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April 27, 2004
Thinking the Unthinkable
Publication:The New York Sun; Date:Apr 26, 2004; Section:Editorial & Opinion; Page:11
on why it’s time for America to take a deep breath and abandon the United Nations Mark Steyn ‘War without the U.N. is unthinkable,” pronounced Polly Toynbee, grande dame of Britain’s Guardian, a year ago, just before it happened. For a certain type of person, any action on the international scene without the United Nations is unthinkable. And, conversely, anything that happens under the U.N. imprimatur is mostly for the unthinking. No matter how corrupt and depraved it is in practice, the organization’s sunny utopian image somehow endures. Say the initials “U.N.” to your average member of Ms. Toynbee’s legions of the unthinking and they conjure up neither U.N. participation in the sex-slave trade in Bosnia, nor the U.N. refugee extortion racket in Kenya, nor the U.N. cover-up of the sex-for-food scandal in West Africa, nor U.N. complicity in massacres, but some misty Austin Powers–era Unesco cultural event compered by the late Audrey Hepburn and featuring photogenic children of many lands. So the question now is whether the U.N. Oil-for-Food program is just another of those things that slip down the memory hole, and we all go back to parroting the soothing lullaby that “only the U.N. can bring legitimacy to Iraq/Afghanistan/Your Basket Case Here.” Legitimacy seems to be the one thing the UN doesn’t bring, and I’m not just talking about the love children of U.N.-enriched Balkan hookers in Kosovo. The scale of the U.N. Oil-for-Fraud program is way beyond any of the corporate scandals that so excite the progressive mind. Oil-for-Food was a U.N. program designed to let the Iraqi government sell a limited amount of oil in return for food and other necessities for their people. Between 1996 and 2003, Saddam Hussein did over $100 billion of business, all of it approved by Kofi Annan’s Secretariat. In return, by their own official figures, $15 billion of food and health supplies was sent to Iraq. What proportion of this reached the sick and malnourished Iraqi children touted by the anti-war crowd before the liberation is anybody’s guess. Coalition troops discovered stockpiles of U.N. food in remote locations far from starving moppets. But let’s assume there’s an innocent explanation for that. Even so, by the U.N.’s own account, Oil-for-Food seemed to involve an awful lot of oil for not much food. Where did all the other billions go? According to Mr. Annan himself, some $31 billion went on other “humanitarian” spending for Iraq. Such as? Well, in 2002, the secretary-general personally expanded the program to cover other “humanitarian” categories such as “sport,” “information,”“justice” and “labor and social affairs.” In Iraq, “sport” meant Uday’s rape rooms, and “justice” meant a mass grave out in the desert, but that’s not to say there weren’t attendant expenses involved. So Mr. himself directly approved such “humanitarian” items as $20 million for an “Olympic sport city” (state-of-the-art rape rooms) and $50 million for Iraq’s Ministry of Information (Comical Ali’s gag writers). As America’s Defense Contract Management Agency’s subsequent report put it after the liberation, “Some items of questionable utility for the Iraqi people (e.g., Mercedes-Benz touring sedans) were identified.” The Jordanian supplier of schoolroom furniture had to be let go on the grounds that he didn’t exist. So far, all this is just U.N. business as usual — venal and wasteful, albeit on a larger scale than ever before. But even by their own revolting standards, the U.N. crossed a line. A program created to allow the world to constrain Saddam became instead the means by which Saddam constrained the world. Oilfor-Food gave him a free hand to reward wellconnected French and Russian suppliers. He ran the show by selling cut-price vouchers for Iraqi oil to politicians and bureaucrats, which they could then offload on the world markets at the going rate. Among the alleged beneficiaries were a French interior minister,a French U.N.ambassador, Russia’s “office of the president,” the Indonesian president,and the Reverend Jean-Marie Benjamin, the French priest who arranged Tariq Aziz’s disgusting photo-op with the Pope and in return for his efforts is said to have received vouchers for 4.5 million barrels of oil. According to documents found in the oil ministry in Baghdad,Saddam saw to it that the man Mr. Annan picked to run Oil-for-Food, the U.N. undersecretary-general, Benon Sevan, got enough oil to make himself a nice illegal profit of $3.5 million. In other words, “Oil-for-Fraud” is everything the left said the war was: It was all about oil — for Mr. Sevan, the U.N.,France, Russia, and the others who had every incentive to maintain Saddam in power. Every Halliburton invoice to the Pentagon is audited to the last penny, but Saddam can use Mr.Annan’s office as a front for a multibillion-dollar global kickback scheme, and, until it was brought to public attention by the tireless Claudia Rosett of the Wall Street Journal and a few other persistent types, the secretary-general apparently never noticed a thing. He hadn’t even noticed that two of the firms enriched by his program had ties to financier Ahmed Idris Nasreddin, named by the U.N. as an individual “belonging to or associated with”Al Qaeda — just another of those non-existent links between Saddam and Islamist terrorism. Mr. Sevan has now returned to New York from Australia, where he was lying low for several weeks. Not that he needed to go to a lot of trouble about it.The lethargic Aussie press made little effort to run him to ground. It seems the notion that lifelong U.N. bureaucrats are at the center of a web of massive fraud, influence-peddling, veto-securing, and torture-funding at the expense of starving Iraqi urchins is just too, too “unthinkable” for much of the press. So the conventional wisdom stays conventional — that we need to get the U.N.back into Iraq. No we don’t. Iraq deserves better than an organization that spent the last six years as Saddam’s collaborator. As Ms. Rosett put it,“We are left to contemplate a U.N. system that has engendered a secretary-general either so dishonest that he should be dismissed or so incompetent that he is truly dangerous — and should be dismissed.” He should be, but he almost certainly won’t be. After all, it’s hardly his fault. When he set up the show, who would have thought that one day there’d be American auditors in Baghdad? Why, it was, as Ms. Toynbee would say, “unthinkable.” Mr. Annan should not be in Turtle Bay, Mr. Brahimi should not be in Baghdad. The U.N. needs to fix itself before it can plausibly be entrusted to fix anywhere else. And, if it doesn’t want to fix itself, it should be abandoned by America, Britain, Australia, and others to die in irrelevance. It’s time to think the unthinkable. Posted by Ruth at 01:14 AM | UNITED NATIONS
April 25, 2004
The meaning of Vanunu
Eye On The Media: The meaning of Vanunu Bret Stephens Apr. 23, 2004
Indeed Vanunu has won. It isn't every ex-con who, after 18 years, walks out of prison into the arms of a small army of supporters, including a Nobel Peace Laureate, an Oscar nominee and a couple of British members of parliament. It isn't every ex-con who gets respectful editorial treatment in newspapers from Sydney to London. It isn't every ex-con for whom a luxury seaside flat is arranged. Ordinarily, this is the sort of treatment given to a serious political dissident, a Wei Jingsheng or Natan Sharansky. That Vanunu should get it as well suggests that, to his admirers, he stands in relation to Israel as Sharansky stood in relation to the USSR. What? WISDOM, WRITES essayist and critic Paul Berman, "consists of the ability to be shocked." That's an ability that's been greatly dulled in Israel over the past 42 months of outrage. But let's try again to be shocked, starting with a piece by Ed O'Loughlin of the Sydney Morning Herald, which I am told is a reputable paper. The gist of his April 17 report is captured by the paper's editorial summary: "Whistleblower's crime was to offend against Israel's unifying creeds." Let's parse that. First, "whistleblower." Earlier this week, Gerald Steinberg noted in these pages that whistleblower "refers to individuals who go public with information on corrupt practices and violations of the law, enabling the constituted authorities to take over and hold the culprits accountable through due process of law." Vanunu did nothing of the sort. Instead, he "imposed his personal views on the elected officials and representatives of the Israeli government," thereby violating "due process of law and the core principles of democracy." Steinberg's argument strikes me as unassailable. But the important point here isn't verbal accuracy. It's journalistic balance. Given there's a controversy over whether to describe Vanunu as a traitor or whistleblower, why does O'Loughlin choose whistleblower? Great care is taken by the news media to find neutral descriptors for people Israelis call terrorists and Palestinians call martyrs. In Vanunu's case, no such effort is made. So here's an open-and-shut case of bias in the first word of O'Loughlin's article. Next: "Vanunu's crime was to offend grievously against Israel's unifying creeds – Zionism, Jewish identity and total loyalty to the government on questions of national security." That is, Vanunu became "involved with left-wing and pro-Palestinian causes"; converted to Anglicanism; and leaked information on the Dimona reactor to the Sunday Times. "The fact that he was due to obtain $US100,000 from a related book deal and serialization deal make him doubly odious." This passage marks O'Loughlin's departure from the realm of bias to flat-out mendacity. Vanunu's crime, in fact, was to violate the terms of his security clearance at Dimona. Terms he signed. This is nothing strange: Every government on earth swears certain people to secrecy and imposes high penalties, including lengthy jail sentences, for any breach. The Jerusalem Post has obtained a copy of Vanunu's clearance, and we reproduce and translate it at the bottom of this article. But nowhere is this detail mentioned in O'Loughlin's report. Instead, Vanunu is described as a man who suffered mainly for rejecting the political, religious, and military shibboleths of the Jewish state. Vanunu didn't break Israel's law, you see. He rejected its anti-Palestinian, anti-Christian, militaristic culture, and in Israel what you get for that is long years in solitary. Credulous Australian readers may be forgiven for believing this, but O'Loughlin cannot be forgiven for reporting it. Pro-Palestinian views forbidden? Please: This newspaper has a Palestinian columnist in Daoud Kuttab and Haaretz regularly publishes the work of avowed anti-Zionists such as Meron Benvenisti and Haim Hanegbi. As for religion, Israelis freely dabble in everything from Buddhism to Baptism. As for militarism, Israel has one of the most active peace movements anywhere. It goes on. O'Loughlin writes that Vanunu was convicted of treason and espionage "even though he made no attempt to provide his secrets to foreign or hostile powers." How broadcasting those secrets publicly – and so to every foreign or hostile power – differs from this in consequence if not intent to Israel is not explained. O'Loughlin also writes that Vanunu's years in solitary confinement were "ostensibly on security grounds." Note ostensibly. What O'Loughlin omits is that in his prison writings Vanunu rendered precise sketches of the Dimona plant and, knowing he was being censored, wrote, "Don't worry, I'll fill you in when I am freed." SO MUCH is contained in O'Loughlin's article. It would have been less egregious if he had bothered to explain the Israeli position or even quote an Israeli spokesperson. But no such effort is made. The floor is Vanunu's alone. The same goes for much of the rest of the news media. Vanunu, The