathy from commentators ever ready to assail any Israeli misstep and aggression. But the silence has been deafening. Islam, that great religion of peace, has had nothing to say of more murdered Jews. That silent majority that disapproves of extremism, that argues the Muslim faith has been ill-served by militants who’ve twisted every article of the Islamic faith — not a murmur of renunciation of those who commit such travesties in their name. Where is the rage?”

Violence and Islam (12/06/02)
By Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post
“This feeling of a civilization in decline — and the adoption of terror and intimidation as the road to restoration — is echoed in a recent United Nations report that spoke frankly of the abject Arab failure to modernize. It is one thing for the Arabs to have fallen behind the West. But to fall behind South Korea — also colonized, once poor and lacking any of the Muslim world’s fantastic oil wealth — is sheer humiliation. Abdurrahman Wahid, former president of Indonesia and leader of perhaps the largest Muslim society in the world, traces Islamic radicalism not just to a failure of self-respect and self-identity — deep feelings of inadequacy and loss — but also to an enormous failure of moderate Muslim leadership. The murderers speak in the name of Islam, and the peaceful majority cannot find the courage to challenge them.”

Silence of the “moderates” (12/04/02)
By Cal Thomas in The Washington Times
“The president should consider calling for ‘moderate’ Muslims to clean up their own house. Such demands are being made by Roman Catholic laity on their hierarchy in the wake of priests alleged to have sexually abused children. The president should ask Muslim political and theological leaders to go after their own, if they are, indeed, misrepresenting ‘true’ Islam. We should not have to clean up after the mess they have made. The problem in the Muslim world is not only theological. It is also the failure of governments to meet minimal human needs. Despite massive infusions of petro dollars, most people in nations run by Muslim authoritarians are poor and illiterate. Their poverty is not the fault of the West.”

Murder in religion’s name (12/08/02)
By The Editors of The New Haven Register
“The governments of many of these Islamic countries, including Saudi Arabia, have been reluctant partners in the war against terror abroad and intolerance within their own borders. Prior to the Bali bombing, the Indonesian government ignored repeated American warnings of a terrorist threat. Saudi money given through Islamic charities finds its way to terrorists. The United States cannot win this fight without the cooperation of governments in the Islamic states. It can point out to Indonesia that it is not immune to terrorism. It must remind Saudi Arabia that the United States is the guarantor of its independence. And to the religious fanatics in Nigeria, it must express how intolerable the world finds murder in the name of religion.”

A Green Light to Spy on Americans? Nonsense. (11/25/02)
By Heather Mac Donald in City Journal
“The FISA standard for wiretapping Americans remains as high after the review court ruling as before: to get a wiretap warrant for an American terror suspect, the government must show not only that he is an “agent of a foreign power” but that he is “knowingly engaged in international terrorism.” The government may not base its case for a warrant by citing activities protected by the First Amendment. Nothing in the ruling changes that demanding standard. The fact that prosecutors and FBI criminal agents can now share their expertise with intelligence agents during the course of an investigation, or even instigate a wiretap request, does not alter the legal standard that that wiretap request must meet. “Ordinary Americans” are as protected from groundless surveillance after the decision as before.”

Targeting Terrorists... not privacy. (11/25/02)
By Michael Scardaville at National Review Online
“The key to the program — both in terms of its effectiveness and its potential to gain acceptance from the millions of Americans who rightly worry about privacy and erosion of civil liberties — is to limit its use to detecting terrorists and preventing future attacks. That means the FBI, the CIA and the soon-to-be-created Department of Homeland Security intelligence arm. It does not mean state and local law enforcement or even those who wish to use it for causes such as aviation security and health surveillance — monitoring for epidemics and biological warfare, etc. Americans must be able to trust that extremely few people will have access to these capabilities and that the punishment for misuse will be severe.”

These Victims Are People, Too: What hate crimes have wrought. (11/26/02)
By Rod Dreher at National Review Online
“The media don’t tell us what to believe, but they do set the terms of public discussion. The narrative model that insists Christians can never be victims of bigotry, violent or otherwise, will ultimately have consequences beyond merely angering pious readers and viewers. In Canada, Christians are having their freedom of speech and worship taken away by hate-speech laws designed to protect homosexuals from having their feelings hurt. Meanwhile, incidents like the radical feminist trashing of Montreal’s Roman Catholic cathedral a couple of years ago (they even threw condoms and soiled tampons at the altar, and burned crosses on the cathedral steps) not only merited little comment in Canada’s press, it didn’t move the Canadian authorities to file anything stronger than minor trespassing charges. Prosecutors said the event didn’t trigger the country’s hate-crimes law.”

Beauty Pageants Can Be Murder (11/27/02)
By Ann Coulter at AnnCoulter.Org
“The New York Times can’t bear to think that their little darlings — angry, violent Muslims — could be at fault in this melee. That makes no sense because Islam is a Religion of Peace. So the Times reviewed the facts, processed it through the PC prism, and spat out the headline: ‘Religious Violence in Nigeria Drives Out Miss World Event.’ According to the Times, rampaging Muslims pouring out of mosques to kill Christians and torch churches resulted from ‘the tinderbox of religious passions in the country.’ Islam is peaceful, but religion causes violence. Pay no attention to the fact that the most bloodthirsty cult in the 20th century was an atheistic sect known as communism. But that was not ‘true communism,’ just as Muslim terrorists are not practicing ‘true Islam.’ The ironic thing is, liberals would hate Muslims who practiced only ‘true Islam.’ Without the terrorism, Muslims would just be another group of ‘anti-choice’ fanatics.”

Testing speech codes (11/27/02)
By Alan M. Dershowitz in The Boston Globe
“Or consider the case of the anti-Semitic poet Amiri Baraka who claims that ‘neo-fascist’ Israel had advance knowledge of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and warned Israelis to stay away. This lie received a standing ovation, according to The Boston Globe, from ‘black students’ at Wellesley last week. Baraka had been invited to deliver his hate speech by Nubian, a black student organization, and paid an honorarium with funds provided by several black organizations. Would those who are advocating restrictions on speech include these hateful and offensive lies in their prohibitions? If not, would they seek to distinguish them from other words that should be prohibited? These are fair questions that need to be answered before anyone goes further down the dangerous road to selective censorship based on perceived offensiveness. Clever people can always come up with distinctions that put their cases on the prohibited side of the line and other people’s cases on the permitted side of the line.”

Is Harvard ditching free speech? (11/27/02)
By Scot Lehigh in The Boston Globe
“Civil libertarian Harvey Silverglate, cofounder of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, says the group’s research has determined that more than 90 percent of colleges and universities have adopted behavior codes prohibiting offensive speech if it touches on matters of race, sexual orientation, or gender. Why no sustained outcry from the faculties? ‘They don’t consider that to be a free speech issue because it is imposed by the academic left, and the academic left is an authoritarian movement, not one of genuine liberalism,’ Silverglate, himself a liberal, observes. The demand for protection from offensive speech highlights both a lack of clarity and an absence of confidence on the part of faculty and students.”

No Hate Speech at Harvard (11/14/02)
By The Staff of The Harvard Crimson
“Harvard is an open academic community dedicated to the vigorous exchange of ideas. The freedom of speech is absolutely central to the University’s mission. But Harvard has no obligation to encourage hate speech, speech that explicitly incites ethnic violence. Such speakers have no place in a community based on respect and tolerance, and for that reason, the English department was right to ask Irish poet Tom Paulin not to give the Morris Gray Lecture.... Paulin is certainly entitled to express his own opinions—and of course, extremely critical views of Israel should not preclude him from speaking at Harvard, on that subject or any other. Whether or not he believes in the right of a Jewish state to exist is irrelevant to a discussion of epic poetry, the original subject of his lecture. But when the English department learned that he advocated killing civilians and considered the Israeli military a modern-day incarnation of the SS, the content of his poetry became immaterial.”

In About-Face, English Dept. Re-Invites Anti-Israeli Poet (11/20/02)
In The Harvard Crimson by Alexander J. Blenkinsopp
“Concerned about the message it was sending on free speech, the English department yesterday renewed the invitation it cancelled just one week ago to Tom Paulin, an award-winning Irish poet who has expressed violently anti-Israeli views. English department chair Lawrence Buell said the department’s faculty met last night for two and a half hours and voted to re-invite Paulin. The vote, which was unanimous apart from two abstentions, marks a reversal of an earlier decision by a smaller group of English professors to cancel the speech.”

Bestowing An Undue Honor (11/21/02)
By The Staff of The Harvard Crimson
“Paulin’s statements in Al-Aram newspaper make it perfectly clear that his vision of a solution to the Middle East conflict is one in which “Nazi, racist” Brooklyn-born settlers are “shot dead.” Despite Paulin’s claims that his views in Al-Aram were not fully reflective of his stance, he has not retracted his remarks. By inviting Paulin to speak, the English department has implicitly legitimized him as one worthy of recognition by the College and its students, poetry and politics alike. Regardless of his contributions to the field of poetry, we would hope that the department would be more judicious in its invitations and withold them from figures who advocate violence.”

Keillor’s tantrum shows disdain for Minnesotans (11/27/02)
By Gary Larson in The Star Tribune
“Keillor’s histrionics show a disdain for Minnesotans. He is ‘a stranger with memories of people I knew there.’ Estrangement is complete. Most backwoods lake and prairie folk like us in rural Minnesota — idiots all? — voted for the Republican he despises. To this apostasy a smug Keillor shrugs: ‘To my own shame, I knew them. I’m ashamed of Minnesota for electing this cheap fraud.’ Thus he crowns his new hate object; ‘Hollow Man’ succeeds ‘The Body’ as prime target for his egotistical wrath. Sore losers are exposed in stressful situations. Crybabies lash out, poisoning the landscape. (This affliction strikes both left and right.) Keillor asserts GOPers are ‘cheap, cynical and unpatriotic,’ and ‘Republicans first, and Americans second.’”

A Letter From the Boss Contradicts Fox’s Creed (11/19/02)
By Alessandra Stanley in The New York Times
“The revelation that Roger Ailes, the chairman of Fox News, the self-proclaimed fair and balanced news channel, secretly gave advice to the White House after the Sept. 11 attacks was less shocking than it was liberating — a little like the moment in 1985 when an ailing Rock Hudson finally explained that he had AIDS. Ever since Mr. Ailes changed jobs from Republican strategist to news executive, he has demanded to be treated as an unbiased journalist, not a conservative spokesman. But the cable channel he controls has an undisguised ideological agenda, which has made his protestations a bit puzzling.”

Attack on Fox News reeks of hypocrisy (11/24/02)
By Sterling Rome in The Boston Herald
“That the Times, the bastion of political correctness and diversity, would choose to print an analogy like this is proof of both its hypocrisy and its thinly veiled contempt. Never mind that the Times is comparing a political ideology to a deadly disease; it is doing so at the expense of a homosexual man who died a tragic death. Such an analogy by anyone else (most especially anyone from the right) would normally result in a flurry of op-eds and demands for termination from the Times.”

Empty victory for a hollow man: How Norm Coleman sold his soul for a Senate seat. (11/07/02)
By Garrison Keillor at Salon via TCPUNK
“It was a dreadful low moment for the Minnesota voters. To choose Coleman over Walter Mondale is one of those dumb low-rent mistakes, like going to a great steakhouse and ordering the tuna sandwich. But I don’t envy someone who’s sold his soul. He’s condemned to a life of small arrangements. There will be no passion, no joy, no heroism, for him. He is a hollow man. The next six years are not going to be kind to Norm.”

Minnesota’s shame: Republicans don’t like my criticism? Too bad.... (11/13/02)
By Garrison Keillor at Salon via Twin Cities Independent Media Center
“The hoots and cackles of Republicans reacting to my screed against Norman Coleman, the ex-radical, former Democratic, now compassionate conservative senator-elect from Minnesota, was all to be expected, given the state of the Republican Party today. Its entire ideology, top to bottom, is We-are-not-Democrats, We-are-the-unClinton, and if it can elect an empty suit like Coleman, on a campaign as cheap and cynical and unpatriotic as what he waged right up to the moment Paul Wellstone’s plane hit the ground, then Republicans are perfectly content. They are Republicans first and Americans second.”

Woebegone in Minnesota? (11/12/02)
By Bruce C. Sanborn at The Claremont Institute
“Garrison Keillor grew up in small-town Minnesota. In the column he wrote for Salon (the one in which he shot those insults at Coleman and Minnesotans) Keillor engaged in a small-town practice he professes to hate. Keillor treated gossip as political commentary: ‘St. Paul is a small town and anybody who hangs around the St. Paul Grill knows about Norm’s habits. Everyone knows that his family situation is, shall we say, very interesting, but nobody bothered to ask about it, least of all the religious people in the Republican Party. They made their peace with hypocrisy long ago.’ In more than one way, Keillor’s gossip is hypocritical, and his behavior may well bother Minnesotans and fair-minded Democrats. Keillor also asserted Coleman won his Senate seat ‘because he was well-financed and well-packaged.’ To be sure, in his debate with Mondale, Coleman had President Bush’s arguments down pat. Against the backdrop of the Democrats’ jumbotron political frenzy at the memorial rally for Paul Wellstone, Coleman delivered those arguments impressively and respectfully, as Mondale presented the Democrats’ forcefully and a bit patronizingly.”

Sing Goddess of the Wrath of Garrison: The Limits of Leftist Humor Get Narrow (11/21/02)
By Bruce C. Sanborn at The Claremont Institute
“Certainly, it’s possible Keillor wants to rally liberal Democrats after virtually nothing came up roses for them on election day. Keillor calculated that irony and humor would not rouse their passions the way a hot-blooded jeremiad would. He’d slam and damn Coleman — and the Republicans, too, for backing him all the way. He’d say the Republicans got in a car named Unpatriotic, cynically left Main Street, drove right past Fiscal Responsibility Avenue, and then, foul to the core, drove over the hearts of all the people who cared about America and about the Americans who died on 9/11 — and to their eternal shame, Minnesotans rewarded the Republicans with the election; that’s what he’d say; that’s what he said.... That then may explain what Keillor was up to in writing ‘Minnesota’s shame,’ but of course if it does, what must Keillor think of his fellow Democrats — I mean if he calculated that with them he should play the demagogue?”

Was Paul Wellstone Murdered? (10/28/02)
By Michael I. Niman at AlterNet
“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.”

Hey, Roeper! I was right (11/24/02)
By Mark Steyn in The Chicago Sun-Times
“Calling for an international inquiry into his [Wellstone’s] death, Niman does not directly accuse the president [Bush] but the only guys he seems to think would have any motive for offing Wellstone are those for whom the idealistic senator had ‘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.’ I don’t know why Niman is suddenly so sheepish. If he’s not implying that Wellstone was killed by forces linked to the ‘unelected government,’ perhaps he could enlighten us as to what precise point his column was making. Here’s the thing: Ted Rall, Barbra Streisand and Niman reckon there’s something fishy about the Wellstone crash for no other reason than that a left-wing man is dead and a right-wing government’s in power.”

Commentary on Election 2002 (11/08/02)
By Bill Moyers at PBS
“And 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. And it includes secrecy on a scale you cannot imagine. Above all, it means judges with a political agenda appointed for life. If you liked the Supreme Court that put George W. Bush in the White House, you will swoon over what’s coming. And if you like God in government, get ready for the Rapture. These folks don’t even mind you referring to the GOP as the party of God. Why else would the new House Majority Leader say that the Almighty is using him to promote ’a Biblical worldview’ in American politics? So 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.”

The Day After (11/06/02)
By Matthew Rothschild in The Progressive
“The landscape this November 6 is barren. The Democrats managed to lose the Senate, and now the Republicans will have their way. They will be able to clog the benches with rightwing judges, cement Bush’s retrograde tax cuts, and roll back environmental, labor, and a host of other protections.... If the Democrats are to give themselves a fighting chance to win, and if they are going to stand as the party of the people, they had better start appealing to the poor, people of color, and the majority of Americans who didn’t show up at the polls November 5. A huge majority of Americans want a raise in the minimum wage. A huge majority of Americans believe that corporations have too much power. A huge majority of Americans identify health care as one of their top concerns. A huge majority of Americans want the environment protected, and a decent, affordable education for their kids. The Democrats ought to be able to say: We’ll give you a big raise, we’ll give you free health care, we’ll give your kids a free college education, we’ll curb corporate power and take the money out of politics, and we’ll clean up the environment while we’re at it.”

A dark week for democracy (11/10/02)
By Will Hutton at Guardian Unlimited Observer
“Nor do the Conservatives’ ambitions stop there. Following the ideas of the high priest of ultra conservatism, Leo Strauss, they want to construct a republic of ‘moral’, god-fearing citizens who adhere to traditional virtues, rewarding the rich who can only have become rich through the virtue of hard work and penalising the poor who are only poor because of their own fecklessness. Above all, by now having the opportunity to pack the judiciary with extreme right-wing judges, they intend to do away with the famous Roe v Wade judgment that legalised abortion. This is the most fiercely reactionary programme to have emerged in any Western democracy since the war, and for which last Tuesday’s vote, argue Republicans, is an explicit mandate.... But the game isn’t up. America’s conservatives, blinded by their ideology and in control of every lever of government, will overreach themselves and the reality of what they plan will become evident to all, stirring the apathetic voter and reminding the best of America what it stands for. Last week represented the highwater mark of American conservatism and, although it looks bleak, the beginnings of the long-awaited liberal revival. Not just the United States, but the world, needs it badly. In the meantime, despite its flaws, give thanks to the European Union for partial shelter from the conservative storm.”

Oh Boy — More Fear And Gluttony: Darkness falls across the land, flowers wilt, the GOP takes full, and frightening, control (11/08/02)
By Mark Morford at The San Francisco Gate
“Feel that numbness? That strange slightly chilling shift deep in the heart, like a cold wind across the blood, an ice pick straight to the third eye, fingernails across the karmic chalkboard? Fear not — it’s just the dark storm clouds of sadness and savage spiritual pain that just settled in over the collective soul of the country and indeed much of the world recently, as the Republican Party snatched total control of the American government and really honestly promised to further its agenda of fear and war and intolerance and bad sex and more petroleum products forevermore.... Let us not also forget anti-choice misogyny, racism, gluttony, support for Big Agribiz and Big Tobacco and a general antipathy toward anyone who makes less than six figures or who really cares about the environment or enjoys true religious freedom or alternative viewpoints or authentic orgasms or honest laughter.”

Jackson sees rights eroding under GOP (11/14/02)
In The Washington Times by Steve Miller
“American blacks face the end of civil rights under the new Republican-controlled Congress, and need to force the Democratic Party further to the left as a remedy, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and other liberal black leaders said yesterday at a voter-participation forum. Last week’s results ‘positions us to see the end of the second Reconstruction,’ said Mr. Jackson in a conference at the National Press Club. ‘Next year, the right wing is going to control the White House, the House, the Senate and the courts virtually every civil rights remedy will be made illegal next year,’ the two-time former Democratic presidential hopeful predicted.”

Dictatorship begins (11/08/02)
Letter to the Editor by Russell Rimovsky in The Lincoln Journal Star
“The dictatorship begins as the diabolical Republican party rises to power. We will see senior citizens shivering, begging for food, and dying a tortuous death after George W. Bush shoves them into the streets. Hospitals and care facilities will suffer neglect as the attention to health care is diverted by the worship of war. Calamity inevitably abounds. Terrorists will unleash horror as we’ve never seen before, because the warmongering dictator, George W. Bush, will now have his way, and the terrorists are really going to get mad at us now. Pollution will proliferate and thousands will perish by poisoning through our food, water and air. The delicate environment will deteriorate before our very eyes. Children, especially black children, will starve in our schools. Schools? What am I saying? There won’t be any schools.”

Absurd liberals (11/15/02)
Letter to the Editor by Russell Rimovsky in The Lincoln Journal Star
“I received a vast amount of feedback regarding my Nov. 8 letter, ‘Dictatorship begins.’ With that letter, I made foes of my friends, and friends of my foes, which was a risk I was willing to take in the pursuit of displaying the absurdity of the Liberal Democrat agenda. The summation of the column was, now that the Republicans have arisen to the distinct power they will soon enjoy while leading the House, Senate and White House, the nation will plummet into violent oblivion. The intent of the letter was to reveal the absurdity of the liberal perspective, by energetically portraying it. In other words, the letter was unapologetically sarcastic.”

Left-Wing Hates America, Says Author (11/07/02)
By Michael L. Betsch at Cybercast News Service
“‘The left talks a great deal about diversity, but the diversity that exists on college campuses is a diversity where you have a faculty that looks like the United Nations, but thinks like a San Francisco coffee house,’ Flynn said. For example, he said the Left hates Christianity’s influence in American society because it is an ‘intolerant’ religion. ‘But if you look at America, people of all faiths can practice their religion here,’ Flynn said. ‘You’re not going to be able to practice your faith in a lot of places outside of western civilization.’”

Failures of Nerve (November 2002)
By Roger Kimball in The New Criterion
“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). ‘To abjure violence,’ Orwell noted, ‘it is necessary to have no experience of it.’”

Retreats into fantasy (November 2002)
By David Pryce-Jones in The New Criterion
“In the superficial sense that they seized power and initiated regimes, the nationalist leaders of the 1950s and 1960s succeeded. In some countries, for example in Indonesia, Malaysia, and sub-Saharan Africa, they seemed to have restored the rightful sense of dignity to their people. In the Arab countries, however, independence has brought neither freedom nor dignity but one-man rule secured by a single party and the military and secret police apparatus. The archetypal Arab leader remains Gamal Abdul Nasser, the undisputed leader of Egypt from 1953 till his death in 1970. What he claimed to be building was Arab socialism. What in fact he built was a second-hand totalitarian state with neither human rights, nor respect for life and property. Other Arab countries, even those that were nominally monarchies, imitated the model or deferred to it, also relying on the military and secret police apparatus.”

Yearning to be liked (November 2002)
By John Derbyshire in The New Criterion
“Try to imagine that your own notion of life in the United States was constructed entirely from American movies and TV programs. You would perceive my country as being inhabited by a mix of gigantic, steroid-enhanced basketball stars, exquisitely beautiful young people with perfect teeth and musculature, gangsters, detectives, lawyers, and freakish pop singers. We live in palatial apartments, do very little work, sleep around a lot, and get our way mainly by murdering each other. It is not much of a secret, I think, that a large proportion of American movies are made for export. The people of the Third World watch them with fascination. Unfortunately, fascination is not the same as admiration or fondness. It can coexist very happily with, for example, disgust.”

Behind the Veil: A Muslim Woman Speaks Out (11/09/02)
In The New York Times by Marlise Simons
“The theme of injustice toward women in Islamic countries has become common in the West, but it has gained fresh currency through Ms. Hirsi Ali’s European perspective, her study of Dutch immigrants and her own life. Born in Mogadishu, she grew up a typical Muslim girl in Somalia. When she was 5, she underwent the ‘cruel ritual,’ as she called it, of genital cutting. When her father, a Somali opposition politician, had to flee the country’s political troubles, the family went to Saudi Arabia, where, she said, she was kept veiled and, much of the time, indoors. At 22, her father forced her to marry a distant cousin, a man she had never seen. But a friend helped her to escape and she finally obtained political asylum in the Netherlands. She was shocked when, as a university student, she held a job as an interpreter for Dutch immigration and social workers and discovered hidden ‘suffering on a terrible scale’ among Muslim women even in the Netherlands. She entered safe houses for women and girls, most of them Turkish and Moroccan immigrants, who had run away from domestic violence or forced marriages. Many had secret abortions.”

The Reform Islam Needs (Autumn 2002)
By James Q. Wilson in City Journal
“Freedom of conscience has made the difference. In an old world where knowledge came from libraries, and scientific experiments were rare, freedom would not be so important. But in the new world, knowledge and all that it can produce come from the sharp challenge of competing ideas tested by standards of objective evidence. In Istanbul, Muslims printed no book until 1729, and thereafter only occasionally. By contrast, the West became a world in which books were published starting three centuries earlier and where doubt and self-criticism were important. Of course, doubt and self-criticism can become, as William Bennett has observed, a self-destructive fetish, but short of that calamity, they are the source of human progress. The central question is not why freedom of conscience failed to come to much of Islam but why it came at all to the West. Though Westerners will conventionally assign great weight to the arguments made by the defenders of freedom, I do not think that the ideas of Milton, Locke, Erasmus, and Spinoza — though important — were decisive. What made religious toleration and later freedom of conscience possible in England was not theoretical argument but political necessity. It was necessary, first in England and later in America and much of Europe, because rulers trying to govern nations could not do so without granting freedom to people of different faiths.”

This Is Serious: Dominance for Republicans. Vindication for the president. And a good showing from the American people. (11/06/02)
By David Brooks in The Weekly Standard
“The Republicans should not read a radical ideological mandate into the results tonight. But there is a trend here. The American people are fundamentally serious. They know that the most important problem facing the country right now is terrorism and security. They know that George W. Bush is basically right on how to approach this problem. They know it is important to send people to Washington to support the president. In key states, they are doing that.... Don’t underestimate the importance of the Wellstone memorial service/rally. The polls shifted in the last few days. One big event was that rally. People saw liberal self-righteousness and they remembered that they don't like it. People saw the future of the Democratic party and its name was Walter Mondale.”

Fallout from a Memorial: Did the memorial service for Paul Wellstone cost Democrats the election? (11/18/02)
In Time by Matthew Cooper
“A backlash against the politically charged service almost certainly helped Norm Coleman beat Walter Mondale for Wellstone’s Minnesota Senate seat. And a private poll by Bill Clinton’s former pollster, Mark Penn, suggests the service backfired on Democrats nationally as well. Penn found that 68% of voters knew about the service — a high awareness of an event broadcast live nationally only on C-SPAN. What’s more, 49% of voters said the service made them less likely to vote for a Democrat — and 67% of independents said they felt that way.”

The Gerrymander Scandal: Why bother voting for Congress? Redistricting has already determined the outcome. (11/10/01)
By the Editors of The Wall Street Journal
Americans will go to the polls a year from now in the quaint belief that they will be electing a new Congress. But the real story is that nearly all of those races have already been decided — by politicians in backrooms and long before anyone even votes. The reason is the bipartisan scandal known as redistricting, or more colorfully as the "gerrymander." That is the process by which state politicians sit down every 10 years to carve up Congressional districts. This time they’re doing it with an even more blatant mix than usual of partisanship and incumbent protection. The result is that perhaps only 30 of 435 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives will even be competitive next year.“”

The Gerrymandered Democrats: Incumbency protection isn’t good for the minority party or democracy. (11/05/02)
By the Editors of The Wall Street Journal
“Gerrymanders are hardly new, but it used to be that politicians had to guess how to draw district lines every 10 years. Nowadays they use computer databases that can account for voter tendencies down to the city block. Nowadays, too, politicians tend to be careerists who prize incumbency above even partisanship. So rather than go for broke every decade by creating many competitive seats, their first priority is to protect themselves. This is the box canyon Democrats have walked into this year. In California, Texas, New York and Illinois, accounting for nearly one-third of all House seats, they conspired with GOP incumbents to freeze the status quo. The result is that in America’s largest state of California, which is increasingly Democratic, only one of 53 House races is even competitive, and that one only because Gary Condit became famous. Republicans in the state still can’t believe their good luck.”

Based on Koranic Verses, Interpretations, and Traditions, Muslim Clerics State: The Jews Are the Descendants of Apes, Pigs, And Other Animals (11/01/02)
By Aluma Solnick at The Middle East Media Research Institute
“Depicting Jews – and sometimes also Zionists – as ‘the descendants of apes and pigs’ is extremely widespread today in public discourse in the Arab and Islamic worlds. For example, in a weekly sermon in April 2002, Al-Azhar Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi, the highest-ranking cleric in the Sunni Muslim world, called the Jews ‘the enemies of Allah, descendants of apes and pigs.’ In one of his sermons, Saudi sheikh Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sudayyis, imam and preacher at the Al-Haraam mosque – the most important mosque in Mecca – beseeched Allah to annihilate the Jews. He also urged the Arabs to give up peace initiatives with them because they are ‘the scum of the human race, the rats of the world, the violators of pacts and agreements, the murderers of the prophets, and the offspring of apes and pigs.’”

Pigs, Jews & War: Fronts in the clash of civilizations. (11/01/02)
By Jonah Goldberg at The National Review Online
“Jean Francois Revel wrote, ‘Clearly, a civilization that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself.’ Well, increasingly I can’t help but think that the liberals of Europe and the leftists of America (there’s still hope for our liberals) have lost the energy and the conviction to defend themselves. They cannot grasp that our enemies — especially those hailing from the Third World — cannot be reasoned with. It doesn’t matter if we wronged them in the past. It doesn’t matter if their historical grievances have weight. What matters, as a matter of pure survival and morality, is what they believe today and what they do because of those beliefs. Germany had any number of legitimate grievances about the Treaty of Versailles and its treatment at the hands of the victors in World War I. That doesn’t justify Nazism.”

The Faith-Based Left: Getting behind the debate. (02/05/01)
By Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online
“Conservatives and liberals alike have bought into the notion that we face a choice between value-free programs that ignore the individual and simply dole out material goods, and faith-based programs that look to transform character by instilling morality. Certainly there are food banks and soup kitchens that fit the model of a strictly secular giveaway that makes neither moral nor behavioral demands on its beneficiaries. (Ironically, many of these effectively secular programs are run by churches.) But the government already gives legal and financial support to a raft of coercive and morally fraught leftist social programs that are religious in all but name. These programs are designed to turn their beneficiaries into gender warriors and militant multi-culturalists — whether they like it or not.”

The Church of the Left: Finding meaning in liberalism. (05/31/01)
By Stanley Kurtz at National Review Online
“Liberalism arose as a solution to the destructive religious wars of Europe’s past, and succeeded because it allowed people of differing religious perspectives to live peacefully and productively in the same society. Designed to make the world safe for adherents of differing faiths, liberalism itself was never supposed to be a faith. But that is exactly what liberalism has become. And this transformation of liberalism into a de facto religion explains a lot about what we call ‘political correctness.’”

Our Secularist Democratic Party (Fall 2002)
By Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio in The Public Interest
“Anyone who has followed American politics over the past decade cannot help but feel some concern about the supposed fundamentalist Christian threat to democratic civility, pluralism, and tolerance. At the very least, the attentive citizen would find it hard not to regard the cultural and political positions of fundamentalists as outside the mainstream, given the volume of media stories that have conveyed this point. At the same time, the media’s obsession with politicized fundamentalism distracts public attention from the changing role of religion in political life today. In particular, the media overlooks the remarkable erosion of denominational boundaries that until a quarter century ago defined the religious dimension of partisan conflict, with Catholics, Jews, and southern evangelicals aligned with the Democratic party and nonsouthern white, mostly mainline Protestants forming the religious base of the Republicans. Also, the media mistakenly frames cultural conflict since the 1970s as entirely the result of fundamentalist revanchism. In so doing, the media ignores the growing influence of secularists in the Democratic party and obfuscates how their worldview is just as powerful a determinant of social attitudes and voting behavior as is a religiously traditionalist outlook.”

UW-Waukesha astir over column: Student writer links black fashion, community, parents to Young’s death (10/25/02)
By Scott Williams in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“The fatal mob beating of Charlie Young Jr. is stirring racial tensions on a college campus here after a student newspaper column linked the Milwaukee incident to lifestyles and struggles in the African-American community. ‘Stop the welfare payments and you’ll end the madness,’ wrote assistant editor Dan Hubert in the latest issue of the Observer, University of Wisconsin-Waukesha’s student newspaper. Since the column rolled off the presses earlier this week, angry students have demanded Hubert’s expulsion from school and called for the university to cut off funding for the Observer.”

Student columnist apologizes but defends stance at forum: UW-Waukesha crowd sounds off about bigotry, rights (10/30/02)
By Scott Williams in The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Attracting more than 200 students and others to the University of Wisconsin-Waukesha, the nearly two-hour forum was organized in response to a student newspaper column that linked African-American culture to a deadly mob attack in Milwaukee. The uproar that followed has turned an uneasy spotlight on the Waukesha college, as students and administrators struggle to balance freedom of the press with racially charged commentary that some view as hate speech.”

Zigging and zagging on the sniper’s trail (10/21/02)
By Mark Steyn in The National Post
“When the expert commentators get so much of the easily verifiable stuff wrong, it’s hard to see why their airier fancies should command respect. Is the sniper linked to al-Qaeda? ‘Most unlikely,’ said Elliott Leyton, a St. John’s professor of anthropology, in The Globe And Mail. ‘Such groups (religious or political) generally find their murderous pleasures in bombs, airplanes and gas, not rifles.’ In fairness to the Islamofascists, when it comes to their ‘murderous pleasures’ variety is the spice of death. They disdain a consistent M.O. Much of what they do is unprecedented: September 11th, the shoe bomber, the Afghan resistance leader they assassinated by posing as interviewers and killing him with a disguised camera. Before I rule out the Islamists, I’d want a better reason than Professor Leyton’s.”

We angry white males were right about the sniper (10/27/02)
By Mark Steyn in The London Telegraph
“You get the picture: sure, Muslim fundamentalists can be pretty extreme, but what about all our Christian fundamentalists? Unfortunately, for the old moral equivalence to hold up, the Christians really need to get off their fundamentalist butts and start killing more people. At the moment, the brilliantly versatile Muslim fundamentalists are gunning down Maryland schoolkids and bus drivers, hijacking Moscow theatres, self-detonating in Israeli pizza parlours, blowing up French oil tankers in Yemen, and slaughtering nightclubbers in Bali, while Christian fundamentalists are, er, sounding extremely strident in their calls for the return of prayer in school.”

Coloring the sniper news (10/11/02)
By Michelle Malkin in Jewish World Review
“The media immediately embraced the Angry White Male theory by sensationalizing the cops’ questioning over the weekend of one Robert Gene Baker. Newspaper reports described him as ‘heavily tattooed’ and ‘linked’ to ‘militia and white supremacist’ groups. The headlines screamed: ‘Supremacist Sought in Sniping Spree’ and ‘Neo Nazi Named as Sniper Murders Suspect.’ But in fact, Baker was never a suspect and had no weapons on him at the time he was taken into custody for an outstanding auto-theft warrant. The AWM theory remains a plausible one, of course. But it isn’t the only one. You won’t hear Katie Couric or Peter Jennings talking about it with their conventional-thinking experts, but there is a significant possibility that the sniper and the sniper’s support system could be non-white Muslim extremists with ties to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network.”