Guardian editorialized this week, "may be a traitor to the Israeli state... but in exposing a secret which needed to be told he has shown a higher duty to wider humanity." The Financial Times says the remaining restrictions on Vanunu's freedom "border on the sadistic." A couple of points here. If an Israeli traitor is a hero to "wider humanity" and therefore in a category with Oleg Penkovsky and Claus von Stauffenberg, then Israel has no right to exist. As for sadism, it seems curious that any truly sadistic state would have bothered to release Vanunu at all, instead of arranging an accident in prison or executing him outright. That Vanunu can emerge from prison as he did, despite being detested universally by Israelis, the security establishment most of all, testifies to the scrupulousness of the Israeli justice system, not its cruelty. The larger point made about Vanunu is that the West cannot demand the wider Middle East to be disarmed of weapons of mass destruction without demanding as much from Israel. But the underlying assumption is that a nuclear-armed Israel is neither more nor less a threat to the peace of the world than, say, a nuclear-armed Syria. Do serious people actually believe this? Well, yes. They also believe that if Israel disarmed unilaterally, Israel's enemies would have no reason to seek WMD. Even this argument is disingenuous: It isn't so much that Vanunu's admirers want Israel to disarm so that others may follow; it's that they want only Israel to disarm. Thus Vanunu, who in 1981 protested the destruction of the Osirak reactor, now says he wants to see Dimona destroyed just as Osirak was. And The Guardian, which claims in its Vanunu leader to advocate a nuclear-free Middle East, editorialized in September 2003 that "Iran does have one deeply persuasive reason for acquiring nuclear arms: national security." "Iran's fears are real," went the title. Apparently, however, Israel's fears are not real. ZEH HAFUCH, say Israelis: It's upside down. In the imagination of much of the West today, Palestinian terrorism is a response to Israeli militarism; Yasser Arafat is a democrat and Ariel Sharon is a strongman; and the Arab and Muslim worlds only seek WMD to defend against aggressive Israel. It is in this climate of moral inversion and reverse causality that a man like Vanunu can emerge as a hero to right-thinkers everywhere. The rest of us should think hard about what that means before the shock is absorbed without being felt. Secrecy Agreement with the Security Department upon commencing position 1. I, the undersigned, declare that I have been informed and it has been brought to my attention, that the following falls under the security category - "top secret" whose contents could cause very serious and continuous damage to the state if it fell into enemy hands or any unauthorized persons. 2. In accordance with this, I pledge myself to strict observance of the law and security of the state (Amendment to the Criminal Code 1977) and furthermore, to carry out all the security rules and procedures that have been enacted - and those that may be enacted in the future - by the unit for special operations responsible for dealing with the list of security procedures and their safeguarding. 3. I pledge 4. I am fully aware that my commitments under Section 3 of the above, does not detract from any Law, amendment or all other existing rules, but rather adds to them. 5. I am fully aware that should I transgress on any of the above instructions, I can expect to be brought to justice. Posted by Ruth at 11:37 PM | ISRAEL NEWS
April 24, 2004
UN envoy to Iraq: Israel's policy 'poisonous'
UN envoy to Iraq: Israel's policy 'poisonous' THE KOFI KLATCH
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- "Israel's aggressiveness and the suffering condition of the Palestinians is the greatest poison in the Middle East," said United Nations special envoy to Iraq Lakhdar Brahimi, adding that many share his views, Israel Radio reported Friday. In an interview with a French radio station, Brahimi said that there is a clear connection between the situation in Iraq and Israel's policy. Brahimi criticized US President George W. Bush's support of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and his unilateral disengagement plan. Fred Eckhard, spokesman for UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, said that Brahimi's statements are his personal opinions and do not represent the opinion of Secretary-General Annan. Posted by Ruth at 01:00 AM | UNITED NATIONS
April 21, 2004
Andalusian Myth, Eurabian Reality Inventing the past, and denying the present. A Jihad Watch EXCLUSIVE essay by Bat Ye'or and Andrew G. Bostom
April 21, 2004 On Sunday, April 18, 2004, this revealing exchange took place between outgoing Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar, and interviewer Chris Wallace of FoxNews: Jose Maria Aznar (through the translator): “So this means that Iraq, for them, was just a pretext. In the eyes of Islamic terrorism, it looks at the West, and Spain is a very special part of this parcel, because they feel that to recover Spain is to get back some of their territory.” Islamic scholar Mordechai Nisan recently discussed the contention by the founder of the Institute of Islamic Education, M. Amir Ali, that Medieval Spain had actually been "liberated" by Muslim forces, who "deposed its tyrants". Nisan extrapolated this ahistorical narrative line, and pondered: "Reflecting on March 11, as Muslim terrorism killed 200 and wounded 1,400 in Madrid, one wonders whether one day this event will also not be commemorated as a liberating moment. " Events surrounding the completion of the new Granada Mosque, which was marked by celebratory announcements July 10, 2003 of a “…return of Islam to Spain”, were also consistent with Nisan's dark musings. At a conference entitled “Islam in Europe” that accompanied the opening of the mosque, disconcerting statements were made by European Muslim leaders. Specifically, the keynote speaker at this conference, Umar Ibrahim Vadillo, a Spanish Muslim leader, encouraged Muslims to cause an economic collapse of Western economies (by ceasing to use Western currencies, and switching to gold dinars), while the German Muslim leader Abu Bakr Rieger told Muslim attendees to avoid adapting their Islamic religious practices to accommodate European (i.e., Western Enlightenment?) values. Shortly after this event, a Wall Street Journal editorialist in a grossly distorted encomium to Muslim Spain, mentioned the “pan-confessional humanism” of Andalusian Islam, and even asserted: "one could argue that the oft-bewailed missing ‘reformation’ of Islam was under way there until it was aborted by the Inquisition." María Rosa Menocal, Yale Professor of Spanish and Portuguese, in her 2002 hagiography of Muslim Spain, The Ornament of the World, has further maintained that "the new Islamic polity not only allowed Jews and Christians to survive, but following Qur’anic mandate, by and large protected them." We believe that reiterating these ahistorical, roseate claims about Muslim Spain abets the contemporary Islamist agenda, and retards the evolution of a liberal, reformed “Euro-Islam” fully compatible with post-Enlightenment Western values. Iberia (Spain) was conquered in 710-716 AD by Arab tribes originating from northern, central and southern Arabia. Massive Berber and Arab immigration, and the colonization of the Iberian peninsula, followed the conquest. Most churches were converted into mosques. Although the conquest had been planned and conducted jointly with a strong faction of royal Iberian Christian dissidents, including a bishop, it proceeded as a classical jihad with massive pillages, enslavement, deportations and killings. Toledo, which had first submitted to the Arabs in 711 or 712, revolted in 713. The town was punished by pillage and all the notables had their throats cut. In 730, the Cerdagne (in Septimania, near Barcelona) was ravaged and a bishop burned alive. In the regions under stable Islamic control, Jews and Christians were tolerated as dhimmis - like elsewhere in other Islamic lands - and could not build new churches or synagogues nor restore the old ones. Segregated in special quarters, they had to wear discriminatory clothing. Subjected to heavy taxes, the Christian peasantry formed a servile class attached to the Arab domains; many abandoned their land and fled to the towns. Harsh reprisals with mutilations and crucifixions* would sanction the Mozarab (Christian dhimmis) calls for help from the Christian kings. Moreover, if one dhimmi harmed a Muslim, the whole community would lose its status of protection, leaving it open to pillage, enslavement and arbitrary killing. By the end of the eighth century, the rulers of North Africa and of Andalusia had introduced Malikism, one of the most rigorous schools of Islamic jurisprudence, and subsequently repressed the other Muslim schools of law. Three quarters of a century ago, at a time when political correctness was not dominating historical publication and discourse, Evariste Lévi-Provençal, the pre-eminent scholar of Andalusia, wrote: "The Muslim Andalusian state thus appears from its earliest origins as the defender and champion of a jealous orthodoxy, more and more ossified in a blind respect for a rigid doctrine, suspecting and condemning in advance the least effort of rational speculation." The humiliating status imposed on the dhimmis and the confiscation of their land provoked many revolts, punished by massacres, as in Toledo (761, 784-86, 797). After another Toledan revolt in 806, seven hundred inhabitants were executed. Insurrections erupted in Saragossa from 781 to 881, Cordova (805), Merida (805-813, 828 and the following year, and later in 868), and yet again in Toledo (811-819); the insurgents were crucified, as prescribed in Qur’an 5:33*. The revolt in Cordova of 818 was crushed by three days of massacres and pillage, with 300 notables crucified and 20 000 families expelled. Feuding was endemic in the Andalusian cities between the different sectors of the population: Arab and Berber colonizers, Iberian Muslim converts (Muwalladun) and Christian dhimmis (Mozarabs). There were rarely periods of peace in the Amirate of Cordova (756-912), nor later. Al-Andalus represented the land of jihad par excellence. Every year, sometimes twice a year, raiding expeditions were sent to ravage the Christian Spanish kingdoms to the north, the Basque regions, or France and the Rhone valley, bringing back booty and slaves. Andalusian corsairs attacked and invaded along the Sicilian and Italian coasts, even as far as the Aegean Islands, looting and burning as they went. Thousands of people were deported to slavery in Andalusia, where the caliph kept a militia of tens of thousand of Christian slaves brought from all parts of Christian Europe (the Saqaliba), and a harem filled with captured Christian women. Society was sharply divided along ethnic and religious lines, with the Arab tribes at the top of the hierarchy, followed by the Berbers who were never recognized as equals, despite their Islamization; lower in the scale came the mullawadun converts and, at the very bottom, the dhimmi Christians and Jews. The Andalusian Maliki jurist Ibn Abdun (d. 1134) offered these telling legal opinions regarding Jews and Christians in Seville around 1100 C.E.: "No…Jew or Christian may be allowed to wear the dress of an aristocrat, nor of a jurist, nor of a wealthy individual; on the contrary they must be detested and avoided. It is forbidden to [greet] them with the [expression], ‘Peace be upon you’. In effect, ‘Satan has gained possession of them, and caused them to forget God’s warning. They are the confederates of Satan’s party; Satan’s confederates will surely be the losers!’ (Qur’an 58:19 [modern Dawood translation]). A distinctive sign must be imposed upon them in order that they may be recognized and this will be for them a form of disgrace." Ibn Abdun also forbade the selling of scientific books to dhimmis, under the pretext that they translated them and attributed them to their co-religionists and bishops. In fact, plagiarism is difficult to prove since whole Jewish and Christian libraries were looted and destroyed. Another prominent Andalusian jurist, Ibn Hazm of Cordoba (d. 1064), wrote that Allah has established the infidels’ ownership of their property merely to provide booty for Muslims. In Granada, the Jewish viziers Samuel Ibn Naghrela and his son Joseph, who protected the Jewish community, were both assassinated between 1056 to 1066, followed by the annihilation of the Jewish population by the local Muslims. It is estimated that up to five thousand Jews perished in the pogrom by Muslims that accompanied the 1066 assassination. This figure equals or exceeds the number of Jews reportedly killed by the Crusaders during their pillage of the Rhineland, some thirty years later, at the outset of the First Crusade. The Granada pogrom was likely to have been incited, in part, by the bitter anti-Jewish ode of Abu Ishaq, a well known Muslim jurist and poet of the times, who wrote: "Put them back where they belong and reduce them to the lowest of the low..turn your eyes to other [Muslim] countries and you will find the Jews there are outcast dogs...Do not consider it a breach of faith to kill them...They have violated our covenant with them so how can you be held guilty against the violators?" The Muslim Berber Almohads in Spain and North Africa (1130-1232) wreaked enormous destruction on both the Jewish and Christian populations. This devastation- massacre, captivity, and forced conversion- was described by the Jewish chronicler Abraham Ibn Daud, and the poet Abraham Ibn Ezra. Suspicious of the sincerity of the Jewish converts to Islam, Muslim “inquisitors” (i.e., antedating their Christian Spanish counterparts by three centuries) removed the children from such families, placing them in the care of Muslim educators. Maimonides, the renowned philosopher and physician, experienced the Almohad persecutions, and had to flee Cordoba with his entire family in 1148, temporarily residing in Fez — disguised as a Muslim — before finding asylum in Fatimid Egypt. Indeed, although Maimonides is frequently referred to as a paragon of Jewish achievement facilitated by the enlightened rule of Andalusia, his own words debunk this utopian view of the Islamic treatment of Jews: "..the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us...Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they.." A valid summary assessment of interfaith relationships in Muslim Spain, and the contemporary currents responsible for obfuscating that history, can be found in Richard Fletcher's engaging Moorish Spain. Mr. Fletcher offers these sobering, unassailable observations: "The witness of those who lived through the horrors of the Berber conquest, of the Andalusian fitnah in the early eleventh century, of the Almoravid invasion- to mention only a few disruptive episodes- must give it [i.e., the roseate view of Muslim Spain] the lie. The simple and verifiable historical truth is that Moorish Spain was more often a land of turmoil than it was of tranquility...Tolerance? Ask the Jews of Granada who were massacred in 1066, or the Christians who were deported by the Almoravids to Morocco in 1126 (like the Moriscos five centuries later)…In the second half of the twentieth century a new agent of obfuscation makes its appearance: the guilt of the liberal conscience, which sees the evils of colonialism- assumed rather than demonstrated-foreshadowed in the Christian conquest of al-Andalus and the persecution of the Moriscos (but not, oddly, in the Moorish conquest and colonization). Stir the mix well together and issue it free to credulous academics and media persons throughout the western world. Then pour it generously over the truth…in the cultural conditions that prevail in the west today the past has to be marketed, and to be successfully marketed it has to be attractively packaged. Medieval Spain in a state of nature lacks wide appeal. Self-indulgent fantasies of glamour...do wonders for sharpening up its image. But Moorish Spain was not a tolerant and enlightened society even in its most cultivated epoch." The socio-political history of Andalusia was characterized by a particularly oppressive dhimmitude that is completely incompatible with modern notions of equality between individuals, regardless of religious faith. At the dawn of the 21st century, we must insist that Muslims in the West adopt post-Enlightenment societal standards of equality, not "tolerance," abandoning forever their hagiography of the brutal, discriminatory standards practiced by the classical Maliki jurists of "enlightened" Andalusia. *The Noble Qur'an- Three esteemed translations, online: Bat Ye'or, www.dhimmitude.org, www.dhimmi.org , is the author most recently of Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide, and the forthcoming Eurabia. Andrew Bostom is co-editor with Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer of the forthcoming Prometheus Books essay collection, The Myth of Islamic Tolerance.
Posted by Ruth at 11:28 PM | SUGGESTED READING
UNITED NATIONS VERSUS ISRAEL
U.N. vs. Israel Telling standards. By Anne Bayefsky April 20, 2004, 8:48 a.m. http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/bayefsky200404200848.asp
Hamas has been declared a terrorist organization by the U.S. State Department, as well as the European Union, Canada, and Australia. The 1988 Covenant of Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, speaks for itself. It begins "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it." It continues: "There is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are all a waste of time and vain endeavors." Its violent message is invoked in the name of defeating the "plan of World Zionism" "embodied in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion." In Rantissi's words of July 2001: "I urge all the brigades to...target the Israeli political leaders and members of parliament..."; "the Hamas political leadership has freed the hand of the brigades to do whatever they want against the brothers of monkeys and pigs." In plain language, the Hamas aim to obliterate the Jewish state is about pure, unadulterated antisemitism. Rantissi himself (and others, such as Yassin) was named by the State Department as a "specially designated global terrorist." Last month the Bank of England froze the assets of Rantissi because "the Treasury have reasonable grounds for suspecting that...Rantissi, is or may be a person, who commits, facilitates or participates in" "the commission of acts or terrorism." As soon as Rantissi took over the leadership of Hamas on March 23, 2004, after the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) killed Yassin, he called for further bloodshed, "The doors are wide open for attacks inside the Zionist entity." Israelis keeping the grim statistics have counted at least 425 Hamas attacks killing 377 Israelis and wounding 2,076 in less than three and a half years of violence, including 52 separate suicide attacks. Hamas terrorists have blown themselves up among teenagers at a discotheque, families at a Passover seder, in restaurants, in a pedestrian mall, and on commuter buses. Only one day prior to Rantissi's death Hamas claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing which killed another Israeli. The international legal framework, therefore, could not be clearer. Rantissi was a combatant in a war. His killing was not "extrajudicial" because the legal term, by definition, applies only to individuals entitled to judicial process before being targeted. Combatants — including the unlawful combatants of Hamas who seek to make themselves indistinguishable from the civilian population — are not entitled to such prior judicial process. Furthermore, the manual on the laws of armed conflict of the International Committee of the Red Cross, states that civilians who take a direct part in hostilities forfeit their immunity from attack. Even beyond that, judicial process in these instances is not an option, since it would place both IDF and Palestinian civilians at much greater risk of harm. The overriding legal limit on the conduct of war and the targeting of combatants like Rantissi is the rule of proportionality. In the words of the Geneva Conventions, an attack on a military target "which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life" is prohibited if "excessive." The likelihood of civilian casualties must be carefully considered prior to taking action. With zero civilian casualties (the only deaths being that of Rantissi and two Hamas accomplices, one a bodyguard, the other his 27-year-old son), the Israeli action could not have been more precise, and hence, proportionate. The United Nations response to the legality of the killing of Rantissi (and Yassin) is therefore enormously revealing. U.N. condemns Israel's assassination of...Yassin...UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan led the way: "The Secretary-General strongly condemns Israel's assassination of...Yassin...etc. Almost immediately following Yassin's death (along with eight others at least four of whom were also Hamas terrorists), on March 22, 2004, the U.N. Human Rights Commission convened a special sitting. This move was despite the fact that the commission was already in session, and at that very moment set to consider the only country-specific agenda item at the commission for the past 34 years — on Israel. The suffering of Yassin's victims, or the current genocidal plight of Sudanese in the Darfur region — reported by international agencies to involve 10,000 dead in the past year, and which may now have reached 1,000 dead per week — didn't move the commission to hold a special sitting. But they did see fit to schedule an extra three hours to denounce Israel over the death of one man — a man who personally instigated and authorized suicide bombing, ordered the firing of missiles at Israeli communities, and repeatedly exhorted his followers to "armed struggle" against Israelis and Jews "everywhere." Having glorified the terrorist in particular, the commission went on to sanction terrorism in general. On April 15, the commission adopted a resolution, sponsored by the Organization of the Islamic Conference, which aimed to condone suicide bombing by referring to "the legitimacy of the struggle [against] foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle" and the "right...to resist." The resolution passed by a large majority. Shortly thereafter, resolutions which would have criticized Zimbabwe, China, and Russia (in relation to events in Chechnya) were either blocked by procedural maneuvers or voted down. The total tally of country specific votes coming from the 2004 Commission now stands at: While those other country resolutions were being considered, the U.N. hosted a two-day meeting on Israel's security fence, April 15 and 16, directly across the hall from the commission. The juxtaposition was staggering. The same facilities were provided for a meeting on Israel as were provided for human rights on the remainder of the planet. And hours before the meeting ended on its second day, the "Final Document" — condemning Israel — was distributed to the public claiming to be based on discussions which had not yet occurred. Sooner or later one can only hope a light will go on. Whatever superficial lip service is paid to the contrary, according to the U.N., Israel has no right of self-defense. Everything the U.N. does in the context of the Arab-Israeli conflict — whether it be calls for the return to 1967's indefensible borders, declarations that Jerusalem is occupied territory, demands for the return of Palestinian refugees ending the Jewishness of the state, or efforts to isolate and demonize Israel as the worst human-rights violator in the world today — emanates from the standpoint that the Jewish side is not entitled to fight back.