Who let Lee Malvo loose? (10/25/02)
By Michelle Malkin at TownHall
“The mainstream media informed us this week that Lee Malvo, the reportedly ‘17-year-old’ youth charged as a material witness in the sniper investigation along with John Mohammed, is a ‘Jamaican national.’ As of this writing (Oct. 24), the Immigration and Naturalization Service refused to comment publicly on the exact nature of Malvo’s immigration status. Here are the facts the INS doesn’t want you to know: Lee Malvo is an illegal alien from Jamaica who jumped ship in Miami in June 2001. He was apprehended by the Border Patrol in Bellingham, Wash., in December 2001, but was then let go by the INS district in Seattle in clear violation of federal law and contrary to what the arresting Border Patrol officers intended, according to my law enforcement sources. ”

With the Sniper, TV Profilers Missed Their Mark (10/25/02)
By Paul Farhi and Linton Weeks in The Washington Post
“Almost everything the sniper ‘profilers’ and pundits told the media over the past three weeks turns out to have been off the mark, considering the very real profiles of the two people arrested early yesterday. The men and women who had been described on the air and in print as ‘forensic psychologists’ and ‘former FBI investigators’ took many swings at the who and why of the sniper case — and mostly missed.... The important question is, was the orgy of speculation harmless — or was there a very dangerous undercurrent to it? By saturating the public’s consciousness with phantom images of thirtyish white men, did the media profilers distract attention from a more general and possibly open-minded search for the perpetrators?”

Arm-Twisting: A historian’s book makes the case for gun control. Other scholars hotly dispute his claims. (04/05/01)
By Kimberley A. Strassel at OpinionJournal
“Released by highbrow publisher Knopf last year, Arming America was a historical and political bombshell, a rare piece of work that purported not only to overturn long-held historical beliefs, but to alter modern politics profoundly in the process. Few colonial Americans owned guns, Mr. Bellesiles argues. He bases this on his study of probate and military records, travel narratives and other primary sources.... Unsurprisingly, left-leaning journalists, academics and politicians went weak at the knees.... But there’s a problem. A growing number of respected scholars, from across the political spectrum, are saying that Mr. Bellesiles’s research and conclusions are wrong.”

Guns and Poses: Michael Bellesiles’s work is charming and disarming — but sloppy and maybe fraudulent. (02/22/02)
By Kimberley A. Strassel at OpinionJournal
“Arming America came out in September 2000. About that time, James Lindgren, a professor of law at Northwestern, wanted to reanalyze Mr. Bellesiles’s probate information for his own research. He sent Mr. Bellesiles a routine e-mail in August 2000 asking the Emory historian for details about which records he had used and where to find them. Mr. Bellesiles wrote back that he’d read them on microfilm in the federal archives in East Point, Ga. But when Mr. Lindgren and others made calls, they were told the facility had no such records. Mr. Bellesiles then sent an e-mail saying he’d read them in some 30 different places across the country. He also told Mr. Lindgren he couldn’t immediately send detailed information on which records he’d used because his counts — made on legal pads — had been damaged by a flood.”

Academic Accountability: An antigun scholar defends his shoddy work by calling critics names. (06/06/02)
By Kimberley A. Strassel at OpinionJournal
“Several weeks ago, in a bold and impressive move, the NEH became the first institution to treat the accusations against Mr. Bellesiles with the gravity they deserve. It came in response to a $30,000 NEH-funded fellowship that the Newberry Library, a Chicago research institution, awarded Mr. Bellesiles in February 2001. Last month NEH deputy chairman Lynne Munson wrote to the library that in light of the ‘serious question concerning academic integrity,’ that have been raised about Mr. Bellesiles, the NEH wanted its name removed from the fellowship. The Newberry Library’s defense is that the criticism of Mr. Bellesiles’s book didn’t take on a ‘scholarly character’ until after it had granted the fellowship. But whatever the timing, the fact remains that Newberry never did anything about revoking or suspending the fellowship — even when serious questions about Mr. Bellesiles’s academic integrity came to the fore.”

Michael Bellesiles Resigns from Emory Faculty (10/25/02)
By Robert A. Paul in a Press Release from Emory University
“I have accepted the resignation of Michael Bellesiles from his position as Professor of History at Emory University, effective December 31, 2002. Although we would not normally release any of the materials connected with a case involving the investigation of faculty misconduct in research, in light of the intense scholarly interest in the matter I have decided, with the assent of Professor Bellesiles as well as of the members of the Investigative Committee, to make public the report of the Investigative Committee appointed by me to evaluate the allegations made against Professor Bellesiles (none of the supporting documents, however, are being made public).”

Voices in the Wilderness: Versus the age-old sirens of appeasement. (10/18/02)
By Victor Davis Hanson at The National Review Online
“Every day a Marine is killed, a French tanker blown up, Christians butchered in Pakistan, tourists incinerated in Bali, terrorist cells broken up from Oregon to New York — and our pundits demand proof that we are at war. Why do the presidents’ critics press their attacks, the more principled playing down the chances of future danger, the more disingenuous engaging in character assassination and cheap psychoanalysis? In a word, human nature. It is our way always to put aside distant threats of the future to enjoy the tangible, but temporary, lull of the present.”

False Alarm: Why Liberals Should Support the War (10/10/02)
By Jonathan Chait at The New Republic Online
“It is perhaps telling that the case for war with Iraq was most clearly made not by Republican President George W. Bush but by Democratic President Bill Clinton. ‘Predators of the twenty-first century,’ Clinton warned, speaking four and a half years ago, ‘will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them.... There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.’ And if the world were to allow Saddam to continue to construct his terrible weapons? ‘Well, he will conclude that the international community has lost its will,’ Clinton declared. ‘He will then conclude that he can go right on and do more to rebuild an arsenal of devastating destruction. And some day, some way, I guarantee you, he’ll use the arsenal.’”

Air War: How Saddam Manipulates the U.S. Media (10/17/02)
By Franklin Foer at The New Republic Online
“Like their Soviet-bloc predecessors, the Iraqis have become masters of the Orwellian pantomime — the state-orchestrated anti-American rally, the state-led tours of alleged chemical weapons sites that turn out to be baby milk factories — that promotes their distorted reality. And the Iraqi regime has found an audience for these displays in an unlikely place: the U.S. media. It’s not because American reporters have an ideological sympathy for Saddam Hussein; broadcasting his propaganda is simply the only way they can continue to work in Iraq. ‘There’s a quid pro quo for being there,’ says Peter Arnett, who worked the Iraq beat for CNN for a decade. ‘You go in and they control what you do.... So you have no option other than to report the opinion of the government of Iraq.’ In other words, the Western media’s presence in the Ministry of Information describes more than just a physical reality.”

Say “No” to War on Iraq (10/17/02)
By Josh Feit in The Stranger
“There’s a much more logical and honest (and urgent) way to proceed against terrorism. Let’s promote democratic reforms in the real linchpins of the region: Egypt, Israel, Palestine, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. And I’m not talking about Radio Free Europe broadcasts — an imprecise, hit or miss Cold War tactic waged against our enemies. I’m talking about a direct American campaign for democracy (and women’s rights!) in the Middle East aimed at our suspect allies. In short, we have more than radio waves to influence the likes of Cairo and Riyadh. We’ve got dollars, business investments, and political relationships. Let’s get tough, and demand changes from our friends; demands backed with the threat of pulling our support.”

Say “Yes” to War on Iraq (10/17/02)
By Dan Savage in The Stranger
“You see, lefties, there are times when saying ‘no’ to war means saying ‘yes’ to oppression. Don’t believe me? Go ask a Czech or a European Jew about the British and French saying ‘no’ to war with Germany in 1938. War may be bad for children and other living things, but there are times when peace is worse for children and other living things, and this is one of those times. Saying no to war in Iraq means saying yes to the continued oppression of the Iraqi people. It amazes me when I hear lefties argue that we should assassinate Saddam in order to avoid war. If Saddam is assassinated, he will be replaced by another Baathist dictator — and what then for the people of Iraq? More ‘peace’ — i.e., more oppression, more executions, more gassings, more terror, more fear.”

They want to kill us all (10/19/02)
By Mark Steyn in The Spectator
“An appeaser, said Churchill, feeds the crocodile in the hope that it will eat him last. But sometimes the croc eats him first anyway. For months, the US, Britain and Canada had warned the Indonesian government about terrorists operating within its borders. So had Singapore and Malaysia. President Megawati’s administration responded by calling Washington anti-Muslim. The American ambassador was publicly denounced by her vice-president. Hassan Wirayuda, the foreign minister, said in February that the outside world’s fears of Islamic terrorism in Indonesia were overblown and that in Jakarta ‘we laugh at it’. Ha-ha. From government contacts to police indifference, the administration’s strategy was to deny the crocodile existed and then quietly slip him the à la carte menu. Now, Indonesian stocks are down, the rupiah’s in the toilet, the national carrier’s flying empty, and the official tourism websites have switched to continuously updated info on dead tourists, safe in the knowledge that they’re unlikely to be getting any new bookings from live ones.”

Don’t blame the west (10/16/02)
By Clive James in The Guardian
“But let us allow, for the moment, that the mass outcry against American hegemony is the voice of the true, the eternal and the compassionate left. Allowing that, we can put the best possible construction on its pervasiveness. 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.”

So Long, Fellow Travelers: Is That All That’s Left? (10/20/02)
By Christopher Hitchens in The Washington Post
“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. (He actually says he wants to restore the old imperial caliphate and has condemned the Australian-led international rescue of East Timor as a Christian plot against Muslim Indonesia). Or a Left that can think of Milosevic and Saddam as victims.”

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter wins Nobel Peace Prize (10/11/02)
In The San Francisco Chronicle by Doug Mellgren of The Associated Press
“Former President Carter won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday ‘for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights.’ .... ‘It should be interpreted as a criticism of the line that the current administration has taken,’ Gunnar Berge, chairman of the Nobel committee, said. ‘It’s a kick in the leg to all that follow the same line as the United States.’”

There He Goes Again: Jimmy Carter, our “model ex-president.” (05/02/02)
By Jay Nordlinger in The National Review
“Carter is immensely proud of his rendezvous with Middle East history, and he trades on it constantly. No one should assume, however, that he’s an honest broker — at least anymore. For the past many years, he has been passionately anti-Israel, more or less embracing the PLO line. He has repeatedly been at the service of Yasser Arafat. After the Gulf War, the PLO chief was on the outs with Saudi Arabia, because he had backed Saddam Hussein. So he asked Carter to fly to Riyadh to smooth things over and restore Saudi funding to him — which he did. Arabs are also robust funders of the Carter Center, the ex-president’s redoubt and vehicle in Atlanta.”

Carterpalooza! Jimmy Carter, our “model ex-president.” (10/11/02)
By Jay Nordlinger in The National Review
“The ex-president is known as Joe Human Rights, but he’s mighty selective about whose human rights to champion. If you live in Marcos’s Philippines, Pinochet’s Chile, or apartheid South Africa, he’s liable to care about you. If you live in Communist China, Communist Cuba, Communist Ethiopia, Communist Nicaragua, Communist North Korea, Communist...: screw you.”

Harry Belafonte Slams Colin Powell as Race Sellout (10/08/02)
At The Drudge Report by Matt Drudge
“Singer Harry Belafonte took to the AM radiowaves on Tuesday morning to slam Secretary of State Colin Powell as a sellout to the black race! Belafonte, appearing on San Diego’s 760 KFMB, told host Ted Leitner that Powell was like a plantation slave who moves into the slave owner’s house and only says what his master wants him to say.”

Harry Belafonte’s Havana Farewell (07/18/00)
By Ronald Radosh at FrontPage Magazine
“Most American admirers of Harry Belafonte probably don’t realize that the popular singer and actor is an unreconstructed Stalinist.... In an interview he gave in 1995, Belafonte claimed that ‘racism has sucked up my entire life,’ and that as a result, he decided never to accept ‘an indignity where I might find one.’ Some might view genuflecting before Castro in the year 2000 as an ultimate indignity — but to Harry Belafonte, the illusion dies hard. What will be left, I wonder, when the Cuban people finally are free of the longest surviving dictator in the world and his grotesque socialist prison? The banana boat is coming, Harry, and it won’t be long.”

C.I.A. Letter to Senate on Baghdad’s Intentions (10/07/02)
In The New York Times
“¶Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of Al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad. ¶We have credible reporting that Al Qaeda leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire W.M.D. capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to Al Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs. ¶Iraq’s increasing support to extremist Palestinians coupled with growing indications of relationship with Al Qaeda. suggest that Baghdad’s links to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action.”

Who’s killing the children of Iraq? (10/08/02)
By Margaret Wente in The Globe and Mail
“Of all the reasons to oppose a war against Iraq, one of the most compelling is the image of innocent civilian victims. Children will die — if only because Saddam Hussein won’t hesitate to build orphanages atop his weapons labs. And of all the accusations hurled against the West in its treatment of Iraq, the most damning is the human cost of sanctions. According to many peace groups, humanitarian organizations and politicians, sanctions have killed 500,000 Iraqi children. The total death toll from sanctions amounts to a million and a half innocent people. Are these figures credible? Only if you believe Saddam Hussein.”

Text: Iraq Resolution (10/10/02)
In The Washington Times by The Associated Press
“The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to – (1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq. ”

A just war? (10/06/02)
By Jean Bethke Elshtain in The Boston Globe
“Several weeks ago, 100 teachers of Christian ethics, both pacifists and those working within the just war tradition, signed a petition declaring, in its entirety: ‘As Christian ethicists, we share a common moral presumption against a pre-emptive war on Iraq by the United States.’ Although I am an ethicist and a Christian, I was not among the signatories, for two reasons. First, the statement is vague and, therefore, evasive. Within the just war tradition, there is a common moral presumption for justice as well as a recognition that all war is terrible. But there are times when justice demands the use of force as a response to violence, hatred, and injustice.”

Kids beat man to brain death, police say: Nearly 20 suspected of taking part, one just 10 years old (10/01/02)
In The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by Leah Thorsen
“A mob of nearly 20 kids beat a man brain dead Sunday night after he confronted them for throwing an egg at him and punched one teen in the mouth, police said. Eight suspects, at least one as young as 10, were in custody Tuesday, police said. The victim, Charlie Young Jr., 36, remained on life support. Police said the group chased Young onto the porch of a house at 2021 N. 21st Lane and used bats, shovels and boards to pummel him in an attack that left blood splattered floor to ceiling.”

Community reacts with disbelief, outrage: Police, politicians, neighborhood groups condemn beating (10/01/02)
In The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by Leonard Sykes Jr.
“As police continued their investigation Tuesday into the mob beating that left Charlie Young Jr. dead, reaction throughout the city ranged from shock and disbelief to outrage. From community centers, schools and City Hall, police, politicians and neighborhood groups condemned the brutal beating as they wrestled with what — if anything — can be done to prevent similar incidents in the future.”

Victim’s response to egging prompted beating, boys say: Youths tell police they were angry at Young’s overreaction (10/02/02)
In The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by Jamaal Abdul-Alim
“Based on detailed statements police say some of the boys gave, none of the boys had any problem with Young, 36, and they were hanging out with him at a house on W. Brown St. for at least part of Sunday evening. But around 10 p.m., one of them — a 13-year-old nicknamed ‘Bump’ — objected to how Young intruded on a game of insults between Bump and his girlfriend and ‘started ribbing on everybody.’ That’s when Bump threw an egg that might as well have been a bombshell.”

10 held in beating death: Only one is adult; more suspects sought; murder charges expected (10/02/02)
In The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by Jamaal Abdul-Alim and Jessica McBride
“Among those prosecutors expect to charge with murder in adult court is a 10-year-old boy, who could be the youngest person ever prosecuted as an adult in Wisconsin. Milwaukee Police Chief Arthur Jones said eight of those in custody have confessed to their roles in the beating death of Charlie Young Jr., who died Tuesday evening at Wauwatosa's Froedtert Memorial Lutheran Hospital after being attacked Sunday by about 20 boys and young men.”

7 boys charged as adults in beating: 10-year-old kept in Children’s Court; other juveniles expected to be charged (10/02/02)
In The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by Jessica McBride, Jamaal Abdul-Alim, and Tom Held
“Prosecutors charged seven youths as adults with first-degree reckless homicide Thursday in a savage mob beating, but they spared the youngest, a 10-year-old, from adult court and a possible 40-year prison term. The 10-year-old was charged with second-degree reckless homicide in Children’s Court, where he now could face a two-year sentence at a juvenile prison, a sentence that could be extended only until he is 18. At least three more teens in custody are expected to be charged next week, and police are looking for more suspects.”

Crime, gangs and broken homes play large part in boys’ lives (10/03/02)
In The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel by Gina Barton
“The 10-year-old who told police he helped beat Charlie Young Jr. to death has been smoking marijuana since summer, his half sister says. A 14-year-old being held in the case already is the father of a baby girl. He was arrested on a burglary charge when he was 8 or 9.”

Wichita to revisit brutal slayings as testimony begins (10/07/02)
In The Washington Times by Valerie Richardson
“The brothers, 24-year-old Reginald and 22-year-old Jonathan, face 113 criminal counts, notably kidnapping, rape, robbery and five murders, in connection with a crime spree from Dec. 7 to Dec. 15, 2000, that terrorized Wichita and much of Kansas. If convicted, they could receive the death penalty.... The Carr brothers are black, and each of the five victims was white. At the time of their arrest, Sedgwick County District Attorney Nola Foulston refused to charge them with hate crimes, explaining that the main motive was robbery, and that Kansas did not have a hate-crimes law.”

Inside Al Qaeda’s Training Camps: What they’re ready for. (10/01/02)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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.”

A Visit to Shanksville (09/11/02)
By Joan Marie Nagy at NewsMax
“I hope the permanent memorial maintains the evidence of that violent impact and preserves that hallowed ground forever. Americans need to remember the price paid in that Pennsylvania field. When I remember September 11, I will feel grief, then anger, then pride. The overwhelming thought or feeling I will forever associate with September 11 will be that, when given a chance, most every ordinary American will still fight to the death to preserve the lives of other Americans.”

A Bell Tolls In Shanksville (09/11/02)
At CBSNews by Jim Krasula (?)
“Flight 93 took off from Newark, N.J., bound for San Francisco. It crashed in a grass field next to a line of trees about 70 miles southeast of Pittsburgh — far from the devastation in New York and at the Pentagon. The reason, say investigators, is that people on board confronted their four hijackers and brought down the flight far from some intended target in Washington, D.C. — The Capitol, according to al Qaeda members interviewed by Arab television recently.”

“Citizen-soldiers” of Flight 93 honored (09/12/02)
In The Modesto Bee by Lawrence M. O’Rourke
“Charles Carpenter, a farmer just over the ridge from the crash site, said the terrorists failed to splinter America. ‘The terrible thing that happened here has brought us closer together as a people,’ he said. ‘If those terrorists had in mind splitting us up, it sure did backfire.’ Sandy Dahl, widow of pilot Jason Dahl, said that the memory of Sept. 11 constantly reminds her that ‘lives are short and there is no time for hate.’ ‘Here we remember ordinary people who did heroic things,’ said Albert Youngblood, an accountant whose half sister, Wanda Green, a flight attendant, died in the crash. Alice Hoglan, the mother of passenger Mark Bingham of San Francisco, said the terrorist attack showed the need for the United States to take an active role in solving the world’s problems. ‘Today was beautiful,’ she said. ‘It was a fitting tribute in honor of the actions the people aboard Flight 93 took.’”

The Heroes Of Flight 93: The last full measure of devotion (09/12/02)
In Newsday by Hugo Kugiya
“A sharp change in the weather marked the service for the 33 passengers (not including the four hijackers) and the crew of seven aboard the Boeing 757 that crashed onto a reclaimed strip mine about an hour after it departed Newark Airport. Low, dark clouds, propelled by a furious wind, arrived with the dawn, turning frigid what had been a string of balmy, humid days. Schools in Somerset County were canceled for the day, as all the district’s school buses were deployed to shuttle people to the memorial site. Attendees were searched and prohibited from freely entering and leaving the service. State police patrolled the grounds on horseback. A covered stage was set up about 500 yards from the crash site, where the Johnstown Symphony Orchestra and a Marine Corps band played to open the service at 9:30 a.m. Relatives sat in white folding chairs on a gravel clearing in front of the stage. Separated by a plastic fence behind the relatives were the 4,000 others who attended.”

Flight 93 Victims Praised as Patriots (09/11/02)
At KDKA by The Associated Press
“Family members clutched flowers and flags - some wore pins with photographs of their lost loved ones - under overcast skies as wind whipped across the pastoral setting. Military aircraft, first large cargo ships and then four fighter jets, flew over the ceremony in formation.... Some of the family members of the victims also spoke. Murial Borza, an 11-year-old who lost her half-sister, Deora Bodley, asked for a minute of silence for world peace. Sandy Dahl, the wife of Flight 93 pilot Jason Dahl said, ‘If we learn nothing else from this tragedy, we learn that life is short and there is no time for hate.’”

Courage of Flight 93 heroes celebrated in Pa. (09/12/02)
In The (Penn State) Collegian by Adam Fabian
“‘We are all grateful,’ Director of Homeland Security and former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Ridge told the listeners. ‘Your loved ones did not expect to serve the cause of freedom that Tuesday morning, but serve freedom they did.’ Ridge also took a moment during his statement to thank the citizens of Shanksville for their help and support. ‘This sleepy little town puts its arms around you and embraces you,’ he said. After those remarks, the family members of Flight 93 stood and applauded the crowd that included many residents of Shanksville and surrounding communities.”

Site of Crash Is “Hallowed Ground”: In a Pa. Field, Thousands Pay Homage to Where America First Fought Back (09/11/02)
In The Washington Post by Sue Anne Pressley
“There is nothing much to see at the rural crash site of United Airlines Flight 93 — just a line of charred trees and a distant disturbance in the oats field where the giant crater was. Yet people keep coming here, with the hushed reverence of church-goers, more than a thousand of them a week. Most say it helps them somehow. They stand quietly near the wall of tokens brought here by other visitors — the police patches and firefighters’ caps from around the country, the flags with broken hearts designed by someone in Ohio, even plain rocks with ‘Thank you, Heroes of Flight 93’ scrawled over them in big black letters.”

Flight 93 Passengers Honored with Gratitude (09/11/02)
At ABCNews by David Morgan of Reuters
“The tolling of a single bell and release of white doves on a wind-swept field on Wednesday honored the memory of the 40 passengers and crew on United Airlines Flight 93, a year after their plane crashed during an onboard struggle with four hijackers. Near the edge of a reclaimed strip mine in the Appalachian highlands 70 miles southeast of Pittsburgh, thousands — including more than 500 relatives of the victims — gathered for an anniversary service under leaden skies, many tearfully clutching American flags.”

Site Of Tragedy Now A Shrine To American Heroes (09/02/02)
At Cox Newspapers by Bob Dart
“Todd Beamer’s final call to action is repeated on hundreds of signs, rocks and scrawled messages at the temporary memorial that overlooks the crash site. Congress will soon approve legislation authorizing the National Park Service to build and maintain a permanent memorial. It will be designed with input of the families of the 40 victims of Flight 93. Meanwhile, thousands of tributes have been attached to a billboard-sized rectangle of chain-link fence. Smaller memorials are added daily by the visitors who drive down Skyline Drive to reach the site. Visitors write on every available spot — poster boards attached to the fence, the guard rails around the parking lot, stones on the ground, even the porta-potties. ”

Life in small town forever changed by Sept. 11 plane crash (03/09/02)
In The (South Carolina) State by Amy Worden of Knight Ridder Newspapers
“Twenty miles from the Pennsylvania Turnpike, along narrow roads, Shanksville is not easy to find. A driver could easily miss the small sign directing traffic to a temporary memorial along a newly paved mountaintop road. Visitors stop at a parking area built a quarter-mile from the crash site, overlooking the area now ringed with chain-link fence and still under 24-hour guard. A memorial wall - a colorful shrine to the heroes of Flight 93 - has sprouted on the barren land scarred by years of mining. Visitors leave familiar tokens behind - flags, flowers, toys and signs - and they bring intimate mementos such as MIA bracelets, watches, police badges, and a United Airlines flight attendant’s uniform.”

Year One: We Didn’t Change After All (09/09/02)
By Charles Krauthammer in The Spectator
“This September 11 marks not just a day of infamy, but the close of Year One of that war. And to win it we will need to demonstrate — as we did in the other great wars of necessity — patience, endurance, determination, and a willingness to bear any burden. That is a solemn calling, but it need not elicit grim solemnity. Success will require that both sides of the American character — the visible fluff and the (once) buried steel — remain in play. Last September 11, we thought that the one must banish the other. The great lesson, the great triumph, of Year One is that fury and grit did not drive out lightness and laughter. And a good thing too. To prevail in this long twilight struggle, we will need them all.”

The triumph of American values (09/07/02)
By Mark Steyn in The Spectator
“The change that occurred on 11 September was a simple one. When Osama bin Laden blew up the World Trade Center, he also blew up the polite fictions of the pre-war world. At Ground Zero, they’ve been working frantically to clear away the rubble. Likewise, at the UN, EU and all the rest, they’ve also been working frantically not so much to clear away the mess but to stick it back together and reconstruct the great fantasy world as it existed on 10 September, that bizarro make-believe land where Nato is a ‘mutual defence alliance’ and Egypt and Saudi Arabia are ‘our staunch friends’. Even in America, some people are still living in that world. You can switch on the TV and hear apparently sane ‘experts’ using phrases like ‘Bush risks losing the support of the Arab League’.”

America, Be Angry: This is no time to “get over” Sept. 11. (08/13/02)
By Rod Dreher at The National Review Online
“The most patriotic thing the networks can do in the days running up to the September 11 anniversary is run those pictures of the planes crashing into the towers, over and over. They were taken off the air days after the attack, for fear of traumatizing the shocked nation. Well, we need to be shocked again. We need to be traumatized again. Our national survival depends on it. And this time, don't withhold the images of human beings jumping to their deaths from the upper floors of the towers. We can handle the truth.”

It’s a good time for war (09/08/02)
By Christopher Hitchens in The Boston Globe
“I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a traveling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated. On one side, the ethics of the multicultural, the secular, the skeptical, and the cosmopolitan. (Those are the ones I love, by the way.) On the other, the arid monochrome of dull and vicious theocratic fascism. I am prepared for this war to go on for a very long time. I will never become tired of waging it, because it is a fight over essentials.”

Say no to the nay-sayers (08/31/02)
By Bruce Anderson in The Spectator
“Before the summer recess, all of Mr Blair’s senior advisers were convinced that America would go to war with the UK in support, and nothing seems to have changed during the PM’s holiday. There is a constant interplay of co-operation between London and Washington; the SIS and the CIA are virtually functioning as one body. Recently, one British visitor was chatting to CIA Director George Tenet about the Europeans’ role. ‘I’ll tell you exactly what the President said the other day on that very subject,’ said Mr Tenet. ‘He said, “I don’t give a sh*t what the Europeans think.”’”

Are We Owed an Apology? Muslim leaders remain mute on 9/11. (08/16/02)
By William F. Buckley Jr. at The National Review Online
“If a band of Americans, proclaiming their devotion to the faith, assaulted a Muslim center, we would not need to wait very long for disavowals — by Christian leaders. When John Brown carried his faith to unreasonable lengths, we hanged him. What we are waiting for, says Dr. Graham, is an apology from Muslim leaders. Why shouldn’t we have that? An explicit disavowal, as contrary to acceptable teachings of the Koran — of the acts of the terrorists.”

The Parable of the Weed: Attacking terrorism at its roots. (07/19/02)
By Victor Davis Hanson at The National Review Online
“The latter systematic choice in the short-term — the ending of Saddam Hussein; ultimatums to Syria and Iran to cease their succor to Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, or else; a reckoning with the terrorist enclaves in Lebanon; a gradual dissolution of alliances with the autocracies of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan; subsidies to democratic reformers throughout the Middle East — is both unorthodox, frightening, and easily caricatured. But, in the long term, it offers the only hope of destroying weeds like al Qaeda for good. Anything less and we are simply pruning back a perennial pest.”

US begins push for humanitarian aid in Iraq (08/14/02)
In The Financial Times by Carola Hoyos in Washington
“The US has launched a public bidding process for humanitarian relief organisations to work in Iraq and surrounding areas in the run-up to a possible military campaign against the regime of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein. In addition, Central Command, the military operations centre co-ordinating the war against terrorism, this week asked for a list of American international relief organisations - non-governmental organisations - working in or around Iraq, senior members of NGOs said.”

Preemptive strike on Iraq to improve peace prospects (08/11/02)
By Henry Kissinger in The Manila Times
“Military intervention should be attempted only if we are willing to sustain such an effort for however long it is needed. For, in the end, the task is to translate intervention in Iraq into terms of general applicability for an international system. The imminence of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the huge dangers it involves, the rejection of a viable inspection system, the demons­trated hostility of Saddam combine to produce an imperative for preemptive action. But it is not in the American national interest to establish preemption as a universal principle available to every nation.”

Act Now: The danger is immediate. Saddam Hussein must be removed. (09/06/02)
By George P. Schulz in The Washington Post
“This is a defining moment in international affairs. Authorization for action is clear. We have made endless efforts to bring Saddam Hussein into line with the duly considered judgments of a unanimous U.N. Security Council. Let us go to the Security Council and assert this case with the care of a country determined to take decisive action. And this powerful case for acting now must be made promptly to Congress. Its members will have to stand up and be counted. Then let’s get on with the job.”

Target Iraq’s Terrorist Regime, Not Just Osama bin Laden, to Win War on Terrorism (10/02/01)
By James A. Phillips of The Heritage Foundation
“President George W. Bush has declared war against international terrorism in response to the September 11 terrorist attacks that killed more than 6,000 innocent people. That war will require eradicating Osama bin Laden’s global terrorist network and uprooting its Taliban protectors from Afghanistan. But that alone will not be enough to stop terrorism. Troubling questions have been raised about possible Iraqi support for bin Laden’s network; this is not surprising, given Iraq’s past support for terrorist attacks against America and its allies.”

Bushophobia on West 43rd Street: The New York Times’s daily rant. (08/12/02)
By Erin Sheley in The Weekly Standard
“On two consecutive days last week, the New York Times advanced its crusade against military action in Iraq with page-one ‘news’ stories — the first detailing a leaked war plan, the second predicting dire effects for the U.S. economy. While these prominently featured pieces occasioned much comment, lesser instances of the Times’s political use of its news columns are commonplace and also deserve attention.”

The Left has lost its way and lost its voice (08/17/02)
By Camille Paglia in The London Times
“Only a lunatic fringe on the far Left is still calling for revolution, a smashing of the social order, but it must be acknowledged how widespread that idea was in the 1960s. Most leftists do believe that, without them, the naive proletariat would wallow for ever in ignorance and slavery. Unless they are volunteering hands-on service in blighted neighbourhoods, however, most leftists are far removed from working-class life. Many are wordsmiths — journalists or academics who run in packs. Leftism has become wordplay — a refuge for bourgeois intellectuals guilty about their comfort and privilege.”

Teaching Enronomics (07/02/02)
By Stephen Balch in The New York Post
“In the wake of the recent scandals, the National Association of Scholars, an association of academics dedicated to raising standards on campus, asked Zogby International to poll American college seniors about what they’re being taught. College students imbibe from their academic mentors a low opinion of prevailing business ethics. When asked to name a profession in which, according to their teachers, an ‘anything goes’ attitude is most likely to yield success, business leads the pack - chosen by 28 percent - among eight choices provided. (Twenty percent named journalism; 16 percent, law. Teaching, science/medicine, the civil service, religion and the military each drew 5 percent or less.)”

NAS/Zogby Poll Reveals American Colleges Are Teaching Dubious Ethical Lessons (07/02/02)
A Press Release from National Association of Scholars
“‘These results have disturbing implications both for America’s economy and its institutions of higher education,’ said National Association of Scholars President Stephen H. Balch. ‘They suggest that our colleges and universities, however unwittingly, are contributing to, and perpetuating, the ethical laxness behind the recent scandals at Enron, Worldcom, and other major American firms.’ ‘To be sure, the foundations of ethical education are laid in the home and school. At best, universities can only confirm the lessons taught there. But they can also undermine these lessons by providing sophisticated excuses for succumbing to the temptations of greed and power. The relativization and politicization of ethical standards, plus cynicism about business in general, opens the way for such excuse making.’”

College Seniors Taught Right and Wrong Is Relative (07/08/02)
At Cybercast News Service by Lawrence Morahan
“A large majority of students also report that they’ve been taught that corporate policies furthering ‘progressive’ social and political goals are more important than those ensuring that stockholders and creditors receive accurate accounts of a firm’s finances, the study said. When respondents were given a list of business practices and asked, based on what they’ve been taught at college, which of the practices rank as the most important, 38 percent chose ‘recruiting a diverse workforce in which women and minorities are advanced and promoted.’ Eighteen percent chose ‘minimizing environmental pollution,’ and another 18 percent chose ‘avoiding layoffs by not exporting jobs or moving plants from one area to another.’ Only 23 percent said ‘providing clear and accurate business statements to stockholders and creditors’ is the most important business practice.”

Professors who see no evil (07/22/02)
By John Leo in U.S. News & World Report
“A Zogby International poll of college seniors came up with a fascinating finding. Almost all of the 401 randomly selected students around the country–97 percent–said their college studies had prepared them to behave ethically in their future work lives. So far, so good. But 73 percent of the students said that when their professors taught about ethical issues, the usual message was that uniform standards of right and wrong don’t exist (‘what is right and wrong depends on differences in individual values and cultural diversity’). It’s not news that today’s campuses are drenched in moral relativism. But we are allowed to be surprised that college students report they are being well prepared ethically by teachers who tell them, in effect, that there are no real ethical standards, so anything goes.”

Point. Click. Think? As Students Rely on the Internet for Research, Teachers Try to Warn of the Web’s Snares (07/16/02)
In The Washington Post by Laura Sessions Stepp
“Welcome to the world of Net thinking, a form of reasoning that characterizes many students who are growing up with the Internet as their primary, and in some cases, sole source of research. Ask teachers and they’ll tell you: Among all the influences that shape young thinking skills, computer technology is the biggest one. ‘Students’ first recourse for any kind of information is the Web. It’s absolutely automatic,’ says Kenneth Kotovsky, a psychology professor at Carnegie-Mellon University who has examined the study habits of young people.”

Assignment America: Tales from the newsroom (07/08/02)
By John Bloom at United Press International
“This new book Coloring the News: How Crusading for Diversity Has Corrupted American Journalism... will break your heart. I’ve worked in journalism all my life, and I had no idea any of this was going on. All through the 1990s, every time Rush Limbaugh would accuse the media of a liberal bias, I would just chuckle it away as the usual sort of right-wing paranoia we’ve been dealing with since the Nixon administration. But William McGowan has written a carefully researched analysis of news coverage in the ’90s, showing that ... it’s true. It’s even worse than liberal bias.”

Break cycle of eternal poverty (07/16/02)
By Jim Wooten in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“America’s first public housing projects for the poor were in Atlanta. The idea born here should die here. The nation should never build another stick of public housing. Assembling the poor in concentrations where their life models are broken families and welfare dependency is an idea whose time is gone. It’s a mistake to teach self-destructive behavior — and that is the legacy of public housing.”

Cohabiting can make marriage an iffy proposition; Even married, men may still feel less committed (07/08/02)
In USA Today by Karen S. Peterson
“An expert addressing a ‘Smart Marriages’ conference this week will drop research on his colleagues that may indeed make some Americans smart. Researcher Scott Stanley’s case is this: Women living unmarried with guys and expecting a lasting, committed marriage down the line had better review their options. His research finds that men who cohabit with the women they eventually marry are less committed to the union than men who never lived with their spouses ahead of time.”

Perfidious Belgium (07/13/02)
By Paul Belien in The Spectator
“According to a recent inquiry ordered by a Belgian parliamentary commission, Brussels has become a major recruiting base for al-Qa’eda and a launch-pad for terrorist attacks on neighbouring countries. The commission investigated the failure of the Sûreté de l’Etat, the Belgian secret service, to screen Islamic terrorists. On 5 June, Mrs Godelieve Timmermans, the head of the Sûreté, resigned after the report concluded that the Sûreté had remained passive because it had found no indications that the terrorists would attack Belgian targets, and also because the Sûreté did not want to discredit certain corrupt Belgian authorities or politicians for fear that these might attribute to the secret service ‘a racist or xenophobic attitude towards immigrants or Muslims’.”

Gays race supporters of marriage amendment (07/15/02)
In The Washington Times by Larry Witham
“To neutralize state court rulings on same-sex ‘marriage’ rights, Mr. Daniels and other family-values groups are backing the Federal Marriage Amendment, which last month was introduced in the House with bipartisan backing. It would amend the U.S. Constitution to define marriage as between a man and woman and allow state legislatures to decide on marriage benefits.”

The Gay Inquisition (07/19/02)
By Camille Paglia at FrontPage Magazine
“There was a time when gay men were known for their scathingly independent minds and their encyclopedic knowledge of culture. The welcome relaxation of legal and social sanctions against homosexuality over the past 30 years has paradoxically weakened the unsentimental powers of observation for which gays, as outsiders, were once renowned. Gay men used to be ferocious exemplars of free thought and free speech. But within 15 years of the 1969 Stonewall rebellion, an insidious totalitarianism infected gay activism, parallel to what was occurring in feminism in the Catharine MacKinnon/Andrea Dworkin era. Intolerance and witch hunts became the norm.”

Moral Relativity Is a Hot Topic? True. Absolutely. (07/13/02)
By Edward Rothstein in The New York Times
“The war now taking shape may even be related to the principles that gave birth to postmodernism. Avatars of absolutism — terrorist Islamic fundamentalists — are challenging the liberal democratic societies of the West, objecting to their power, their values, their differing creeds, their modern (and postmodern) perspectives. This is something Mr. Fish recognizes. But postmodernism tends to retain its old critical habits. So when postmodernist arguments are applied to the war, they often seem directed at the West, relativizing its claims and qualifying condemnations of the opposition.”

America should celebrate its independence (07/04/02)
By Mark Steyn in The National Post
“The anything most of the Western world’s non-believers believe in is government: the age of church-and-state has been superseded by the era of state-as-church. In Europe, they’re happy to have cast off the supposed stultifying oppressiveness of religion for a world in which the EU regulates every aspect of life from ‘xenophobia’ to the curvature of bananas. The fact that the most religious nation in the West is also the most powerful militarily, economically and culturally may be sheerest coincidence, so let’s just say that separating church from state wound up strengthening the vitality of religion in America.”

Why we should all love America (07/04/02)
By Michael Gove in The London Times
“Britain may be more stable, earthed and charming. Australia may have much of America’s openness with a healthier population, freer of conceit. Europe’s smaller nations such as The Netherlands and Denmark may have succeeded in building greater social solidarity while still preserving personal freedom. But no nation has the sheer innovative energy, the democratic vitality, the openness to personal growth and the willingness to shoulder burdens bigger than itself that America has.”

The business of America is America — and we’d better get used to it (07/06/02)
By Matthew Paris in The Spectator
“Why should the Americans join the ICC if they do not want to? Are they not a sovereign nation with some reason to distrust progressive internationalists? America is not preventing other countries setting up whatever international courts we choose; she is simply declining to take part. Any claims we make to jurisdiction over non-participants are preposterous, and if we cannot assure Washington that US peacekeeping troops are safe from being dragged before this court, then — obviously again — her troops will come home.”

Fatah calls for attacks on US, Zionist targets (07/02/02)
By Margot Dudkevitch and Lamia Lahoud in The Jerusalem Post
“Groups affiliated with Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement yesterday called upon all Palestinian organizations, including the Islamic movements, to attack Zionist and American targets everywhere in response to US efforts ‘to remove the legitimate leadership of the Palestinian people.’”

Time for Muslim Show-and-Tell (07/02/02)
By Tammy Bruce at FrontPage Magazine
“Somehow the pathetic proving would rest with the victims as we swim in false guilt and political correctness inflicted on us by the Left Elite for decades. The same mentality that compelled the American establishment to beg Muslims to like us in the aftermath of slaughter brought to us by their ‘brothers’ is also responsible for our inability to stop it as the conspiracy grew. Can you imagine an effort by law enforcement before September 11 to question Arabs or Muslims in this country? It was impossible. And it remains impossible even after the attack. Our hands were tied then as they are now, by a Left Elite rhetoric that has reduced our critical minds to mush, and twisted our legal right to defend ourselves into the bizarre effort at group therapy to make sure those who hate us know that we don’t hate them.”

The Enemy Among Us (07/02/02)
By Editors of The New York Post
“Ten months after 9/11, too many officials remain reluctant to address head-on the question of how much support for terrorism exists within the U.S. Muslim community. Efforts at the worthy goal of reassuring Muslim-Americans that their community isn’t being stigmatized have left many government officials suddenly sharing a platform with known supporters of Islamic terrorism.”

Test of revered wisdom (07/07/02)
By Linda Chavez in The Washington Times
“The Founders understood that religious belief was not incidental to the American experiment in liberty but was the foundation on which it was built. The whole idea that individuals were entitled to liberty rests on the Judeo-Christian conception of man. When the colonists rebelled against their king — an action that risked their very lives — they did so with the belief that they were answering to a higher law than the king’s. They were emboldened by ‘the laws of nature and nature’s God,’ in Thomas Jefferson’s memorable phrase, to declare their independence.”

Death of a Thousand Cuts: Killing the death penalty softly. (07/02/02)
By William Saletan at Slate
“The Times isn’t really angry that the death penalty is administered too secretly in Japan or too openly in the United States. It’s angry that the death penalty is administered at all. But most Americans don’t share that view, so the Times and other critics seize on any related issue — the killer’s youth or mental capacity, the execution’s secrecy or publicity — that might buy extra sympathy for the condemned. Over time, these related issues add up. If you can’t kill murderers when they’re too young or too old, too dumb or too smart, killed secretly or killed openly, then you can’t kill them at all. That’s the objective all these arguments are meant to disguise.”

The Political Intolerance of Academic Feminism (06/21/02)
By Mary Zeiss Stange in The Chronicle Review
“Feminist scholars have struggled to be inclusive when it comes to every conceivable form of "otherness" (race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, age, appearance, education, ability). Every form of otherness, that is, except one: politics. How ironic, given that our movement began with the assertion that the personal is political.”

Letting Parents Decide (06/28/02)
By Editors of The Washington Post
“In affirming yesterday the constitutionality of Ohio’s use of vouchers in Cleveland — one of the country’s most dramatically failed school systems — the Supreme Court’s conservative majority rightly created wiggle room for states, localities and potentially even Congress to try carefully designed voucher programs. The case split the court along ideological lines, with the court’s more liberal justices all but declaring this voucher program to signify the end of church-state separation. We don’t belittle the dangers. But the dangers of vouchers are hypothetical ones at this stage. The crisis in education is real. And the court should not be insisting that the only lawful policies are the ones that have already failed.”

A Win for America’s Children (06/28/02)
By Rod Paige in The Washington Post
“The No Child Left Behind Act, when fully implemented, will make it easier to determine what works and what doesn’t in America’s schools, and it will carry consequences for failure. Among the consequences are public school choice and access to supplemental educational services, both underwritten by federal dollars. Now the Supreme Court has opened the door to even broader school choices, not only ushering in a new era in American education policy but also potentially starting a reformation in American public education. What must emerge through this education reformation should be a focus on students and achievement, rather than on the ‘system.’”

Federal Appeals Court Rules Pledge of Allegiance Unconstitutional (06/26/02)
In The Washington Post by David Kravets of Associated Press
“Harvard scholar Laurence Tribe predicted the U.S. Supreme Court will certainly reverse the decision unless the 9th Circuit reverses itself. ‘I would bet an awful lot on that,’ Tribe said. The 9th Circuit is the nation’s most overturned appellate court – partly because it is the largest, but also because it tends to make liberal, activist opinions, and because the cases it hears – on a range of issues from environmental laws to property rights to civil rights – tend to challenge the status quo.”

“One Nation Under God” (06/27/02)
By Editors of The New York Times
“This is a well-meaning ruling, but it lacks common sense. A generic two-word reference to God tucked inside a rote civic exercise is not a prayer. Mr. Newdow’s daughter is not required to say either the words ‘under God’ or even the pledge itself, as the Supreme Court made clear in a 1943 case involving Jehovah’s Witnesses. In the pantheon of real First Amendment concerns, this one is off the radar screen. The practical impact of the ruling is inviting a political backlash for a matter that does not rise to a constitutional violation.”

One Nation Under Blank (06/27/02)
By Editors of The Washington Post
“If the court were writing a parody, rather than deciding an actual case, it could hardly have produced a more provocative holding than striking down the Pledge of Allegiance while this country is at war. We believe in strict separation between church and state, but the pledge is hardly a particular danger spot crying out for judicial policing. And having a court strike it down can only serve to generate unnecessary political battles and create a fundraising bonanza for the many groups who will rush to its defense. Oh, yes, it can also invite a reversal, and that could mean establishing a precedent that sanctions a broader range of official religious expression than the pledge itself.”

The risks in the Rome Statute (07/02/02)
By Editors of Ha’aretz
“The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court goes into force today, establishing for the first time a permanent institution for investigating and judging people accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes. The court, which will begin operating from The Hague next year, will have the authority to judge individuals, based on complaints made to it by governments or the UN Security Council.”

Lone stand for justice (07/01/02)
By Editors of The London Telegraph
“Hitherto, legal systems have been rooted in democratic assemblies. Laws are passed by national legislatures, which are responsible to their peoples, and treaties signed by accountable governments. But, from today, the ICC will cast off the guy-ropes that attach it to its constituent states. From now on, it will function as an international body answerable to no one. The idea that laws ought to be made by the people’s representatives will be replaced by the pre-modern concept that law-makers are answerable to no one but themselves.”

President Bush Calls for New Palestinian Leadership (06/24/02)
George W. Bush in The Rose Garden at The White House
“I call on the Palestinian people to elect new leaders, leaders not compromised by terror. I call upon them to build a practicing democracy, based on tolerance and liberty. If the Palestinian people actively pursue these goals, America and the world will actively support their efforts. If the Palestinian people meet these goals, they will be able to reach agreement with Israel and Egypt and Jordan on security and other arrangements for independence.”

Democracy for Palestinians: Bush’s bold plan for Mideast peace. (06/25/02)
By Editors of The Wall Street Journal
“It’s important to understand how radical this idea of democracy is for Palestine. For years the U.S. and Israel both winked at the brutality of Arab leaders, in the Faustian hope that they would provide ‘stability’ and ‘peace.’ This was the flaw at the heart of the Oslo peace process, in which the U.S. sub-contracted with Yasser Arafat to stop attacks against Israel. But this was impossible as long as Mr. Arafat and other Palestinian leaders derived all of their political legitimacy from the struggle against Israel. Yesterday Mr. Bush said this day is over.”

What it Means: Politically, Arafat is a dead man walking (06/25/02)
By David Landau in The Ha’aretz
“Yasser Arafat, the seemingly immortal leader of the Palestinian national movement, was politically assassinated Monday by President George W. Bush. His role as Israel’s prospective partner in any future diplomatic process was effectively snuffed out by a stern-sounding American president, delivering his verdict on two years of violent intifada and his recipe for a turnabout towards peace in this war-torn region. Bush’s verdict: Arafat is the guilty party.”

An End to Pretending (06/26/02)
By Michael Kelly in The Washington Post
“There is some limited truth in seeing what Bush is trying to do in the Middle East in traditional terms — hard-liners vs. State Department softies, etc. — but this is missing the elephant on the settee. For better or worse — a great deal better, I think — Bush has set the Palestinian issue within the context of a larger approach that is fundamentally, historically radical: a rejection of decades of policy, indeed a rejection of the entire philosophy of Middle East diplomacy. This philosophy has rested on a willingness to accept a U.S. role as a player in a running fraud.”

Admit terrorism’s Islamic link (06/24/02)
By Michael Medved in USA Today
“Ideas — including religious ones — have consequences, and examining those consequences is the best way to judge them. Americans are mature enough to handle the inescapable truth that our daily dangers come not, as Hollywood would have it, from freelance misfits and nostalgic Nazis, but from a serious and frightening Islamic mass movement implacably devoted to our destruction.”

Judgement Day in Dallas (06/22/02)
In The Tablet by Richard Major
“Greater than any constitutional shift is a change in the way the American Catholic Church and society see each other. They are not mutually comprehending; they do not now trust each other. In Dallas justice required the Church to humble itself before society and accept the demands of public opinion. But the shattering effect of its humiliation will make the Church think more freshly of its role. Cardinal George, cool and sad, declared that this scandal would be ‘providential’ if it made the Church look beyond the particular and attend to the wider context of American society. He said: ‘The Church was weakened even before this crisis began; for a generation we have experienced profound loss. How are we to be the Catholic Church within this kind of culture?’ Then the cardinal spelled out his view of American civilisation, and the journalists began squirming, stirring in their seats, laughing nervously and snorting — which is the effect truth sometimes has on journalists. ‘Our culture is secularised protestantism, self-righteous and decadent at the same time’, Cardinal George said baldly. In such a culture, how can the Church understand itself? How can it, ‘smaller perhaps but faithful’ as it is likely to be, he said, understand anew celibacy, or homosexuality, which society does not pretend to understand either? ‘To whom do we really listen?’ he asked.”

Trying to Restore a Faith (06/15/02)
By Frank Keating in The New York Times
“Yesterday I accepted a request by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops to become chairman of a special lay commission that will address the crisis of confidence — and in too many cases, a crisis of faith — in my church. I undertook this task after much thought and prayer, and only after specific criteria were established defining the powers and goals of the commission. Those goals can be easily summarized: to protect the innocent from abuse and exploitation, and to restore faith in the church and its leadership.”

God Save Us From Democracy (06/20/02)
By J. P. Zmirak at FrontPage Magazine
“The Vatican, for all its reputation as an international power broker, is little more than a (very tall) bully pulpit; the pope has a staff of a few hundred overworked men and women, a budget smaller than most Fortune 500 corporations, and no legal leverage. Under these constraints, it labors around the world, nudging bishops, persuading statesmen, sending missionaries, mediating wars, caring for the poor, trying to keep the Moslems from slaughtering nuns and the West from eating its young. It’s an inhuman task; that the Church succeeds at all, and has not already collapsed, ought to impress any skeptic that there’s something mysterious about this organization.... Would that happen, if ordinary Catholics — not just trouble-making, orthodox intellectuals like me — got involved in choosing bishops? In changing Church policy? You bet it would. Andrew Greeley, erotic novelist and weathervane, is probably right when he says that the average American Catholic wants both condoms and altar rails, easy divorce and ‘Ave Maria,’ sung at his daughter’s third church wedding. Subject Church teachings to plebiscite — remembering that a majority of American Catholics voted for Clinton and Gore — and what will you get? God only knows. And that’s why he’s protecting the Church from democracy.”

Throw Away the Key: Well, not really — but hold Padilla for as long as necessary. (06/20/02)
By Rich Lowry at National Review Online
“Embedded in all this heated rhetoric is the idea that there is no check on the executive’s authority in the Padilla case. But habeas corpus has not been repealed (if it had been, that would indeed be news, and actually endanger our rights). Which means that if the heavy-breathers are correct and Padilla’s rights are so obviously being trampled, his lawyer can challenge the constitutionality of his detention in court. Which is exactly what she — with plenty of help from the ACLU — is going to do.”

Powell’s Trial Balloon (06/17/02)
By William Safire in The New York Times
“1. Statehood, even if qualified as provisional or interim, confers a degree of sovereignty. That means control of borders, the ability to make treaties, and to import arms from Iraq and by sea from Iran. 2. Partial statehood would give Arafat control of an airport. A plane loaded with fuel or explosives could hit a major Tel Aviv building within three minutes, too quickly for Israeli jets to scramble. Ritual condemnation would follow. 3. Any form of statehood would limit Israel’s ability to search out bomb factories and arrest terrorist leaders. What is now a tolerable sweep into disputed territory would be denounced in the U.N. as invasion pure and simple. That would trigger European economic boycotts and draw Arab allies into a wider war.”

Qaeda’s New Links Increase Threats From Global Sites (06/16/02)
In The New York Times by David Johnston, Don Van Natta Jr. and Judith Miller
“A group of midlevel operatives has assumed a more prominent role in Al Qaeda and is working in tandem with Middle Eastern extremists across the Islamic world, senior government officials say. They say the alliance, which extends from North Africa to Southeast Asia, now poses the most serious terrorist threat to the United States. This new alliance of terrorists, though loosely knit, is as fully capable of planning and carrying out potent attacks on American targets as the more centralized network once led by Osama bin Laden, the officials said.”

Arrests Reveal Al Qaeda Plans: Three Saudis Seized by Morocco Outline Post-Afghanistan Strategy (06/16/02)
In The Washington Post by Peter Finn
“Besieged by U.S. and allied forces in December in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden commanded his fighters to disperse across the globe to attack ‘American and Jewish interests,’ according to accounts officials here say they have obtained from three al Qaeda operatives who were captured in Morocco. The three men, citizens of Saudi Arabia, have told interrogators that they escaped Afghanistan and came to Morocco on a mission to use bomb-laden speedboats for suicide attacks on U.S. and British warships in the Strait of Gibraltar, senior Moroccan officials said. The men were captured in May in a joint Moroccan-CIA operation.”

Scholar warns West of Muslim goals (06/18/02)
At United Press International by Uwe Siemon-Netto
“A leader of the small worldwide Muslim reform movement warned the West Tuesday against wishful thinking as the U.S. government promotes an intensive dialogue with Islam. ‘The dialogue is not proceeding well because of the two-facedness of most Muslim interlocutors on the one hand and the gullibility of well-meaning Western idealists on the other,’ said Bassam Tibi.”

Iraq’s tortured children (06/22/02)
By John Sweeney of BBC News
“Ali talked about the paranoid frenzy that rules Baghdad — the tortures, the killings, the corruption, the crazy gangster violence of Saddam and his two sons. And the faking of the mass baby funerals. You may have seen them on TV. Small white coffins parading through the streets of Baghdad on the roofs of taxis, an angry crowd of mourners, condemning Western sanctions for killing the children of Iraq. Usefully, the ages of the dead babies — ‘three days old’, ‘four days old’ — are written in English on the coffins. I wonder who did that.”

2 FBI Whistle-Blowers Allege Lax Security, Possible Espionage (06/19/02)
In The Washington Post by James V. Grimaldi
“In separate cases, two new FBI whistle-blowers are alleging mismanagement and lax security — and in one case possible espionage — among those who translate and oversee some of the FBI’s most sensitive, top-secret wiretaps in counterintelligence and counterterrorist investigations. The allegations of one of the whistle-blowers have prompted two key senators — Judiciary Chairman Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) — to pose critical questions about the FBI division working on the front line of gathering and analyzing wiretaps.”

Stop — in the Name of Hate! (06/19/02)
By Chris Weinkopf at FrontPage Magazine
“To the champions of hate-crime legislation, not all victims — and not all criminals — are the same. Race, sex, religion, or sexual preferences are crucial. They distinguish truly ghastly crimes from the mundane. Which groups are entitled to special protection (or extra prosecution) depends entirely on which biases the self-proclaimed enemies of bias enshrine that day.”

Web Thinkers Warn of Culture Clash (06/21/02)
In The Washington Post by Anick Jesdanun of Associated Press
“The Internet’s potential for promoting expression and empowering citizens is under threat from corporate and government policies that clash with the medium’s long-standing culture of openness, some leading Internet thinkers warned. At the annual Internet Society conference this week in Arlington, the engineers who built the Internet and many of the policymakers who follow its development urged caution as governments try to exert control and businesses look to maximize profits.”

Prepare for the big chill (06/22/02)
By Andrew Kenny in The Spectator
“When the global warmers tell us that the stakes are very high, they are quite right. Global warming has become an immense international gravy train worth billions of dollars. It is now one of the largest recipients of government research money in the world. It finances jobs, grants, conferences, international travel and journals. It not only keeps a huge army of people in comfortable employment but also fills them with self-righteousness and moral superiority, and satisfies those deep instincts in the Green movement for meddling, hectoring, controlling and censuring.”

Silent Spring at 40: Rachel Carson’s classic is not aging well. (06/12/02)
By Ronald Bailey at Reason Online
“So 40 years after the publication of Silent Spring, the legacy of Rachel Carson is more troubling than her admirers will acknowledge. The book did point to problems that had not been adequately addressed, such as the effects of DDT on some wildlife. And given the state of the science at the time she wrote, one might even make the case that Carson’s concerns about the effects of synthetic chemicals on human health were not completely unwarranted. Along with other researchers, she was simply ignorant of the facts. But after four decades in which tens of billions of dollars have been wasted chasing imaginary risks without measurably improving American health, her intellectual descendants don’t have the same excuse.”

Federal Judge Throws Out Charge in Shoe Bomb Case (06/11/02)
By The Associated Press at FOXNews
“A judge threw out one of nine charges Tuesday against a man accused of trying to blow up a jetliner with explosives in his shoes, ruling that an airplane is not a vehicle under a new anti-terrorism law. The charge — attempting to wreck a mass transportation vehicle — was filed under the USA Patriot Act, which was passed by Congress after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. U.S. District Judge William Young said that although an airplane was engaged in mass transportation it is not a vehicle as defined by the new law.”

Dispatcher Says She Was Told Not to Report Shoe-Bomb Incident (06/13/02)
In The New York Times by Matthew L. Wald
“The American Airlines dispatcher who was monitoring a trans-Atlantic flight when the captain reported that a passenger had a shoe bomb said today that her supervisor tried to prevent her from notifying the authorities. The supervisor worried that law enforcement officials would delay the plane on the ground, the dispatcher said. In a complaint filed with the Federal Aviation Administration, the dispatcher said her supervisor ‘instructed me to hold off informing the authorities because the flight would be remotely parked, and “it would be forever before we could get the plane out of there.”’”

Shoe-bomb flight conduct criticized (06/13/02)
In The Dallas Morning News by Jim Morris
“The American Airlines dispatcher who helped guide the flight carrying a suspected shoe-bomber to a safe landing in December alleged in a whistle-blower complaint Wednesday that airline supervisors interfered with her during the incident and threatened her afterward. In a complaint filed with the director of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Whistleblower Protection Program, Julie Robichaux, a 12-year American employee, said she was subjected to ‘intimidation, threats and disciplinary action’ after criticizing the airline’s handling of Flight 63 on Dec. 22.”

Post-Sept. 11 “Backlash” Proves Difficult to Quantify (06/12/02)
In The New Jersey Law Journal by Jim Edwards
“With five lawsuits filed in three states last week by the American Civil Liberties Union, all alleging racial profiling of Arabs and Asians on airplanes, Americans could be forgiven for thinking that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had turned the country into a nation of vigilantes and bigots. But 10 months after the events, the official numbers tell a less alarming story. While there certainly was a hike in such bias claims since September, it’s hard to say that the increase was serious or even statistically significant.”

Much of Sept. 11 Charity Remains to Be Disbursed (06/11/02)
In The Washington Post by Lena H. Sun, Sarah Cohen and Jacqueline L. Salmon
“Of the $2.3 billion raised by the largest charities in the nine months since the terrorist attacks, 29 cents of each dollar has gone to the survivors of those killed. A survey by The Washington Post of the major charities, which raised virtually all of the funds that flowed in after Sept. 11, found that roughly 20 cents of each dollar has gone to displaced workers and others affected by the attacks and an additional 40 cents has yet to be distributed. Several charities reported that money continues to come in — in one case an average of $21,500 a day — even though the organizations have long since ended their appeals for donations.”

The State of the Special Relationship (June 2002)
By Robin Harris in Policy Review
“If America’s European allies only France and Britain possessed a significant capacity to assist in the war on terrorism, and only Britain had the will. A British task force was accordingly deployed in the Gulf; British submarines fired Tomahawks against Taliban targets on two occasions. Within Afghanistan, members of Britain’s SAS regiment — without doubt the most skilled special service forces in the world — performed taxing and dangerous tasks with great success, notably in attacking the al Qaeda training camp outside Kandahar and in hand-to-hand fighting in the Tora Bora region. British forces are still involved in mopping-up operations against the enemy. The pity is that from first to last these exploits have mattered little in the overall outcome. This has been America’s war, and the U.S. has fought it according to its own battle plan and almost entirely with its own resources.”

Climate Changing, U.S. Says in Report (06/03/02)
In The New York Times by Andrew C. Revkin
“In a stark shift for the Bush administration, the United States has sent a climate report to the United Nations detailing specific and far-reaching effects that it says global warming will inflict on the American environment. In the report, the administration for the first time mostly blames human actions for recent global warming. It says the main culprit is the burning of fossil fuels that send heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.”

White House defends U-turn on global warming (06/04/02)
In The Washington Times by George Archibald
“The White House yesterday defended the about-face on global warming contained in its report to the United Nations on climate change. The report marked the first Bush administration agreement with environmental activists that recent global warming is caused by heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from human use of fossil fuels.... White House spokesman Scott McClellan yesterday defended the report, issued Friday by the Environmental Protection Agency, by pointing to its language reiterating the administration’s stance that, Mr. McClellan said, there remains ‘considerable uncertainty in current understanding of how climate varies naturally.’ The administration says such uncertainty backs its opposition to the Kyoto treaty’s goal of cutting U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 7 percent from their 1990 levels between 2008 to 2012.”

Bush burned by climate report (06/08/02)
By Henry Lamb at WorldNetDaily
“Despite a flurry of media reports to the contrary, the Bush administration’s policy on climate change has not flip-flopped. The media frenzy followed the release of a U.S. Climate Assessment Report prepared for the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.... Most of the individuals who prepared the report are holdovers from the Clinton-Gore era, who are known proponents of the global-warming theory. It is also widely known that some of Bush’s high-level appointments are also proponents of the theory, even though Bush, himself, has expressed strong reservations. Release of the report was not intended to be an announcement of a change in policy — it was simply compliance with treaty requirements.”

Don’t tell Dubya (06/09/02)
By Robert Novak in The Chicago Sun-Times
“The Environmental Protection Agency report warning of global warming dangers was issued without President Bush’s being informed in advance, even though it seemed to contradict his long-held position. That’s why Bush dismissed what the EPA did as a ‘report put out by the bureaucracy.’ The president did not mention EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey who has frequently clashed with the White House.”

C.I.A. Was Tracking Hijacker Months Earlier Than It Had Said (06/03/02)
In The New York Times by David Johnston and Elizabeth Becker
“The officials said the C.I.A. learned in early 2001 that Khalid al-Midhar, who died in the attack on the Pentagon, was linked to a suspect in the bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole in October 2000. The agency had said previously that it did not learn of Mr. Midhar’s connections to Al Qaeda or his multiple visits to the United States until the month before the hijackings, when an increase in ‘chatter’ about terrorist threats prompted a review of the C.I.A.’s terrorism files.”

Face to Face With a Terrorist: Government Worker Recalls Mohamed Atta Seeking Funds Before Sept. 11 (06/06/02)
By Brian Ross at ABC News
“Four of the hijackers who attacked America on Sept. 11 tried to get government loans to finance their plots, including ringleader Mohamed Atta, who sought $650,000 to modify a crop-duster, a government loan officer [Johnelle Bryant] told ABCNEWS.... Atta also expressed an interest in visiting New York, specifically the World Trade Center, and asked Bryant about security there. He inquired about other American cities, including Phoenix, Los Angeles, Seattle and Chicago. Prompted by a souvenir she had on her desk, he also expressed interest in the Dallas Cowboys’ football stadium, mentioning that the team was ‘America’s team’ and the stadium had a ‘hole in the roof.’”

The Other Shoe: Obsessing over Sept. 11 distracts us from preventing the next attack. (06/07/02)
By Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal
“At the same time the institutions that keep us up and humming, or at least help keep us mutually invested in and respectful of each other and our way of life, continue to wobble and groan from the weight of their misconduct. The American Catholic Church is a victim of self-inflicted wounds, its corruptions as towering as its cathedrals. Big business — Enronned. Wall Street — stock tipped, finagled and fooled by a bubble. Big accounting, by which we judge how our business investments are doing, is a joke. The FBI and the CIA are more joke fodder. Our serious journalists are focused on today’s testimony, tonight’s game and the 2004 Democratic presidential primaries. The others do shark attacks and entertainment awards. Our intellectuals are off on various toots, most of them either irrelevant — the latest edition of the New York Review of Books leads with stories on David Brock, Clarence Thomas, Sexy Puritans, Peggy Guggenheim and Noel Coward — or all too relevant and wrong.”

Wartime Distractions (06/04/02)
By John Podhoretz in The New York Post
“The war did not end with the regime change in Afghanistan. Nor did it end with the removal of the last girder from Ground Zero. It’s still ongoing. The CIA-FBI-Congress-media frenzy is the way the Washington game was played before the war on terrorism. For a while, it seemed that game had at last been retired in the wake of Sept. 11. It should have been. But you could sense a kind of perverse relief on the part of the media and governmental Establishment that the old game could still be played.”

A Few Very Good Men: Priest Recruiter Bill Parent Is Looking for Those Who Have Seen the Light (06/09/02)
In The Washington Post by Phil McCombs
“What’s most surprising, in talking with the seminarians and young priests and new deacons-at the reception and later by phone-is that, far from being discouraged by the scandals that have rocked the church, they seem filled with new fervor, as McCarrick indicated. These are hard-charging guys-tough, determined, full of life and good humor, a palpable sense of joy. Most come from solid Catholic homes, had careers before they went to seminary, and wanted success, cars, romance-all the stuff of modern life. But something kept nagging, and although they ran and hid and wrestled with demons and angels they knew deep down what it was.”

Celibate and Loving It: For Many Priests, True Happiness Lies in The Joining of Self and Church (06/06/02)
In The Washington Post by a Staff Writer
“Part of the point of celibacy, for Catholics, is to confront people with something bigger than biology, society, music, dancing, writing, painting, advertising. And sex. Celibates also turn around the supposition this life is a heroic renunciation. They say celibacy is not No. It is Yes. Maybe. Anyway, it's not just a Catholic thing.”

The Body of Christ and the spring meeting of the U.S. Catholic bishops (06/09/02)
By Francis Cardinal George, OMI, in The Catholic New World
“A crisis of authority in the Church cannot be resolved if bishops don’t act like bishops. A bishop has responsibility before Christ for keeping people united to Christ. A bishop therefore sets boundaries, in the matter of sexual misconduct or any other matter; but, more fundamentally, he encourages people to live virtuously in Christ. When people are “in Christ” and not full of themselves and their own lives, they are the Church. Since the bishop is the visible point of reference for union with Christ, people divorced from their bishop are not part of the apostolic Church. Hence the terrible trial for the Church when priests and people and bishops are not together in purpose and in life.”

The Bishops and the Vatican (06/10/02)
By Avery Cardinal Dulles in The New York Times
“The bishops are understandably concerned to show that they are taking bold and decisive measures. But they should take care not to lock the church into positions that will later prove to be unwise. If they yield too much to the present atmosphere of panic, the Holy See can be relied upon to safeguard the theological and canonical tradition. The many levels of authority in the church are a precious resource.”

Tearful FBI Agent Apologizes To Sept. 11 Families and Victims (05/30/02)
At Cybercast News Service by Jeff Johnson
“In a memorandum written 91 days before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, an FBI agent warned that Americans would die as a result of the bureau’s failure to adequately pursue investigations of terrorists living in the country. FBI Special Agent Robert Wright, Jr., who wrote the memo, led a four-year investigation into terrorist money laundering in the United States. Wright began crying as he concluded his remarks at a Washington press conference Thursday.”

FBI admits bureau missed clues of Sept. 11 attacks (05/30/02)
In The Oklahoman by Ted Bridis of Associated Press
“FBI Director Robert Mueller said Wednesday there may have been more missed clues before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He also suggested for the first time that investigators might have uncovered the plot if they had been more diligent about pursuing leads. ‘The jury is still out on all of it,’ Mueller said, during a wideranging, two-hour presentation at FBI headquarters. ‘Looking at it right now, I can’t say for sure it would not have, that there wasn’t a possibility that we could have come across some lead that would have led us to the hijackers.’”

Stop frisking crippled nuns (06/01/02)
By Mark Steyn in The Spectator
“So you’re at Newark standing in line behind a young Saudi male and an 87-year-old arthritic nun from Des Moines. Who’ll be asked to remove his or her shoes? Six out of ten times, it’ll be the nun. Three out of ten times, you. One out of ten, Abdumb al-Dumber. Even if this is just for show, what it’s showing is profound official faintheartedness.”

Liberal Reality Check (05/31/02)
By Nicholas D. Kristof in The New York Times
“One reason aggressive agents were restrained as they tried to go after Zacarias Moussaoui is that liberals like myself — and the news media caldron in which I toil and trouble — have regularly excoriated law enforcement authorities for taking shortcuts and engaging in racial profiling. As long as we’re pointing fingers, we should peer into the mirror. The timidity of bureau headquarters is indefensible. But it reflected not just myopic careerism but also an environment (that we who care about civil liberties helped create) in which officials were afraid of being assailed as insensitive storm troopers.”