Posted by Ruth at 10:34 AM | UNITED NATIONS
STINGING REBUKE BY STATE'S DEP SEC ARMITAGE W/ IRAQ
Tuesday, April 20, 2004 1:18 PM
Thank you all very much. ### END.
April 20, 2004
Oil-for-Terror ?
Oil-for-Terror ? There appears to be much worse news to uncover in the Oil-for-Food scandal. By Claudia Rosett April 18, 2004. http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/rosett200404182336.asp
It's time to talk about Oil-for-Terror. Especially with the U.N.'s own investigation into Oil-for-Food now taking shape, and more congressional hearings in the works, it is high time to focus on the likelihood that Saddam may have fiddled Oil-for-Food contracts not only to pad his own pockets, buy pals, and acquire clandestine arms — but also to fund terrorist groups, quite possibly including al Qaeda. There are at least two links documented already. Both involve oil buyers picked by Saddam and approved by the U.N. One was a firm with close ties to a Liechtenstein trust that has since been designated by the U.N. itself as "belonging to or affiliated with Al Qaeda." The other was a Swiss-registered subsidiary of a Saudi oil firm that had close dealings with the Taliban during Osama bin Laden's 1990's heyday in Afghanistan. These cases were reported in a carefully researched story published last June by Marc Perelman of the New York-based Forward (http://www.forward.com/issues/2003/03.06.20/news2.html) , relying not only on interviews, but on corporate-registry documents and U.S. and U.N. terror-watch lists. It was an important dispatch but sank quickly from sight. At that stage, the U.N. was still busy praising its own $100-billion-plus Oil-for-Food program, even while trying quietly to strip out the huge graft overlay from the remaining $10 billion or so in contracts suddenly slated for handover to the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). That was shortly before the records kept in Baghdad by Saddam began surfacing in such damning profusion that Secretary-General Kofi Annan was finally forced last month to stop stonewalling and agree to an independent investigation — though just how independent remains to be seen. As it now appears, Oil-for-Food pretty much evolved into a BCCI (http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/1992_rpt/bcci/) with a U.N. label. The stated aim of the program, which ran from 1996-2003, was to reduce the squeeze of sanctions on ordinary Iraqis by allowing Saddam to sell oil strictly to buy food and other relief supplies. As Oil-for-Food worked in practice, however, the program gave Saddam rich opportunity not only to pad his own pockets, but to fund almost anything and anyone else he chose, while the U.N. assured the world that all was well. (For the full saga, see my article in the May issue of Commentary , "The Oil-for-Food Scam: What Did Kofi Annan Know and When Did He Know It? " : http://www.commentarymagazine.com/SpecialArticle.asp?article=A11705017_1). For a sample of the latitude enjoyed by Saddam, there's Treasury's announcement last week that the U.S., in its latest round of efforts to recover Saddam's loot, is asking U.N. member states to freeze the assets of a worldwide group of eight front companies and five individuals that were "procuring weapons, skimming funds, operating for the Iraqi Intelligence Service, and doing business in support of the fallen Saddam Hussein regime." The list includes a Dubai-based firm, Al Wasel & Babel General Trading, a major contractor under the Oil-for-Food program that turned out to be a front company set up by Saddam's regime specifically to sell goods (and procure arms) via the program — right under the U.N.'s approving eye. Indeed, Al Wasel & Babel's website boasts that the company was set up in 1999 especially to "cater to the needs of Iraq Government under 'Oil for Food Program.' "
In this context, which suggests just how easily money might also have been passed right along to terrorists, Perelman's tale of terrorist links deserves a reprise. We will get to that below. The details are complex, which in matters of terrorist financing tends to be part of the point. Complications provide cover. So before we dive into a welter of names and links, let's take a look at how Oil-for-Food was configured and run by the U.N. in ways that left the program wide open not only to the abuses and debaucheries by now well publicized, but also to the funneling of money to terrorists — if Saddam so chose. And though this avenue remains to be explored, it is at least worth noting that the explosive growth of Oil-for-Food — from a limited program for Iraqi relief introduced in 1996 to a kickback-wracked fiesta of fraud and money-laundering by the late 1990s and beyond — coincided neatly with the period in which al Qaeda really took off. It was in 1998 that Oil-for-Food began to expand and more fully accommodate Saddam's scams. If allegations detailed in a Wall Street Journal story on March 11 prove correct, 1998 was also the year that Saddam may have begun sending oil to a Panamanian front company linked to the head of the program, Benon Sevan. And it was in 1998 that Osama bin Laden issued his fatwa, specifically denouncing U.S. intervention in Iraq and urging Muslims to "Kill the Americans and plunder their money wherever and whenever they can find it." To be sure, there is no evidence of a causal connection. But there is certainly room to wonder whether Saddam, a master of manipulation, on record as sharing bin Laden's sentiments at least in regard to U.S. involvement in Iraq, would not have been tempted to involve himself in the terrorist boom of the next few years. In principle he was still under sanctions, but Oil-for-Food gave him loopholes through which billions of dollars could pass. As Oil-for-Food worked in practice, there were two glaring flaws that lent themselves to manipulation by Saddam. One was the U.N. decision to allow Saddam to choose his own buyers of oil and suppliers of goods — an arrangement that Annan himself helped set up during negotiations in Baghdad in the mid-1990s, shortly before he was promoted to Secretary-General. The other problem was the U.N.'s policy of treating Saddam's deals as highly confidential, putting deference to Saddam's privacy above the public's right to know. Even the Iraqi people were denied access to the most basic information about the deals that were in theory being done in their name. The identities of the contractors, the amounts paid, the quantity and quality of goods, the sums, fees, interest, and precise transactions involved in the BNP Paribas bank accounts — all were kept confidential between Saddam and the U.N. With Saddam allowed to assemble a secret roster of favorite business partners, the only hope of preserving any integrity under Oil-for-Food was that the U.N. would ferociously monitor every deal, and veto anything remotely suspect. Instead, the Security Council looked for weapons-related goods; the Secretariat looked for ways to expand the program (while collecting its three-percent commission on Saddam's oil sales); and Saddam looked for — and found — ways to pervert the program. To grasp just how easily the U.N. let Saddam turn Oil-for-Food to his own ends, it helps to see his lists of contractors, which the U.N. kept confidential. Luckily, some lists have leaked, and in paging through the wonderland of Saddam's U.N.-approved clientele, including many hundreds of oil buyers and goods suppliers, what one finds is a vast web of business partners that — had the U.N. followed any reasonable policy of disclosure — should have set off major alarms from beginning to end of the program. Why, for instance, was Saddam allowed to peddle oil (especially under-priced oil — yielding fat profits) to clusters of what were clearly middlemen in such financial hideouts as Cyprus, Liechtenstein, and Panama? Was it wise to let him kick off the program by including among the first 50 or so oil buyers a full dozen based in Switzerland? Did nobody at the U.N. wonder about his choice of business partners — such as a holding company in the Seychelles; the Burmese state lumber enterprise; and the Center for Joint Projects at the executive committee of the Belarus-Russia Union? On the suppliers' list, the entries are no less intriguing. To take just one typical example: On the vague and generic lists provided by the U.N. to the public, you can see that Saddam bought both milk and oil-industry equipment from Russia. Once you see the in-house spreadsheet, however, what emerges is that Saddam bought not only oil equipment, but more than $5 million worth of milk from a Russian state oil company, Zarubezhneft. What look like diverse suppliers in various countries in some cases track back to fronts elsewhere, or to parent companies that in the graft-rich environment of Oil-for-Food clearly had enough of an inside track with Saddam to garner hundreds of millions worth of business — hidden at least to some extent from both their competitors and the wider public, which was asked to trust the U.N. In other words, Saddam did pretty much what he wanted, and the U.N. role seems to have consisted largely of occupying one more slot — and not a terribly vigilant one — on his patronage payroll.