In the mind of a would-be suicide bomber (05/30/02)
In The Jerusalem Post by David Rudge
“Underlying it all, however, were the teachings which preach the need for jihad to ‘create a just and equal, non-corrupt and non-criminal society by the spread and unification of Islam.’ .... ‘I also began to imagine the people I would be killing, whether they would be women and children, families sitting down at a cafe. I became a bit disillusioned, because I had been told to blow myself up in any event,’ she said. ‘This meant to me that what was important for them was to succeed in perpetrating an attack, whether there were casualties or not, and then they would be able to pat themselves on the back. I felt like they were playing a game with the blood of the martyrs.’”

Shin Bet, IDF nab reluctant female suicide bombers (05/30/02)
In Ha’aretz by Staff
“25-year-old Tanzim activist from Jaba in the northern West Bank was planning to carry out a suicide strike in Jerusalem. Hamamra told reporters she had decided to go ahead with the attack for ‘personal reasons’ but wouldn’t give further details.... She said after she had completed the training, she had a change of heart and decided not to go through with the plan. She said: ‘I began to think about killing people — babies, women, sick people, and to imagine my family sitting in a restaurant and someone coming in and blowing them up.’ Hamamra said she feared ‘God would not see it as a good reason for committing suicide and therefore would not accept me as a shaheed.’”

My fellow Muslims, we must fight anti-Semitism (05/26/02)
In Ha’aretz by Joseph Algazy
“Ramadan, 39, is not only an outstanding Muslim intellectual but also the grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hassan Al-Bana, who was murdered in his own country in 1949. He firmly condemns the anti-Semitic incidents that took place during the past year in France, Belgium and other European countries, such as attacks on synagogues and Jewish institutions. ‘Too few Muslims have spoken out against these anti-Semitic and Judeophobic phenomena,’ he says. In his opinion, any attempt to afford legitimization to anti-Semitism on the basis of texts taken from the Islamic tradition, and as an expression of protest against the suffering of the Palestinians, must be firmly rejected.”

The Elderly Man and the Sea? Test Sanitizes Literary Texts (05/02/02)
In The New York Times by N. R. Kleinfield
“In a feat of literary sleuth work, Ms. Heifetz, the mother of a high school senior and a weaver from Brooklyn, inspected 10 high school English exams from the past three years and discovered that the vast majority of the passages — drawn from the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anton Chekhov and William Maxwell, among others — had been sanitized of virtually any reference to race, religion, ethnicity, sex, nudity, alcohol, even the mildest profanity and just about anything that might offend someone for some reason. Students had to write essays and answer questions based on these doctored versions — versions that were clearly marked as the work of the widely known authors.”

Political Diversity Lacking in Many UNC-CH Departments (May 2002)
In Carolina Journal by Jon Sanders
“A survey of faculty members in nine departments at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has found that more than four-fifths are registered Democrats. The results of the survey, conducted by the conservative student magazine Carolina Review for its March issue, called into question UNC-CH’s devotion to diversity. The results were not unique; in 1996, The Daily Tar Heel examined eight departments and found a similar disparity: 91 percent of professors who were registered with a major political party were Democrats, while 9 percent were registered Republicans.”

The unhyphenating of America: Census finds fewer citing European roots (05/31/02)
In The Boston Globe by Cindy Rodriquez and Bill Dedman
“Four centuries after the Pilgrims reached Plymouth Rock, European-Americans are cutting their ancestral roots. In the last decade, the number of Americans who said they were English, Irish, or from another European derivation dropped by at least 32 million, according to new Census 2000 data. Six million more people than 10 years ago, about 20 million, listed their ancestry as “American” or “USA.” And millions more left it blank.”

UN Misses the Forest for the Trees (05/22/02)
By Alex A. Avery of Hudson Institute
“We suggest that the United Nations work to accelerate market reforms, property rights protections, and the rule of law so that people in developing nations can increase their standards of living. Moreover, the UN should work much harder than it has in the past to increase the productivity of farmers in developing countries.... It is just too bad that Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the World Wildlife Fund, and the other groups that are supposedly concerned about biodiversity continue to be distracted by fights over fertilizers, pesticides, and biotechnology as the forest burns around them.”

Weakland apologizes for his “sinfulness” (05/31/02)
In The Journal-Sentinel by Staff
“Former Milwaukee Archbishop Rembert Weakland apologized to his parishioners tonight for the ‘scandal that has occurred because of my sinfulness,’ saying he felt ‘remorse, shame, contrition and emptiness’ over a relationship he had 20 years ago with a man and the archdiocese’s subsequent $450,000 payment to silence him. Weakland also revealed that, contrary to earlier statements, his income from honoria and writing projects over his 25 years as archbishop did not cover the amount of the settlement. ‘In my remaining years, I will continue to contribute to the archdiocese whatever I can,’ he said, ‘and, of course, the archdiocese will receive whatever effects I own on my death.’”

Text: Weakland’s apology (05/31/02)
In The Journal-Sentinel
“I come before you today to apologize and beg forgiveness. I know — and I am sure you do too — that the Church to be authentic must be a community that heals. But I also know — and you do too — that there is no healing unless it is based on truth. In my remarks I will do my best. I apologize to all the faithful of this Archdiocese which I love so much, to all its people and clergy, for the scandal that has occurred because of my sinfulness. Long ago, I placed that sinfulness in God’s loving and forgiving heart, but now and into the future I worry about those whose faith may be shaken by my acts.”

Finger Pointing (05/25/02)
By Linda Chavez in The Washington Post
“So what should the president have done in August 2001 after he was warned that intelligence sources thought an attack against American interests was likely in the not-too-distant future? If the president had gone public with the information, he probably would have been rebuked by the very same people who are raising a fuss now because he didn’t speak out sooner.”

What Clinton Knew (05/21/02)
By Dick Morris in The New York Post
“If Bush did not know much about al Qaeda intentions before 9/11, why didn’t he? The blame rests not on his incumbency, then only months old, but on that of his predecessor.... So, even had Bush received notification of the nature of al Qaeda’s plans, there was little he could have done, in the weeks before 9/11, to stymie them. Clinton and Gore had simply not left behind them the tools to permit an increase in airport security.”

FBI Memo Author Did Not Envision Sept. 11 (05/23/02)
In The Washington Post by Bill Miller and Dan Eggen
“The Phoenix FBI agent who wrote a memo last summer warning about possible terrorists at U.S. flight schools told lawmakers yesterday that he never expected officials at FBI headquarters to respond immediately to his suggestion for an investigation and that he never envisioned the kinds of attacks that took place Sept. 11. Although his memo cautioned that al Qaeda members might be training at U.S. aviation schools, FBI agent Kenneth Williams told congressional panels in secret hearings yesterday and Tuesday that none of the information in the document could have led investigators to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks, according to officials familiar with his testimony.”

Low Profile: The real scandal of the Phoenix memo isn’t that it was ignored — it’s why it was ignored. (05/24/02)
By Christopher Caldwell in The Weekly Standard
“The real scandal of the FBI memo is that it wasn’t passed up the line. And we can make a pretty good guess why it wasn’t. In May 8 hearings held by the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein asked FBI director Robert Mueller what had happened. Mueller replied, ‘There are more than 2,000 aviation academies in the United States. The latest figure I think I heard is something like 20,000 students attending them. And it was perceived that this would be a monumental undertaking without any specificity as to particular persons; the individuals who were being investigated by that agent in Phoenix were not the individuals that were involved in the September 11 attack.’ What a load of nonsense. Any small-town newspaper reporter could have narrowed down that 20,000 to under a hundred in an afternoon, just by focusing on names like... oh, I don’t know... try Mohamed, Walid, Marwan, and Hamza. Couldn’t the entire FBI have done the same?”

Letter contends FBI unit had dots to connect (05/25/02)
In The Chicago Tribune by Stephen J. Hedges and Cam Simpson
“A letter to Congress from an FBI lawyer suggests that at least a week before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, FBI officials in Washington had a broader knowledge of flight training activities by men with terrorist connections than has been previously disclosed.... Rowley’s letter, which expresses her frustration that it took three weeks from Moussaoui’s arrest before her office was told of the Phoenix investigation, is the strongest suggestion yet that someone within FBI headquarters had a working knowledge of both cases, and had acted on them together.”

Social Security memo gives GOP smoking gun (05/24/02)
In The Washington Times by Stephen Dinan
“Republicans have obtained a congressional staff memo they say proves that Democrats want to use Social Security for scare tactics, not serious debate. The memo, mistakenly sent by e-mail to a Republican staff member on Capitol Hill, contains an apparent draft opinion piece on Social Security and reaction from staffers in the office of Rep. Marcy Kaptur, Ohio Democrat.... But another Kaptur staff member responded that the information in the opinion piece was ‘not entirely factually accurate,’ adding: ‘Talk about scaring seniors — this may be a little over the top. But it is sooo fun to bash Republicans.’ She included an e-mail ‘smiley face’ — :) — after her comment.”

Ammunition in a Battle for Souls (05/22/02)
In The New York Times by Daniel J. Wakin
“Over the past four months, while Catholics have publicly debated and suffered over their church’s scandals, most other Christian denominations have stayed aloof, perhaps aware of a certain aphorism about stones and glass houses, and also sympathetic. Most evangelical Christians would say they have no interest in capitalizing on Catholicism’s woe. But when asked, they do not hesitate to find the scandal’s roots in Catholic dogma, and some go even further. In a few cases, priests say, the scandal is being thrown in Catholic faces by proselytizing neighbors. And others who study the evangelical world suggest that the scandal will be used as a wedge in the long struggle between Catholics and evangelicals for Latino souls.”

Report: Weakland sexually abused former student, paid for silence (05/23/02)
By The Associated Press in The Journal-Sentinel
“Roman Catholic Archbishop Rembert Weakland of Milwaukee agreed in 1998 to pay $450,000 to a man who accused him of sexual assault, according to documents cited Thursday by ABC News. ABC said the agreement had required Paul J. Marcoux, 53, to keep silent. ‘I was involved in a cover-up. I accepted money to be silent about it, not to speak out against what was going on,’ Marcoux said in an interview broadcast on ‘Good Morning America.’”

Pope accepts Weakland’s resignation (05/25/02)
In The Journal-Sentinel by Tom Heinen
“Pope John Paul II has quickly granted Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland’s request to speed up his retirement, with the Vatican announcing on Friday that Weakland’s resignation had been accepted. The moment that action was communicated to Weakland, he was officially retired and Auxiliary Bishop Richard J. Sklba assumed Weakland’s duties.”

Weakland’s views take on new meaning after scandal (05/25/02)
In The Journal-Sentinel by Dave Umhoefer
“How much, the faithful are left to wonder, did Weakland’s struggles with sexual questions and the until-now private accusations of abuse against him color his actions in defending and dealing with priests in similar situations over the years? How did they affect his controversial views about teenage victims in such cases?”

Catholic Bishops Refuse Communion To Homosexual Activists (05/20/02)
At Cybercast News Service by Patrick Goodenough
“‘Homosexual acts are contrary to the natural law, they close the sexual act to the gift of life,’ Archbishop George Pell told Catholics gathered for Pentecost Sunday Mass at St. Mary’s Cathedral in Sydney. In an orchestrated move, 20 members of a group campaigning for the church to give full recognition to homosexual Catholics had earlier gone forward for communion, while another 12 did the same St. Patrick’s Cathedral in another major city, Melbourne. Each member of the Rainbow Sash Movement (RSM) wore a rainbow-colored sash over their clothing. In both churches they were denied communion, although in Melbourne, Archbishop Denis Hart did offer the sash-wearers a blessing.”

The Bishop Is Back (05/22/02)
On ABC7 News by The I-Team
“Patrick Ziemann was the first bishop ever to be sued by a priest for sexual assault. He resigned from the Santa Rosa diocese, and the church paid more than half a million dollars to settle the case. In light of the recent sex scandals across the country, we wondered what is Ziemann doing now. The answer has some North Bay Catholics shocked and dismayed. When we found him in Arizona three weeks ago, Bishop Patrick Ziemann didn’t want to discuss the mess he left behind in Santa Rosa — his sexual misconduct and severe financial mismanagement.... A church spokesman says Ziemann’s past prohibits him from acting as a priest in the Tucson Diocese. But, he is allowed to work inside the monastery with young men who want to become priests and with people who are going through some crisis in their lives, who go there for guidance. ”

Cardinal Coverup (05/02/02)
In New Times LA by Ron Russell
“Yet in his pell-mell rush to be seen as the cardinal with a plan, all the while playing a gullible local mainstream press like a harp in diverting attention from his own dismal record of protecting pedo-priests, Mahony’s actions amounted to little more than a public-relations snow job.... In fact, most of his publicly announced ideas for dealing with the sex-abuse crisis, including those he unveiled amid much fanfare before jetting off to Rome along with other American cardinals to meet with the pope this month, weren’t Mahony’s at all. They had been forced on him, kicking and screaming, as it were, last August as conditions for settling a potentially explosive sex-abuse case involving the former principal of a prominent Catholic high school in Orange County, Monsignor Michael Harris.”

Four Sue Cardinal Over Sexual Abuse (05/21/02)
At Yahoo! News by Paul Wilborn of Associated Press
“Four men filed a racketeering lawsuit against Cardinal Roger Mahony that accuses him of protecting a priest who allegedly molested several children in the nation’s largest archdiocese. The suit, which seeks unspecified damages, cites federal laws involving conspiracy in a criminal enterprise. It was filed Monday in a state court.”

A cardinal who gets it (05/23/02)
By Adrian Walker in The Boston Globe
“He believes it is time for clergy to set an example by living more simply. He further believes the mansion he lives in, which has been the scene of overnight stays by a pope and a president, is unnecessarily lavish. And his archdiocese may face the prospect of paying damages to victims of sexual abuse. Therefore, the cardinal — Francis E. George of Chicago — announced this week that he will seek permission to sell his residence, one of the more lavish in the city.”

Battling poison with ink and holy water (05/12/02)
By David House in The Star-Telegram
“I’ve read many U.S. news reports about this issue. I agree with Christine Chinlund — the reader advocate at The Boston Globe, where the pedophilia story broke last January — that coverage has been factual, well-documented, even-handed, and the product of commendably aggressive but fair and persistent inquiry. The news media will follow developments in this scandal, and not because they have found a delightfully marvelous mountain of muck to rake. You may hear otherwise. Think twice about believing it. The truth is that the media are confronting an evil on behalf of millions of people, including the many selfless priests who have been unjustly smeared.”

When in Dallas (05/17/02)
By Editorial Staff of Commonweal
“The toxicity of this scandal lies not only in pernicious decisions over the years, but also in the manner that senior church officials have handled the current crisis. There has been a failure of episcopal leadership in kowtowing to cardinals and in remaining silent. Just as many priests have been affected by the sins of the few, so too have many bishops. Their June meeting gives them a singular opportunity to begin bailing out a ship that is in grave danger of sinking.”

Seriously ill historian’s book-in-progress tells of his changed views (05/24/02)
In The Miami Herald by Brett Martel of Associated Press
“In what he fears may be his dying days, cancer-stricken historian Stephen E. Ambrose spends much of his time at his word processor, trying to set the record straight about some of the views he espoused as a young professor. Perhaps best known for his 1994 best seller D-Day, Ambrose, 66, has put a World War II project about the Pacific on hold in favor of a new book depicting his own transformation from a left-wing demonstrator to a super patriot.”

Now girls have the advantage in school (05/22/02)
By Katherine Kersten in The Star Tribune
“Is there gender bias in American schools? Evidence is growing that the answer is yes. But if you think it’s girls who are suffering, you’re wrong. Today, boys are on the short end of the academic stick, and their performance gap with girls is both startling and alarming. Thus far, few educators have acknowledged or addressed the problem of widespread male academic underachievement. ”

Why are U.S. universities moral wastelands? (05/21/02)
By Dennis Prager at WorldNetDaily
“The vast majority of Americans believe that America’s war against Islamic terror is a moral one, that the Iraqi, Iranian and North Korean regimes are evil, and that Israel’s war for survival is a just war. They also believe that colleges should not have dormitories or graduation ceremonies segregated by race or ethnicity.... In sum, if the universities are morally right, Americans are, by and large, morally wrong, and America is indeed the malevolent force in the world that so many colleges depict it as. On the other hand, if Americans are by and large right about the greatest moral issues of the day, and America, with all its flaws, really is the greatest force for good in the world, our universities are, with a few exceptions, moral wastelands.”

College recruiters look to gays: But schools see problem in identifying students (05/21/02)
In The Boston Globe by Patrick Healy
“Last Saturday, Harvard, Yale, Brown, and about 40 other New England colleges — as well as top private institutions outside the region, like Stanford and Grinnell — sent representatives to Boston for the nation’s first college fair for gay high school students. Colleges were invited for the first time to the annual Youth Pride celebration for gay teenagers as a way to broaden the event. Several admissions officials had also asked regional gay organizations about ways to recruit these students, said chief organizer Mark Taggart of the Massachusetts Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth. ”

College Commencements Still Dominated By Liberals (05/21/02)
At Cybercast News Service by Matt Pyeatt
“Young America’s Foundation (YAF) released its study Monday and found that the list of the nation’s commencement speakers leans heavily to the left. The report also shows that schools not listed in the top 50 colleges and universities also lack representation from conservatives at commencement. ‘For the ninth consecutive year, our most prestigious schools excluded scholars such as Milton Friedman, Clarence Thomas, Antonin Scalia and Thomas Sowell for the likes of left-wing activists Morris Dees, Lani Guinier, Madeline Albright and Whoopi Goldberg,’ Ron Robinson, president of YAF, said. ‘College administrators are using commencement ceremonies to send their students off with one more predictable leftist lecture.’”

Principals should stop preaching, start teaching (05/22/02)
By Bruce Ramsey in The Seattle Times
“Dear principals: Stop saving the world. A dream of racial brotherhood does not justify labeling Seattle’s kids ‘White’ and ‘Colored’ (or whatever your labels are) and shuffling them around to Do Good. Brotherhood will not result. Anyway, the people of Washington had a vote, and you lost. If you would prepare students for success in the world, hammer on academics, academics, academics. That was John Stanford’s message. Academics! If certain schools are weak, make them strong. That is your job.”

Harvard to award more B’s, raise honors standards (05/22/02)
In The Boston Globe by Patrick Healy
“Concerned that grade inflation has become pervasive at Harvard University, the school’s faculty yesterday committed itself to awarding more B’s to students and voted to sharply raise academic requirements for honors, which went to a record 91 percent of graduating seniors last June. For the first time, Harvard will cap the number of students receiving summa, magna, and cum laude, starting with the current freshman class. No more than 60 percent of seniors will be eligible, and cut-off scores will be raised to make honors harder to achieve.”

Anti-Semitic Pogrom at San Francisco State (05/09/02)
By Laurie Zoloth at FrontPage Magazine
“I cannot fully express what it feels like to walk across campus daily, past maps of the Middle East that do not include Israel, past posters of cans of soup with labels on them of drops of blood and dead babies, labeled ‘canned Palestinian children meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license,’ past poster after poster calling out ‘Zionism = racism, and Jews = Nazis.’ This is not civic discourse, this is not free speech, and this is the Weimar Republic with brown shirts it cannot control. This is the casual introduction of the medieval blood libel and virulent hatred smeared around our campus in a manner so ordinary that it hardly excites concern — except if you are a Jew, and you understand that hateful words have always led to hateful deeds.”

Jewish Blood Libel Poster at SFSU (April 2002)
By Scott Armel-Funkhouser of University of California at Berkeley
“This poster, funded by the Associated Students of San Francisco State University, was posted on campus in April 2002. This is perhaps the most grotesque and explicit incarnation of the ‘blood libel’ observed in the free world since the Nazi Holocaust. It was generated on the campus of a public university by students, using public money. The poster included the names of the following organizations: Associated Students, GUPS (General Union of Palestinian Students), MSA (Muslim Student Association) and WIA (unidentified). The poster incorporates the two most common elements to this medieval racist slur. It suggests (1) that Jews ingest the flesh and/or blood of children, and (2) that there are rites associated with the Jewish religion which detail how to perform this cannibalism. Note that this vicious racism is not directed specifically at Israel but at Jews, for it reads, ‘slaughtered according to Jewish rites’.”

Anti-Semitic riot at San Francisco State University (05/16/02)
By Melissa Radler in The Jerusalem Post
“After being surrounded by a mob of students shouting, ‘Hitler didn’t finish the job,’ and ‘Get out or we’ll kill you,’ pro-Israel students at San Francisco State University are finally finding an ally against hate. The university president is so fed-up with the hate-filled atmosphere on the Bay Area campus that he has asked the local district attorney’s office to help bring pro-Palestinian hate-mongers to justice.”

Colleges Only Protect PC Speech, Groups (05/16/02)
By Glenn Harlan Reynolds at FoxNews
“But so far this event, and the university’s tepid response, is simply the latest stage in a long-standing and widespread trend of giving some student groups the permission to engage in behavior that the university would not permit for a moment if it came from groups not favored as politically correct. The result of impunity, of course, is escalation. Just as the toleration of ‘broken windows’ and other petty acts of lawbreaking leads to more serious crime, so a policy of tolerating acts of lawlessness by overpoliticized students leads to more serious problems.”

University of South Carolina Mandates Political Indoctrination and Orthodoxy (05/13/02)
At Foundation for Individual Rights in Education
“The University of South Carolina (USC), in a required course for a degree-granting program, has adopted ‘Guidelines for Classroom Discussion’ that demand adherence to a narrow set of partisan political assumptions — on pain of being graded poorly for honest disagreement. Although USC is a public institution, bound by the First Amendment, it has created an ideological ‘loyalty oath’ that constitutes a profound threat to both freedom of speech and freedom of conscience in South Carolina and across the country.”

Women’s studies mandates seen as threats to free speech (05/16/02)
By Ellen Sorokin in The Washington Times
“The course syllabus, distributed in January, specifically outlines eight prerequisites during class discussion, which counts for 20 percent of the students’ overall grade. The course — ‘Women’s Studies 797: Seminar in Women’s Studies’ — is listed on the program’s Web site as ‘required’ for a certificate of graduate study in women’s studies. One of the prerequisites is that students ‘acknowledge that racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism and other institutionalized forms of oppression exist.’”

Berkeley Course on Mideast Raises Concerns (05/16/02)
In The New York Times by Chris Gaither
“The political tensions in the Middle East have once again roiled the University of California, with the most recent incident focused on a catalog course description.... The listing for the course, ‘The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance,’ one of the choices for a required course in reading and composition, was pulled for review last week by university officials after protests by civil liberties and pro-Israeli groups.... The last line of his course description drew the most ire, especially among civil libertarians: ‘Conservative thinkers are encouraged to seek other sections.’”

Replacing Airport Screeners Proves Tough (05/15/02)
In Washington Post by Sara Kehaulani Goo
“After 4,800 people applied for 600 federal airport screening jobs at Baltimore-Washington International, the Transportation Security Administration confidently removed the job application from its Web site. Then the problems started. Hundreds of applicants either failed the government’s tests for prospective screeners or they didn’t even show up for the exam, according to a TSA official. ‘Surprisingly, the numbers of the latter were higher than we expected,’ he said.”

Global Warming Models Labeled “Fairy Tale” By Team of Scientists (05/14/02)
At Cybercast News Service by Marc Morano
“A team of international scientists Monday said climate models showing global warming are based on a ‘fairy tale’ of computer projections. The scientists met on Capitol Hill to expose what they see as a dearth of scientific evidence about global warming. Hartwig Volz, a geophysicist with the RWE Research Lab in Germany questioned the merit of the climate projections coming from the United Nations sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC.) The IPCC climate projections have fueled worldwide support for the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to restrict the greenhouse gases thought to cause global warming.”

Climate change faults and fears (05/12/02)
By Pete du Pont in The Washington Times
“While climate models cannot be expected to simulate future weather, they should be able to accurately depict the Earth’s present climate and to simulate changes in the frequency and type of the weather events that make up ‘climate.’ Since they cannot, GCM predictions of climate change are statistical exercises with little bearing on reality and certainly should not serve as the basis for government policy.”

Jimmy Carter: America basher (05/15/02)
By Jonah Goldberg at TownHall
“It’s an unusual thing for a former president to more or less choose sides against the United States and with a hostile nation ruled by a ruthless dictator. Unusual, that is, in the sense that most U.S. presidents — current or former — don’t do this sort of thing. Unfortunately, Carter is the exception that proves the rule.”

Death rattle? (05/13/02)
By Laura Miller at Salon
“Beyond the familiar schism between the Sunnis and the Shiites, the faith is spectacularly diverse, from the mystical brotherhoods of the Sufis, to the puritanical Wahabbites, to (what remains of) the relatively secularized cosmopolitan elites of more developed countries like Egypt. It makes as much sense to draw conclusions about all Muslims on the basis of the beliefs of the Taliban or bin Laden as it does to expect a Quaker to light candles to Santa Barbara or a Unitarian minister to plant bombs in abortion clinics simply because other people who call themselves Christians do so.”

Beyond the Numbers: A hopeless state (05/15/02)
By Ron Dermer in The Jerusalem Post
“In fact, the recipe for making a suicide bomber is one part fanaticism and one part hope. The fanaticism is bred in a culture of death, where terrorist recruits are meticulously brainwashed to believe that their noble ends justify any means. Still, a fanatical mindset only sets the fuse. Hope is the spark that lights it. Suicide bombers would not be so quick to die if they didn’t believe that the cause they so fanatically pursue will be advanced by their sacrifice.”

Gaza’s Children Worship Martyrdom (05/14/02)
In The Washington Post by Hamza Hendawi
“In Gaza’s funerals for ‘shaheeds,’ or martyrs, and in rallies by Palestinian factions such as Arafat’s Fatah or the militant Islamic group Hamas, children as young as three or four are outfitted with combat fatigues, masks and toy guns. Such occasions routinely attract hundreds of children, all accustomed by now to the deafening noise made by gunmen firing in the air.”

Exploding Myths: Why Israel’s war on terrorism is working. (05/13/02)
By Jonathan Chait at Slate
“Palestinian terrorism does not result from Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but from Israel’s existence. Palestinian terrorism long predates the 1967 occupation; the Palestine Liberation Organization was formed in 1964, three years earlier. But hasn’t the more recent phenomenon of suicide bombing come about because of long-simmering Palestinian despair? Not really. Suicide bombings started only after the 1993 Oslo Accords, which provided Palestinians with their best opportunity for a state.”

Columnist Andrew Sullivan Bites Paper; Paper Bites Back (05/14/02)
In The Washington Post by Howard Kurtz
“Andrew Sullivan, the confrontational conservative columnist, has been attempting the high-wire act of writing for the New York Times while frequently whacking the Times for liberal bias on his Web site. Now the tightrope has snapped. Sullivan, who once wrote a biweekly column for the New York Times Magazine, says he has been ‘barred indefinitely from writing any more’ for the magazine. The popular Weblog writer says the directive came from Executive Editor Howell Raines. ”

New York Times v. Sullivan (05/14/02)
By Nick Schulz at Tech Central Station
“There is already chatter among the chattering asses dissecting Sullivan’s banishment. Slate’s Mickey Kaus and John Ellis of Fast Company fame suggest it is because of Raines’ need for control. Meanwhile the folks at The American Prospect — the terrific lefty publication edited by Robert Kuttner — say that explanation is way off base. Actually, they call it ‘paranoid.’ They say Sullivan was dropped because he has taken shots at the Times for its biased coverage and shoddy reporting.”

The Cultures of Newsrooms: A Book Unfit for The New York Times (05/15/02)
By Nat Hentoff in The Village Voice
“Unlike Bernard Goldberg’s bestselling Bias, McGowan’s Coloring the News has received generally favorable reviews, even in such papers as The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, which are sharply criticized in his book. But the influential New York Times Book Review has so far ignored McGowan’s indictment of much of the press — an analysis that, as Peter Schrag, no right-winger, says in the Columbia Journalism Review, ‘has focused attention on important and troubling issues.’”

The news we heard from a guy at Handgun Control (05/16/02)
By Ann Coulter at Town Hall
“But for bald-faced lies, nothing beats the [New York] Times’ preposterous characterization of Supreme Court precedent. The most recent case directly raising the Second Amendment was United States vs. Miller, decided in 1939.... The Miller case simply defined the types of guns protected by the Second Amendment. Reviewing the case of two bootleggers charged with failing to pay federal taxes on a sawed-off shotgun, the court concluded that the ‘instrument’ was not covered by the Second Amendment.”

Guns are bad. The New York Times says so. (05/08/02)
By David Nieporent at Jumping to Conclusions
“The Justice Department submitted briefs to the Supreme Court on Monday that said that the Second Amendment protected an individual right, not just a collective right, to bear arms.... And then the [New York] Times had to try to prove that this is a novel theory, that John Ashcroft was going against established law. Unfortunately, since he wasn’t, the Times had to make something up: ‘The Supreme Court’s view has been that the the Second Amendment protected only those rights that have “some reasonable relationship to the preservation of efficiency of a well regulated militia,” as the court put it in United States v. Miller, a 1939 decision that remains the court’s latest word on the subject.’ Actually, this cleverly clips the Supreme Court quote in just the right part so that she can paraphrase it incorrectly.”

Lawyer says animals have rights too (05/17/02)
In Contra Costa Times from Reuters
“Basing his arguments on well-documented studies of their mental powers, emotional bonds, social skills, language and self-awareness, Wise says there is also increasing evidence to suggest that African elephants, African Gray parrots, honeybees and dogs may merit such legal rights. In an age when it would be unthinkable to use newborn human babies, the profoundly senile, or the insane for biomedical research or display them for public entertainment, Wise asks why dolphins, chimps or elephants — some of whom are more sophisticated than tiny infants — should have to endure such indignities.”

Fighting for Moe: Activists Pursuing Legal Status for Animals One Case at a Time (05/13/02)
At ABCNews.com by Amanda Onion
“Moe’s owners think they know what’s best for him. So does the city of West Covina, Calif., so does the Animal Legal Defense Fund, and so does the director of a local sanctuary. The problem is, even though he’s 36 years old, Moe the chimp can’t speak for himself. That’s partly why the custody battle between Moe’s owners and the city of West Covina has continued for nearly four years. It’s also why a growing cadre of prominent lawyers is lobbying to broaden the way we define all animals and animal rights in the U.S. court system.”

Germany votes for animal rights (05/15/02)
At CNN without Byline
“A majority of lawmakers in the Bundestag voted on Friday to add ‘and animals’ to a clause that obliges the state to respect and protect the dignity of humans. The main impact of the measure will be to restrict the use of animals in experiments. In the end 543 lawmakers in Germany’s lower house of parliament voted in favour of giving animals constitutional rights. Nineteen voted against it and 15 abstained.”

Darwinism in a flutter (05/11/02)
Review by Peter D. Smith of Of Moths and Men: Intrigue, Tragedy & the Peppered Moth at Guardian Unlimited
“The question Hooper sets out to answer is why such a shoddy piece of scientific research was so readily accepted by the scientific community and allowed to attain iconic status in evolutionary biology. Her answer: because scientists wanted to believe it. Once it had been cited enough times, it became an irrefutable article of faith. Hooper’s meticulous research provides a fascinating insight into the fallibility of scientists — after all, as she points out, they are only human.”

Anchor Steam: Why the Evening News is Worse Than “O’Reilly” (05/10/02)
By Rob Walker at The New Republic Online
“So what did I learn in three weeks of watching the evening news? Basically that the network news, which defends itself against detractors by invoking the earnest sobriety of its broadcasts, contains as much hype and fake populism as any of its cable competitors. In fact, in some ways it’s actually worse. As distasteful as the cable shout fests can be, they generally assume that their viewers can handle a detailed discussion, conflicting views, and lengthy segments on a particular issue.”

Why is “morality” a dirty word? (05/13/02)
By Dennis Byrne in The Chicago Tribune
“We are a diverse nation founded on respect for others’ beliefs, religious or otherwise. But that principle has become subverted by this hell-bent determination to avoid discussion of the moral aspects of conduct. When you think of it, this avoidance makes no sense, because we are a nation operating on such concepts as justice and equality — concepts that are fundamentally moral in nature.”

Christianity turns the other cheek: Where is the outrage when a church is desecrated? (05/13/02)
By Raymond J. de Souza in The National Post
“It needs to be said. The occupation of the Church of the Nativity by armed Palestinian terrorists was a gravely anti-Christian act. Much has been made of how the basilica was filthy but not seriously damaged. To speak only of what happens to a church physically is to miss the point. One of Christianity’s holiest shrines was profaned by armed terrorists. It is blasphemy to use the house of God as a military refuge. For more than a month, the faithful were denied access to the basilica to pray while the gunmen used its status as a house of prayer as a tactical advantage.”

Family Matters: Welfare reform has liberals and conservatives calling for government action. (06/02)
By Mike Lynch at Reason Online
“Why exactly it’s up to ‘us’ to set goals for less-educated women and to slot them into their proper role in promoting that great fiction of ‘society’s interest’ is left unsaid. Maybe even less-educated women are smart enough to get by without conservatives shoving them to the altar — or liberals shoving them into classrooms.”

Reliving 9/11: Too Much? Too Soon? (05/12/02)
In The New York Times by Julie Salamon
“Television has long been the defining medium for great and terrible national events like war, assassinations and presidential elections. But nothing in the past has generated this sheer volume of reportage and commentary, because Sept. 11 was an unprecedented event occurring in an age of unprecedented media exposure.... The variety and quantity have been staggering — valuable (much of it), but also alarming.”

Megachurches as Minitowns (05/09/02)
In The New York Times by Patricia Leigh Brown
“Southeast Christian is an example of a new breed of megachurch — a full-service ‘24/7’ sprawling village, which offers many of the conveniences and trappings of secular life wrapped around a spiritual core. It is possible to eat, shop, go to school, bank, work out, scale a rock-climbing wall and pray there, all without leaving the grounds. These churches are becoming civic in a way unimaginable since the 13th century and its cathedral towns. No longer simply places to worship, they have become part resort, part mall, part extended family and part town square.”