Which brings us to back to terrorist ties, and Perelman's story of June 20, 2003, for which the reporting checks out. In brief (hang on for the ride): One link ran from a U.N.-approved buyer of Saddam's oil, Galp International Trading Corp., involved near the very start of the program, to a shell company called ASAT Trust in Liechtenstein, linked to a bank in the Bahamas, Bank Al Taqwa. Both ASAT Trust and Bank Al Taqwa were designated on the U.N.'s own terror-watch list, shortly after 9/11, as entities "belonging to or affiliated with Al Qaeda." This Liechtenstein trust and Bahamian bank were linked to two closely connected terrorist financiers, Youssef Nada and Idris Ahmed Nasreddin — both of whom were described in 2002 by Treasury as "part of an extensive financial network providing support to Al Qaeda and other terrorist related organizations," and both of whom appear on the U.N.'s list of individuals belonging to or affiliated with al Qaeda. The other tie between Oil-for-Food and al Qaeda, noted by Perelman, ran through another of Saddam's handpicked, Oil-for-Food oil buyers, Swiss-based Delta Services — which bought oil from Saddam in 2000 and 2001, at the height of Saddam's scam for grafting money out of Oil-for-Food by way of under-priced oil contracts. Now shut down, Delta Services was a subsidiary of a Saudi Arabian firm, Delta Oil, which had close ties to the Taliban during Osama bin Laden's heyday in Afghanistan in the late 1990s. In discussions of graft via Oil-for-Food, it has been assumed that the windfall profits were largely kicked back to Saddam, or perhaps used to sway prominent politicians and buy commercial lobbying clout. But that begs further inquiry. There was every opportunity here for Saddam not solely to pocket the plunder, but to send it along to whomever he chose — once he had tapped into the appropriate networks. Are there other terrorist links? Did Saddam actually send money for terrorist uses through those named by the Forward ? Given the more than $100 billion that coursed through Oil-for-Food, it would seem a very good idea to at least try to find out. And while there has been great interest so far in the stunning sums of money involved in this fraud, there has been rather less focus on the potential terrorist connections. While Treasury has been ransacking the planet for Saddam's plunder, there is, as far as I have been able to discover, no investigation so far in motion, or even in the making, focused specifically on terrorist ties in those U.N. lists of Saddam's favored partners. Indeed, the whereabouts of the full U.N. Oil-for-Food records themselves remain, to say the least, confusing. By some official U.N. accounts, they were all turned over to the Coalition Provisional Authority; by others they were not. A U.N. source explained to me last week that some of the records might be in boxes somewhere on Long Island; yet another says they were sent over to the U.S. Mission to the U.N. Especially crucial, one might suppose, would be the bank records, which should show into which accounts, and where, the Oil-for-Food funds were paid. But what is clear is that no one has so far sat down with access to the full records and begun piecing together the labyrinth of Saddam's financing with an eye, specifically, to potential terrorist ties. If there is a silver lining to all this, it is that those contract lists and bank records could be a treasure trove of information — an insider tour of what Saddam's regime knew about the dark side of global finance. There are plenty of signs that the secret U.N. lists became, in effect, Saddam's little black book (papered over with a blue U.N. label). Though perhaps "little" is not the correct word. The labyrinth was vast. The wisest move by the U.N., the U.S., or any other authority with full access to these records, would be to make them fully public — thus recruiting help from observers worldwide, not least the media, in digging through the hazardous waste left by Oil-for-Food. The issue is not simply how much Saddam pilfered, or even whether he bought up half the governments of Russia and France — but whether, under the U.N. charade of supervision, he availed himself of the huge opportunities to fund carnage under the cover of U.N. sanctions and humanitarian relief. We are way overdue to pick up that trail.
Posted by Ruth at 11:29 AM | UNITED NATIONS
April 15, 2004
SHARON’S BETRAYAL AND OUR ADMINISTRATION’S DOUBLE VISION
This release by Americans for a Safe Israel was sent in response to the agreement and letters of intent between President Bush and Prime Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon.
In response to the exchange of letters between Prime Minister Sharon and President Bush on April 14, Herbert Zweibon, Chairman of Americans For a Safe Israel/AFSI, asserts, “In order to shore up his flagging political fortunes, Israel’s Prime Minister has betrayed the Zionist principles on which he served the nation as general and on which he ran for public office.” Zweibon continues, “President Bush, so resolute in Iraq, displays a double vision. With one eye he clearly sees that Arabs recently liberated from a murderous regime have turned their violence and primitive hatred to the very forces which attempt to bring stability and a better life to their country. With the other eye he has the “vision” of a democratic Palestinian Arab state accepting Israel, renouncing terrorism and living peacefully side by side with a Jewish state. The paltry “victory” of keeping some of the Jewish towns of Judea and Samaria and refusing Palestinian Arabs the so-called right of return to Israel is mere gift-wrapping on a box of explosives. There exists within the 1967 borders a large Arab population, which can easily be mobilized by the prospect of driving the Jews out. An Arab sovereignty in the high terrain of Judea and Samaria, fueled by jihad, supported and armed by all Arab nations, and encouraged by the entire Moslem world could easily overrun the remaining communities (reduced to "enclaves" by Sharon's retreat) and commence a deadly war against the Jewish state. In fact, with Gaza in Arab hands, Syria in control of the north, an enthusiastic partner in Egypt from the south, Israel will be caught in a pincer movement of Arab troops.” AFSI’s chairman calls on all Israel’s supporters to denounce and reject this ill conceived and dangerous plan. "It abrogates Israel's patrimony and its historic rights. It glosses over the expulsion of 8,000 Jews who built their homes and livelihoods in Gaza at the behest of various Labor governments. The plan also calls for the expulsion of over 150,000 more Jews from Judea and Samaria, placing the state in existential danger. Every time Israel makes concessions, the result is an escalation of terrorism, flouted agreements, and more demands. The deadly results of Oslo should have set the bar, but utopians here and in Israel just keep moving the bar lower." Posted by Ruth at 10:03 PM | ISRAEL NEWS
April 14, 2004
The Mask Slips in Gaza
Hugh Fitzgerald is a frequent contributor to OUTPOST and will have an article in the May issue. The Mask Slips in Gaza
No Krazy Glue will keep it in place. It is clear that even under the As non-Muslims, Jews under Islam lived lives that were extremely difficult. The desire to ensure that all non-Muslims who are not killed, or who do not The difference between Hamas and the P.A. is like that between "extremist" The goals of the PA have always been the same as those of Hamas. It will be Europeans seemingly incapable of recognizing the Jihad, of understanding
Hugh Fitzgerald is a lecturer on the manipulation of language for political
April 13, 2004
'A House Divided Cannot Stand'U.S. Senator Zell Miller
U.S. Senator Zell Miller After watching the harsh acrimony generated by the September 11 Commission – which, let me say at the outset, is made up of good and able members – I’ve come to seriously question this panel’s usefulness. I believe it will ultimately play a role in doing great harm to this country, for its unintended consequences, I fear, will be to energize our enemies and demoralize our troops. After being drowned in a tidal wave of all who didn’t do enough before 9/11, I have come to believe that the Commission should issue a report that says: “No one did enough in the past. No one did near enough.” Then thank everyone for serving, send them home and let’s get on with the job of protecting this country in the future. Tragically, these hearings have proved to be a very divisive diversion for this country. Tragically, they have devoured valuable time, looking backwards when we should be looking forward. Can you imagine handling the attack on Pearl Harbor this way? Can you imagine Congress, the media and the public standing for this kind of political gamesmanship and finger pointing after that “day of infamy” in 1941? Some partisans tried that ploy, but they were soon quieted by the patriots who understood how important it was to get on with the war and take the battle to America’s enemies, and not dwell on what FDR knew when. You see, back then the highest priority was to win a war, not win an election. That’s what made them “The Greatest Generation.” I realize that many well-meaning Americans see the hearings as “democracy in action.” Years ago, when I was teaching political science, I probably would have had my class watching it live on television and using that very phrase with them. There are also the not-so-well-meaning political operatives who see these hearings as an opportunity to “score cheap points.” Then, there are the Media Meddlers who see this as “great theater” that can be played out on the evening news and on endless talk shows for a week or more. Congressional hearings have long been one of Washington’s most entertaining pastimes. Joe McCarthy. Watergate. Iran Contra. They all kept us glued to the TV, and made for conversation around the water coolers and arguments over a beer at the corner pub. A Congressional hearing in Washington, D.C. is the ultimate aphrodisiac for political groupies and partisan punks. But, it’s not the groupies, punks and television-sotted American public that I’m worried about. This latter crowd can get excited and divided over just about anything. Whether it’s some off-key wanna-be dreaming of being the American Idol, or what brainless bimbo The Bachelor or Average Joe will choose or who will Donald Trump fire next week. No, it is the real enemies of America that I’m concerned about. These evil killers who right now, right now are gleefully watching the shrill partisan finger pointing of these hearings and grinning like a mule eating briars. They see this as a major split within the Great Satan America. They see anger, they see division, instability, bickering, peevishness and dissension. They see the President of the United States hammered unmercifully. They see all this and they are greatly, greatly encouraged. We should not be doing anything to encourage our enemies in this battle between good and evil. Yet, these hearings, in my opinion, are doing just that. We are playing with fire. We’re playing directly into the hands of our enemy by allowing these hearings to become the great divider they have become. Dick Clarke’s book and its release coinciding with these hearings have done this country a tremendous disservice, and someday we will reap its whirlwind. Long ago, Sir Walter Scott observed that revenge is “the sweetest morsel that ever was cooked in hell.” The vindictive Clarke has now had his revenge, but what kind of hell has he, his CBS publisher and his axe-to-grind advocates unleashed? These hearings, coming on the heels of the election the terrorists influenced in Spain, bolster and energize our evil enemies as they have not been energized since 9/11. Chances are very good that these evil enemies of America will attempt to influence our 2004 election in a similar dramatic way as they did Spain’s. And to think that could never be in this country is to stick your head in the sand. That is why the sooner we stop this endless bickering over the past and join together to prepare for the future, the better off this country will be. There are some things - whether this city believes it or not - that are just more important than political campaigns. The recent past is so ripe for political second-guessing “gotcha” and Monday morning quarter-backing. And it is so tempting in an election year. We should not allow