Is anti-Catholicism the new anti-Semitism? (05/09/02)
By Rev. Ephraem Chifley in The Age
“Considering that most instances of paedophilia involve not priests but live-in step-fathers, clerical celibacy cannot be considered a significant element in this tragedy. Strange, isn’t it, that cartoonists and comedians don’t make jokes about paedophilia and mum’s new boyfriend, or that there are so few voices calling for a royal commission into marriage break-up and child protection? That, of course, would call for society to examine its substitution of personal fulfilment for duty — far easier to attack a large and slow-moving target, like the church, especially as it is apt frequently to say inconvenient and frightening things.”

Doing Nothing is Something (05/13/02)
By Anna Quindlen in Newsweek via MSNBC
“It is not simply that it is pathetic to consider the lives of children who don’t have a moment between piano and dance and homework to talk about their day or just search for split ends, an enormously satisfying leisure-time activity of my youth. There is also ample psychological research suggesting that what we might call ‘doing nothing’ is when human beings actually do their best thinking, and when creativity comes to call. Perhaps we are creating an entire generation of people whose ability to think outside the box, as the current parlance of business has it, is being systematically stunted by scheduling.”

Who’s ugly now? (05/04/02)
By Mark Steyn in The Spectator
“Muslims killed thousands of Americans, but America doesn’t have anti-Muslim political parties — just a goofy President who hosts a month of Ramadan knees-ups at the White House and enjoins schoolkids to get an Islamic penpal. America has millions of Muslims, but they don’t firebomb synagogues and beat up Jews, and, if they did, the police wouldn’t turn a blind eye.”

Bush is right: Skip international court (05/08/02)
By Editors of The Seattle Times
“President Bush is right to pull out of the treaty for the International Criminal Court, which is an agreement that would give a foreign court jurisdiction over acts committed by U.S. soldiers. This is not the International Court of Justice, or ‘World Court,’ which has existed since 1945 to settle disputes that governments bring to it. This court is to have jurisdiction over individuals. It promises to act only if national courts don’t, but it will make the decision to intervene itself, which is a breach of national sovereignty.”

The New York Times Gloats Over Pope’s Illness, Awaits His Death (05/09/02)
By J. P. Zmirak at FrontPage Magazine
“It fills Keller, and liberal Catholics, with intolerant rage that a Church is permitted to exist which claims continuity with the past and divine authority, which refuses to cave in to their opinions, which dares to dissent from dissent. They will not follow their consciences — which point the way to the Episcopal church down the road — and they’re furious that they cannot coerce the consciences of other Catholics, pull down the Church’s leadership, destroy her internal consistency and integrity, then smoke a joint in her rubble.”

How Jenin battle became a “massacre” (05/06/02)
By Sharon Sadeh at Media Guardian
“In line with the prevalent tradition, the liberal British press has made an extensive and creative use of figurative language in its reports, which betrayed both bias and an attempt to elicit emotional response from the readers which could be translated into increased sales circulation.”

The Big Jenin Lie (05/08/02)
By Richard Starr in The Weekly Standard
“Precisely a month ago, on April 8, the Palestinian news agency Wafa was reporting that Israel had committed the ‘massacre of the 21st century’ in the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin. ‘Medical sources’ informed Wafa of ‘hundreds of martyrs.’ This was a lie, concocted not only for local consumption — to keep the Palestinian people whipped up in a patriotic, Israel-hating frenzy — but mostly for export to the West.”

The brutal Afghan winter hits Jenin: Announcing the first British Press Award For Total Fantasy (05/06/02)
By Mark Steyn in The National Post
“Nonetheless, in recognition of my London friends’ spectacularly inept record since Sept. 11, I am proud to announce the inauguration of the British Press Award For Total Fantasy. Journalists can enter as many of their reports as they wish. Can’t decide whether that story based on a Hamas press release is more risible than that dispatch based on the Radio Taliban lunchtime news? Hey, send us both! Winners will receive a grand prize of five thousand pounds!!!! However, in keeping with traditional Fleet Street standards of numerical accuracy, when the cheque eventually shows up a month later it’ll be for £8.47.”

DUPED! When journalists fall for fake news (n.d.)
At Society of Professional Journalists by Chris Berdik
“Media hoaxes are nothing new. Both Ben Franklin and Edgar Allen Poe wrote satirical yarns and passed them off as news articles. And in the 19th century, frontier newspapers were filled with tall tales of murder and mayhem. It seems that as long as there’s been mass media in America, there’s been somebody around to monkey with it. Yet there is something new, as it turns out. In recent years, the public’s confidence in and regard for news media has plummeted.”

The Internationalist (05/03-09/02)
Christopher Hitchens on George Orwell in Weekly Literary Supplement of LA Weekly
“Orwell was an early and consistent foe of European imperialism and foresaw the end of colonial rule. He was one of the first to volunteer to bear arms against fascism and Nazism in Spain. And, while soldiering in Catalonia, he saw through the biggest and most seductive lie of them all — the false promise of a radiant future offered by the intellectual underlings of Stalinism.”

The “Dinosaurs” Are Taking Over (05/13/02)
Jane Black interviews Lawrence Lessig at Business Week Online
“Who should control the Internet? If Stanford University law professor Lawrence Lessig is right, the Internet will soon belong to Hollywood studios, record labels, and cable operators — corporate giants that he says are trying to cordon off chunks of the once-open data network.... Lessig argues that imminent changes to Internet architecture plus court decisions that restrict the use of intellectual property will co-opt the Net on behalf of Establishment players — and stifle innovation.”

Two Cheers for Colonialism (05/10/02)
By Dinesh D’Souza in The Chronicle Review
“There is nothing uniquely Western about colonialism.... The West did not become rich and powerful through colonial oppression.... The reason the West became so affluent and dominant in the modern era is that it invented three institutions: science, democracy, and capitalism. All those institutions are based on universal impulses and aspirations, but those aspirations were given a unique expression in Western civilization.... The descendants of colonialism are better off than they would be if colonialism had never happened. ”

The SAT Comes Full Circle: Proposed changes in the Big Test guarantee more racial special-pleading. (05/06/02)
By Heather Mac Donald in City Journal
“Racial quota pushers are laying a big trap. For years, they have argued that the college admissions aptitude test, the SAT, discriminated against blacks and Hispanics.... Despite its faulty arguments, the race industry easily persuaded colleges virtually to ignore low SAT grades when evaluating black and Hispanic students. Now, the race industry is about to claim its biggest victory of all — dismantling the SAT entirely.”

Disassembling the Catholic Church, Public Education and the U.S. Navy (05/01/02)
By Diane Alden at NewsMax
“If the leadership in all the institutions don’t get a grip, speak up and out, defend Western civilization and traditional beliefs, the scandals of the Catholic Church will pale in comparison to the horrors inflicted by the ‘facilitators’ and ‘change agents’ of the despotic left. Our war on terrorism should include a war on the ideas and the people who promote moral relativism and the use of trends like diversity and sensitivity training to produce the new statist man.”

Conservatism can survive despite liberal bias (05/05/02)
By Debra J. Saunders in The San Francisco Chronicle
“Of course the news media are liberal.... Better to get the facts with a little bias than no facts at all.... Besides, most reporters — not columnists, who are paid to be opinionated — try to keep their ideology under wraps. Most also strive for balance within a story. It’s in the story ideas, however, that the bias really shows.”

Biologists Sought a Treaty; Now They Fault It (05/07/02)
In The New York Times by Andrew C. Revkin
“A treaty enacted nine years ago to conserve and exploit the diversity of species on earth is seriously impeding biologists’ efforts to catalog and comprehend that same natural bounty, many scientists say.... As a result, biologists say, in many tropical regions it is easier to cut a forest than to study it.”

Fall and Rise of Christianity (05/04/02)
In The Wichita Eagle by Kristin E. Holmes
“When scholars talk about the death of Christianity and the rise of the secular state, Penn State University professor Philip Jenkins just remembers the south. Not south as in Georgia or Mississippi, but south as in sections of Latin America, Africa and Asia. There, Christianity is not only alive but thriving. ‘Christianity is not in free fall,’ said Jenkins, a professor of history and religious studies at Penn State. ‘It’s booming and growing very fast in absolute and relative numbers.’”

A Hard Look at Jenin (05/07/02)
By Richard Hart Sinnreich in The Washington Post
“But before Americans, assaulted by dramatic pictures of Jenin refugee camp’s rubble-strewn streets and shattered buildings, draw hasty conclusions about the Israeli Army’s recent operations, we had better face up to an uncomfortable reality: In an urbanizing world in which enemies actuated by ideological or religious fervor feel no obligation to conform to Western norms of military behavior, scenes such as those in Jenin are likely to increasingly become the rule in war rather than the exception.”

“Final Solution,” Phase 2 (George Will)
“In Britain the climate created by much of the intelligentsia, including the elite press, is so toxic that the Sun, a tabloid with more readers than any other British newspaper, recently was moved to offer a contrapuntal editorial headlined ‘The Jewish faith is not an evil religion.’ Contrary to what Europeans are encouraged to think. And Ron Rosenbaum, author of the brilliant book ‘Explaining Hitler,’ acidly notes the scandal of European leaders supporting the Palestinians’ ‘right of return’ — the right to inundate and eliminate the state created in response to European genocide — ‘when so many Europeans are still living in homes stolen from Jews they helped murder.’ It is time to face a sickening fact that is much more obvious today than it was 11 years ago, when Ruth R. Wisse asserted it. In a dark and brilliant essay in Commentary magazine, she argued that anti-Semitism has proved to be ‘the most durable and successful’ ideology of the ideology-besotted 20th century.”

Gore’s Grossing (Ken Adelman)
“When former Vice President Al Gore takes pen to paper — or computer to email — he seemingly can’t avoid engaging in hyperbole. Thus, it is no surprise the man who wrote that we live in ‘a dysfunctional civilization’ in Earth in the Balance would claim in a column to The New York Times April 21 that the administration that replaced his was in the pocket of special interests. But as the Danish mathematician, Bjorn Lomborg, pointed out in The Skeptical Environmentalist, to characterize as ‘dysfunctional’ a civilization that has produced ‘more leisure time, greater security, fewer accidents, more education, more amenities, higher incomes, fewer starving, more food and healthier and longer life,’ is ‘quite simply immoral.’”

Speaking Lies to Power: Ralph Nader fudges the truth just like a real politician. (Matt Welch)
“Eighteen hours earlier, I had watched the Nader 2000 crew engage in a far more flagrant manipulation of the truth, more egregious than anything else I witnessed during my two months covering the campaign for the lefty news site WorkingForChange.com. Even before the first preliminary exit poll data crossed the wires, young staffers, on the orders of campaign headquarters, were frantically devising multiple formulas to ‘prove’ that Nader didn’t cost Gore the election, no matter what the results might say later. ‘That’s shocking,’ I told one of the harried idealists charged with carrying out the deception. The faces around the computer, for what it’s worth, did not register any surprise. We’ve come to expect this kind of professional dishonesty from the two major political parties, which is one of the reasons many of us find them repellent. But coming from a ‘purity’ candidate who wants to lecture us on ‘how to tell the truth,’ it suggests a certain self-delusion. It’s one thing to display the schizophrenia inherent in trying to cobble together a coalition of disaffected lifelong Democrats and party-hating anti-globalization activists. It’s quite another to ‘speak truth to power’ by fudging it.”

Careers are “making women miserable” (London Telegraph)
“Women have become unhappier as a result of concentrating more on their careers than the family role they once fulfilled, an academic claims in a new book. Prof James Tooley believes the feminist revolution of the 1960s and 1970s brought about huge changes in attitudes which have not be conducive to motherhood. In his book, The Miseducation of Women, published next month, he suggests many professional woman would have been more contented by staying at home and bringing up children. He draws comparisons with the film character Bridget Jones, a love-hungry young woman in publishing who becomes a television presenter and craves a stable relationship rather than being left ‘a singleton’. Prof Tooley, professor of education policy at Newcastle University, considers that the role of housewife has been ‘desperately undervalued’ in society. He argues that schools should allow girls to concentrate on the arts and domestic science rather than being pushed towards subjects such as engineering and computer science in an attempt at sexual equality.”

It’s the End of the Modern Age (John Lukacs)
“For a long time, I have been convinced that we in the West are living near the end of an entire age, the age that began about 500 years ago. I knew, at a very early age, that ‘the West’ was better than ‘the East’ — especially better than Russia and Communism. I had read Spengler: But I believed that the Anglo-American victory over the Third Reich (and over Japan) was, at least in some ways, a refutation of the categorical German proposition of the inevitable and imminent Decline of the West. However — Churchill’s and Roosevelt’s victory had to be shared with Stalin. The result, after 1945, was my early decision to flee from a not yet wholly Sovietized Hungary to the United States, at the age of 22. And 20-odd years later, at the age of 45, I was convinced that the entire Modern Age was crumbling fast. But there is a duality in every human life, in every human character. I am neither a cynic nor a categorical pessimist. Twelve years ago, I wrote: ‘Because of the goodness of God I have had a happy unhappy life, which is preferable to an unhappy happy one.’ I wrote, too: ‘So living during the decline of the West — and being much aware of it — is not at all that hopeless and terrible.’ But during these past 10 years (not fin de siècle: fin d’une ère), my conviction hardened further, into an unquestioning belief not only that the entire age, and the civilization to which I have belonged, are passing but that we are living through — if not already beyond — its very end. I am writing about the so-called Modern Age.”

Gun Control Misfires in Europe (John Lott)
“Sixteen people were killed during Friday’s school shooting in Germany. This follows the killing of 14 regional legislators in Zug, a Swiss canton, last September, and the massacre of eight city council members in a Paris suburb last month. The three worst public shootings in the Western world during the past year all occurred in Europe, whose gun laws are exactly what gun-control advocates want the U.S. to adopt. Indeed, all three occurred in gun-free ‘safe zones.’ Germans who wish to get hold of a hunting rifle must undergo checks that can last a year, while those wanting a gun for sport must be a member of a club and obtain a license from the police. The French must apply for gun permits, which are granted only after an exhaustive background and medical record check and demonstrated need, with permits only valid for three years. Even Switzerland’s once famously liberal laws have become tighter. Swiss federal law now limits gun permits to only those who can demonstrate in advance a need for a weapon to protect themselves or others against a precisely specified danger. The problem with such laws is that they take away guns from law-abiding citizens, while would-be criminals ignore them, leaving potential victims defenseless. The U.S. has shown that making guns more available is actually a better formula for law and order.”

The end of poverty? (Christian Science Monitor)
“John Edmunds has seen the future – and it’s wealthy. This will be news to many – certainly to all those antiglobalization protesters who now force the world’s economic leaders into retreat behind concrete wherever they gather. And many people are used to thinking of the developing world only in terms of dire, and worsening, poverty. But Dr. Edmunds, a professor at Babson College in Wellesley, Mass., is adamant. ‘The economic problem is now solved,’ he says. ‘For thousands of years, mankind struggled to achieve freedom from poverty. The solution is now here and is rapidly transforming everyone’s economic possibilities everywhere.’ It may be true that global wealth creation continues apace. But some warn that the rich are getting richer, and the poor poorer, at rates that surprise even pessimists. A recent World Bank study, for instance, found the gap between rich and poor ‘absolutely huge and far higher than conventional measures indicate.’ Yet statistics also show millions escaping poverty.... And someone out there is buying all those cellphones and TVs and computers being sold in the developing world.”

Great Basin Mammals (co2science.org)
“The results of this study and those of several others (Grayson, 2000; Grayson and Madson, 2000; Fleishman et al., 2001) stand in stark contrast to the doom-and-gloom predictions of climate alarmists, who incessantly claim that global warming will lead to a mass extinction of species nearly everywhere on earth because, as they say, plants and animals will not be able to migrate fast enough to keep up with the climatic zones to which they are currently most accustomed, or alternatively, they will literally ‘run out of places to run’ when the migration is upward as opposed to poleward. As simple-sounding as that fearsome hypothesis is, more complex studies, such as the one reviewed here, indicate it is simply wrong, because plants and animals are simply not the simpletons climate alarmists make them out to be, as they possess a wide array of strategies for coping with environmental change and recolonizing former territories after having once been forced out of them.”

Water Level History of the U.S. Great Lakes (co2science.org)
“Climate alarmists worry — or claim they worry — that greenhouse-induced warming will dramatically lower the water levels of the Great Lakes. However, over what they claim to be the century that has exhibited the greatest warming of the entire past millennium, there has been no net change in the water level of any of the Great Lakes. In addition, over the past two decades of what they typically refer to as unprecedented warming, the four lakes have exhibited their greatest stability and highest water levels of the past century. These observations fly in the face of all the climate alarmists’ horror stories, suggesting that either the consequences they predict to follow on the heels of global warming are wrong or their global temperature history of the past millennium is wrong... or both are wrong. Based on their poor track record in representing reality, we lean towards the latter alternative.”

Study: Science Literacy Poor in US (Yahoo! News)
“Few Americans understand the scientific process and many believe in mysterious psychic powers and may be quick to accept phony science reports, according to a national survey. The survey, part of the National Science Foundation (news - web sites)’s biennial report on the state of science understanding, research, education and investment, found that the belief in ‘pseudoscience’ is common in America. The study found that science literacy has improved only slightly since the previous survey and that 70 percent of American adults do not understand the scientific process. America continues to lead the world, the study found, in scientific investment, in research and development and in technology advances. But it found weakness in some levels of scientific education and noted that the U.S. continues to depend heavily on foreign-born scientists and now faces increased competition from steadily improving scientific enterprises abroad. In the survey of American attitudes toward science, the study found that doctors and scientists were the most respected of the professions, but it also found that ‘belief in pseudoscience is relatively widespread and growing.’”

Limits (Peter Beinart)
“At first glance, the dynamics of the Church pedophilia cover-up feel familiar: Mid-level officials abused their authority; their superiors, fearing embarrassment, protected them, immeasurably compounding the offense; those superiors responded to initial press reports by stonewalling and denigrating the accusers; but then, when the revelations grew overwhelming, they belatedly opted for full disclosure and public apologies. Presented with this apparently familiar script, the commentariat has settled into its familiar role. As with Enron, Gary Condit, and Monica Lewinsky, it has focused on two main questions: ‘Who should take the blame?’ and ‘What lesson is to be drawn?’ The problem in the Church pedophilia scandal is that the opinion industry can’t answer either of those questions because, in a deep sense, they are none of its business. The Boston Globe and The Boston Herald have called on Bernard Cardinal Law to resign. But you can’t declare someone unfit for their post without having an opinion about the requirements of the post. And you can’t have an opinion about the requirements of the post without having an opinion about the mission of the institution as a whole. Newspapers can call on a politician to resign because they have legitimate opinions about the purpose of the government in which he or she serves. They can demand that a cardinal who shields pedophile priests go to jail because they have legitimate opinions about criminal justice. But they can’t legitimately call on a cardinal to resign because they can’t have a legitimate opinion about the purpose of the Catholic Church. You can’t weigh Law’s cover-up of pedophilia against his work serving the poor, or opposing abortion, or bestowing the sacraments, or espousing the gospel, without making a judgment about the relative value of those endeavors, and that judgment is inescapably theological. It is a judgment about the best way to incarnate the revelation of Jesus Christ — and that’s not a judgment for The Boston Globe.”

Scientists Cautious on Report of Cancer From Starchy Foods (NYT)
“Many experts say that a rising furor over a new report that many starchy foods, including breads, cereals and French fries, are laced with a chemical that could cause cancer is overblown. The chemical is acrylamide, which, Swedish scientists reported last week, is produced when certain carbohydrates are baked or fried at high temperatures. The scientists have not published a paper on their small study. Instead, they made their announcement at a news conference last week. Shortly afterward, the World Health Organization announced it would ‘organize an expert consultation as soon as possible to determine the full extent of the public health risk from acrylamide in food.’ But many experts said yesterday that it made no sense to be alarmed over unpublished data on a chemical that was very unlikely to have a measurable impact on cancer rates. ‘It’s just dumb, dumb, dumb,’ Dr. Stephen Safe, a professor of toxicology at Texas A&M University. ‘There are carcinogens in everything you eat. Maybe they’ll just ban food.’ Others agreed.”

Tales of the Tyrant (Mark Bowden)
“Fresh food is flown in for him twice a week — lobster, shrimp, and fish, lots of lean meat, plenty of dairy products. The shipments are sent first to his nuclear scientists, who x-ray them and test them for radiation and poison. The food is then prepared for him by European-trained chefs, who work under the supervision of al Himaya, Saddam’s personal bodyguards. Each of his more than twenty palaces is fully staffed, and three meals a day are cooked for him at every one; security demands that palaces from which he is absent perform an elaborate pantomime each day, as if he were in residence. Saddam tries to regulate his diet, allotting servings and portions the way he counts out the laps in his pools. For a big man he usually eats little, picking at his meals, often leaving half the food on his plate. Sometimes he eats dinner at restaurants in Baghdad, and when he does, his security staff invades the kitchen, demanding that the pots and pans, dishware, and utensils be well scrubbed, but otherwise interfering little. Saddam appreciates the culinary arts. He prefers fish to meat, and eats a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables. He likes wine with his meals, though he is hardly an oenophile; his wine of choice is Mateus rosé. But even though he indulges only in moderation, he is careful not to let anyone outside his most trusted circle of family and aides see him drinking. Alcohol is forbidden by Islam, and in public Saddam is a dutiful son of the faith.”

The Hidden Victims (Thomas Friedman)
“Progressive Arab states, like Jordan, Morocco and Bahrain, which want to build their legitimacy not on how they confront Israel but on how well they prepare their people for the future, are being impeded. And retrograde Arab regimes, like Syria, Saudi Arabia or Iraq, can now feed their people more excuses why not to reform. The Palestinians have been experts at seducing the Arab world into postponing its future until all the emotive issues of Palestine are resolved. Three generations of Arabs have already paid dearly for only being allowed to ask one question: Who rules Palestine? — not, How are we educating our young or what kind of democracy or economy should we have? It would be a tragedy if a fourth generation suffered the same fate.”

A Field of Nightmares (Jessica Gavora)
“Feminists call the struggle for proportionality under Title IX the pursuit of “gender equity.” The Women’s Sports Foundation (WSF) is perhaps the strongest advocate of Title IX and “gender equity” in sports, having as its mission to “increase and enhance sports and fitness opportunities for all girls and women.” Founded by tennis player Billie Jean King in 1974 in the after-glow of her victory over Bobby Riggs in the “Battle of the Sexes,” the WSF is the most powerful advocacy group for female athletes in the country. Like most women’s groups, it has benefited from friendly press coverage.... But behind the appealing image of strong female athleticism that is the group’s public face, the Women’s Sports Foundation pursues a relentlessly political agenda: to turn the grant of opportunity for women guaranteed under Title IX into a grant of preference. Under the leadership of its street-fighting executive director, Donna Lopiano, a former All-American softball player and the former women’s athletic director at the University of Texas, the WSF has done more than any other group to convince colleges and universities that compliance with Title IX means manipulating the numbers of male and female athletes.”

Cardinal Coverup (New Times LA)
“On the day after child-molesting Boston priest John Geoghan was sentenced to prison in late February, marking an incremental low in the sex scandal afflicting the Roman Catholic Church, Los Angeles Cardinal Roger M. Mahony launched a remarkable public-relations campaign. It began subtly, with a pastoral letter published in The Tidings, the archdiocese’s official newspaper. The 65-year-old cardinal pledged to do ‘all that is humanly possible’ to prevent sexual abuse in the L.A. Archdiocese, the nation’s largest. He set forth a zero tolerance policy for priests who abuse children.... A few days later — even as he abruptly dismissed a few sex-abusing priests who had enjoyed his favor for years despite his knowledge that they were molesters, and then stonewalled law enforcement about who they were — Mahony quickly sought to establish himself as a leading voice in dealing with the widening scandal. He ordered that a brochure on the problem of sex abuse be distributed to all parishes and schools within the sprawling L.A. Archdiocese, encompassing Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara counties. And he unveiled a new sexual-abuse hotline ostensibly aimed at enabling abuse victims to blow the whistle on errant priests. The cardinal’s press spokesman described these efforts in glowing terms. In view of the Boston scandal, Tod Tamberg, his spokesman, said the cardinal thought the time had come to let the faithful know ‘that we have comprehensive policies on sex abuse, that we follow them carefully and review them regularly.’ The implicit message: Other Catholic hierarchs might appear flat-footed in the face of the worst scandal to rock the church in centuries, but Los Angeles’ Mahony was a leader who was actually doing something. Yet in his pell-mell rush to be seen as the cardinal with a plan, all the while playing a gullible local mainstream press like a harp in diverting attention from his own dismal record of protecting pedo-priests, Mahony’s actions amounted to little more than a public-relations snow job. His image as a reformer took another beating this week with the disclosure that his protecting of accused pedophiles has extended even to the new Our Lady of the Angels Cathedral residential suites, with abuse claims against Father Carl Sutphin, who until recently was associate pastor there.... In fact, most of his publicly announced ideas for dealing with the sex-abuse crisis, including those he unveiled amid much fanfare before jetting off to Rome along with other American cardinals to meet with the pope this month, weren’t Mahony’s at all. They had been forced on him, kicking and screaming, as it were, last August as conditions for settling a potentially explosive sex-abuse case involving the former principal of a prominent Catholic high school in Orange County, Monsignor Michael Harris. Barely a month before he would have been forced to testify at the Harris trial, Mahony authorized the Los Angeles Archdiocese to pay victim Ryan DiMaria $5.2 million — the largest such settlement ever for a single victim in a Catholic sex-abuse case.”

Bishops, media views of “zero tolerance” create gap in perceptions (CNS)
“U.S. church leaders left a Vatican summit on clerical sex abuse saying they felt encouraged to take new steps to curb such abuse and rein in offenders. But they arrived home in the United States to a largely negative reaction and headlines that read: ‘Cardinals Confront Sex Abuse and Come Up Short,’ and ‘Vatican Summit Confounds, Angers.’ What happened? Why such a gulf between perceptions? One big reason was confusion over the term ‘zero tolerance,’ especially in light of a final communique by summit participants. Going into the meeting, ‘zero tolerance’ was a phrase used by bishops and dioceses to describe the policy of removing from positions of ministry any priest who has abused minors or who is facing a credible accusation. In effect, the priest remains a priest, but he is out of a church job. The summit communique introduced a new, even stronger potential punishment that may be designed for priest-offenders: a quick procedure of forced laicization. That means an abusive priest would not only be out of a job, he would no longer be a priest. Unfortunately, many in the media never understood the distinction.”

What We’re Fighting For: We hold these truths to be self-evident. Let’s start acting like it. (Brendan Miniter)
“Now it’s time for Western culture to stand up again. Worries about imperialism, especially cultural imperialism, should be cast off. Global free trade isn’t imperialistic; it’s the spread of a natural right, economic freedom. Demanding that a country respect its people’s basic rights isn’t imperialistic, and neither is standing for an unfettered media. No one wants to bring back colonial empires. All cannot remain quiet on the Western front. The West, not just America, is locked in a struggle with forces that question its foundation. Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and many others reject the fundamental ideals of Western culture: individual sovereignty, freedom of conscience, free interaction among men and the right to the fruits of one’s own labor. They reject the Western intellectual framework that has permitted scientific, political and economic freedom and given the world the fruits of unparalleled creativity. These thugs hate Western success and religious plurality. Like Lenin buying rope from capitalists, the only Western product they seem to like is weaponry. The media’s historical ignorance helps undermine Western confidence. Rarely do we see reports explaining how the West benefited from Judeo-Christian thought. We are told America’s Founding Founders were deists if not atheists. Yet studying the period you’ll find countless references to God and prayers of asking God’s guidance. John Adams once said the intellectual framework for rebellion was laid in the churches years before it became a political struggle. That makes sense, for America is founded on the idea that man is endowed by his Creator with the right to be free.”

Blind Spot (Randall Kennedy)
“The key argument in favor of racial profiling, essentially, is that taking race into account enables the authorities to screen carefully and at less expense those sectors of the population that are more likely than others to contain the criminals for whom officials are searching.... Some commentators embrace this position as if it were unassailable, but under U.S. law racial discrimination backed by state power is presumptively illicit. This means that supporters of racial profiling carry a heavy burden of persuasion.... Stressing that racial profiling generates clear harm (for example, the fear, resentment, and alienation felt by innocent people in the profiled group), opponents of racial profiling sensibly question whether compromising our hard-earned principle of anti-discrimination is worth merely speculative gains in overall security. A notable feature of this conflict is that champions of each position frequently embrace rhetoric, attitudes, and value systems that are completely at odds with those they adopt when confronting another controversial instance of racial discrimination — namely, affirmative action. Vocal supporters of racial profiling who trumpet the urgency of communal needs when discussing law enforcement all of a sudden become fanatical individualists when condemning affirmative action in college admissions and the labor market. Supporters of profiling, who are willing to impose what amounts to a racial tax on profiled groups, denounce as betrayals of ‘color blindness’ programs that require racial diversity. A similar turnabout can be seen on the part of many of those who support affirmative action. Impatient with talk of communal needs in assessing racial profiling, they very often have no difficulty with subordinating the interests of individual white candidates to the purported good of the whole. Opposed to race consciousness in policing, they demand race consciousness in deciding whom to admit to college or select for a job.”

A War of Resolve: American kowtowing to “moderate” Arabs may embolden bin Laden. (Bernard Lewis)
“It was the shock of America’s rapid and sharp reaction that made bin Laden blink. After the U.S.’s initial response, he halted his campaign and adopted a more cautious attitude. But some recent American actions and utterances may bring a reconsideration of this judgement and the halt to which it gave rise. Our anxious pleading with the fragile and frightened regimes of the region to join — or at least to tolerate — a campaign against terrorism and its sponsors has put the U.S. in a corner where it seems to be asking permission for actions that are its own prerogative to take. Likewise, the exemptions accorded to some terrorist leaders, movements and actions not immediately directed against us have undermined the strong moral position which must be the foundation of our global war on terrorism. The submission to being scolded and slighted, as Secretary of State Colin Powell did in his recent meeting with the king of Morocco, and his failure to meet with the president of Egypt, make the U.S. seem it is reverting to bad habits. That only further contributes to a perceived posture of irresolution and uncertainty on the part of the U.S. administration.”

Radical Islam gains adherents abroad (Stephen Handelman)
“But even where it succeeded in gaining a political foothold, radical Islam exposed itself as incoherent and unsatisfying to those whom it most needed to attract. Islamists’ ‘incendiary rhetoric and uncompromising approach to statecraft alienated the very middle classes that earlier sympathized with their critique of corrupt elites,’ wrote Ray Takeyh of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. So what does their failure have to do with Europe and the West? The answer is chillingly simple: Unable to win political traction at home, radical Islam has found its most passionate new adherents in Muslim communities abroad. At least 12 million Muslims — perhaps as many as 22 million — live in Europe today. The targets of economic discrimination and prejudice themselves, many can be easily swayed to violence in the pursuit of a political agenda set elsewhere. That governments in the Muslim world are aware of this is indisputable. Also indisputable is the fact that the money and logistics support channelled to these overseas groups by some of those governments deflects the still-genuine threat posed by Islamic alternatives at home.”

Intellectuals are failing the West (Paul Mulshine)
“With a few prominent exceptions, such as Johns Hopkins University professor Fouad Ajami, intellectuals have been reluctant to criticize the Muslim world’s tilt toward totalitarianism. And that Muslim world will continue to be a threat to the West as long as so many fanatics cling to the illusion that a government is justified in ignoring basic rights as long as it claims to be religiously inspired. ‘Even the massacre of 3,000 innocent people has not alerted people to what’s going on,’ Warraq said of the events of Sept. 11. ‘I noticed in England, where I have some liberal friends, that many of the intellectuals took it that this was all because of American foreign policy. It’s really, really dangerous to go along that line of thought.’ The problem is much deeper than that, according to Warraq. The leaders of the Islamist movement see themselves as on the verge of another great expansion like the one that occurred in the Middle Ages. And the mushiness of the multiculturalists fuels their ambitions.... The multiculturalists maintain that different cultures can have different values, even if those values infringe upon the basic rights of the individual. The opposite view, best stated by Thomas Jefferson back when it was European kings who were claiming to rule in the name of God, is that rights are unalienable. Any government that tramples on them is illegitimate. Warraq says Western intellectuals should insist that Muslim governments observe individual rights.”

Excusing child abuse (Matt Kaufman)
“There are some things whose evil should be so obvious that no debate is necessary. We wouldn’t be a better society if we sat down for calm, dispassionate discussions of the merits of, say, rape. (‘Sure,’ one side would argue, ‘women say “no means no,” but some of them don’t really mean it.’) The same is true of sex with children. That’s why it’s important that we not only reject pedophilia, but reject it vehemently, with undisguised disgust. We modern folk hesitate to display that sort of disgust, for fear we’ll be considered ‘judgmental.’ But we’d better recognize something: If the pro-pedophilia crowd can simply get recognized as a legitimate side in a debate — sharing podiums with opponents, haggling over the fine points of scientific studies, gradually accustoming people to the idea that some types of pedophilia aren’t really so bad — then they’re well on their way to achieving their goal. As Newshouse News Service writer Mark O’Keefe summarizes their view, ‘it may be only a matter of time before modern society accepts adult-child sex, just as it has learned to accept premarital sex and homosexual sex.’ That’s a sobering comparison for anyone who complacently assumes society will never reach the point of tolerating pedophilia. It’s also an important reminder of where the roots of the threat really lie.”

Gunmen stole gold, crucifixes, escaped monks report (Jerusalem Post)
“Three Armenian monks, who had been held hostage by the Palestinian gunmen inside the Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity, managed to flee the church area via a side gate yesterday morning. They immediately thanked the soldiers for rescuing them. They told army officers the gunmen had stolen gold and other property, including crucifixes and prayer books, and had caused damage. The three elderly monks were assisted by soldiers. One of them held a white cloth banner with the words ‘Please help.’ One of the monks, Narkiss Korasian, later told reporters: ‘They stole everything, they opened the doors one by one and stole everything... they stole our prayer books and four crosses... they didn’t leave anything. Thank you for your help, we will never forget it.’”

In Dealing With Abusive Priests, Bishops Stood Along Wide Spectrum (NYT)
“While some American bishops transferred predator priests from parish to parish, the leader of one diocese, Bishop Donald W. Wuerl of Pittsburgh, battled for seven years to remove a sexually abusive priest from the ministry. Bishop Wuerl suspended the priest, the Rev. Anthony Cipolla, in 1988 after a former altar boy sued him for damages and at least one other victim stepped forward. And when Father Cipolla persuaded the Vatican’s highest tribunal to reinstate him, Bishop Wuerl traveled to Rome with suitcases full of papers to document the priest’s sex crimes. The Vatican reversed course in 1995, upholding the bishop’s sanctions and vindicating what he describes as his effort to protect the safety of his flock. ‘You have to assure your people that their needs are first,’ he said in an interview last week. Bishop Wuerl stands on one end of a broad spectrum of how Catholic leaders have responded to the sexual abuse crisis in the church. While he and some other bishops in the nation’s 194 dioceses have sought in various ways to prevent abuse and to hold pedophiles accountable, others have seemed more concerned with protecting the church’s name and its bank accounts, church leaders and religious scholars said in interviews.... In an interview on Thursday at his downtown Pittsburgh chancery, Bishop Wuerl said that shortly after assuming leadership of the diocese in 1988, he paid a visit to the shattered family of two brothers who had been abused by priests. The meeting had a profound effect on him, he said. ‘You cannot visit with someone who has been abused without coming away with deepened resolve that this should never happen again,’ he said. That same year, he removed Father Cipolla as a chaplain at a Catholic home for handicapped children, after Timothy A. Bendig, a Pittsburgh paramedic, accused the priest of having repeatedly abused him when he was an altar boy earlier in the 1980’s. Mr. Bendig, the second Pittsburgh Catholic to step forward with accusations against Father Cipolla, sued the Diocese of Pittsburgh for damages, eventually obtaining a settlement. Father Cipolla appealed his removal all the way to the Vatican’s highest court, the Signatura, which in 1993 ordered that he be reinstated, on the ground that Bishop Wuerl had violated his rights under canon law. But in 1995, after the bishop went to Rome to offer details of the priest’s behavior, the court reversed itself. ‘Bishop Wuerl took a brave stand in my case,’ Mr. Bendig said in an interview. ‘He just insisted, “This man should not be a priest.”’”

Well, oil be ... it’s our new pal, Russia (Bill Virgin)
“So we have finally soured on our friends of convenience, the Saudis. This is hardly surprising. After all, if you expect us to keep your country from being annexed by Saddam as the 19th or 20th province of Iraq but you treat our troops like your subjects, all the while secretly encouraging attacks on us and our allies, even we Americans eventually catch on. But this is all right, because we believe we have found a new best friend — the Russians. An affiliation with the Russians has several attractions. It provides an answer and an alternative to the reason we’ve put up with the Saudis this long — oil. Having Russia as a major supplier would allow us to tell the Saudis to literally and figuratively go pound sand. And being business and political partners with Russia puts on our side a nation that, while smaller than in the Soviet Union era, is still a significant force (‘we just know we’ve got those nukes around here somewhere’).”

Jewish Chiefs: Anti-Semitism Grows (Yahoo! News)
“World Jewish leaders warned Tuesday that the level of anti-Semitic attacks in Europe is the worst since World War II. The executive committee of the World Jewish Congress demanded better protection by authorities. Secretary-general Avi Beker said 360 anti-Semitic incidents in France over the past two weeks heralded worse to come for Jewish communities in Europe. ‘There is today an anxiety on the part of Jews when they go to the religious centers, they go to their social centers, when they send their children to school,’ Beker said on the last day of a two-day emergency meeting of the umbrella group that represents Jewish groups from about 80 countries. ‘This is quite shameful for Europe.’ Synagogues, Jewish schools and cemeteries have been targeted in attacks in several European nations in recent weeks, coinciding with Israel’s major offensive in Palestinian cities in the West Bank. Suspects in many of the attacks are Arab youths of North African origin.”

U.S. to help U.N. redefine “families” (WT)
“The Bush administration has joined European delegates to an upcoming U.N. summit on children in moving to recognize families ‘in various forms,’ including unmarried cohabiting couples and homosexual partners. A coalition of Catholic and Muslim countries has formed to block the change to the traditional U.N. definition of the family — married heterosexual parents and children — at the General Assembly’s Special Session on Children from May 8 to May 10. A senior official at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York said the U.S. Mission and the State Department are backing the delegates from Switzerland and the European Union in their efforts because so many children today are brought up by single parents. Informal negotiations resume today in New York on a final document for the summit. The U.S. official spoke anonymously, saying he did not want to be ‘hung out to dry’ for explaining the administration’s position. He said the United States supports the proposal to recognize families ‘in various forms’ because ‘obviously we feel this more reflects the families of today, which are headed by single parents and extended families.’ Customarily, U.N. members are obliged to conform their national laws to the body’s declarations, and critics have said that the European-backed changes would make such proposals as homosexual ‘marriage’ and domestic-partner benefits an internationally recognized right.”

PAT Answers: It’s time to stop taking the likes of Paul Ehrlich seriously. (Pete Du Pont)
“So how did the leading environmentalists get it so wrong in the 1970s? Perhaps the most important reason was a profound misunderstanding of the way the world works. The root of the misconception was Paul Ehrlich and John Holden’s famous equation: I = PAT. The negative Impact of humans on the environment, they said, is the product of Population times Affluence times Technology. A bigger population was a bad thing because people consume resources and need houses and roads and so forth. More affluence was bad too as it allowed greater capita consumption of resources, and that must be multiplied by the negative impact of the technology necessary to produce the resources consumed.... What was missing in this view was the greatest resource of all — the human mind and its ability to develop efficient technologies that would improve the quality of life. Missing was the understanding that more electricity for more operating rooms to do more heart surgery was a good thing. More fertilizer meant less acreage had to be tilled, thus saving — and actually expanding — the forests. More production of goods meant more jobs, more opportunity and more national income to devote to environmental improvement. In short, I = PAT posited not even a zero-sum society (your gain is my loss), but a negative-sum society (your gain is always the world’s loss). It was a cost-benefit analysis in which there was only cost, never benefit. And it was dead wrong.”

Religious Freedom in Jeopardy? (Susanna Cornett)
“The protection religious groups have now is because of our Constitution — the protection of religious freedom — and because it is generally felt even among non-believers that religion on the whole benefits society, if for no other reason than that it is an expression of our freedom of speech and pursuit of happiness. What if, as society changes, the religious practices become more and more out of step with it? I think the response to what we see in Afghanistan is illustrative. When the media speak about the oppression of women in Afghanistan, using burkas as a symbol of it, they don’t separate belief from practice. The problem, as I see it, is not that women wear burkas, but that the ones who don’t believe it necessary are forced to do so. Our society, however, can’t quite conceive of women choosing to live within the restrictions imposed by some of the stricter Muslim teachings, so we assume that any woman who is living that way is doing so through force or ignorance. Perhaps that is true in some cases, but not all. And if we insist that their religious freedoms must stay within certain boundaries, then how can we preserve the full range of our own? I’m not advocating, in the Muslim instance, that all manifestations of Islam should be allowed. Murder of the innocent is always wrong, and we have a responsibility to stop it. And I’m also not saying that the teachings of Islam are correct; I don’t believe that’s true. But how we as a society respond to their religious choices, and how those of us who are religious respond to evil when we find it in our midst, will shape the tomorrow for religious freedom in the United States. Losing tax-exempt status wouldn’t end religious freedom in this country, but it would move us further down that road, and it’s not a road with easy return. Just as our right to privacy is in jeopardy from laws passed ostensibly to give us greater homeland security, so our religious freedoms could suffer from laws passed to prevent ecclesiastical abuse. I think we stand at a crossroad; how we call the Catholic Church hierarchy to account for lies, abuse and years of protecting self at the cost of the innocence of dozens of young men and women will help determine on which path we set our feet.”

The Hard Way: It’s easier to fight than to pray. So let’s pray. (Peggy Noonan)
“So what are we to do? I was daydreaming about all this as I walked in my neighborhood on Pierrepont Street yesterday, and I found myself staring at a message someone had drawn onto newly poured concrete: ‘Smile. Today is what you have.’ It struck me, naturally, as sentimental street art. And then I thought no, it’s both spiritual — ‘This is the day the Lord made / let us rejoice and be glad in it,’ wrote the Psalmist — and fatalistic.... It is easier to fight than to pray. In fact it’s much easier to fight than to pray. It’s one of the reasons we do more of the former than the latter. And fighting is hard. But it’s not the hardest thing of all the things we could do. The hardest thing is this: I have been reading about Karol Wojtyla during World War II, long before he became Pope John Paul II. Mr. Wojtyla was in his late teens when the war started, and after the Nazis invaded Poland he worked manual labor, on the freezing overnight shift at a factory, outdoors, breaking and carrying rocks.... He helped friends in the Resistance, but he did not join them. Why? Because, as he told a friend, the only resistance that would work was asking God’s help. ‘The only thing that will be effective is prayer.’ .... Prayer is the hardest thing. And no one congratulates you for doing it because no one knows you’re doing it, and if things turn out well they likely won’t thank God in any case. But I have a feeling that the hardest thing is what we all better be doing now, and that it’s not only the best answer but the only one.”

On Jew-hatred in Europe (Oriana Fallaci)
“I find it shameful that in part through the fault of the left — or rather, primarily through the fault of the left (think of the left that inaugurates its congresses applauding the representative of the PLO leader in Italy of the Palestinians who want the destruction of Israel) — Jews in Italian cities are once again afraid. And in French cities and Dutch cities and Danish cities and German cities, it is the same. I find it shameful that Jews tremble at the passage of the scoundrels dressed like suicide bombers just as they trembled during Krystallnacht, the night in which Hitler gave free rein to the Hunt of the Jews. I find it shameful that in obedience to the stupid, vile, dishonest, and for them extremely advantageous fashion of Political Correctness the usual opportunists — or better the usual parasites — exploit the word Peace. That in the name of the word Peace, by now more debauched than the words Love and Humanity, they absolve one side alone of its hate and bestiality. That in the name of a pacifism (read conformism) delegated to the singing crickets and buffoons who used to lick Pol Pot’s feet they incite people who are confused or ingenuous or intimidated. Trick them, corrupt them, carry them back a half century to the time of the yellow star on the coat. These charlatans who care about the Palestinans as much as I care about the charlatans. That is not at all.”

Return of the Guy (Charlotte Allen)
“In the furnaces of September 11, there was suddenly forged a new social trend: the return of the guy. (Remember that it was four guys who rushed the terrorists who commandeered United Airlines Flight 93, wrenching it to the ground near Pittsburgh.) This trend was continued in the war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. No one, even NOW, was heard to gripe that there were no women reported among the U.S. Special Forces troops fighting hand to hand with militant supporters of Osama bin Laden during the days after the Taliban fled Kabul. ‘For the first time in a long time, American heroes are not movie actors or sports figures or celebrity scandal-survivors,’ political commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote in the Sunday Times of London. ‘They are cops and firemen and special forces soldiers.’ Their sex is male, and they do the kind of work that calls on specifically male attributes and virtues: physical strength, tough fatherly leadership (think of Rudolph Giuliani), brotherly bonding into fighting units, courage, and blunt compassion. Welcome back, guys.”

The Big Lie and the Big Lawsuit (Lawrence Henry)
“The world has changed, and it’s a meaner place. Little children who once would have gathered around a pipe smoker to say, ‘That smells good’ and ‘Daddy, why don’t you smoke a pipe?’ now point fingers and say ‘That stinks!’ and ‘You’re gonna die!’ Carrie Nation and her saloon-busting hatchet are totems of historical ridicule today. But Carrie Nation’s heirs in the anti-smoking movement have tapped into all the same wretched excesses of American culture — bluenosery, totalitarianism, and vandalism. There is a difference, of course. Today’s Carrie Nations have used thirty years of anti-tobacco jihadery to practice the sinister modern techniques of the Big Lie and the Big Lawsuit. Along the way, they’ve corrupted science, destroyed objective journalism, and made the truth nothing more than a commodity. They’ve demonized tens of millions of people and turned tens of millions more into preening, self-righteous jerks. And of course they’re not done. Having practiced and perfected their techniques, they’re now casting around for new targets. Food looms as the most likely. But there are others, lots of others. I would say that George Orwell himself would be challenged to describe it all. But of course he wouldn’t.”

Their way of life isn’t ours (Paul Mulshine)
“The problem, if my readings and discussions with American Muslim political activists are any indication, is that their goals and ours seem to be mutually exclusive. In our phone conversation, Obeidallah made a point of insisting that Muslims in America want to live Islam as what he termed ‘a way of life.’ I asked him what he meant by that. ‘Living Islam as a way of life means the leader is actually an Islamist,’ he said. ‘It means you must govern by the rules of the Koran and the rules of the Prophet Mohammed.’ He is not alone in that view. When I interviewed another leader of New Jersey’s Muslim community, Yasir El-Menshawy, the president of the New Jersey Council of Mosques and Islamic Organizations, he also insisted that the Muslim idea of a religious state is superior to the American idea of a secular state. ‘Muslims tend to want to have a more complete implementation of Islam running the affairs of the state,’ El-Menshawy told me. When I insisted that the American system of religious freedom is clearly a better one, he responded, ‘I don’t agree the U.S. system is clearly a better system.’”

I do have a few things to say now (Jon Carroll)
“Listen to me. It doesn’t matter who’s right. Let me say that again: Right now, it doesn’t matter who’s right. Stop with the screeds. It doesn’t matter who’s right. Peace making requires more courage than war making. Peace making require more intelligence than war making. Peace making requires patience, time, serenity and an open mind. I know about the numerous failures of peace making in the Mideast. But if we are to be humans, hope is always an obligation. We must always start again. We have just lived through a century of mass deaths, deaths in unimaginable numbers. Six million Jews killed by Nazis, at least 8.5 million people killed by Stalin, 800,000 Armenians murdered by Turks; 100,000 Kurds murdered by Saddam Hussein. One million Cambodians killed by the Khmer Rouge; 800,000 Tutsis of Rwanda murdered by Hutus in 100 days. Do you know whether the Tutsis or the Hutus had a better claim to their disputed lands? Are you interested in the validity of the political claims made by the Armenians? The last two times we entered a world war, only a few people believed that it would happen. Generals on both sides of World War I thought it would last six months. At the beginning of World War II, the British called it ‘the phony war.’”

The priceless gift of the priesthood (Fr. William Leahy)
“To be a priest requires living a life marked by faith, integrity, and service, and it offers the possibility for doing so much good and for helping make God more present in our world. One day this winter I visited the parents of a recent graduate of Boston College whose son, like 20 other alumni of our university, was killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. In grief and pride they told stories about their son, and showed me photographs, awards, and diplomas that chronicled his young life. They were speaking to me, I knew, as the president of the institution their son had loved but also as a priest. They asked if I would like to go upstairs and see their son’s bedroom, which they had kept exactly as he had left it. Perhaps they would have asked the same of the president of Harvard University or Stanford University. Perhaps not. But as a priest I was glad to be there to offer whatever comfort I could. Such moments have been part of my life as a priest, and as a result I feel truly blessed by God. I do not deny that there have been times of suffering and sorrow in my life. Like so many others, I feel betrayed and saddened by the shameful incidents of sexual misconduct committed by some priests, so devastating and harmful, especially to children and their families. But I trust that God and his people will sustain me and my fellow priests, now and in the future, and that my vocation, with all of its gifts, will never cease to be the wonderfully fulfilling experience that it is for me today.”

A Plan for the New Millenium (Fr. Robert J. Carr)
“The Roman Catholic Church has secularized itself and turned itself into a corporation. This is the center of the confusion.... We are supposed to be a community of faith. Ultimately, the issue, therefore, is whether we are a community of faith or a corporation. It is time to make the choice. The difference between a corporation and community of faith is all about how we define our association as members of the Roman Catholic Church. We were founded for one reason: ‘God so loved the world that in the fullness of time, he sent his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him may not die, but have eternal life.’ We maintain that Jesus is resurrected. Many outside Christianity do not understand what that means in the long run, yet to put it simply: Believing in the resurrection of the dead means to live in a mindset that is so radical that once someone begins to comprehend this truth, they live their lives in radical ways not possible prior to that moment. Indeed, it is such a key aspect of our faith, that St. Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 15 that if Jesus did not resurrect from the dead, we are wasting our time. I guess that is the best, yet quite poor, way of explaining what the depth of this fully inexpressible truth says to us.”

Holiness Is the Key (Fr. Roger Landry)
“The only adequate response to this terrible scandal, the only fully Catholic response to this scandal — as St. Francis of Assisi recognized in the 1200s, and as countless other saints have recognized in every century — is holiness! Every crisis that the Church faces, every crisis that the world faces, is a crisis of saints. Holiness is crucial, because it is the real face of the Church. There are always people — a priest meets them regularly, you probably know several of them — who use excuses for why they don’t practice the faith, why they slowly commit spiritual suicide. It can be because a nun was mean to them when they were 9. Or because they don’t understand the teaching of the Church on a particular issue — as if any of these reasons would truly justify their lack of practice of the faith, as if any of them would be able to convince their consciences not to do what they know they should. There will doubtless be many people these days — and you will probably meet them — who will say, ‘Why should I practice the faith, why should I go to Church, since the Church can’t be true if God’s so-called chosen ones can do the types of things we’ve been reading about?’ This scandal is a huge hanger on which some will try to hang their justification for not practicing the faith. That’s why holiness is so important. They need to find in all of us a reason for faith, a reason for hope, a reason for responding with love to the love of the Lord. The beatitudes which we have in today’s Gospel are a recipe for holiness. We all need to live them more.”

March 10, 2002, Homily (Msgr. Thomas Kane)
“What do we say? Immorality has no defense, does it? Abuse of minors has no defense. For our religious leaders, it may be absolutely inexcusable. And our hearts go out indeed to the victims of child abuse at the hands of churchmen. I cannot explain the Boston situation satisfactorily, and I cannot excuse Palm Beach. But as your pastor I should like to share some personal reflections with which you may identify and, hopefully, that will ameliorate some of the anguish that we feel – indeed embarrassment, as Catholics, that we all feel in view of the recent events.... I can honestly tell you that, after all these years, my idealism about the priesthood is exactly the same as it was when I served mass as a kid. It has not deteriorated. It has not been jeopardized. It has not diminished. And I think I can speak from the experience of knowing maybe 3,000 priests, and therefore knowing more of abuses than the average person would. And nonetheless to say unhesitatingly to you, the priesthood in its ideals, in its ministry, in its practice, is no less good, holy and outreaching as you ever thought it was. I say that to you as one who’s seen much of the sordid side of the life, sometimes, of my brothers, but also to reassure you that you are not to be disillusioned by the stories of the New York Times or Time magazine or the Washington Post or Boston Globe. You are not to be disillusioned. The priesthood is everything I thought it was as a kid, and from that vantage point of many years later, I would like to assure you that we are in this thing with you, we suffer with you, we know that embarrassment that you face, when maybe members of our faith nod knowingly to you, when those who are critical, when those who would smirk, when those who are cynical – I’d like to just say to you: We know we have our problems, but we have a priesthood that is as dedicated and holy and generous as ever it was.”

What the Titanic teaches (Stephen Cox)
“Investigation revealed that the Titanic had been following normal navigational practices and that she was equipped with more than normal safety features — including 200 more lifeboat spaces than government regulations required. In fact, more than 400 of the Titanic’s lifeboat spaces were never used. A very large ship, like a very large plane, is hard to evacuate completely; even if the Titanic had provided lifeboat spaces equal to the number of passengers, there would not have been enough time to use them all. No plans or regulations can guarantee that any vessel — or any human enterprise — is completely safe. Every action, even the apparently obvious action of turning a ship to evade an iceberg, carries with it an incalculable risk. And our moral decisions are just as risky as our practical decisions. The Titanic continues to fascinate the world because it raised this essential fact to the highest pitch of dramatic intensity. The Titanic sank [Apr. 14-15, 1912] in two hours and forty minutes — the length of a classic play. During that time, everyone involved in the disaster had to ask the most basic questions about what life is worth and what means may be used to save it. People had time to think, observe, reflect; but they finally had to decide, irrevocably, what they ought to do. Their decisions were as various as the individuals themselves.”

It’s a war, not a grudge match (George Jonas)
“In his Rose Garden speech on April 4 announcing Mr. Powell’s mission, the President struck a lyrical note: ‘America itself counts former adversaries as trusted friends — Germany and Japan and now Russia,’ Mr. Bush said. ‘Conflict is not inevitable. Distrust need not be permanent. Peace is possible when we break free of old patterns and habits of hatred.’ What Mr. Bush failed to mention was that Germany was flattened and de-Nazified before it became America’s trusted friend; imperial Japan was nuked, and Soviet Russia had imploded. The friendship of these nations was preceded by a complete collapse and fundamental restructuring of their respective societies. One wishes the Mideast conflict were just a grudge match between two old men. Unfortunately, it isn’t. It’s a war between the Jewish state and those who have been trying to reject it for the past 54 years. Despite Mr. Bush’s uplifting speech, Mr. Powell probably lacks the illusions of Neville Chamberlain. He isn’t going to Ramallah as Chamberlain went to Munich in 1938, with the lofty hope for ‘peace in our time.’ Mr. Powell is hoping only for a licence from the Arab world to wage his own war in peace. He wants to finish a job in Iraq he left unfinished a decade ago.”

Evil’s triumph over conscience (Norman Doidge)
“Spooked, America is unwilling to let Israel end Arafat’s reign of terror. Washington has retreated into approaching him with a kind of primitive behaviour-therapy that says, ‘If he renounces terror’ or ‘If he controls terror,’ then we will talk to him. It is as though all that matters is to get him to say the right words, never mind his intentions; as if no distinction need be drawn between his strategic goal — the destruction of Israel — and a tactical willingness to say he opposes terror (when a lie serves his strategy). Arafat has discovered, as Shakespeare understood, that the more brazen and relentless one’s acts of brutality, the more likely it is that one will be allowed a second chance, and find even powerful men of conscience coming to one’s door offering to forget, to forgive and to give forgiveness a bad name.”

How white liberals destroyed black families (Anthony Covington)
“It would be nice to put the blame for inequality of incomes between African, Euro- and Asian Americans squarely where it belongs. Not on ‘white racism’, ‘the legacy of slavery’ and other dead or dying nebulae, but on poor old Dad — wherever he is. Even he is not the real villain. Rather, the most blame falls on American Democratic politicians between 1949-1999, including Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Their allies in the American left-wing devised the welfare state, an institution that wrecked the African-American family better than slavery or racism ever did. ‘Hold on’, I hear you say, ‘that sounds upside down?’ However, consider this; it is not colour, religion or your education in the USA that makes you more likely to end up in poverty, unemployed, on drugs and in crime. It is not having a father. Fatherless families of whatever colour in the USA make up 70 per cent of criminals, drifters, unemployed and failures. Parenting and not race is the major factor — undeniably so. Study after study confirms it.”

The death of socialism (Roger Kimball)
“It is one of the great ironies of modern history that socialism, which promises a more humane, caring, and equitable society, has consistently delivered a more oppressive and mismanaged one. Socialism’s motto — Muravchik optimistically offers it to us as socialism’s ‘epitaph’ — turns out to be: ‘If you build it, they will leave.’ If, one must add, they are allowed to leave. As Muravchik reminds us in this excellent survey of socialist personalities and socialist experiments, encouraging dissent is never high on a socialist’s agenda. The socialist pretends to have glimpsed paradise on earth. Those who decline the invitation to embrace the vision are not just ungrateful: they are traitors to the cause of human perfection. Dissent is therefore not mere disagreement but treachery. Treachery is properly met not with arguments but (as circumstances permit) the guillotine, the concentration camp, the purge.”

Understanding history (Balint Vazsonyi)
“At last, reparations for slavery have taken center-stage. It has been like waiting for the other shoe to drop, ever since the United States decided to compensate persons of Japanese ancestry for their treatment following Pearl Harbor. Once we accepted the proposition whereby the attitudes of the present, though no less transitory than those of the past, should nonetheless be applied to the past, we mortgaged the future. We can no more relive the past than foretell the future. The appropriate expression of disagreement with the ways of the past is to change those ways in the present, for what we believe will be a better future. Attempts at ‘rectifying’ the past are bound to fail because, owing to obvious limitations, they have to be selective. Unavoidably, what we see as old injustices will result in new injustices.”

The Mau-Mauing at Harvard (John McWhorter)
“The campus race game has largely prevented any sustained investigation into what — if anything — Afro-American studies programs actually accomplish academically. The assumption in the mainstream press during the West-Summers contretemps was that the intellectual quality of Harvard’s Afro-American studies was unassailable. Unfortunately, that’s far from true. Survey the department’s undergraduate curriculum, and you find that most of the courses express the pernicious belief that victimhood defines what it means to be African-American — that to be black in America has always been a story of betrayal, disappointment, passivity, and tragedy, and that when things seem to be improving, it’s only an illusion.”

Hunt the Boeing! (Urban Legends Reference Pages)
“The notion that the Pentagon was not damaged by terrorists who hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 (a Boeing 757) and crashed it into the military office complex, but that the whole affair was staged by the U.S. government, has been promulgated by French author Thierry Meyssan in his book, The Frightening Fraud. Meyssan offers no real explanation for what did cause the extensive damage to the Pentagon, asserting only that Flight 77 did not exist, no plane crashed into the Pengaton, and that ‘the American government is lying.’ Unfortunately, the appeal of conspiracy theories has resulted in widespread dissemination of Meyssan’s ‘theory’ in France and the USA, particularly in web sites that mirror his work. As Le Nouvel Observateur noted: ‘This theory suits everyone — there are no Islamic extremists and everyone is happy. It eliminates reality.’ The text cited in the example above comes from a Hunt the Boeing! And test your perceptions! web site, one of the English-language mirrors of Meyssan’s claims, where readers are invited to ponder a series of questions about why photographs of the damaged Pentagon seemingly show no evidence of a crashed airplane. The answers to the questions are....”

Are Michael Bellesiles’s Critics Afraid to Say What They Really Think? (Jerome Sternstein)
“Has the time come to ask if Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America is an example of scholarly deceit? Some defenders of Bellesiles’s work have insisted in various forums that Bellesiles’s critics have yet to bring forth any evidence to suggest scholarly fraud. Recently, in making his case, one apologist pointed to the ‘searching examinations’ of Bellesiles’s book in the January 2002 issue of the William and Mary Quarterly (WMQ), which, ‘although severely critical, eschews charges of fraud or misrepresentation.’ To be sure, ‘charges of fraud’ do not appear in the Quarterly’s forum on Bellesiles. But what is truly remarkable about that forum is what does appear there: scathing appraisals of his book’s misuse of sources and evidence which some might regard as consistent with academic fraud, such as repeatedly misquoting, distorting, falsifying, or perhaps even deliberately inventing evidence to support one’s thesis.”

The slavery reparations hustle (Jeff Jacoby)
“Don’t bother telling the plaintiffs who sued last month to collect reparations for slavery from three US corporations that they don’t have a legal leg to stand on. They already know it. After all, you don’t need a law degree to recognize that FleetBoston, CSX, and Aetna bear no legal culpability today because of lawful activities their corporate ancestors may have engaged in two centuries ago. Even unlawful activities were long ago mooted by statutes of limitations. And in any case, none of the companies being sued and none of their living shareholders has ever owned or trafficked in slaves, just as none of the plaintiffs and none of the 36 million black Americans whose interests they claim to represent has ever been held in bondage. These specious lawsuits will never win. But then, they were never expected to. The plaintiffs and their lawyers make no secret of the fact that their goal is not to win a legal verdict but to pressure the companies into making lucrative out-of-court settlements. If they balk, the lawyers’ PR machine will generate ugly publicity about the companies’ ‘insensitivity’ to African-Americans. Set up pickets outside their corporate headquarters. Threaten a national boycott. Maybe arrange a public denunciation by Al Sharpton or the Congressional Black Caucus. It isn’t hard to mau-mau corporate America if you know how to play the race card.”

Big earners hit hard by income tax (Houston Chronicle)
“Another way the rich are different: They pay the lion’s share of the nation’s income tax bill. The wealthiest 5 percent pay more than half the taxes, while people in the bottom half pay 4 percent. The annual federal tax deadline for most of America is next Monday. Two-income households are increasing, putting more families in the top slice of taxpayers. Millions of small businesses and partnerships are up there, too, paying personal instead of corporate income taxes. Many other people were boosted by the 1990s stock market boom. President Bush’s big tax cut will prevent the wealthy from paying an even greater share in coming years. But key provisions, such as the doubling of the child tax credit, will cut or eliminate income taxes for many middle-income people, while the rich won’t qualify.”

Congress Sets Record for Pork Spending (FOXNews)
“A war and a recession did not stop Congress from doling out the pork for special hometown projects, a government watchdog is reporting Tuesday. Citizens Against Government Waste is releasing its annual ‘Pig Book,’ a listing of what it calls the most egregious examples of special interest spending. The results are grim, but not surprising, group officials said. ‘Taxpayers will be disappointed,’ said Thomas Schatz, president of CAGW. ‘Here they are, sitting around doing their taxes — a good time to be thinking what they’re getting for their money, and in this case it’s a pretty bad deal.’ According to the group, members of Congress seem to be the only ones not tightening their belts since the economy took a downturn and the country started fighting a war against terrorism. Pork — that is, excessive spending for members’ pet projects, which usually grease the skids for special interest and hometown support — increased 9 percent in fiscal year 2002 to $20 billion. The number of pork projects increased 32 percent to a total of 8,341.”

Safe House: High-end “Panic Room” hideouts becoming more common (SFC)
“Paula Milani bought a home with three bedrooms, two baths and one Batcave. Her secret hideout is behind a seamless wall in her one-story ranch house in rural Livermore. A robber could break in, check every room and never know she’s a few feet away, calling authorities as she loads a handgun. Milani is one of the hundreds of Bay Area residents who have a real-life ‘panic room,’ which real estate insiders used to call safe rooms before the hit movie starring Jodie Foster came out. Some are converted closets with doors that bolt shut from the inside. Others are like Milani’s — with secret entrances that are impossible to detect unless you know where they are. And a few are similar to Foster’s fortresslike hideout in Panic Room, or even more intricate, with heat-sensing cameras, multiple ventilation systems and chemical washbasins for scrubbing away biohazards. In Los Angeles, most A-list celebrities and entertainment executives have safe rooms, said Bill Rigdon, who is a vice president of Building Consensus, a Los Angeles company that builds the hideaways. He said Bay Area safe-room owners are a little less conspicuous. ‘It’s the guy who owns the grocery store chain, software people, an owner of several hundred business franchises,’ said Rigdon, who has built more than a dozen safe rooms from San Jose to Marin County. ‘During the next fiasco, where do you want to be?’”

Among the Bourgeoisophobes: Why the Europeans and Arabs, each in their own way, hate America and Israel. (David Brooks)
“Around 1830, a group of French artists and intellectuals looked around and noticed that people who were their spiritual inferiors were running the world.... Hatred of the bourgeoisie became the official emotion of the French intelligentsia.... Of all the great creeds of the 19th century, pretty much the only one still thriving is this one, bourgeoisophobia.... Since September 11, there has been a great deal of analysis of the roots of Muslim rage. But to anybody familiar with the history of bourgeoisophobia, it is striking how comfortably Muslim rage meshes with traditional rage against meritocratic capitalism. The Islamist fanatic and the bourgeoisophobe hate the same things. They use the same words, they utter the same protests. In an essay in the New York Review of Books called ‘Occidentalism,’ Avishai Margalit and Ian Buruma listed the traits that enrage al Qaeda and other Third World anti-Americans and anti-Westerners. First, they hate the city. Cities stand for commerce, mixed populations, artistic freedom, and sexual license. Second, they hate the mass media: advertising, television, pop music, and videos. Third, they hate science and technology — the progress of technical reason, mechanical efficiency, and material know-how. Fourth, they hate prudence, the desire to live safely rather than court death and heroically flirt with violence. Fifth, they hate liberty, the freedom extended even to mediocre people. Sixth, they despise the emancipation of women. As Margalit and Buruma note, ‘Female emancipation leads to bourgeois decadence.’ Women are supposed to stay home and breed heroic men. When women go out into the world, they deprive men of their manhood and weaken their virility. If you put these six traits together, you have pretty much the pillars of meritocratic capitalist society, practiced most assertively in countries like America and Israel.”

Myths of the Crusades hard to kill (Vincent Carroll)
“You look at the latest U.S. News & World Report cover story, on the Crusades, and you figure they’ve got to be kidding. You know they can’t be serious in proclaiming the Crusades ‘the first major clash between Islam and Western Christendom,’ or in headlining the Crusades — in both print and in the version at USNews.com — as ‘The First Holy War.’ No sober journalist or historian could claim that ‘During the Crusades, East and West first met — on the battlefield,’ and expect any reader even casually familiar with world history not to leap out of the chair in exasperated shock. It’s a gag, almost certainly, when U.S. News quotes the chair of Islamic studies at American University as solemnly maintaining that ‘The impact of the Crusades created a historical memory which is with us today — the memory of a long European onslaught.’ No serious news journal would let such a statement stand without some mention of what happened before 1099 and the sack of Jerusalem by the likes of Tancred and Godfrey of Bouillon.... Like so many articles on the Crusades since the attacks of Sept. 11, U.S. News takes for granted the idea that the Crusades constitute a looming grievance against the West that rightly resonates to this day. And it would be funny, this journalistic malpractice, if it didn’t buttress the convictions of the fanatics who are still seeking revenge.”

China’s Economic Facade (Arthur Waldron)
“Officially, China has for some time been claiming growth rates of 7 percent or more. But information casting doubt on those figures has long been available. Visitors see lots of rural people camped out at urban railroad stations or on sidewalks: Clearly they have nothing to do where they come from, or where they have arrived. Block after block of abandoned construction projects in cities suggest someone has run out of money (as does the recent proposal that money be raised for the Three Gorges Dam by selling stock). Almost daily protests by workers, many violent, are also a clue that all is not well. Moreover, even the official figures don’t make sense: How can it be that energy use is falling in a booming economy? And unemployment rising (as the official statistics show)? This is unprecedented in economic history. Finally, the state borrowing for pump priming to which Premier Zhu refers has always been public knowledge. Why, if the economy is burning up the track, has stimulus been necessary? Once again Chinese officialdom has put one over on Western observerdom. The shining exception is Prof. Thomas Rawski of the University of Pittsburgh, who over the past year or so has been making thoroughly empirical and highly persuasive presentations across the United States on China’s economy, based entirely on open Chinese sources, comparisons with other fast-growing economies and some solid economic analysis. He argues that China’s economy may actually have been contracting since 1998.”