ourselves to indulge that temptation. We should put our country first. Every administration from Jimmy Carter to George W. Bush bears some of the blame. Dick Clarke bears a big heap of it because it was he who was in the catbird’s seat to do something about it for more than a decade. Tragically, it was the decade in which we did the least. We did nothing after terrorists attacked the World Trade Center in 1993, killing six and injuring more than 1,000 Americans. We did nothing in 1996 when sixteen U.S. servicemen were killed in the bombing of the Khobar Towers. When our embassies were attacked in 1998, killing 263 people, our only response was to fire a few missiles on an empty tent. Is it any wonder? Is it any wonder that after that decade of weak-willed responses to that murderous terror, our enemies thought we would never fight back? In the 1990's is when Dick Clarke should have resigned. In the 1990's is when he should have apologized. That is when he should have written his book. That is, if he really had America’s best interest at heart. Some will say, “We owe it to the families” to get more information about what happened in the past and I can understand that. But no amount of finger-pointing will bring our victims back. So, now we owe it to future families and all of America now in jeopardy not to encourage more terrorists, resulting in even more grieving families, perhaps many more over the ones of 9/11. It’s obvious to me that this country is rapidly dividing itself into two camps: the wimps and the warriors. The ones who want to argue and assess and appease, and the ones who want to carry this fight to our enemies and kill him them before they kill us. And, in case you haven’t figured it out, I proudly belong to the latter. This is a time like no other in the history of this country, and this country is being crippled with petty partisan politics of the worst possible kind. In time of war, it is not just unpatriotic; it is stupid, and it is criminal. So, I pray that all this time, all this energy, all this talk and all this attention could be focused on the future instead of the past. I pray we would stop pointing fingers, assigning blame and wringing our hands about what happened on that day David McCullogh has called “the worst day in our history” more than two years ago. And instead, pour all of our energy into how we can kill these terrorists before they kill us - again. For make no mistake about it. They watch these hearings. They are scheming and smiling about the distraction and the divisiveness they see in America. And while they may not know who said it years ago in America, they know instinctively that a house divided cannot stand. There is one other group that we should remember is listening to all of this - our troops. And I turned to the Division’s Sergeant Major, the top enlisted man in the division, a big, burly, 6-foot-3, 240 pound African American and I said, “That’s good, but how do you sustain that kind of morale?” Without hesitation he narrowed his eyes, and he looked at me and said “The morale will stay high just as long as these troops know the people back home support us.” Just as long as the people back home support us. What kind of message are these hearings and the outrageously political speeches on the floor of the Senate yesterday sending to those marvelous young Americans in the uniform of our country? I say Unite America! Before it is too late! Put aside these petty partisan differences when it comes to the protection of our people. Argue and argue and argue and debate and debate and debate over all the other things – jobs and education and the deficit and the environment – but please, please do not use the lives of Americans and the security of this country as a cheap-shot political talking point. Finish It or Forget It
Finish It or Forget It This is a War—not terrorism, insurgency, or uprising Victor Davis Hanson For about a year now, a baby-faced grotesque thug, Sadr, dressed up in a cleric's robes and backed by two or three thousand gangsters has held world-wide televised press conferences as he pompously boasted about his promised imposition of Iranian-style theocracy upon 26 million other Iraqis. There is a lesson in the saga of Sadr here that we really must relearn about this entire war. The United States, because it is militarily powerful and humane in the way that it exercises that force, usually can pretty much do what it wishes in this war against terrorists. In every single engagement since October 2001 it has not merely defeated but obliterated jihadists in Afghanistan and Iraq. The only check on its power has been self induced: out of a misplaced sense of clemency it has often ceased prematurely the punishment it has inflicted on enemies—at Tora Bora, in the Sunni Triangle, during the looting of Baghdad, and now perhaps at Fallujah—and relented to enter into peace parleys, reconciliation, and reconstruction too early. Here are a few good places to start thinking like an uncouth Sherman rather than a gentlemanly McClellan that might remind us that we are still in a war. Why worry about the constraints of religion? We should simply ignore most supposed Islamic restrictions on war-making since they are entirely one-sided, asymmetrical, and self-serving. All during the Afghanistan campaign we worried about Ramadan, and were warned by the impotent Arab Street about the repercussions to follow if we shot back at Taliban thugs who hid in mosques and sniped at us during their holy days. Did we remember that when Egypt invaded Israel during its sacred Yom Kippur holidays it bragged of the sneak attack as the "Ramadan War"—and in pride, not shame? Did we hold back from attacking Nazi Germany on Hitler's Birthday? And was it really wise to impose what turned out to be a one-sided truce at the Tet holiday in Vietnam? Putting non-explosives in GPS bombs at the end of the war to avoid collateral damage beyond targeted artillery pieces and tanks parked in Iraqi mosques, or not wishing to hurt religious militias as they carted off the material future of Iraq and cached them in mosques after the liberation, may have been humane and logical, but that and other efforts at restraint have consistently sent the wrong message to jihadists and thereby emboldened killers—namely, that we would respect their own holy sites far more than those who had desecrated them with munitions. As way of illustration, the world should ask in April 2004, right now how many Churches, Temples—or Mosques—concurrently serve as weapons depots? As I recall the radical Muslim world canonized armed Islamic criminals who desecrated the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem without apology to its Christian clergy. A general rule then: once armed combatants enter mosques for sanctuary, the United States military must declare that such shrines are immediately no longer holy sites, and then allow 48 hours for Islamic clergy to remove such killers before it does it for them. A mass-murderer in a wheel chair, or a street tough wearing a turban really is not a holy man—and the Islamic world needs to realize that when the fatwas of mullahs and imams invoke the name of "God" to murder, then they have sacrificed the sanctuary of religion. Why do we worry about finding all the exact ties between the so-called terrorists? Terrorists and jihadists do not have to leave a paper trail or scents over email and cell phones to grasp that they really do work in general concert: Bombing and killing before critical elections, ratcheting it up in Iraq as the transition to Iraqi rule nears, and using the same barbaric methods worldwide—whether cutting off Danny Pearl's head on tape, putting decapitated Israeli soldiers' heads on billboards in Lebanon, placing ball-bearings and rat poison in suicide bombs, burning and cutting apart bodies in Fallujah, or threatening to burn and eat Japanese captives. There is a pattern here of barbarism and we should accept it as the common tracer of the work of fundamentalists and Middle East terrorists. If we are going to win this war, we should begin right now to notify Syria and Iran that their incessant support to terrorists in Iraq will soon be met with a systematic air campaign whose intensity will be predicated on their own behavior. We need not necessarily invade either country, but simply ever so incrementally begin to attrite their conventional military assets, the pulse of the bombing carefully calibrated to the flow of jihadists and material into Iraq from their soil. We need to publicly show the world the tangible proof—captured soldiers, supplies, IDs from slain warriors, communications intercepts—of Syrian and Iranian activity, and then begin to take out their instillations. Again, each time we struck back resolutely and unexpectedly in Afghanistan and Iraq we were successful; and each time we wavered, promised to be sober and restrained, our enemies simply harvested more Americans. Yes, our enemies are right: the West Bank seems to be a part of the war as well. We are blamed in the Arab world for whatever we do in seeking reconciliation over the so-called Palestinian problem. The latest jubilation in the street that broke out on news of Americans dying and corpses being desecrated in Iraq follows a continuous litany of macabre anti-American outbursts, Saddam's bounties to suicide killers, the murder of American diplomats seeking to offer fellowships to Palestinians, Hamas' warnings to extend their bombing campaign against Americans, and, of course, the wild celebration on reports of thousands of dead Americans on September 11. All this is the DNA of a true belligerent of the United States at a time of war. Americans are sick and tired of this poll and that survey warning us that we are not liked on the West Bank. Instead of yet another opinion sampling indicating Palestinian anger at the United States, what Palestinians need to peruse are several polls that reveal Americans' growing disgust with their methods and barbarism. As a start of our new determination, we should insist on a complete travel ban to the West Bank. We must declare all representatives of the Palestinian Authority personae non gratae in the United States—folk at the present time not welcome in the United States, including and especially diplomats, journalists, students, and academics. Only when such elites and grandees see that there are consequences to their cheap slurs and venom on campuses and American television will they ponder their present relationship with the United States. If we are at war, surely we do not wish normal relations with a people and their quasi leaders who cheer our deaths and threaten more. We should inform the Palestinians that they are now analogous to Albanians circa 1970 or, better yet, contemporary North Koreans, who now stay out of the United States and vice versa. No aid whatsoever, no travel, no direct ties until barbarism ceases on the West Bank. Americans can accept war, but what tires them are enemies who lob a bomb, scream on television, assassinate an occasional American, and then seethe, claiming that they collectively hate the United States—and yet want its attention, money, and aid. It is time to accept their animus and assume that in this war against fascism in the Middle East, Arafat and Hamas too are quite logically our enemies and should be put on notice concerning the dangerous wages of that new reality. Apparently someone in the present administration thinks by waging war-Lite that it can split the difference with Mr. Kerry and win the election. That is fallacious in terms of military strategy, politics, and morality. We can defeat our enemies only by articulating what we stand for and why we are going to win the war. We have the force and imagination to succeed on the battlefield and the American people will accept sacrifices for victory. But they will—and should—turn on any leader who doesn't fight to win and thereby ensures that we will all pay a far higher price for defeat than we would have for victory. So let us marshal the troops and will to take Fallujah, clean up the Sunni Triangle, eliminate the militias of Mr. Sadr, demonstrate to the Iranians and Syrians that a number of their sites they don't want touched may soon go up in smoke, and begin to fight this war as if we wished to win—or simply quit and unleash instead Mssrs Kerry, Kennedy, Clinton, Dean, Gore, and Carter to bring us home and apologize to the Middle East.
April 11, 2004
OH THOSE MODERATE EGYPTIANS
Special Dispatch - Egypt/U.S. & the Middle East Egyptian Professor at American University of Cairo Reacts to U.S. Reform Initiative & Claims there is 'No Conclusive Proof'' Arabs & Muslims were Behind 9/11 - U.S. May be Responsible In an article titled 'Colonial Echoes' which appeared recently in Al-Ahram Weekly, Galal Amin, a professor of economics at the American University in Cairo, reacted to the U.S. administration's Greater Middle East Initiative. The following are excerpts from the article:(1) The U.S. Greater Middle East Initiative - What For, Why Now? "A few lines into the text of the Greater Middle East Initiative one is gripped with puzzlement. The initiative tops the agenda of the G8 conference scheduled for June in the U.S. The text, published on 13 February in the London-based Arabic-language newspaper Al-Hayat, gets into the drawbacks of Arab societies by line three. A small introductory paragraph and we are faced with the horrors of the Arab world. The combined GDP of members of the Arab League is less than that of Spain, for example. About 40 per cent of Arab adults, or 65 million persons, are illiterate, two-thirds of these women. The list goes on, establishing the claim, made in the first sentence of the text, that the situation presents a 'challenge and unique opportunity to the international community.' "The first thing that must come to the Arab mind is: what a bundle of nonsense is this? What business do you have interfering in our affairs? Have we complained to you about our democracy, knowledge and women, and asked for help? The more one thinks of it, the more outrageous the whole thing seems. For one thing, the ailments the text mentions - democracy, knowledge, women - go back a long way, decades if not centuries. So why the sudden interest in righting the wrongs? Why now?... "The claim that the Greater Middle East Initiative aims, wholly or partly, to eliminate terror of the type seen on September 11, 2001 is unconvincing, for several reasons. One is that there is still doubt that the September attacks were the outcome of Arab and Islamic terror. No conclusive proof to this effect is yet available. Many writers, American and European, as well as Arab, suspect that the attacks were carried out by Americans, or with American assistance, or that Americans knew about them and kept silent. Such doubts are strong and rest on damning evidence, but the U.S. administration forcefully censors them and bans any discussion of the matter - something that, by the way, makes one suspect the US administration's commitment to 'knowledge.' But enough of that." 'The Claim That Terror Is The Outcome Of Lack Of Freedom, Knowledge And Women's Empowerment Is Untenable' "Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that the September attacks were truly the outcome of Arab and Islamic terror. Let's also assume that so-called Arab and Islamic terror is a phenomenon truly independent from any foreign intervention. Let's assume that Arab and Islamic terror has not been helped and abetted by intelligence services from other parts of the world... Let's assume that Arab and Islamic terror is purely Arab and Islamic, emanating from Arab sources, grown on Arab soil. Even if this were true, the claim that terror is the outcome of the lack of freedom, knowledge and women's empowerment is still untenable, for several reasons." "Firstly, on the basis of what rigorous analysis can you claim that the cause of terror is the lack of democracy, knowledge, and women's empowerment? The terror you complain of is a terror directed against you. What guarantee do you have that an Arab government that is democratic and faithfully expressing the sentiments of its own people would not engage in acts of terror against you, or encourage certain individuals to carry out such acts? Take, for example, the case of the Iranian government, which came to power in 1979 as a result of a popular revolt overwhelmingly supported by the Iranian people. Was it not under that government that Ayatollah Khomeini issued an edict sanctioning the murder of U.K. writer Salman Rushdie for writing a novel thought to be anti-Islamic? Perhaps democracy is not sufficient to eliminate terror, one would think." Weren't Those Who Piloted the Planes Into the Twin Towers Educated? Weren't the Female Palestinian Suicide Bombers Empowered? "As for the lack of knowledge, what do you have to say about the young Arab men who you say piloted the planes that crashed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon? Weren't they well educated, with enough technical sophistication to commandeer commercial planes? So, knowledge is not sufficient to eliminate terror, one would think. Or do you mean something else by knowledge? For if you mean knowledge of international literature and humanities, please say so, as it is much easier to catch up in that domain. "It is much simpler to assume that the main cause of terror is not related to inadequate democracy, knowledge, and women power, but to the special relations we have with the U.S., and to the U.S. position on the Palestinian issue and Israel. If so, then the Greater Middle East Initiative is likely to increase, rather than temper, the region's inclination for terror. Because such a project would strengthen the region's relationship with the U.S., and make this relationship even more lopsided. The initiative seems geared towards worse treatment of the Palestinians - for one thing, it does not have anything to say of the Palestinians and their suffering. The only country in the region the initiative has a good word for is Israel. "If the doubts mentioned above are justified, and I think they are, then this sudden interest in reform has ulterior motives, such as controlling Iraq's oil, carving off regional markets, softening the region for Israel's domination. Since none of these motives are in the interest of Arabs, they had to be sugarcoated with slogans superficially compatible with Arab interests: democracy, knowledge, women's empowerment, and development. "The Greater Middle East Initiative reminds me of the leaflet Napoleon Bonaparte distributed to the Egyptians when his armies invaded Egypt in 1798. The similarity is striking, although the French and U.S. projects are two centuries apart. I went back to Napoleon's statement, cited by one of his Egyptian contemporaries, the historian Al-Gabarti. The statement opens on a devout note and proceeds to advocate democracy and equality, while maligning the local rulers of the country for treating foreigners unjustly... ********************* MEMRI holds copyrights on all translations. Materials may only be used with proper attribution. The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) Posted by Ruth at 08:27 PM | SUGGESTED READING
April 09, 2004
INTERESTING SITE
Check out this site for some interesting artiles on Islam:
Posted by Ruth at 11:26 PM | SUGGESTED READING
April 08, 2004
POUND FALLUJA- JOSEPH FARAH
POUND FALLUJAH There are 250,000 people living in Fallujah. My guess is that the population is going to be reduced shortly. Not all of the Iraqi city's population, or even most of them, bear responsibility for the despicable, cowardly attacks on four U.S. civilians murdered, mutilated, incinerated and hung from a bridge over the Euphrates River. But the longer that religious leaders and residents protect and shield those who carried out the attacks -- and others against U.S. troops and those Iraqis eager to build a free society -- the more responsible the residents of Fallujah collectively become. The day of reckoning is coming. It will be precise, according to U.S. military officials. And it will be overwhelming. Fallujah is going to pay a price for the blood it has spilled. The temptation of Americans is to be too cautious. That approach can only result in more American blood being spilled. The United States should give the leaders of Fallujah a chance to turn over all those who participated in the bloodletting, all those who cheered them on, all those who kicked the mutilated and charred bodies of the Americans who were there on a mission of mercy -- bringing food to the forsaken city. I have no expectations that Fallujah's elders will make the right call, do the right thing. And when they fail to do so -- say, in the next few days -- the United States should pound Fallujah like it has never been pounded before. We should not try to gain an international consensus for this action. We should not apologize for it. We should not restrain our Air Force and our artillery batteries from wreaking devastation. We should not expose our ground troops to unnecessary risks. In other words, we may need to flatten Fallujah. We may need to destroy it. We may need to grind it, pulverize it and salt the soil, as the Romans did with troublesome enemies. Quite frankly, we need to make an example out of Fallujah. Here's a chance for justice. Here's an opportunity to show the people of the Middle East it doesn't pay to resort to barbarism and terrorism. Immediately, the United States should stop its humanitarian efforts in Fallujah. There should be no more food caravans. Instead, we should isolate the city and cut off its supplies and its power. It should be a city under siege. Military leaders had hoped that some clerics might issue a fatwa, or religious edict, banning attacks on Americans. But no such calls have been heard. Just a block away from where the American convoy was attacked, some graffiti reads, "It is permitted to steal from Americans; it is permitted to kill Americans for vengeance." There were many pictures taken of happy Iraqis kicking the burned remains of those four American civilian contractors. I hope the military is keeping files. I hope the military is going to hold each of those individuals responsible for the massacre. I hope the military ensures that all of those people are dead or in custody at the conclusion of the Fallujah campaign. It's time to take off the velvet gloves. It's time to stop being Mr. Nice Guy. It's time to cease worrying about collateral damage. It's time to show all Iraqis and their brothers and sisters throughout the Middle East that it doesn't pay to mess with Americans. They need to see there is no profit in it. They need to understand we mean business. They need to accept things will never be the same in Iraq. They need to feel the heat. They need to be provided with visible disincentives to further attacks on Americans, free Iraqis and other coalition partners. Sometimes the most merciful course of action seems like the harshest. Fallujah needs to feel some pain. If this operation is carried out well -- and with finality -- it can save many more Iraqis, Americans and others from future pain. The war in Iraq is not over. It won't be over until Fallujah and the rest of the Sunni Triangle is fully pacified. To find out more about Joseph Farah and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com. COPYRIGHT 2004 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
April 07, 2004
Why the Iraqi Uprising?