They are the product of institutionally indoctrinated hatred of the West or of Jews (Howard Gerson and Harold Waller)
“The myth that suicide bombers are necessarily produced by ‘desperate’ or ‘inhumane conditions’ should have been fully dispelled by the suicide attacks of Sept. 11, which were carried out by highly indoctrinated and motivated individuals who were neither economically deprived nor oppressed. Rather, they had been living freely in the United States for years. For many of us, this lack of desperation or of any apparent oppression was one of the most intellectually indigestible facts to emerge from the investigation post-Sept. 11. Perhaps there is a powerful need in Western culture to ascribe something other than simple hatred to explain a phenomenon as extreme as a suicide attack. Similarly, the idea that such attacks are the result of an institutionally indoctrinated hatred of the West or of Jews is repugnant to our rational and liberal approach. The Western psyche demands a reason to make ‘sense’ out of the act: The homicidal terrorist must suffer from ‘desperation,’ ‘humiliation,’ or "hopelessness." There must be ‘another side’ or a ‘missing link’ to the story. Yet the evidence that the recent suicide attacks in Israel are the result of indoctrinated hatred actively carried out or condoned by Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, and by the Arab states, is overwhelming.”

Bush must face truth about Arab terror against Israel (Norman Podhoretz)
“A linguistic child of the concept of moral equivalence, the words ‘cycle of violence’ allow of no distinction between terrorist attacks and retaliation against them. They allow of no distinction between the deliberate murder of civilians and the inadvertent harm done to civilians in a military action. And in the context of the ‘Arab-Israeli conflict’ (itself a deceptive label for what should actually be called ‘the Arab war against Israel’), to speak of a ‘cycle of violence’ is to conjure up a Hatfield-McCoy type of feud between equally irrational parties. This maneuver is calculated to conceal the crucial fact that Palestinian terrorism is neither a random nor an uncontrollable nor a ‘senseless’ phenomenon. On the contrary: it is a tactic carefully designed to advance a precise objective. And that objective is to wipe the Jewish state physically off the map, just as Israel is erased from the maps of the region printed in the textbooks given to Palestinian and other Arab schoolchildren.”

Journal Editors Disavow Article on Biotech Corn (WP)
“The science journal Nature has concluded that a controversial article it published last year on the discovery of genetically engineered corn growing in Mexico was not well researched enough and should not have been published. In a highly unusual ‘editorial note’ in this week’s edition of the journal, the editors said that based on criticisms of the article and assessments by outside referees, ‘Nature has concluded that the evidence available is not sufficient to justify the publication of the original paper.’ .... The initial study had been embraced by anti-biotechnology activists, who said it confirmed worries that the technology was spreading in uncontrolled and unapproved ways. But Nature’s near-retraction of the article was welcomed by advocates for the technology.”

Say goodbye, Yasser Arafat (Mark Steyn)
“It’s very difficult to negotiate a ‘two-state solution’ when one side sees the two-state solution as an intermediate stage to a one-state solution: ending the ‘Israeli occupation’ of the West Bank is a tactical prelude to ending the Israeli occupation of Israel. The divide among the Palestinians isn’t between those who want to make peace with Israel and those who want to destroy her, but between those who want to destroy Israel one suicide bomb at a time and those who want to destroy her through artful ‘peace processes’.... As for the Palestinians, they’re a wrecked people. It’s tragic, and, if you want to argue about who’s to blame, we can bat dates around back to the Great War. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t even matter whether you regard, as the Europeans appear to, the Palestinians’ descent into depravity as confirmation of their victim status: as Palestinian Authority spokesman Hasan Abdul Rahman said on CNN after a new pile of Jewish corpses, it’s the fault of Israel for ‘turning our children into suicide bombers’. Might be true, might be rubbish. Makes no difference. They can’t be allowed to succeed, because otherwise the next generation of suicide bombers will be in Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s. That’s why Arafat will never be president of a Palestinian state, and has begun his countdown to oblivion. The unravelling of the Middle East has just begun.”

Fawning Critics Don’t Say Book Was Fraud (Glenn Harlan Reynolds)
“In the fall of 2000, professor Michael Bellesiles of Emory University published his book Arming America, which purported to establish that the core historical argument behind the Second Amendment was a fraud. The brave minuteman armed with his trusty rifle, Bellesiles told us, was mostly a myth — Americans at the time of the Revolution, and for many decades afterward, seldom owned guns, but instead relied on the government for protection. Bellesiles received glowing reviews in the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Atlantic Monthly, and many other publications, from reviewers who were often visibly pleased that he was sticking it to the National Rifle Association. As it turns out, the fraud was on Bellesiles’ end. At least, that’s the conclusion of those who have examined his work — from journalists, to historians, to law professors — and found it wanting. Bellesiles turns out to have quoted sources out of context, to have falsely reported data, and to have claimed to have used documents that have not existed since the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. One historian familiar with Bellesiles’ work called it a case of ‘bona fide academic fraud.’ Emory University is investigating.... Yet despite all these problems with Bellesiles’ work, many of the publications that afforded his book so much laudatory attention when it came out have remained silent.”

Crusade Propaganda: The abuse of Christianity’s holy wars. (Thomas Madden)
“The crusades are quite possibly the most misunderstood event in European history.... The crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world. While the Arabs were busy in the seventh through the tenth centuries winning an opulent and sophisticated empire, Europe was defending itself against outside invaders and then digging out from the mess they left behind. Only in the eleventh century were Europeans able to take much notice of the East. The event that led to the crusades was the Turkish conquest of most of Christian Asia Minor (modern Turkey). The Christian emperor in Constantinople, faced with the loss of half of his empire, appealed for help to the rude but energetic Europeans. He got it. More than he wanted, in fact.... Despite modern laments about medieval colonialism, the crusade’s real purpose was to turn back Muslim conquests and restore formerly Christian lands to Christian control. The entire history of the crusades is one of Western reaction to Muslim advances. The crusades were no more offensive than was the American invasion of Normandy.”

Understanding America (Owen Harries)
“The great sympathy felt for America immediately after September 11 has quickly evaporated and been replaced by suspicion and hostility. Rosemary Righter, chief leader write of the London Times, has observed recently that ‘America-bashing is in fashion as it has not been since Vietnam’ — and she is talking, not of Asia and the Middle East, but of London and Paris and Berlin. Moreover she asserts that it is not just a case of the usual suspects on the Left, but that a ‘resurgent anti-Americanism’ exists across the political spectrum. As she says, ‘America is never less loved in Europe than when... it is angry, determined, and certain that it is in the right’. Let me be clear: After the outrage of September 11, I do not believe that the United States could have reacted in any way other than as she did. But doing so will carry a cost. The long term significance of what happened some months ago may be that it forced American decisively along a course of action that — by emphasising her military dominance, by requiring her to use her vast power conspicuously, by making restraint and moderation virtually impossible, and by making unilateralism an increasing feature of American behavior — is bound to generate widespread and increased criticism and hostility towards her. That may turn out to be the real tragedy of September 11.”

Religion of Peace Update (Rod Dreher)
“On the way to work [NYC] this morning [Apr. 3, 2002], I stopped into an Arab-owned convenience store to buy a newspaper. A wiry Arab man, about my age and looking like a tightly coiled spring, stood by the counter holding a clipboard. ‘You should not buy that one,’ he said to me in a thick accent, as I picked up a New York Post. ‘You should buy this one. It’s more fair about this story,’ he said, holding up a Daily News — which, like the Post, reports the Bethlehem siege on its front page. The man’s eyes were hot, and I didn’t want to argue with him. I told him I prefer the Post. ‘But they print lies about Palestine!’ he said, his voice rising (the Post's editorial policy is strongly pro-Israel). ‘Hitler, he knew what the those people were about. He knew that if you give them freedom, they will take over your country, just like they have done here. And I’m not just saying that because I’m a Muslim.’ I pointed out to the man, as calmly as I could, that Hitler killed six million Jews. ‘Not true!’ he shot back, sticking his finger in my face. ‘It’s a lie!’ I turned and walked out without saying a word more. Because there is nothing left to say to such fanatics.”

Quiet time campaign muzzle (Jacob Sullum)
“No one disputes that the First Amendment applies to opinions about who should run the government and what the government should do. Yet in the topsy-turvy world of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act, the closer speech gets to the sort of political expression the Framers clearly meant to protect, the more restricted it is. An organization may criticize a politician, so long as the message is timed so it’s not likely to change anyone’s vote. Or it may discuss an issue, so long as it does not mention a particular official’s position on it. What it may not do is engage in ‘electioneering communication’ — speech that might actually have a political impact. These restrictions do not apply to news organizations, which helps explain why so many of them looked favorably on campaign finance reform. (For newspapers and magazines, as Reason’s Jeff Taylor has noted, there was also the possibility of attracting ad revenue that would otherwise go to TV and radio stations.) Unlike environmentalists and anti-abortion activists, journalists remain free to discuss the merits of candidates at any time and in any terms they choose.”

Area man says father shot Martin Luther King Jr. (Gainesville Sun)
“Claiming he wanted to get a 34-year-old secret off his chest, an Alachua County man said Tuesday that his father was the triggerman in the April 4, 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. And, the Rev. Ronald Denton Wilson said, portions of the murder plot were hatched in Gainesville.... ‘My dad was the one who shot Dr. King,’ he said. He said his father, Henry Clay Wilson, died in 1990 at age 68 and is buried in Gainesville. His father’s two co-conspirators, R.D. Wilson said, also are dead. Wilson, who lives near Keystone Heights, and several other family members and ministry associates gathered at the Gainesville Community Plaza to reveal what they said was the truth about the King assassination. Wilson and his sister, Velma Roark of Waldo, said their father told them many times over the years that he shot King.”

“Why Do They Hate Us?” (John Perazzo)
“Since September 11, the uniquely introspective, self-critical people known as Americans have asked this question countless times. What elusive logic, we want to know, lies behind much of the Muslim world’s overt hatred of our nation? Not surprisingly, our progressive social critics, ever eager to explain the logical underpinnings of anti-Americanism, have dutifully provided numerous answers to these questions.... Considering the amount of time Americans have devoted to analyzing the aforementioned questions, it is utterly remarkable that the opposite questions are never raised: What have Muslim societies done to convince us that we should not hate them? Have they demonstrated an ability to resist engaging in ‘meddlesome,’ ‘cruel,’ ‘decadent,’ or ‘arrogant’ behavior? These would be reasonable queries coming from a citizen of the mostly-Christian United States, given that his or her fellow Christians are treated abominably in much of the Islamic world.”

Suicidal Lies (Thomas Friedman)
“The world must understand that the Palestinians have not chosen suicide bombing out of ‘desperation’ stemming from the Israeli occupation. That is a huge lie. Why? To begin with, a lot of other people in the world are desperate, yet they have not gone around strapping dynamite to themselves. More important, President Clinton offered the Palestinians a peace plan that could have ended their ‘desperate’ occupation, and Yasir Arafat walked away. Still more important, the Palestinians have long had a tactical alternative to suicide: nonviolent resistance, à la Gandhi. A nonviolent Palestinian movement appealing to the conscience of the Israeli silent majority would have delivered a Palestinian state 30 years ago, but they have rejected that strategy, too.... Let’s be very clear: Palestinians have adopted suicide bombing as a strategic choice, not out of desperation. This threatens all civilization because if suicide bombing is allowed to work in Israel, then, like hijacking and airplane bombing, it will be copied and will eventually lead to a bomber strapped with a nuclear device threatening entire nations. That is why the whole world must see this Palestinian suicide strategy defeated.”

We shall not fear (David Warren)
“We hang not on the Cross, but on Christ’s Resurrection. At the centre of all Christian doctrine — and according to Christians, at the centre of everything — is this one moment. It is not understood as a miracle, but as the miracle at the heart, explaining all miracles before and after. It was, or rather it is, the grand intersection between the eternal and our own transitory world of space and time. Everything in nature and in ourselves was — is — transformed by it. It casts backwards through history as well as forwards, it gathers together every strand of meaning, into one knot, into one flame, and is of the moment with the Creation. And in prayer, and contemplation, the Christian apprehends, through the fact of the Cross, and shining through the Cross, the Resurrection. It is the lifting of the burden, the weight — of sin, of mortality, of fate. Christ, according to the Gospels, came into the world to abolish death. To abolish the tyranny over us, to free us from our greatest fear. In the moment of contemplating Christ’s Resurrection, we know the truth, and the truth has set us free.”

Bogus bias at MIT (John Leo)
“The sad truth is that MIT, one of the world's great centers of scientific education, has now produced and accepted two astonishingly unscientific studies of its own administrative behavior. In response to these studies, nobody on campus has spoken out. ‘The people on the gender committees control the airwaves on this story, and nobody will speak up,’ Steiger says. ‘And with good reason. If they speak, they will be branded as misogynists, and their careers will be in jeopardy.’ Worse, the culture of MIT is being changed. Gender equity has replaced scientific merit as the value administrators will be judged by. And as always in preference schemes, women on the faculty will now come under suspicion as people who wouldn’t be there except for politics. And all without any real discussion or open debate. Amazing.”

Listening for the Voices of Women (NYT)
“In the two decades since she wrote In a Different Voice and went on to identify a crisis of confidence in adolescent girls — a phenomenon Ms. Gilligan famously dubbed ‘losing voice’ — her work has attained the status of public gospel, inspiring pop psychology books, feminist lobbies and op-ed columnists, and galvanizing policy makers. Ms. Gilligan is often cited as an impetus behind the 1994 Gender Equity in Education Act, which, with an eye toward improving girls’ test scores, banned sex-role stereotyping and gender discrimination in the classroom.... Meanwhile, social scientists were busy challenging her research. In a Different Voice was attacked almost as soon as it appeared. Some researchers rejected Ms. Gilligan’s claim that women were more likely to consider their obligations to others (what she called an ethics of ‘care’) in making moral decisions, while men were more likely to rely on abstract principles of fairness (what she called an ethics of ‘justice’). Ms. Gilligan was accused of using unorthodox interview methods, of lacking control groups and of failing to publish her data in peer-reviewed journals. In a 1983 article in the journal Social Research, Debra Nails, now a philosophy professor at Michigan State University, dismissed In a Different Voice as ‘social science at sea without anchor.’ Since then, trying to replicate Ms. Gilligan’s findings has become a virtual social-science subfield, employing a small army of researchers — with little success.”

What You Say Reveals How You Think (David Stolinsky)
“The same paper, like most papers, takes great care to refer to anyone who has not yet been convicted of a crime as an ‘alleged’ or ‘accused’ murderer or rapist. This wording avoids lawsuits, and more importantly, it follows the American tradition that one is presumed innocent until proven guilty. So why is it that this paper began a story about child abuse in the Catholic Church with the front-page headline ‘Mahony Won’t Name Abusers.’ Not one of these priests had been charged with a crime, much less convicted, or their names would already be a matter of public record. But those Cardinal Mahony didn’t name were not referred to as ‘alleged’ abusers. Somehow the fear of lawsuits, and the devotion to civil liberties, were forgotten in the rush to condemn the Catholic Church — and, by extension, Christianity in general. Accused murderers and rapists in jail awaiting trial are ‘alleged,’ but priests not formally charged with anything are ‘abusers.’ How inconsistent. But how revealing.”

The slyer virus: The West’s anti-westernism (Mark Steyn)
“The Arabs say America is to blame for the Middle East. And Britain and America don’t disagree, not really. The Durban Syndrome — the vague sense that the West’s success must somehow be responsible for the rest’s failure — is a far slyer virus than the toxic effusions of the Chomsky-Sontag set, and it has seeped far deeper into the cultural bloodstream. At its most benign, Durban Syndrome manifests itself in a desire not to offend others if one can offend one’s own instead. We saw this after September 11 in the incessant exhortations from government, public service announcements, the nation’s pastors and vicars, etc., that the American people should resist their natural appetite for pogroms and refrain from brutalizing Muslims. Ninety-nine-point-nine-nine-nine percent of Americans had no intention of brutalizing Muslims but they were sporting enough to put up with being characterized as a bunch of knuckledragging swamp-dwellers, understanding that diversity means not just being sensitive to other peoples but also not being too sensitive about yourself. Similarly, at airports across the continent, eighty-seven-year-old grannies waited patiently as their hairpins were confiscated and their bloomers emptied out on the conveyor belt, implicitly accepting this as a ritual of the multicultural society: to demonstrate that we eschew ‘racial profiling,’ we go out of our way to look for people who don’t look anything like the people we’re looking for.... I am woman, hear me roar! Say it loud, I’m black and proud! We’re here, we’re queer, get used to it! The one identity we’re not encouraged to trumpet is the one that enables us to trumpet all the others: our identity as citizens of a very particular kind of society, built on the rule of law, property rights, freedom of expression, and the universal franchise. I am Western, hear me apologize!”

A Turn from Tolerance (WP)
“Long before Sept. 11, many white Europeans had deep-running concerns that their countries were involuntarily becoming multicultural as guest workers and refugees, mostly Muslim, established themselves in residence. There are about 15 million Muslims in Europe, making Islam the the continent’s largest non-Christian religion. The post-Sept. 11 concerns underscored a paradox that has cycled through European politics for years: The continent needs foreign workers to gird an aging workforce but is queasy about accepting them, especially if they are Muslim. ‘There is this fear for national identity combined with a fear of Muslims that has fueled this debate on immigration,’ said Jan Niessen, director of the Migration Policy Group, a research organization in Brussels.”

As the Web Matures, Fun Is Hard to Find (NYT)
“Just 11 years after it was born and about 6 years after it became popular, the Web has lost its luster. Many who once raved about surfing from address to address on the Web now lump site-seeing with other online chores, like checking the In box. What attracted many people to the Web in the mid-1990’s were the bizarre and idiosyncratic sites that began as private obsessions and swiftly grew into popular attractions: the Coffee Cam, a live image of a coffee maker at the University of Cambridge; the Fish Tank Cam from an engineer at Netscape; The Spot, the first online soap opera; the Jennicam, the first popular Internet peephole; the Telegarden, which allowed viewers to have remote control of a robot gardener; and the World Wide Ouija, where viewers could question the Fates with the computer mouse. The Web was like a chest of toys, and each day brought a new treasure.... The problem facing the Web is not that some of these particular sites have come and gone — there are, after all, only so many times anyone can look at a coffeepot, even online — but that no new sites have come along to captivate the casual surfer.”

What’s news for the experts is common knowledge to most (Kay Hymowitz)
“Not so long ago, everyone knew that children — boys and girls — were cruel, aggressive, Darwinian creatures who needed adults around to teach them self-restraint. William Golding’s classic 1954 novel Lord of the Flies, a disturbing story of English private school students deserted on an island after an airplane crash, illustrated the point most dramatically. It was common knowledge that, while girls didn’t often resort to fisticuffs, they were prone to back-stabbing, manipulation and scheming, a fact known to everyone from William Thackeray, who created the infamous Becky Sharpe in the novel Vanity Fair to Charles Schultz, inventor of Charlie Brown’s nemesis, Lucy. But in the late 1960s, development experts began revising the commensense view of children’s natural ethical state. This was partly because of the influence of the liberation movements of the time, partly to address changes in the family such as divorce and working mothers that made autonomous children a necessity.... But after a dramatic rise in juvenile crime and bullying, a slew of suburban school shootings, and just the daily grind of adult-child warfare, this theory was bound to disappoint.”

U.S. maintains the upper hand (David Warren)
“As I reported in this newspaper on Friday, the ‘jailing,’ or rather probationing of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat has been taken over from Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, by U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney. It is an extremely significant step, not because it ‘disempowers’ the Israelis, but because it puts the United States forward directly in the role of Israel's protector, negotiating on Israel’s behalf. While lost on the western media, the point has been taken in several capitals of the Arab world: Mr. Arafat and his terrorist groups are no longer simply confronting Israel. They are now confronting a United States that is increasingly aware of their international connections. Mr. Cheney set the conditions for a meeting between himself and Mr. Arafat in Cairo yesterday, which did not take place because Mr. Arafat did not meet them. The essential, verifiable condition was that Mr. Arafat would deliver a public address, to his people, in unambiguous Arabic, demanding an immediate end to all terrorist strikes against Israel, and be seen delivering like orders to all the Palestinian militias under his ultimate command. Instead, he appeared on Palestinian TV looking as if he were a hostage reading a prepared statement by his kidnapper. He condemned, after the fact, only one particular suicide bombing in Jerusalem. This was 11 eggs short of a dozen.”

Stranglehold on Speech (Robert Samuelson)
“Free speech is not selective speech, respectable speech or popular speech. Free speech does not exist unless it can include speech that you — and perhaps most people — despise. People must have, as individuals and as groups, the routine right to express themselves, even if their expressions offend. Somehow these truths escape the supporters of ‘campaign finance reform,’ whose crusade threatens free speech.... In the final 60 days before the 2000 election, more than 135,000 political advertisements were run by sponsors who weren’t candidates or the political committees of candidates, reports the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. The new campaign finance legislation — known variously as McCain-Feingold and Shays-Meehan after its main Senate and House sponsors — aims to remove many (if not most) of these ads by non-candidates from the air. Unless political advertisements aren’t ‘speech,’ this represents a massive suppression of free speech.... Free speech must be a concept that ordinary people can grasp in most ordinary circumstances. It must not become a lawyerly collection of qualifications, footnotes and regulations, and that is where the campaign finance crusade is leading.”

Bleak future looms if you don’t take a stand (Dan Gillmor)
“This is a quiz about your future. It’s about how you view some basic elements of the emerging Digital Age. 1. Do you care if a few giant companies control virtually all entertainment and information? 2. Do you care if they decide what kinds of technological innovations will reach the marketplace? 3. Would you be concerned if they used their power to compile detailed dossiers on everything you read, listen to, view and buy? 4. Would you find it acceptable if they could decide whether what you write and say could be seen and heard by others? Those are no longer theoretical questions. They are the direction in which America is hurtling. Media conglomerates are in a merger frenzy. Telecommunications monopolies are creating a cozy cartel, dividing up access to the online world. The entertainment industry is pushing for Draconian controls on the use and dissemination of digital information.”

The Great Terror (Jeffrey Goldberg)
“Gosden believes it is quite possible that the countries of the West will soon experience chemical- and biological-weapons attacks far more serious and of greater lasting effect than the anthrax incidents of last autumn and the nerve-agent attack on the Tokyo subway system several years ago — that what happened in Kurdistan was only the beginning. ‘For Saddam’s scientists, the Kurds were a test population,’ she said. ‘They were the human guinea pigs. It was a way of identifying the most effective chemical agents for use on civilian populations, and the most effective means of delivery.’ The charge is supported by others. An Iraqi defector, Khidhir Hamza, who is the former director of Saddam’s nuclear-weapons program, told me earlier this year that before the attack on Halabja military doctors had mapped the city, and that afterward they entered it wearing protective clothing, in order to study the dispersal of the dead. ‘These were field tests, an experiment on a town,’ Hamza told me. He said that he had direct knowledge of the Army’s procedures that day in Halabja. ‘The doctors were given sheets with grids on them, and they had to answer questions such as “How far are the dead from the cannisters?”’ Gosden said that she cannot understand why the West has not been more eager to investigate the chemical attacks in Kurdistan. ‘It seems a matter of enlightened self-interest that the West would want to study the long-term effects of chemical weapons on civilians, on the DNA,’ she told me. ‘I’ve seen Europe’s worst cancers, but, believe me, I have never seen cancers like the ones I saw in Kurdistan.’”

The good, the bad and the Gallic shrug (Mark Steyn)
“Countries A and B may be at war, but there is no good side and no bad side, just two parties ‘trapped’ in a ‘mindless’ ‘cycle of violence’ that ‘threatens the peace process.’ The ‘peace process’ tends to be no peace and lotsa process, in which Western panjandrums have invested considerable amounts of their prestige. That’s why in Paris this weekend most of my dining companions were outraged not by the deaths of Palestinians or Israelis but by the shelling of Palestinian Authority buildings. ‘These buildings,’ one indignant Frenchman told me, ‘were built with money direct from the Union!’ — i.e., the European Union. ‘We have given billions, and now it is rubble.’ ‘Oh, your money's perfectly safe,’ I said. ‘Its sitting in the Hamas bigshots’ numbered bank accounts in Zurich.’ .... Forget the ‘cycle of violence’ and the ‘peace process.’ History teaches us that the most lasting peace is achieved when one side — preferably the worst side — is decisively defeated and the regime’s diseased organs are comprehensively cleansed. That’s why National Socialism, Fascism and Japanese militarism have not troubled us of late.”

Households Divided (Jean Bethke Elshtain)
“Wilson argues that the destructive features of a world without fathers are by now so well documented that they are beyond challenge. No responsible person wants to see that world expand, given its clear and present dangers. But how did it come about, and how are we to bring the second nation closer to the standard of the first in order to ensure that, in the parlance of the moment, no child is left behind? Wilson reminds us that when Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan first alerted the country in 1960 to the troubles looming on the horizon as the world of fatherlessness and rising out-of-wedlock birth was coming into view, he was denounced, accused of everything from racism to sexism to cultural imperialism, even as many people within the black community were saying the same thing — that a leap in fatherlessness was a ‘pathology.’ But that made no difference to the mainstream media or scholarship. As a result, it was easy for the first nation, irresponsibly, to ignore the problem of the second. Forty years later, facing an epidemic in teenage motherhood — by 1995, ‘three out of every four births to all teenagers were to unmarried girls; for black girls, it was nine out of ten’ — the alarm bells finally went off as politicians and social analysts converged on the same point: This trend cannot continue, as too much measurable harm is being done to children. As the evidence piled up, even those most resistant to the notion that fatherlessness as an independent factor generated risk factors for children, whatever the family’s socio-economic status, were forced to acknowledge the data. ‘Children in one-parent families, compared to those in two-parent ones, are twice as likely to drop out of school. Boys in one-parent families are much more likely than those in two-parent ones to be both out of school and out of work. Girls in one-parent families are twice as likely as those in two-parent ones to have an out-of-wedlock birth.’”

How Oscar Ghettoized Poitier (John Podhoretz)
“The spin on the evening was that it made history because two black performers won Best Actor and Best Actress on the same night that the first black movie star, Sidney Poitier, received an honorary Oscar. But there was something terribly retrogressive about the way all this was treated. The Oscar show worked overtime to make us think of Denzel Washington, Halle Berry and Poitier not as unique and remarkable talents but rather as tokens. Why were only black actors and actresses given a chance to speak in the three-minute film tribute to Sidney Poitier? Did Poitier’s career really have meaning only to black performers? Of course not. His extraordinary dignity and power gave the lie to the racist idea that white audiences could only respond to white performers and white stories. In a magnificent speech that was the highlight of the otherwise-unspeakable ceremony, Poitier himself paid a powerful and modest tribute to the directors, producers and studio heads who made history by casting him in the films that made him a star. They were all white. So is Poitier’s wife Joanna. Poitier had two daughters with Joanna, who are therefore both black and white. He is an integrationist not only professionally, but personally. For him to be seen as an inspiration only to black people is to ghettoize an extraordinary man who simply refused to accept the limits of race.”

Dumbing Down the SAT: The very existence of intelligence differences in America is about to become a forbidden truth. (Stanley Kurtz)
“There was a time when Americans believed that finding and training the country’s finest minds was in the national interest. Certainly, all American children ought to have access to quality education. But, ultimately, it is to our collective advantage as a nation to have a way of identifying students of high aptitude. And it is fairer to students themselves — especially those from lesser schools — to have a way of recognizing intellectual potential that has not yet come to the surface. The irony is that support for destruction of the SAT test comes from a liberal elite that is itself the product of our educational meritocracy. Guilt about success combines here with a hidden craving for moral superiority over the benighted middle classes. Those in the middle — and many minorities as well — still believe in the principles of liberty and equality that created the meritocracy in the first place. But once again, the liberal elite, in a conversation amongst itself, is managing to turn our most basic values and practices inside out — with nary a peep from a public that would fight these changes if they were honestly told what is happening.”

Of conscience & cowardice (Robert Going)
“I happen to believe in the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death. While perhaps a minority view, it is generally not considered an extreme position except by those who take delight in yanking babies feet first three quarters of the way out of their mothers’ wombs, sticking a needle in the head and sucking the brains out. Those people would doubtless find my views radical. Still, if I had written what I’ve just written, or said it aloud in a public place at any time from 1985 when I first became a candidate for judicial office until I left the bench in 2001, I would have been subject to discipline, even removal, by the Commission on Judicial Conduct. Some members of that commission and its staff have even gone so far as to state that accepting the nomination of the Right to Life Party is judicial misconduct.... After I became a county-level judge, the death penalty was restored in this state. As a cross-assigned judge I was offered the opportunity to take special training that would allow me to sit on capital cases. I declined, and wondered what I would do if such assignments became mandatory. Most of us don’t give a lot of thought to the death penalty. I never did, truthfully. But when faced with the real possibility that you might someday decide who lives and who dies, you’d sure better start thinking about it. I likely would have ended up as one of those who should have resigned rather than follow the law. But would I have? I believe in the sanctity of human life from birth to natural death. It’s such an easy thing to say. Now.”

But Seriously, Folks (Larry Miller)
“But, you see in all of American life there has, for a long time, been a battle of sorts to define what is serious and what is not, and all the wrong people are consistently winning. No matter how stupid, wrongheaded, or immoral some of our leaders and representatives have been over the years, if they can affect an appearance of troubled thoughtfulness when they address our problems, if they speak in a measured way, if they look around and nod with gravity, and if they use coy, calculated gestures — biting a lower lip, say — they will always be considered ‘serious’ people, and there’s no telling how far they can go. And I just don’t get it. P.J. O’Rourke has created some of the most immensely funny things in the history of immensely funny things, and I consider his work to be wise, large, insightful, and practical; in short, serious. The problem for me, you see, is that I don’t know what to call the ‘serious’ people of today, because I don’t think they are. When Mr. Daschle holds forth on our war effort, everyone thinks he’s serious, he certainly thinks he’s serious, but all I see behind those unblinking blue eyes is a man thinking, ‘Boy, I sure would look good stepping off that big, green helicopter and saluting.’ The ‘support’ Messrs. Daschle, Leahy, Biden, et al. have given to our war effort has the same sincerity of the wrestling bad guy who spends two minutes gouging the face of his opponent with an awl and then, when confronted by the referee, slips the iron into his shorts and holds up his hands like a Vegas dealer going on his break.”

The 1930s, Again: A hard rain is going to fall. (Victor Davis Hanson)
“And so we Americans, like those 70 years ago who so wanted a perpetual peace, pray for a return of sanity in the Middle East. We chose to ignore horrific stories of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia — the embryo of 9/11. We are more amused than shocked that madrassas have taught a generation to hate us. When mullahs in Iran speak of destroying Israel we wince, but also shrug. We want to see no real connection between madmen blowing themselves up to kill us in New York and the like-minded doing the same in Tel-Aviv. We put our trust in peace with a killer like Mr. Arafat, who packs a gun and whips up volatile crowds in Arabic. All the while, no American statesman has the guts to tell the Arab leadership that statism, tribalism, fundamentalism, gender apartheid, and autocracy — not America, not Israel — make their people poor, angry, and dangerous.... I don’t listen any more to the apologies and prevarications of our whiney university Arabists, our equivocators in the state department, and the really tawdry assortment of oil men, D.C. insiders, bought and paid for PR suits, and weapons hucksters. The truth is that a large minority of the Middle Eastern world wishes a war with America that it cannot win — and much of the rest is apparently either indifferent or amused. So we should stop apologizing, prepare for the worst, hope for the best, and accept this animosity — just as our forefathers once did when faced by similar autocrats and their captive peoples who threatened us in 1941.”

New Analysis Says Women’s Studies Prism Emits a Distinctly Feminist Coloring (FOXNews)
“The modern woman is plagued by stereotypes imposed by a male-dominated society, which keeps her relegated to rearing children, keeping home and working in low-paying, menial jobs. That is the universal claim found in women’s studies textbooks on college campuses today, according to a critical analysis by the Independent Women’s Forum, a women’s group that has often tangled with the traditional feminist establishment. The treatise, set forth by Christine Stolba, a senior fellow at IWF, has already drawn fire from scholars who see Stolba as an ‘ultra-conservative’ with an ax to grind against traditional feminists.... She said many of the textbooks ignore the advances women have made in order to push an anti-male, liberal agenda that is rooted more in the stone age of gender relations than in 21st-century culture. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged in women’s studies textbooks that women have been and continue to be the victims of oppression,’ wrote Stolba. ‘Women’s studies textbooks support a large number of factual inaccuracies. Many of these are deliberately misleading sisterly sophistries.’”

Keyes’ challenge: Return nation to principles (Pensacola News Journal) 
“The people of faith in America bear a special burden to return the nation to its founding principles, Ambassador Alan Keyes told a crowd Friday in Pensacola. ‘God Bless America? Yes, but I keep hearing the question,’ Keyes said. ‘Why?’ Afghanistan terrorist Osama bin Laden did not introduce America to evil on Sept. 11, he said. ‘Don’t think you can escape responsibility for your own.’ The moral challenge is simple, he said: ‘Cease to do evil, and learn to do good.’ .... ‘We do not stand on the same ground the nation was founded on. We do not stand on the same principles the country’s strength was built on,’ Keyes said. ‘It reminds me of the old cartoons we used to see when I was a kid. Roadrunner would get halfway across the abyss, and he would suddenly realize where he was. I sadly believe that in one respect, that’s where we are in terms of our freedom. There’s nothing underneath us anymore.’ .... ‘We have made the name of God obscene in our public schools. In ancient Greece, obscene was something you could not show in public. The name of God has been an obscenity in our government-run schools for the last 30 or 40 years. Don’t say it, don’t show it, don’t speak it. That’s all been run out by this auspicious principle of separation (of church and state) they're always telling us about.... ’The most terrible departure... is the fact that we have embraced an understanding of our rights that now encompasses the lie that the most fundamental right — which is the right to live at all — is not a matter of God’s will, but of human choice. ‘In the Roe v. Wade decision, the Supreme Court told us the right to life for each human being... comes from human choice. How do we think we can have it both ways? I don’t understand this contradiction. It can’t be God’s choice and my choice, too.’”

What Hollings’ Bill Would Do (Wired News) 
“If Hollywood and the music industry get their way, new software and hardware will sport embedded copy protection technology. A bill introduced by Senate Commerce Chairman Fritz Hollings would prohibit the sale or distribution of nearly any technology — unless it features copy-protection standards to be set by the federal government.... Anyone selling — or creating and distributing — ‘digital media devices’ may not do so unless they include government-approved security standards.... It would be unlawful to import software or hardware without government-approved security standards.... Network-connected computer systems may not delete markers indicating a file is copy-protected. Knowingly removing copy-protection markers from digital content is prohibited.... It would be unlawful to knowingly distribute or send someone any digital content that has been purged of its this-is-copy-protected marker.... One part of the bill overrides a landmark lawsuit that said the Rio MP3 player did not violate copyright law.”