If Al-Sadr prevails, Iraq or the portion of it that he rules will be governed by Islamic law, like the Islamic Republic of Iran. This prospect doesn’t seem to have dampened his popular appeal in Iraq, despite the fact that in Iran itself the mullahs are trying to stifle a formidable democracy movement. How could Al-Sadr have developed such a commanding movement? What happened to all the Iraqis who were supposed to be thirsting for democracy? The problem is not only that Iraq has no democratic tradition. President Bush has pointed repeatedly to the examples of Japan and Germany after World War II: two countries that had no democratic traditions, and where plenty of naysayers were predicting that democracies couldn’t be established. They were wrong then, he says, and they’re wrong now. But after World War II, both German National Socialism and the State Shinto that gave rise to Japanese militarism were dead ideologies. An open Nazi in 1946 Berlin wouldn’t have made many friends; likewise, after Hirohito declared that he wasn’t really a god, it would have been tough to carry on his struggle. But the radical Islam of Al-Sadr and others like him has not been discredited in Iraq or around the Islamic world today. Far from it. It is likewise out of focus to assume that Al-Sadr’s movement takes its impetus simply from the resentment that any occupying force will arouse in a proud people. Here the President’s analogies are helpful. After World War II, long-standing hatreds were overcome by overwhelming empirical evidence of American good will, reinforced daily in Germany and Japan. Not that all was smooth sailing from the beginning — and even Hollywood noticed. Humphrey Bogart’s little-known Tokyo Joe records a largely forgotten period of postwar Japanese history, during which the American occupying forces were viewed with considerable suspicion, as well as overt and covert opposition from groups that couldn’t get over thinking of them as the enemy. But eventually this melted away. So far Western largesse has not generated this good will in Iraq, but maybe it will, given time. After all, the occupation of Japan lasted for eight years. But to say that radical Islam has not been discredited is the same as saying that political Islam is still potent, and that we ignore it at our own peril. Yet despite daily confirmations of this from around the globe, American officials have remained reluctant to acknowledge that Islam has any political dimension at all. When National Guardsman and Muslim convert Ryan Anderson was arrested in February on suspicion of trying to pass information to al Qaeda, a Guard spokesman, Lt. Col. Stephen Barger, was asked about his religion. He answered: “Religious preferences are an individual right and responsibility, and I really can’t get into it.” Yes, but religious preferences are not solely an individual’s business; Barger should have known better — or been allowed to speak honestly about what he knew. From its inception, Islam has presented itself not just as a religion in the Judeo-Christian sense of the term, but as a comprehensive set of laws for the ordering of society, including political life. Pious Muslims generally believe these laws to be the laws of Allah himself, and therefore immediately superior to any societal structures arrived at through elections: you don’t vote on the law of God. Secularism entered the Islamic world only as a Western import, and has always encountered considerable resistance on Islamic grounds — most notably from radical Muslim theorists who laid the intellectual and theological groundwork for today’s jihadist terror groups. The Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, executed by the strongman Nasser in 1966 as a threat to his relatively secularist regime and revered by radical Muslims around the world today as a martyr, heaped contempt on Western notions of freedom as illusory. True freedom, he insisted, could come only from obedience to the laws of Allah, not from the constructs of the secularists, which were ipso facto idolatrous — and it was every Muslim’s duty to wage war against these idolatrous regimes until Allah’s laws were obeyed. Al-Sadr is proceeding from the same assumptions. Until such assumptions are taken seriously, there will be more and more Al-Sadrs. Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch and the author of Onward Muslim Soldiers: How Jihad Still Threatens America and the West (Regnery Publishing), and Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest Growing Faith (Encounter Books).
CHOMSKY IDENTIFIES "THE EVIL" THAT HAUNTS THE WORLD
Thanks to Rachel Neuwirth for bringing this to our attention CHOMSKY IDENTIFIES "THE EVIL" THAT HAUNTS THE WORLD At the conclusion of his latest book, Noam Chomsky, quotes these lines from Bertrand Russell: "After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution This is a fitting conclusion for a work that starts with another quotation- this time from the Chomsky summarises Mayr's view like this: "The human form of intellectual organisation may not be favoured by selection. The history of life Russell and Mayr, though trained scientists, belonged to what one might call the "romantic-tragic" Chomsky, an eminent linguistics professor, belongs to the same tradition. If his latest book, "Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance", has any message is Before we examine Chomsky's thesis, let us briefly analyse the two pillars of his system, i.e. the The problem with Russell is twofold. First, he compares trilobites and butterflies, which are species, with Neros, Genghis Khans and The second problem with Russell's view, and the foundation of his pessimistic vision, is that he Mayr's vision also suffers from two flaws. The first is that he believes that smartness, i.e. intelligence, and stupidity are uniform Thus the recipe for human survival is not, as Mayr suggests, to become stupid, so as to win the The approach of both Russell, a self proclaimed atheist, and Mayr is essentially religious, and more After all, Adam, according to the Christian narrative, was expelled from paradise because he and his Chomsky's method is also religious, more precisely theological, inasmuch as he tries to find a Chomsky's position as a self-styled Jeremiah is underlined in his book's blurb: "From the world's To be sure, Chomsky's monism is not theistic. Nor does he adopt the monisms of Russell and Mayr, Like Russell and Mayr, Chomsky is not concerned with the positive achievements of humanity. His The US, he tells us, began its existence by massacring the peaceful natives of North America. George The US then expanded southwards and westwards through a series of aggressions against Mexico, the Chomsky finds American fingerprints everywhere. Hitler and Mussolini were helped achieve power with American, and in part, British, help. (p.67) And The Korean War was caused not because Kim Il-sung tried to conquer the whole of the peninsula but The US is even blamed for the Algerian war of independence, presumably because France was a full And why do you think the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979? Chomsky tells us that this was Contrary to what some Arabs imagine, Israel is a pawn in Washington's hand. Chomsky writes: Chomsky claims that almost every evil character in the past century or so, anywhere in the world, So why did the US wage war against Hitler, Mussolini, the Japanese militarists, Slobodan Milosevic, Chomsky's answer is simple: they all initially worked for the US but had to be crushed when they In Chomsky's Manichaean world anyone who is opposed to the United States is good and anyone who Saddam gassed the Kurds in response to "Kurdish terrorism" which, in turn, had been prompted by the According to Chomsky, Saddam's invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was a just punishment for the latter's While Chomsky insists that Saddam was no threat to anyone and thus unfairly included in the Chomsky portrays the defunct Soviet Union as a victim of American aggression. He tells us that He praises Stalin, and even the sinister Lavrenti Beria, subsequently executed for his crimes, as President Dwight Eisenhower rejected the Soviet peace proposals because that would have meant an end Chomsky ignores the fact that it was the USSR that almost always introduced new and deadlier weapons The Taliban, having come into being by "American design", were evil when they were supported by the Chomsky opposed the war that toppled the Taliban and claims that the US wanted to invade Afghanistan US help to the Colombian government's programme of eradicating cocaine cultivation is described as In other words even the drug barons are transformed into choir boys when they are attacked by the Chomsky tells us that the war in Kosovo was not about Serbs massacring ethnic Albanians but the The US, and NATO, intervened to prevent Slobodan Milosevic from rushing to rescue his fellow Serbs Faithful to the classical methods of religious propaganda, Chomsky does not allow the slightest He goes further than fellow-travellers like Russell who tried to establish a moral equivalence He claims that the US and all its leaders, starting with Washington, as already noted, were evil President James Monroe was evil because he declared a doctrine designed to prevent the European Even the idealistic President Woodrow Wilson does not escape Chomsky's censure. Wilson is portrayed President John F. Kennedy is presented as almost a lunatic who, through the Cuban missile crisis of Even John Stuart Mill, the leading philosopher of Western liberalism, does not escape Chomsky's ire, Chomsky makes too many factual errors to be enumerated here. His knowledge of the Middle East and But Chomsky's book, written in haste, suffers from more serious problems. The first of these is his habit of arranging facts to suit his often contradictory claims. |