France’s Bloody Hands (NYP) 
“France is hardly in a position to lecture the United States about justice, the death penalty or civil rights. The last time that France was involved in a major terrorist campaign, in Algeria from 1954-62, French security forces routinely tortured rebel suspects — while murdering uncounted thousands in summary executions. Only recently, retired French Army Gen. Paul Aussaresses published a sensational memoir calmy recounting his own role in these atrocities, which were carried out with the approval of French government figures — such as future President Francois Mitterand. Even today, the French criminal justice system is so weighted against defendants that the accused is practically guilty until proven innocent.... In any case, it’s one thing for France — which has officially abolished the death penalty at home — to register its unhappiness at the prospect of Moussaoui’s execution, but it’s quite another for this ‘ally’ to threaten non-cooperation with the Sept. 11 investigation. It is early in this war against terror, but you can be sure the United States will not forget the countries which stood beside her. And those that let her down.”

Religious leaders waste their energy (Bill Wineke) 
“The question I have this morning is whether Jesus Christ went to the cross to encourage us to drive Saturns. Because Sunday is Palm Sunday, the first day of the Christian season of Holy Week, I don’t think that’s an impertinent question. Yet, I have on my desk a letter signed by ‘48 Wisconsin Religious leaders’ telling me that God wants sport utility vehicles to get better gas mileage and I’m asking myself, ‘why does the church keep doing this?’ .... Among other conservation measures, the letter calls on the senators to support policies to ‘raise substantially vehicle fuel economy across the board in the shortest feasible timeframe, and require SUVs, minivans and passenger cars to meet the same standard.’ But the letter doesn’t stop there. It also calls for more investment in wind, geothermal and biomass technologies, regulation of carbon dioxide emissions and greater energy efficiency. It is signed by leaders from liberal Protestant, Jewish, Roman Catholic and, even, Zen religious bodies. For whatever it’s worth, I agree with most of the ideas expressed in the letter. What I don’t understand, again, is why religious leaders are issuing such exhortations in the name of God.”

Saudi newspaper editor “apologizes” for Purim blood libel (Jerusalem Post) 
“A Saudi Arabian newspaper editor yesterday issued a backhanded apology for a column published last week which resurrected the medieval blood libel against Jews by claiming they use the blood of Christian or Muslim ‘mature adolescents’ to prepare special Purim pastries. Al-Riyadh editor-in-chief Turki al-Sudairi wrote that the article, written by Umayma Ahmed al-Jalahma of King Faisal University, was ‘not fit to print.’ The paper had been sharply criticized by the US government before Al-Riyadh published the apology. On Monday, the Voice of America aired an editorial praising Saudi Arabia for its peace initiative, but criticizing it for not doing more to reduce Israel-Arab tensions. ‘In the meantime,’ said VOA, ‘there is something that Saudi Arabia and other countries could do right now to ease tensions in the Middle East. They could stop newspapers and radio and television stations, especially those controlled by the state, from inciting hatred and violence against Jews.’”

The fundamentalist question (Josie Appleton) 
“So why did radical Islam begin to emerge in the West in the 1990s? The emergence cannot be explained by the strength of the doctrine of radical Islam. Rather, the reasons some young Muslim men began to be gripped by anti-Western religious dogma should be sought in changes within Western society. The key factor in the rise of fundamentalism in the West was the end of the Cold War in 1989. This effectively unfroze politics — dissolving the left-right axis that had structured political and social identities for much of the twentieth century. With the collapse of the left, the right could no longer sustain its coherence — and in Europe and the USA, right-wing governments tumbled. Society was left increasingly atomised and directionless. This malaise was compounded by the erosion of long-standing institutions which had helped tie individuals into society, including the family, the church, the monarchy and civic organisations. The ideology of Islamic fundamentalism grew stronger in this vacuum left by the end of the Cold War. Where post-Cold War politics seemed uncertain and unconfident, Islamic fundamentalism promised firm rules, a coherent sense of identity, and a sense of belonging to a global Islamic community.”

Epidemic of fear (Frank Furedi) 
“Since 11 September, speculating about risk is represented as sound risk management. The aftermath of 11 September has given legitimacy to the principle of precaution, with risk increasingly seen as something you suffer from, rather than something you manage. Of course, taking sensible precautions makes a lot of sense. But continually imagining the worst possible outcome is not an effective way to deal with problems. Allowing speculation to dominate how we think about risks may even distract us from tackling the everyday problems and hazards that confront society. We don’t need any more Hollywood-style brainstorming. We need a grown-up discussion about our post-11 September world, based on a reasoned evaluation of all the available evidence rather than on irrational fears for the future.”

The Social Psychology of Modern Slavery (SciAm) 
“To many people, it comes as a surprise that debt bondage and other forms of slavery persist into the 21st century. Every country, after all, has made it illegal to own and exercise total control over another human being. And yet there are people like Baldev who remain enslaved — by my estimate, which is based on a compilation of reports from governments and nongovernmental organizations, perhaps 27 million of them around the world. If slaveholders no longer own slaves in a legal sense, how can they still exercise so much control that freed slaves sometimes deliver themselves back into bondage? This is just one of the puzzles that make slavery the greatest challenge faced by the social sciences today. Despite being among the oldest and most persistent forms of human relationships, found in most societies at one time or another, slavery is little understood. Although historians have built up a sizable literature on antebellum American slavery, other types have barely been studied.... Human trafficking — the involuntary smuggling of people between countries, often by organized crime — has become a huge concern, especially in Europe and Southeast Asia. Many people, lured by economic opportunities, pay smugglers to slip them across borders but then find themselves sold to sweatshops, brothels or domestic service to pay for their passage; others are kidnapped and smuggled against their will. In certain areas, notably Brazil and West Africa, laborers have been enticed into signing contracts and then taken to remote plantations and prevented from leaving. In parts of South Asia and North Africa, slavery is a millennia-old tradition that has never truly ended.”

The Social Life of Paper (Malcolm Gladwell) 
“Computer technology was supposed to replace paper. But that hasn’t happened. Every country in the Western world uses more paper today, on a per-capita basis, than it did ten years ago. The consumption of uncoated free-sheet paper, for instance — the most common kind of office paper — rose almost fifteen per cent in the United States between 1995 and 2000. This is generally taken as evidence of how hard it is to eradicate old, wasteful habits and of how stubbornly resistant we are to the efficiencies offered by computerization. A number of cognitive psychologists and ergonomics experts, however, don’t agree. Paper has persisted, they argue, for very good reasons: when it comes to performing certain kinds of cognitive tasks, paper has many advantages over computers. The dismay people feel at the sight of a messy desk — or the spectacle of air-traffic controllers tracking flights through notes scribbled on paper strips — arises from a fundamental confusion about the role that paper plays in our lives.”

Propaganda at its best (Cal Thomas) 
“Last week, ABC News allowed entertainer Rosie O’Donnell to take over two hours of airtime for a one-sided infomercial promoting ‘gay adoptions.’ All of the elements required for breaking down what few social norms remain regarding the family structure were present on ‘Primetime Thursday.’ First, the celebrity factor. In our postmodern, post Christian, post objective truth generation, celebrity equals credibility. Celebrities have replaced God. When they speak, some people think the rest of us should listen.... Rosie is right because she says so. She says President and Laura Bush are wrong when they say that the ideal setting for a child is in a home with a mother and father. End of discussion. The celebrity goddess has spoken.... There are credible scientific, legal and religious arguments against ‘gay adoptions.’ ABC didn’t present them because if they had, Rosie O’Donnell would not have appeared on ‘Primetime Thursday.’ This was journalism at its worst but propaganda at its best.”

They Died for Lack of a Head Scarf (Mona Eltahawy) 
“The fire was a tragedy that could have struck anywhere. Fifteen girls between ages 13 and 17 were trampled to death and 52 others were hurt when a blaze swept through their school.... Firefighters told the Saudi press that morality police forced girls to stay inside the burning building because they were not wearing the head scarves and black cloaks known as abayas that women must wear in public in that kingdom. One Saudi paper said the morality police stopped men who tried to help the girls escape the building, saying, ‘It is sinful to approach them.’ Girls died because zealots at the gate would rather see them burn than appear in public dressed inappropriately.... What kind of virtue is it to allow girls to die in a fire because of what they were not wearing? Whose Islam is it that allows these men to dilute the faith I and millions of others cherish for its teachings of compassion and justice to nothing more than a dress code and sexual segregation? I grew up learning God is merciful and that faith was based on choice — you could not force actions on anyone in the name of religion.”

Zero tolerance means educators cannot practice what they teach (Dave Lieber) 
“I keep waiting for Rod Serling to pop out in the story of L.D. Bell High School student Taylor Hess and tell us it is another episode from his old television show, The Twilight Zone. Hess was expelled from school because his grandmother’s bread knife was found in his pickup parked on school property.... ‘What they’re trying to do is incomprehensible,’ Robert Hess, Taylor’s father, told me. ‘I just can’t believe it. Zero tolerance doesn’t mean zero brains. You have to use your judgment.’ .... This is so sad, what our public education system has been reduced to, as administrators and teachers try to cope with the very real threat of student violence. We have taken away from them the very concepts that we try to teach our children. We have removed their ability to use their own good judgment, their reasoning powers and their ability to make decisions on a case-by-case basis. If justice is not examined on a case-by-case basis, then it is not true justice.”

You’re the Doctor: What’s as Easy as ABC? Only a Little Farther Up the Alphabet? A PhD. (WP) 
“These days, PhDs are like opinions and pie holes — pretty much everybody’s got one. You can earn a PhD: in human nutrition at Michigan State University; in social work at the University of Texas; in recreational studies at the University of Florida; in family studies at the University of New Mexico; and in fashion merchandising at Texas Women’s University. A candidate for a PhD in creative writing at the University of Georgia can submit poems instead of a dissertation. At the University of Michigan you can get a PhD in literature without reading Shakespeare.... In fact, all kinds of people are picking up PhDs. This year about 42,000 people will earn doctorates in the United States, according to the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center, which conducts research for the National Science Foundation and five other federal agencies. Most striking is a trend toward more PhDs in the humanities — up more than 11 percent between 1999 and 2000.... Candidates in the past were required to possess a breadth of knowledge bearing on a given subject. Often they had to study additional languages. And their labor — which usually took years of intense study in required courses — was subject to review by outside scholars. In many cases, the requirements have been eased.”

Mein Kampf for sale, in Arabic (London Telegraph) 
“An Arabic translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf which has become a bestseller in the Palestinian territories is now on sale in Britain. The book, Hitler’s account of his life and anti-Semitic ideology written while he was in prison in the 1920s, is normally found in Britain in academic or political bookshops. But The Telegraph found it on sale in three newsagents on Edgware Road, central London, an area with a large Arab population.... Copies of the translation are understood to have been distributed to London shops towards the end of last year and have been selling well. In the preface, Luis al-Haj, the translator, states: ‘National Socialism did not die with the death of its herald. Rather, its seeds multiplied under each star.’ The book was on sale alongside newspapers, magazines, cigarettes and sweets at a newsagent’s kiosk.”

Web Critics Take Aim at Old-Style Publishers (FOXNews) 
“A small but growing contingent of amateur and semi-professional media critics are taking aim at newspapers and periodicals, picking up where those papers’ ombudsmen (if they have them) leave off. One of the first to appear was SmarterTimes.com, a site that painstakingly points out flaws in The New York Times. Since then, similar sights have cropped up that skewer the Los Angeles Times (LAExaminer.com) and the San Francisco Chronicle (Chronwatch.com).”

The Suicide of the Palestinians (David Gelernter)
“We ought to face squarely the origins of the Palestinian descent into barbarism. In July 2000, Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak made a peace offer that stunned Israel and the world: Israel would re-divide Jerusalem — would turn over large pieces of its ancient capital to the same people who had destroyed its synagogues, desecrated its cemeteries, and banned Jews from entering when they last ran the show. Arafat rejected the offer. Then in September 2000 the new wave of murderous violence began, supposedly triggered by Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount.... Everyone knows about Munich, September 1938: Britain and France generously donate a big slice of Czechoslovakia to Hitler, in exchange for ‘peace with honor,’ ‘peace in our time,’ and the Brooklyn Bridge. Many people know about the Kristallnacht pogrom, November 1938: Germany’s approach to the Jews turns from mere oppression to bloodthirsty violence. Kristallnacht was ‘triggered’ by the murder of a German diplomat by a deranged Jew. But some (not all) historians point out the obvious: A leading cause of Kristallnacht was Munich itself. Hitler read the Munich agreements as a proclamation by England and France stating: ‘We are weak; you have nothing to fear; do what you like.’ The analogy is not close, just close enough. Israel is no Czechoslovakia and was not sold down the river. Barak made his offer freely and in good faith. But to a significant number of Palestinians, the offer obviously said: ‘We are weak; you have nothing to fear; attack.’ Appeasement doesn’t merely fail to prevent catastrophe, it provokes catastrophe.”

A Peace of My Mind (Dave Shiflett)
“Have you slapped a pacifist today? If not, get to it. It’s one thing to protest a war undertaken in some remote jungle you have to take a long flight to, and whose purposes may be a bit gauzy. It’s quite another when the enemy is dive-bombing New York and Washington. The fact that our enemies are determined to return the world to the seventh century and force our women to dress in sacks makes the anti-war position all the more controversial. There seems little choice but to douse these people with the hot oil of ridicule. At the outset, it should be pointed out that these contemporary pacifists are not cut from the same cloth as history’s grand Mahatmas, whose neutrality may have sometimes been in error but who were people of large and often courageous spirit.... Not so the new breed, which appears to be largely made up of self-absorbed snots. When the heat shows up, they run. If they get jugged, they get someone to post bail, preferably on Daddy’s AmEx card. Some do a bit of car-burning and looting on the side. They blossom most brilliantly in the spotlight, which they are forever seeking, and they hail from the expected provinces: Hollywood, the Ivy League, the Ivory Tower, Trust Fund City. Many hold dual citizenship.”

Study: Death penalty deters scores of killings (Paul Rubin)
“Executions are always controversial, and there are always debates about whether states should use the death penalty. But this debate cannot proceed rationally unless we fully understand the advantages and disadvantages of execution.... One conservative version of our model finds that each execution deters an average of 18 homicides, with a range of between 8 and 28 murders deterred by each execution. Other variants find even larger numbers of prevented murders.... We as a society might decide that we want to eliminate capital punishment. But this should be an informed decision, and should consider both the costs and benefits of executions. Our evidence is that there are substantial benefits from executions and, thus, substantial costs of changing this policy.”

Minoritarianism: A dangerous obsession (John Derbyshire)
“In a civilized liberal democracy, majorities owe certain things to harmless minorities: tolerance, civility, and the rights granted in the Constitution — freedom of speech, assembly, etc. However, it seems to me that minorities owe something to the majority in return: mainly, a proper respect for their tastes, beliefs, and sensibilities, and a decent restraint in challenging them, if there are some reasonable grounds for challenging them. This contract imposes some costs on minorities, of course, but I think they should look on those costs as the price of the tolerance they enjoy. Is that patronizing? Well, then add ‘being patronized’ to the list of costs — none of which, in any case I can think of in American society today, is much more arduous or oppressive than that. There are, after all, reciprocal costs on the majority when they make those accommodations.... I don’t see any danger at all that majorities will ride roughshod over minorities unless restrained by wise, omniscient elites. I do, though, see the opposite danger: That by allowing themselves to be browbeaten by those elites into yielding on every single point of accommodation demanded by every loud minority, the majority will find at last that they have no institutions, no traditions, no moral landmarks, no common understandings left, and will be adrift in a wasteland of moral relativism, naked to the cold, heartless winds of intellectual fashion.”

Can There Be a Decent Left? (Michael Walzer)
“A few left academics have tried to figure out how many civilians actually died in Afghanistan, aiming at as high a figure as possible, on the assumption, apparently, that if the number is greater than the number of people killed in the Towers, the war is unjust. At the moment, most of the numbers are propaganda; there is no reliable accounting. But the claim that the numbers matter in just this way, that the 3120th death determines the injustice of the war, is in any case wrong. It denies one of the most basic and best understood moral distinctions: between premeditated murder and unintended killing. And the denial isn’t accidental, as if the people making it just forgot about, or didn’t know about, the everyday moral world. The denial is willful: unintended killing by Americans in Afghanistan counts as murder. This can’t be true anywhere else, for anybody else.”

The man who knows too much (Jonathan Tobin)
“CNN reporter Steve Emerson was stuck in Oklahoma City on Christmas 1992 with nothing to do and wandered by the city’s Convention Center, where a gathering of the Muslim Arab Youth Association was taking place. Inside, he found ‘books preaching Islamic Jihad, books calling for the extermination of Jews and Christians, even coloring books instructing children on subjects, such as How to Kill the Infidel.’ Later, after listening to speeches urging jihad against the Jews and the West from luminaries such as the head of the Hamas terrorist group, Emerson called his contacts in the FBI to inquire whether they were aware of this bizarre meeting in the American heartland. They were not. A year later, Emerson attended a similar Muslim conference in Detroit that included representatives from Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other terror groups. It also included an appearance from a befuddled senior FBI agent. When a member of the hostile audience asked the agent for advice on how to ship weapons overseas, Emerson relates that the G-man said, matter-of-factly, that he ‘hoped any such efforts would be done in conformance with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms guidelines.’ Apparently, the FBI official had attended the radical conference under the mistaken impression that it was ‘some kind of Rotary Club.’”

The Core of Muslim Rage (Thomas Friedman)
“It has to do with the contrast between Islam’s self-perception as the most ideal and complete expression of the three great monotheistic religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam — and the conditions of poverty, repression and underdevelopment in which most Muslims live today. As a U.S. diplomat in the Middle East said to me, Israel — not Iraq, not India — is ‘a constant reminder to Muslims of their own powerlessness.’ How could a tiny Jewish state amass so much military and economic power if the Islamic way of life — not Christianity or Judaism — is God’s most ideal religious path? When Hindus kill Muslims it’s not a story, because there are a billion Hindus and they aren’t part of the Muslim narrative. When Saddam murders his own people it’s not a story, because it’s in the Arab-Muslim family. But when a small band of Israeli Jews kills Muslims it sparks rage — a rage that must come from Muslims having to confront the gap between their self-perception as Muslims and the reality of the Muslim world.”

Special Dispatch No. 354: Saudi Government Daily: Jews Use Teenagers’ Blood for “Purim” Pastries (MEMRI)
“In an article published by the Saudi government daily Al-Riyadh, columnist Dr. Umayma Ahmad Al-Jalahma of King Faysal University in Al-Dammam, wrote on ‘The Jewish Holiday of Purim.’ Following are excerpts of the article: ‘This holiday has some dangerous customs that will, no doubt, horrify you, and I apologize if any reader is harmed because of this.... For this holiday, the Jewish people must obtain human blood so that their clerics can prepare the holiday pastries. In other words, the practice cannot be carried out as required if human blood is not spilled!!.... For this holiday, the victim must be a mature adolescent who is, of course, a non-Jew — that is, a Christian or a Muslim. His blood is taken and dried into granules. The cleric blends these granules into the pastry dough; they can also be saved for the next holiday. In contrast, for the Passover slaughtering, about which I intend to write one of these days, the blood of Christian and Muslim children under the age of 10 must be used, and the cleric can mix the blood [into the dough] before or after dehydration....’”

The Crescent and the Gun (Brian Saint-Paul)
“The problem, then, is not in the Koran itself but in those who are free to twist it. Because there’s no one to interpret the book authoritatively, it’s vulnerable to any charismatic leader willing to abuse it to justify his personal hatred. The sad result is clear for all to see: The Koran’s command not to harm civilians is ignored; its prohibition against suicide is interpreted away by suicide bombers; its call for freedom in worship is cast aside in many Islamic states; its order to stand up for the oppressed is ignored by those too afraid to speak out against the persecution of non-Muslims. Islam has the Koran, but the Koran has no interpreter. An analogous situation is in Protestant Christianity, where the inheritors of the Reformation gather around the call of sola scriptura (Scripture alone). Different Protestant denominations read the Bible in different ways, with no single, authoritative interpreter. Why then don’t we see fringe Protestants strapping bombs around their waists and walking into crowded malls? The answer brings us back to the different concepts of justice. In Islam, following the Old Testament model, the attacker can be justly destroyed. In Christianity, following the just-war theory, the attacker must be repelled — but only in proportion to the attack. Ultimately, the violence perpetrated by Muslim fringe groups has two roots: first, the Koran’s command to fight the oppressor, and second, the lack of a single voice to identify who that oppressor is. Without that authority, any group — any people, any nation — can be considered an oppressor by those who feel they’ve been wronged. The result, too often, is bloodshed.”

Spying: The American Way of Life? (Wired News) 
“In the six months since the Sept. 11 attacks, Americans may not have exactly embraced a surveillance society, but they appear to have grown to accept portions of it. A Zogby poll conducted last December says that 80 percent of respondents favored video monitoring on public places such as street corners. Especially in the dark days after the Pentagon was hit, the White House targeted, the Capitol anthraxed, and the World Trade Center leveled, that public reaction was predictable. In national emergencies, the uneasy relationship between freedom and order edges toward greater restrictions on individual liberty. But Bush’s war on terror is not a traditional military conflict with a clear end that can be met after, say, U.S. soldiers capture a city, eliminate a Taliban command post — or even snare Osama bin Laden himself. Bush and other top administration officials repeatedly have warned that the attempt to exterminate al-Qaida dens may continue for years, even decades. It conceivably could succeed the Cold War as the most important political struggle of the 21st century. If that happens, new surveillance powers that police receive today likely will become permanent.”

Profs Do Better on Shorter Leash, Study Concludes (NewsMax) 
“Tenured college professors might be bad teachers and even worse scholars, but their institutions and peers have little ability to influence their conduct, according to a recent study by The Fraser Institute, a libertarian think tank in Vancouver, British Columbia. To improve the quality of their teaching, professors need incentives, something radically nonexistent in the individualistic culture of the North American university, write Rodney Clifton and Hymie Rubenstein in ‘Collegial Models for Enhancing the Performance of University Professors.’ Often when professors receive tenure they neglect their students and focus on research or outside assignments like consulting businesses, Clifton and Rubenstein write. The sheer number of extraneous commitments may cause professors to view students as nuisances rather than the paying consumers they are, according to the authors.”

Whooping It Up: In Beirut, even Christians celebrated the atrocity (Italian journalist Elisabetta Burba)
“Where were you on Sept. 11, when terrorists changed the world? I was at the National Museum here [in Beirut], enjoying the wonders of the ancient Phoenicians with my husband. This tour of past splendor only magnified the shock I received later when I heard the news and saw the reactions all around me. Walking downtown, I realized that the offspring of this great civilization were celebrating a terrorist outrage. And I am not talking about destitute people. Those who were cheering belonged to the elite of the Paris of Middle East: professionals wearing double-breasted suits, charming blond ladies, pretty teenagers in tailored jeans. Trying to find our bearings, my husband and I went into an American-style cafe in the Hamra district, near Rue Verdun, rated as one of the most expensive shopping streets in the world. Here the cognitive dissonance was immediate, and direct. The cafe’s sophisticated clientele was celebrating, laughing, cheering and making jokes, as waiters served hamburgers and Diet Pepsi. Nobody looked shocked, or moved. They were excited, very excited.... Back in Italy, I received a phone call from my friend Gilberto Bazoli, a journalist in Cremona. He told me he witnessed the same reactions among Muslims in the local mosque of that small Lombard city. ‘They were all on Osama bin Laden’s side,’ he said. ‘One of them told me that they were not even worthy to kiss his toes.’”

Anti-Americanism blamed on college teachers (WT)
“Professors and administrators are to blame for anti-American sentiment on college campuses today, according to a report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. More than 140 college campuses in 36 states have held anti-war rallies denouncing the country’s military actions in Afghanistan, the report says. The document — ‘Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It’ — concludes that many professors and administrators are quick to clamp down on acts of patriotism, such as flying the American flag, and look down on students who question professors’ ‘politically correct’ ideas in class.”

In war, grownups can’t play silly games (Mark Steyn)
“But the six-month suspension of normal politics is taking its toll on Democrats. ‘We seem to be good at developing entrance strategies,’ Sen. Robert C. Byrd, West Virginia’s porkmeister par excellence, whined the other day, ‘and not so good at developing exit strategies.’ Well spotted, senator. Here’s something else that will shock you: Churchill didn’t have an ‘exit strategy’ for World War II.... You don’t have exit strategies when your national territory’s been attacked; you have a responsibility to see the war through to the end.... The headline on Jules Witcover’s column in the Baltimore Sun read, ‘Democrats Ask Tough Questions On War.’ In fact, tough questions would be welcome. But Byrd’s and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle’s criticisms are pathetic: They’re about spin, posturing, about how it’ll play on TV. In war, grownups don’t have time for silly games in the congressional schoolyard.”

Being reasonable about faith when we all ignore God (Hanna Clark)
“This fact versus faith dichotomy relies on a gendered and racialized conception of the human mind and soul (or are they even separate?). White people are seen as rational and logical, living in the world of logic and ideas. People of color are seen as more spiritual, irrational and emotional. The same can be said of men (they’re rational) and women (they’re irrational). And the same can be said of Macalester atheists (rational) and the rest of us (irrational). The problem is that Atheism is just as based on faith as any other religion. At Macalester, religion is often seen only as an institution that tries to exert control. There’s a knee-jerk reaction to the imposition of rules and social mores, and all religion and spirituality is thereby ridiculed. It’s ironic that so many people use a patriarchal and racist ideology to critique what they think is an engine of oppressive authority.”

The Pristine Myth (Katie Bacon interviews Charles Mann)
“For years the standard view of North America before Columbus’s arrival was as a vast, grassy expanse teeming with game and all but empty of people. Those who did live here were nomads who left few marks on the land. South America, too, or at least the Amazon rain forest, was thought of as almost an untouched Eden, now suffering from modern depredations. But a growing number of anthropologists and archaeologists now believe that this picture is almost completely false. According to this school of thought, the Western Hemisphere before Columbus’s arrival was well-populated and dotted with impressive cities and towns — one scholar estimated that it held ninety to 112 million people, more than lived in Europe at the time — and Indians had transformed vast swaths of landscape to meet their agricultural needs. They used fire to create the Midwestern prairie, perfect for herds of buffalo. They also cultivated at least part of the rain forest, living on crops of fruits and nuts.”

Diagnosis: Delusional (Drs. Michael A. Glueck & Robert J. Cihak)
“People need to feel right about themselves. Not just good — right. Morally right. For some people, hating America provides an inexhaustible source of unearned moral stature. They can’t be right unless their country is wrong, always and forever wrong: an attitude empowered by the quaint notion that dissent is somehow automatically morally superior to consent, and refusal to participate a greater good than support. Sadly, there is much in this country to criticize. We’re far from perfect, and in many ways the intensity of our self-scrutiny stands as a badge of our virtue. But there comes a time when some overweening emergency takes precedence.”

Correctness Crack-Up (Stephen Goode and Christopher Jolma)
“But the response to Sept. 11 at U.S. colleges and universities might be bringing about a bigger, more profound transformation that’s now in its earliest stages. It’s change that challenges and may undermine — the gospel of political correctness, which has ravaged U.S. schools for nearly two decades. It’s a transformation, too, that may bring an end to the power held at American universities and colleges by the left-wing 1960s activists — many of whom long have held senior and tenured positions at American schools and have used those positions to preach the same tired left-wing politics and anti-Americanism they began so loudly advocating 40 years ago.”

Campus Capers (David Horowitz)
“In any case, the media blackout of my book makes my current campus speaking tour something of a necessity. I have one additional agenda, moreover, which is to cast a spotlight on the rampant political bias in the hiring of faculty at American universities. This repression of conservative viewpoints — an academic McCarthyism that puts McCarthy’s puny efforts to shame — is blatant, unconstitutional and illegal, but ubiquitous nonetheless.”

What will it take to persuade? (Balint Vazsonyi)
“The brutal murder of journalist Daniel Pearl has shaken even our own television news analysts. That is significant, since some of our most highly visible — and highly paid — commentators had never known a foreign terrorist they didn’t like. Well, that might be a bit harsh. Let us say instead, they had never seen a foreign terrorist whose ‘cause’ they didn’t respect. But this was too much, even for them. Are we mad enough yet?”

How The Left Undermined America’s Security (David Horowitz)
“Underlying the Clinton security failure was the fact that the Administration was made up of people who for twenty-five years had discounted or minimized the totalitarian threat, opposed America’s armed presence abroad, and consistently resisted the deployment of America’s military forces to halt Communist expansion. National Security Advisor Sandy Berger was himself a veteran of the Sixties ‘anti-war’ movement, which abetted the Communist victories in Vietnam and Cambodia, and created the ‘Vietnam War syndrome’ that made it so difficult afterwards for American presidents to deploy the nation’s military forces.”

The cost of academic integrity (Walter Williams)
“College budgets depend on admitting warm bodies. That means we can’t expect college administrators to do anything to stop unprepared students from being admitted, courses dumbed-down and fraudulent grades given. Boards of Trustees tend to be yes-men and women for the president, so we can’t expect anything from them. The money spigot needs to be turned off. Alumni, foundations and other charitable donors — not to mention taxpayers — should be made aware of fraudulent practices and academic dishonesty.”

The Plains vs. The Atlantic: Is Middle America a backwater, or a reservoir? (Blake Hurst)
“The combination of progressive taxation and urban real-estate prices ensures that almost nobody on the coasts has more spendable income than the highest paid people in Franklin County or the rest of rural Red America. People here in Missouri’s small towns can buy a beautiful older home for less than $100,000. Brooks makes much of the fact that he literally could not spend more than $20 for a meal in Franklin County. The fare in Red America is a bit limited. You can’t buy one of those meals with a dime-sized entrée in the middle of a huge plate, with some sort of sauce artfully squirted about. But you can buy a pound of prime rib for ten bucks. Class-consciousness isn’t a problem in Red America, because most people can afford to buy everything that’s for sale.”

Proof that the classics speak to everyone (Katherine Kersten)
“For 35 years now, we’ve been hearing that ‘the classics’ — the great books of the Western world — are largely irrelevant in today’s classrooms. Why? Most were written by dead white males. Obviously, then, they can hold little meaning for females or for black or Hispanic kids. Everyone knows that if young people are to be moved or inspired, they need books whose authors ‘look like them.’ Try telling that to the students at Wilbur Wright College, a two-year community college in a working-class neighborhood in Chicago. Students at Wright are predominantly black, Hispanic or from immigrant families. Wright is for kids who aren’t ready for four-year colleges. Yet students there are flocking to a Great Books program and lining up to read authors like Plato, Cicero and Dante.”

Why the Muslims Misjudged Us (Victor Hanson)
“Two striking themes — one overt, one implied — characterize most Arab invective: first, there is some sort of equivalence — political, cultural, and military — between the West and the Muslim world; and second, America has been exceptionally unkind toward the Middle East. Both premises are false and reveal that the temple of anti-Americanism is supported by pillars of utter ignorance.”

Parsing out grammar (Linda Chavez)
“I learned how to diagram sentences in elementary school — or what we used to call, appropriately, grammar school.... Progressive teachers and their professional associations, especially the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), believe diagramming sentences is make-work that bores students and turns them off to writing. So they banished diagramming from the classroom years ago, along with most grammar instruction. ”

Slouching Toward Bias: A Neo-Conservative Critiques the Media (Poynter)
“‘The media, notably certain powerful big city dailies and the network news divisions that generally follow their lead, reflect a worldview that is not only distinctly liberal in character, but hostile to those who hold alternative views.”

The Education of Abraham Lincoln (Eric Foner)
“He read incessantly, beginning as a youth with the Bible and Shakespeare. During his single term in the House of Representatives, his colleagues considered it humorous that Lincoln spent his spare time poring over books in the Library of Congress. The result of this ‘stunning work of self-education’ was the ‘intellectual power’ revealed in Lincoln’s writings and speeches.”

Lost Boys (Amy Benfer)
“Suddenly, the debate among researchers is focused on the boys: Are they behind because of the girl empowerment movement? Are they being shortchanged in the classroom simply because they are boys?”

Skewed News: Fair and balanced coverage requires diversity of opinion (Cathy Young)
“Neither Goldberg nor McGowan allege a deliberate vast left-wing conspiracy to distort the news. Rather, they convincingly argue that news coverage is often influenced by a knee-jerk bias stemming from the journalists’ own views on political and social issues.”

Why We Don’t Marry (James Q. Wilson)
“Marriage was once a sacrament, then it became a contract, and now it is an arrangement. Once religion provided the sacrament, then the law enforced the contract, and now personal preferences define the arrangement.”

Faith and Diversity in American Religion (Alan Wolfe)
“No aspect of life is considered so important to Americans outside higher education, yet deemed so unimportant by the majority of those inside, as religion. The relative indifference to religion in higher education may be changing, however, as a wide variety of social and intellectual trends converge.”

The Trouble With Self-Esteem (Lauren Slater)
“‘There is absolutely no evidence that low self-esteem is particularly harmful,’ Emler says. ‘It’s not at all a cause of poor academic performance; people with low self-esteem seem to do just as well in life as people with high self-esteem. In fact, they may do better, because they often try harder.’”

Managing Us: We’re So Easy (Fred Reed)
“First, people will watch any television rather than no television. Second, sooner or later they will begin to imitate what they see on the screen. Third, while you can’t fool all of the people all of the time, you can fool enough of them enough of the time, especially if you are a lot smarter than they are, and do it patiently, calculatedly, over time, like water eroding stone. And that is all it takes.”

Wrong Turn (Roger Kimball)
“The most delicious news to emerge from the art world this year [2001] came in October, courtesy of the BBC. Under the gratifying headline ‘Cleaner Dumps Hirst Installation,’ the world read that ‘A cleaner at a London gallery cleared away an installation by artist Damien Hirst having mistaken it for rubbish. Emmanuel Asare came across a pile of beer bottles, coffee cups and overflowing ashtrays and cleared them away at the Eyestorm Gallery on Wednesday morning.’ I hope that Mr. Asare was immediately given a large raise. Someone who can make mistakes like that is an immensely useful chap to have about.”

Losing our religion (Theo Hobson)
“It has become unthinkable for a Church leader, or any public figure who is a Christian, to speak as if the gospel of Jesus Christ is superior to other creeds; to talk about Christianity as an exceptionally, uniquely good thing. In public, at least, such talk is taboo. Some of the bishops might still say this sort of thing in their pulpits; maybe the Blairs tell their children. But it is not for public hearing.”